unit 5 - 副本.pptVIP

Unit 5 Romantic Poets: Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson A critic, poet, and short story writer: important in all three aspects fountainhead of aestheticism (art for art’s sake); Great writer in the tradition of Gothic novel Forerunner of science-fiction The first to combine Gothic and detective tradition, actually the founder of the detective tradition The first major critic and theorist in America Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) “isolated”, divorced from society; more interested in redeeming and refining language; called the “great literary engineer” The first writer in America to give so much concern to the form and art in literary works; The central belief: all literary work is the creation of beauty. [the heresy of the didactic] wrote over 1,000 essays, most of which were literary criticism Poe As a Critic poetic theories (“The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle”) The poem should be short, readable at one sitting. Its chief aim is beauty; to create a feeling of beauty in the reader. Art does not lie in its message; poetry does not have to inculcate a moral; it has only to be; the artistry of the poem lies not in what is being said but in the way it is said. Poe stresses rhythm, defines true poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty.” Principles for short stories: Nobody before Poe has put so much emphasis on the effect of the work. Ideal length of a work is to be read at one sitting (brevity); should produce “totality of effect” on the reader, “single effect”, “finality”; carefully structured and carefully designed unity; organic whole of the story in which “no part can be displaced without ruining the whole.” [cf. Chang, 147-8][Shirley Jackson, Lottery] Beauty aims at “an elevating excitement of the soul,” and “beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Thus melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tones” and “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestiona