《美国文学》课件二十六.ppt

Lecture 25 Wallace Stevens (1879-1955);1. His position in American literary history Stevens was a father-figure among contemporary poets, and became, along with Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, a major influence in contemporary American poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. ;2. The style of his poetry Stevens is a very sensual poet, and delights in depicting the world as revealed to the senses; colors, sounds and exotic images all appeal to him. He was influenced by the Imagist movement in his early career. But his style in the final phrase of his career (from the 1940s through his death in 1955) underwent a significant change; he becomes increasingly more meditative and even obscure in style and more difficult to read.;3. Stevens’s views Stevens held that a poet lives in two worlds—the world of reality and the world of imagination—and builds bridges between them; he repeatedly deals in his poetry with the role of the power of imagination; the exaltation of the role of imagination and that of art reaches the highest point in him in modern American literary history. ; Stevens is tremendously interested in the brute fact of reality. He thinks that a poet should find beauty and pleasure and excitement and meaning in the sordidness of reality, hence his ceaseless search and pondering over the true nature of reality which to him is not quite knowable. ;;1) Language points: jar: symbol of human civilization; Tennessee：the state of Tennessee, an agricultural state with many hills，symbol of the unexplored natural world; It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill: the jar offers the disorderly wilderness a centre and order;a port in air：port: imposing bearing; air: manner, look; It took dominion everywhere: human civilization and the order coming from it control the disorderly natural world; Bare: unadorned; the unusual power of arts; even an artifact such as a jar with a very simple form has a strong moving and cohesi