Development of Forest Imagery in English Poems

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-004-6_38How to use a DOI?

Keywords

imagery; forest; national characteristic

Abstract

Forest is considered the roots of the British and is also the roots of the British and the most common imagery in poetry. This paper examines the forest as imagery shifts meanings from the paleolithic age to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the romanticism age, and the modernism. The meanings help people have a thorough understanding of forest changes under the influence of policies and religion, as well as British history. Prehistoric worship regarded trees as the connection between the earth and the underworld or the celestial world and as the residence of the ancestors. Gradually it blended into roman cultures and disappeared due to the Christianity abhorrence toward unorthodox cults. In the Renaissance, the forest turned into a place of danger with the strict punishment that applied to the royal forest and the Christian belief. The corollary of industrialization was environmental pollution. Poets from the eighteenth century rebelled against Roman cultures that had changed or expunged British original national spirits. Romanticism showed its ardent affinity to primitive nature and tried to regain the original spirits. Modernism takes on the effect of the wars and the literary traditions. Their appreciation of forests not only as a national symbol but also the environmental protection. The meaning of the forest passes on and takes on the characteristic of the time. The understanding of the forest is also the understanding of a nation.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wenhui Hu
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/03/01
TI  - Development of Forest Imagery in English Poems
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 295
EP  - 302
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-004-6_38
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-004-6_38
ID  - Hu2023
ER  -