高中二年级英语(人教版)上册 Unit 4 Reading

　　Despite its short history, there is a lot of good English poetry around. The earliest English poetry was written in a kind of English that is now difficult to understand. Modern English started around the time of William Shakespeare, towards the end of the sixteenth century. The seventeenth century was a great time for English poetry. Shakespeare is most famous for his plays. His sonnets, however, belong to the best English poetry. In the next generation of great English poets we meet John Donne. Chinese readers admire his works because of his use of surprising images that reminds them of the works of poets such as Su Dongpo. Before the end of the century, there was another famous writer, John Milton. Once published, his work became famous for the absence of rhyme at the end of each line. In the eighteenth century it was Alexander Pope who wrote the finest poetry in England.

　　The next period that produced a great number of fine poets was the nineteenth century. Greatly

　　loved in China are the English Romantic poets. Although they were all born in the eighteenth century, they wrote their major works in the early years of the nineteenth century. John Keats died at a very young age in 1821; while William Wordsworth, who spent much of his time in the English Lake District, lived to the age of 80 and died in 1850. The nature poems by William Wordsworth, George Gordon Byron's Isles of Greece and the sonnets and long poems by John Keats have long been favourites. The style and atmosphere in their poems have often led to comparisons with poets such as Du Fu and Li Bai.

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