美國文學 week11

11/25   Poetry of Emily Dickinson

• Free verse is an open form of poetry. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

• For You O Democracy     By Walt Whitman

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,

I will make divine magnetic lands,

      With the love of comrades,

      With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,

      By the love of comrades,

      By the manly love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!

For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

• A narrow fellow in the grass    By Emily Dickinson

             http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180204 

•  Because I could not stop for Death   By Emily Dickinson

        He knew no hastes

          We passed the School, where Children strove

          At Recess – in the Ring –

          We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

          We passed the Setting Sun –

       ring, gazing grain, setting sun 

       --> 代表人生三階段：幼年、青壯年、老年。

       

       immortality

       eternity

       A Swelling of the Ground 墳墓

       swollen ankle --> Oedipus

• Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality.

•  The inward life, however, flowed and thundered with the energy of a great river.

• Leaves of Grass is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). 

• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

          Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west

          --> memories of president Lincoln

     perennial: to describe situations or states that keep occurring or

     which seem to exist all the time; used especially to describe 

     problems or difficulties. 

• keep the memory

       keep the journal
       keep the book (to keep written records of the finances of a                                              business or other enterprise)

• Each and All   By Ralph Waldo Emerson

          The rolling river, the morning bird; —

        Beauty through my senses stole;

        I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

•    Crossing Brooklyn Ferry   By Walt Whitman

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,

We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,

Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,

We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,

You furnish your parts toward eternity,

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

• No man is an island     By John Donne

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 
It tolls for thee. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940.

• A Passage to India (1924) is a novel by English author E. M. Forster set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. The novel is based on Forster's experiences in India, borrowing the title from Walt Whitman's 1870 poem in Leaves of Grass.

• Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? / I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I / know it.

• Whitman seeks to explore many dualisms in Leaves of Grass, including the paradox of life and death. Whitman does not see death as a negative thing but as a part of the natural world, just as good as the earth, stars, and sun. Death for a true artist is not death, for they live on in their work and deeds. The artist and the person true to their self has discovered that life never ends but is continual. It is lucky to die, therefore, because one becomes fused again with nature and with the unity of all things.

• Why do we need to read?

   Sonnet  18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

   Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

•   Detachment is a 2011 American drama film about the high school education system directed by Tony Kaye, starring Adrien Brody with an ensemble supporting cast.

•    "And Never Have I Felt so Deeply at One And the Same Time. So Detached From Myself and so Present in the World"                                               ----Albert Camus 
•    We must learn to read, to stimulate our imagination, to  cultivate, our own consciousness, our own belief systems. we all need these skills, to defend, to preserve our minds.

•    The House of Usher          Edgar Allan Poe                                   insufferable                 

•    I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

• I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
• Whitman wonders at the reality of collectivity in his poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." In this quote, Whitman seeks to understand what it is that bridges humanity across time and space. He is a New Yorker, of Brooklyn and Manhattan, just as many were before him and many will be after him. He feels, however, that there is something "between us," his self and the selves of those before and after him.

•      O Captain! my Captain!  By Walt Whitman

•   imagenative, imagine, imagery

•    A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. / I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

•     Whitman uses the imagery of grass throughout his book and also uses it in his title. A leaf of grass is meant to symbolize several things: the pages of the book that he writes, the form of his poetry, and a physical piece of grass that grows from the ground. In this poem from "Song of Myself," Whitman uses the imagery of grass on two levels. The first is a physical and natural meaning. On another level, Whitman is describing his own poetry. 
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•    I heard a Fly buzz - when I died    By Emily Dickinson

        Dickinson uses the word "Windows," which seems to be a 

             metaphor for the speaker’s eyes.