上海外国语大学美国文学课件：chapter 10.ppt

* * Chapter Ten Poetry from 1900 through the 1930s Social Background of This Period There were at least two important factors that made this period different from both preceding and following it: the First World War, and the sense of life being dislocated and fragmented which was more keenly felt in the first year of the present century. The war was the biggest event that had a profound impact on the period. Meanwhile, the loss of faith, which began noticeably with Darwin’s theories of evolution and was intensified by the development of modern science, continued with a greater intensity into this century. In the early twentieth century, American poetry began experimenting with new forms and content. The new age demanded proper literary expression. Between 1912 and 1922 there came a great poetry boom in which about 1000 poets published over 1000 volumes of poetry. Indeed, to express the modern spirit, the sense of fragmentation and dislocation, was in large measure the aim of quite a few modern literary movements. Exit Forward Most of the first modernists became, even earlier than the novelists of the twenties, expatriates, and all were more influenced by the French symbolists and the great Italian poet Dante, than by English or American forebears. Those living in Europe, like Pound and T. S. Eliot, were naturally more immediately affected by the postwar disillusionment and loss of faith than were the poets at home. There was among the Americans nothing like the lyrical outpouring of personal loss and anguish of such English soldier-poets — many of them themselves killed before the armistice — as Edmund Blunt, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But the less personal, more political, links the meaningless destruction of young lives in the war with the bankruptcy of the rotten civilization it was supposed to defend. The Major Writers Robert Frost (1874-1963) Carl Sandburg (1878－1967) Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) Ezra Pound (1885-1972) Wil