英美诗歌选读 第一讲

美国文学选读Lecture 1 American Literature:An Introduction♦What is Literature?♦The Purposes of Reading Literature♦How to Approach a Literary Work?♦What Does It Mean by American Literature?♦Some Characteristics of American Literature♦The Development of American Literature♦Benjamin Franklin: The AutobiographyWhat is Literature?♦comes from human interest in telling stories♦14th century : polite learning through reading. A man of letters meant a man of wide reading♦Mid-18th century: the practice and profession of writing♦Since the 19th century: the high skills ofwriting in the special context of high imaginationFor more details, seeWu DingBo. An Outline of American Literature. P1.The Random House Dictionary definition of the word “literature”:1. writing regarded as having permanent worth through its intrinsic excellence;2. the entire body of writing of a specific language, period, people, etc.;3. writing dealing with a particular subject;4. the group of imaginative writing including ficti on, poetry, drama…The four main categories of literature:1.fiction: novel, novella, short stories,myth, legend, folktale…2. poetry: epic, ballad, free verse,lyrics, psalm, eulogy, sonnet…3. drama: play, opera, radio/TV/film scripts…4. prose: essay, criticism, literary theory, (auto)biography…The Purposes of Reading Literature:♦Reading for pleasure♦Reading for relaxation♦Reading for acquiring knowledge♦Reading for sharing human experience♦Reading for professional criticismHow to Approach a Literary Work?♦Analyticale.g. the elements of fiction: plot, character, setting, point of view, theme, symbol, allegory, style, tone, etc.♦ThematicWhat is it about? e.g. love, freedom, courage, alienation, etc.♦HistoricalThe historical development of literature, e.g. romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, post-modernism.What Does It Mean by American Literature?♦By the literature of the United States, we mean all written and oral literary works produced in that part of the world has become the United States of America.See Emory Elliott, et al eds. Columbia Literary History of the United States. Columbia University Press, 1988.pxix.Some Basic Characteristics of American Literature:♦Short history but great achievement♦Began with oral myths, legends, tales♦Poetry, fiction, drama, essay all highly developed♦Female, ethnic literature came into the centre♦Drawn immense interest from Chinese readersThe Development of American Literature:1.The Colonial Period: 1609—17762.The Revolutionary Period: 1776—18203.The Romantic Period: 1820—18654.The Realism and Naturalism: 1865—19205.The Modern Period: 1920—19606.The Post-modern Period: since 1960Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography:♦ a second-generation immigrant of English descendent♦Writer, printer, publisher, scientist, statesman, and diplomat, he was the most famous and respected private figure of his time.♦Benjamin Franklin recorded his early life in his famous book The Autobiography.♦He was the first great self-made man in America, a poor democrat born in an aristocratic age♦supported the cause of independence,, and aided Jefferson in writing the Declaration of Independence.♦Practical yet idealistic, hard working and enormously successful.♦the Scottish philosopher DavidHume called him America's "firstgreat man of letters”.Major Works:Franklin’s place in literature owes much to hisalmanac and autobiography♦Poor Richard’s Almanac (1732)（格言历书）♦Published from 1732 to 1758 under the name of Richard SaundersFull of proverbs which teach people thrift, carefulness, and independencePoor Richard’s Almanac:♦lost time is never found again”♦“a penny saved is penny earned”♦“God helps those that help themselves”♦“Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”The Autobiography:♦Franklin wrote the first five chapters of the book in England in 1771, resumed again thirteen years later (1784-85) in Paris and later in 1788 when he returned to America. He ends the account of his life in 1757 when he was 51 years old.♦Although Franklin worked on the Autobiography at four different times (1771,1784, 1788, and 1788----1789) and revised the completed portions extensively, it remained unfinished at his death.♦It is now widely considered to be the greatest autobiography of its kind.Part One:•Franklin gave the work a rough structural unity, dividing it into four parts.•The first part is an entertaining description of his life up to early manhood. This earlier part dealt with his boyhood, his difficulties in finding an appropriate vocation, his conflicts with his brother, his employers, his friends and with his unreliable patrons, success in printing industry and marriage.•The young Franklin possesses numerous faults, but he eventually succeeds because of his talent, industry, and capacity for learning from error.Part Two:•Franklin focuses on his rise to prosperity, his scientific studies, andespecially on his work as philanthropist and statesman.• A bridge between Franklin’s youth and his adulthood, the section codifies the principles that Franklin learnedthrough experience were necessary for happiness and success, but it alsosatirizes the young Franklin’s naive arrogance and rationalizati on.Part Three and Part Four:♦Written in his hometown Philadelphia, about his life during the ages of 25 to 51♦His later life as a politician in Europe and America were scarcely mentioned♦So, The Autobiography did not record the complete life of Benjamin Franklin•Franklin now realizes the part he has played in American history and writes about himself “for the improvement of others”Section A: To His Son♦Page 2 to 3♦The opening part of the whole book♦Reasons for writing this autobiography♦“imagining it m ay be equally agreeable to you to know the circumstances of my life—many of which you are yet unacquainted with—and expecting a week’s uninterrupted Leisure in my present country retirement, I sit down t write them for you.”Section B: The Arrival in Philadelphia♦“Night approaching, we had no remedy but to have patience till the wind abated, and in the meantime the boatman and I concluded to sleep if we could, and so we crowded into the scuttle with the Dutchman who was still wet, and the spray breaking over the head of our boat leaked through to us, so that we were soon almost as wet as he. In this manner we lay all night with very little rest; but the wind abating the next day, we madea shift to reach Amboy before night, having been thirty hours on the water withoutvictuals or any drink but a bottle of filthy rum, the water we sailed on being salt. ” p6, para 2.♦“I sat down among them, and after looking round awhile and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy through labour and want of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep and continued so till the meeting broke up, when someone was kind enough to rouse me.This was therefore the first house I was in or slept in, in Philadelphia.” p7, the end. Summary♦Courage♦perseverance ♦Plain language ♦Smooth narration ♦Simplicity♦SincerityThe 13 Virtues:1.Temperance2.Silence3.Order4.Resolution5.Frugality6.Industry7.Sincerity 8.justice9.Moderation10.Cleanliness11.Tranquility12.Chastity13.HumilityComments:♦Franklin’s autobiography remains one of the classics of its kind. It shows Franklin as a man of versatile energy and new ideas, a man who represented American enlightenment and the fulfillment of American dream.♦It is a humorous and fascinating record of an old man’s reflections on his rise from a poor boy to a rich and famous personage through self-reliance and self-improvement.Questions:1.Why did Franklin write his Autobiography?2.What made Franklin decide to leave the brother whom he fad been apprenticed?3.How did he arrive in Philadelphia?4.What features do you find in the style of the above selection?。

英美诗歌选读第一讲英美诗歌的韵步第一节韵步的定义与种类韵步（foot，也被称为音步），是由音节（syllable）组成的，因此，首先要了解什么是音节。

音节由音素（phone）构成，它是语音中最小的不可再分解的单位，是字母组合后的读音标记。

音素靠听觉辨认，字母靠视觉辨认，音素属于读音系统，字母属于拼写系统。

例如，scansion [′skæn∫зn]由8个字母拼写而成，只有7个音素。

英语音素分为元音（vowel）和辅音（consonant），共有48个。

音节是英语的发音单位，由一个元音或者由一个元音同一个或若干个辅音构成。

音节可分为单音节、双音节、多音节三类。

单音节：you，day，me，big，make，bar等。

双音节：begin，open，foolish，summer，mountain等。

多音节：wonderful，revolution，satisfactory等。

辅音也可构成音节，如people，rhythm中的ple和thm都属于一个音节。

每个英语单词都有一个重读音节，其重读音节是固定的。

如husband，共两个音节，第一个音节重读；express有两个音节，第二个音节重读；beautiful有三个音节，第一个音节重读；religion有三个音节，第二个音节重读；subterranean有四个音节，第三个音节重读。

在短语或句子中，冠词和介词一般不重读。

如在in the morning，on a desk中，in、the、on、a都不重读。

弄清楚什么是音节，就可以理解什么是韵步了。

韵步是一个或两个重读音节和一个或两个非重读音节的排列组合。

其类型如下：韵步类型表名称英语名称的形容词形式例子（大写表示重读）抑抑格pyrrhicpyrrhicin a抑扬格iambiambicenGAGE扬抑格trocheetrochaicALways扬扬格spondeespondaicHOT STUFF抑抑抑格tribrachtribrachicand in the抑抑扬格anapaestanapaesticon the WAY抑扬抑格amphibrachamphibrachiceTERnal抑扬扬格bacciusbachiacthe WHOLE DAY扬抑抑格dactyldactylicWANdering扬抑扬格amphimacer or creticcreticPIECE of CAKE扬扬抑格antibachiusantibachiacGOOD MORning扬扬扬格molossusmolossicGREAT WHITE HOPE第二节韵步类型举例一、抑扬格抑扬格是一个非重读音节和一个重读音节的排列组合。

英美文学选读要点总结精心整理[英国』Chapter1 The Renaissance period（14世纪至十七世纪中叶）文艺复兴1. Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance.人文主义是文艺复兴的核心。

2. the Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things.人文主义作为文艺复兴的起源是因为古希腊罗马文明的基础是以“人”为中心，人是万物之灵。

3. Renaissance humanists found in then classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfection, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy.人文主义者们却从古代文化遗产中找到充足的论据，来赞美人性，并开始注意到人类是崇高的生命，人可以不断发展完善自己，而且世界是属于他们的，供他们怀疑，探索以及享受。

4. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English humanists.托马斯.摩尔，克利斯朵夫.马洛和威廉.莎士比亚是英国人文主义的代表。

5. Wyatt introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into England.怀亚特将彼特拉克的十四行诗引进英国。

Chapter I The Renaissance PeriodDefinitions of the Literary Terms: 文艺复兴时期的界定1. The Renaissance: The Renaissance marks a transition from the medie val to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14 th & 17th centuries. 历史文化背景It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture & literature. From Italy the movement went to emb race the rest of Europe. The Renaissance, which means "rebirth" or "reviva l," is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the re-discovery of ancient Roman & Greek culture, the new discoverie s in geography & astrology, the religious reformation & the economic expa nsion. The Renaissance, therefore, in essence is a historical period in whic h the European humanist thinkers & scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that e xpressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, & to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.2. 文艺复兴到英国比较晚的原因The Renaissance was slow in reaching England not only because of England‟s separation from the Continent but also be cause of its domestic unrest. It was not until the reign of Henry VIII that the Renaissance really began to show its effect in England. With Henry VII I‟s encouragement the Oxford reformers, scholars and humanists introduc ed classical literature to England. 15th century, began the English Renaissa nce, which was perhaps England‟s Golden Age, especially in literature.人文主义H umanism: Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It sprang from the endeavor to restore a medieval reverence for the ancient author s and is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its consci ous, intellectual side, for the Greek and Roman civilization was based on s uch a conception that man is the measure of all things. Through the new l earning, humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment, b ut the human values represented in the works. Renaissance humanists fou nd in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see th at human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfections, and that the world they inhabited was thei rs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, by emphasizin g the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the bea uty of this life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wond ers. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the b est representatives of the English humanists.The first period of the English Renaissance was one of imitation and assimi lation.Petrarch was regarded as the fountainhead of literature by the English writ ers. For it was Petrarch and his successors who established the language o f love and sharply distinguished the love poetry of the Renaissance from it s counterparts in the ancient world . Wyatt and Surrey began engraving th e forms and graces of Italian poetry upon the native stock. While the form er introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into England , the latter bought in bla nk verse. And Marlowe gave new vigor to the blank verse with his …mighty lines‟. In the early stage of the Renaissance, poetry and poetic drama we re the most outstanding literary forms and they were carried on especially by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The Elizabethan drama is the real main stream of the English Renaissance. The most famous dramatists in the Ren aissance England are Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben J onson.Please state Shakespeare‟s views on the Renaissance literature. Shakespeare has accepted the Renaissance view on literature. He holds th at literature should be a combination of beauty, kindness and truth, and s hould reflect nature and reality. Based on this consideration, he has claimed trough the mouth of Hamlet that the …end‟of dramatic creation is to give faithful reflection of the social realities of the time. Shakespeare also sta tes that literary works which have truly reflected nature and reality can re ach immortality. From his sonnets, we can find quite a few examples in w hich Shakespeare sings the immortality of poetry.Ⅲ. William ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare was the greatest writer of plays who ever lived. His f riend & fellow playwright Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare was "not of a n age but for all time." The 18th-century English essayist Samuel Johnson described his work as "the mirror of life." The 19th-century English poet S amuel Taylor Coleridge spoke of "myriad-minded Shakespeare." The 20th-c entury English dramatist George Bernard Shaw stressed his "enormous po wer over language."He has 38 plays, 154 sonnets and 2 long poems.领会His Influence1) Contributions to languageMany words and commonly used phrases have been added to everyday En glish vocabulary through their appearance in Shakespeare's works.2) Effects on literatureShakespeare's plays & poetry have had a pervasive influence on world liter ature. Most of the great literary figures of the world have been inspired &stimulated by his achievement.On the whole, however, Shakespeare's contribution has been to the langua ge & spirit of later writing rather than to its form. References & parallels t o Shakespeare's phraseology have occurred in literature since the 16th cen tury.Perhaps the greatest inspiration to subsequent authors has been Shakespe are's capacity to depict life in all its complexity & to illuminate man's char acter & destiny.What did Shakespeare criticize in his plays?The conscientious playwright criticized various kinds of human vices and si ns , like greed, betrayal, pride, prejudice and deception, including acts of social inequality, sexual and racial discriminations in plays such as The Mer chant of Venice and The Tempest. In his tragedies, he condemned the hyp ocrisy, treachery and general corruption at the royal court. He does not he sitate to describe the cruelty and anti-natural character of the wars , agai nst religious persecution and the corrupting influence of money and gold. In King Lear , he criticized the bourgeois egoism while he feared anarchy, hated rebellion and despised democracy.Why is Hamlet so impressive in Shakespeare‟s Hamlet?The hero Hamlet in Shakespeare‟s plays noted for his hesitation to take hi s revenge, his melancholy nature of action only to deny possibilities to do anything. He came to know that his father was murdered by his uncle wh o became king. He hated his so deeply that he wanted to kill him. But he loved his widowed mother who later married his uncle. This made him de ep in trouble. When he planned to kill his uncle, and he was afraid to hurt his mother. And also, when everything was ready for him to kill his uncle, he forgave him for his uncle was praying to God for his crime. Thus he l ost the good chance. Hamlet represented humanism of his time.What are the main themes of Shakespeare’s plays?参考答案：Shakespeare’s plays are divided into 3 types: comedies, trage dies and historical plays.1) His historical plays are with the theme-----national unity under a might and just sovereign/ruler is necessary.2) In his romantic comedies, he takes an optimistic attitude toward love fr iendship and youth.3) In his tragedies, Shakespeare always portrays some noble heroes, who faces the injustice of life and is caught in a difficult situation and whose fa te is closely connected with the fate of his nation. Each hero has his weak ness of nature. We also see the conflict between the individual and the evi l force in the society. And his major characters are always individuals repr esenting certain types.Four periods of his dramatic career:1. The first period was one of apprenticeship. He wrote five history plays: Henry VI, Parts I, II and III, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus泰托斯*安东尼; four comedies: The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentleman of Verona, 维罗纳二绅士The Taming of the Shrew, and Love‟s Labour‟s Lost.2. In the second period, his style and approach became highly individualiz ed. He made subtle comments on a variety of human foibles. He wrote fiv e histories: Richard II, King John, Henry IV, Part I and II, and Henry V; si x comedies: A Midsummer Night‟s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much A do About Nothing,无事生非As You Like It皆大欢喜, Twelfth Night, and The Merry Wives of Windsor; two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesa r.3. His third period includes his greatest tragedies and his so-called dark c omedies: tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleo patra,安东尼与克里奥佩特拉Troilus and Cressida特洛伊勒斯与克里希达, and Cori olanus科里奥拉那斯. two comedies: All‟s Well That Ends Well终成眷属and M easure for Measure.一报还一报4. The last period includes his principal romantic tragicomedies: Pericles, 伯利克利Cymbeline,辛白林The Winter‟s Tale and The Tempest; and his two final plays: Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.两位贵族亲戚His authen tic non-dramatic poetry consists of two long narrative poems: Venus and A donis and The Rape of Lucrece, and his sequence of 154 sonnets.Try to analyze the character Hamlet?Hamlet is neither a frail and weak minded youth nor a thoughtsick dreame r. He has none of the single minded blood lust of the earlier revengers. It is not because he is incapable of action, but because the cast of his mind is so speculative, so questioning and so contemplative that action, when i t finally comes, seems almost like defeat. Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing and plotting , and apparently bearing the intolerable burde n of the duty to revenge his father‟s death, Hamlet is obliged to inhabit ashadow world ,to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and ac tion. His life is one of constant role playing, examining the nature of actio n only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his n ature to conventional role of a stage revenger. By characterizing Hamlet, S hakespear successfully makes a philosophical exploration of life and death. Hamlet is also a humanist, a man who is free from medieval prejudices a nd superstitions. He has an unbounded love for the world rather than hea ven. He cherishes a profound reverence for man and a firm belief in man‟s power over destiny.Discuss his art of creations.(1)His major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones; they are individuals representing certain types. Each character has his or her own personalities; meanwhile, they may share features with others.(2) By applying a psycho-analytical approach, Shakespeare succeeds in ex ploring the character‟s inner mind.(3) Shakespeare seldom invents his own plots; instead, he borrows them f rom some old plays or storybooks.(4) In his writings, disguise is also an important device to create dramatic irony, usually with woman disguised as man.(5) He often wrote skillfully in different poetic forms , like the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet.4. 领会His Major Works1) DramaA. The Merchant of VeniceTheme: to praise the friendship between Antonio & Bassanio, to idealize P ortia as a heroine of great beauty, wit & loyalty, & to expose the insatiabl e greed & brutality of the Jew.Plot: The play has a double plot (P39)B. HamletHamlet is generally regarded as Shakespeare's most popular play on the st age, for it has the qualities of a "blood-and-thunder" thriller & a philosophi cal exploration of life & death. And the timeless appeal of this mighty dra ma lies in its combination of intrigue, emotional conflict & searching philos ophic melancholy.C. The TempestThe Tempest, an elaborate & fantastic story, is known as the best of his fi nal romances. The characters are rather allegorical & the subject full of suggestion. The humanly impossible events can be seen occurring everywher e, in the play. The playwright resorts to the supernatural atmosphere & to the dreams to solve the conflict. To Shakespeare, the whole life is no mo re than a dream. Thus, The Tempest is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life & society in his late years.2) PoemsA. SonnetsThe first 126 sonnets are apparently addressed to a handsome young nobleman, presumably the author's patron. The poems express the writer's selfless but not entirely uncritical devotion to the young man.Twenty of the sonnets are about a young woman characterized as a " dark lady," whom the poet distrust but cannot resist. The poems addressed directly to her are perhaps the most remarkable in the sequence because their unsentimental tone is unlike that of traditional love sonnets.A philosophical theme that appears in many of the sonnets is that of ti me as the destroyer of all mortal things. Also expressed in the poems is t he author's disillusionment with the false ness of earthly life.The form of the poems is the English Variation of the traditional Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet, Shakespeare's sonnets have three quatrains, or gr oups of four lines, & a final couplet. Their rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, ef ef, gg. A theme is developed & elaborated in the quatrains, & a concluding thought is presented in the couplet.7. 应用Selected Readings1) Sonnet 18Theme: a profound meditation on the destructive power of time & the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves.Imagery: a summer's day-youththe eye of heaven-the sun2) The Merchant of VeniceTheme: To praise the friendship between Antonio & Bassanio, to idealiz e Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit & loyalty, & to expose the insati able greed and brutality of the Jew.3) HamletThis is one part of Hamlet's most famous monologue. Hamlet, facing t he dilemma of action & mind, is hesitating whether he should revenge for his father, which may bring him death, or he should suffer & hide his hatr ed for his uncle in his deep heart, which may secure his life.Ⅵ. John MiltonAccording to the setting of the poem Paradise Lost , discuss the theme, th e author‟s intention to create it and the implication that the poem express es.(1)The theme of the poem Paradise Lost is the …Fall of Man‟, i.e. man‟s dis obedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause-----Satan.(2)The author‟s intention to write this poem is to expose the ways of Sata n and to …justify th ways of God to men‟.(3)In this poem, the author implicitly expresses his fundamental concern w ith freedom and choice and his belief that the unquestionable truth of Bibli cal revelation means that an all knowing God was just in allowing Adam a nd Eve to be tempted and of their free will choose sin and its inevitable p unishment.1.一般识记Brief IntroductionJohn Milton, English poet & prose writer, born in London, England, Dec. 9, 1608, and died in London, Nov 8, 1674.Milton was one of the greatest poets in the English language & one of the towering figures in all literature. His masterpiece, Paradise Lost, is con sidered the unsurpassed English epic poem. It is a powerfully imaginative & dramatic work, based in part on the Biblical story of the temptation & fa ll of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. Milton, a deeply religious man, w rote the epic " to justify the ways of God to men." He is also famous for his graceful lyric poems, such as Lycidas, L'Allegro, & for his intensely mo ving sonnets.Milton was a great master of language, & his poetry, both epic & lyric, is admired for its sublime eloquence & rich musical quality.2. 识记His literary achievementsMilton's literary achievements can be divided into three groups: the ea rly poetic works, the middle prose pamphlets & the last great poems.In his early works, Milton appears as the inheritor of all that was best in Elizabethan literature. Lycidas (1637) is a typical example, dedicated to Edward King, a fellow undergradu ate of Milton‟s at Cambridge. The poem moves from a sad apprehension of death, through regret, to passionate qu estioning, rage, sorrow & acceptance. The feelings begin in a low key but move on to the large questions of divine justice & human accountability. T he climax of the poem is the blistering attack on the clergy, i.e. the "Shep herds," who are corrupted by self-interest.All of Milton's early works reflect his interest in Greek & Latin poetry, whi ch greatly influenced his style. His poems contain a wealth of classical refe rences, figures of speech, & other poetic devices, all masterfully blended in to his rich verse.Areopagitica is probably his most memorable prose work. It is a great plea for freedom of the press.After the Restoration in 1660, Milton was imprisoned. His release was brought about mainly through the efforts of his friends, notably the poet Andrew Marwell, After that time he devoted himself to his 3 major poetical works: Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), & Samson Agonis tes (1671).(1)Paradise LostIt is the greatest , indeed the only generally acknowledged epic in Eng lish literature since Beowulf, and the last one is the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English. It is a lone epic divid ed in 12 books.“man shall find grace.”But he must lay hold of it by an act of free wil l. The freedom of the will is the keystone of Milton‟s creed.(2)Paradise Regained(3)Samson AgonistesMilton again borrows his story from the Bible. But this time he turns t o a more vital and personal theme.。

《英美诗歌欣赏》讲义A Course of British and American Poetry: A SurveyLecture one introductionThe earliest English poems appeared in the Anglo-Saxon period which experienced a Bookless Age. English literature was almost exclusively a verse literature in oral form. The oldest specimens now existent are found in the Exeter Book containing the following poems: Widsith, Doer‟s Lament, The Wanderer and The Sea-Farer, The Battle of Maldon. By far the most significant poem of the Anglo-Saxon Age, however, is Beowulf, which is the oldest poem and the surviving epic in the English language. It is the representative work of Pagan poetry. The poem descended from generation to generation in oral form, sung by bards at the end of the sixth century. The present manuscript was written down in the 10th century or at the end of the 9th century.The characteristics of Anglo-Saxon poetry are the abundant use of metaphor, understatement and alliterative meter. At the same time a number of Christian poets appeared. The most well-known were Caedmon and Cynewulf. They chiefly took their subject matter from the Bible, but their writing styles were almost the same as Anglo-Saxon poetry.The Norman Conquest in 1066 brought forward a literary revolution. Thanks to the French influence, the language and literary taste experienced an enormous change.A new literary form named “romance” became prevailing. Romance dealt mainly with perilous adventures about courageous knights‟ devotion to the king and church. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the most charming and enduring example.The first harvest in English literature was, in the 14th century, in which several remarkable poets lived, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower and John Wycliff. Among them, Chaucer towered above all and became the representative of this century. He has won the tide of the Father of English poetry.The 15th century was an age full of wars, which greatly affected the development of literature. There were no great names in poetry but a group of Chaucerians. So the 15th century in English literature is traditionally described as the barren age. Yet in this barren age, ballads became popular, for example, Lord Randal, Glasgerion and Robin Hood.English poetry in the 16th century achieved an age of prosperity. Under the reign of Queen Elizabeth poetry writing became a fashion. There appeared a group of excellent poets, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Wyatt introduced into England the Italian sonnet, a fourteen-line poem with a rhyme scheme abba, abba, cddc, ee. It was Henry Howard who created the English form of sonnet with the rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef gg. This scheme was later so skillfully and American Poetry used by Shakespeare that it is usually called the Shakespearean sonnet. Wyattand Howard are generally regarded as the founders of the golden age. Sir Philip Sidney‟s best known book was his pastoral romance, Arcadia. His sonnets, altogether one hundred and twenty poems, were imitative of Italian ones, but they possessed a charm distinctly of their own. Edmund Spenser‟s chief works include The Faerie Queen, The Shepherd’s Calendar, and The Amoretti. In his The Faerie Queen, Spenser planned twelve books, each speaking of twelve virtues, with a different hero distinguished for one of the private virtues. But it was a pity that only six books and two cantos of the seventh were completed. In writing this great allegorical poem, Spenser created a new poetic form known as the Spenserian stanza, consisting of nine lines rhyming ababhchcc. This form was widely imitated by later poets, especially by the romantic poets of the 19th century. The best imitator of the Spenserian stanza is John Keats. Christopher Marlowe‟s entire reputation rests on his plays such as Tamburlain, The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus. Marlowe is considered to be the greatest of the pioneers in English drama. He is the first poet to make blank verse the principal instrument of English drama. The last one, Shakespeare, is undoubtedly the greatest. Besides his 37 plays, he also wrote two long poems and 154 sonnets. His sonnets figure among the greatest in the language.The death of Elizabeth in 1603 brought the Tudor dynasty to an end and the throne was passed to the Stuarts. On the basis of different political and religious beliefs, people of this period were separated into two vasdy different groups: the Cavaliers and the Puritans. In the field of poetry, two schools of poets appeared: the Cavaliers and Metaphysical poets. The noteworthy names of Cavaliers were Robert Herrick, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace and Thomas Carew. The Cavaliers were royalistic against the British Revolution. They found their happiest poetic expression in gay little sparkling lyrics. The chief representatives of metaphysical poets, on the other hard, were John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvel, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley. The term “metaphysical” was applied by Dr. Samuel Johnson to describe Donne and his followers. Their common features are: arresting and original images and conceits, wit, ingenuity, good use of colloquial speech, considerable flexibility of rhythm and meter, complex themes, a liking for paradox and dialectical argument, a direct manner, a caustic humor, a keenly felt awareness of mortality, and a distinguished capacity for elliptical thought and tersely compact expression. Their manner was directly opposed to the grace and romanticism of the Elizabethans. They shed profound influence on the course of English poetry in the 20th century.The distinguished example of Puritan poets is John Milton. He wrote one of the greatest odes, Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, a famous elegy Lycidas, a number of unforgettable sonnets, the tragedy Samson Agonistes and his masterpiece Paradise Lost. Milton‟s religious ideas influenced his political and literary careers. During the revolution he became a fighter by using his pen. The chief poet of the Restoration Period was John Dryden, who won his fame as a dramatist, satirist, and writer of odes and lyrics. He contributed to English literature his greatest drama All for Love, a political satire Absalom and Achitophel, two religious poems Religio Laid and The Hind and the Panther, and a magnificent Pindaric ode Song for St. Cecelia’sDay. Nowadays modern writers show their great interest in the study of the Restoration and Metaphysical poets. Dryden in particular has received the applause and cheer of many intellectuals.The 18th century in England is known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment Movement was an expression of the struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism. It was a progressive intellectual movement and also a furtherance of the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries. It exerted an immense influence upon English social life and literature. The purpose of the movement was to enlighten the whole world with modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners fought against class inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other remains of feudalism. They celebrated rationality, equality and science. The major representatives were Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith and so on. Artistically this period was characterized by the so-called neoclassicism, a revival of classical standards of order, balance, and harmony in literature. John Dryden and Alexander Pope were major exponents of the neoclassical school. Toward the middle of the century, a new literary trend of sentimentalism appeared. This trend was closely knitted with the radical social and ideological changes in England of that age. It indulged in emotion and sentiment, which were used as a sort of relief from the grief toward the world‟s unfairness wrongs from and mild protest against social injustice. The first notable poem in this tendency is James Thomson‟s The Seasons. Another is Thomas Grey‟s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard which has been thought of as one of the greatest meditative lyrics. The century drew its curtain down with Robert Burns, a lyrical poet and William Blake, a mystical poet. Burns wrote the majority of his poems in his Lowland Scottish dialect. In spite of the limitation of his lyric range, his expression of the simple singing line was greatly varied. Blake, with his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, is regarded as the forerunner of Romanticism.Poetry in the 19th century experienced a significant phase in its development in Britain. William Wordsworth, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1798, published an epoch-making volume, Lyrical Ballads, which marks the break from the neoclassicism of the 18th century and the beginning of the romantic revival in England. Wordsworth wished to intensify everyday experience. The three men, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey were known as Lake Poets, as they spent much of their time in the Lake District of northern England. George Gordon Lord Byron‟s fame rests mainly on two long poems: Childe Harolds Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He also wrote many short beautiful lyrics such as She Walks in Beauty and When We Two Parted. Percy Bysshe Shelley‟s writing is the most passionate and intense of all the Romantic poets. His greatest lyrics include Song to the Men of England, Ode to the West Wind and To a Skylark. John Keats, influenced by the poets of the English Renaissance period, endeavored to create a beautiful world of imagination as opposed to the sordid reality of his day. His immortal odes are To Autumn, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn. Robert Browning is entitled “the Shakespeare of the 19th century”. He was interested in stylistic experimentation, using rough colloquial diction and word order, surprisingand even grotesque rhymes, and harsh rhythms and metrical patterns. His Men and Women, a collection, displays his perfect use of a poetic form: the dramatic monologue. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning‟s wife, is the first woman poet who has occupied an everlasting place in English literature due to her sequence of love poems entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese.In the Victorian Age even when the novel became the dominant literary form, there appeared many important poets such as Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Victorian poetry has a close connection with Romantic poetry. Tennyson is a follower of John Keats, Swinburne of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Matthew Arnold of William Wordsworth. The Victorian poets endeavored to search for appropriate modes and experimented in a variety of ways. In versification, they experimented with new or unusual metrical patterns. In line with their metrical experiments were those in the art of narrative poetry. Among them appeared dramatic monologue, most effectively used by Tennyson and Browning. In subject matter, they dealt with some frequently recurring subjects, including a preoccupation with man‟s relationship to God, an acute awareness of time, the timeless equilibrium of lovers, the poignant experience of isolation and hostility of partners in a shattered marriage. Tennyson was the top poet to present the Victorian spirit. His works include the sentimental romance Maud, the epic Idylls of the King, the famous elegy In Memoriam. Swinburne‟s poetry threatened the Victorian sense of decency, so he became celebrated for his revolutionary utterances. His Poems and Ballads was considered a masterpiece of erotic literature. He showed his ingenuity in metrics and phonetics. He outwitted others by creating a new form, the roundel. Arnold was as much a critic and essayist as a poet, although his poetic output was comparatively little. Sohrab and Rustum, his best-known poem, is written in a delicate blank verse with Homeric style. But as a matter of fact his Dover Beach attains far greater height. Many of his best poems convey a melancholy, pessimistic sense of the dilemmas of modern life and tend to focus on the moral aspect of life.The early 20th century saw a technical revolution which is known as Imagism. In the years leading up to WWI, the imagist movement set the stage for a poetic revolution and reevaluation of metaphysical poetry. Thomas Stern Eliot extended the scope of Imagism by bringing the English metaphysicals and the French Symbolists to the rescue, introduced into modern English and American poetry the kind of irony achieved by shifting suddenly from the formal to the colloquial or by oblique allusions to objects or ideas that contrasted sharply with those carried by the surface meaning of the poem. So the 1920s is regarded as the age of Eliot. Gerard Manley Hopkins combined absolute precision of the individual image with a complex ordering of images and a new kind of metrical patterning. William Butler Yeats worked out his own notions of symbolism, developed a rich symbolic and metaphysical poetry with its own curiously haunting cadences and imagery. His poetry reflected the varying developments of his age and maintained an unmistakably individual accent. Both Thomas Hardy and Alfred Edward Housman inherited English poetic traditions and shared the similarity in having a pessimistic vision to human life.Wystan Hugh Auden often combined deliberate irreverence with verbal craftsmanship. His poetry is noted for its vitality, variety, and originality. Robert Graves and Edwin Muir are the two important 20th-century poets who stood somewhat apart from the main map of English poetry in the first half of the century. Both of them show that there were strengths in the English poetic tradition untapped by Thomas Sterns Eliot and his followers. They were much concerned with time and the human response to time, and both had a deep sense of history. New forces kept coming in during the sixties and seventies. English poetry today is more diverse than before. Since the end of the 1950‟s a new element of both rhetoric and myth has been coming into English poetry. The recent famous poets are Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney.In American literature the Puritans who had settled in New England were the first poets of the American colonies. When they came to America they maintained their cultural allegiances to Britain. Most Puritan poets saw the purpose of poetry as careful Christian examination of their life. So the Puritan‟s religious subject and imitation of English literary traditions were the two essential characteristics of early American literature. Anne Bradstreet, the first American poet, published a volume of poetry. Her famous The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America contained a muted declaration of independence from the past and a challenge to authority.Colonial poets of the 18th century still followed the example of British poets such as Alexander Pope. Ebenezer Cook and Richard Lewis wrote accomplished satirical poems based on British pastoral models. The development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. Revolutionary-era poets felt an urgency to produce a serious national poetry that would celebrate the country‟s new democratic ideals. They d id not bother with the question whether a new nation required new forms of poetry, but were content to use traditional forms to write about new subjects in order to create the first truly American poetry. Many of Philip Freneau‟s poems focused on America‟s future greatness and other subjects including the beauties of the natural world. His lyric poems such as The Wild Honey Suckle and On a Honey Bee can be seen as the first expressions in American poetry of a deep spiritual engagement with nature. Phillis Wheatley wrote in 18th-century literary forms. But her highly structured and elegant poetry nonetheless expressed her frustration at enslavement and desire to reach a heaven where her color and social position would no longer keep her from singing in her full glory.In the 19th century American poetry assumed real literary value for the first time. The most remarkable poet born in America was William Cullen Bryant who gained public recognition for his Tbanatopsis. Influenced by British Romantic poets, especially by William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bryant wrote about his personal experiences in nature and society, therefore, nature became the major theme of his poems. Edgar Allan Poe created noble poetry with felicity and won a reputation both in America and abroad. Toward the middle of the century there appeared a group of poets named the New England Group, which consisted of John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, andRalph Waldo Emerson. Whittier became best known for Snow-Bound, a long nostalgic look at his Massachusetts Quaker boyhood. Whittier was sensitive to find the beauty of the commonplace, to comprehend the profound meaning of freedom and democracy. Holmes followed the tradition of neoclassicism in his poetic creation, although he lived in the Romantic Period. His poetry was characterized by his light verse with witty, arresting charm. Lowell was best remembered for his volumes of poems such as A Year’s Life, Under the Willows and The Cathedral, in which he demonstrated his striking characteristics of simplicity, wit and urban good nature. Longfellow was the most distinguished poet in his story-telling faculty. His long poem The Song of Hiawatha was written in the nearest approach to a native epic that America as yet possessed. Ralph Waldo Emerson‟s poetry was more searching and intellectual than sensuous. His verse functioned as the transition from blank verse to free verse. These poets were united by a common search for a distinctive American voice to distinguish them from their British counterparts. The transcendentalism of Emerson and Henry David Thoreau was the distinctly American strain of English Romanticism. During the 19th century, black and white poets also wrote about the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves.Bridging the gap between the New England Group and the contemporary poets towers the figure of Walt Whitman, the first working-class American poet. In 1855 Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass which marked the birth of truly American poetry. In this collection Whitman developed a poetic style of originality, which was a major experiment in cadenced rather than metrical versification. Emily Dickinson is now regarded a chief poet, as great as Walt Whitman. She, the only important female poet in America in the 19th century, was fascinated with love, friendship, nature, life, immortality and death. Her poetry is distinguished not only by its intensity of emotion but by its idiosyncratic form — the frequent use of dash and capitalization, fragmentary and enigmatic metrical patterns. Herman Melville, though much better known as a novelist, wrote powerful poetry about the Civil War, collected in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. He later wrote a long and mysterious poem, Clarel, about his search for faith, his struggle with doubt, and his anxiety about the decline of civilization.By 1900 the United States experienced multiple changes: westward expansion, waves of immigration, and increasing urbanization that combined to create a physically larger, more populous, and far more diverse country. American poetry in die opening decades of the century displayed far less unity. In the last decades of the 19th century, American literature had entered a period of regionalism. Dialect poetry written in exaggerated accents and colorful idioms became a sensation for a time and found its chief exponents in James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Paul Laurence Dunbar.The following period in the development of American poetry is generally considered as new era, dating from 1914. Edwin Arlington Robinson‟s Children of the Night and Collected Poems were full of brilliant condensations and sympathy for all phases of humanity, particularly with those lost dreamers whom the world appraises as mediocrities and failures. Robinson explored the lives of New Englanders in hisfictional Tilbury Town through dramatic monologues. He employed the rhythm of everyday speech and reflected a Puritan sense of humankind‟s moral corrupti on. At an equal rank with Robinson, Robert Frost further developed Robinson‟s New England voice in poetry that could be read both as regional and as some of the most accomplished modern poetry of the early 20th century. He revolutionized blank verse. Restr ained, humorous, and understated, Frost‟s poetry gives voice to modern psychological constructions of identity without ever losing its focus on the local and the specific. Carl Sandburg‟s writing was completely different from that of Robinson and Frost, who advocated reticence, whereas Sandburg was in favor of declamations. Sandburg saw the Middle West as the source of most of his materials and concerned himself with steel mills and slaughterhouses, city streets and farm houses, so he was called “the laureate of industrial America”.Ezra Pound and Thomas Sterns Eliot are the leading poets of early 20th century American literature. Meanwhile, many other poets also made important contributions. These included Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Edward Estlin Cummings, Langston Hughes and Hart Crane. After WWII, a number of new poets and poetic movements emerged. The Confessional movement was just one of them. Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and William De Witt Snodgrass were its major members, and the first two were its leading lights. Both Berryman and Lowell were closely acquainted with modernism. Their subject matter had not been openly discussed in American poetry in the previous time. Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships were addressed in their poetry. WWII saw the emergence of a new generation of poets, many of whom were influenced by Wallace Stevens, Richard Eberhart, Karl Shapiro and Randall Jarrell. Around the same time, the Black Mountain poets appeared under the leadership of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. They were a group of mid-20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered around Black Mountain College. The group included Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, Paul Blackburn, and Jonathan Williams. They based their approach to poetry on Olson‟s essay Projective Verse. Some of the Black Mountain poets are often considered to have contributed to the San Francisco Renaissance. The 1970s saw a revival of interest in surrealism, with the most prominent poets such as Russell Edson and Maxine Chernoff working in this field. In 1980s appeared a group of poets known as the New Formalists, including Molly Pacock, Dana Gioia and Marilyn Hacker. They wrote in traditional forms and declared that this return to rhyme and more fixed meter was the new avant-garde.What Is PoetryThere have been many attempts to define what poetry is. Plato says that “The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and then the mind is no longer in him.” Aristode defines that “poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and higher thing than history, fo r poetry tends to express the universe, history, the particular”. For Aristotle, poetry is a species of imitation or mimesis. Poetry uses different mediums, objectsand modes in order to carry out an imitation. Sir Philip Sidney borrows and amends the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Horace and a few of his contemporary Italian critics. He writes that “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for as Aristode terms in his word …mimesis‟, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth.” but lat er he adds a Horation note, declaring poesy‟s chief end to be “to teach and delight”. Like Aristode, Sidney values poetry over history, law, and philosophy, but he takes Aristode‟s idea one step further by declaring that “poetry, above all the other arts a nd sciences, embodies truth.” Samuel Johnson insists that “the end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.” William Wordsworth defines “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist i n the mind. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge has his definition that “the proper and immediate object of Science is the acquirement or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of pleasure ... I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose: words in their best order; poetry: the best words in the best order.” Percy Bysshe Shelley says poetry is “the record of the best and happiest moments of the best minds”. Emily Dickinson thinks poetry is that which “makes my body so cold no fire can warm me, and makes me feel as if the top of my head were taken off”. To Carl Sandburg, “Poetiy is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits ... a series of explanations of life, fading o ff into horizons too swift for explanation”. Thomas Sterns Eliot considers that poetry is “not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us”. Robert Frost holds that “a poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.” Louis Untermeyer gives, perhaps, the most eloquent definition: “Po etry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable”. A. E. Housman observes that “I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat,” while Dylan Thomas believed that “there is no such thing as poetry, only poems.” Here is Archibald Macleish‟s poem about poet ry: Ars PoeticaA poem should be palpable and muteAs a globed fruit,DumbAs old medallions to the thumb,Silent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown —A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs,Leaving, as the moon releasesTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind —A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs.A poem should be equal toNot true.For all the history of griefAn empty doorway and a maple leaf.For loveThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea —A poem should not meanBut be.It is clear that poetry is almost too complex to define. Every poet seems to have his or her own definition of poetry. Usually a poet is just describing his or her definition in his or her poems. It is difficult to have a single definition of poetry that fits all its varying structures, styles and subject material. A typical dictionary might define poetry as literary composition written in verse with meaning. This simple definition only characterizes poetry on the surface, but there is so much more to poetry than just words. One can hardly define what poetry is. However, one can make an attempt to describe its properties, function, and characteristics as clearly as possible. It is a method to express one‟s emotion and make his reader feel it by means of the best language. If one is dealing with similar ideas and perspectives, conventional forms of language may not be sufficient to express emphatically and efficiently. That is why poetry has evolved and taken so many different linguistic forms over the centuries. The definition of poetry can be discussed, debated, and analyzed, but it cannot be understood in concrete terms. In a world full of unknowns, secrets, and mysteries, poetry becomes a means of survival and coping. Through poetry, one can acquire knowledge how to do with the change, how to come to terms with joy and grief, and how to celebrate the wonder still to be found in the extraordinary energy of daily life. Due to this perspective by itself, poetry cannot be limited by definitions. It cannot be communicated or fathomed other than by the use of poetry itself.How to Read a PoemPoetry is written to be read aloud and heard. In the past, it was common for people to get together and read poetry to each other. A poem was not simply a piece of。