The Comparative Study Of Wordsworth And Shelly In Perspective Of Romanticism

Romanticism is a style of literature in America and Europe popular during the 18th and 19th centuries. it was highly imaginative, idealistic, and sentimental. It is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong disapproving voice, made him an authoritative and much-denigrated figure during his life and afterward. This essay is to analyze Shelley's main attitudes of great passion on history, social dimension, agrarian politics, to show his positive romanticism. Compare with Shelley, Wordsworth's passive romanticism strengthens the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and so on. I take Wordsworth and Shelley to stand for the characteristics of romanticism in Britain romantic literature from 18th to 19th centuries.This study of Wordsworth and Shelly in Perspective of Romanticism firstly give us a brief introduction about romanticism, which indicates the background and main characteristics and of romanticism, then it takes William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley as two romantic representatives. William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth is regarded as a worshipper of nature. He can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. Common life is Wordsworth's only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. His sympathy always goes to the suffering poor. Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginning finally turns out to be its end. Wordsworth's deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profound poetry which no other poets has ever equaled. Poetry, he believes originates from "emotion recollected in tranquility." Rejecting the contemporary emphasis on form and intellectual approach that drained poetic writing of strong emotion, he maintains that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people are the raw material of which poetry can be made. Wordsworth's major works includes: Lyrical Ballad, Lucy Poems, Sonnet, The Prelude, and so on. Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of Life.This essay is divided into five parts, the introduction is just the explanation of romanticism, which includes the background, characteristics and its development. Chapter one is about the romantic social ideals of Wordsworth and Shelley, in which the Wordsworth's pursuit for idyllic life and Shelley's quest for radical reform are two main topics. Chapter two introduces their romantic historical attitudes, in this chapter, the reader can understand Wordsworth's nostalgic longing to preserve stability and Shelley's celebration of historical progress. Chapter three gives us an introduction about the two great poets'romantic poetic passions, it tells the reader about Wordsworth's photographic subjectivity and Shelley's incongruity through irony and paradox. According to the comparative study of the two romantic writers, the readers can get a good understanding about their attitudes to some themes we concern about in the romantic era of 18th to 19th centuries.