美国文学史考试总结.docVIP

Brief introduction of his life Eliot（1888-1965） American-born English poet， literary critic, and dramatist， who is best known for his poem The Waste Land. He was born in St. Louis， Missouri. Features of his poetry Eliot’s poetry was becoming noted for its fresh visual imagery视觉表象, its flexible灵活 tone语气音调 and highly expressive rhythm.韵律 His famous principle “objective correlative”客观相关物 i.e. using related有关联的 objects, situations情境, events, all external外部的事实 facts, to express emotions.情感 His criticism他善于以精辟和富于权威性的语言表达其他人经常想到和提到，然而不能准确讲出的论点 Eliot was a distinguished literary critic. He became “a giver of laws and the arbiter of taste” in the new poetry and criticism. His criticism possessed an air of authority and offered a measure of reassurance The basic them of his criticism the relationship of between tradition and individual talent, and between the past, the present and the future His famous doctrine on poets and poetry “impersonal theory or the theory of impersonality and objectivity. To Eliot, what the poet has to express, is not a “personality,个性” but a particular 方法medium in which impressions印象 and experiences经历 combine结合 in 奇特peculiar and unexpected 出乎意料的ways. Poetry is not a turning loose释放 of emotion, but an escape from it; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from it. The influence of his theory Lead to the emergence of the New Criticism新批评主义 in later years and influence a whole generation of poets.一代 His theory became something like a law for American poets for over two decades from mid 1920s through the 1950s. The waste land is a reprehensive谴责 work of the high modernism of 1920s, impersonal, 客观的discontinuous间断的 with its fragments片段, full of literary allusions暗示 and ancient myths古代神话, measuring测量 modern life against the historical past and finding it wanting不足 in many ways. The change of these five parts is abrupt 生硬and jerky, with no hint of logical order逻辑次序的暗示 and causal relationship.因果关系 Through gaps, absence of connective tissues连接