英美文学 Whitman Dickinson.ppt

Whitman and Dickinson Both Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) were American poets in theme and technique. Thematically, both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism, and its Americanness, their poetry being part of what F. O. Matthiessen terms “American Renaissance.” In technical terms, both added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry pointing to Ezra Pound and the imagists, and to William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens and other traditions in modern American poetry. In fact, a handy way of seeing modern American poetry is to find its sources in the two founts, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Walt Whitman(1819-1892) Whitman was brought up in a working-class background on Long Island, New York. He had five years of schooling and a good deal of “loafing” and reading. Thirsting for experience and gregarious in habit, Whitman tried at a variety of jobs and picked up a first-hand knowledge of life and people in the new world. He worked as an office boy, a printer’s apprentice, schoolmaster, printer, editor, and journalist. He wrote some lurid tales, a tear-jerking novel, and some traditionally metrical rimed verse. In 1848 he traveled to new Orleans and saw very much of the Mississippi heartlands. This experience with the people and the country furnished both the material and the guiding spirit for his epic, Leaves of Grass, the firs edition of which came out in 1855. It contained twelve poems and did not sell well, but it made a stir on the American literary scene. It broke with the poetic convention, and its sexuality and exotic and vulgar language brought harsh criticism on it. During the civil war, Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse, a “wound-dresser” in military hospitals, an experience which further enriched his knowledge of life and t