Unit 4 The Literature of Romanticism (Part III)

(1781—1865)

l        Key Words: Romanticism, Transcendentalism, American Renaissance,

l       Target: This unit aims at introducing the American Literature in the 18^th century —the Literature of Romanticism, including the literary history and the leading writers, together with their famous works.

l       Study Points:

1.       Early Romanticism;

2.       Transcendental Romanticism;

3.       High Romanticism;

4.       Transitional Figures from Romanticism to Realism

l        Teaching Hours: 16 (History: 8 hours and Reading: 8 hours) 

III. Transcendentalism

(American Renaissance) (1836—1855)

Transitional Figures from Romanticism to Realism

1. Knowledge about Poetry

◆     Features of Poetry

1.  Emotional

The subject matter maybe many things, but behind it, it is about the poet’s love towards love. The themes are the following:

A.       Love

Western literature: emphasizing love before marriage;

Chinese culture: emphasizing marriage (In Chinese classical literature, love poems were not too many.)

B.       Friendship

e.g. 桃花潭水深千尺，不及汪伦送我情。

C.      Nature

Western literature: man’s feelings exaggerated; emphasis on he himself; nature is not the background.

Chinese culture: Man is in nature; nature is bigger than man; man is not exaggerated.

e.g. 孤帆远影碧空净，唯见长江天际流。

D.      Sorrow

E.       Individualism

F.       Democracy

G.      Motherland

2.   Symbolic

You cannot call a spade a spade in poetry. You must bury your feelings and hide your feelings. Without symbols, you cannot write poetry.

e.g. My love is a red, red rose.

By using symbols, we have images. (意象) Image is something felt inside. It is concrete. Images can be divided into:

A.       visual images;

B.       aural images;

C.      tactile images.

e.g. 流光容易把人调，红了樱桃，绿了芭蕉。 (How time flies!)

In 1920s, Ezra Pound was enlightened by Chinese poetry. He appeal to the imagism. T. S. Eliot became a master of it. The images of dirty, twisted, ugly, etc. always occurred in his poems. E.g.

The Hollow Men (空心人)

We are the hollow men (#没有灵魂)

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! (#长得丑陋)

Our dried voices, when (#声音丑陋)

We whispered together (#像鬼魂一样，不是在说话)

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass (#没有生命)

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

……

Modern poetry differs from the traditional poetry. Traditional poetry employs the beautiful images.

e.g. 张爱玲

人生像一个华美的睡袍，

只是里面长满了虱子，

外面光鲜，各个阶段却很难受。

(To express that life is full of troubles, which you cannot get rid of.)

2.   Language is condensed and vivid

僧推（敲）月下门

春风又绿江南岸

Language in poetry must be descriptive and expressive.

“活”美人：美目盼了，巧笑倩了。

白居易—杨贵妃：”一骑红尘妃子笑，无人知是荔枝来”

◆     How to read poems

1.       Insight of writer

Insight refers to the theme expressed by the poet in his poem. We must make it clear that what the insight is, how the insight is achieved, and by what means, etc.

2.       Methods

Heroic couplet, sonnet, lyric poem, ballad poem, rhymed poem, blank verse or free verse

Usually a poem has its own structure. E.g.  Sonnet can be Italian Sonnet (abbaabba, cdecde, ) Shakespearean Sonnet (abab, cdcd, efef, gg), or Spenserian sonnet (ababbcbccdcdee).

Detailed method: rhyme, rhyme scheme, meter, pitch, tone, female rhyme (rhymes with more than one syllable, 韵律) alliteration, onomatopoeia, personification, etc, (i.e  a. structure of a poem, b. rhetorical method)

3.       Types of poetry

Ø       Epic poetry (time-honored with historical background, detailed, even redundant).

Ø       Narrative poetry: to narrate a story in poetic form;

Ø       Lyric poetry: to express personal feelings;

Ø       Satirical Poetry:

Ø       Didactic Poetry 

 2. Walter Whiteman

(1830—1886)

◆     Life

Ø         Born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills farming community on Long Island, New York.

Ø         The family moved to Brooklyn in 1823. Whiteman had only five or six years of formal schooling.

Ø       About eleven, he began working as an office boy in law firm, then for a doctor, and afterwards he learned printing. He grew up in a microcosm of working class America.

Ø       From 1836 to 1841 he worked as an elementary school teacher.

Ø      In 1838 he returned to Long Island and turned his hand to journalism and found the Long Islander (a weekly newspaper). In 1842 he went back to Brooklyn and became editor of the New York Aurora. His supporting with Jackson's Democratic view of the exclusion of slavery from new states in his news paper led him dismissal from his job.

Ø       In 1848, he went New Orleans, Chicago, the Western frontier, and then returned to New York starting experiments wit poetry.

Ø         In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass.

Ø       During the Civil War he served as a correspondent for The New York Times.

Ø       After a paralytic stroke in 1873, he moved to Camden, New Jersey where his brother George lived.

Ø       He was poor all his life and never married. He died at Camden on March 26, 1892.

◆     Literary Achievement—Leaves of Grass

Whitman was one of the most original and inspiring American poet, true to his art and to his role as a poet. As America's first genuine epic poem, Leaves of Grass ran nine editions with more than 400 poems all written in free verse form. (That is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.) The title implies rebirth, renewal, or green life. He himself said, Leaves of Grass is “the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature—an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America) freely, fully and truly on record.”

For Whitman, science, democracy and spirituality were the three things that underlie the structure of modern poetry. He tried to blend them into one, to incorporate these into his poetry. He threw aside the traditional ornaments and prettiness of verse and created his own form. Both the form and content of his poems are revolutionary. With its frequent use of colloquial language and everyday events, his verse represents a turning point of the history of American Poetry­—poetry fashioned out of specially American experience in a distinctly American idiom. Whitman's unique poetic creation has developed a very significant tradition in American poetry.

◆     Special features of Whitman's Poems

(1)     The sprawling lines are often extremely long;

(2)     The line link is visual for Whitman.

(3)     Parallelism is a technique of the Biblical poetry, of repeating the idea in verse lines, but there might be minor changes in wording.

(4)     His poetry is religious.

(5)     His poetic structure is called the envelope structure.

(6)     He used the catalogue technique.

(7)     His verse unit is unique.

A.       There is no regular pattern;

B.       The verse unit is usually an independent clause;

C.      Each verse unit is a complete statement.

(8)     Whereas many poets use meter to establish the rhythm of the poem, Whitman seems to work according to thoughts.

(9)     Oratory was very popular at the beginning of the American democracy, and this was one of the ways that Whitman used democracy as a basis for his poetry.

(10)  The influence of opera on his poetry is evident.

(11)  His poems are composed like mosaics.

(12)  He often wrote in the third person about his own experience.

(13)  He mixed up slang words, foreign words, technical words, sexual words, and learned words in his poems. (“Sometimes I think that Leaves of Grass is only a language experiment.”)

(14)  Whitman's mysticism refers to an experience that teaches people that there is some divine power greater than human intelligence. 

3. Emily Dickinson

(1830—1886)

◆     Life of Emily Dickinson

Ø         born in Amherst, Mss. where her grandfather had founded  Amherst College

Ø        Her father was an important lawyer, deeply religious and universally respected as an active leader in all the town's civic, educational, political and church activities. 

Ø       Emily attended the Amherst Academy where she was not only a good student but a very sociable and popular one, known for light-hearted pranks. 

Ø        After her graduation at seventeen she enter the nearby Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, but left before the end of the year because of illness. 

Ø        Although she dearly loved her brother, who lived next door after his marriage, and marriage, and maintained a warm correspondence with many neighboring friends and relatives, she gradually went out less and less, spending almost all her time at home and in her large garden. 

Ø        Yet she was not unsociable. She wrote frequent letters, often enclosing short poems prepared for the occasion. 

Ø        But increasingly during her last twenty years she spent the greater part of her time in her room, secretly working on her poetry.  After her death, her sister, emptying desk, was amazed to find almost 2000 poems neatly copied on small pieces of paper stitched together to form little booklets.

Ø         As far as is known, there were few important outward events in Emily Dickinson's life.  The year 1862 seems to have been a turning point. 

Ø         In that year she wrote more poems than in any other, roughly a poem a day. 

Ø         In that year also, Charles Wadsworth, a Presbyterian(长老会的) minister and the man Emily loved, departed for San Francisco.  Although he was kind to her, he as a married man did not return her love.  It was about the time of his departure that she took to dressing entirely in white.

Ø        Still in that year, Emily Dickinson began her correspondence with another man, Thomas, Wentworth Higginson. 

Ø        She read in the Atlantic Monthly an article entitled “Letter to a Young Contributor” by him.  She wrote him, enclosing several of her poems, to ask whether they were “alive.“  He recognized the originality of her mind and his reply began a lifelong friendship, carried entirely by correspondence.

Ø         Emily Dickinson was thought of as an eccentric maiden lady by her neighbors and she was known to very few readers in her life. 

Ø         During her lifetime, only seven of the poems were published, in various local periodicals, all of which appeared anonymously, and apparently without the poet's permission or even her knowledge.

◆     Features of Dickinson's Poetry

Ø        Her subjects were love, death, nature, immortality, beauty. 

Ø        Written largely in meters common to Protestant hymn books, her poems employ irregular rhythms, off- or slant rhymes(不工整韵，指元音不同或辅音不同的韵脚，如lid和lad, eyes和light), paradox, and a careful balancing of abstract Latinate and concrete Anglo-Saxon words. 

Ø        Her lines are gnomic(格言式的) and her images kinesthetic(动感的), highly concentrated, and intensely charged with feeling.

Ø       Her greatest lyrics were on the theme of death, which she typically personified as a monarch, a lord, or a kindly but irresistible lover, yet her moods varied widely, from melancholy to exuberance, grief to joy, leaden despair to spiritual intoxication.

◆    Appreciation of Dickinson's Poetry 

1.  Because I Could Not Stop for Death

Ø        Emily Dickinson's intense concern with consciousness and her uncertainties about her religious belief led her to write many poems that explore death as the end of consciousness.

Ø        "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" is one of her romantic examinations of this world, but it bears many of the general features of her poetry.

Ø       Characteristically she treats this somber subject with a light tone.  Death is not a terrifying figure but a civil, courteous gentleman or suitor.  Because we do not willingly stop our lives for death, we must be taken. 

Ø        In keeping with the poem's tone, the taking is here presented as a kindly inducement to ride in a carriage.  And since immortality makes a third passenger, there seems little threat in the experience. 

Ø       The journey itself is a leisurely review of familiar scenes.  Death knows no haste, and the poet has put away all her concerns of work and leisure.  This is a reminder that death is mild, even reassuring. 

Ø        The scenes that are passed on the journey are equally pleasant---schoolchildren at rest (recess) (representing the poet's own childhood), the fields if grain (perhaps her ripening or adulthood).  Only the setting suggests the inevitable end of a person's mortal time.

Ø        The fourth stanza introduces a darker tone.  The journey had seemed destined to pass the sun (which measures human time) and thereby to transcend mortality.  Instead , the journey is passed by the sun, leaving the poet to the dark earth and ill clad for the sudden chill of the gathering dew.  Her gown is only gossamer, and her scarf only tulle. 

Ø        The carriage is after all a hearse, and its destination is not some heaven beyond the sun but only the cemetery.

Ø        In the fifth stanza, the carriage reaches the grave.  It is described as a house, a word that has comforting connotations.  However, the roof is so low as to be scarcely visible and the repetition of the word ground reminds us that this is a final house within the earth.

Ø         If the early stanzas take a romantic view of the end of life, with death as an attractive suitor, the final stanza completes an ironic reversal of this view.  It is “centuries” now, since the poet's death.  But in God's “eternity”, centuries feel shorter than a single day in life. 

Ø        The contrasts is between our human time and God's timelessness.  Left behind by the sun that marks off our days, consciousness is obvious to the passage of time. 

Ø        Even if consciousness is immortal, meaningful existence requires the “day” of human measurement and evidences of life, such as children and fields of grain.  Ironically, immortality becomes a meaningless gift.  Consciousness, our awareness of existence, cannot feel itself without the world that gave it being.

2.  I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed

Ø         In the poem, Dickinson presents a feeling of transcendence in terms of intoxication.

Ø       Some critics have suggested that this poem contains a parody of Emerson's “Bacchus”(酒神巴克斯), with Emily Dickinson announcing her preference for strong beer as against the Dionysiac(狂欢，极度兴奋，酒神的) wine of inspiration called for by Emerson. 

Ø       But if so, the poems swoops beyond parody to evoke an all-possessing glee, an intoxication of spirit in the midst of physical nature that has the angels in heaven cheering and the saints hurrying to the windows to watch. 

Ø        The third stanza compares the poet to bees and butterflies, which have their own kind of joyous intoxication. 

Ø        The religious references in the last stanza suggest the intoxicating communion with nature is also a reaching toward divinity.

Questions on the Poem

1.      What words and images running through the poem refer to drinking or drunkenness?  What things intoxicate the poet in stanza 2?

2.      Who is the Landlord of bees and butterflies?  How would the poet react to even the disapproval of her intoxication?

3.      What are the religious references?

3.  I Felt a Funeral in My Brain

Ø         It is Emily Dickinson's most brilliant and in its way most appalling use of the Protestant funeral service to dramatize the slow death of personality, of mind and reason, senses and spirit. 

Ø        It is connected directly with those dramas of the soul, those relentless metaphorical journeys through the corrupted “heart” that Puritan writers rendered with such force and that, in Emily Dickinson's lifetime, Hawthorne and Henry James continued to represent with every kind of subtlety.

Ø         The soul—or brain—is the setting of its own terrible drama: it is the little church where the “mourners” (mournful, grief-stricken thoughts) mill about and where the service is then held; and the path to the cemetery across which the coffin is carried. 

Ø        But under the persistent, intolerable throbbing of pain, the soul gradually shreds and dissociates, is reduced to an ear hearing nothing but the booming deathknell of its being, is wrecked, stranded, isolated—until, as in the dramatic figure the coffin is lowered into the grave, reason collapses utterly, and the soul plunges down ravines of unconsciousness, striking world after world of nothingness.

4.  I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died

Ø         “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.”  This poem tells a disconcerting truth: that one's death may be a most trivial event, hedged about with irrelevancies, and leading to no afterlife.

Ø       But it tells that truth circuitously(曲折地): undermining the pieties of Protestant theology by references to the last parceling out of small possessions, the uncertain and irrelevant buzzing of a blue flying, the slow loss of physical vision. 

Ø         No grand final words or gestures; no heavenly music or angels descending; no vision of God's eternity.

PPT of Dickinson for Class Teaching

Questions on the Poem

1.    According to lines 5-8, what are the expectations of the mourners gathered around this deathbed?  What is the effect of juxtaposing death and the trivial appearance of a buzzing fly?

2.    The perspective through the poem is a dying person.  As the sense fails in the last stanza, the fly “With blue-uncertain Buzz,” becomes the last thing seen and heard of the world.  How is this perspective of failing senses maintained in lines 15-16?

Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3

Reference Books:

q      Chang Yaoxin: A Survey of American Literature, the 2^nd edition. Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2003.12

q      Liu Cunbo: Selected Readings in British and American Literature, Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2001

q      陈新选著：《英美名家短篇小说精品赏析》，北京：中国对外翻译出版公司，

q       李翠葶，李正栓：《美国文学学习指南》，北京：清华大学出版社，2002

q       万　莉，陈范霞：《英美文学选读》，北京：光明日报社，2001

q    吴定柏：《美国文学大纲》，上海：上海外语教育出版社，1998

||  Learning Zone || Last || Next || Literature || Course Forum ||