文学讲稿12.1

讲稿内容备注Chapter 21The Confessional school and The Beat Generation

I. Revision and Homework-checking

Ask students the following questions:

1.The women writers talked about in the previous lecture.

2.What about the famous works by these female writers?

II.The Confessional school

The Confessional school:

One distinct group in the postwar period is the Confessional school.

A. In a broad way, many people whose poetry seems to share common

features such as a ruthless, excruciating self-analysis of one’s background

and heritage, one’s own most private desire and fantasies etc., and the urgent

“I’ll-tell-it-all-to-you” impulse.

B. In a narrow way survey of the scene, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton seem to

stand closer and have been mentioned and meant often when the epithet “Confessional” is brought up in the context of a poetry discussion.

Robert Lowell(1917-1977)

A. life:

1. born in 1917 into one of Boston's oldest and most prominent families.

2.He attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon

College,

3.His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness(1944) and Lord Weary's

Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty),

were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and

explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy.

4. Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously

formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of

meter and rhyme.

5. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was

repeatedly hospitalized.

2. works:

Poetry

Day by Day (1977)

For Lizzy and Harriet (1973)

For the Union Dead (1964)

History (1973)

Imitations (1961)

Land of Unlikeness (1944)

Life Studies (1959)

Lord Weary's Castle (1946)

Near the Ocean (1967)

Notebooks, 1967-1968 (1969)

讲稿内容备注Poems, 1938-1949 (1950)

Selected Poems (1965)

Selected Poems (1976)

The Dolphin (1973)

The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951)

Prose

The Collected Prose (1987)

Anthology

Phaedra (1961)

Prometheus Bound (1969)

Drama

The Old Glory (1965)

3. form and style of Lowell’s works

Began as a strict formalist of the New Critical school in the 1940s. All his

poetry before the end of the 1950s was regular in form, witty, packed, and

well crafted.

After 15 years of immersion in the New Criticism, he felt fed up with

building its clever type of artifice and thirsted, along with the trend of his

time, for “human richness”. He was never slack and undisciplined in form.

Although he wrote in free verse (and was autobiographical), there is always

visible discipline in his artistic control. He always kept his formal values in

mind.

4. theme

Thematically, the change was a natural corollary of the gradual evolution of

Lo well’s vision of man’s fate and “the fate of selfhood in time.”

A. first volume of poetry Land of Unlikeness reveals that man’s soul has

changed; it is no longer like God and even itself. Man is in danger. He is

heading for Hell.

Second volume of poetry Lo rd Weary’s Castle portrays modern man as dull

and hopeless and neglecting salvation.

In third volume of poetry The Mills of the Kavanaughs, he run away from his

religious enthusiasm to some more secular material like society and

individual life stories, and explores the possibility for people to find stability,

a secular stability, through supra-personal forms of belief, myth, or meditation.

5. masterpiece: Life Studies (consists of four parts)

A. part one delimits the context of human behavior and offers the frame of

reference for subsequent revelations.

B. part two is the book’s prose section, entitled “91 Revere Street.” strictly autobiographical segment, which reveals the poet’s anxiety over a decaying

culture as he sees if embodied in his father’s perso nality.