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Edmund Spenser - Sonnet 75One day I wrote her name upon the strand,But came the waves and washed it away:Again I wrote it with a second hand,But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assayA mortal thing so to immortalize,For I myself shall like to this decay,And eek my name be wiped out likewise.Not so (quoth I), let baser things deviseTo die in dust, but you shall live by fame:My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,And in the heavens write your glorious name.Where whenas Death shall all the world subdue,Out love shall live, and later life renew.What distinguishes Spenser's poem from earlier poetry is the personal note it strikes. The poet places himself in the centre of the poem, telling us about his personal situation, emotions and convictions. Such poetry, which expresses the poet's emotions, is called lyric. Lyric poetry became very popular in Spenser's time, the Renaissance, because people began to be interested in the individual. In de Middle Ages man was seen as a part of a community. In the sixteenth century he came to be seen as an individual, unlike every other man. This individualism is reflected in Elizabethan poetry, of which Edmund Spenser is one of the greatest representatives.In this sonnet, addressed to his wife, Spenser claims to give her immortality in his verse. He does so by starting from a very ordinary, very charming incident that may occur any day in summer by the seaside. The situation is therefore a general one, but Spenser handles it in such a way as to make it intimately personal. His imagination creates a picture of tender young love through the conversation between his lady and himself, absorbed in each other, against the background of the eternal sea. He would like to preserve this experience for ever, but the waves wipe out her name just as cruel time destroys every man-made thing. Nevertheless he feels confident that he is able to immortalize his love by a different kind of writing, his poetry, no matter how short life on earth may be. At the same time the writing of the lady's name, which is the central image of the poem, is transferred from earth to heaven. Love, poetry and religious belief are closely associated.Technically, Spenser's poetry is at a very high level. He uses simple words so skilfully that they create a complete, harmonious picture. After the action of the first quatrain he switches to the dialogue in the second and third, to conclude with the couplet which summarizes the theme of the sonnet. Spenser's perfect handling of vowels and the wavelike rhythm of his poem can only be appreciated when the sonnet is read aloud so as to bring out its melody. His frequent use of alliteration binds the poem together.RenaissanceThe Renaissanceis a period in Europe, from the 14th to the 17th century, regarded as the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. It started as a cultural movement in Italy in the Late Medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe, marking the beginning of the Early Modern Age.The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its own invented version of humanism, derived from the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "Man is the measure of all things." This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe.As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".There is a consensus that the Renaissance began in Florence, in the 14th century. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure; the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici; and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, and finally Rome during the Renaissance Papacy.The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance": It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization—historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science—but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".The word Renaissance, literally meaning "Rebirth" in French, first appeared in English in the1830s. The word also occurs in Jules Michelet's 1855 work, Histoire de France. The word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century.HumanismHumanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over acceptance of dogma or superstition. The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it. The term was coined by theologian Friedrich Niethammer at the beginning of the 19th century. Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress. In modern times, humanist movements are typically aligned with secularism, and today humanism typically refers to a non-theistic life stance centred on human agency and looking to science rather than revelation from a supernatural source to understand the world.English RenaissanceThe English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. As in most of the rest of northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later. The beginning of the English Renaissance is often taken, as a convenience, to be 1485, when the Battle of Bosworth ended the Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the Tudor Dynasty. Renaissance style and ideas, however, were slow to penetrate England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance.The English Renaissance is different from the Italian Renaissance in several ways. The dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were literature and music. Visual arts in the English Renaissance were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. The English period began far later than the Italian, which was moving into Mannerism and the Baroque by the 1550s or earlier. In contrast, the English Renaissance can only truly be said to begin, shakily, in the 1520s, and it continued until perhaps 1620.Literature. England had a strong tradition of literature in the English vernacular, which gradually increased as English use of the printing press became common by the mid 16th century. By the time of Elizabethan literature a vigorous literary culture in both drama and poetry included poets such as Edmund Spenser, whose verse epic The Faerie Queene had a strong influence on English literature but was eventually overshadowed by the lyrics of William Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and others. Typically, the works of these playwrights and poets circulated in manuscript form for some time before they were published, and above all the plays of English Renaissance theatre were the outstanding legacy of the period. The works of this period are also affected by Henry VIII's declaration of independence from the Catholic Church and technological advances in sailing and cartography, which are reflected in the generally nonreligious themes and various shipwreck adventures of Shakespeare.The English theatre scene, which performed both for the court and nobility in privateperformances, and a very wide public in the theatres, was the most crowded in Europe, with a host of other playwrights as well as the giant figures of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Elizabeth herself was a product of Renaissance humanism trained by Roger Ascham, and wrote occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure at critical moments of her life. Philosophers and intellectuals included Thomas More and Francis Bacon. All the 16th century Tudor monarchs were highly educated, as was much of the nobility, and Italian literature had a considerable following, providing the sources for many of Shakespeare's plays. English thought advanced towards modern science with the Baconian Method, a forerunner of the Scientific Method. The language of the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, and at the end of the period the Authorised V ersion ("King James Version" to Americans) of the Bible (1611) had enduring impacts on the English consciousness.Criticism of the idea of the English RenaissanceThe notion of calling this period "The Renaissance" is a modern invention, having been popularized by the historian Jacob Burckhardt in the 19th century. The idea of the Renaissance has come under increased criticism by many cultural historians, and some have contended that the "English Renaissance" has no real tie with the artistic achievements and aims of the Italian artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello) who are closely identified with Renaissance visual art. Whereas from the perspective of literary history, England had already experienced a flourishing of literature over 200 years before the time of Shakespeare, during the last decades of the fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer's popularizing of English as a medium of literary composition rather than Latin occurred only 50 years after Dante had started using Italian for serious poetry, and Chaucer translated works by both Boccaccio and Petrarch into Middle English. At the same time William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, and John Gower were also writing in English. In the fifteenth century, Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte D'Arthur, was a notable figure. For this reason, scholars find the singularity of the period called the English Renaissance questionable; C. S. Lewis, a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge, famously remarked to a colleague that he had "discovered" that there was no English Renaissance, and that if there had been one, it had "no effect whatsoever".Historians have also begun to consider the word "Renaissance" as an unnecessarily loaded word that implies an unambiguously positive "rebirth" from the supposedly more primitive Middle Ages. Some historians have asked the question "a renaissance for whom?," pointing out, for example, that the status of women in society arguably declined during the Renaissance. Many historians and cultural historians now prefer to use the term "early modern" for this period, a term that highlights the period as a transitional one that led to the modern world, but attempts to avoid positive or negative connotations.Other cultural historians have countered that, regardless of whether the name "renaissance" is apt, there was undeniably an artistic flowering in England under the Tudor monarchs, culminating in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.American RenaissanceThis period in American Literature ran from about 1830 to around the Civil War. A centralterm in American studies, the American Renaissance was for awhile considered synonymous with American Romanticism and was closely associated with Transcendentalism.Scholar F. O. Matthiessen originated the phrase "American Renaissance" in his 1941 book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. The thematic center of the American Renaissance was what Matthiessen called the "devotion" of all five of his writers to "the possibilities of democracy." He presented the American Renaissance texts as "literature for our democracy”and challenged the nation to repossess them.Often considered a movement centered in New England, the American Renaissance was inspired in part by a new focus on humanism as a way to move from Calvinism. Literary nationalists at this time were calling for a movement that would develop a unique American literary style to distinguish American literature from British literature. Walter Channing in a November 1815 issue of the North American Review called for the people to form "a literature of our own," which was later echoed by other literary critics. Following this call, there was a wave of literary nationalism in America for much of the 1820s that saw writers such as Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper become the identity of writers worthy of American literature. From this wave of literary nationalism the American Renaissance can be seen as being born.There are many criticisms associated with the American Renaissance, some critics even questioning if it ever actually took place. One of the most prominent criticisms being that authors during this period are seen as simply taking styles and ideas from past movements and culture and reforming them into new, contemporary works.Some critics say that authors fail to address major political issues during this period, such as slavery, even as they had large influence on the writing of the time.[6] There is also criticism that women authors and women's issues were generally left out of discussion and publication.The notion of an American Renaissance has been criticized for overemphasizing a small number of white male writers and artifacts of high culture.[8] William E. Cain noted the "extreme white male formation" of Matthiessen's list of authors and stated that by "devoting hundreds of pages of analysis and celebration to five white male authors, Matthiessen unwittingly prefigured in his book what later readers would dispute and labor to correct."Some critics argue that literature written by women during this period was not as popular as first thought, and that it took a distant second place in popularity to works written by men. Matthiessen and other scholars are even known to exclude women and minority authors, especially African Americans.[6] Critics also argue that there is no separate style or genre, such as sentimental-domestic fiction, distinguished by gender.[7] However, other critics point out that the most read authors of the time were women, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Fanny Fern [10] and criticize Matthiessen for not including women in the original canon.The demographic exclusivity of the American Renaissance began eroding among scholars toward the end of the twentieth century. They have included Emily Dickinson in the canon; she started writing poetry in the late 1850s. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) rose to a prominent reputation in the late 1970s. African-American literature, including slave narratives by such masters as Frederick Douglass, and early novels by William Wells Brown, has gained increasing recognition.Asceticism 禁欲主义Asceticism is a lifestyle characterized by abstinence from worldly pleasures, often for the purpose of pursuing spiritual goals. Ascetics may withdraw from the world for their practices or continue to be part of their society, but typically adopt a frugal lifestyle, characterised by the renunciation of material possessions and physical pleasures, and time spent fasting while concentrating on the practice of religion or reflection upon spiritual matters.Asceticism is classified into two types. "Natural asceticism" consists of a lifestyle where material aspects of life are reduced to utmost simplicity and a minimum but without maiming the body or harsher austerities that make the body suffer, while "unnatural asceticism" is defined as a practice that involves body mortification and self infliction of pain such as by sleeping on a bed of nails.Asceticism has been historically observed in many religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Mainstream Islam has lacked asceticism, except for its minority Sufi sect whose long tradition has included strict asceticism. The practitioners of these religions eschewed worldly pleasures and led an abstinent lifestyle, in the pursuit of redemption, salvation or spirituality. Asceticism is seen in the ancient theologies as a journey towards spiritual transformation, where the simple is sufficient, the bliss is within, the frugal is plenty.英雄双韵体(Heroic Couplet)英雄双韵体是一种英国古典诗体，由十音节双韵诗体演化而来，每行五个音步，每个音步有两个音节，第一个是轻音，第二个是重音。