二战后的美国文学.docx

1、二战后的美国文学研究型美国文学学习资料二战后的美国文学American Poetry Since 1945: The Anti-Tradition A shift away from an assumption that traditional forms, ideas, and history can provide meaning and continuity to human life has occurred in the contemporary literary imagination throughout many parts of the world, including th

2、e United States. Events since World War II have produced a sense of history as discontinuous: Each act, emotion, and moment is seen as unique. Style and form now seem provisional, makeshift, reflexive of the process of composition and the writers self-awareness. Familiar categories of expression are

3、 suspect; originality is becoming a new tradition. It is not hard to find historical causes for this disassociated sensibility in the United States. World War II itself, the rise of anonymity and consumerism in a mass urban society, the protest movements of the 1960s, the decade-long Vietnam conflic

4、t, the Cold War, environmental threats - the catalog of shocks to American culture is long and varied. The change that has most transformed American society, however, has been the rise of the mass media and mass culture. First radio, then movies, and now an all-powerful, ubiquitous television presen

5、ce have changed American life at its roots. From a private, literate, elite culture based on the book, the eye, and reading, the United States has become a media culture attuned to the voice on the radio, the music of compact discs and cassettes, film, and the images on the television screen. Americ

6、an poetry has been directly influenced by mass media and electronic technology. Films, videotapes, and tape recordings of poetry readings and interviews with poets have become available, and new inexpensive photographic methods of printing have encouraged young poets to self-publish and young editor

7、s to begin literary magazines - of which there are now well over 2,000. From the late 1950s to the present, Americans have been increasingly aware that technology, so useful in itself, presents dangers through the wrong kinds of striking images. To Americans seeking alternatives, poetry seems more r

8、elevant than before: It offers people a way to express subjective life and articulate the impact of technology and mass society on the individual. A host of styles, some regional, some associated with famous schools or poets, vie for attention; contemporary American poetry is decentralized, richly v

9、aried, and impossible to summarize. For the sake of discussion, however, it can be arranged along a spectrum, producing three overlapping camps - the traditional on one end, the idiosyncratic in the middle, and the experimental on the other end. Traditional poets have maintained or revitalized poeti

10、c traditions. Idiosyncratic poets have used both traditional and innovative techniques in creating unique voices. Experimental poets have courted new cultural styles. TRADITIONALISMT raditional writers include acknowledged masters of traditional forms and diction who write with a readily recognizabl

11、e craft, often using rhyme or a set metrical pattern. Often they are from the U.S. Eastern seaboard or from the southern part of the country, and teach in colleges and universities. Richard Eberhart and Richard Wilbur; the older Fugitive poets John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren; s

12、uch accomplished younger poets as John Hollander and Richard Howard; and the early Robert Lowell are examples. They are established and frequently anthologized. The previous chapter discussed the refinement, respect for nature, and profoundly conservative values of the Fugitives. These qualities gra

13、ce much poetry oriented to traditional modes. Traditionalist poets are generally precise, realistic, and witty; like Richard Wilbur (1921- ), they are often influenced in these directions by 15th- and 16th-century British metaphysical poets brought to favor by T.S. Eliot. Wilburs most famous poem, A

14、 World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness (1950), takes its title from Thomas Traherne, a metaphysical poet. Its vivid opening illustrates the clarity some poets have found within rhyme and formal regularity: The tall camels of the spiritSteer for their deserts, passing the last groves loudWith

15、 the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honeyof the aridSun. They are slow, proud.Traditional poets, unlike many experimentalists who distrust too poetic diction, welcome resounding poetic lines. Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) ended one poem with the words To love so well the world that we m

16、ay believe, in the end, in God. Allen Tate (1899-1979) ended a poem, Sentinel of the grave who counts us all! Traditional poets also at times use a somewhat rhetorical diction of obsolete or odd words, using many adjectives (for example, sepulchral owl) and inversions, in which the natural, spoken word order of English is altered unnaturally. Sometimes the effect is noble, as in the line by Warren; other times, the poetry seems stilted and out of