[TEA-Demo] ENG3U, En ...

Today you will have more opportunities to paraphrase poetry in order to better relate to the meaning and connect it with your life experiences and thinking. 

You will also be introduced to one of the important themes of early English literature – the relationship between human and the natural world.

There is a whole tradition of English poetry known as Romanticism. an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 1700s, and lasted approximately from about 1800 to 1850.

The Concept of the Chain of being (everything is connected The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals, and plants, to minerals.
The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement whose three central concepts were the use of reason, the scientific method, and social progress. Enlightenment thinkers believed they could help create better societies and better people. 

The tension between love of the natural world which people before the Enlightenment accepted Nature as signs of the Goodness of God. People did not question how it worked. Science came along and removed God from the thinking and applied scientific explanations to everything. Science removes emotion and therefore the emotional connection people had in the past with Nature was being destroyed.

Einstein maintained that in science there is always an element of poetry – imagination 

Today we are going to examine some poems that look at the connection between humans and nature – some examples include birds and dinosaurs.