Câu 9: Romanticism

1 .A deep interest in nature and in obscure: humble or underprivilege people.

It was then believed that civilization was harmful to man. As a result, nature was turned into a hiding place for those who wanted to escape from the complexities of civilization in industrial towns where men had dropped their good nature, growing luxurious and artificial, to escape from the sickness of town-life, there was no other way but to return to mountains, hills and meadows. There, in "humble and rustic life" the real feelings of the heart flourished best.

2. A vivid imagination that can produce supernatural or fantastic dream worlds.

In Coleridge's poetry, there was an extremely strange territory of memory and dream, of strange birds, phantom ships, Arctic sea-caverns, and unearthly instruments.

3. An enthusiasm in fighting against tyrannical authority and glorifying liberty.

Keats wrote in one of his letters:" You speak of Lord Byron and me- there is this great difference between us: He describes what he sees, I describe what I imagine "What Byron saw was that his dreams could not be realized. This resulted in a kind of poetry characterized by a deep hatred of social injustice, of every type of oppression and by an ardent belief in self- sacrifice and heroism as the only way to pull mankind out of its troubles. In this sense, Byron was the most forceful embodiment of the spirit of rebellion against tyrannical authority.

4. A love for the remote in time and distance

 Byron provided his readers with a political geography in verse, a vast panorama of different countries through Childe Harald's Pilgrimage. Sir Walter Scott, through his historical novels, took his readers to "old, far-off things and battles long ago" in his native Scotland.

5. A sense of disappointment mixed with a melancholy mood.

The age was, to use Coleridge's phrase, an age of anxiety. Disillusioned, the individual man shrank into his own ego, becoming drowned in loneliness and opposed to everything which was "non-ego" This state of things led to prideful subjectivism penetrated with gruesome loneliness. Loneliness was the decease of the age.

6. A revolution in literary language-use

The romantics made a revolution in literary language-use. Their actual poetry showed that they were the enemies to conventionality and daintiness of the earlier classical poetic diction, to the triteness and pompousness of its metaphors and simile, and to its failure to record direct observation and emotion. The use of everyday language was a characteristic feature of the innovating verse.