1、. The Characteristics of the Romantic Poetry -by He ZhiEnglish Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridges Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scotts death and the passage of the fir

2、st Reform Bill in the Parliament.The romantics asserted that reliance upon emotion and nature provided romantic movement typically asserts the unique nature of the individual, the privileged status of imagination and fancy, the value of spontaneity over “artifice” and “convention,” the human need fo

3、r emotional outlets, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life. Their writings are often set in rural or Gothic settings and they show an obsessive concern with “innocent” children, young lovers, and animals. The major romantic poets included Wi

4、lliam Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Gordon Byron. This essay describes two major characteristics of the romantic poetry, namely, nature and emotion.Nature The romanticism poets poetry mostly originates from the nature. The romanticism poets almost all advocate

5、 the nature. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but provides the dominant subject matter. Wordsworth conceives of nature as “the nurse, the guide and guardian of my heart and soul.” Nature to the romanticists is a source of cleanliness and spiritual understanding; it is a teacher

6、; it is the stepping-stone between man and god, so romantic poets mostly take describing the nature to eulogize the nature as the subject.Wordsworth is regarded as a worshipper of nature. He can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. I Wandered Lonely as a Clou

7、d is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature. Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem of nature after he came across a long belt of golden daffodils tossing, reeling and dancing along the waterside. There is a vivid picture of the daffodils here: When all at once I saw a crowd，A host，o

8、f golden daffodils，/ Beside the lake， beneath the trees，/ Fluttering and dancing in the breeze./Continuous as the stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way，/ They stretchd in never-ending line/Along the margin of a bay：/Ten thousand saw I at a glance/Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.To a

9、 Skylark is a poem completed by Percy Bysshe Shelley. A skylark soars into the sky singing happily. As it flies upward, the clouds of evening make it invisible, but its song enables the poet to follow its flight. All the earth and air is filled with its song. A skylark is addressed by the poet, who

10、calls it a blithe Spirit rather than a bird, because its song emanates from Heaven. Out of its full heart pours profuse strains of unpremeditated art. The skylark ascends higher and higher in the blue sky,” Higher still and higher / From the earth thou springest / Like a cloud of fire / The blue dee

11、p thou wingest / And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.”, like a cloud of fire, singing as it ascends. In the golden lightning of the sun, it floats and runs, like an unbodied joy. As the skylark flies higher and higher, the poet loses sight of it, but is still able to hear its shrill

12、 delight, which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the white dawn, which can be felt even when they are not seen. The earth and air ring with the skylarks voice, just as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind a lonely cloud.Emotion Romantic poets describe poetry as “t

13、he spontaneous overflow of powerful felling” which expresses the poets mind. They pay great attention to spiritual and emotional life of man placing the individual rather than the society at the centre of their vision believing in human progress and improvement and advocating the freedom to express

14、personal feelings rejecting convention and tyranny and emphasizing the rights and dignity of the individualOde to a Nightingale, Keatss masterpiece, expresses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness and human world of agony. Here the aching ecstasy roused by the birds song is felt

15、 like a form of spiritual homesickness, a longing to be at one with beauty. The poem first introduces joy and sorrow, song and music. By combining a tingling anticipation with a lapsing towards dissolution, Keats manages to keep a precarious balance between mirth and despair, rapture and grief. The

16、complex emotion is vividly shown in the poetry such as What thou among the leaves hast never known,/The weariness, the fever, and the fret /Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.In Ode to the West Wind, Percy Bysshe Shelley describes the west wind. The poet expressed his deep love toward the

17、 west wind and yearned for the nature through the westerly wind. Here Shelleys rhapsodic and declamatory tendencies find a subject perfectly suited to them. The autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new spring, becomes an image of Shelley himself, as he would want to be, in its freedom

18、, its destructive-constructive potential, its universality. I fall upon the thorns of Life! I bleed! calls the Shelley that could not bear being fettered to the humdrum realities of everyday! The whole poem has logical feeling, a not easily analyzable progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful and convincing conclusion: If winter