Astrugglebetweenman’snaturalismandsocialism英美文学

1、A struggle between man s naturalism and socialism 1、 general introduction of Robert Frost the content and characteristics of his poems (1) rejected the revolutionary poetic principles of his contemporaries, choosing instead “the- foalsdhioned way to be new. ” He employed the plain speech of rural Ne

2、w Englanders and preferred the short, traditional forms of lyric and narrative. (2) He saw nature as a storehouse of analogy and symbol. (3) His concern with nature reflected deep moral uncertainties, and his poetry, for all its apparent simplicity, often probes mysteries of darkness and irrationali

3、ty in the bleak and chaotic landscapes of an indifferent universe where men stand alone, unaided and perplexed. he become a national bard, win four Pulitzer Prizes famous poems“: The Road Not Taken、”“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. 2 my understanding of stopping by the woods in a snowy evening

4、 Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harne

5、ss bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sounds the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. Nature is full of beauty and imagination, but only those w

6、ho own the observe eyes can find the beauty and enjoy it. the owner of the woods even not notice the beauty and difference of the woods after snowing, but,frost, a past-by, choosing to stop and enjoy the beauty of the nature. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” though the woods are lovely,attract

7、ive,but frost chooses to not stop any longer, but to keep his promise and still stay with the society. this line fully expressed the inner struggle of frost, he really want to enjoy the beauty of the nature, be a member of it,but,the little horse warns him by shaking the bell, reminding him the resp

8、onsibility ,the duty and the must to return to the real world,reture to the society. This is a poem to be marveled at and taken for granted. Like a big stone, like a body of water, like a strong economy, however it was forged it seems that, once made, it has always been there. Frost claimed that he

9、wrote it in a single nighttime sitting; it just came to him. Perhaps one hot, sustained burst is the only way to cast such a complete object, in which form and content, shape and meaning, are alloyed inextricably. One is tempted to read it, nod quietly in recognition of its splendor and multivalent

10、meaning, and just move on. But one must write essays. Or study guides. Like the woods it describes, the poem is lovely but entices us with dark depths of interpretation, in this case. It stands alone and beautiful, the account of a man stopping by woods on a snowy evening, but gives us a come-hither

11、 look that begs us to load it with a full inventory of possible meanings. We protest, we make apologies, we point to the dangers of reading poetry in this way, but unlike the speaker of the poem, we cannot resist. The basic conflict in the poem, resolved in the last stanza, is between an attraction

12、toward the woods and the pull of responsibility outside of the woods. What do woods represent? Something good? Something bad? Woods are sometimes a symbol for wildness, madness, the pre-rational, the looming irrational. But these woods do not seem particularly wild. They are someone s woods, someone

13、 thse i n particular owner lives in the village. But that owner is in the village on this, the darkest evening of the yearso would any sensible person be. That is where the division seems to lie, between the village (or“ society, ” “ civilization, ” “ duty, ” “ sensibility,” and the woods (that whic

14、h is beyond the borders of the village and all it represents). If the woods are not particularly wicked, they still possess the seed of the irrational; and they are, at night, dark with all the varied connotations of darkness. Part of what is irrational about the woods is their attraction. They are

15、restful, seductive, lovely, dark, and deep like deep sleep, like oblivion. Snow falls in downy flakes, like a blanket to lie under and be covered by. And here is where many readers hear dark undertones to this lyric. To rest too long while snow falls could be to lose one s way, to lose the path, to

16、freeze and die. Does this poeexmpr ess a death wish, considered and then discarded? Do the woods sing a siren s song? To be lulled to sleep could be truly dangerous. Is allowing oneself to be lulled akin to giving up the struggle of prudence and self-preservation? Or does the poem merely describe th

17、e temptation to sit and watch beauty while responsibilities are forgotten to succumb to a mood for a while? The woods sit on the edge of civilization; one way or another, they draw the speaker away from it (and its promises, its good sense).“ Society ” would condemn stopping here in the dark, in the

18、 snow it is ill advised. The speaker ascribes society s reproach to the horse, which may seem, at first, a bit odd. But the horse is a domesticated part of the civilized order of things; it is the nearest thing to society s agent at this place and time. And having the horse reprove the speaker (even

19、 if only in the speaker s imagination) helps highlight several uniquely human features of the speaker s dilemma. One is the regard for beauty (often flyinin gth e face of practical concern or the survival instinct); another is the attraction to danger, the unknown, thedark mystery; and the third per

20、haps related but distinct is the possibility of the death wish, of suicide. Not that we must return too often to that darkest interpretation of the poem. Beauty alone is a sufficient siren; a sufficient protection against her seduction is an unwillingness to give up on society despite the responsibi

21、lities it imposes. William Faulkner William Faulkner (1897-1962), was an American novelist and poet whose works feature his native state of Mississippi. He was regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is known fo

22、r his epic portrayal, in some 20 novels, of the tragic conflict between the old and the new South. Although Faulkners intricate plots and complex narrative style alienated many readers of his early writings, he was a literary genius whose powerful works and creative vision earned him the 1949 Nobel

23、Prize in literature. Faulkner was a towering figure in American literature during the first half of the 20th century. With Ernest Hemingway, he is usually considered one of the two greatest American novelists of his era. Faulkner was particularly noted for the eloquent richness of his prose style an

24、d for the unique blend of tragedy and humor in his works. His novels have a stunning emotional impact and his characters are highly memorable. The dramatic force and vividness of Faulkner best work is sunsurpassed in modern fiction. Using the decay and corruption of the South after the American Civi

25、l War (1861-1865) as a background, Faulkner portrayed the tragedy that occurs when the traditional values of a society disintegrate. Some of his chief concerns were the nature of evil and guilt and the relationship between the past and the present. Despite his preoccupation with depravity and violen

26、ce, however, Faulkner also wrote of people capacity to perform acts of nobility and goodness. which contains elements of the author Among Faulkner s most remarkable short stories is“A Rose for Emily ” (1931 s common theme of the decline of the old South. Go Down, Moses, a volume of stories about the

27、 McCaslin family, includes the author well-known novella “The Bear. ” Another story that would later be anthologized as a Faulkner classic is“That Evening Sun ” (1931), which also features the Compson family. A Rose for Emily recounts the story of an eccentric spinster, Emily Grierson. An unnamed na

28、rrator details the strange circumstances of Emilys life and her odd relationships with her father, who controlled and manipulated her, and her lover, the Yankee road worker Homer Barron. When Homer Barron threatens to leave her, she is seen buying arsenic, which the townspeople believe she will comm

29、it suicide with. After this, Homer Barron is not heard from again, and is assumed to have returned north. Though she does not commit suicide, the townspeople of Jefferson continue to gossip about her and her eccentricities, citing her familys history of mental illness. She is heard from less and les

30、s, and rarely ever leaves her home. Unbeknownst to the townspeople until her death, in her upstairs room she hides all day with the corpse of Homer Barron, which explains the horrid stench that emits from Miss Emilys house. The story s complexities have inspired critics while casual readers found th

31、e work one of Faulkner s most accessible (and shortest) works. The popularity of the story was due in no small part to its gruesome ending. The story explores many themes, including the society of the South at that time, the role of women in the South, and extreme psychosis. Ezra Pound 1 Imagism: Po

32、und and Eliot became the early leaders in restoring to poetry the use of literary reference as an imaginative instrument. major work of poetry is the long poem called“The Cantos ” 2 Pound is the leading spokesman of Imagist Movement and the forerunner of the 20th-century American poetry. Pounds earl

33、ier poetry is saturatht ed f awmithili ar poetic subjects that characterize the 19th century Romanticism. Later he is more concerned about the problems of the modern culture: the contemporary cultural decay and the possible sources of cultural renewal as well. The other important aspects of Pounds p

34、oetic work include his use of myth and personae. As to his language, his lines are usually oblique yet marvelously compressed. Imagist Movement, which flourished from 1909 to 1917,is a movement advanced modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism,

35、 especially Tennysons wordiness and high-flown language in poetry. As one of the leaders of the Imagists. Pound endorsed the groups three main principles, which include directtreatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words rather than in the sequence of a metronom

36、e. American poet and critic, often called the poets poet because his profound influence on 20th century writing in English. Pound believed that poetry is the highest of arts. A rebel par excellence, he challenged many of the common views of his time and spent 12 years in an American mental hospital.

37、 Pounds major work was the Cantos, which was published in ten sections between 1925 and 1969, and then as a one-volume collected edition, THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND I-CXVII (1970). Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, but he was brought up in Wyncote, Philadelphia. In 1908 Pound travelled widely in E

38、urope, working as a journalist. His first book of poems, A LUME SPENTO (1908), was privately printed by A. Antonini in Venice. Inspired by the work of Yeats, he went to London because he thought Yeats knew more about poetry than anybody else: He founded with Richard Aldington (1892-1962) and others

39、the literary Imagism, and edited its first anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). The movement was influenced by thoughts of Rmy de Gourmont whose book, The Natural Philosophy of Love (1904), Pound translated later, and T.E. Hulme (1883-1917), who stressed the importance of fresh language and true percept

40、ion on nature. In his cautions, published in Poetry in 1913, Pound wrote: Dont use such an expression as dim lands of peace. It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writers not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. In their manifest

41、o the Imagists promised: 1. Direct treatment of the thing whether subject or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. Pounds short one-image poem In a St

42、ation of the Metro is among the most celebrated Imagist works: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough. Pound had seen a succession of beautiful faces one day on the Paris Metro, and in the evening he found suddenly the expression for his sudden emotion. Pound soon

43、 lost interest in Ima Amygism. With Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was killed in 1915, he founded Vorticism, which produced a magazine, Blast. He helped Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce to publish their works in the magazines Egoist and Poetry. When he worked in 1

44、913-14 as W.B. Yeatss secretary, he started a correspondence with Joyce. After their first meeting the Irish poet had said that Pound cant sing as he has no voice, but later called him a solitary volcano; Wyndham Lewis said he was the Trotsky of literature. Pound wrote on Joyce on various magazines,

45、 collected money for him, and even sent spare clothes for him. Pound also played crucial role in the cutting of Eliots The Waste Land. Eliot dedicated the work to him, as il miglior fabbro (the better maker). In 1914 Pound married the artist Dorothy Shakespear, surely the most charming woman in Lond

46、on, as Pound described her to his mother. After a vacation in Egypt, Dorothy conceived in 1926 a child, Omar. In 1922 Pound started his relationship with the violinist Olga Rudge, with whom he had a daughter, born five months before Omar. From this period date one of Pounds most widely read poems, H

47、OMAGE TO SEXTUS PROPERTIUS (1919). Pound has been called the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. Beginning in 1913 with the notebooks of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, he pursued a lifelong study of ancient Chinese texts, and translated among others the writings of Confucius. Pounds translat

48、ions based on Fenollosas notes, collected in CATHAY (1915), are considered among the most beautiful of his writings. Dante and Homer became other sources for inspiration, and especially Dantes journey through the realms have parallels with his examination of individual experiences in the Cantos. In

49、1920 Pound moved to Paris the teeth. Four years later her settled in Italy, where he lived over 20 years, comfortable with his role as an outsider. He met Mussolini in 1933 and saw in him the long-needed economic and social reformer. In his anti-Semitic statements Pound agreed with those who believe

50、d that the economic system was being exploited by Jewish financiers. During World War II he made in Rome a series of hysterical and bitter radio broadcasts, that were openly fascist. In one of his radio talks he suggested that if some man had a stroke of genius, and could start a pogrom against Jews

51、. there might de something to say for it. In 1945 he was arrested by the U.S. forces and put in a six foot by six foot gorilla cage was labelled as paranoid by the examining psychiatrists. Pound spent 12 years in Washington, D.C., in a hospital for the criminally insane. It has been suggested that P

52、ound was feigning insanity to escape the death penalty, but the treason indictment did not drastically affect his ability to write and translate poetry. During this period he received the 1949 Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos, which concerned his imprisonment at the camp near Pisa. After Pound w

53、as released from St. Elizabeths hospital due to the actions and efforts of his last living prot間 ? Eustace Mullins, he returned to Italy, where he spent his remaining years. Pound died on November 1, 1972, in Venice. According to Katherine Anne Porter, Pound was one of the most opinionated and unsel

54、fish men who ever lived, and he made friends and enemies everywhere by the simple exercise of the classic American constitutional right of free speech. Pound published over 70 books and translated Japanese plays and Chinese poetry. The Cantos, a series of poems which he wrote from 1920s throughout his life, are considered among his best achievements. Its last volume was DRAFTS AND FRAGMENTS OF CANTOS CX-CXVII (1968). In the Cantos Pound recorded the poets spiritual quest for transcendence, and intellectual search for worldly wisdom. However, he d