重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
Lecture Thirteen 教案首页
学生专业班级
外国语学院英语专业土木、机电、商贸、船舶方向
学 时 数
2
1． 了解 20 世纪意象主义现代诗歌。
教学目的
2． 了解弗罗斯特诗歌的哲理性
1． 介绍庞德生平和他发起的意象主义诗歌运动，他对中国古代文化的翻
译，讲解诗歌《在地铁站》和他翻译的李白的诗歌《长干行》。
教学内容
2． 介绍斯蒂文斯的生平，讲解诗歌《罐子的轶事》。
3． 介绍威廉斯的生平，讲解诗歌《红色手推车》《春天与一切》
4． 介绍弗罗斯特生平，讲解诗歌《冰与火》
《雪夜林边驻足》
《未选之路》
1． 庞德的意象主义诗歌运动和以他为代表的意象主义诗人。
教学重点
2． 弗罗斯特诗歌的新英格兰气息和哲理性
1． 庞德主张的意象诗中的意象叠加和并置。
教学难点
2． 弗罗斯特诗歌的哲理性。
1． 半个小时介绍讲解庞德。
教学进程
2． 半个小时介绍讲解斯蒂文斯和威廉斯
3． 半个小时介绍讲解弗罗斯特
课堂讲解，讨论
教学方法
多媒体
教
具
1． 庞德与意象主义诗歌运动
课后总结
2． 弗罗斯特诗歌哲理性分析
浅谈庞德对中国古诗的创造性翻译
作
业
备注：教学进程一栏可根据教学内容的多少自定页数。
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
Lecture Thirteen
Part One Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
I. Introduction to Ezra Pound
American poet and critic, often called "the poet's poet" because of his profound influence on
20th century writing in English. Pound believed that poetry is the highest of arts. He challenged
many of the common views of his time and spent 12 years in an American mental hospital. Pound's
major work was the Cantos, which was published in ten sections between 1925 and 1969 .
He was born in Hailey, Idaho and brought up in Wyncote, Philadelphia. At the age of twelve
Pound entered Cheltenham, a military school, where he was introduced to Greek and Latin. He
then studied languages at the University of Pennsylvania, and befriended there the young William
Carlos Williams (1883-1963), who gained later fame as a poet in New York's avant -garde circles.
From 1903 to 1906 Pound studied Anglo-Saxon and Romance languages at Hamilton College. In
1907 his teaching career was cut short at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, when he had
entertained an actress in his room.
In 1908 Pound traveled widely in Europe, working as a journalist . Inspired by the work of
Yeats, he went to London because he thought "Yeats knew more about poetry than anybody else":
He founded with Richard Aldington (1892-1962) and others the literary 'Imagism', and edited its
first anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). The movement was influenced by thoughts of Rémy de
Gourmont and T.E. Hulme (1883-1917), who stressed the importance of fresh language and true
perception on nature.
In their manifesto the Imagists promised: "1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subject
or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As
regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome." Pound's short "one-image poem" 'In a Station of the Metro' is among the most
celebrated Imagist works: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black
bough." Pound had seen a succession of beautiful faces one day on the Paris Metro, and in the
evening he found suddenly the expression for his sudden emotion.
Pound soon lost interest in Imagism, and after disputing with the poet Amy Lowell, Pound
called the movement "Amygism." He founded 'Vorticism', which produced a magazine, Blast. He
helped Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce to publish their works in the magazines Egoist
and Poetry. When he worked in 1913-14 as W.B. Yeats's secretary, he started a correspondence
with Joyce. Pound wrote on Joyce in various magazines, collected money for him, and even sent
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
spare clothes for him. Pound also played crucial role in the cutting of Eliot's The Waste Land,
which Eliot dedicated to him.
Pound has been called the "inventor" of Chinese poetry for our time. Beginning in 1913 with
the notebooks of the Orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, he pursued a lifelong study of ancient Chinese
texts, and translated among others the writings of Confucius. Pound's translations based on
Fenollosa's notes, collected in Cathay (1915), are considered among the most beautiful of his
writings. Dante and Homer became other sources for inspiration, and especiall y Dante's journey
through the realms have parallels with his examination of individual experiences in the Cantos.
In 1920 Pound moved to Paris. Four years later her settled in Italy, where he lived over 20
years. He met Mussolini in 1933 and saw in him the long-needed economic and social reformer. In
his anti-Semitic statements Pound agreed with those who believed that the economic system was
being exploited by Jewish financiers. During World War II he made in Rome a series of hysterical
and bitter radio broadcasts, that were openly fascist. In 1945 he was arrested by the U.S. forces
and put in a six foot by six foot "gorilla cage". In a trial he was labeled as paranoid by the
examining psychiatrists. Pound spent 12 years in Washington, D.C., in a hospital for the
criminally insane. It has been suggested that Pound was feigning insanity to escape the death
penalty. During this period he received the 1949 Bollingen Prize for his Pisan Cantos, which
concerned his imprisonment at the camp near Pisa. After he w as released, he returned to Italy,
where he spent his remaining years. Pound died on November 1, 1972, in Venice. According to
Katherine Anne Porter, "Pound was one of the most opinionated and unselfish men who ever lived,
and he made friends and enemies everywhere by the simple exercise of the classic American
constitutional right of free speech."
Pound's style was clear, economical and concrete.
II. Select Reading
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bow.
Compare:
大漠孤烟直，长河落日圆。
鸡声茅店月，人迹板桥霜。
梨花一枝春带雨。
人面桃花相映红。
The River-Merchant's Wife
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever. （常存抱柱信，且上望夫台。）
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months. （五月不可触）
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, （下三巴）
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
附：
长干行
李白
妾发初抚额，折花门前剧。
郎骑竹马来，绕床弄青梅。
同居长干里，两小无嫌猜。
十四为君妇，羞颜未尚开。
低头向暗壁，千唤不一回。
十五始展眉，愿同尘与灰。
常存抱柱信，且上望夫台。
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
十六君远行，瞿塘滟淤堆。
五月不可触，猿声天上哀。
门前迟行迹，一一生绿苔。
苔深不能扫，落叶秋风早。
八月蝴蝶来，双飞西园草。
感此伤妾心，坐愁红颜老。
早晚下三巴，预将书报家。
相迎不道远，直至长风沙。
Part Two Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
I. Introduction to Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879. He attended
Harvard University as an undergraduate from 1897 to 1900. He planned to travel to Paris as a
writer, but after working briefly as a reporter for the New York Herald Times, he decided to study
law. He graduated with a degree from New York Law School in 1903 and was admitted to the U.S.
Bar in 1904. He practiced law in New York City until 1916.
Though he had serious determination to become a successful lawyer, Stevens had several
friends among the New York writers and painters in Greenwich Village, including the poets
William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and E.E. Cummings.
In 1914, he sent a group of poems under the title "Phases" to Harriet Monroe for a war poem
competition for Poetry magazine. Stevens did not win the prize, but was published by Monroe in
November of that year.
For the next several years, Stevens focused on his business life. He began to publish new
poems in 1930. More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned wit h the transformative
power of the imagination. Composing poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings,
Stevens continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet, uneventful life.
Though now considered one of the major American poets of the century, he did not receive
widespread recognition until the publication of his Collected Poems, just a year before his death.
His major works include Ideas of Order (1935), The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), Notes
Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942), and a collection of essays on poetry, The Necessary Angel
(1951).
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
Stevens died in Hartford in 1955.
II. Selected Reading
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.
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 every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Part Three William Carlos Williams(1879-1955)
I. Introduction to Williams
William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He began writing
poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to
become both a writer and a doctor. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania,
where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence in Williams' writing,
and in 1913 arranged for the London publication of Williams's second collection, The Tempers.
Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams
began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist,
and playwright. Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement,
though as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values p ut forth in the work of
Pound and especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions.
Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent
an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. His influence as a poet spread
slowly during the twenties and thirties, overshadowed, he felt, by the immense popularity of
Eliot's "The Waste Land"; however, his work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s
as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, were impressed by the accessibility of
his language and his openness as a mentor. Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack
in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in 1963.
II. Selected Reading
The Red Wheelbarrow
So much depends
upon
A red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Spring and All
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
dazed spring approaches—
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf
One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken
[1923]
Part Four Robert Frost (1874-1963)
I. Introduction to Robert Frost
American poet, one of the finest of rural New England's 20th century pastoral poets . Frost
published his first books in Great Britain in the 1910s, but he soon became in his own country the
most read and constantly anthologized poet, whose work was made familiar in classrooms and
lecture platforms. Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times. Nature and Frost's rural
surroundings were for him a source for insights "from delight to wisdom" .
He was born in San Francisco, California. His father William Prescott Frost Jr., a journalist
and an ardent Democrat, died when Frost was about eleven years old. To support her family,
Frost's Scottish mother, the former Isabelle Moody, resumed her career as a schoolteacher. They
moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost's paternal grandfather, William Prescott Frost,
gave his grandson a good schooling.
After graduating from a high school in 1892, Frost attended Darthmouth College for a few
months. Over the next ten years he held a number of jobs. Frost worked among others in a textile
mill and taught Latin at his mother's school. In 1894 the New York Independent published Frost's
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
poem 'My Butterfly', earning him $15. He had also five poems privately printed. While working as
a teacher Frost continued to write and publish his poems in magazines. In 1895 he married a
former schoolmate; they had six children.
From 1897 to 1899 Frost studied at Harvard, but left without receiving a degree due family
problems and poor health. He moved to Derry, New Hampshire, working there as a cobbler, farmer,
and teacher at Pinkerton Academy. He held the post for five years. When he sent his poems to The
Atlantic Monthly they were returned with this note: "We regret that The Atlantic has no place for
your vigorous verse."
In 1912 Frost sold the Derry farm and took his wife and four young children to England.
There he published his first collection of poems, A Boy’s Will, at the age of 39. It was followed by
North Boston (1914), which gained international reputation. The collection contains some of
Frost's best-known poems: 'Mending Wall,' 'The Death of the Hired Man,' 'Home Burial,' 'A
Servant to Servants,' 'After Apple-Picking,' and 'The Wood-Pile.' The poems, written with blank
verse or looser free verse of dialogue, were drawn from his own life, recurrent losses, everyday
tasks, and his loneliness.
While in England Frost became acquainted with Ezra Pound, who called Frost's poems
"modern georgics". In 1915 he returned to the US in 1915 with his family and bought a farm near
Franconia, New Hampshire. When the editor of The Atlantic Monthly asked for poems, he gave the
very ones that had previously been rejected. Frost taught later at Amherst College (1916-38) and
Michigan universities. In 1916 he was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
On the same year appeared his third collection of verse, Mountain Interval, which contained such
poems as 'The Road Not Taken,' 'The Oven Bird,' 'Birches,' and 'The Hill Wife.'
Frost's poems show deep appreciation of natural world and sensibility about the human aspirations .
down-to-earth approach to his subjects, readers found it is easy to follow the poet into deeper
truths, without being burdened with pedantry. Often Frost used the rhythms and vocabulary of
ordinary speech or even the looser free verse of dialogue.
In 1920 Frost purchased a farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, near Middlebury College,
where he cofounded the Bread Loaf School and Conference of English. His wife died in 1938 and
he lost four of his children. Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns, and his son Carol, a
frustrated poet and farmer, committed suicide in 1940. Frost also suffered from depression and the
continual self-doubt led him to cling to the desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In
A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947), using the Old Testament characters of
Job and Jonah, Frost examined the complex relationship between man and God. After the death of
his wife, Frost became strongly attracted to Kathleen (Kay) Morrison, whom he employed from
1938 as his secretary and adviser, but who probably became also his lover. Frost also composed
for her one of his finest love poems, 'A Witness Tree.'
With his future biographer, Lawrance Thompson, Frost travelled in 1957 to England, and to
Israel and Greece in 1961. He participated in the inauguration of President John Kennedy in 1961
by reciting two of his poems. When the sun and the wind prevented him from reading his new
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
poem. In 1962 Frost travelled in the Soviet Union as a member of a goodwill group. He had a long
talk with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, whom he described admiringly as "no fathead"; as smart, big
and "not a coward."
At the time of his death on January 29, 1963, Frost was considered a kind of unofficial poet
laureate of the US. Frost depicted the fields and farms of his surroundings, observing the details of
rural life, which hide universal meaning.
II. Selected Reading
Fire and Ice
S OME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
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重庆交通大学外国语学院精品课程《英美文学史及选读》美国文学部分电子课件：第十三讲
The Road Not Taken
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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