An Analysis Of The Romantic Elements In Thomas Chatterton’s Poems

Thomas Chatterton,a gifted young poet at the end of the 18th century,was highly acclaimed by British Romanticists.In Wordsworth’s masterpiece Resolution and Independence,the line “I thought of Chatterton,the marvelous Boy” is famous in poetry circle.Based on this comment,American writer Charles Edward Russell,winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography,wrote a biography The Marvelous Boy for Chatterton.Coleridge wrote a monody for him,hoping to shine like a divine light like Chatterton.Southey edited Chatterton’s poems into a volume.Keats praised Chatterton as “the most English poet except Shakespeare” in Endymion,and compared him with Milton.Dante Gabriel Rossetti,a pre-Raphael painter and poet declared: “Not to know Chatterton is to be ignorant of the true day-spring of modern Romantic poetry”.Wilde hailed Chatterton as“the father of the Romantic movement in literature,the precursor of Blake,Coleridge and Keats,and the greatest poet of his time”.So far no in-depth research has been done on Thomas Chatterton and his poems in China.Now that Chatterton ended his young life at the age of seventeen whose Rowley poems are under the guise of the 15th-century monk Thomas Rowley,most foreign scholars focused mainly on his life and the authenticity of Rowley poems,trying to analyze his tragic image and the authorship of Rowley poems.Based on the theory of Romanticism,associating with Thomas Chatterton’s life and the background,the thesis attempts to reveal the Romantic elements in Chatterton’s poems through analyzing his specific poems.The author finds that Thomas Chatterton loves and venerates nature.He uses rich imagination to express his subjective emotion in the world of poetry,reconstructs the medieval culture through imagination,and shows the mysterious beauty of the Gothic.British Romantic poets,such as Coleridge,Wordsworth,Keats and Wilde,all have benefited a lot from Chatterton’s poems.Chatterton has profoundly enlightened the emergence and development of the British Romantic poetry.Therefore,this thesis draws the conclusion that Thomas Chatterton is indeed a leading British Romantic poet.