惠特曼与迪金森.pptVIP

第四部分 惠特曼与迪金森 长春大学光华学院 外国语学院 Walt Whitman (1819-1892) 1. Whitman’s Life and Works 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 loafiing” and reading. Whitman liked experience, so he tried at a variety of jobs. At the same time, he got a first hand knowledge of life and people in the new world. He worked as an office boy, a printers apprentice, schoolmaster, printer, editor and journalist. The first edition of Leaves of Grass came out in 1855. It contained twelve poems and did not sell well, but it made a stir on the American literary scene. During the Civil War, Whitman worked as a volunteer nurse in military hospitals. The experience further enriched his knowledge of life and the world. In the meantime he continued to revise and expand his Leaves of Grass. It went through nine editions altogether: 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871, 1876, 1881, 1889, 1891-1892. Whitman began to receive recognition in England and America when his fifth edition appeared. Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke in 1873, but he continued to work at his. Leaves of Grass until his death. In his last time he prepared the Deathbed Edition which containing all of his 400-odd poems. 2. Whitmans Importance 1) Whitman was a catalog of American and European thought. As the great acceptor, he was susceptible to many influences. The enlightenment and its ideals of the rights and dignity of the individual, idealism and in the Transcendentalism of Carlyle, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Emerson, German philosophy, especially Hegels doctrine of a cosmic consciousness that unfolds through conflict to divine ends, with Newtonian and evolutionary, the idea of progress, and current American life with its western frontier spirit, individualism and Civil War Unionism. All these can be found in his system and his poetry. 2) Whitman broke the poetic convention by creating the Free Verse. Free Verse: ① It is a form of po