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Introduction to English Poets,
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黃黃黃黃埔學報埔學報埔學報埔學報 第四十第四十第四十第四十九九九九期期期期 民國九十四年民國九十四年民國九十四年民國九十四年 259
WHAMPOA - An Interdisciplinary Journal 49(2005) 259-266
Romantic Poetry: A Critical Investigation
Lishu Chang Chien
Department of Foreign Languages, Chinese Military Academy, Taiwan
Abstract
This paper aims to show the emergence of Romantic Poetry as the herald of Ecocriticism. As a
critical stance, the Romantic Movement strove to defend for the rights of humans and nature, and it
fought against the material culture caused by the Industrial Revolution. As a theoretical discourse,
Romantic criticism proclaims the approach of Ecocriticism on the assertion of biocentrism and
interests in sense of place. By critical investigations of Romantic Poetry on the subject matter, the
chosen language, the role of the poet, and the function of poetry, I will emphasize in the conclusion
that Romantic poetry connotes the tenets of Ecocriticism with the assertion of symbiosis and integrity
between humans and nature.
Keywords: Romanticism, Ecocriticism, sense of place, symbiosis, integrity
1. Introduction
In this paper I will illustrate how
Romantic poetry shows a new interest in
nature and the common individual as
suitable subject for poetry and I will
explicate the spirit and artistic achievements
of major English Romantic poets.
Meanwhile, I will delineate the emergence
of Romantic poetry as the herald of
Ecocriticism. But before that I will trace
the historical background of the age that
influenced this important literary movement.
To do this I will relate the writers’ lives and
experiences to their work by comparing and
contrasting individual poets and the value
stressed in their work.
2. The beginning and the end of the
Romantic Age:
The beginning of the Romantic Age in
English literature is usually taken as 1798,
the year in which William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a book
of their poems called Lyrical Ballads. The
Romantic Age traditionally ended in 1832,
with the death of Sir Walter Scott.
3. The Historical Background – The
American Revolution & French
Revolution:
These two Revolutions (happened
outside England) disturbed the basic values
and structures of English society.
Philosophically, the French Revolution
seemed to signal the victory of ever more
radical democratic principles than those
enunciated in the American Declaration of
Independence. Indeed, it was the most
significant event of the romantic period. In
English the Crown and the ruling classes
feared the effects of the French Revolution
from the beginning. But English liberals
and radicals, who themselves had been
calling for the democratization of English
society, saw in the early stages of the French
Revolution--in the Declaration of the rights
of Man and in the storming of the Bastille on
July 14, 1789, to release imprisoned political
prisoners--a triumph of popular democracy.
Among the enthusiastic supporters of the
Revolution in its early stages were writers
who would play a central role in English
Romanticism. Wordsworth visited France
during the summer of 1790 and was filled
with hope and excitement as the country
celebrated the first anniversary of the fall of
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the Bastille. William Godwin (1756-1836),
a philosopher and novelist who exerted
considerable influence on Wordsworth,
Shelley, and other Romantic poets, predicted
in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793) a peaceful version in England of
what appeared to be happening in France.
In The Spirit of the Age, Hazlitt said that the
French Revolution seemed at first to
announce that “a new impulse had been
given to man’s minds” (XVII). The sense
of being present at some apocalyptic event
of history was common at this time: hopes
were high that mankind was about to see the
end of the old world and the beginning of a
new and better one. Wordsworth, looking
back at this time over ten years later, gave
expression to what must have been a
widespread feeling at the outset of the
French Revolution:
O pleasant exercise of hope and joy,
For great were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
(The Prelude 1805. X 105-09)
But the promise and expectation
aroused by the early of the Revolution in
France soon gave way to bitter
disappointment as events took an
increasingly violent and repressive course.
When revolutionary extremists gained
control of the government in 1792, they
executed hundreds of the imprisoned
nobility in what came to be known as the
“September Massacres.” The reaction in
England to these events in France was
predicable. Even the most ardent supports of
the Revolution were left in disillusionment
and despair. As Wordsworth expressed it
in The Prelude:
Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defense
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for: and mounted up,
Openly in the view of earth and heaven,
The scale of Liberty. (The Prelude 1805. X 206-11)
During the years of violent political
revolution and reaction for the spirit of
liberty, another revolution was taking place
throughout European society for the
economic growth.
4. The Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution in England
marked the beginning of the modern era, and it
caused profound economic and social changes
with which the existing principles and structures
of government were totally undermined.
Important cities in central and northern England
that had previously been stable and orderly
centers of skilled labor developed into sprawling,
dirty industrial cities. Working and living
conditions in these cities were terrible: women
and children as well as men labored for long
hours under intolerable conditions, for wages that
were barely enough to keep them alive. Reports
were not uncommon of young children being
harnessed to coal-sledges and made to crawl on
their hands and knees in the mines.
Wordsworth’s early poems, for example,
contained a number of figures whose undeserved
suffering is caused by an unfair and uncaring
society. Blake pointed out the miseries of the
Londoners in his daily observation. In “The
Chimney Sweeper,” he describes that the
Chimney-boy has been sold by his father to be a
sweep when he is still so small that he can not
even utter the “/s/” at the beginning of words.
He attempts to cry “Sweep! Sweep!” but his
childlike voice turns out to be “Weep! Weep!”
The double meanings of “sweep” and “weep”
immediately give us a pathetic impression of the
state of his slavery. More than ever England
was sharply divided into two classes: a wealthy
class of property owners who held economic and
political power, and a poor class of wage earners
deprived of rights and possessions. In response
to the rapidly changed society, Wordsworth
shows his angers towards the sheer waste and
sadness of life in his “The World is too much
with us”
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
Lishu Chang Chien: Romantic Poetry: A Critical Investigation 261
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! (1-4)
To the writers, the Romantic Age was a
time of vast and unguided political and
economic changes. Most of the writers of
this period were deeply affected by the
promise and subsequent disappointment of
the French Revolution, and by the distorting
effects of the Industrial Revolution. In
many ways, both direct and indirect, we can
see the historical issues reflected in the main
literary concerns of Romantic poets. Much
as the French Revolution signaled an
attempt to break with the old order and to
establish a new and revitalized social system,
Romanticism sought to free itself from the
rules and standards of eighteen-century
literature and to open up new areas of vision
and expression. The democratic idealism,
which characterized the early stages of the
French Revolution, have their parallel in the
Romantic writers’ interest in the language
and experience of the common people, and
in the belief that writers or artists must be
free to explore their own imaginative worlds.
The main consequences of the Industrial
Revolution--the urbanization of English life
and landscape, and the exploitation of the
working class-- underlie the Romantic
writers’ love of the unspoiled natural world
or remote settings devoid of urban
complexity, and their passionate concern for
the downtrodden and the oppressed.
5. The foundations of the theory and
practice
English Romantic poetry has certain
qualities that show the changes of literary
tendency from the poetry written before.
The chief characteristics of Romantic poetry
are usually defined in contrast with that of
the eighteenth century--the age of Swift,
Pope, and Johnson. Eighteenth-century
writers stressed reason and judgment while
Romantic writers emphasized imagination
and emotion. Eighteenth-century writers
were characteristically concerned with the
general or universal in experience.
Romantic writers were concerned with the
specific. Eighteenth-century writers
asserted the values of society as a whole;
Romantic writers championed the values of
the individual. Eighteenth-century writers
sought to follow and to substantiate
authority and the rules derived from
authority while Romantic writers strove for
freedom. Eighteenth-century writers took
their primary inspiration from classical
Greek and Roman authors but Romantic
writers took a revitalized interest in
medieval subjects and settings.
These contrasts provide a useful way of
approaching English poetry of the Romantic
Age. They help put us in touch with what
William Hazlitt and other Romantic writers
called “the Spirit of the Age”--a shared sense
of liberated energy and fresh departure similar
in some respects to what we find in the
Renaissance. Hazlitt spoke of “a time of
promise, a renewal of the world--and of
letters.” Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed in his
Defence of Poetry that the literature of the age
“has arisen as it were from a new birth” (413).
Yet we should not exaggerate the generalized
contrasts between the Romantic Age and the
eighteenth century, or to take too literally the
more exuberant and sweeping claims of Hazlitt
and Shelley at their most confident. The
Romantic Age was diverse and complex. To
appreciate the achievements of this period, we
need to examine the main political and social
realities of these years. The specific ideas and
practices of writers who were far too
individualistic ever to subordinate themselves
to anything like a Romantic “movement” need
to be looked at more closely.
Literary achievement during the
Romantic Age is found chiefly in poetry. In
the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and
Coleridge reflect new ideas about what
poetry should be. A second edition was
published in 1800, to which was added an
extensive preface, written by Wordsworth
but planned with close consultation with
Coleridge. In the various editions of this
collection, Wordsworth and Coleridge
announce and demonstrate fundamental
changes in both the form and subject matter
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of English poetry. It is important not to
oversimplify the basic literary aims of
Lyrical Ballads, or of English Romantic
poetry in general. These aims are best
understood, in fact, not as a single,
unvarying literary rule or standard, but as
ideals that often embrace opposing or
contrasting values. As Coleridge himself
would later argue in his volume of literary
musings, Biographia Literaria (1817), the
power of the poetic imagination “reveals
itself in the balance or reconciliation of
opposite or discordant qualities” (16). As
for the verbal style of the poetry,
Wordsworth makes it clear in the Preface to
Lyrical Ballads that he and Coleridge were
trying to leave behind the specialized,
formal language of eighteenth-century
poetry--what Wordsworth calls “poetic
diction.” Instead, Wordsworth says in
Lyrical Ballads, his poems are experimental
attempts to fit “to metrical arrangement a
selection of the real language of men in a
state of vivid sensation” (302). The most
memorable phrase here is “the real language
of men.” Wordsworth and other Romantic
writers wanted to draw upon the expressive
power of ordinary speech, instead of relying
automatically upon an artificial, uniquely
“poetic” way of using language. But
Wordsworth did not naively believe that the
language of poetry could ever be a direct
imitation of the language of the man in the
street or the worker in the field. He says,
“The real language must be selected by the
poet, that it must be fitted “to metrical
arrangement” (302). Thus we have the
contrasting elements in Wordsworth’s
stylistic ideal: “real language’ on the one
hand, and its selection and transformation by
the poet’s mind and craft on the other.
Wordsworth and Coleridge also announce
and demonstrate significant changes in the
subject matter of poetry in Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth’s main aim, as stated in the
Preface, is “too choose incidents and situations
from common life.” “Humble and rustic life
was generally chosen,” he goes on to explain,
“because in that condition the essential
passions of the heart find a better soil in which
they can attain their maturity, are less under
restraint, and speak a plainer and more
emphatic language” (304). This preference
for the experience and situations of those
common people, particularly of those living
close to nature in the country, away from the
complexity and contamination of sophisticated
urban existence, is one of the chief
characteristics of Romanticism. But the first
poem in Lyrical Ballads is Coleridge’s “the
Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a work hardly
corresponding to the sort of poetry
Wordsworth describes in the Preface. Once
again we may turn to Coleridge’s Biographia
Literaria for an account of how his role in
Lyrical Ballads was mainly to explore another
and quite different type of Romantic subject
matter. “My endeavors,” Coleridge says,
were “directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to
transfer from our inward nature a human
interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that
willing suspension of disbelief. . . which
constitutes poetic faith”(323). In other words,
the reader willingly cooperates with the poet
by giving up the need for literal truth.
We have in the plan of Lyrical Ballads
two favorite kinds of Romantic subjects: the
natural or commonplace, and the
supernatural or “romantic”. These kinds of
subjects at first appeared to be the very
opposites of each other. But what
Wordsworth and Coleridge were striving for
was similar: to reveal what Wordsworth
calls “the essential passions of heart,” and
what Coleridge calls “our inward nature.”
Nature and commonplace, supernatural and
romantic--both kinds of subjects are treated
so as to make us aware of the basic
operations of the human mind and human
emotions. Another important characteristic
of the subject matter of Romantic literature
proclaimed in Lyrical Ballads is the intense
love of nature. Wordsworth is one of the
greatest “nature poets,” and it is true that in
both theory and practice the natural world
takes on a new significance in his writing.
Lishu Chang Chien: Romantic Poetry: A Critical Investigation 263
He defines in the Preface “Poetry is the
image of man and nature” (311). But what
really interests Wordsworth and other
Romantic poets is not nature for its own
sake, but nature as it affects the human mind
and personality. He directs his attention
toward rustic life because in that condition
the passions of men are incorporated with
the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.
He considers “man and nature are essentially
adapted to each other, and the mind of man
as naturally the mirror of the fairest and
most interesting properties of nature” (312).
The ideas of the reciprocity herald the
philosophy of symbiosis, environmental
ethics, and the ecological conscience that
ecocritics are now doing. Romantic poetry
is as Jonathan Bate points out, “the
Prototypical Ecocriticism.” The major
concern of Romantic poetry “negotiates
between human and nonhuman” (Glotfelty
xix). Again and again in Wordsworth’s
poetry, and in that of his fellow poets, it is
this relationship between the mind and the
natural world that is the central focus. It is
the mind of the poet, or of the figure through
whom the poet expresses himself, that
constitutes the ultimate subject for the
Romantic writer, whether that mind is
understood in relation to the natural world or
in relation to a mysterious, supernatural
fiction.
Another aspect of Romantic subject
matter is the concern with the poet’s own
life, emotions, and subjective experience.
Wordsworth’s very definition of poetry in
the Preface to Lyrical Ballads confirms this
emphasis on subjective emotion and
personal experience. He says, “All good
poetry is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feeling” (305). For the Romantic
poet, poetry must be based ultimately on the
poet’s own feelings and responses. It
cannot be based on values or a subject
derived primarily from books, or from
society, or from abstract scientific reasoning.
Wordsworth goes on to elaborate his
definition in a famous passage: “I have said
that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings: it takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquillity; the
emotion is contemplated till by a species of
reaction, the tranquillity gradually
disappears, and an emotion kindred to that
which was before the subject of
contemplation, is gradually produced and
does itself actually exist in the mind” (316).
It is clear from what Wordsworth says here
that “powerful feelings” or sheer immediate
emotion is not enough for the poet.
Emotion, once experienced, must be
“recollected in tranquillity” or
“contemplated,” as Wordsworth goes on to
say. Romantic poetry has its origin in
strong and spontaneous personal feeling; but
only when this feeling is given shape and
organization by the reflective mind and
adapted to the structures of language can it
enter into poetry.
One final point that Wordsworth
considers in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is
of major importance for Romanticism as a
whole. This concerns the status of the poet
in relation to the rest of human community.
Wordsworth has said that the poet uses “the
real language of men,” not a stylized poetic
diction, and that he draws his subjects from
“common life.” This ideal may be
appealingly democratic, but if it is true, what
distinguishes a poet from anyone else? In
trying to answer this question, Wordsworth
preserves the democratic belief so important
to Romanticism, while at the same time
acknowledging an equally important
Romantic belief in the uncommon sensitivity
of the individual poet. A poet does not
differ “in kind from other men,” he says,
“but only in degree.” The poet “is chiefly
distinguished from other men by a greater
promptness to think and feel without
immediate external excitement, and a great
power in expressing such thoughts and
feelings as are produced in him in that
manner” (313). Once again it is seen that
the Romantic attitude involved a “balance or
reconciliation” of apparent opposites--in this
case, democratic idealism on the one hand
(the poet is just one person speaking to
264 黃黃黃黃埔學報埔學報埔學報埔學報 第四十第四十第四十第四十九九九九期期期期 民國九十四年民國九十四年民國九十四年民國九十四年
others in their own language), and heroic
individualism on the other (each poet is
gifted with unique powers of feeling and
expression).
The poetic ideals announced by
Wordsworth and Coleridge, and even more
their poetic practice, provide a major
inspiration for the brilliant young writers
who made up the second generation of
English Romantic poets. Shelley called
poetry “the expression of Imagination.”
Keats saw the “imagination” as a power
which creates and reveals, or rather reveals
through creating. Through the imagination
Keats sought an absolute reality to which he
could enter by the appreciation of beauty
through the senses. To Keats, poetry was
the ideal vehicle for wide-ranging
imagination and for a fully sensuous
response to beauty and to art. For all young
romantic poets there was a joy to be found in
the natural world which was not present in
man-made institutions or practices.
Against the classic view of nature as a
system of rational laws, the young Romantic
poets emphasized the beauty, strangeness,
and mystery of nature. They saw nature not
as logical but an organic process, in a
constant state of development and change.
In the organic process or dynamic process,
all of the natural entities belong to each
other. Byron, viewing the wonderful
scenery of the Rhine, and the Alps, states, “I
live not in my myself, but I become / Portion
of that around me” ( Childe Harolde III,
LXXII). In this light, Byron heralds
Robinson Jeffers’s philosophy of
“Inhumanism” that is an extraordinarily
harsh critique of the dominant social
practices and attitudes of our species.
Inhumanism as Jeffers in the preface to The
Double Axe and Other Poems defines is “a
certain philosophical attitude . . . a shifting
of emphasis and significance from man to
not man; the rejection of human solipsism
and recognition of the transhuman
magnificence” (vii). Hwong Chang Liou
notes, inhumanism is “a persistent assault
against anthropocentric thought and activity,
especially when manifested through
industrial civilization and its ecological
destruction” (327).
But the artistic admiration toward
Wordsworth and Coleridge on the part of the
second generation was mixed with moral and
political disillusionment. They felt the
founders of English Romanticism had given in
to the values of an unjust and reactionary
society. This disillusionment has left the
young Romantics free to develop their own
artistic interests in a way that a more complete
allegiance to Wordsworth and Coleridge
would not have. “A poet,” says Shelley in A
Defence of Poetry, “is a nightingale, who sits
in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude
with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men
entranced by the melody of an unseen
musician, who feel that they are moved and
softened, yet know not whence or why”(361).
Shelley believed that the poet’s imagination
and insight permitted him to see more in the
everyday world in an extraordinary way.
While Wordsworth’s imagination isolated and
focused, Shelley’s dissolved and transcended.
Shelley further states, “poets. . . were called in
the earlier epoch of the world legislators or
prophets: a poet essentially comprises and
unites both these characters” (358). This
conception of the poet-prophet, quite different
from the viewpoints revealed in Wordsworth’s
Lyrical Ballads marks an appropriate
starting-part for the poetry of the young
generation. More than any other Romantic
poet, Keats sought to subordinate his own
personality in his poetry and to focus attention
on the complex individuality of his subject.
He treats the world as “the vale of
soul-making”, and “how necessary a World of
Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence
and make it soul” (“Letter to George and
Georgiana Keats” April 21, 1819).
Of all the Romantic poets, Byron was
regarded as a “heretic.” Despite his status
as the archetypal Romantic, Byron had
stronger ties to the eighteenth century than
any of his contemporaries. He was a great
admirer of Dryden and Pope, and he was
sharply critical of all his fellow Romantics,
Lishu Chang Chien: Romantic Poetry: A Critical Investigation 265
except Shelley, for having devoted
themselves to “a wrong revolutionary
poetical system.” In his first letter on
Bowels’ Strictures on Pope he writes, “It is
the fashion of the day to lay great stress
upon what they call ‘imagination’ and
‘invention,’ the two commonest of quality:
an Irish peasant with a little whisky in his
head will imagine and invent more than
would furnish forth a modern poem” (554).
His affinity with the eighteenth century is
apparent not only in Don Juan, but also in
many of his shorter lyrics and songs.
Byron never regarded “imagination,” which
enabled many Romantic poets to transform
their world and to escape from it, as an
important element in his work. Instead,
Byron presents in his poems a direct, a
personal contact with nature and elicits a
kindred spirit. Byron reflects such a
sensibility in the wildness,
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and Music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more;
( Childe Harolde IV. CLXXVIII)
The impulses of the woods, the shore,
the deep sea, and the wind construct a
natural community in which Byron finds no
human intruder. The tone foreshadows
Thoreau’s retreat at Walden and adventure
in the Main Woods. The romantic
sentiments attract later nature writers in the
quest of an ecocentric community rather
than an anthropocentric society as Byron
announces, “I love not Man the less, but
nature more.”
6. Critical Reception
The poetic theory of the Romantic age
reflects the art of poetry as a mirror of
human mind and interaction with the natural
world. It is an art for achieving effects on
an audience, concurred in referring to the
motives, emotion, and imagination of the
individual poet. If poetry “is the product of
a poet singing to ‘cheer [his] own solitude
with sweet sounds’ or “the overflow of the
poet’s feeling, or expression for its own
sake,” the problem arises: what use is such
an activity to the reader? Although the size
of the reading public had increased rapidly
during the eighteenth century, most
Romantic poets felt that they were not
understood or appreciated by the reader, that
their values were not those accepted by
English society as a whole. Indeed, poetry
demands much from the reader if he is to
follow what Shelley says:
Man is an instrument over which a
series of external and internal impressions
are driven, like alternations of an
ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre,
which move it by their motion to
ever-changing melody. But there is a
principle whthin the human beings, and
perhaps within a sentient beings, which act
otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not
melody alone, but harmony, by an internal
adjustment of the sounds or motions thus
excited to the impressions which excite them.
(A Defence of Poetry 35-56)
Just as a great musical composition
demands attention and interpretation and is
best appreciated by repeated listening, great
poetry becomes significant only when both
its obvious and implied meanings are
comprehended and its mood and music felt.
To appreciate the mood and implied
meanings of English Romantic poetry
thoroughly, we need to examine the main
political and social realities of these years,
and to look more closely at the specific ideas
and practices of writers.
7. Reference
[1] Bate, Jonathon. Romantic Ecology:
Wordsworth and the Environmental
Tradition. London; Routledge, 1991.
[2] Blake, William. Blake’s Poetry and
Designs. Eds. Mary Lynn Johson and
John E. Grant. New York: Norton, 1979.
[3] Byron, George Gordon. “Letter[John
Murray] on the Rev. W. L. Bowel’s
Strictures on Pope.” Byron’s Letters
266 黃黃黃黃埔學報埔學報埔學報埔學報 第四十第四十第四十第四十九九九九期期期期 民國九十四年民國九十四年民國九十四年民國九十四年
and Journals. 12 vols., ed. Leslie A.
Marchand. Londo, 1973-82.
[4] Byron’s Poetry. Ed. Frank D. et all.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.
[5] Coleridge, Samuel T. Biographia
Literaria. Eds. James Engell and W.
Jackson Bate. NJ. Princeton UP, 1983.
[6] Glotfelty, Cherry, & Horald Fromm.
Eds. The Ecocriticism Reader:
Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens:
U of Georgia P, 1996.
[7] Godwin, William. Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1971.
[8] Hazlitt, William. The Spirit of the Age. In
The Complete Works of William Hazlitt.
Ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. London: 1930-34.
[9] Jefferson, Robinson. The Double Axe
and Other Poems. New York:
Random House, 1948.
[10] Liou, Hwong Chang. “Edward Abbey’s
Wilderness in Desert Solitaire” in The
Proceedings of The Second Tamkang
International Conference on Ecological
Discourse. Tamshui: Tamkang UP,
2003.
[11] Shelley, Percy Byssche. “A Defence of
Poetry.” Criticism: The Major
Statements. Ed. Kaplan, Charles. New
York: St. Martin’s P, 1975.
[12] Wordsworth, William. “Preface to
Lyrical Ballads.” Criticism: The Major
Statements. Ed. Kaplan, Charles. New
York: St. Martin’s P, 1975.
Romantic Poetry: A Critical Investigation
張簡麗淑張簡麗淑張簡麗淑張簡麗淑
陸軍軍官學校外文系陸軍軍官學校外文系陸軍軍官學校外文系陸軍軍官學校外文系
摘要摘要摘要摘要
本文就浪漫詩的主題、語言、詩人角色及詩的功能研究浪漫詩藝與現代生態評論之關
係。理論上,浪漫運動捍衛人權與自然權,並挑戰工業革命所引發的社會病症。透過生
態中心論和地緣意識學我闡明浪漫詩的生態評論宗旨,並針對詩藝研究解說浪漫詩如何
立下生態評論之雛型,呼應其倡導人與大自然共生的核心價值。
關鍵詞關鍵詞關鍵詞關鍵詞: 浪漫詩藝,生態評論,人權與自然權,地緣意識,共生