美国文学 课程ppt 05.pptVIP

Chapter Five 19th-Century American Poets Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) To Helen Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore. To Helen On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs, have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. To Helen Lo! In yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand! Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy-Land! Poe’s principles on poetry writing A poem should be short, readable at one sitting. The chief aim of a poem is to produce a sense of beauty. The most appropriate tone for all poems is melancholy. A poem must be composed with rhythms. A poem must be pure, written for its own sake. Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)  Literary term Free verse: It refers to a kind of poetry whose rhythmical lines vary in length, adhering to no fixed metrical pattern or the usually rhyming system. Such poetry may seem formless, but it does have a form or pattern, often largely based on repetition and parallel structure. Whitman’s poems In his poems, he celebrated new America rather than regretted it. He opposed slavery, idealized Lincoln, supported strikes, and combined the ideal of the democratic common people and that of the rugged individual. Like Emerson, Whitman saw a unity which pervaded the universe. One of his major concerns is the soul and its destiny. For Whitman, sensuality was the origin of the mystical state. Sensuality led to spiritual insight. Whitman celebrated the body, enjoyed the body, because he said that through the physical people learned the spiritual. He held that poetry should include the lowly, the profane, and even the obscene. Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) frequent use of dashes; sporadic capitalization of nouns; convoluted and ungrammatical phrasing; off-rhymes; broken meters;