英语文学阅读与鉴赏B7_Unit 8_Two Poems by Robert Frost.docVIP

Unit Eight Get Started ▇ Read the following background notes before class and be prepared for classroom activities. 1． Some general remarks about poetry: Poetry is hard to define, and even different poets have held different views on what poetry really is. The 18th-century English Romantic poet William Wordsworth says that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”; Wordsworth’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another famous Romantic poet, holds that “prose is words in their best order, but poetry is the best words in their best order”; the American poet Robert Frost asserts that poetry is “a legitimate way of saying one thing and meaning another” and that it occurs “when an emotion has found its thought and thought has found words.” He also claims that “poetry is what is left out in translation.” However, in its basic sense, poetry can be defined as a form of literary art, in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative (唤起…感情的) qualities in addition to its apparent meaning. In terms of form, poetry is different from prose in that the former is arranged in lines and stanzas (诗节) according to certain regular patterns in rhythm and rhyme; in terms of function, the former is aimed at conveying images, human emotions and personal experiences rather than information or instruction. Owing to the elusive (难以表述的) nature of poetry, the same poem may, therefore, mean different things to different readers, and all of these meanings may be different from what the poet has intended to mean and be equally valid. For instance, a poet may have written about some peculiar personal experience, yet the reader may take it as the expression of a general situation or even a universal truth; sometimes, the reader may take the poem as an expression of his or her own private experience, thus getting deeply involved in the poem emotionally. The different interpretations of and the ambiguities in a