History and Anthology of American Literature

History and Anthology of
American Literature
Book II
Compiled by Wu Wenren
Lectured by Gary Chau
American Literature
PART IV
THE LITERATURE OF REALISM
Historical Introduction
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Mark Twain
O. Henry
Henry James
Jack London
Theodore Dreiser
American Literature
I. Historical Introduction
A. Realism
B. Naturalism
C. Local Colorism
D. Political Background
E. Literary Characteristics
(pp4-8)
The Literature of Realism
A. Realism
I. Background: From Romanticism to Realism

Psychological
realism
the three conflicts that reached
breaking point
in this period
industrialism vs. agrarian Psychological realism is the realistic writing
probes deeplywest
into the complexities of
culturely-measured east vs. that
newly-developed
characters
thoughts and motivations. Henry
plantation gentility vs. commercial
gentility
James
novel The
Ambassadors
(1903) is
1880s urbanization: from free
competition
to monopoly
capitalism
considered to be a masterpiece of
the closing of American frontier
psychological realism. Henry James is
considered the founder of psychological
II. Characteristics
realism. He believed that reality lies in the
truthful description of life
impressions
made by life on the spectator, and
typical character under typical
circumstance
not close
in anyobservation
facts of which
spectator isof life
objective rather than idealized,
andthe
investigation
unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the
Realistic writers are like scientists.
that
artist
assumesIttoleaves
represent
open-ending:Life is complexobligation
and cannot
bethe
fully
understood.
much
room for readers to think by life
themselves.
as he sees it, which may not be the same
concerned with social and psychological
problems,
revealing the frustrations
life as it really
is.
of characters in an environment of sordidness and depravity
B. Naturalism
I. Background
Darwins theory: natural selection
Spensers idea: social Darwinism
French Naturalism: Zola
II.Features
environment and heredity
scientific accuracy and a lot of details
general tone: hopelessness, despair, gloom, ugly
side of the society
III.significance
It prepares the way for the writing of 1920s lost
generation and T. S. Eliot.
C. Local Colorism
1860s, 1870s~1890s
I. Appearance
uneven development in economy in America
culture: flourishing of frontier literature,
humorists
magazines appeared to let writer publish their
works
II. What is Local Colour?
Tasks of local colourists: to write or present local
characters of their regions in truthful depiction
distinguished from others, usually a very small
part of the world.
D. Political Background
Northern industrialism/ Southern agrarianism/
Mechanization (pa1)
American life has been changed drastically for the
political, scientific and economic development. (pa2-5)
population doubled as the process of urbanization (pa2,
p3)
the national income quadrupled. (pa3, p3)
a gingerbread era to attract Europeans (pa4, p3-4)
The Gilded Age (Mark Twain): an age of excess and
extremes, of decline and progress, of poverty and
dazzling wealth, of gloom and buoyant hopean age of
conflicts. (pa1, p2)
E. Literary Characteristics
Emily Dickinson: the greatest woman writer of the realistic age
Hariet Beecher Stowe: the most famous literary woman in the
world for her work Uncle Toms Cabin
Walt Whitman: offering a new literary vision to the world
Realism: reality and truth (in France)
---- William Dean Howells Dean of American Realism
---- Henry James the individual psychology of his characters
---- Mark Twain the expansion of American experiences
Naturalism
---- Stephen Crane The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
---- Frank Norris The Octopus (1901)
---- Jack London Martin Eden (1909)
---- Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie (1900)
Local Color Ficition: its peak in 1880s
---- Mark Twain
---- Bret Hartes The Luck of Roaring Camp
Introduction to Verse
Verse is poetry, esp. metrical poetry. There are two main
types of poetry: narrative and lyric. Narrative poetry
includes three kinds of poems: epic, ballad, and metrical
tale. Lyrical poems are: general, dramatic, pastoral,
sonnet, ode, and elegy.
Poetry is a type of discourse that achieves its effects by
rhythm, sound patterns, and imagery in the poetic form
evoking emotions or sensations, conveying loftiness of
tone or lending force to ideas.
Narrative poetry generally tells a story of events,
experiences, or the like, having characters and plots.
Epic is a long narrative poem conceived on a grand
scale, telling a story of great or heroic deeds, for
example, Beowulf and Paradise Lost, etc.
Ballad is a narrative poem, usually in short stanzas (4-line stanzas,

with the second and the fourth lines rhymed), generally about heroic
or tragic deeds, or love, often in vivid, oral (unliterary) language.
Metrical Tale is a tale in poetic meter (measure).
Lyric is a lyrical poem, shorter than a narrative poem, is an
expression of emotion, meditation or observation, often intensely
personal.
General lyric is a lyrical poem that is not particular, but dealing with
all or the overall aspects of a subject without attempting to deal with
specific aspects.
Dramatic lyric is a lyrical poem pertaining to drama or the theater.
Pastoral lyric deals with the idealized country life.
Sonnet is a poem of 14 lines with a regular rhyme scheme.
Ode is a poem, usu. in irregular meter and expressing noble
feelings, often in celebration of some special event.
Elegy is a poem that laments the death of someone; or a poem
written in a nostalgic or melancholy mood.
The Elements of Metrical Poetry

Rhythm: the regular reoccurrence of stressed syllables.
Foot: a rhythmic unit, consisting of a stressed syllable and
an unstressed syllable or syllables accompanying it.
Iambic foot (iambus): consisting of one unstressed
syllable followed by a stressed syllable. e.g. repeat
Trochaic foot (trochee): consisting of one stressed
syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. e.g. never
Anapestic foot (anapest): consisting of two unstressed
syllables followed by a stressed syllable. e.g. engineer
Dactylic foot (dactyl): consisting of one stressed syllable
followed by two unstressed syllables. e.g. carefully
Spondaic foot/spondee: 2 successive stressed
syllables, e.g. heartbreak
Pyrrhic foot/pyrrhic: 2 successive unstressed syllables,
e.g. the top of the morning
Meter: meaning measure. The unit of measure in poetry is the

foot, and the meter of a poem is determined by the number of feet it
contains: monometer (one foot), dimeter (two feet), trimeter (three
feet), tetrameter (four feet), pentameter (five feet), hexameter (six
feet), septameter (seven feet), octameter (eight feet).
Rhyme: the similarity in the sound of syllables at the end of lines.
Masculine rhyme: a rhyme of only one stressed syllable (delay,
today).
Feminine rhyme: a rhyme of two syllables, the second unstressed
(ending, bending; daily, gaily).
Eye rhyme: a rhyme in which two words appear from their spelling
to rhyme, but do not in fact do so (warm, harm; cough, tough).
Blank verse is the unrhymed verse (or lines) in iambic pentameter.
Free verse is a poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and
that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it
uses the cadences of natural speech. While it alternates stressed
and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does
so in a looser way. To make it simpler, free verse is a verse whose
structure is without regular meter and is usually without rhyme.
Alliteration: the repetition of the same initial letter (usually a consonant) in a group of
words, e.g. a deep, dark ditch or safe and sound.
Alliterative verse: in alliterative verse, certain accented words in a line begin with the
same consonant sound. There are generally 4 accents in a line, three of which show
alliteration, as can be seen from the English epic Beowulf.
Heroic couplet: two consecutive rhyming lines (a rhyming couplet) in iambic
pentameters, forming in many poems a complete metrical unit. (See The Canterbury
Tales by Chaucer)
Shakespearean (or English or Elizabethan ) sonnet: a sonnet in iambic pentameter,
consisting of three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. (See
Sonnet 18)
Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet: a sonnet consisting of an octive rhyming abba abba and
a sestet with two or three rhymes as cdc dcd or cde cde or cd cd cd. (See Miltons
poem On His Blindness)
Spenserian stanza: a nine-lined stanza perfected by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), who
used it in The Faerie Queen (1589, 1596). It is suitable only for long narrative
poems. It consists of eight iambic pentameters and an alexandrine, rhyming
ababbcbcc.
Alexandrine: a line of poetry containing regularly six iambic feet (i.e. 12 syllables),
with a caesura after the third.
Ottava rima( ): each stanza containing 8 iambic pentameter lines, rhyming
abababcc. [See Byrons Don Juan (1818-1823)]
Terza rima : a verse form consisting of hendecasyllable tercets
(each tercet consists of three lines). One poem consists of 4 tercets and a
couplet, rhyming aba cdc ded ee, run-on lines. [See Shelleys poem Ode to the West
Wind (1819)]
II. WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

A. Biographical Introduction
B. Leaves of Grass
C. Analysis of the Excerpts
a. Life and works

b. Themes
c. Style
d. Influence
a. Lifea long narrative poem

conceived on a grand scale,
telling a story of great or heroic
deeds.
life (p9-10)
genuine epic poem (Leaves of Grass)
free verse (question-and-answer pattern)
one of great innovators
Leaves of Grass: man and nature/ the life in
New York
Whitmans Democratic Ideas
Whitmans Individualism
Free Verse
verse whose structure is without regular meter and is usually

without rhyme.
Free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line
length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse
structure; instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech.
While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter
verse forms do, free verse does so in a looser way.
Whitmans poetry is an example of free verse as its the most
impressive. Listen to a line from Song of Myself:
A child said What is the grass? Fetching it to me
with full hands;

Here, question and answer create a rising and falling effect,
ending in a stop. Whitman continues:
How could I answer the child? I do not know what
it is any more than he.

Free Verse
The same question-and-answer pattern is repeated,

with the same rising and falling effect. This is not
prose but poetry. It is arranged rhythmically,
tightened and loosened by the poet. It has a plan,
although the plan seems to grow organicallylike
its subjects, nature and human beings.
Although free verse had been used before Whitman
notably in Italian opera and in the King James
translation of the Bibleit was Whitman who
pioneered the form and made it acceptable in
American poetry. It has since been used by Ezra
Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace
Stevens, and other major American poets of the
twentieth century.
b. Works
work: Leaves of Grass (9 editions)
Song of Myself
There Was a Child Went Forth
( )
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Democratic Vistas
Passage to India
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
c. Themes
themes Catalogue of American and European thought
He had been influenced by many American and European
thoughts: enlightenment, idealism, transcendentalism, science,
evolution ideas, western frontier spirits, Jeffersons individualism,
Civil War Unionism, Orientalism.
Major themes in his poems (almost everything):
equality of things and beings
divinity of everything
immanence of God
democracy
evolution of cosmos
multiplicity of nature
self-reliant spirit
death, beauty of death
expansion of America
brotherhood and social solidarity (unity of nations in the world)
pursuit of love and happiness

d. Style
style: free verse
-
--
no fixed rhyme or scheme

parallelism, a rhythm of thought
phonetic recurrence
the habit of using snapshots( )
the use of a certain pronoun I
a looser and more open-ended syntactic structure
use of conventional image
strong tendency to use oral English
vocabulary powerful, colourful, rarely-used words of foreign
origins, some even wrong
sentences catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem

lines
e. Influence
His best work has become part of the common

property of Western culture.
He took over Whitmans vision of the poet-prophet
and poet-teacher and recast it in a more
sophisticated and Europeanized mood.
He has been compared to a mountain in American
literary history.
Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or
form, bears witness to his great influence.
B. Leaves of Grass
a. His main intention to write the poem
b. Whitmans thoughts and feelings;
his poetic form
c. The language style
a. His main intention to write the poem
As Whitman saw it, poetry could play a vital part in the process
of creating a new nation. It could enable Americans to celebrate
their release from the Old World and the colonial rule. And it could
also help them understand their new status and to define
themselves in the new world of possibilities. Hence, the abundance
of themes in his poetry voices freshness. He shows concern for the
whole hardworking people and the burgeoning life of cities. To
Whitman, the fast growth of industry and wealth in cities indicated a
lively future of the nation, despite the crowded, noisy, and squalid
conditions and the slackness in morality. The realization of the
individual value also found a tough position in Whitmans poems in
a particular way. Most of the poems in Leaves of Grass sing of the
en-masse and the physical dimension of the self and
openly and joyously celebrates sexuality . Pursuit of love
and happiness is approved of repeatedly and affectionately in his
lines. Sexual love, a rather taboo topic of the time, is displayed
candidly as something adorable. If two persons are really in love,
what is to us what the rest do or think? The individual person
and his desires must be respected. Obviously, Whitmans sexual
themes are beyond the physical.
b. Whitmans thoughts and feelings;

his poetic form
In this poem, Whitman shows concern for the
whole hard-working people and the burgeoning
life of cities. Pursuit of love and happiness is
approved of repeatedly and affectionately in his
lines. The individual person and his desires must
be respected. Whitman expressed much
mourning for the sufferings of the young lives in
the battlefield during the Civil War and showed a
determination to carry on the fighting dauntlessly
until the final victory.
c. The language style

A looser and more open-ended
syntactical structure is frequently
favored. Lines and sentences of different
lengths are left lying side by side just as
things are, undisturbed and separate.
There are few compound sentences to
draw objects and experiences into a
system of hierarchy. In the poem, different
things would mean a different wave of
feeling. So when we read his poems, we
can feel the rhythm of Whitmans thought
and cadences of his feeling.
C. Analysis of The Excerpt

The Analysis of Whitmans Song of Myself
Song of myself, consisting of 1345 lines,
is the longest poem in Leaves of Grass. The
poet takes for granted the self as the most
crucial element of the world and thus sets
forth two of his principal beliefs: first, a
theory of universality( ); second, all
things are equal in value.
Part I
Line 1 celebrate: praise; honor.
Line 2 assume: admit; perceive.
What words I have used to praise myself would do the
same to you.
Line 3 Each of us is a part of nature, thus, we have the same
structure.
Line 4 loafe: (=loaf) wander; move freely.
While I am loafing, I invited my soul to go together, since
both are free.
Line 5 I lean and loafe: In my wandering, I stopped and
stooped (being attracted
by something)
a spear of: a narrow piece of (grass leave)
Line 6 formd from: (be) created from.
this air: was created or originated from the air.
Line 7 I was born here; my parents were born here.
from parents the same: from the parents who were
born from the same soil and used to take the same air.
Line 8 begin: so I begin.

I am now strong and healthy, I begin to
hope my singing of myself will not stop till
my death.
Line 10 Creeds: religious doctrines. Schools: theory of
a particular group of scholars.
in abeyance: the condition of not being in use or in
force.
When I am singing myself and wandering, Id like to
leave all the creeds and schools aside, to have them
retire back.
Line 11 sufficed: (I felt) I have had quite enough of
creeds or schools.
they: the creeds and schools.
but never forgotten: in spite of my unwillingness to all the
creeds and schools, I would never have them forgotten.
Line 12 harbor: v. accept; admit (whatever of

nature)
I permit to speak: I permit nature to speak
at every hazard: whenever; in any case.
Line 13 check: considering.
original energy: the real intention (of nature)
Lines 12-13 I am willing to accept whatever
nature provides, good or bad, without considering
the real intention of it.
In Part I of the selected sections, the author
unfolds the theme of a leaf of grass is no less
than the journey-work of the stars by cordially
celebrating himself. Meanwhile, he extols the
ideal of equality and democracy and celebrates
the dignity, the self-reliant spirit and the joy of the
common man.
Part X
In part ten he told us his experience in
walking the countryside. He went to the
mountain, to the sea and to take part in
the marriage ceremony of an Indian
couple. At last he told us an experience of
saving a runway slave, which showed his
attitude toward slavery
C. The Analysis of Whitmans I Sit and Look Out
Notes:
Line 2-3: I sit here and look out at all the sorrows of human world,
and look at all the oppression and shame of this world.
Line 3: convulsive sobs: very sad, uncontrollable crying
Line 3-4: at anguish with: felt great pain or suffering of mind.
I can hear the restrained sad crying from young people when
they are regretful for all the sorrows of having done wrong.
Line 4: remorseful sorrow for having done wrong.
Line 5: low life lower society; the poor family.
misused: mistreated; wrongly treated.
Line 6 gaunt: thin, as if ill or hungry.
desperate: helpless
Lines 5-6: I can see that in the poor families, the mother has often
been mistreated by her children. They are neglected and helpless.
Line 7: treacherous: disloyal; deceitful.

Line 8: seducer: person persuades others to do something wrong.
Lines 7-8: I see the wife was mistreated by her husband; I see some
men deceitful to seduce the innocent young women.
Line 9 ranklings: of the extreme degree; the worst.
unrequited love: love of one person which was not reciprocated by
other sex.
Line 10 hid: kept in secret
Lines 9-10 I see the great jealousy of (some young people) and the
fruitless love of some other, though they tried to keep the failure a
secret.
Line 11 workings: fighting.
pestilence: a disease that causes death and spreads swiftly
Line 12 martyrs: a person who by his death or sufferings proves the
strength of his belief.
Lines 11-12 I see in the human world, some are fighting

against the others; some are suffering from the deadly
disease; some are cruelly ruling the people; some are
sacrificing their lives for their belief; some had committed
crime and had been imprisoned.
Line 13 cast lots: draw lots to try ones luck, to make the
decision.
Line 14 preserve: keep safe; keep alive; protect.
Line 13-14 I see that over the sea, the sailors in
starvation are drawing lots to decide which of them
should be killed to provide food for the survival of the
others.
Line 15 slights: insult.
degradations: contempt.
Line 15-16 I see very clearly some self-important
persons are showing insults and contempt to the
laborers, to the poor, to the Negroes and to all the people
alike.
Line 17-18 When I sit here, I can see all the unkindness and
sufferings in this society. However, I can do nothing for a change of
them except just looking at them happening, hearing them crying
and staying in silence. I stay in self-reproach, but nothing more I can
do. I fail in my responsibility to act.
Comment on the poem:
Being a sympathetic person, Whitman felt rather sorrowful for all

the unkindness existing in this world: the mother being misused, the
treacherous seducer of young women, jealousy, battles, pestilence,
tyranny, prison, slights, degradations, arrogance, and the
astounding way of dealing with the famine at sea as well. He was
shameful but he felt unable to do away with them. As a poet with
strong social responsibility, Whitman accomplished his duty to
expose, to condemn, to appeal for a reform, however, nothing
further could be done except these. A sense of guilt made Whitman
suffer but it could by no means be shaken off. Consequently, a
strong implication of self-reproach is added to the last line.
III. EMILY DICKINSON(1830-1886)

A. Biographical
Introduction
B.
Because I Could Not
Stop for Death
C.
Comparison: Whitman
vs. Dickinson
a. Life and Works

b. Themes
c. Style
a. Life and Works

life
born into Amherst, Massachusetts on Dec. 10, 1830
during the narrow span of her lifetime, she kept staying
at home except for a few short trips to Boston or
Philadelphia.
the best poetess America ever created.
works
My Life Closed Twice before Its Close
Because I Cant Stop for Death
I Heard a Fly Buzz When I died
Mine by the Right of the White Election
Wild Nights Wild Nights
b. Themes
based on her own
experiences/joys/sorrows
religion doubt and belief about religious
subjects
death and immortality
love suffering and frustration caused by
love
physical aspect of desire
nature kind and cruel
free will and human
responsibility
Dickinsons poems on
immortality( )
In some of her poems she wrote about religious
subjects. While she desired salvation and immortality,
she denied the orthodox view of paradise. Although she
believed in God, she sometimes doubted His
benevolence. Closely related to Dickinsons religious
poetry are her poems concerning death and immortality,
ranging over the physical as well as the psychological
and emotional aspects of death. She looked at death
from the point of view of both the living and the dying.
She even imagined her own death, the loss of her own
body, and the journey of her own soul to the unknown.
Perhaps Dickinsons greatest rendering of the moment of
death is to be found in I heard a Fly buzzwhen I died
, a poem universally considered one of her
masterpieces.
Dickinsons poems on love
One group of her love poems treats the suffering and frustration
love can cause. These poems are clearly the reflection of. her own
unhappy experience, closely related to her deepest and most
private feelings Many of them are striking and original depictions of
the longing for shared moments, the pain of separation, and the
futility of finding happiness, such as If you were coming in the
Fall, There came a Day at Summers full, I cannot live with
You, etc. The other group of love poems focuses on the
physical aspect of desire, in which Dickinson dealt with,
allegorically, the influence of the male authorities over the female,
emphasizing the power of physical attraction and expressing a
mixture of fear and fascination for the mysterious magnetism
between sexes. However, it is those poems dealing with marriage
that have aroused critical attention first. Im cededIve stopped
being theirs, Im wife Ive finished that are but a few
examples to show Dickinsons confusion and doubt the role of
women in the 19th century America.
Dickinsons poems on nature
More than five hundred poems Dickinson wrote are about nature, in
which her general skepticism about the relationship between
man and nature is well-expressed. On the one hand, she shared
with her romantic and transcendental predecessors who believed
that a mythical bond between man and nature existed, that nature
revealed to man things about mankind and universe. On the other,
she felt strongly about natures inscrutability and indifference to the
life and interests of human beings. However, Dickinson managed to
write about nature in the affirmation of the sheer joy and the
appreciation, unaffected by philosophical speculations. Her acute
observations, her concern for precise details and her interest in
nature are pervasive, from sketches of flowers, insects, birds, to the
sunset, the fully detailed summer storms, the change of seasons;
from keen perception to witty analysis.
c. Style
Tone: the term tone in

literature means the
manner of expression to
indicate the speakers
attitude towards the
subject.
poems without titles

severe economy of expression
directness, brevity
musical device to create cadence
(rhythm)
capital letters emphasis
short poems, mainly two stanzas
rhetoric techniques: personification
make some of abstract ideas vivid
B. I Die for Beauty(449)

Stanza 1: I died pursuing the beauty of art and
immediately as I became accustomed to the new
circumstance of a tomb. I was told that there was
another who died for truth and arrived in the next room.
Stanza 2: I died for beauty and he died for truth. Since
beauty is truth, and truth beauty we are as close as
brothers, or like twins.
Stanza3: The two of us are like kinsmen who met at
night, and we talked in separated rooms for a very long
time until we have harmoniously united into one and
have been completely forgotten by the human world.
C. I Heard a Fly buzz---when I

died---(465)
Stanza 1: When I was dying, I heard the buzz of a fly which reminded me of
the stillness in the air.
Stanza 2: Before the absolute power of death, I was helpless, so were my
relatives and friends. They could do nothing more than gathering around
me, tearless and breathless, and watching the arrival of death to me.
Stanza 3: When I was abandoning this material world, a fly comes to me.
Comment on the poem
This poem is the description of the moment of death. The poetess made
use of a very strange image of a fly to symbolize her last touch with the
human world and, moreover, the perspective of a decaying corpse. The fly
appeared as something which is able to fly between the two worlds of life
and death.
Besides, the word fly is very cleverly used in the work. On the one hand,
it refers to that insect; on the other hand, it may indicate free flying. Before
death, the fly was buzzing around, I hear it; after death, it may lead me to
go far and forever, I am flying.The fly is inconsequently, of little
importance---implying perhaps that death is the same.
D. Because I Could Not Stop for

Death
Line 2 He: death; angel of death.

In this poem the angel of death is personified.
The angel of death is here presented as a very polite gentleman.
The word kindly relaxes the solemn tone of this poem about
death.
Line 3 Carriage: vehicle pulled by horses for carrying people; in this
line, Carriage Refers to hearse( ), a car to carry a body in a
coffin to the funeral before being put in the grave.
Ourselves: the angel of death and the poet.
Line 4 Immortality: state of living forever (Here it is also personified);
immortality appears in the same carriage with death and the
poetess.
Stanza 1: The angel of death, in the image of a kind person, comes in a
carriage for the sake of Immortality and the poetess.
Line 5 He: god of death. God of death isnt in a hurry when doing his
duty.
Line 6 put away: left over; gave up.
Line 8 Civility: politeness; respect.
Stanza 2: To show my politeness to god of death, I gave up my work
and my enjoyment of life as well; I give up my life.
Line 10 Recess: play period during school session.

in the Ring: in the playground; standing in ring when playing
games.
Line 11 Gazing Grain: the grain which is gazing upwards. The
figurative speech of personification is skillfully used here to remind
the reader that we, as human being, are just passers-by in this
world; comparatively, the grain in the fields, growing year after year,
is able to gaze upwards one generation after another.
Stanza 3: The journey of our carriage implies the experience of human
life; school implies time for childhood; the fields of gazing grain, for
youth and adulthood; while the setting sun, for old age.
Line 13 He: the setting sun.

Line 14 The Dews: the appearance of the dews implies the falling
of night.
drew quivering and chill: brought me a sense of fear.
Line 15 (I felt chilly and frightened) because I was dressed only with
Gossamer and Gown.
Gossamer: fine, silky substance of webs made by small
spiders; very thin, silky materials, usually for womans dresses.
Here it refers to the shroud on the dead body.
Line 16 Tippet: long piece of fur, etc., worn by a woman round the
neck and shoulder, with the end hanging down in front.
Tulle: soft fine silky net --- like material used especially for
veils and dresses.
Stanza 4 Probably we may say the sun sets before we reach the
destination--- the night falls, death arrives. I felt a fear and chilly
after death, for my shroud is thin and my scarf too light. Despite the
description of death, the usual gloomy and horrifying atmosphere
is lightened by the poetess with the elegantly fluttering clothing she
describes.
Line 17 House: grave.

Line 18 Cornice: ornamental moulding in plaster, round
the walls of a room, just below the ceiling.
Stanza 5 This stanza shifts to the description of the
tomb. With the words as House, swelling (which
conveys a suggestive similarity to vault) roof,
especially cornice, the grave is described as a
magnificent building.
Line 21 then: the arrival of my death.
Line 23 surmised: supposed; guessed.
Stanza 6: Several centuries had passed since the arrival
of death upon me. However, I felt it is shorter than a day.
On that day I suddenly realized that death is the starting
point for eternity, and the carriage is heading towards it.
Comment on the poem

The poem is discussing death, a very
gloomy subject, but it is done with a rather
light tone. The tone is light just because
the author does not take death as a
catastrophe; instead, she treats the angel
of death as a very polite gentleman, as a
long-missing guest: giving up her work and
leisure, putting on her find silky dresses,
she accompanies death in the same
carriage to eternity. All the beauty of this
work lies in the poetess open-minded
attitude towards death.
C.
Comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson
Thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an

emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its
Americanness, their poetry being part of American
Renaissance.
Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the
new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic
pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before:
they were pioneers in American poetry.
Similarities:
Differences:
Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson

explores the inner life of the individual.
Whereas Whitman is national in his outlook, Dickinson is
regional.
Dickinson has the catalogue technique (direct, simple style)
which Whitman doesnt have.
IV. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

(1811-1896)
she absorbed from fugitive

slaves and visits to the
South a personal knowledge
of the institution of slavery.
She saw with her own eyes
that numerous black slaves
who could no longer endure
the cruel persecution of the
slaveholders fled to the
North with the secret help of
the good-hearted white
people.
the anti-slavery activist.
the little lady who wrote a
book and caused a great
war. (President Lincoln)
Uncle Toms Cabin

Theme:
exposure and denouncement of the evil Southern
slavery through the fate of the old slave Tom.
Characterization:
The slaveholders---Shelby, St. Clare, Legree, the
foremen
The slaves---Tom, Eliza and her husband Georgia
and her son
Protagonist---Tom, the old slave, a docile and
obedient slave
---- Eliza and Georgia, struggling for
freedom
Plot:
conflict--- between Tom, Eliza and their slaveholders
climax --- Tom is sold several times; Eliza, taking his son,
flees towards Canada.
denouement--- Tom forced to death under great labor; Eliza
finally getting her freedom.
Style:
a. Faulty: sentimental, written carelessly, conventional, and
rambling.
b. The plot seems contrived and forced. The author herself
had never lived in the slave states, and the picture may, at parts,
be inaccurate.
c. Her descriptive power and characterization are
convincing and moving.
d. It differs from a thousand others of its kind in that it is more
than an antislavery book; it has dramatic intensity, moral
earnestness, intense emotionalism, and above all, human
interest.
Influence: enormous after the

forty versions of language
appeared
a. It stirred the Civil War.
b. It caused a lot of mothers
sacrificing their sons.
c. It also brought about the
emancipation of black slaves.
V. MARK TWAIN(1835-1910)
Life:
Mark Twain the pen name
source---the cry of a boatman
taking soundings, and meaning
two fathoms( ), i.e. twelve
feet. The choice of name has been
characteristically ironic, since two
fathoms (i.e. twelve feet) was
presumably an uncomfortable
depth for large steamboat.
Works
The Gilded Age
the two advantages
Life on the Mississippi
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthurs Court
The Man That Corrupted
Hardleybug
Localism
a trend in the late 1860s and early 1870s,
having the elements that characterize a
local culture such as speech, customs,
and other peculiarities, and the physical
setting and those distinctive qualities of
Landscape which condition human
thought and behavior.
The local colorism in Twains

works:
Twain is also known as a local colorist, who preferred
to present social life through portraits of the local
characters of his regions, including people living in that
area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the
customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently,
the rich material of his boyhood experience on the
Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction,
and the Mississippi valley and the West became his
major theme. Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain
wrote about the lower-class people, because they were
the people he knew so well and their life was the one he
himself lived. Moreover he successfully used local color
and historical settings to illustrate and shed light on
the contemporary society.
The characteristics of Twains

language:
Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with
language, his use of vernacular . His words are
colloquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentences are
simple, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken
language. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his
protagonists in their everyday life. Whats more, his characters,
confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment,
speak with a strong accent, which is true of his local colorism.
Besides, different characters from different literary or cultural
backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim.
Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular,
Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary
medium in the literary history of the country. His style of language
was later taken up by his descendants, Sherwood Anderson and
Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.
Twains humor:
Mark Twains humor is remarkable, to. It is fun to read
Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be
funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details,
witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall
tales( ). By considering his experience as a
newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popular image of
the American funny man whose punning, facetious
, irrelevant articles filled the newspapers, and a
great deal of his humor is characterized by puns,
straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anticlimax, let alone tricks of travesty and
invective . However, his humor is not only
of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical
elements making people laugh, but kind of artistic style
used to criticizes the social injustice and satirize the
decayed romanticism.
The Analysis of The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Theme: the novel eulogizes the moral values of
antebellum America: simplicity, innocence, peace
and criticizes the machine and worship of
money
Humanitarianism ultimately triumphs;
The white and the black exist together peacefully,
just in a certain and temporary period.
Setting along the Mississippi River, before the
Civil War, around 1850
Characterization:
Aunt Sally
Protagonist--- Jim, the uneducated Black
slave; Huckleberry Finn, the ignorant White
outcast
Plot:
conflict--- between the Black and the White; the
internal attitudes of Huck, with prejudices
against Jim firstly, and then recognizing Jim
correctly.
climax--- the escape of Jim from slavery trap;
Huck helping Jim with the fugitive adventure.
denouement--- Huck accepted Jim as his loyal
friend.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

a story of his seeking for freedom, fame, fortune,
love, manhood. The novel reveals the American
values: one is hero complex, the other is
American dream. His adventures is the
realization of American dream. On the other
hand, the book record the rising Age of American
Bourgeois system. It also bears the irony and
satire toward the religion and by-then popular
rigid, didactic children education, which curbed
the imagination of children and their innate
nature for freedom and adventures and molded
them into a stereotype of lifeless man.
VI. O. Henry (1862-1910)
his life
O. Henry is most commonly associated

with the short story and masterful ironic O
Henry twist.
a bookkeeper, a drugstore clerk, and a
Texas Ranger (woodsman).
He died in drunkenness.
his style:
direct; use of dialect; use of slang; master

of surprise
Analysis of The Cop and the Anthem
Characterization:
the wanderer Soapy
cop; prostitutes
Plot:
Soapy has no place to sleep and in the winter he had
to go to prison for three months. In order to be
arrested, he tried to break the shopping window, tease
woman, eat without paying and took the others
umbrella, but he failed to arise public notice. When he
heard the sound from the church and wanted to
become good, he was arrested.
VII. HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)
Life:
his father (a friend of Emersons) and his brother being
philosophers; in New York, Boston, Paris (Turgenev, Flaubert
and Zola), London.
Literary career: three stages
1865~1882: international theme

The American
Daisy Miller
The Portrait of a Lady
1882~1895: inter-personal relationships and some plays
Daisy Miller (play)
1895~1900: novellas and tales dealing with childhood and
adolescence, then back to international theme
The Turn of the Screw
When Maisie Knew
The Ambassadors
The Wings of the Dove
The Golden BowlThe Literature of Realism
The aim of novel: represent life

Common, even ugly side of life
Social function of art
Avoiding omniscient point of view
Point of view
Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of

consciousness
Psychological realism
Highly-refined language
Aesthetic ideas
Style stylist
Language: highly-refined, polished, insightful, accurate

Vocabulary: large
Construction: complicated, intricate
Jamess realism
Jamess realism is characterized by his psychological
approach to his subject matter. His fictional world is
concerned more with the inner life of human beings than
with overt human actions. His best and most mature
works will render the drama of individual consciousness
and convey the moment-to-moment sense of human
experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we as
readers observe people and events filtering through the
individual consciousness and participate in his
experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the
human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in
novel writing and had great influence on the coming
generations. That is why James is generally regarded as
the forerunner of the 20th-century stream-ofconsciousness novels and the founder of psychological
realism.
Jamess narrative point of

view
One of Jamess literary techniques innovated to
cater for this psychological emphasis is his
narrative point of view. As the author, James
avoids the authorial omniscience as much as
possible and makes his characters reveal
themselves with his minimal intervention. So it is
often the case that in his novels we usually learn
the main story reading through one or several
minds and share their perspectives. This
narrative method proves to be successful in
bringing out his themes.
Psychological realism: the realistic writing that probes

deeply into the complexities of characters thoughts and
motivations. Henry James novel The Ambassadors
(1903) is considered to be a masterpiece of
psychological realism. Henry James is considered the
founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality
lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and
not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such
realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist
assumes to represent life as he sees it, which may not
be the same life as it really is.
Psychological analysis (psychoanalysis): a technique
of psychotherapy which renders conscious the contents
of the unconscious mind through a dialogue between
analyst and analysand (owing much to Sigmund Freud).
Jamess language
As to his language, James is not so easy
to understand. He is often highly refined
and insightful. With a large vocabulary, he
is always accurate in word selection, trying
to find the best expression for his literary
imagination. Therefore Henry James is not
only one of the most important realists of
the period before the First World War, but
also the most expert stylist of his time.
Jamess international theme
Jamess fame generally rests upon his novels and stories with the
international theme. These novels are always set against a larger
international background, usually between Europe and America, and
centered on the confrontation of the two different cultures with
different groups of people representing two different value systems.
The typical pattern of the conflict between the two cultures would be
that of a young American man or an American girl who goes to
Europe and affronts his or her destiny. The unsophisticated boy or
girl would be beguiled, betrayed, cruelly wronged at the hands of
those who pretended to stand for the highest possible civilization.
Marriage and love are used by James as the focal point of the
confrontation between the two value systems, and the protagonist
usually goes through a painful process of a spiritual growth, gaining
knowledge of good and evil from the conflict. However, we may
misinterpret Henry James if we think he makes an antithesis, in his
international novels, of American innocence versus European
corruption.
Jamess work of literary

criticism: The Art of Fiction
Henry Jamess literary criticism is an indispensable part
of his contribution to literature. It is both concerned with
form and devoted to human values. The theme of the
essay The Art of Fiction clearly indicates that the aim of
the novel is to present life, so it is not surprising to find in
his writings human experiences explored in every
possible form: illusion, despair, reward, torment,
inspiration, delight, etc. He also advocates the freedom
of the artist to write about anything that concerns him,
even the disagreeable, the ugly and the commonplace.
The artist should be able to feel the life, to understand
human nature, and then to record them in his own art
form.
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
Characterization:
Protagonist--- Isabel Archer
Mrs. Touchett (her aunt), Raulph Touchett (her cousin and her first
husband), Caspar Goodwood(the American character), Lord
Warburton (symbol of European aristocracy), Madame Merle ( an
expatriate), Gilbert Osmond (the decadent fortune-hunter; her
second husband), Pansy (Gilberts daughter) , Ned Rosia (Pansys
lover), Countess Gemini(Gilberts sister)
Plot: the courtship, marriage, and development of the character of
Isabel Archer.
conflict--- between Isabel Archer and different suitors.
climax--- Isabel recognizes her husbands plot and his true
character:
denouement--- Isabel realizes that Caspar is the one she loves,
but she rejoins her husband and her step daughter.
Theme: Isabels sacrifice, like Daisy Millers death, is an act of
rebellion against the cynical conventions of a decadent culture.
VIII. JACK LONDON (1876-1916)
Biographical Introduction
Menial boring, no skill and not
important and dangerous jobs: an
oyster pirate, seaman, jutemill
workers and coal shoveler the
struggle for survival a. socialism of
Marx; b. Nietzsche and Darwinism
Nietzsche: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900),

German philosopher, philologist and poet. Enthusiastic
love of life was the ground of his philosophy. He did not
produce systematic doctrine, but by virtue of his insight
into the existential situation of modern man, his
perception of the cultural flattening of the industrial era,
and his ideas on the breeding of a new aristocracy (cf.
superman), he was one of the major influences on 20thcentury thought. His most important works are
collections of aphorisms, essays and prose poems,
including The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake
Zarathustra (1883) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886).
Nietzscheism: the philosophy of Nietzsche,
emphasizing the will to power as the chief motivating
force of both the individual and society.
Superman: an idealized man regarded by Nietzsche as
the next stage in the evolution of man: a being with
greatly superior physical and mental qualities.
Darwinism: the Darwinian theory that the

origin of species is derived by descent,
with variation, from parent forms, through
the natural selection of those best adapted
to survive in the struggle for existence.
Survival of the fittest: (Biography) the
fact or the principle of the survival of the
forms of animal and vegetable life best
fitted for existing conditions, while related
but less fit forms become extinct.
Naturalism: a technique developed out of

realism, reflecting a deterministic view of human
nature, attending a non-idealistic, detailed,
quasi-scientific observation of life event, and
reproducing the subjects natural appearance
without avoidance of the ugly.
[or: an extreme form of realism or a harsher
realism. Naturalistic writers usually depict the
sordid side of life and show characters who are
severely, if not hopelessly, limited by their
environment and heredity].
The Artistic Proposition of the Naturalists:

Naturalism as a literary trend flourished in Europe in the
second half of the 19th century. The naturalism argued
that if literature is to reflect life it must be true of life and
that to be true of life the writer must not choose details
from real life but must reproduce in his literary writings
life exactly as it is, including all the details without any
selection. Hence there was the theory of a slice of life,
that is, to cut a slice of life since cut being a whole slice,
the naturalists argued, it still is a truthful representation
of life in its totality and therefore it is true of life. The
fallacy of this theory of a slice of life and indeed of all
theories of art that insist on representing all the details of
life without making any selection, is really very selfobvious, because in the first place it is impossible to
include all the details in real life, even those in a very
small slice of life, and because, what is more important,
the details given without selection, no matter how many
of them are given, can only give the appearance of life
but not its essence.
The Analysis of The Sea Wolf (1904)

Londons tenth book, The Sea Wolf, drew on his
youthful adventures in the sealing grounds off Japan.
The novel concerns the survival of upper class
Humphrey Van Weyden, a man who finds himself,
through means beyond his control, aboard The Ghost, a
sealing schooner on his way to Japan. Van Weyden
soon finds that the captain of the schooner, Wolf Larsen,
has created a hell-ship, filled with brutality and
sordidness, where even the ships practical purpose to
hunt seals is lost in the misery of mere survival. Van
Weyden survives this environment because, like Buck
(the hero, a dog, in The Call of the Wild), he is able to
adapt it, learning new codes of survival, drawing upon
unknown instincts, and using to best advantage all the
benefits of his upbringing and status: intelligence,
optimism, and a capacity to love. Van Weydens growth
is the focus of the novel. If Van Weyden survives
because he, too, has learned the law of the club and the
fang, the ships captain, Wolf Larsen, dies
precisely because he cannot adapt. At least, that was Londons

intention, but it was lost upon many early critics. I attacked
Nietzsche and his superman idea, London wrote to Mary Austin.
Lots of people read The Sea Wolf, [but] no one discovered that it
was an attack upon the superman philosophy.
The Sea Wolf is a fine example of literary naturalism. Larsen, a
sensitive, intelligent, domineering man, treats his crew with
arrogance. He has no inhibitions and also no friends. Alone, his life
lacks purpose and direction, and his aloneness and alienation from
nature and from man, and, in fact, from himself, leads to his
inevitable destruction. Without Van Weydens ability to adapt, Larsen
dies.
If London fails to convince his reader that Larsen died because
he was a superman, perhaps it is because London did not fully
subscribe to the idea himself. The world is full of superman
London fancied himself one in many ways and the Socialist
alternative which London supported intellectually was one he could
not accept emotionally. This conflict between the superman idea and
socialism erupts full-scale in Martin Eden (1909), when London
again takes Nietzsche to task.
While The Sea Wolf may have failed to convey its point to the
critics, it did not fail to capture the fancy of the reading public. Next
to The Call of the Wild (1903), it was (and is) Londons most popular
book, and it gave the author the financial security he so desperately
needed.
The last third of the book is concerned not only with the powerful
element of Larsens degeneration (which Ambrose Bierce called
unforgettable) but also the introduction of Maud Brewster. London
generally had trouble with female characters in his fiction his
editors demanded strict Victorian morals, and London was happy to
oblige and following Mauds introduction, the book is reduced to a
sentimental shambles. While the love story, in great part, insured the
critical failure of the book, it also insured the books popular
success. As soon as Maud steps aboard, Van Weyden reverts to his
earlier stature, as if wholly unaffected by the events that have thus
transpired: his growth and adaptation are cast aside. The
contradictions of The Sea Wolf mirror the contradictions of Londons
own times. The novel is successful on depicting the turn-of-thecentury society in which London lived, which was shaking off the
morals and ways of the last century, yet still was holding on the
vestiges and customs of the earlier time.
The Analysis of Martin Eden (1909)

Called alternately Londons finest and his worst novel,
Martin Eden was meant as another attack on
individualism and the Nietzschean superhero. As in The
Sea Wolf, London was only partially able to convey this
intention. The rags-to-riches motif runs so strongly
through the book that the reader is compelled to identify
and sympathize with Martin, a slow seaman, who without
education or culture is thrown into the world of the
educated and culture. His introduction to their world fires
his mind, and he yearns for their sophisticated ways,
their knowledge, and the woman who brings it to him.
Like London himself, Martin decides that the path to
social betterment lies through his writing talent, and the
novel masterfully describes Martins and (Londons)
literary apprenticeship, early failure, and final success.
Martin Eden is a novel of education. It employs the

potent cultural myth of rags-to-riches, and masterfully
depicts Martins painful transition from the innocence of
unknowing to the power of knowledge. As Martin grows
and learns, he finds himself embroiled in the battle of the
Iron Heel, pitting man against man, oppressed against
oppressor. London offers Martin the key to salvation
through the poet Brissenden socialism but Martin
rejects it, and in so doing seals his fate. By the time
Martins road to success ends, it is too late. Without
reason for living, Martin rejects all that he has thought,
and finally, takes his own life.
Martin Eden was written aboard ship and is about a

sailor. It is therefore not surprising that the paramount
symbol in the novel is water. Beginning life as a sailor,
coming from the ocean, Martin must return to his
beginnings, and he does so by booking passage on an
ocean liner and then committing suicide by drowning in
the sea.
London returns to the theme of The Call of the Wild in Martin

Eden, with one peculiar twist. Like Buck, Martin begins life
unconscious of himself. He does not know that his grammar is
imperfect, that his dress is slovenly, or that his manners are uncouth
until Ruth Morse educates him. As he learns about himself, he
becomes self-conscious. No longer do the instincts which Buck uses
to adapt and survive work for Martin. Unable to adapt to his new
environment, Martin returns to the only thing he knows best the
sea and, fulfilling the paradox of knowing and unknowing, dies.
Martin Eden is a profoundly moving work of imaginative realism,

but, like much of Londons longer work, it suffers from an uneven
structure and sometimes clumsy expression. The major flaw of the
book, however, is Londons failure to convey his point. The reader is
so caught by the potent myth, so sympathetic toward Martin and his
fight to the top, and he cannot understand Martins inevitable death
and feels cheated by it. There is too much of Jack London in Martin
Eden, too much of Londons own confusion over individualism
versus Marxism, to carry the novel, and so it fails, as London did, in
the attempt.
VIIII. THEODORE DREISER(1871-1945)
life
works
Sister Carrie
The trilogy: Financier, The Titan, The Stoic
Jennie Gerhardt
American Tragedy
The Genius
point of view
He embraced social Darwinism survival of the fittest.

He learned to regard man as merely an animal driven
by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in which
only the fittest, the most ruthless, survive.
Life is predatory, a game of the lecherous and

heartless, a jungle struggle in which man, being a waif
and an interloper in Nature, a wisp in the wind of
social forces, is a mere pawn in the general scheme
of things, with no power whatever to assert his will.
No one is ethically free; everything is

determined by a complex of internal
chemisms and by the forces of social
pressure.
Style
Without good structure
Deficient characterization
Lack in imagination
Journalistic method
Techniques in painting
Dreisers themes
From the first novel Sister Carrie on, Dreiser set
himself to project the American values for what he had
found them to bematerialistic to the core (
). Living in such a society with such a value
system, the human individual is obsessed with a neverending, yet meaningless search for satisfaction of his
desires. One of the desires is for money which was a
motivating purpose of life in the United States in the late
19th century. For example, in Sister Carrie, there is not
one character whose status is not determined
economically. Sex is another human desire that Dreiser
explored to considerable length in his novels to reveal
the dark side of human nature. In Sister Carrie, Carrie
climbs up the social ladder by means of her sexual
beauty symbolizes the acquisition of some social status
of great magnitude.
Dreisers language style

Dreisers style has been a controversial aspect of his
work from the beginning. For lack of concision, his
writings appear more inclusive and less selective, and
the readers are sometimes burdened with massive
detailed descriptions of characters and events. Though
the time sequence is clear and the plot straightforward,
he has been always accused of being awkward in
sentence structure, inept and occasionally flatly wrong in
word selection and meaning, and mixed and
disorganized in voice and tone. For him language is a
means of communication rather than an art form.
However, Dreisers contribution to the American literary
history cannot be ignored. He broke away from the
genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a
very realistic way. There is no comment, no judgment but
facts of life in the stories. His style is not polished but
very serious and well calculated to achieve the thematic
ends he sought.
The naturalistic tendency in Dreisers works

With the publication of Sister Carrie (1900), Dreiser was
launching himself upon a long career that would ultimately make
him one of the most significant American writers of the school later
known as literary naturalism. As a genre, naturalism emphasized
heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping
individualized characters who were presented in special and
detailed circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even
tragic. Asked, during his middle years, about what he thought
earthly existence was, Dreiser described it as a welter of
inscrutable forces, in which was trapped each individual human
being. In his words, man is a victim of forces over which he has no
control. To him, life is so sad, so strange, so mysterious and so
inexplicable. No wonder the characters in his books are often
subject to the control of the natural forcesespecially those of
environment and heredity.
The effect of Darwinist idea of survival of the fittest was
shattering. It is not surprising to find in Dreisers fiction a world of
jungle, where kill or be killed was the law. Dreisers naturalism
found expression in almost every book he wrote.
Sister Carrie
The sketch of the story
Sister Carrie, a country girl, comes to Chicago to look for
better life. She first stays with her sister whose workingclass home is, however, too poor to keep her. Winter is
coming and she is seriously ill. A traveling salesman,
Drouet by name, comes to her rescue and takes her
home as his mistress. Sister Carries beauty appeals to
Drouets friend, Hurstwood, so that the respectable
manager deserts his comfortable home and family and
forces her to elope with him. They run first to Canada
and then settle down in New York. For some time they
experience dire poverty. Sister Carrie goes out to find
work on the stage, but Hurstwood proves himself to be
utterly unfit to survive. His downfall is complete when he
commits suicide one cold winter night. At the end of the
book Sister Carrie is seen sitting in her rocking-chair, still
rocking.
The theme of the novel

Though received not favorably and
attacked as immoral by the public in its
time, Sister Carrie best embodies
Dreisers naturalistic belief that while men
are controlled and conditioned by heredity,
instinct and chance, a few extraordinary
and unsophisticated human beings refuse
to accept their fate wordlessly ( )
and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find
meaning and purpose for their existence.
The character Carrie

Carrie, as one of such people above, senses
that she is merely a cipher in an uncaring world
yet seeks to grasp the mysteries of life and
thereby satisfies her desires for social status
and material comfort.
Dreisers language style in the novel
Though the time sequence is clear and the plot
straightforward, his language is awkward in
sentence structure, inept and occasionally flatly
wrong in word selection and meaning, and
mixed and disorganized in voice and tone. For
him language is a means of communication
rather than an art form.
Chapter One of Sister Carrie
Chicago is the scene of Sister Carrie, in which Carrie is a pretty

young girl whom Dreiser uses to express his own longings for
wealth and affection, for the glitter and excitement of the city which
has come to symbolize the possibility for the realization of the
American Dream. The opening chapter, divided into two parts, is
largely included here. It shows Carrie leaving home and taking the
train to the city. The passage is typical Dreiser; he gives his
thoughts about Carrie and the salesman she meets, and describes
them minutely.
Dreisers Sister Carrie is a typical naturalist novel. Carrie,
according to Dreiser, becomes either someone under anothers care
and protection (falls into saving hands and becomes better), or the
victim of a voracious city. There is no middle ground. In either case,
it is apparent that Carrie has little control over her life. There are
large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression
possible in the most cultured human. The mind, the soul, the body,
is taken in. The beauty of the city is an illusion and a trap, which,
like music, too often relax, then weakens, then perverts the simpler
human perceptions.
Carrie is a half-equipped little knight, involved in the

search for the American Dram. She is nave, although
filled with self-interest, warm with the fancies of youth.
She meets a man on the train, well dressed and
impressive, whatever he had to recommend him, you
may be sure was not lost upon Carrie, in this, her first
glance. He is a superficial man whose mind was free of
any consideration of the problems or forces of the world.
His suavity attracts her, and she feels inferior by
comparison. Here is the success story, incarnate, she
feels. Her own plain blue dress, with its black cotton
tape trimmings, now seemed shabby. His fat purse
impressed her deeply. It is evident, when he asks for
her address, that Carrie has embarked upon the
beginning of her end.
PART V
TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
I. Section 1 The 1920s

1. Introduction
The 1920s is a flowering period of American literature. It is
considered the second renaissance of American literature.
The nicknames for this period:
Roaring 20s comfort
Dollar Decade rich
Jazz Age Jazz music
2.Background
First World War a war to end all wars
Economically: became rich from WWI. Economic boom: new

inventions. Highly-consuming society.
Spiritually: dislocation, fragmentation.
wide-spread contempt for law (looking down upon law)
c) Freuds theory
3. Features of the literature

Writers: three groups
Participants
Expatriates
Bohemian (unconventional way of life)
on-lookers
Two areas:
Failure of communication of Americans
Failure of the American society
II.Section 2 The 1930s

Radical 1930s
Background
Great Depression (1929 Black Thursday)

Literature
a.Writers of the 1920s were still writing, but they

didnt produce good works.
b.The main stream is left-oriented.
-Writers of 1930s
a.social concern and social involvement
b. revival of naturalistic tradition of Dreiser and
Norris
III. The Post-War Period: 50s & 60s

Historical Background multi-faceted
Cold War
McCarthyism (persecution of communists)
Korean War
Civil Rights Movement
Counter-culture Movement political, economical
and military achievement
Literature in the 1950s
Regional literature emerged from the south, etc.
Many women writers appeared.
Dramatists wrote about everyday people, e.g. Arthur
Miller.
Minority literature developed quickly.
Literature in the 1960s

This period is the rising period of postmodern literature. Many forms of postmodern fiction appeared, such as metafiction,
surfiction, parafiction, self-reflexive fiction,
self-begetting fiction, anti-novel, etc. The
literature in this period is considered as
multi-cultural literature. The same mood in
this period is despair, but continuing to search
absurdity of modern life; lonely, but searching
for the meaning of existence; identity.
Modernism: As far as literature is concerned,

modernism reveals a breaking away from
established rules, traditions and conventions,
fresh ways of looking at mans position and
function in the universe and many experiments
in form and style. Some aspects of the
movement are touched on in the following
entries: imagism, symbolism, expressionism,
futurism, surrealism, novels of stream-ofconsciousness, novels of psychological analysis,
literature of existentialism, theatre of the absurd,
the new novel, imagism, black humor, etc.
The literary thought of modernism

Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. The
appalling shock of the First World War severely destroyed peoples
faith in the Victorian values; and the rise of the irrational philosophy
and new science greatly incited writers to make new explorations on
human natures and human relationships.
The French symbolism, appearing in the late 19th century, heralded
modernism. After the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of
modernism appeared: expressionism, surrealism, futurism,
Dadaism, imagism and stream of consciousness. Towards the
1920s, these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist
movement, which swept across the whole Europe and America. The
major figures that were associated with this movement were Kafka,
Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Modernism was somewhat curbed in the 1930s. But after the
Second World War, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like
existentialist literature, theater of the absurd, new novels and black
humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist ideas that the world
was absurd, and the human life was an agony.
Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist
literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between
man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and
himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than
on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are
mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. Therefore,
they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological
one. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are
mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of
an individual.
Modernism is, in many aspects, a reaction against realism. It rejects
rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism; it excludes from
its major concern about the external, objective, material world,
which is the only creative source of realism; by advocating a free
experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary
creation, it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature
such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which
are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the
modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and
anti-drama.
I. EZRA POUND (1885-1972)
Imagism
I.
Background
Imagism was influenced by French symbolism,

ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese literature haiku
II.
Development: three stages
1908~1909: London, Hulme
1912~1914: England -> America, Pound
1914~1917: Amy Lowell
III. What is an image?
An image is defined by Pound as that which

presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time, a vortex or cluster of fused ideas
endowed with energy. The exact word must bring the
effect of the object before the reader as it had presented
itself to the poets mind at the time of writing.
IV.
Principles
Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or
objective;
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
presentation;
As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the
musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.
V.
Significance
It was a rebellion against the traditional poetics which
failed to reflect the new life of the new century.
It offered a new way of writing which was valid not only
for the Imagist poets but for modern poetry as a whole.
The movement was a training school in which many
great poets learned their first lessons in the poetic art.
It is this movement that helped to open the first pages of
modern English and American poetry.
Biographical Introduction
Life
literary career
works
Cathay
Cantos
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
point of view
Confident in Pounds belief that the artist was morally and
culturally the arbiter and the saviour of the race, he took it
upon himself to purify the arts and became the prime mover of
a few experimental movements, the aim of which was to dump
the old into the dustbin and bring forth something new.
To him life was sordid personal crushing oppression, and
culture produced nothing but intangible bondage.
Pound sees in Chinese history and the doctrine of Confucius
a source
of strength and wisdom with which to counterpoint

Western gloom and confusion.
He saw a chaotic world that wanted setting to

rights, and a humanity, suffering from spiritual
death and cosmic injustice, that needed saving. He
was for the most part of his life trying to offer
Confucian philosophy as the one faith which could
help to save the West.
style: very difficult to read
Pounds early poems are fresh and lyrical. The

Cantos can be notoriously difficult in some
sections, but delightfully beautiful in others. Few
have made serious study of the long poem; fewer,
if anyone at all, have had the courage to declare
that they have conquered Pound; and many seem
to agree that the Cantos is a monumental failure.
Contribution
He has helped, through theory and
practice, to chart out the course of
modern poetry.
The Cantos the intellectual diary
since 1915
Features:
Language: intricate and obscure
Theme: complex subject matters
Form: no fixed framework, no central
theme, no attention to poetic rules
The artistic characteristics of Pounds poetry

Besides Imagism, the other important aspects of Pounds
poetic work include his use of myth and personae. The
poet, he argued, cannot relate a delightful psychic
experience by speaking out directly in the first person: he
must screen himself and speak indirectly through an
impersonal and objective story, which is usually a myth or
a piece of the earlier literature, or a mask, that is, a
persona. In this way, Pound could sustain a dialogue
between past and present successfully. As to his
language, his lines are usually oblique yet marvelously
compressed. His poetry is dense with personal, literary,
and historical allusions, but at the expense of syntax and
summary statements. In spite of all this, Pounds
reputation as a forerunner of the twentieth-century
American poetry has never been depreciated.
The subjects of Pounds poems

Pounds earlier poetry is saturated with the familiar
poetic subjects that characterize the 19th century
Romanticism: songs in praise of a lady, songs
concerning the poets craft, love and friendship, death,
the transience of beauty and the permanence of art, and
some other subjects that Pound could call his own: the
pain of exile, metamorphosis, the delightful psychic
experience, the ecstatic moment, etc. Later he is more
concerned about the problems of the modern culture: the
contemporary cultural decay and the possible sources of
cultural renewal as well. From perception of these things,
stems the poets search for order, which involves a
search for the principles on which the poets craft is
based.
In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Notes
The excellent image in this short poem is
not a decoration. It is central to the poems
meaning. In fact, it is the poems meaning.
The Metro is the underground railway of Paris. In this brief

poem, Pound uses the fewest possible words to convey an
accurate image, according to the principles of the Imagists.
He tries to render exactly his observation of human faces in
an underground railway station. He sees the faces, turned
variously toward light and darkness, like flower petals which
are half absorbed by, half resisting, the wet dark texture of a
bough.
The word apparition, with its double meaning, binds the
two aspects of the observation together: 1) apparition
meaning appearance, in the sense of something which
appears, or shows up; something which can be clearly
observed; 2) apparition meaning something which seems
real but perhaps is not real; something ghostly which cannot
be clearly observed.
Comment on the poem

This short poem, published in 1913, is the earliest
and the best of Pounds work. When writing it, Pound
adopted the Japanese kaiku (a type of Japanese poem
with 3 lines, consisting of 17 syllables, divided into a
stanza of 5-7-5).
The poem, regarded as the classic specimen of
Imagist poetry, was first written in more than a hundred
lines but was later condensed into two lines to convey an
accurate image by using the fewest possible words.
Pound was once so impressed by the pretty faces of
some women and children hurrying out of the dim, damp
and somber station that he attempted to record exactly
the spectacle of the faces which reflected variously
toward light and darkness, like flower petals which are
half absorbed by half resisting, the wet, dark texture of a
bough.
The Cantos (1917-1959)

The progressive series (115 cantos), exceeding the
proposed limit of one hundred poems, are loosely
connected cantos, like Dantes Divine Comedy
(1308-1320) in three sections, but representing a
comedy human, not divine, dealing with the wreck
of civilizations by reason of the infidelity of mankind
in the three epochsthe ancient world, the
Renaissance, and the modern period. In The
Cantos, Pound traces the rise and fall of eastern
and western empires, the moral and social chaos of
the modern world, especially the corruption of
America after the heroic time of Jefferson.
A Virginal
NOTES
Virginal: a type of small square legless piano-like musical
instrument popular in Europe in the 16th and 17th
centuries, usually played by young girls---virgins.
Line 1 No, no! Go from me: The musical instrument,
virginal, is personified and
repelling a new player to get away from it.
her: the former virginal player, who must have been a
pretty girl, a virgin.
Line 2 I will not spoil my sheath: I would not be willing to
uncover myself to a new player, for I am still missing the
former player.
with lesser brightness: in a less bright atmosphere.
Line 3 For my surrounding air hath a new lightness: For I
feel I am still bathed in the bright air left by the former
player.
Line 4 her: the former players.
they: the former players
arms.
Line 5 cloaked as with: I was covered as if with

a gauze(a very thin transparent material) of aether(the air
or sky): a cover of pleasant air.
aether: equivalence to ether. the upper air; a very fine
substance, once believed to fill the whole of space,
through which light waves were thought to travel.
left me: with the embrace of that air, I felt
Line 6 As with sweet leaves: I was covered as if with
sweet leaves.
as with subtle clearness: I was bathed as if in subtle
clearness.
subtle clearness: all the brightness around, which is not
easy to describe in words.
The poet implies the lady had been compared to birch
tree, which has leaves, branches(arms), bowers( ),
shoots( ) and white bark.
Line 7 have picked up magic: have gained a mysterious
quality.
in her nearness: with the fresh memory of my former
player.
Line 8 To sheathe me: to influence me.

half: almost in the way of ; She (the former player)
influenced me almost in the way as that brightness had
influenced her.
Line 9 I have still the flavour: I can still sense the special
quality (of the former player).
Line 10 Soft as: (Her flavour) was as soft as.
birchen bowers: shade of birch trees.
bowers: shady places under trees or climbing-plants in a
wood or a garden.
Line 11 Green come the shoots: (Her flavour is able to)
change the shoots of plants into green --- bringing new
life to them.
aye April in the branches: (Her flavor) brings April, an
image of spring, to the branches of all plants.
aye: yes; brings.
Line 12 As winters wound with her sleight hand

she staunches: Her hand is so gentle as to
staunch the winters wound.
her sleight hand: the gentle, delicate hand of her
flavor.
Sleight means magic, or magical.
staunch: = stanch. stop the flow of blood.
Line 13 Hath of the trees a likeness of the
savour: (Her flavour) shares the charm of a birch
tree.
savour: pleasant taste or flavour.
Line 14 As white their bark, so white this ladys
hours: this ladys (the former players ) time has
been bright and pure as the bark of birch trees.
Comment on the Poem

This poem was written in the form of a sonnet but
narrated by a personified musical instrument, a virginal.
In the virginals narration, either the beats or the rhymes
vary from those of a traditional English sonnet. The
poem can be divided into two sections.
In the first section--- the first 8 lines: the brightness of the
former player of the virginal is highly praised. That lady,
with all her brightness, appears a perfect figure and thus
the virginal cannot extricate itself from the light and
missing of her.
The second section, the last six lines, suggest a
presentation of the flavour of her ladyship. Soft as the
spring wind, her flavor brings green shoots to the birch
and cures the winter wounds with her sleight hand.
Obviously, the poet had compared the lady to a birch tree:

white in color, bright in appearance, graceful in shape, and
cloaked with leaves. Besides, two minor images were
offered: the brightness of a lady in the first 8 lines and the
flavour of the lady in the latter 6 lines. The image of the
birch tree is better interpreted by the two minor images: the
brightness of it and the flavor of it, through the sense of
sight and the sense of smelling.
Whats more, the poet used similes in this poem: left me
cloaked as with a gauze of aether, as with sweet leaves,
as with subtle clearness. In the last two lines, the ladys
time is as bright as the bark of a birch.
All the images, comparison, as well as the similes contribute
to the portraying of a noble woman with magnificent beauty.
A Pact
NOTES
pact: agreement; treaty.
Line 2 detested: hated with very strong feeling.
long enough: for rather a long time.
Line 3 I come to you as a grown child: now I have grown
up and begun to understand you.
Line 4 has had a pig-headed father: I used to have a
stubborn father. There is an old saying as like father, like
son; I, as the son of a stubborn father, must have been
rather obstinate. But now, fortunately, I have changed.
pig-headed: stubborn;
Line 5 old enough to make friends: have grown up to
understand others.
Line 6 broke the new wood: made experiments with the
conventions of traditional poetry.
Line 7 time for carving: it is the proper time to cut

the new wood into a significant shape--something new as imagist poetry.
Line 8 We: Whitman and Pound as poets of the
same nation.
have one sap and one root: share the same sap
and same root; we grew out of the same root by
being fed with the same sap. Pound used a
metaphor to imply that the two poets are like two
branches of the same tree.
Line 9 Let there be commerce between us: Let us
have a trade so that each can profit from the other.
commerce: exchange of views, attitudes, etc.

Pounds forthright (direct, honest) confrontation with Walt
Whitman, allows the poet to come to terms with a debt to
his American forebear, the father of free verse
expressionism. Flaunting(showing off) hatred of a
dismally self-limiting poet, Pound depicts himself as the
petulant(in a impatient and angry way) child of an
obstinate father, but stops short of a meaningless
tantrum(anger). By reining himself in the fifth line, he
gives over peevish(easily annoyed) vengeance to
acknowledge the development of modernism from its
foundations. From this new wood that Whitman
exposed, Pound intends to carve the future of poetry,
thus achieving a commerce between himself and his
predecessor.
Edwin Arlington Robinson

(1869-1935)
1. Robinson began his career as a poet in bleakness

and poverty.
2. Since 1904 when one of his early books Captain
Craig came into publication, his powerful, realistic
poems continued to impress a growing audience.
3. Robinsons approach to characterization, and his
diction and themes, reflect the new movements in poetry,
Richard Cory and Miniver Cheevy are good examples
of his realistic attitudes.
4. Robinsons poems sometimes appear to be simple,
yet the surface simplicity often serves to conceal an
intricacy and subtlety of thought.
The Analysis of The House on the Hill

Line 4 Through broken walls and gray: Through broken
and gray walls. The inverted order aims at the regular
rhyme scheme.
Line 5 The winds blows bleak and shrill: the winds are
blowing bleakly and shrilly.
Line 7 Nor is there one to-day: no one is there at present
in this house.
Line 8 To speak them good or ill: to praise, admire or
execrate them.
Line 10 stray: wander; move away from ones proper
place with no fixed destination or purpose.
Line 11 the sunken sill: the collapsed window.
Line 13 our poor fancy-play: the simple and plain games

often played during our childhood.
Line 14 For them is wasted skill: Is wasted skill for them.
Because the games are too easy and they are all adults
now.
This poem is written in strict Villanelle (
) style, a popular verse style in 16 th century
France, with 6 stanzas, 3 lines for each of the first 5
stanzas, but 4 line for the last. The first and the last lines
of the first stanzas appear alternatively at the end of the
next 4 stanzas until in the last stanza, they meet to
conclude the whole. The repetition and cycling structure
contribute greatly to a nostalgic mood.
The house in the poem is the one in which

the poet enjoyed his childhood. Now it is
broken and gray with sunken sill, all the
old acquaintances had left. The memory of
childhood games just makes the poet even
more sentimental and sad. Robinson, as a
naturalist poet, is accustomed to looking at
the world on the pessimistic side and
presenting the predestinate emotion. In this
poem, he succeeds in these by concise
words, exquisite structure, and very melodic
rhythm.
The Analysis of Miniver Cheevy

Line 1 child of scorn: a scornful child; one who is apt to
complain.
scorn: strong usually angry feeling of disrespect,
contempt.
Line 2 Grew lean: became very thin; became frail.
assailed the seasons: killed the time.
Line 3 wept: cried regretfully.
Line 4 he had reasons: he had reasons to weep, to be
regretful.
Stanza 1: Miniver Cheevy is a scornful child and he
regrets he was ever born at his time.
Line 5 the days of old: ancient time; Middle Ages.

Line 6 steeds: horses.
prancing: run quickly and proudly with a springing or
dancing step. , ,
Line 7 a warrior bold: a bold warrior; an adventurous
soldier.
Line 8 set him dancing: excite him; cause him dance for
joy.
Stanza 2: Miniver Cheevy deeply indulges himself in a
dream of Middle Ages soldiers. Any image of them would
result in his enthusiasm.
Line 9 sighed for what was not: felt very sorry for the fact that he
was unable to become an ancient warrior; longed for what did not
exist.
Line 10 rested from his labor: (while he indulged himself in
dreaming, he) stopped working.
Line 11 Thebes: capital city in Boeotia, rival of ancient Athens and
Sparta.
Camelot: the legendary court of King Arthur and the knights of
the Round Table located close to the present Winchester.
Line 12 Priam: the last king of Troy, father of 50 sons including
Hector and Paris, the latter stole Helen away from Sparta and thus
aroused the Trojan War. Priams neighbors refer to the neighboring
countries of Troy. In this poem, together with Priam, they all indicate
the embodiments of ancient heroes.
Stanza 3: Miniver Cheevy is so absorbed in his dreaming of the old
city, old heroic kings and the ancient heroes that he had completely
neglected his business.
Line 13 mourned the ripe renown: grieve for the brilliant

achievements (in literature and art) of the old time.
Line 14 That: the ripe renown.
so many a name: so many names (of the ancient
heroes).
Line 15 Romance: literature.
Line 16 And Art: And he also mourned for Art.
Stanza 4: Miniver Cheevy was extremely sorrowful for
the mistreatment to literature and art, which, in the
modern world, have long been deserted, and which is
now wandering in town like beggars.
Line 17 Medici: Family of wealthy merchants, statesmen

and art patrons in Renaissance Florence. Many
businessmen, politicians and literary men came from the
family and some of them were notorious for ruthlessness
and sinfulness.
Line 18 Albeit: Although.
one: a single member of the Medici family.
Line 19 incessantly: never stopping; continuously.
Line 19-20 If he were a member of the Medici family, he
would have been as ruthless and sinful just as some
members of that family used to be.
Stanza 5: Miniver Cheevy longed to be a member of
Medici family so as to live a ruthless life.
Line 21 commonplace: the plainness.

Line 22 eyed: looked at; regarded as
Khaki suit: military uniform of a yellowish brown
color; the military uniform of modern time.
loathing: a feeling of disgust; hatred.
Line 24 iron clothing: ancient military uniform
made of iron; armor.
Stanza 6: Miniver Cheevy misses the ancient
warriors but shows contempt for modern
soldiers.
Line 25 the gold he sought: the money,

wealth he obtained.
Line 26 sore annoyed was he without it: he
became anxious if he was without money.
sore: sorely.
it: money; wealth.
Stanza 7: Miniver Cheevy scorns money
but he was annoyed when he was without
it.
Line 29 born too late: Miniver Cheevy regrets he

was born too late.
Line 30 Scratched his head: Miniver Cheevy
scratched his head.
Line 31 it: the fact that he was born too late.
Line 32 kept on drinking: He found solace
nowhere else but in his cup.
Stanza 8: He was born late and he could not do
anything for a change. Miniver Cheevy indulged
himself in drinking.

Miniver Cheevy, sounding rather similar to mini
achieves, is the lively sketch of an ambitious and cynical
young man who believes he would be successful in any
other age but the present one. This kind of person is
often too cynical to face reality. Their life is, therefore, a
succession of windbaggary and complaints. They are
used to imagining wild and far but resentful for any
practical intentions. They feel that life is futile but still live
with an optimistic desperation--- attempting to search for
excuses for all the failure in reality. However, due to the
frailty in nature, the best resolution they result in is often
kept on drinking, which, instead of easing them from
misery, plunges them deeper into suffering.
The Analysis of Richard Cory

Line 3 a gentleman from sole to crown: (he was)
gentlemanlike from top to feet; (he was) a
standard gentleman.
Line 4 Clean favored: clean and tidy; neat and
elegant in appearance.
imperially slim: slim but not without the
majestic air.
Stanza 1: An introduction of Richard Cory and a
suspense about his popularity is
intended.
Line 5 quietly arrayed: properly dressed.

Line 6 human: sympathetic and understanding others.
Lines 7-8 But he still causes peoples pulses to beat irregularly
or he still makes the passers-by feel extremely flattered when
being greeted by him.
Line 8 glittered when he walked: wherever he goes, he appears
very attractive and peoples eyes focus on him.
Stanza 2: A further description of Richard Corys character and

the neighbors impression of him.
Line 10 admirably schooled: well educated; strictly trained.

in every grace: in all manners; in every aspects.
Line 11 In fine: to make a long story short; in short.
Stanza 3: A depiction of Richard Corys family background, his
education, his social status and his accomplishment which
arose the admiration from us all.
Line 13 So on we worked: So we worked on and on after

his model; we worked on and on by just following his
examples.
waited for the light: waited for the opportunities to
change our lives; waited for good fortune to fall upon us.
Line 14 went without the meat: (For the purpose of
catching up with Richard Cory, we had to) live a thrifty
life and eat meat at long intervals or none at all.
cursed the bread: (we) grudged having bread everyday.
This is the way for the ordinary people to save money so
as to accumulate a large sum and become rich.
Line 16 put a bullet through his head: committed suicide.
Stanza 4 Out of the admiration for Richard Cory, we
grudged ourselves for a dream of being like him, but,
unexpectedly, he killed himself one calm summer night.
Comment on the poem
Robinsons world is naturalistic in nature. Here God is no

longer caring, men suffer from frustrations and want of
mutual understanding, and life is in general futile and
meaningless. These reveal Robinson as a modern poet,
capable of a tragic vision in step with the modern spirit,
trying to suggest a despairing courage to seek out the
meaning of life. Take Richard Cory for example.
Richard Cory is a gentleman, rich and human and clean
and graceful, the way he is dressed, walks downtown,
speaks to people, In fine, we thought that he was
everything/To make us wish that we were in his place.
But all of a sudden, we hear of his suicide: And Richard
Cory, one calm summer night, /Went home and put a
bullet through his head. The poem is thus also an
illustration of Robinsons fascination with psychological
enigmas, enigmas that were the product of modern life.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
life
point of view
All his life, Frost was concerned with
constructions through poetry. a momentary
stay against confusion.
He understands the terror and tragedy in
nature, but also its beauty.
Unlike the English romantic poets of 19th
century, he didnt believe that man could find
harmony with nature. He believed that serenity
came from working, usually amid natural
forces, which couldnt be understood. He
regarded work as significant toil.
works poems
the first: A Boys Will
collections: North of Boston, Mountain Interval

(mature), New Hampshire
style/features of his poems
Most of his poems took New England as setting, and

the subjects were chosen from daily life of ordinary
people, such as mending wall, picking apples.
He writes most often about landscape and people

the loneliness and poverty of isolated farmers, beauty,
terror and tragedy in nature. He also describes some
abnormal people, e.g. deceptively simple,
philosophical poet.
Although he was popular during 1920s, he didnt

experiment like other modern poets. He used
conventional forms, plain language, traditional metre,
and wrote in a pastured tradition.
Robert Frosts The Road Not

Taken
Line 1 diverged: went out in different directions.

yellow wood: an implication of the seasonautumn.
Line 4 looked down one: looked along one of the
two roads.
Line 5 bent: turned away; disappeared.
Stanza 1: The poem begins as if when the poet
was walking in a wood in late autumn at a fork in
the road. He was choosing which road should
follow. Actually, it is concerned with the important
decisions which one must make in life: one must
give up one desirable thing in order to possess
the other.
Line 6 the other: (the traveler is determined to take) the other road
of the two.
as just as fair: (the second road looks) in the same condition as
the first one. My choice of the second road is as reasonable as the
choice of the first.
Line 7 the better claim: a better reason (for taking the second road).
Line 8 wanted wear: (My reason for taking the other road is)
because that road did not look quite worn out; it appeared more
isolated, less used.
Line 9 as for that: concerning the condition of the second road.
the passing there: the frequency of people passing that road;
peoples footprints on that road.
Line 10 worn them really about the same: the two roads have
been trodden in almost the same degree, neither is better than the
other, actually.
them: the two roads.
Stanza 2: After the judgment and hesitation, the traveler makes up
his mind to take the road which looks grassy and wants wear. This
is often believed to be the symbol of the poets choice of a solitary
life--- taking poetry writing as his life profession.
Line 11 both: both roads.

Line 12 In leaves no step had trodden black: (that
morning both roads were covered by) the fallen leaves of
trees which had not been trodden black by anybody.
Line 13 the first: the first road.
for another day: for next choice.
Line 14 way leads on to way: one road may branch into
several minor ways. It may diverge into many branches.
In human life, one choice leads to more further choices.
Line 15 come back: return to the first road (to keep my
promise of taking it for the next choice).
Stanza 3: The two roads are equally pretty, so as soon
as he made the choice of the one, the poet felt pitiful for
abandoning the other. He is quite aware that his intention
of next choice will be nothing than an empty promise.
Line 16 telling this with a sigh: He regrets his

decision. His regret doesnt lie in his choice of
the first road, but in that he was unable to take
both.
this: the poets choice of one road and
abandonment of the other.
Line 20 all the difference: the difference of my
life from that of the others.
Stanza 4: The poet was imagining many years
later when he is recalling the choice he made
today, he would respond with nothing else but a
sigh, for it would be too hard for anyone, after
many more experiences in life, to make any
comment on the choice made early in life.
Comment on the poem

The poem is written in classic five-line stanzas,
with the rhyme scheme a-b-a-a-b and
conversational rhythm. The poem seems to be
about the poet, walking in the woods in autumn,
choosing which road he should follow on his
walk. In reality, it concerns the important
decisions which one must make in life, when one
must give up one desirable thing in order to
possess another. Then, whatever the outcome,
one must accept the consequences of ones
choice, for it is not possible to go back and have
another chance to choose differently.
In the poem, the poet hesitates for a long

time, wondering which road to take,
because they are both pretty. In the end,
he follows the one which seems to have
fewer travelers on it. Symbolically, he
chose to follow an unusual, solitary life;
perhaps he was speaking of his choice to
become a poet rather than some
commoner profession. But he always
remembers the road which he might have
taken, and which would have given him a
different kind of life.
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Life Story
born into a poor but affectionate family of
Swedish immigrants.
a migratory laborer.
the study in Lombard College, starting his
writing.
a roving reporter to 1908.
Characteristics of Sandburgs
Poems
As a poet, Sandburg was an active member of the
imagist group in the early part of the century: either Fog
or Lost-- is illustrated with vivid images. However, most
critics considered Sandburg to be a close follower of
Whitman. Imitating and experimenting, Sandburg reached
the maturity. Having succeeded with his optimistic spirit
and freedom in dealing with rhythm, Sandburg was also
able to take advantage of Emily Dickinsons epigrammatic
style. Whats more important, he insisted on innovation in
American poetry, not only by invention of new ways of
expression, but also by shifting the subject matter from
traditional rural landscapes to modern industrial city life.
In addition, Sandburg tried to keep up with time in
praising modern mechanical culture and adopting
colloquial diction into versification.
Analysis of Chicago
Line 1 Hog butcher for the world: (Chicago, as
an industrial city) runs as a butcher providing
meat for the world. Chicago for most of its
history has been the center of the meatproducing industry in the United States.
Line 2 Stacker: person who put things into or
formed a neat pile. In this line it refers to the
dealer of wheat.
Line 3 Player with railroads: runner of the
railway.
the Nations Freight Handler: people who handle
the railway transportation of the country.
Line 4 Stormy: noisy fierce expressions of

feeling.
husky: of a person or voice which is difficult to
hear, as if the throat were dry; a big and strong
person.
brawling: always ready for a noisy quarrel, often
in a public place, includes fighting.
In the first 5 lines, Chicago is personified as the
one who shoulders much
responsibility: a butcher, a tool maker, a grain
dealer, a manager of railroad; on the
whole, the backbone of the country.
Lines 6-9
Line 6 you: Chicago.
painted women: prostitutes.
Line 7 crooked: dishonest; illegal.
gunman: murderer.
go free: without being punished.
Line 8 wanton hunger: reckless hunger.
Line 9 sneer at: laugh scornfully at; smile
contemptuously at.
Line 6-9 The seamy side of the city is exposed:
wickedness, crookedness, brutality, prostitutes luring
boys, gunmen killing and going free, and women and
children going hungry; nevertheless, despite all these,
the poet speaks in defense of the city.
Lines 10-11
Line 10 You cant find another city which is as lively as
Chicago, which is as coarse, strong and cunning as
Chicago.
Line 11 Flinging: speaking, expressing in a violent way.
magnetic curses: violent words with powerful attraction.
amid: in the middle of ; among.
toil of piling job on job: doing hard work day and night.
a tall bold slugger: a tall and strong boxer.
set vivid against: appear quite different from;
contrasting.
Lines 12-17
Line 12 Fierce as a dog: (Chicago is as) fierce as a dog.

with tongue lapping for action: with the tongue reaching
out to lap for an attack.
cunning as a savage: (Chicago is as) clever and
ingenious as savage people.
pitted: test somebody or something in a struggle or
competition with
Line 13 Bareheaded: Chicago is like a toiler who is
working bareheadedly, but diligently.
Line 14 Shoveling: Chicago is toiling with shoveling.
Line 15 Wrecking: dismantling (takeapart), tearing
down.
Line 16 Planning: After destruction, Chicago revived to
make another plan for a brighter future.
Line 13-17 Chicago is like a diligent and persistent
worker trying to improve its image.
Lines 18-22
Line 18 When it (Chicago) is under the smoke and with
dust all over its mouth, it still laughs merrily.
Line 19 Despite the heavy burden and bad luck, Chicago
is energetic, vigorous and hopeful.
Line 20 Chicago is optimistic as a fighter who has never
lost a battle.
Line 21 under his wrist is the pulse: Chicago is laughing
in the rhythm of the pulse of its people. Chicago is a
giant, under its ribs throbs the heart of its people.
Line 22 Chicago is proud to be the big shoulders of the
country; it is proud to take all the responsibility.
Comment on the poem

When Chicago was condemned for all its
defects, the poet rose up to speak in defense of
the city by making use of personification and
metaphor. First he compares the city to various
fierce figures. Then he expresses his respect for
them despite the seamy side. Finally, as a
conclusion, the poet shows his pride in the city,
he is proud of its diligence, its persistence, its
vigor and its hopeful future.
This poem was published in Poetry in 1914 and
later collected in his Chicago Poems (1916).
Analysis of Fog
Lines 1-2 comes on little cat feet: comes
soundlessly and very softly.
Line 5 on silent haunches: sitting there
quietly.
Line 6 then moves on: (After sitting and
looking for a while, the fog) leaves quietly
without being noticed.
Comment on the poem

The poem is pervaded with a tranquil atmosphere. The
shapeless fog is embodied as a cat, an image of
softness and tranquility. The cat is quiet, but it is not
without curiosity. It sits, looks; it searches into every part
of the city and then it leaves by itself. Therefore, the
tranquility of the picture is rather set off by all the
motions of a cat. Everything is quiet, everything is
moving: the cat, the fog, the harbor, and the city.
The short poem is written in Free Verse, of course it is
without any feet or rhyme scheme. Yet it is written in
colloquial words and is structurally quite similar to
Japanese Haiku. The similarity is understandable
because this poem was done in 1916 when American
imagist poets led by Ezra Pound was experimenting to
imitate the form of Japanese Haiiku and Sandburg, more
or less, was involved in the latest trend of fashion.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Life Story
a lawyer, a successful businessman.
perfecting what he wrote.
2. Characteristics of Stevens Poems

Most of Stevens important poems were composed during the
time of the Great Depression and the two World Wars. Yet he
showed little concern with the sufferings and frustrations of the time,
for he believed that, as a poet, what he should and could do is not to
heal or reform society, but help his people to become more happily
aware of the beauty and pleasure and excitement and meaning in
the sordidness of reality.
However, Stevens was not blindly optimistic, nor was he the one
who escaped from reality. Instead, he was interested in the ideas of
order, that is, true ideas correspond with an innate order in the
universe. He was interested in the relationship of chaos and order,
the reconciliation of reality and imagination, by insisting that an artist
should observe reality and create reality out of his imagination, and
that the order and faith we have lost in modern society can be
reached in artistic work through imagination.
Having been regarded as a poet of the imagist group, Stevens
was good at applying metaphors and symbols. As with all the other
imagists, he experimented a lot with styles, sounds, and rules of
rhymes.
Stevens Major Poems

The earliest poetic work of Stevens came out
in 1914, but he did not have his poems collected
into a book Harmonium until 1923. After it, more
and more poems poured out over the next 20
years, including Ideas of Order (1935), Owls
Clover (1936), The Man with the Blue Guitar
(1937), Parts of a World (1942), The Auroras of
Autumn (1950), The Necessary Angel: Essays
on Reality and the Imagination (1951), and The
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954).
Wallace Stevens Notion of

Imagination
Wallace Stevens was absolutely committed to the notion
that a poet lives in two worldsthe world of reality and
the world of imaginationand builds bridge between
them. So obsessed was he with interrelationship
between reality and art that a key to understanding his
poetry and criticism lies in realizing that this is a very
basic theme for him.
Stevens deals repeatedly in his poetry with the role of

the power of imagination. He sees the role of the poet
as Picnicking in the ruins that we live, which is
another way of saying that a poet should find beauty and
pleasure and excitement and
meaning in the sordidness of reality. So we find, in

Stevens, the poet as the imaginative man, a heroic type,
heroic because capable of imagination, and we find
poetry as a major modern form of revelation, revealing,
among other things, the heroism of modern man who,
even though recognizing the nothingness of modern
existence, yet brings order and meaning to its chaos and
meaninglessness. The poet operates in the two spheres
of the real world and the imagined world and anchors his
poetry solidly in the world of the here now.
He thinks that things that have their origin in imagination
or emotion very often take on a form that is ambiguous
and uncertain, and that is not possible to attach a single
rational meaning to such things without destroying the
imaginative, emotional ambiguity and uncertainty
inherent in them. Agreeing with T. S. Eliots notion of
poetry as an autonomous construction capable of more
than one interpretation, Wallace Stevens is rather
opposed to telling people what his poems meant.
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 everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Notes:
anecdote: a short story based on your personal
experience
jar: a container made of clay, stone etc used
especially in the past for keeping food or
drink in
slovenly: untidy, lazy and careless
sprawl: to lie or sit with your arms or legs
stretched out in a lazy or careless way
give of: if you give of yourself, your time, your
money etc, you do things for other
people without expecting anything in return
port: strong sweet Portuguese wine that is
usually drunk after a meal
Comment on it
We can only decipher the meaning of Anecdote of the Jar by
placing it in the larger context of his aesthetic credo and thematic
concerns. Here lies the wild and chaotic and formless rural
Tennessee, which lets us assume is a symbol of the world of
nature. Then the I of the poem places in it a tall, round jar, a manmade object, which is suggestive of the world of art, and by
extension, the world of imagination. What happens when the jar is
standing there is almost a miracle: it controls the whole disorderly
landscape, so that The wilderness rose up to it, /And sprawled
around, no longer wild. The poem seems to be talking about the
relationship between art and nature. The world of nature,
shapeless and slovenly, takes shape and order from the presence of
the jar. The world of art and imagination gives form and meaning to
that of nature and reality, thus suggesting, as Stevens may be
doing, that any society without art is one without order and that man
makes the order that he perceives, and the world he inhabits is one
he half creates. Stevens firmly believes that the poet is the
archetype of creative power on which all human understanding
depends. His poet is the necessary angel of the earth, in whose
sight man sees the earth again. The poet is, in other words, an
instrument by means of which man is made to see life whole again.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Line 1 the roller of big cigars: the one who rolls big cigars;
god or the unknown power controlling life and death.
Line 2 The muscular one: a strong man; the roller of
cigars.
Line 3 concupiscent curds( ): lustful or sensual
curds.
Line 4 wenches: mature girls or young women; maiden
girls; it is a pejorative term.
dawdle: loaf around; be slow; waste time.
Line 7 Let be be finale of seem: Let be be turned into
seem by the end; let the possibility become less
possible or impossible.
Line 8 emperor: an image for the most powerful being.
Stanza 1: Every one is a part of the world; every one
enjoys his life in his own way. In this world, nothing is
really powerful; except
the god of death.
Line 9 the dresser of deal: the cupboard made of

cheap pine or fir planks.
Line 11 fantails: fan-shaped designs.
Line 12 it: the embroidered designs.
Line 13 horny feet: feet made hard and rough by
the diligent toil of her life.
protrude: jut or stick out from under the
surface (the sheet)
Line 15 affix: stick; fasten or attach something.
Stanza 2: Lets take, from the cupboard of deal,
a sheet with an embroidered pattern to cover her
face. If the sheet is not large enough to cover
her body, the exposed feet show that she is cold
and dumb.
Comment on the poem

The god of death is compared to the ice-cream which
is hard, cold and stiff, wearing everything of the
appearance of death. Moreover, like ice-cream, which
melts easily and quickly, human life is short and
burdened with empty reputation.
The two extremes of life --- reality and imagination,
interweaved in the work. When a woman died, she was
covered with a sheet embroidered by herself while the
others still live in their own ways: the girls were dressing
in the usual way and the boys made use of the old
newspaper. The world is cold. God is indifferent. The
power of death is so fierce that it controls everything in
the world. Thus in reality, the emperor is the emperor of
ice-cream.
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

(1888-1965)
Life
the descendant of a well-to-do but
religious family
his study covered language, belles-letters,
metaphysical poetry, literature of
Italian Renaissance, Western and Oriental
philosophy.
works
poems
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Waste Land (epic)
Hollow Man
Ash Wednesday
Four Quartets
Plays
Murder in the Cathedral
Sweeney Agonistes
The Cocktail Party
The Confidential Clerk
Critical essays
The Sacred Wood
Essays on Style and Order
Elizabethan Essays
The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticisms
After Strange Gods
(1)The modern society is futile and chaotic.

(2)Only poets can create some order out of chaos.
(3)The method to use is to compare the past and the present.
Style
(1)Fresh visual imagery, flexible tone and highly expressive

rhythm
(2)Difficult and disconnected images and symbols, quotations and
allusions
(3)Elliptical structures, strange juxtapositions, an absence of
bridges
point of view
The Waste Land: five parts
(1)The Burial of the Dead

(2)A Game of Chess
(3)The Fire Sermon
(4)Death by Water
(5)What the Thunder Said
Symbolism
the literary practice of representing things by symbols, or of

investing things with a symbolic meaning or character. Symbolism
came into being in literature of Europe in the late 19th and early
20th century in reaction against naturalism and realism.
It is likely that in his abundant use of literary reference in The Waste
Land (1922) he was influenced by Pound, a close friend whose
advice, as Eliot declared, he followed strictly in cutting and
concentrating the poem. The Waste Land is the acknowledged
masterpiece of its sort. It also introduced a form the orchestration
of related theme in successive movements which he used again in
The Hollow Men (1925), Ash-Wednesday (1930), and his later
masterpieces, Four Quartets (1936-1942; 1943).
The Simple Introduction of The

Waste Land (1922)
The Waste Land has generally been accepted as

Eliots most important single poem. In Eliots view, the
waste land stands for Western Europe, or for
Western civilization as a whole, which brought to the
human beings large-scale destruction and slaughter in
the world-wide war and spiritual and cultural
degeneration. Therefore, in The Waste Land, Eliot
aimed above all else at a search for regeneration for the
human race, and in this sense the poem has its
undeniable significance in its negation of the bourgeois
status quo in Western Europe and in its quest for
change.
The poem divided into five sections. The first section

deals chiefly with theme of death, sterility, and
meaninglessness of life. The title of the section, The
Burial of the Dead, suggests the death and burial of
the Western world or the waste land.
The second section, entitled A Game of Chess,

emphasizes the meaninglessness of love and lust in the
human world or the waste land.
The third section, The Fire Sermon, deals chiefly

with the river. The river of the modern world is contrasted
with that in the Elizabethan days: the 16th-century sweet
Thames, run softly, till I end my song in Spensers
Prothalamion( ) celebrating his own
wedding is contrasted with the debris left on the river
banks after the feastings and love-makings of the
evening before in modern Western cities. The section
ends with the repeated words of burning to indicate the
fall of a modern city or of the whole modern civilization,
deserted by God.
The fourth and shortest section, Death by Water,

more directly and markedly points to the theme of death.
The section ends on the general warning of death
waiting for everybody.
The fifth and last section finally touches upon the Grail
legend. The title of the section is What the Thunder
Said. According to the Grail legend (the Christian
legend of the Holy Grail), only if a questing knight goes
to the Chapel Perilous, situated in the heart of the waste
land, and there asks certain ritual questions about the
Grail (i.e. Cup) and the Lance (which were
originally male and female fertility symbols respectively),
this Waste Land symbolizing death, infirmity and sterility
can be revived. In the section, after a cocks crow,
spoke the thunder: Datta meaning give,
Dayadhvam meaning sympathize, and Damyata
meaning control, these three words contain the secret
for the regeneration of the waste land.
The Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock
1. J. Alfred Prufrock: an invented name for the
narrator of the story, a disillusioned
aesthete( ).
2. This is taken from Lines 61-68, Inferno,
chapter XXVII of Dantes Devine Comedy. It is
Italian. The English version runs as follows:
If I believed my answer were being mae(more)
to one who could ever return
to the world, this flame would gleam no more;
but since, if what I hear is true,
never from this abyss did living man return,
I answer thee without fear of infamy.
Line 2 one that might return to view the world:

the person who might revive from
death and return to the human world.
Line 5 abyss: hole so deep that it seems to have
no bottom; hell.
Line 6 infamy: infamous behavior; wickedness.
This is the introductory section of the whole

poem. It provides the supposed situation of the
background: J. Alfred Prufrock, narrator of the
story, like Guido de Montefeltro, is suffering from
the inner conflict in the inferno. Since no one
might return to view the world, the narrator is
free to expose his self-conflict.
Line 1 you: The explanation of you greatly diverges.

The poet himself declared that
you indicates an unidentified male companion; while
some critics prefer to believe you to be the other
psychic self of Prufrock. Some others regard you
simply as a general reference to the reader.
Line 2 The hospital images happen in this poem from
time to time. The poet must be indicating by the hospital
image that the world is like an etherized patient.
etherized: Either is a light colorless liquid made from
alcohol, which burns and is easily changed into gas. It is
often used in industry or as an anesthetic to
to put people to sleep before an operation. In this line,
the past participle implies while they were walking, the
streets were all quiet, pervaded with a sense of stillness
and numbness which, as was felt by the poet, was the
state quite similar to a stagnant and spiritless patient.
table: the operating table.
Line 4 Prufrock is imagining he is walking through a street.

Line 5 muttering retreats: the isolated places where people are
gossiping in a low unclear voice.
Line 6 Of restless nights: go through the certain half-deserted
streets of the restless nights.
onenight cheap hotels: hotels of very poor condition where one
would stay for only one night.
Line 7 sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Cheap restaurants
where food tastes as sawdust and the floors are always dirty with
oyster shells.
Lines 4-7 The poet reveals the state of his mind by an image of the
streets which are half-deserted, filled with cheap hotels and dirty
restaurants. Hotels and restaurants are images for the humans
basic necessities, which are irresistible for life; however, they are
dull and boring as well.
Line 8 Streets: go through the streets that : Streets in this poem
symbolizes the flowing of thinking--- the stream of consciousness--in Prufrocks mind.
Lines 8-9 follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent: A simile
is used here to compare the meandering streets to a tiresome but
maliciously plotted argument.
Line 10 overwhelming question: very important question.

Line 13-14 These two lines repeat themselves several times in the
poem, paralleling Prufrocks going in the streets. With the
interruption of these two lines, the poet implies a striking contrast
that on the one hand, through Prufrocks eyes, we catch sight of the
etherized people and a spiritless world; on the other hand, some
women dilettantes are actively Talking of Michelangelo just to show
their gentility; which was, doubtlessly, as tedious as sawdust food.
However, this is the fashion of modern society.
Michelangelo(Buonarroti ~, 14751564) , the world famous Italian
sculptor, painter and poet of the Renaissance period, is mentioned
here as an embodiment of fine arts. The poet wrote ironically with a
sincere belief that fine art is not something that can be thoroughly
understood by plain people, let alone by the genteel women
gathered in a salon. Yet in this world, there are always those who
are apt to the talking about fine art. Their gossip, as well as the
cheap hotels and the dirty restaurants, is obviously just an
unavoidable section of society. They are talking not because they
really know, understand or are interested in fine art; instead, they
just talk to show off. The phrase come and go adds, more or less,
a bit of vigor to the line, but when mingled with their gossip, it
represents another kind of very tedious life.
Stanza 1: As the prelude to the narration, the poet presents the
modern world as he is The
presenting
the tedious and dirty streets and
Literature of Realism
thus leads the reader to the innermost part of Prufrocks mind.
Line 15 The yellow fog (and The yellow smoke in the

next line): Yellow fog or smoke of the sordid city was a
familiar detail in French symbolism. Yellow is the color of
barrenness and timidity, which, in this line, intensifies the
sense of the city as a wasteland.
Lines 15-22 The fog and smoke are animated as
something like a yellow cat, which rubs its back, rubs its
muzzle(nose and mouth of an animal), licks its tongue,
lingered upon the pools, slipped, leapt, curled and fell
asleep, which roams down the lanes and houses,
indicating the density and movement.
Stanza 2: The description of the farther background of
the streets, where everything is dull except the fog and
smoke, which seem active but are also in a color of
decay; which appear vigorous but vanish easily.
Line 23 there will be time: The repetition of these words indirectly refers to
Ecclesiastes( ) of the Old Testament: For everything there is an appointed
season, and there is a proper time for every project under heaven: a time to be born,
and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to root up what is planted; a time to kill,
and a time to heal; a time to wreck, and a time to build; a time to weep, and a time to
laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time
to gather stones; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to
seek, and a time to lose; a time to retain, and a time to throw away; a time to rend,
and a time to sew; a time to be silent, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time
to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
Line 27 To prepare a face: to make up before meeting his lady.
face: Prufrocks face.
faces: womens faces.
Line 29 works and days: Works and days is a poetic work of Hesiod, a Greek poet
of 8th century B.C. Here the phrase means there is enough time for what one wants
to do.
Line 30 on ones plate: to occupy ones time or energy.
Line 32 indecisions: state of being unable to decide; hesitation.
Line 33 visions and revisions: thinking imaginatively again and again; again and again
you have pictures of this kind.
Line 34 the taking of a toast and tea: image of trivial but absolutely necessary things
of human life.
Stanza 3: With the allusion of there will be time for the poet depicts Prufrock as
an indecisive character and exposes the intention of modern people to idle away their
life.
Line 38 Do I dare: Do I dare to propose to the lady?

Line 39 Time to turn back and descend the stair: There will be time to turn
back and go down the stairs. The narrator is still hesitating and is almost
going to retreat.
Line 40 a bald spot in the middle of my hair: That indicates that Prufrock is, if
not old,
at least a middle-aged man.
Line 41 They: the women.
his: Prufrocks. Prufrock is imagining that if he dares to propose, he
would be
laughed at by those women.
Line 42 My morning coat to the chin: the collar of my morning stands firmly
against my chin.
Line 43 My necktie a simple pin: My necktie is luxurious but not expensive;
it is
fixed to the shirt by a plain pin.
Judging from his clothes, Prufrock is not very rich, probably a petty banker
or clerk.
Lines 45-46 Prufrock imagines his question (proposal to one of those genteel
women) might be such a shocking one that the universe would be disturbed
by it.
Lines 47-48 Prufrock has a timid mind which may make a quick decision and
a revision, and a prompt change of it soon after.
Stanza 4: Prufrock is still hesitating and imagining that he will be
laughed at if he dares to
propose
to of
any
of those women.
The
Literature
Realism
Line 49 them all: the various life styles of all those ladies.
Line 51 measured out my life with coffee spoons: (I have been)
killing time by drinking much coffee; (I have) wasted my life in such
boring, superficial things. People usually use a spoon to stir in
coffee cups. You may stir round and round without ending, for the
coffee spoons are usually in the tiny size, with it, one is able to
measure life with extraordinary leisure.
Line 52 a dying fall: a tone which begins with a high pitch and then
steadily falls. This tone is commonly used in upper society when
speaking. T.S.Eliot may have borrowed this expression from
Shakespeare who, in his Twelfth Night, through a lovesick dukes
mouth, says, That strain again! It had a dying fall.
Line 52-53 I recognized that the voices of those women were
characterized with a falling tone and was fading in the music from a
distant room.
Line 54 presume: venture to do something; be so bold as to do
something. Here and in the next two stanzas, this word appears to
imply Prufrocks venturous prospect for disturbing those women or
having sexual acts with them.
Stanza 5: Prufrock knew something about those women but as a
timid man, he is doubting his ability to propose to any of them.
Line 56 The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase:

those women stare at you may be impolite and greet you
with clichs.
formulated phrase: clichs; boring words. This simply
shows the womens contempt for him.
Line 57 sprawling on a pin: Prufrock used a pin to imply
that, once he heard the boring words from those women,
he feels like a small insect, being lifeless and pinned on
the wall to be studied by others.
Line 58 wriggling: making quick, short, twisting and
turning movements. Despite I was trapped in the
boredom, I attempt to escape.
Line 60 butt-ends: stub; short piece at the end of a cigar
or cigarette that is left when it has been smoked. In this
line, Prufrock compares the rest part of his life to buttends and is doubting how he could get out of futility.
Stanza 6: In front of the arrogant women, Prufrock felt
inferior and wants to escape from them but doesnt know
how to.
Line 63 Arms that are braceleted: arms wearing bracelets.

Line 64 downed with light brown hair: (those arms are) shown,
covered with light brown hair.
Line 66 digress: turn away or wander from the topic in speech. In
this line it indicates Prufrocks failure to have sexual impulse in his
wild imagination. This implies Prufrock, as a man, is not only timid
by nature, but also sexually impotent.
Line 68 should I then presume? : This time Prufrock is doubting the
necessity of venturing his life on a proposal to one of those women.
Stanza 7: Prufrock had an imagined sexual act with those women
but failed, so he began to doubt about the necessity of the venture.
From Line 48 to Line 68, we have actually three paralleled

stanzas, all beginning with I have known them all already, known
them all, and I have known the eyes already, known them all, and
I have known the arms already, known them all. What is more,
each of the first two stanzas is with the similar ending: How should I
presume? but the third ends with how should I begin? The change
suggests that if Prufrock could not quite understand how he should
presume at the beginning, his doubting had shifted to a negative
idea at the end of this section, He was inclined to deny the necessity
to presume.
Lines 73-74 a pair of ragged claws: a crab; crab is a

relatively primitive thing. Prufrock is tired of the human
world and is likely to be a crab which scuttling across the
floors of silent seas rather than venturing in this world to
make various decisions.
Stanza 8: Prufrock felt himself too weak to face the world
and he, as a result, intends to escape by living a crabs
life.
Line 77 malingers: pretends to be ill in order to avoid
work or duty.
Line 79 after tea and cakes and ices: the time late in the
afternoon. The mentioning of tea and cakes and ices
strengthens Prufrocks sense of hesitating.
Line 80 to force the moment to its crisis: to regard the
moment as the crisis time; to have his crucial question
asked.
Line 81 I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed: Eliot
here makes an allusion to the words from Samuel of the
Old Testament, it runs as And they mourned, and wept
and fasted (II, 1-12)
That means
The Literature
of Realismin order to obtain
the ladys love for him, he has made every effort.
Line 82 seen my head brought in upon a platter: another allusion to the story of John,
the Baptist from Matthew of the New Testament. The head of John the Baptist was
brought to Queen Herodias by the King, Herod by name, on a charger to please her
step-daughter Salome, whose dances the Queen enjoys very much. (XIV, 3-1)
Therefore, John is mentioned here as the image of sacrifice to show Prufrocks
determination for his love, which includes the sacrifice of his life.
Line 83 I am no prophet: I cant predict the consequences of the matter; I cant tell
whether that lady will accept me or not. Despite all his will of sacrifice, Prufrock is a
weak person by nature, he hesitates once more.
Matthew xiv: 3-11. The head of John the Baptist was brought to Queen Herodias on a
charger. Prufrock is bald, quite unlike John the Baptist as represented in Richard
Strausss opera Salome(1905) or Oscar Wildes play (1894) on which it was based,
both emphasizing the passion of Herodias for the prophet.
Heres no great-matter: (my death) is not a crucial thing. Id like to have my love be
accepted at the cost of my life.
Line 84 flicker: (light or flame) burn or shine unsteadily; be felt or seen briefly. For a
short while, I felt my confidence.
Line 85 And: but; meanwhile.
the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker: Prufrock imagines a frequent
scene of upper-class social life: while he is enjoying himself at a luxurious
party, the male servant is holding his coat motionlessly but sniggering( ) at
him, which greatly lowered his dignity.
Line 86 I was afraid: I was afraid of being rejected.
Stanza 9: Prufrock was determined to express his love even at the cost of life.
However, he was too timid to accomplish that purpose and so once more he shrank.
Line 86 When Prufrock, after hesitating, doubted would have

been in this stanza,
it implies that he had probably made up his mind not to ask, or it is
no longer possible for him to ask his question.
Lines 88-89 the cups, the marmalade, the tea, the porcelain, some
talk of you and me are symbols of the trifles of upper society daily
life.
Line 91 To have bitten off the matter with a smile: to solve the
problem peacefully. The matter indicates Prufrocks proposal to the
lady.
Line 92 squeezed the universe into a ball: This expression
originates from To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678).
It runs as, Let us roll all our strength and all/ Our Sweetness up into
one ball.
The line is adopted here to indicate Prufrocks concentration of
attention on one point or his determination to gather enough
courage to fulfill the difficult task--- proposal to a lady.
Line 93 some overwhelming question: one of the crucial problems
--- Prufrocks proposal to the lady.
Lines 94-95 The story of the resurrection of Lazarus is adopted from the New
Testament, John XI, 1-44 or from the 16th chapter of Luke. Lazarus was a
student and friend of Jesus Christ. He was poor and seriously ill with
scabies(
). He was restored to life 4 days after his death. As a matter of fact, during
that 4 days, he lived in the Afterworld quite leisurely but he saw the rich
suffering in Hell. At his leaving, he was begged by the rich to pass the word to
their families that they must be kind to the inferior and behave themselves as to
avoid all the sufferings after death. Prufrock doesnt appreciate the life style of
the upper class, yet he felt quite unable to make any change, for he was aware
that he was no Lazarus who had a friend as Jesus Christ ready for the revival of
all. This simply implies that in Prufrocks mind, the genteel upper class is
actually going downhill and is thoroughly irrecoverable. When doubting
would it have worth it to Prufrock showed disappointment with modern
society and had already made the negative decision.
Lines 96-98 the one refers to a lady. The three lines convey Prufrocks fear of
being
rejected by a lady.
Stanza 10: Prufrock doubts whether it is worthwhile to ask his question if he is
supposed to be rejected and thus he is inclined to make a negative decision.
Lines 101-102 sunsets, dooryards, the sprinkled streets,

the novels the teacups, skirts trail along the floor are,
like those mentioned in Lines 88-89, symbols of the
trifles of upper societys everyday life.
Lines 104-105 Prufrock seems unable to expose his
inner world or to make his proposal, that would be like
showing ones nerves in patterns against the light of a
magic lantern.
Lines 106-110 Prufrocks supposition of being refused.
Eliot doesnt directly mention the rejection, instead, he
mentioned the actions of refusing: turning toward the
window, That is not what I meant.
Line 107 one: a woman.
Stanza 11: This stanza paralles the structure of the one
above. Again, Prufrock doubted the necessity of asking
his question and tried to persuade himself not to do so.
Line 111 Prince Hamlet: the hero in Shakespeares

tragedy Hamlet, well-known for his hesitating and
melancholy character. Prufrock believed he is not as
important as a Prince, nor did he want to be as hesitating
and melancholy as Hamlet.
Line 112 an attendant lord: a minor figure.
Lines 112-114 one that will do. To swell a progress, start
a scene or two, advise the prince; an easy tool:
Prufrock realized that he was just a trivial person, whose
function is to walk in a file in a ceremonial parade (while
figures such as Hamlet would be on the stage). A
progress refers to the ceremonial royal parade, the rank
and file.
Line 113 start a scene or two: as a minor role, one is
supposed to appear in just one or two scenes in society,
without the possibility of those major heroes, who are
dominant figures everywhere and who are able to make
scenes whenever.
Line 114 Advise the prince: Prufrock implies he is playing

the role of Polonius, the lord chamberlain( ), father of
Ophelia and Laertes in Hamlet. Polonius is
knowledgeable and eloquent, well remembered for his
worldly advice to his son.
no doubt, an easy tool: Prufrock was aware that he is,
doubtlessly, not a decisive person but a tool easily taken
by a master.
Line 116 Politic: (Prufrock thought he was) wise; prudent.
Line 117 Full of high sentence: be filled with boasting.
The expression is adopted from the Canterbury Tales, II.
303-306, when Chaucer describes the speech of the
Clerk as terse, and full of high sentence.
Line 119 the Fool: Prufrock considered his role in this
world as no better than a court Fool, a conventional
fixture in Elizabethan dramas who ridicules and is
ridiculed, similar to a clown.
Stanza 12: Prufrock indicates his own futility by
comparing himself with a number of
literary characters.The Literature of Realism
Line 120 After the realization of the insignificance of life, Prufrock is

confronted by
another cruel fact--- His youth is no longer with him.
Line 121 wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled: Old people always
become thrifty
and shorter in stature, thus when wearing the old trousers he had to
roll up the bottoms of them.
Line 122 part my hair behind: change my hair to a new fashionable
style.
eat a peach: an allusive phrase for Adam and Eves eating of apple.
It
therefore means to venture a new experience.
Line 123 wear white flannel trousers: Flannel is the soft loosely
woven woolen cloth
usually for making fashionable dresses. To wear flannel trousers
means to keep
up with the fashion.
walk upon the beach: another symbol of fashionable life.
Line 124 I have heard the mermaid( ) singing: Id

like to be very much indulged in the fashion as able to
hear the mermaids singing to each other.
mermaids: symbol of beauty. It is a mythical creature
having the body of a woman, but a fishs tail instead of
legs, who sat on rocks and lured the sailors by her
beautiful songs. It may also be an allusive image from
Go and Catch a Falling Star by John Donne, Teach me
to hear mermaids singing, when the poet was actually
paralleling something impossible as catch the falling
star and hear the mermaid singing.
each to each: In Greek mythology, there are eight
mermaids (Sirens) in all. I heard each of them singing to
the other.
Stanza 13: Though Prufrock has to face the reality, his
youth has gone and his oldtrousers are loose to wear, he
is still wildly imagining the possibility of keeping up
with time.
Line 125 Prufrock was not confident enough to be lured

by the mermaids.
Line 126 them: the mermaids.
Line 129 Eliot changed I into we.
the chambers of the sea: the imagined palace at the

bottom of the sea.
Line 130 sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and
brown: Sirens in the sea wearing wreathes made from
red and brown seaweed.
Line 131 In Western legends, the sirens had the power to
lure men to visit them in caves beneath the sea; but
when their singing stopped the spell was broken, and the
men would drown. Therefore, when human voices wake
us, the singing of mermaids is stopped and we drown.
Human beings will be drowned if they are in water
for too long. However, Prufrock thinks his life is with him
when he is in water, or, among women. When he comes
back to reality, he feels frustrated and is drowned.
Comment on the poem
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock depicts a timid middle-aged

man going (or thinking of going) to propose marriage to a lady but
hesitating all the way there. It takes the form of soliloquy, an interior
monologue like that of Robert Brownings. Whether the man actually
leaves his spot at all remains a question. Most probably he stays
where he is all the while, allowing his imagination to run wild.
Prufrock is the image of an ineffectual, sorrowful, tragic twentiethcentury Western man, possibly the modern intellectual who is
divided between passion and timidity, between desire and
impotence. His tragic flaw is timidity; his curse is his idealism.
Knowing everything, but able to do nothing, he lives in an area of life
and death; and caught between the two worlds, he belongs to
neither. He craves love but has no courage to declare himself. He
despairs of life. He discovers its emptiness and yet has found
nothing to replace it. Thus the poem develops a theme of frustration
and emotional conflict.
The title of the poem is ironic in that the Love Song is in fact
about the absence of love. The name of Prufrock is that of a
furniture dealer in St. Louis. His initial J sounds tony and
classy, giving one a sense of the upper class to which he
belongs. The epigraph, taken from Dantes Inferno, is in fact, a
confessional, a kind of Ill tell you all. The speaker in it is the
flame of Guido suffering in the eighth circle of Hell for consular
fraud. Through the tongue of the flame, Guido says to the effect
that, since nobody ever goes out of Hell, I can answer you
without fear, which is another way of saying that we can talk
candidly about our sins. The implication of all this is that
Prufrock is, like Guide, also in Hell or a hellish situation. Since
Prufrock is not guilty of anything and Guido is, the
resemblance is highly ironic. The epigraph also implies that
modern man inhabits a nightmarish inferno. The first line, Let
us go then, you and I, suggests that what follows is dramatic
monologue with an audience. The you, according to Eliot
himself, is an unidentified male companion. But to most
critics, you is Prufrocks alter ego, symbolizing the split
nature of this divided person; I represents his inner self.
Prufrock is a middle-aged dandy, well dressed and self-conscious to a fault.

He lives in an urban world, seedy, raw, more or less Zolaesque as the first
few lines suggest and the third section of the poem (LL. 15-22) confirms. It
is a world where there is no social unity, and where there is elegance and
beauty of a kind such as divorced from force and vitality. It is trivial world of
total emptiness (I have measured out my life with coffee spoons). Here
walks (or he imagines himself walking) this man with an obsession he
cannot handle in the natural way, afraid of rejection, of being misinterpreted,
of forcing the moment to its crisis. Here is an extreme example of the
Hamlet problem: a man harassed with self-doubt, never reaching that
Readiness is all state with his inability to act and be alive at the moment.
Neurotically desperate, Prufrock can conceive a heroic action which he is
incapable of fulfilling; he can see his actions on the grandest level but do not
a thing. He sees himself as Lazarus coming back from the dead, but cannot
break through his deadness. He sees himself as John the Baptist, that
vigorous, dynamic, committed human being that he is by all standards not,
with his aimless, silly, repetitive way of wasting his life in a purposeless
social environment. At the end of the poem he fancies himself in the
chambers of the sea/By sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown,
but the human voices wake him up from his revery. Unable to bring himself
and his world together, to build a base for meaningful action, Prufrock
represents the spiritual impotence of archetypal modern man. What is
redeeming is probably his self-perception: he sees, his own absurdity.
The poem is interesting also for its method of

presentation. We do not move in sequential fashion.
Apart from the surreal vividness which characterizes
certain parts of the poem, there are elliptical structures,
strange juxtapositions, an absence of bridges, so that
the whole seems broken; nothing is explained in a logical
manner. We have to make leaps in our reading and
appreciation, as the poet seems to jump from one scene
to another and from one idea to another. It is important to
note here, however, that the association of images
establishes the general meaning. Nothing is discordant,
irrelevant, or abrupt any more when the overall mood of
the poem is perceived.
This is the first poem of importance by Eliot, one of

the most memorable pieces because of its unflinching
undisguised satire on the genteel society, showing the
emptiness, the listlessness and the boredom of these
men and women in superb, effectively ironic style.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

life participant in 1920s
works
This Side of Paradise
Flappers (a fashionable young woman in the
late 1920s) and Philosophers
The Beautiful and the Damned
The Great Gatsby
Tender is the Night
All the Sad Young Man
The Last Tycoon
point of view
He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called
American Dream is false in nature.
He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating
effects of money on the emotional make-up of his character. He found
that wealth altered peoples characters, making them mean and
distrusted. He thinks money brought only tragedy and remorse.
His novels follow a pattern: dream lack of attraction failure and
despair.
His ideas of American Dream
It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could
become rich.
Style
Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is
smooth, sensitive, and completely original in its diction and metaphors. Its
simplicity and gracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between
the general and the specific reveal his consummate artistry.
The Great Gatsby
Narrative point of view Nick
He is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer
who is never quick to make judgements.
Selected omniscient point of view
The Analysis of
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgeralds greatness lies in the fact that he found intuitively in his

personal experience the embodiment of that of the nation and
created a myth out of American life. The story of The Great Gatsby
is a good illustration. Gatsby is a poor youth from the Midwest. He
falls in love with Daisy, a wealthy girl, but is too poor to marry her.
The girl is then married to a rich young man, Tom Buchanan.
Determined to win his lost love back, Gatsby engages himself in
bootlegging and other shady activities thus earning enough money
to buy a magnificent imitation French villa. There he spreads
dazzling parties every weekend in the hope of alluring the
Buchanans to come. They finally come and Gatsby meets Daisy
again, only to find that the woman before him is not quite the ideal
love of his dreams. A sense of loss and disillusionment comes over
him. Then Daisy kills a woman, who happens to be her husbands
lover, in an accident, and plots with Tom to shift the blame on
Gatsby. So Gatsby is shot and the Buchanans escape.
Gatsbys life follows a clear pattern: there is, at first, a dream, then a
disenchantment, and finally a sense of failure and despair. In this, Gatsbys
personal experience approximates the whole of the American experience up
to the first few decades of this century. America had been a fresh, green
breast of the new world, had pandered to the last and greatest of all
human dreams and promised something like the orgiastic future for
humanity. Now the virgin forests have vanished and made way for modern
civilization, the only fitting symbol of which is the valley of ashes the living
hell. Here modern men live in sterility, meaninglessness and futility as best
illustrated by Gatsbys essentially pointless parties. The crowds hardly know
their host; many come and go without invitation. The music, the laughter,
and the faces, all blurred as one confused mass, signify the
purposelessness and loneliness of the party-goers beneath their masks of
relaxation and joviality. The shallowness of Daisy whose voice is full of
money, the restless wickedness of Tom, the representative of the
egocentric, careless rich, and Gatsby who is, on the one hand, charmingly
innocent enough to believe that the past can be recovered and resurrected,
but on the other hand, both corrupt and corrupting, tragically convinced of
the power of money, however it was made the behavior of these and other
people like the Wilsons all clearly denote the vanishing of the great
expectations which the first settlement of the American continent had
inspired. The hope is gone; despair and doom have set in. Thus Gatsbys
personal life has assumed a magnitude as a culture-historical allegory for
the nation. Here, then, lies the greatest intellectual achievement that
Fitzgerald ever achieved.
Fitzgerald has always been critical of the rich

and tried to show the disintegrating effects of
wealth on the emotional make-up of his
characters. In the novel The Great Gatsby, Tom
and Daisy are the rich who are completely
dehumanized and dehumanizing, aimless and
wearily restless. Nick Caraway, the narrator of
the novel, comments on their behavior They
were careless people Tom and Daisythey
smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast
carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess
they had made The very rich attracted and
repelled Fitzgerald at the same time.
The meaning of the theme and the analysis of the main

character Gatsby:
A masterpiece in American literature, The Great Gatsby evokes a
haunting mood of a glamorous, wild time that seemingly will never
come again. Like his other stories, this novel again deals with the
themethe bankruptcy of the American Dream, which is highlighted
by the disillusionment of the protagonists personal dreams due to
the clashes between their romantic vision of life and the sordid
reality. Besides, the loss of an ideal and the disillusionment that
comes with the failure are exploited fully in the personal tragedy of a
young man whose incorruptible dream is smashed into pieces by
the relentless reality. Gatsby is a mythical figure whose intensity of
dream partakes of a state of mind that embodies American itself;
Gatsby is the last of the romantic heroes, whose energy and sense
of commitment takes him in search of his personal grail; Gatsbys
failure magnifies to a great extent the end of the American Dream.
However, the affirmation of hope and expectation is self-asserted in
Fitzgeralds artistic manipulation of the central symbol in the novel,
the green light.
G. Ernest Hemingway (18991961)

point of view (influenced by experience in war)
He felt that WWI had broken Americas culture and traditions, and
separated from its roots. He wrote about men and women who were
isolated from tradition, frightened, sometimes ridiculous, trying to
find their own way.
He condemned war as purposeless slaughter, but the attitude
changed when he took part in Spanish Civil War when he found that
fascism was a cause worth fighting for.
He wrote about courage and cowardice in battlefield. He defined
courage as an instinctive movement towards or away from the
centre of violence with self-preservation and self-respect, the mixed
motive. He also talked about the courage with which to face
tragedies of life that can never be remedied.
Hemingway is essentially a negative writer. It is very difficult for him
to say yes. He holds a black, naturalistic view of the world and
sees it as all a nothing and all nada.
.works
In Our Time
Men Without Women
Winner Take Nothing
The Torrents of Spring
The Sun Also Rises
A Farewell to Arms
Death in the Afternoon
To Have and Have Not
Green Hills of Africa
The Fifth Column
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Across the River and into the Trees
The Old Man and the Sea
themes grace under pressure
war and influence of war on people, with scenes connected with

hunting, bull fighting which demand stamina and courage, and
with the question how to live with pain, how human being live
gracefully under pressure.
code hero
The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine
tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few
words. That is an individualist keeping emotions under control,
stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place. These people are
usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills, and most of them
encounter death many times.
style
simple and natural
direct, clear and fresh
lean and economical
simple, conversational, common found, fundamental words
simple sentences
Iceberg principle: understatement, implied things
Symbolism
The Lost Generation
This term has been used again and again to describe the people of
the postwar years. It describes the American who remained in Paris
as a colony of expatriates or exiles, the writers like Hemingway
who lived in semi-poverty, and the Americans who returned to their
native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar
changing world.
After World War I, the young disappointed American writers, such
as Hemingway, Pound, Cummings, Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their
place of exile. They came from the East or the Middle West of the U.
S. A., and most of them had been shocked or wounded in the war.
An American woman writer named Gertrude Stern, who had lived in
Paris since 1903, welcomed these young writers to her apartment
which was already famous as a literary salon. She called them the
Lost Generation, because they had cut themselves off from their
past in America in order to create new types of writing which had
never been tried before. The Lost Generation is also
painted in the writers writings. The young English and American

expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war and cut off
from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new
era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and
restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and
beauties of nature, but they were away all the while that the world is
crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and
defeated.
In the novel The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes, Robert Cohn, and
Brett Ashley, who were both physically and spiritually wounded in
the war, are seen wandering aimlessly and, restless and impotent,
enjoying things like fishing, swimming, a bullfight, and beauties of
nature but aware all the while that the world is crazy and
meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated.
Jake Barnes, the protagonist, wounded and made sexually impotent
in the war, finds life a nightmare after it. The only strength to live on
with any dignity comes from nowhere but himself. He comes to see
that, in a world in which all is vanity and vexation of spirit, there is
nothing one can do but to take care of ones own life and be tough
against fate and tough with grace under pressure. Jake Barnes is
really a Fisher King in an Eliotian Waste Land. His physical
impotence is a token of modern mans spiritual impotence.
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Hemingways second success is A Farewell to Arms,
which wrote the epitaph to a decade in the 1920s in
telling us a story about the tragic love affair of a wounded
American soldier with a British nurse. Fredrick Henry
represents the experience of a whole nation, who is
wounded in war and disillusioned with the insanity and
futility of the universe. He deserts the army and flees
with Catherine to Switzerland, where they believe they
could find some peace by disengaging themselves from
society so as to concentrate on the intensity of their
emotional life. But what they share, instead, is the sense
of doom. In this novel, Hemingway not only emphasizes
his belief that man is trapped both physically and
mentally, but goes to some lengths to refute the idea of
nature as an expression of either Gods design or his
beneficence and to suggest that man is doomed to be
entrapped.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

works
Cup of Gold
Tortilla Flat( )
In Dubious Battle
Of Mice and Men
The Grapes of Wrath
Travels with Charley
Short stories: The Red Pony, The Pearl
point of view
His best writing was produced out of outrage at
the injustices of the societies, and by the
admirations for the strong spirit of the poor.
His theme was usually simple human virtues,
such as kindness and fair treatment, which were
far superior to the dehumanizing cruelty of
exploiters.
style
poetic prose
regional dialect
characterization: many types of characters rather
than individuals
dramatic factors
social protect: spokesman for the povertystricken people The Literature of Realism
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is one of the major American books. The title
of the book comes from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, a war
song of the Civil War, in which there are the lines, Mine eyes have
seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, /He is tramping out the
vintage where the grapes are stored. The implication of this is that
as injustice is building up and up, something is going to explode into
violence.
The Grapes of Wrath is a crisis novel. It is Steinbecks clear
expression of sympathy with dispossessed and the wretched. The
Great Depression throws the country into abject chaos and makes
life intolerable for the luckless millions. One of the worst stricken
areas is the central prairie lands. There farmers become bankrupt
and begin to move in a body toward California, where they hope to
have a better life. The westering is a most tragic and brutalizing
human experience for families like the
Joads. There are unspeakable pain and suffering on the road,

and death occurs frequently. Everywhere they travel, they see
universal landscape of decay and desolation. When they reach
California and try to settle down, they meet with bitter
resistance from the local landowners. Iniquity is widespread
and wrath is about to overwhelm patience. The prophecy of an
imminent explosion is sent forth from the anger-saturated
pages: When a majority of the people are hungry and cold
they will take by force what they need, Steinbeck is saying.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it
makes a hot fire Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let
the putrescence drip into the earth. But Steinbeck then says,
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. The
day of wrath is coming. In the souls of the people the grapes of
wrath are filling and growing heavy. Something in the nature of
a social revolution would be imminent, the book is in effect
saying, if nothing is done to stop the detonation. This is
perhaps one of the reasons why the book was for many years
banned.
Structurally, The Grapes of Wrath consists of two blocks of

material: the westward trek of the Joads and the dispossessed
Oklahomans, and the general picture of the Great Depression. The
fact that the intercalary chapters are dispersed in between others
tends to give one the impression of a formal looseness not to be
tolerated in a good work of art. However, critical research has
revealed a close relationship between the two parts of the book. The
interchapters function as informational and informative, offering, for
instance, the social and historical background against which the
characters move. We read the appalling description of drought at
the beginning of the book to get ready for the unnerving population
movement that constitutes its action. The dismal look of Highway 66
enables us to visualize the tragic nature of the trek of the
Oklahomans. The chapters dealing with migrant life appear in
between the narrative chapters of the actual westering journey,
while the last interchapter describes the rain in which the action of
the novel ends. These are but some of the illustrations of the
inherent unity of the novel.
The novel is structurally interesting for another, perhaps more

important, reason, that its structure is dictated by the Bible. There
are suggestions that the author was thinking about the Bible when
writing the novel. The 30 chapters fall neatly into three sections, with
the description of the drought in the first ten, the journeying in
chapters 13 through 18, and the remaining 12 devoted to a narrative
of the life of the migrants in California. These three sections
correspond to The Exodus story in the Old Testament. The Exodus
tells about the bondage of the ancient Jews in Egypt, their escape
out of it and journeying toward Canaan, the Promised Land. In
distant times, so the story goes, the Jews went to Egypt in search of
food and, having stayed there for some 400 years, became the
slaves of the Egyptian Pharaoh. There suffering was such that God
sent Moses as His prophet to lead them out. This Moses did, and
the great host traveled through the desert toward Canaan, only to
meet with bitter resistance there. The Grapes of Wrath, in
emphasizing the fact of the Oklahomans coming from the Oklahoma
desert, crossing the big Death Valley desert and into California, the
land of hope for them, works out the parallel to the Exodus
admirably well. Steinbeck is not stating this very explicitly, but the
suggestion is very strong, and is supported by symbols such as that
of the grapes.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)

literary career: three stages
1924~1929: training as a writer
The Marble Faun
Soldiers Pay
Mosquitoes
1929~1936: most productive and prolific period
Sartoris
The Sound and the Fury
As I Lay Dying
Light in August
Absalom, Absalom
1940~end: won recognition in America
Go Down, Moses
point of view
He generally shows a grim picture of human society where

violence and cruelty are frequently included, but his later works
showed more optimism. His intention was to show the evil, harsh
events in contrast to such eternal virtues as love, honour, pity,
compassion, self-sacrifice, and thereby expose the faults of
society. He felt that it was a writers duty to remind his readers
constantly of true values and virtues.
themes
history and race
He explains the present by examining the past, by telling the

stories of several generations of family to show how history
changes life. He was interested in the relationship between blacks
and whites, especially concerned about the problems of the
people who were of the mixed race of black and white,
unacceptable to both races.
Deterioration
Conflicts between generations, classes, races, man and

environment
Horror, violence and the abnormal

style/features of his works

complex plot
stream of consciousness
multiple point of view, circular form
violation of chronology
courtroom rhetoric: formal language
characterization: he was able to probe into the
psychology of characters
anti-hero: weak, fable, vulnerable (true
people in modern society)
He has a group of women writers following
him, including OConnor and Eudora Welty
Stream-of-consciousness
a term coined by William James (1842-1910, American
psychologist and philosopher) in Principles of
Psychology (1870) to denote the flow of inner
experiences. Now an almost indispensable term in literary
criticism, it refers to that technique which seeks to depict
the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass
through the mind. Another phrase for it is interior
monologue. This technique, first used by James Joyce,
the Irish novelist, in 1922 in Ulysses (1922), tells story by
recording the thoughts of one character. Action and plot
are less important than the reactions and inner musings
of the narrator. Time sequences are often dislocated. The
reader feels himself to be a participant in the story, rather
than an observer, and high degree of emotion can be
achieved by this technique.
Stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue, is one of the

modern literary techniques. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish
novelist James Joyce. This modernistic trend in 1920s, deeply
influenced by the psycho-analytic theories of Sigmund Freud,
adopted the psycho-analytic approach in literary creation to explore
the existence of subconscious and unconscious elements in the
mind. In English fiction, the novels of stream-of-consciousness were
represented by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Those novels
broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly
and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and
flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and
illusory psychology people had when they faced reality. Britain was
the center of the novels of stream-of-consciousness. The modern
American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this
technique. In his stories, action and plots were less important than
the reaction and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences
were often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in
the stories, rather than an observor. A high degree of emotion can
be achieved by this technique. But it also makes the stories hard to
understand.
Multiple Points of View

The modern American writer William Faulkner used a
remarkable range of techniques, themes and tones in his
fiction. He successfully advanced two modern literary
techniques, one was stream-of-consciousness, the other
was multiple points of view. Faulkner was a master at
presenting multiple points of view, showing within the
same story how the characters reacted differently to the
same person or the same situation. The use of this
technique gave the story a circular form wherein one
event was the center, with various points of view
radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique
makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a
true judgment.
Faulkners mythical kingdom:

Yoknapatawpha
Yoknapatawpha County is actually an imaginary place
based on Faulkners childhood memory about the place
where he grew up, the town of Oxford in his native
Lafayette County. With his rich imagination, Faulkner
turned the land, the people and the history of the region
into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. The
Yoknapatawpha stories deal, generally, with the historical
period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when the First
World War broke out, and people of a stratified society,
the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the
blacks. As a result, Yoknapatawpha County has become
a n allegory or a parable of the Old South, with which
Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama
of the experience and consciousness of the whole
Southern society.
A Rose for Emily (1930)

The story
A Rose for Emily is Faulkners first short story
published in 1930. Set in the town of Jefferson in
Yoknapatawpha, the story focuses on Emily Grierson, an
eccentric spinster who refuses to accept the passage of
time, or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies
it. Simple as it is in plot, the story is pregnant with
meaning. As a descendent of the Southern aristocracy,
Emily is typical of those in Faulkners Yoknapatawpha
stories who are the symbols of the Old South but the
prisoners of the past. In this story, Faulkner makes best
use of the Gothic devices in narration, and, the deformed
personality and abnormality Emily demonstrates in her
relationship with her sweetheart is dramatized in such a
way that we feel shocked and thrilled as we read along.
The theme
The story focuses on Emily Grierson, an eccentric
spinster who refuses to accept the passage of time, or
the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it and
who is the symbol of the Old South but the prisoner of the
past.
The portrayal of the character
The heroine Emily Grierson is an eccentric spinster who
refuses to accept the passage of time, or the inevitable
change and the loss that accompanies it. As a
descendent of the Southern aristocracy, Emily is typical of
those in Faulkners Yoknapatawpha stories who are the
symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past. In
this story, Faulkner makes best use of the Gothic devices
in narration, and, the deformed personality and
abnormality Emily demonstrates in her relationship with
her sweetheart is dramatized in such a way that we feel
shocked and thrilled as we read along.
The language style

His prose, marked by long and embedded sentences,
complex syntax, and vague reference pronouns on the
one hand and variety of registers of the English
language on the other, is very difficult to read. It is not
surprising to find in Faulkners writings his syntactical
structures and verbals paralleled, negatives balanced
against positives, compounded adjectives swelling his
sentences, complex modifying elements placed after the
nouns, etc. In contrast, Faulkner could sound very
casual or informal sometimes. He captured the dialects
of the Mississippi characters, including Negroes and the
redneck, as well as more refined and educated
narrations.

History and Anthology of American Literature

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History and Anthology of

I. Background: From Romanticism to Realism

Ballad is a narrative poem, usually in short stanzas (4-line stanzas,

The Elements of Metrical Poetry

Meter: meaning measure. The unit of measure in poetry is the

II. WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

The Literature of Realism

a. Life and works

The Literature of Realism

a. Lifea long narrative poem

The Literature of Realism

verse whose structure is without regular meter and is usually

A child said What is the grass? Fetching it to me

with full hands;

How could I answer the child? I do not know what

it is any more than he.

The same question-and-answer pattern is repeated,

equality of things and beings

death, beauty of death

brotherhood and social solidarity (unity of nations in the world)

pursuit of love and happiness

no fixed rhyme or scheme

sentences catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem

His best work has become part of the common

The Literature of Realism

his poetic form

c. The language style

The Literature of Realism

a. His main intention to write the poem

b. Whitmans thoughts and feelings;

c. The language style

C. Analysis of The Excerpt

The Literature of Realism

The Literature of Realism

Line 8 begin: so I begin.

Line 12 harbor: v. accept; admit (whatever of

The Literature of Realism

C. The Analysis of Whitmans I Sit and Look Out

The Literature of Realism

Line 7: treacherous: disloyal; deceitful.

The Literature of Realism

Lines 11-12 I see in the human world, some are fighting

Comment on the poem:

Being a sympathetic person, Whitman felt rather sorrowful for all

III. EMILY DICKINSON(1830-1886)

The Literature of Realism

a. Life and Works

The Literature of Realism

a. Life and Works

Dickinsons poems on love

Dickinsons poems on nature

The Literature of Realism

Tone: the term tone in

poems without titles

B. I Die for Beauty(449)

The Literature of Realism

C. I Heard a Fly buzz---when I

The Literature of Realism

D. Because I Could Not Stop for

Line 2 He: death; angel of death.

The Literature of Realism

Line 10 Recess: play period during school session.