A Study Of Emotion In English Romantic Poetry

This dissertation is intended to research English romantic emotion, aiming at a thorough and systematic study on English romantic poems from the perspective of emotion. The effective salvation power and correspondent limitation of romantic emotion have been clearly analyzed and indicated through the study of its origin, nature, carrier and value.The essential definition of this dissertation is"emotional reason", which is proposed on the basis of the rationality and emotion development through systematic analysis. Traditionally, reason and emotion are naturally regarded as two controversial definitions, but this dissertation holds the idea that reason refers to the basic abilities of thinking, judging and inferring. No one is completely of no reason."Emotional reason", in the dissertation, is defined as a unique thinking mode of reasoning, judging and writing, having the distinctive inner structure and target which is indicated by the means of understanding the reality and picturing the ideal from the perspective of emotion. Consequently, the English romantic poets, who reflect reality and seek after the ideal world with strong emotional color, make the reality in their poems far from the true one. What the romantic poets pursue is also the ideal with emotion as its core, which in turn leads to the problems that this ideal can never be realized in reality.According to the features of emotional reason, the dissertation concludes the nature of English romantic emotion as self-liberation and self-deletion. English romantic poets, under the considerable influence of emotion, can only have their freedom of spirit and self-liberation realized in a pure emotional domain. As a result, the romantic poets, after their fervent emotional release, finally choose to avoid the real world and adopt self-deletion in different ways.In order to further grasp and interpret romantic emotion, the dissertation, based on the research of considerable text, pursues in-depth study on image—the carrier of romantic emotion. Then, with the analysis on concept of image as well as the nature and features of poetic image, the dissertation divides the romantic images into natural images, mental images and virtual images on the basis of the differences between the emotional structure and emotional mechanism of romantic poems. According to the classification, the various degrees of emotional capabilities have been summarized as mapping emotion; expressing emotion and building up emotional ideal.After this, the dissertation proposes the salvation value of emotion in current society in accordance with two characteristics of romantic emotion. English romantic poets advocate the value of emotion and wish it to become the effective tool for people to resist the tendency of materialism in the rapid development of industrial civilization. In current society, the extremely rapid process of industrialization has scattered materialism everywhere. The study, centered on the emotional thinking mode, is hoping to partly help people shake off the oppression of materialism and concern their emotion as the romantic poets do. At the same time, the dissertation points out the limitation of salvation value of emotion, which can only be achieved in the field of mentality, but can not change the real world.In the innovations of the dissertation,○1 for the first time, the concept of"emotional reason"has been proposed and a detailed analysis on the position and coordinate system of romantic emotion has helped define and comprehend the concept.○2 The innovative summary and interpretation of the nature of the romantic emotion has been conducted with the analysis of the two aspects: self-liberation and self-deletion.○3 The romantic carrier—image has been analyzed vertically and horizontally to construct the overall structure of the romantic image, thus making its study more systematical.○4 The study of romantic emotion has been associated with real life, which provides a new exploration for the combination of literature research with reality.