Chapter 21 The Confessional School The Beat Generation英文学习资料.ppt

Chapter 21 The Confessional School The Beat Generation Introduction One distinct group of poets in the postwar period is the Confessional School. This includes many people whose poetry seems to share common features such as a ruthless, excruciating self-analysis of one’s own background and heritage, one’s own most private desires and fantasies etc., and the urgent “I ‘ll-tell-it-all-to-you” impulse: Delmore Schwartz, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, W.D. Snodgrass, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrrienne. Robert Lowell (1917-1977) The most influential recent poet, Robert Lowell, began traditionally but was influenced by experimental currents. Because his life and work spans the period between the older modernist masters like Ezra Pound and the contemporary writers, his career places the later experimentalists in a larger context. Lowell fits the mold of the academic writer: white, male, Protestant by birth, well-educated, and linked with the political and social establishment. He was a descendant of the respected Boston Brahmin family that included the famous 19th-century poet James Russell Lowell and a recent president of Harvard University. Robert Lowell found an identity outside his elite background, however. He went not to Harvard but to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he rejected his Puritan ancestry and converted to Catholicism. Jailed for a year as a conscientious objector in World War II, he later publicly protested the Vietnam conflict. Lowells early books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Wearys Castle (1946), which won a Pulitzer Prize, revealed great control of traditional forms and styles, strong feeling, and an intensely personal yet historical vision. The violence and specificity of the early work is overpowering in poems like Children of Light (1946), a harsh condemnation of the Puritans who killed Indians and whose descendants burned surplus grain instead of shipping it to hungry people. Lowell wr