美国文学(Emerson and Thoreau).pptVIP

American Literature;Ralph WaldoEmerson(1803-1882);Born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian (一神教的) minister who was a member of an old Puritan family. After his father’s death, he was raised by his mother and an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a zealously pious woman who expressed her sardonically critical mind in a style her nephew admired and imitated. At Harvard in 1820 he began to keep the voluminous journals that he continued throughout his life, and that formed the basis of most of his essays and poems. ;After graduation in 1821 he took over his brother’s Boston school for young ladies, although with some misgivings When he moved to Canterbury with his family in 1823 he expressed his relief at returning to the natural beauties of the countryside in the poem “Good-bye”. He taught for two more years, then entered the Divinity School at Harvard, where ill health and doubts on dogmas made him a desultory student. ;Although approved as a candidate for the Unitarian ministry in 1826, he had to go to Georgia and Florida for the winter because of a pulmonary disease. He married in 1829, but his wife died in 1831. A year later came the great turning point in his life; he resigned his pastorate of the Second Church of Boston where he had been an effective and popular preacher, because he could not conscientiously administer the Lord’s Supper.;During a tour of Europe (1832-33), he met Carlyle, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, through whom he became intimately associated with the transcendental thought and its sources with the German idealism. Other influences on Emerson’s later thinking included his own Unitarian-Yankee background his admiration for Plato and the neo-Platonism his study of the sacred bocks of the East the skepticism of Montaigne. ;On his return to Boston he did some preaching, but turned more and more to lyceum lecturing, for which he drew materials from his journals. His addresses, presented in such series as “The Philosophy of History,” “Human