文档介绍：Walt Whitman 惠特曼
Life and works
.---Brooklyn---journalist, editor---dismissed from his job---experimenting with poetry
Leaves of Grass in 1855
II. Influences over Whitman []
Emerson
About the poet
About art
A child of his age:
mysticism, anti-rationalism, pantheism, idealism
III. Leaves of Grass
9 editions with more than 400 poems written in free verse form
The title implies rebirth, renewal or green life.
Both form and content are revolutionary.
IV. Literary features and works
1. ideals of equality and democracy; the dignity, the self-reliant spirit, and the joy of mon man.
Song of Myself
2. responds enthusiastically to the expansion of America.
“Song of Myself”
“There was a Child Went forth”
3. a daring experimentalist
Free Verse:
refers to a kind of poetry not written in a regular rhythmical pattern or meter. Instead of having metrical feet and lines, free verse has a varying rhythm that suits its meaning and that uses the sounds of spoken language in lines of different lengths. Its form pattern is often largely based on repetition and parallel structure. Walt Whitman’s poems are typical examples.
Free verse is the translation of the French term “vers libre.” It is rhymed or unrhymed poetry free from conventional rules of meter.
The aesthetic and musical effect of free verse is achieved through rhythms and cadence of natural speech.
Blank verse refers to poems of unrhymed lines, usually written in iambic pentameter. Because the poems are unrhymed, the rhyme scheme is “blank”, hence the name.
V. Reading
Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
(从永久摇荡的摇篮里)
2. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
3. O Captain! My Captain!
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And though of him I love.
2
O powerful w