《英美文学教学资料》Whitman.pptVIP

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes)” A national figure in American literary history “The greatest democrat the world has seen” openness, freedom, equality, fraternity, individualism and democracy His Life Born on Long Island, New York, Grew up in Brooklyn, where he left school at 11. Did various jobs: an office boy, a doctor’s helper, a printer’s assistant, a journalist, a typesetter, an itinerant(巡回的) schoolteacher, etc. His life experiences had an effect on the themes and manner of his poetry. His book grew out of a slow and conscious effort to employ his experiences and his own maturity. faith in democratic equality belief in the individual rebel against society’s restrictions a figure of the average man and the superman in his conception of himself. pursuing social freedom (mind) through democracy pursuing emotional freedom (heart) through love Pursuing spiritual freedom (soul) through religion (pantheism 泛神论) declared his democratic love for man was considered a homosexual His Poetry His abnormal sensitivity and extreme sensuousness (知觉) appear to be primary forces in his poetry. combination of contradictory elements open description of sex and sexuality unconventional poetic style Whitmans poetry is daring in its rejection of rhyme, meter and traditional stanza forms. He liked to use free verse, that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. To give form to this free verse, he turned to rhetorical devices such as repetition and parallelism. To unify his longer poems, he employed stanzas of widely varying length, in which an idea could be developed, images could be clustered, different things can be catalogued, and a symbolic pattern could be woven, e.g., 42 . . . This is the city and I am one of the citizens, Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factor