1. Chapter 13 Frost, Sandburg, Cummings, Crane, Moore
Poets and Poems

2. Robert Frost(1874-1963) ※ 4 Pulitzer Prizes
※read poetry at a presidential inauguration.
※ received honorary degrees from 44 colleges
※ unofficial poet Laureate, one of the most celebrated American’s modernist poets

3. Biographical Introduction
born in San Francisco in 1874.
his mother brought him to New England at his eleven, with which his poetry has always been associated.
After graduating from high school in 1892, Frost entered Dartmouth College but soon left to work at odd jobs and to write poetry.
In 1897, he was accepted as a special student by Harvard but withdrew after two years because of his increasing dislike for academic convention. For the next twelve years, Frost made a minimal living by teaching and farming while continuing to write his poems.

4. In 1912, he and his family moved to England.
Determined to win recognition in his native land, Frost returned to the US and settled on a farm in his native land.
By the end of his life he had become a national poet; he received honorary degrees from forty-four colleges and universities and won four Pulitzer Prizes; the United States senate passed resolutions honoring his birthdays and when he was eighty-seven he read his poetry at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

5. Robert Frost (1874-1963) Influence on him: He wrote very much in the
Wordsworthian tradition, and
there is a good deal of Emerson in him.

6. Main Works A Boy’s Will 1913 <<一个男孩的意愿>>
North of Boston, << 波士顿的北部>>
Mountain Interval, <<山间>>
New Hampshire <<新罕布什尔>>
Collected Poems <<诗集>>
A Further Range <<又一片牧场>>
A Witness Tree <<见证树>>

7. Robert Frost ( )
Features of his poem:
Full of wit and wisdom, peace and harmony, serenity and enjoyment.
Appalling and terrifying: design of darkness: “Design”, the short poem, can overwhelm one with a great sense of uncertainty and fear. Abnormal people: “Home Burial” is about to crack up with grief over her child’s death. “Mending Wall” reveals the tension of modern life.

8. Robert Frost ( )
His themes:
Nature: Nature appears as an explicator and a mediator for man and serves as the center of reference of his behavior.
Order: In “Birches” he reveals his concern for order and admits that when he feels “weary of considerations” and “life is too much like a pathless wood”, he would like to get away from the earth for a while, going back to be a swinger, and wishes that fate would willfully misunderstand him and snatch him away not to return. “The Wood Pile” is likewise a metaphor for order.

9. Robert Frost (1874-1963) Differences from modernist:
1) he did not seem particularly enthusiastic about experimentation in form.
2) His views about form: He retained a faith in the traditional forms of poetry.

10. Robert Frost ( )
Style: simple. His poems can be read very often on many levels.
His aim: What Frost did was in fact to juxtapose the regional and the cosmopolitan, and the human and the natural, in a word, to root his poetry in New England to reach the plane of universal meaning.

11. Robert Frost (1874-1963) The Road Not Taken
Describe both of the roads that the author finds.
Which road does the speaker choose?
Which road would you choose? why?
How do you understand the word “sigh”?Is it a kind of nostalgic relief or regret?
What might the two roads stand for in the speaker’s mind? (the symbolic meanings)
What does he want to convey in this poem?

12. The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I marked the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

13. About the Poem “The Road Not Taken”
Frost claims that he wrote this poem about his friend Edward Thomas, with whom he had walked many times in the woods near London. Frost has said that while walking they would come to different paths and after choosing one, Thomas would always felt wondering what they might have missed by not taking the other path.
About the poem, Frost asserted, “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem– very tricky.” Superficially, the poem has been and continues to be used as an inspirational poem, encouraging self-reliance, not following where others have led. But a close reading of the poem proves not so.

14. The Framework of the Poem
Stanza One---- Describes Situations
Stanza Two---- Decides to Take Less-travelled Road
Stanza Three---- Continues Description of Road
Stanza Four----Recalls the Road Taken and Not Taken

15. How do you understand the word “sigh”
How do you understand the word “sigh”?Is it a kind of nostalgic relief or regret?
The word “sigh” is a tricky word. Because sigh can be interpreted into nostalgic relief or regret. If it is the relief sigh, then the difference means the speaker feels glad with the road he took. If it is the regret sigh, then the difference would not be good, and the speaker would be sighing in regret. Hence, sigh is ambiguous here for the speaker is not showing whether his choice is right or wrong.

16. Carl Sandburg ( )

17. Carl Sandburg ( )
His ideal of life:
was to be “the word of the people,” to articulate in song the thoughts, feelings, and aspirations of ordinary men and women.

18. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) His works: 《碾米机》 《肆无忌惮的狂热》
In Reckless Ecstasy (1904)
He did not become known as a poet until his first volume, Chicago Poems (1916)
Cornhuskers (1918)
Smoke and Steel (1920)
Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922)
Good Morning, America (1928)
The People, Yes (1936)
Collected Poems (1951)
The American Songbag (1927)
The Prairie Years (1926)
The War Years (1940)
《肆无忌惮的狂热》
《碾米机》
《人民，好！》
《美国歌袋》
《草原的年代》
《战争的年代》

19. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) Influences on his poems:
His poems show Imagist influence, e.g. “Lost—” “Monotone”, “The Harbor” and “Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard”
Folk song: seen in The American Songbag.
Biographical writing. The Prairie Years, The War Years
Whitman: Carl Sandburg was probably the only great poet who wrote in the Whitmanesque tradition in the present century. Like Whitman, he contains “multitudes”

20. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) His view of life: Optimistic: Affirmative:
Objective:

21. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) His political view:
Sandburg was a socialist. He was a
hearty voice from the masses of the
people he had close contact with
all his life.
His contribution to style: colloquial.

22. E.E. Cummings(1894-1963) Harvard graduate.
Comment on Cummings: He was probably the most interesting experimentalist in modern American poetry, becoming a symbol of the modern pioneering spirit in modern American literary history.

23. E.E. Cummings(1894-1963) influences:
Poetic influence on: Tennyson, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Decadents of the 1890s. The discovery of free verse led him toward the modern verse revolution as he found it in Amy Lowells’ Imagist anthologies and the little magazines of the time.

24. E.E. Cummings ( )
Painting influence: Post-impressionist and Cubist paintings and sculptures and Picasso and other modern masters.
Social influence : the First World War, he was wrongly accused of espionage and detained in a French concentration camp for three months.

25. E.E. Cummings ( )
His outlook on life and society: he values vitality, celebrates individualism and rejects groupiness. His abhorrence of collectivism and conformity is forcefully expressed in some of his poems.

26. E.E. Cummings (1894-1963) His writing content:
He wrote mostly love poems and poems which handle such motifs as the coming of dawn, an urban scene in snowfall, and a satiric rendering of religious preaching. Gradually a distinct Cummings style came to maturity.

27. Hart Crane ( )
Life:
One of the best American poets of the twentieth century. Published his first poem at 17.
Never got on good terms with his divorced parents, he went to New York in 1924, and made some friends with some well-known literary figures.
He tried to perfect his poetic art in poverty and fatigue and became addicted to alcohol.

28. Hart Crane ( )
With the help of a financier, he was able to focus on writing.
Crane had been feeling emotionally stressed out.
Had an incredible pressure on his increasingly fragile nerve system.
Jumped into sea on his way back to New York from Mexico.

29. Hart Crane (1899-1932) His Works: Influences on him:
The works of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound had an immense impact on his poetry.
His Works:
1) White Buildings (1930)
2) The Bridge (1926)
3) Collected poems (1933)
4) The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose (1966)

30. Hart Crane (1899-1932) Comment on White Buildings
Includes 23 poems of his early career, one of which, “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, expresses his views on beauty, love and rebirth.
Crane’s Masterpiece: Bridge, a failure at first
1) Taking the bridge—the Brooklyn Bridge—as an emblem of life and of the ideal future of America, was meant to be another vehement response to T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.

31. Hart Crane ( )
2)one of the long poems to come out of the twentieth-century American modern epic tradition, ranking along side The Waste land, The Cantos, and Paterson.(212)
3) he regards the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol of America’s future and its unique identity, and sees hope in the mechanical civilization that his contemporaries had ruthlessly censured. He was writing about the myth of America in “an epic of modern consciousness”.

32. Hart Crane ( )
3) The Bridge consists of the poem and eight sections, totaling 15 poems.
To Brooklyn Bridge
Ave Maria
The Harbor Dawn
Van Winkle
The River
The Dance
Indiana
Cutty Shark

33. Hart Crane (1899-1932) Cape Hatteras Three Songs Southern Cross
National Winter Garden
Virginia
Quaker Hill
The Tunnel (see analysis on p.215)
Atlantis

34. Marianne Moore ( )
Life: born in Missouri and graduated from Bryn Mawr where she had H. D. as her classmate. Her poems began to appear in the Poetry magazine.
An editor of the literary magazine the Dial
Her poetry has won admiration from diverse quarters such as William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot.
Won Pulitzer prize, the Bollingen Prize, and a National Book Award.
Later nationally famous and a baseball fan.

35. Marianne Moore (1887-1972) Works: Collected Poems (1967) Reputation:
Has a unique place in the history of American poetry.
1)One of the first “new” poets in the first years of the twentieth century along with other famous poets.
For her, poetry is important because it encases the essense of life and reality. “Poetry” is a graphic statement. (p216)

36. Marianne Moore ( )
2) an influence over younger poets of later times such as Elizabeth Bishop.
Good at catching hold of the poetic in the varied manifestations of mundane reality around her. (“The fish” is a good case in point, p.217)
3) Her poetry is conspicuous with her: full of well chosen quotations which, however, present little or no difficulty as the poet always furnishes notes for her sources.