I. Three periods of English poetry

1. The English Renaissance: Renaissance refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th century in western civilization and the movement, which marks the transition from the medieval to the modern world. It first started in Florence and Venice of Italy and went to embrace the rest of Europe, with the flowering of painting, sculpture and architecture.

2. The Age of Romanticism: Romanticism (also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism, conservatism and nationalism.

3. The Victorian Age: The mid-and-late 19th century is generally known as the Victorian age, controlled by the rule of Queen Victoria. This is a period of dramatic change that led England to the summit of development as a powerful nation. The rising bourgeoisie were getting political importance as well as wealth. England became the world’s workshop and London the world’s bank. London became the center of Western civilization. Literacy increased as the masses started to be educated and started to think for themselves. This stage has got ready for the coming of the Golden Age of the English novel. Along with other forms of literature, they displayed a mirror of the Victorian society and a powerful weapon of its criticism. The English critical realists of the 19th century truthfully reflect the evil of upper class in bourgeois society as well as of the lower classes. Generally speaking, the Victorian literature vividly portrays the reality of the age.

II. Sonnet

A sonnet is a short song in the original meaning of the word. Later it became a poem of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter with various rhyming schemes. It was first written by the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) who wrote sonnets to a lady named Laura.

Sonnet was introduced to England by poets Thomas Wyatt (1503? 1542) and the Earl of Surrey (15179 -1547). Shakespeare wrote his sonnets in about 1589 and they were published in 1609. The writing of sonnets, either to one’s love, or to one’s patron, or to one’s friend, was a fashion in his time.

The metrical form of Shakespeare’s sonnets is different from that of Petrarach’s. Petrarch’s sonnet is divided into two parts. The first eight lines are called an octave rhyming pattern of abba abba, in which the theme of the sonnet is put forward or a problem is raised. The next six lines are called a sestet following a rhyming scheme cde cde, in which the answer to the theme is given. Shakespeare’s sonnet consists of three quatrains with a rhyming scheme abab cdcd efef and ends with a couplet rhyming gg. In the three quatrains the theme is put forward and developed, and in the couplet the sonnet ends with a surprise conclusion or a shift of ideas.

III．Lake Poets

“Lake Poets”: Cumbria of England, charming for its lake-strewn valleys, covers an area of 2. 243 square kilometers known as the English Lake District. In point of fact, the region gained its fame when such poets as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth and sometimes De Quincey were attached to it. These poets were later named Lake Poets or Lakers since they lived one way or another in the Lake District at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Although two of the four: namely Southey and Wordsworth, were Poets Laureate, they were confusingly grouped since Southey and De Quincey do not seem to have subscribed in their views or work to the poetic theories of such romantic poets as Coleridge and Wordsworth who co-authored the famous Lyrical Ballads.

The Lake School, another term that refers to this group of poets, seems to have appeared for the first time in the Edinburgh Review of August 1817. The expression and a couple of others related to the Lake District were not always taken as that of proper respect by the contemporaries. Lord Byron, for instance, referred slighting to “all the Lakers” in his dedication to Don Juan and De Quincey even denied the existence of such a “school” in his recollections of the Lake Poets.

IV. Romantic Poetry

Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted from 1800 to 1850, approximately.

The poems of Lyrical Ballads intentionally re-imagined the way poetry should sound: “By fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men,” Wordsworth and his English contemporaries, such as Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Blake, wrote poetry that was meant to boil up from serious, contemplative reflection over the interaction of humans with their environment. Although many stress the notion of spontaneity in Romantic poetry, the movement was still greatly concerned with the difficulty of composition and of translating these emotions into poetic form. Indeed, Coleridge, in On Poesy or Art, sees art as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”. Such an attitude reflects what might be called the dominant theme of English Romantic poetry: the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create meaning.