新托福听力经典加试(9)

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ROMANTICISM

Romanticism is a style in the fine arts and literature. It emphasizes passion rather than reason, and imagination and intuition rather than logic. Romanticism favors full expression of the emotions, and free, spontaneous action rather than restraint and order.

Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century

Neoclassicism in particular.

It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Romanticism in literature. During the Romantic Movement, most writers were discontented with their world. It seemed commercial, inhuman, and standardized. To escape from modern life, the Romantics turned their interest to remote and faraway places, the medieval past, folklore and legends, and nature and the common people. The Romantics were also drawn to the

supernatural.

WORDSWORTH

Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), is considered by many scholars to be the most important English Romantic poet. In 1795, Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The two men

collaborated on Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems frequently regarded as the symbolic beginning of the English Romantic movement.

Wordsworth argued that serious poems could describe "situations from common life" and be written in the ordinary language "really used by men." He believed such poems could clarify "the primary laws of our nature." Wordsworth also insisted that poetry is "emotion recollected in tranquility."

He explained that his poetry used everyday language rather than the elevated poetic

language of such earlier writers as Dryden and Pope because everyday language comes closer to expressing genuine human feeling. For the same reason, he wanted to write about everyday topics, especially rural, unsophisticated subjects.

Wordsworth and Coleridge lived most of their lives in the scenic Lake District of

northwestern England and wrote expressively about the beauties of nature and the thoughts that natural beauty inspires. Many of their blank verse poems are written in a meditative, conversational tone new to English poetry.

Wordsworth, as we have said, is the chief representative典型的 of some of the most important principles原则 in the romantic movement, but he is far more a member of any movement, through his supreme poetic expression of some of the greatest spiritual ideals he belongs among the five or six greatest English poets.

First, he is the profoundest interpreter of nature in all poetry. His feeling for nature has two aspects. he is keenly sensitive, and in a more delicately discriminating way than any of his predecessors, to all the external beauty and glory of nature, especially inanimate nature of mountains, woods and fields, streams and flowers, in all their infinitely varied aspects. A