美国文学Henry_Wadsworth_Longfellow朗费罗汇编

Style of his poetry
purity
Style
gentleness
musicality Directness moralization sweetness
Simplicity
sentimentality
Characters Major themes from all walks of life idealized vision of world and life Poetic technique
Second, Longfellow wrote on obvious themes which appeal to all kinds of people. His poems are easily understood; they sing their way into the consciousness of those who read them. Above all, there is a joyousness in them, a spirit of optimism and faith in the goodness of life which evokes immediate response in the emotions of his readers.
Evaluation
• During the last years of his life, Longfellow received many honors, including honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities in England. • After his death, a bust of Longfellow was placed in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey—the first American to be so honored. • In the late 19th century, Longfellow was without a doubt the most popular American poet.
traditional
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow(1807-1882) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is noted as the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century. His poetry and narrative works are lyrical with an easy rhythm, making them memorable. Uplifting with topics the "every man" can relate to, Longfellow's poetry hums in people's minds like a favorite song.
Was he a great poet? He was certainly a grand poet, and in the public mind the grandest of his day and age. No American poet of any era, it's safe to say, has been both as awesomely prolific and prodigiously popular. If Walt Whitman, his younger contemporary by a dozen years, is enshrined as the founding father of modern American poetry, Longfellow deserves no less than to be remembered as the native bard who gave mythic dimension to the country's historical imagination, a national poet of epic sweep and solemn feeling who came along right at the moment when the emerging nation had the most need for one.
But "the flowering of New England," as Van Wyck Brooks terms the period from 1815 to 1865, took place in Longfellow's day, and he made a great contribution to it. He lived when giants walked the New England earth, giants of intellect and feeling who established the New Land as a source of greatness. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and William Prescott were a few of the great minds and spirits among whom Longfellow took his place as a singer and as a representative of America.
Life
• Longfellow was born in Maine. • One of his grandfathers was a state Senator and the other grandfather had been a Revolutionary War general and a Congressman. • Following his graduation in 1826 from Bowdoin College, where he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Longfellow went to Europe to study. • When he returned to the United States three years later, he taught European languages, first at Bowdoin and then at Harvard. • After 18 years of teaching at Harvard, he resigned his position because he felt it interfered with his writing.
Before death:
1.Receiving honorary degrees from
Cambridge and Oxford
2.Invited to Windsor by Queen Victoria 3.Called by request upon the Prince of Wales 4.Breakfasting with British Prime Minister 5.Elected member of Russian Academy and of
Works
• • • • • • • Voices of the Night 1839 《夜籁集》 Ballads and Other Poems 1841《歌谣及其他》 Evangeline 1847 《伊凡吉林》 Hiawatha 《海华沙之歌》 Tales of a Wayside Inn 1863, 1872, 1873 《路边酒肆的故事》 Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems 1845 《布鲁茨的钟楼及其他》 “A Psalm of Life” 1838 《人生礼赞》
Spanish Academy
6.75th birthday celebrated by the nation
After death
After his death, he became the only American to be honored with a bust(半身像） in the poet’s corner of Westminster Abbey.
Americans owe a great debt to Longfellow because he was among the first of American writers to use native themes. He wrote about the American scene and landscape, the American Indian ('Song of Hiawatha'), and American history and tradition ('The Courtship of Miles Standish', 'Evangeline'). At the beginning of the 19th century, America was a stumbling babe as far as a culture of its own was concerned. The people of America had spent their years and their energies in carving a habitation out of the wilderness and in fighting for independence. Literature, art, and music came mainly from Europe and especially from England. Nothing was considered worthy of attention unless it came from Europe.
我有一种多麽美妙的幻觉每当我极目凝源自海洋所有昔日的浪漫传奇和我的梦境都又重新回到我的心房
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
朗费罗
(1807-1882)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• • • • Life Works Evaluation The Secret of the Sea
• During his lifetime, 19th-century writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ranked as one of the most popular American poets. While Longfellow’s contemporaries praised his poetry for its clarity and simplicity, many modern critics fault his lines for their lack of originality. One of Longfellow’s most lasting contributions, however, may have been the role he played in popularizing poetry in America.
• Longfellow became a great teacher of the masses. If his worst fault is that he made poetry seem so easy to write that anyone could do it, his greatest virtue is that he made poetry seem worth reading and worth writing.
There are two reasons for the popularity and significance of Longfellow's poetry. First, he had the gift of easy rhyme. He wrote poetry as a bird sings, with natural grace and melody. Read or heard once or twice, his rhyme and meters cling to the mind long after the sense may be forgotten.