https://literarydevices.

net/bright-star-would-i-were-steadfast-as-thou-art/

https://www.biography.com/writer/john-keats

Board Project

Theme: Nature is no longer the rustic retreat of the Wordsworthian poet.. it is now a pressing political question,
a question of survival.

Components: Introduction – Importance of nature

A brief on English Literature

OR
English literature, the body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of the
British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century to the present day. The major literatures written in
English outside the British Isles are treated separately under American literature, Australian literature,
Canadian literature, and New Zealand literature.

English literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single English
novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the French writer
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the subjugated
Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign in origin, in which the
churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination emerged a
flexible and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to supreme
application by William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical learning
and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts; and ideas of Augustan literary
propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the 19th century for a less specific, though still selectively
viewed, Classical antiquity continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses derived from a
foreign source, namely the Mediterranean basin. The Decadents of the late 19th century and the
Modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals and movements for inspiration.
Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism dead in the late 20th century, for by the mid-1980s
the approach known as structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in origin,
infused the very study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and university
departments. Additional influence was exercised by deconstructionist analysis, based largely on the
work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Further, Britain’s past imperial activities around the globe continued to inspire literature—in some cases
wistful, in other cases hostile. Finally, English literature has enjoyed a certain diffusion abroad, not only
in predominantly English-speaking countries but also in all those others where English is the first choice
of study as a second language.

English literature is therefore not so much insular as detached from the continental European tradition
across the Channel. It is strong in all the conventional categories of the bookseller’s list: in Shakespeare
it has a dramatist of world renown; in poetry, a genre notoriously resistant to adequate translation and
therefore difficult to compare with the poetry of other literatures, it is so peculiarly rich as to merit
inclusion in the front rank; English literature’s humour has been found as hard to convey to foreigners as
poetry, if not more so—a fact at any rate permitting bestowal of the label “idiosyncratic”; English
literature’s remarkable body of travel writings constitutes another counterthrust to the charge of
insularity; in autobiography, biography, and historical writing, English literature compares with the best
of any culture; and children’s literature, fantasy, essays, and journals, which tend to be considered minor
genres, are all fields of exceptional achievement as regards English literature. Even in philosophical
writings, popularly thought of as hard to combine with literary value, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell stand comparison for lucidity and
grace with the best of the French philosophers and the masters of Classical antiquity.
 Role of Nature in English Literature
Romanticism as a trend in art and literature of England emerged in the 90th of XVIII century.   
Romanticism in England took shape earlier than in other Western European countries, it had its vivid
specificity and individualism. Its most bright representatives were William Blake, William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas Moore, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, Walter Scott, John Keats and others, who have left a rich heritage in the literature of England
and contributed to the world literature. 

Romanticism is one of the most controversial trends in European literature, in the

literature Romanticism is mostly understood not only as a formal literary trend, but as a certain
philosophy, and it is through this philosophy that we try to define Romanticism.

One of the features of Romanticism in England was its magnificent lyric poetry, especially lyric
poetry, in which the identity of the poet was brightly expressed in whatever he wrote. English poets
framed their observations and views in parables, fantastic visions, cosmic symbolism. Sublime things
and feelings were understood by them not only as something exclusive, but that could be present in the
simplest things, in everyday life. 

One of the characteristics of romantic literature was a special attention to the spiritual world of man, but,
in contrast to the sentimental literature, Romantics were interested not in an ordinary man, but “the
exceptional man in the exceptional circumstances”.  Romantic hero is experiencing violent emotions, is
striving for perfection, dreams of an ideal. Romantic hero loves and sometimes idealizes the Middle
Ages time, “pristine nature”, in powerful forms of which he sees reflection of his strong and conflicting
emotions.  

When characterizing the relation of romantic writers and poets to the world, it is important to point
aspiration to the ideal, human impulses and feelings, the belief that not logic and knowledge but
intuition and imagination could reveal all the mysteries of life. But it is aspiration to the ideal,
sometimes illusory or unattainable, that lead to rejection of everyday life which did not meet that
ideal.  Therefore, the romantic heroes had an “internal duality”, forced to live in two disparate worlds of
the ideal and reality, sometimes coming in protest not only against the bone of reality, but also against
the divine world order.  Here came the so-called “romantic irony” of a man in relation to an established
reality, that the average man took seriously. In general, the idea is often combined with irony, that is the
peculiarity of English literature at all stages of its development. 

English Romantics were especially interested in social problems, as to the modern bourgeois society
they opposed the old, pre-bourgeois relations, they glorified nature and simple, natural feelings. Bright
representative of English Romanticism is Byron, who, according to critics, “clothed in a dull hopeless
romanticism and selfishness.” His works are full of pathos of struggle and protest against the modern
world, glorifying freedom and individualism.

Understanding of nature and its image in the works of the Romantics

In the late XVIII – early XIX century the very understanding of nature has changed. First of all, it was
associated with changes in life philosophy and world view of romantics, who then explained all the
phenomena from another point of view, different from the medieval and enlightenment views. The
change in the “philosophy of the world spirit” and in understanding of nature had effects on the
romantic image of the landscape: Romantics view the world spirit as a basic principle of nature, as
“weak, vacillating, the least comprehensible and most mysterious part of nature”. With this
understanding of nature, the image of nature and landscape appeared as dual: the nature itself and also
the spirit that filled it and “governed” it. Some critics argue that the difference of the romantic
interpretation of the nature was in the fact that romanticism “tried to carry balance of the world of pure
ideas with the world of tangible and visible things, eliminating their opposition”. (Abrams, 1975)
Reading and writing compound.

The pupil will have to read about 2 poets allotted to him/her