英国文学选读unit8.pptVIP

教学课件 英国文学选读 Unit 8 Romantic Poets Percy Bysshe Shelley(1788-1824) John Keats(1759-1821) Percy Bysshe Shelly Shelly was a revolutionary and an idealist, a dedicated seeker of an ideal world where love and brotherhood of man prevail. His poetry expresses his spirit of rebellion and his love of man and of freedom. He uses the objects of nature which he worshiped, as images of his internal state. What makes Shelly a great poet is the sheer music and matchless spontaneity of his verse. Few poets have matched his clear-flowing melody and his lyric suggestion of a sublime world beyond the physical which man has never seen but which he knows must exist. Shelly was born in 1792, in a family of a wealthy country squire When he was young he displayed the inclination for independent thinking and a strong love for literature. Before he was eighteen he had written two romances (Gothic novels) and published a collection of poems in which he glorified freedom, exposed tyranny and expressed his sympathy for the oppressed. At Eton he read widely. William Godwin’s book Inquiry Concerning Political Justice mad him an atheist. At Oxford he published The Necessity of Atheism in which he challenged the evidence for God’s existence. As a result he was expelled from the university and disowned by his father and became homeless. Though he lived a brief life he had a stormy emotional history. In the same year he made acquaintance and married a girl of 16, Harriet, but his marriage proved unhappy, because she could not share his ideals and the marriage was dissolved in 1814. In 1816 he married Marry, William Godwin’s daughter. It was a happy marriage, because Marry understood and shared his ideals. But Shelly’s political enemies made such great scandal of the sudden death of Harriet who drowned herself in a fit of despair that he was compelled to leave England in 1818 and spend the rest of his life in Italy. As early as 1816 began Shelly’s friendship with Byron, following the appearan