Lord Byron was perhaps the most fascinating & influential literary personality of the Romantic age. An eloquent poet, handsome nobleman, & political rebel, he was one of the most popular & notorious figures of the 19th century.
He was educated first at Harrow & then Cambridge. In 1807, a volume of Byron's poems, Hours of Idleness, was published. A very harsh review of this work in the Edinburgh Review prompted a satirical reply from Byron in heroic couplets, entitled English Bards & Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which Byron lashed not only his reviewers, but also the conservative schools of contemporary poetry, showing his lasting contempt for what he considered the commonplace & vulgarity of the " Lake Poets."
In 1811, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords, & made vehement speeches, attacking the reactionary policy of the English government, & showing his great sympathy for the oppressed poor. At the news of the Greek revolt against the Turks, Byron not only gave the insurgent Greeks financial help but plunged himself into the struggle for the national independence of that country. In July 1823, Byron joined the Greek insurgents at Missolonghi. The Greeks made him commander in chief of their forces in January 1824. Because of several months' hard work under bad weather, Byron fell ill & died. The whole Greek nation mourned over his death.
2. 识记 His Literary Career
In 1807, a volume of Byron's poems, Hours of idleness, was published. In 1809, he wrote a satirical reply to a harsh review in the Edinburgh Review in heroic couplets, entitled English Bards & Scotch Reviewers. The publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poem narrating his travels between 1809 & 1811 in Europe, brought Byron fame. In the following two years. He had written a number of long verse-tales, generally known as the Oriented Tales, with similar kind of heroes. In 1816, he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold & the narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon. From 1816 to 1819, he produced, among other works, the verse drama Manfred (1817), the first two cantos of Don Juan (1818-1819), & the fourth & final canto of Childe Harold (1818). In 1821, Byron wrote the verse drama Cain & the narrative poem The Island. He published, in 1822, one of the greatest political satires, The Vision of Judgment, with its main attack on Southey, the Tory Poet Laureate. Don Juan, a mock epic in 16 cantos, was finished in 1823.
3. 识记His Major works
(1) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
The poem is about a gloomy, passionate young wanderer who escaped from the society he disliked & traveled around the continent, questing for freedom. It teems with all kinds of recognizable features of Romantic poetry --- the medieval, the outcast figure, love of nature, hatred of tyranny, preoccupation with the remote & savage, & so on. It also contains many vivid & exotic descriptive passages on mountains, rivers & seas. With his strong passion for liberty & his intense hatred for all tyrants, Byron shows his sympathy for the oppressed Portuguese under French occupation; he gives his strong support to the Spanish people fighting for their national independences; he laments over the fallen Greece, expressing his ardent wish that the suppressed Greek people should win their freedom; he glorifies the French Revolution & condemns the despotic Napoleon period; & he appeals for the liberty of the oppressed nations while exalting the great fighters for freedom in history.
2) Don Juan
Don Juan is Byron's masterpiece, a great comic epic of the early 19th century. It is a poem based on a traditional Spanish legend of a great lover & seducer of women. In the conventional sense, Juan is immoral, yet Byron takes this poem as the most moral. He invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity & frankness, which, according to Byron are virtues neglected by the modern society. In addition, though Don Juan is the central figure & all the threads of the story are woven around him, he & his adventures only provide the framework: the poet's true intention is, by making use of Juan's adventures, to present a panoramic view of different types of society.
4. 领会Characteristics of Byron's Poems
Byron's poetry, though much criticized by some critics on moral grounds, was immensely popular at home, & also abroad, where it exerted great influence on the Romantic Movement. This popularity it owed to the author's persistent attacks on "cant political, religious, & moral," to the novelty of his oriental scenery, to the romantic character of the Byronic hero, & to the easy, fluent, & natural beauty of his verse. Byron's diction, though unequal & frequently faulty, has on the whole a freedom, copiousness & vigor. His descriptions are simple & fresh, & often bring vivid objects before the reader. Byron's poetry is like the oratory which hurries the hearers without applause. The glowing imagination of the poet rises & sinks with the tones of his enthusiasm, roughing into argument, or softening into the melody feeling & sentiments. Byron employed the Ottva Rima (Octave Stanza) from Italians mock-heroic poetry. It was perfected in Don Juan in which the convention flows with ease & naturalness, as Colonel Stanhope described "a stream sometimes smooth, sometimes rapid & sometimes rushing down in cataracts-a mixture of philosophy & slang-of everything."
5 领会 Byronic Hero
As a leading Romanticist, Byron's chief contribution is his creation of the " Byronic hero," a proud & mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense superiority in his passions & powers, the Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in an evil society, & would fight single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion or in moral principles with unconquerable wills & inexhaustible energies. The conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn social systems & convention. Such a hero appears first in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, & then further developed in later works such as Oriented Tales, Manfred, & Don Juan in different guises. The figure is, to some extent, modeled on the life & personality of Byron himself, & makes Byron famous both at home and abroad.
6 领会 His influence
For a long time, there existed two controversial opinions on Byron. He was regarded in England as the perverted man, the satanic poet; while on the Continent, he was hailed as the champion of liberty, poet of the people. Byron's poetry has great influence on the literature of the whole world. Across Europe, patriots & painters & musicians are all inspired by him. Poets & novelists are profoundly influenced by his works. Actually Byron has enriched European poetry with an abundance of ideas, images, artistic forms & innovations. He stands with Shakespeare & Scott among the British writers who exert the greatest influence over the mainland of Europe.
7 应用 Selected Readings
1) Song for the Luddites(1)
Luddites named after Ned Ludd, a late 18th-century workers' leader, were craftsmen who deliberately smashed machinery in the industrial centers of the East-Midlands, Lancashire & Yorkshire, because they believed that machinery was a cause of their unemployment. On February 27, 1812, Byron in the House of Lords made his famous parliamentary speech, showing his sympathy for the Luddites & indignation at the Frame-breakers Bill(《破坏织机者法案》) which would induce capital punishment to the destroyers of machines.
The poem selected here was written in March 1817. It shows his sympathy & support for the workers in their struggle against the capitalist oppression & exploitation. It is composed of three 5-lined stanzas, each with a rhyme scheme of abaab, all of which are strong & vigorous masculine rhymes. The general metrical movement is anapestic trimeter & dimeter with line 3 in iambic dimeter..
2) The Isles of Greece (from Don Juan, III)
Don Juan, the masterpiece of Byron, is a long satirical poem. Its hero Juan is an aristocratic libertine, amiable & charming to ladies. Byron puts into Don Juan his rich knowledge of his world & his wisdom. It presents brilliant pictures of life in its various stages of love, joy, suffering, hatred & fear. The unifying principle in Don Juan is the basic ironic theme of appearance & reality, i.e. what things seem to be & what they actually are. The selected section, "The Isles of Greece," is taken from Canto III, which is sung by a Greek singer at the wedding of Don Juan & Haidee, the pure & beautiful daughter of a pirate. In the early 19th century, Greece was under the rule of Turk. By contrasting the freedom of ancient Greece & the present enslavement, the poet appealed to people to struggle for liberty.
V. Percy Bysshe Shelley 
1. 一般识记 His Life
Shelley (1792-1822) was born into a wealthy family at Sussex. Though gentle by nature, his rebellious qualities were cultivated in his early years. At 18, Shelley entered Oxford University, where he had written & circulated a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), repudiating the existence of God. This event resulted in his expulsion from the university & being disinherited by his headstrong father. Early in 1818, Shelley & his wife Mary left England for Italy. During the Remaining four years of his life, Shelley traveled & lived in various Italian cities. Shelley was drowned in 1822 in storm near La Spezia, at the age of 30.
2. 识记 His Literary Outlook
Shelley grew up with violent revolutionary ideas under the influence of the free thinkers like Hume & Godwin, so he held a life-long aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority, institutional religion & the formal shams of respectable society, condemning war, tyranny & exploitation, However, under the influence of Christian humanism, Shelley took interest in social reforms. He realized that the evil was also in man's mind. So he predicted that only trough gradual & suitable reforms of the existing institutions could benevolence be universally established & none of the evils would survive in this "genuine society", where people could live together happily, freely & peacefully.
3. 识记 His major works
1) Lyrics: "To a Skylark" & "Ode to the West Wind"
In "To a Skylark," the bird, suspended between reality & poetic image, pours forth an exultant song which suggests to the poet both celestial rapture & human limitation. Best of all the well-known lyric pieces is Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind " (1819); here Shelley's rhapsodic & 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, 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 a logic of feeling, a not easily analyzable progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful & convincing conclusion: "If winter comes, can Spring before behind?" The poem is written in the terza rima form Shelley derived from his reading of Dante. The nervous thrill of Shelley's response to nature however is here transformed through the power of art & imagination into a longing to be united with a force at once physical & prophetic. Here is no conservative reassurance, no comfortable mysticism, but the primal amorality of nature itself, with its mad fury & its pagan ruthlessness. Shelley's ode is an invocation to a primitive deity, a plea to exalt him in its fury & to trumpet the radical prophecy of hope & rebirth.
2) Poetic drama: Prometheus Unbound (1820)
Shelley's greatest achievement is his four-act poetic drama, Prometheus Unbound. According to the Greek mythology, Prometheus, the champion of humanity, who has stolen the fire from Heaven, is punished by Zeus to be chained on Mount Caucasus & suffers the vulture's feeding on his liver. Shelley based his drama on Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, in which Prometheus reconciles with the tyrant Zeus. Radical & revolutionary as Shelley, he wrote in the preface: "In truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that reconciling the Champion with the oppressor of Mankind." So he gave a totally different interpretation, transforming the compromise into a liberation. With the strong support of Earth, his mother; Asia, his bride & the help from Demogorgon & Hercules, Zeus is driven from the throne; Prometheus is unbound. The play is an exultant work in praise of humankind's potential, & Shelley himself recognized it as " the most perfect of my products."
3) Prose: Defence of Poetry
4. 领会 Characteristics of Shelley's Poetry
Shelley is one of the lending Romantic poets, an intense & original lyrical poet in the English language. Like Blake, he has a reputation as a difficult poet: erudite, imagistically complex, full of classical & mythological allusions. His style abounds in personification & metaphor & other figures of speech which describe vividly what we see & feel, or express what passionately moves us.
5. 应用 Selected Readings
1) A Song: Men of England (1)
This poem was written in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre. It is unquestionably one of Shelley's greatest political lyrics. It is not only a war cry calling upon all working people of England to rise up against their political oppressors, but also an address to point out to them the intolerable injustice of economic exploitation. In the poem Shelley pictured the capitalist society as divided into two hostile classes: the parasitic class ("drones") & the working class ("bees").
The song contains eight quatrains; generally each line contains 4 accented syllables. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is uniformly aabb. The last two stanzas of the poem are ironically addressed to those workers who submit passively to capitalist exploitation. They serve as a warning to the working people, that if the latter should give up their struggle they would be digging graves for themselves with their own hands compared to the preceding stanzas, these lines appear weak & ineffectual.
2) Ode to the West Wind
The poem Ode to the West Wind was the best known of Shelley's shorter poems. In the poem the poet describes vividly the activities of the West Wind on the earth, in the sky & on the sea, & then expresses his envy for the boundless freedom of the West Wind & his wish to be free like the wind & scatter his words among mankind. He gathered in this poem a wealth of symbolism, employed a structural art & his powers of metrical orchestration at their mightiest. 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, its destructive-constructive power, 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 a logic of feeling, a progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful & convincing conclusion: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" Here is no reassurance, no mysticism, but the primal amorality of nature itself, with its mad fury & its pagan ruthlessness. Shelley's ode is an invocation to a primitive deity, a plea to exalt him in its fury & to trumpet the radical prophecy of hope & rebirth.
VI. John Keats
1. 一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
John Keats (1795-1821) was born in London & educated at the Clarke's School. At 15, he left school & was apprenticed to a surgeon, Thomas Hammond. Subsequently from 1815 to 1816, Keats studied medicine at Guy's Hospital in London. But he left this profession very soon. He read much of Spenser, Milton & Homer. It was Spenser who awakened in Keats his dormant poetic gift, & the first verses which he wrote were in imitation of the Elizabethan Poetry. Besides the classical elements, Hunt, the radical journalist & minor poet, was a vital influence on the early Keats, cultivating him with a taste for liberal politics as well as for the fine arts.
Keats's first important poem "On first Looking into Chapman's Homer" was published in 1816 in the paper, Examiner, run by Hunt. In 1817, he published his first volume of poems. In 1818, a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion & the moon goddess, Endymion, was published. From 1818 to 1820, Keats reached the summit of his poetic creation. In July 1820, the third & best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, & Other Poems, was published. Keats died in Rome on February 23,1821.
2. 识记 His Major Poetic Works
The odes are generally regarded as Keats's most important & mature works. Their subject matter, however, is the poet's abiding preoccupation with the imagination as it reaches out to union with the beautiful. In the greatest of these works, he also suggests the undercurrent of disillusion that accompanies such ecstasy, the human suffering which forever questions the visionary transcendence achieved by art.
