Lesson Plan 17 - Emily Dickinson英美文学.pptVIP

O Captain, My Captain! Stanza 1: What does our fearful trip refer to? What prize have the crew on the ship won? (please explain both meanings, real meaning and the metaphor) Stanzas 2 and 3: What has happened to the Captain? What does the speaker want the captain to do and why? Stanzas 4 and 5: How does the speaker feel at the end of this poem? Emily Dickinson 1830-1886 Life and Legacy Grew up with a normal childhood, but experienced a lot of death and other traumas as a young teenager. She left her secondary school early at age 18. As an adult, she led a very isolated life, described as “introverted and reclusive.” After 1862, she rarely left her house. Only a dozen out of 1,775 of her poems were published while she was alive. Legacy: Considered a powerful and innovative figure in American Poetry. Style As part of Dickinson seeking essence or the heart of things, she eliminated inessential language and punctuation from her poems. She leaves out helping verbs and connecting words; she drops endings from verbs and nouns. It is not always clear what Dickinson’s pronouns refer to; sometimes a pronoun refers to a word which does not appear in the poem. At her best, she achieves breathtaking effects by compressing language. Style Dickinson’s disregard for the rules of grammar and sentence structure is one reason twentieth century critics found her so appealing. Her use of language anticipates the way modern poets used language. The downside of her language is that the compression may be so drastic that the poem is incomprehensible; it becomes a riddle or intellectual puzzle. Readers are still saying What? in response to some of her poems. Themes Dickinson’s poems are short, many of them being based on a single image or symbol. She writes about love and a lover nature (flowers/gardens) mortality and immortality success and failure and death In Contrast to Whitman, Dickinson’s poetry has little social or political interest. Death, the ultimate experience, is for Dick