“The Road Not Taken” “Mending Wall”
Carl Sandburg
• Mid-west prairie poet • Ideal in life was to be “the word of the people” • First volume: Chicago Poems • “Fog”
• • • •
New England landscape Spoken language Conversational rhythm Deeper and wider symbolic meaning
• Some famous poems: “Stoppning”
A Survey of American Literature
Chapter 12 T.S. Eliot, Stevens, Williams
• Eliot (born in America, settled down in England) • Major works:
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The Waste Land Hollow Man Four Quartets Murder in the Cathedral (play)
Chapter 13 Frost, Sandburg, Cummings, Hart Crane, Moore
• Robert Frost (1874-1963)
long way to recognition; fresh voice; won the Pulitzer Prize four times; unofficial Poet Laureate; stood aside from the Modernist endeavor his time; retained a faith in the traditional forms of poetry
Anecdote of the Jar
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • I placed a jar in Tennessee，
And round it was， upon a hill．
It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill．
• Eliot’s poetry is difficult to read.
images and symbols disconnect; lot of learned quotations and allusions
• The essence of his thought lies in the interaction between the past, the present, and the future.
• “Objective correlative”(客观对应物), impersonal theory ---using related objects, situations, events , all
external facts, to express emotions
1948，Nobel Prize winner
The jar was gray and bare．
It did not give of bird or bush， Like nothing else in Tennessee．
William Carlos Williams
• A physician, and a poet • Strongly disapprove of the Pound-Eliot bookish, “internationalist,” and intellectual brand of poetry • Believe that “localism alone can lead to culture.” • There is poetry in everyday life. • “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Morning at the Window
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens, And along the trampled edges of the street I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates. The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts An aimless smile that hovers in the air And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
E. E. Cummings (1894-1963)
• A juggler with syntax, grammar, and diction, entirely regardless of any established conventions of poetry • Modern painter, fascinated with PostImpressionist and Cubist paintings and sculptures
The wilderness rose up to it，
And sprawled around， no longer wild．
The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air．
It took dominion everywhere．
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
• As a business man and poet, he lives in the world of reality and the world of imagination. • A poet should find beauty and pleasure and excitement and meaning in the reality. • “Anecdote of the Jar”