Lecture14victorianpoets概述.ppt

Lecture 1314 Victorian Poets Alfred Tennyson Robert Browning Matthew Arnold So the age “witnessed “at least the temporary decline of English poetry”. c. In 1828, he went to Cambridge and met A.H. Hallam. In 1831he was called home by the illness and death of his father. Reading ???The Eagle ?He clasps the crag with crookèd hands;?Close to the sun in lonely lands,?Ringd with the azure world, he stands.??The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;?He watches from his mountain walls,?And like a thunderbolt he falls. The first stanza of this consciously styled fragment poem personifies an eagle, describing its claws as hands and conferring upon the bird almost the status of the lonely, Romantic outsider. In the second stanza, the eagle dives upon the object it has seen far below, but which the poet does not record. Also in the poem he refers to the bird as a male, this refers to the pride. The idea of dominance he has is especially evident in line 5 where Tennyson referred to the crags being mountain walls, which symbolizes the eagle guarding his fortress. b. After graduation from Oxford, he became an inspector of schools, traveling about England and on the continent to make investigations and write reports on reforms in English education. c. From 1857 -1867 he held the rofessorship of poetry at Oxford. b. The function of literary criticism is neither to find fault nor to learning or influence, but to find and propagate “the best which has been thought and said in the world”. c. He regarded the quality of “high seriousness” as the principal virtue of a poet. He paid great attention to the moral values of poetry. To him, “the end and aim of all literature is “a iticism of life”. iii. Read “Dover Beach”  b. He defined the feature of his poems as “though for the most part Lyric in expression, always Dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine”. Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!A