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Лекция 1
Тақырыбы: The Beginnings of the American Tradition
1. Exploration and Settlement
2. The North: Puritanism
3. The South: Gentlemen Planters
4. The Beginnings of American Literature
For fifty years after Columbus' voyage, Europeans explored the New World actively. Some hoped to find a faster trade route to China; others hoped to find the fabled Earthly Paradise containing a cure for all diseases, rivers filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. Both hopes came to nothing. But the explorers brought back remarkable and often grim stories, particularly about the more than two thousand Indian tribes they discovered already living on the continent. Books soon told of Cortes, who besieged Mexico City for ninety-three days until he destroyed it and exterminated the Aztec inhabitants. They told of Cabeza de Vaca, marooned with a few other men in Florida, who in searching for a European settlement walked across nearly two-thirds of North America. Other stories about the New World were less grim but more fanciful. They told about a land where people slept under water, about a king who became a giant by having his bones stretched, about people with hard tails.
In 1620 a hundred or so English men and women settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to be followed ten years later by about another thousand who settled around Boston. Most of these settlers came not so much seeking the New World as fleeing from the Old. For decades, they had battled with English authorities over the right to practice their religion, known as Puritanism. One Puritan published a pamphlet proposing drastic reforms in the Church of England. Authorities put him in jail —and also fined him, whipped him, cut off the tops of his ears, burned his forehead with a hot iron, and slit his nose. Although eager to escape such trials, most Puritans left the Old World reluctantly. If settlement in America meant an end to harassment, it also meant leaving friends and relatives and facing a wilderness.
The Southern settlements and those of New England were different in several ways. The two regions differed in climate, in manner of settlement, in religion, and in ideals of behavior. The South had warmer weather and richer soils Whereas the typical Puritan settlement was a village community, populated by friends and acquaintances who had come to America together, the typical Southern settlement was a plantation of several hundred acres, managed by a single planter with the help of numerous black slaves. (Many Puritans owned slaves too, but the number of slaves in the North was fewer than in the South.) The often long distances between plantations forced each planter to become a civilization unto himself. Each planter had to do his own farming, weaving, and baking, and had to provide his own medical care and entertainment. Occasionally he traveled to Williamsburg, Charleston, or some other urban center to conduct business and have a say in political life.\The dominant religion of the South was the Church of England, the same church whose forms of worship the Puritans defied. The Southern ideal of conduct, moreover, was represented not by the zealous, soul-searching believer, but by the generous, self-controlled gentleman, attentive to manners and keenly aware of his obligation to serve the public.
Explorers seeking the Fountain of Youth, Puritans longing for grace, Southern planters describing the wilderness—all introduced into American culture ideas and ideals that have endured. Although Puritanism as a way of life vanished, its emphasis on examining and purifying one's feelings lingers in Ralph Waldo Emerson's call for Americans to see the world not through the eyes of the past, but freshly, as if reborn. The Puritans' insistence on plainness, too, resounds in the spare poetry of Emily Dickinson and the un-decorated prose of Ernest Hemingway. The Puritan vision of America as a divinely appointed place pervades later American concepts of an "American Mission," a "Manifest Destiny," or "The American Dream." Similarly, the Southern gentleman's ideal of public service survives in Washington, Jefferson, and the other Southern Revolutionary leaders; and the planter's closeness to the land lives on in the works of modern Southern writers like William Faulkner.
What the explorers, Puritans, and early Southerners share with later American writers most of all is a desire to convey the special quality of life in America, to show how they felt living in a New World, facing new experiences. In various ways, nearly all American writers from the beginning to the present have been saying, "The Eagle has landed."
Лекция 2
Тақырыбы: The Beginnings of the American Tradition
1. John Smith
2. William Bradford
3. Edward Taylor
4. Jonathan Edwards
The first man to promote the permanent settlement of America, and the first to attempt it successfully, was the English soldier and adventurer Captain John Smith. Before he was twenty-five years old he had battled in the Netherlands and Hungary, fought at sea off the African coast, and been captured and taken as a slave to Constantinople.
When Smith sailed late in 1606 for America, trouble and excitement awaited him. Captured by Indians in Virginia, he was brought to their leader, Powhatan, and threatened with death. He was rescued by Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas (her real name was Matoaka), and he was made Powhatan's son. Badly burned in an explosion in 1609, he went back to England, only to return to America five years later - this time to New England, where he explored the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts.
In his upbringing and his devotion to God, William Bradford typified most of the first settlers of New England. The son of an English farmer, he began to read the Bible seriously at the age of twelve. While still a boy, he joined with a group of Puritans for prayer and religious discussion. The act took courage, for members of Bradford's family urged against it, and Puritans in England were often, in Bradford's words, "taken and clapped up in prison" or "had their houses beset and watched night and day. ..." Such hounding by authorities led many Puritans to flee to Holland. Bradford was among them. Uneasy in Holland as well, he and some other Puritans decided to come to America.
Bradford's life in America began tragically, and in this too he typified many of the first settlers. With about a hundred other English emigrants, Bradford reached Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December 1620, aboard the Mayflower—& tiny ship with a cracked beam that barely weathered the crossing. While the ship stood in Cape Cod harbor considering where to land, Bradford's wife fell —or jumped —overboard and drowned. Many of those who landed were no luckier. In their first, fierce winter ashore in America, about half of them died.
It took two hundred years for the hest poems written in early America to be published. Although their author, Edward Taylor, wrote thousands of lines of poetry, he allowed only two stanzas of one poem to be published during his long life, and asked his heirs not to publish any more. Written in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, his poems were not printed until the twentieth century.
Likemost American Puritan writers, Taylor was a minister. He came to Boston in 1668 after losing a teaching position in England because he refused to take an oath contrary to his religious beliefs. He already had a degree from an English university, but he took a second degree at Harvard. After graduation he accepted a post as minister to the tiny frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts. He wrote that the hundred-mile journey there in November 1671 proved difficult, "the snow being mid-leg deep, the way unbeaten, or the track filled up again, and over rocks and mountains. . . ."
Difficulties persisted during the nearly sixty years Taylor spent in Westfield. The town was under constant threat of attack during King Philip's War, the great Indian war of the 1670's in which two-thirds of the villages of Massachusetts Bay were damaged or destroyed. Taylor's first wife bore eight children, five of whom died as infants. A conservative and seemingly irritable man, he also quarreled with tenants on his property and with his own congregation and other ministers on religious matters.
The Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards once wrote a short treatise entitled "Of Insects." In it he recorded his observations of spiders as they sailed from tree to tree, and from their behavior he drew the conclusion that everything in Goifo universe exists for some purpose. The surprising fact about "Of Insects" is neither that its descriptions of insects are exact nor that its arguments are ingenious, but that Edwards wrote it when he was eleven years old.
Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1703, Edwards entered Yale College at the age of thirteen. Soon he began writing philosophical works on the nature of existence and of the mind. At the age of seventeen he discovered that thunder and lightning no longer terrified him. Indeed, he now found them beautiful — one of the several signs that made him certain he had experienced grace. In his early twenties he married Sarah Pierrepont of New Haven, a woman as otherworldly and absorbed in God as he, and began preaching at one of the leading American churches, in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Лекция 3
Тақырыбы: The Revolutionary Period
1. The Age of Reason
2. The American Revolution
3. The Growth of American Culture
4. Benjamin Franklin
5. Thomas Paine
6. Thomas Jefferson
7. Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur
8. Phillis Wheatley
Writers of this period were all conscious of belonging to what is called the Age of Reason. Whether English or American, they believed that by using reason human beings could manage themselves and their societies without depending on authorities and past traditions. Reason, they also believed, thrived on freedom — freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary rulers, freedom to experiment, freedom especially to question existing laws and institutions. By the free use of reason, human beings could progress: social evils could be corrected, superstition and ignorance ended, and the general quality of existence improved.
The leading writers of the period concerned themselves with the state of life on earth. Unlike the Puritans, they had little interest in the hereafter or the supernatural. They tended to write on science, ethics, or government rather than on religion. Typical of the spirit of the Age of Reason are such men as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—Franklin by his ingenious inventions designed to make life more comfortable, Jefferson by his hatred of any restriction on human inquiry, and both men by their love of moderation and order.
The American Revolution was fought not only with muskets but also with thousands of pamphlets, essays, songs, poems, and speeches. As had not been true earlier, citizens of New England, of the South, and of the Middle Colonies began writing about a single, vastly important subject. In doing so they began to think of themselves not as New Yorkers or Rhode Islanders or Virginians, but as Americans.
The war of words began around 1763. The English government started a program of taxing the colonies to help pay the costs of the French and Indian War and of protecting America from other European nations in the future. Americans wrote, argued, and demonstrated against the taxes noisily enough to persuade England to withdraw the Stamp Act of 1765. Fearing that such a retreat would be taken for weakness, England imposed a new tax program in 1767, the Townshend Acts. When Americans again reacted with angry essays and speeches, and refused to buy English products as well, the mother country sent eight hundred soldiers into Boston. On March 4, 1770, the troops killed five persons on King Street. After this "Boston Massacre," Britain again backed down, withdrawing both the Townshend Acts and the troops.
Peace and quiet followed, but only for three years. In 1773 Parliament set a new tax on tea. That December, some Bostonians dumped chests full of the taxed tea into their harbor-an event that became known as the Boston Tea Party. Parliament decided to punish not only the demonstrators, but the whole city. It closed Boston Harbor, reducing the city's food supply and stopping its trade.
Amid the uproar and gunfire occurred a second, very different revolution. The arts in America flourished as never before. They did so partly because by 1763 America had existed for one hundred fifty years and was ready for a richer cultural life, and partly because the Revolution itself inspired people to express their feelings and ideas, but mostly because during the Revolutionary period American cities grew swiftly and the country's population almost doubled. When the Frenchman Michel-Guillaume Jean deCrevecoeur pictured the New World for Europeans in 1782, he told them that "an hundred years ago all was wild, woody, and uncultivated.'' But new immigrants to America, he said, would now behold "fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields, an immense country filled with decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges. . . ."
Artistic achievements that were common in Europe but new to America appeared at every stage of the Revolution. In 1767, only months before Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, actors known as The American Company gave the first professional production of an American play, The Prince of Parthia. A year after the Boston Massacre, a Philadelphia Quaker named Benjamin West exhibited in London a painting called The Death of General Wolfe, whose method of depicting a historic event influenced European art. In the same year that his townsmen dumped the hated tea, a Boston leather worker named William Billings published The New-England Psalm-Singer, the first volume of American-composed music. Months before George Washington was inaugurated as President in 1789, newspapers advertised the publication of The Power of Sympathy, the first American novel.
"The First American," as Benjamin Franklin has been called, was bom in the capital of New England Puritanism, Boston, just as Puritanism was dying out. He left Boston at the age of seventeen, but Puritan ideals stayed with him. As Puritans hoped to be made pure by God's grace, he tried to make himself morally perfect by self-discipline. He failed to do so, but he did carry out another kind of self-transformation. By cleverness and hard work he changed himself from the poorly educated son of a candle- and soap-maker into a world-famous scientist, diplomat, philosopher, and writer.
A few paragraphs cannot describe, but only list, Franklin's many interests and accomplishments. He made his living mostly as a hard-working Philadelphia printer. But he also helped improve the city's pavements, street lighting, sanitation, fire companies, and police; ran a magazine and a newspaper; founded or helped to found a debating club, a hospital, the American Philosophical Society, the first circulating library in America, and the college that became the University of Pennsylvania; studied earthquakes, ocean currents, and wind; improved or invented the lightning rod, bifocal eyeglasses, a device for lifting books off high shelves, a rocking chair that could swat flies, a musical instrument made of moistened glass bowls called the armonica, and a stove that was sold throughout America and Europe; addressed the English House of Commons on the Stamp Act, drew an important political cartoon, and served as first Postmaster General of America; assisted in creating the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of tlje United States; discovered the laws of electricity (for which he won honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale and a gold medal from the English Royal Academy); and became perhaps the first American millionaire.
In
the war of words to win support for the American or the English
side, America's hardest blows were
struck by an Englishman—Tom Paine. The early
events of his stormy life perhaps taught him sympathy for underdogs.
He left school at thirteen and
worked unsuccessfully as a sailor, teacher, grocer, tax collector,
and corset maker. He read much and managed to educate himself, but by
his mid-thirties he faced imprisonment for debt. A meeting with
Benjamin Franklin during one of Franklin's
stays in England persuaded him to emigrate to America.
For a man of Paine's bold opinions, America in, 1775 was the right place and the right time. Early that year, only weeks after arriving in Philadelphia, he published an article blasting slavery as equal to murder and asking Americans to give it up. Later the same year he wrote a forty-seven page pamphlet entitled Common Sense, asking the colonists to think the unthinkable: that the English king was a "Royal Brute," that the very idea of monarchy insulted human dignity, and that war must come because "the period of debate is closed." Common Sense, published in 1776, sold 120,000 copies in three months. Reprinted around the world, it has been called the most important pamphlet in American history.
Probably the most dramatic coincidence in American history occurred the day John Adams died in Massachusetts. His last words were, "Thomas Jefferson still survives." But in Virginia earlier that same day, Thomas Jefferson also died. The coincidence is remarkable not only because Adams and Jefferson were both leaders of the Revolution, nor only because they were lifelong friends. The day on which they both died happened to be the Fourth of July, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
A champion of equal rights and of intellectual and political freedom, Jefferson had the tastes and some of the privileges of an aristocrat. His father, a man of substantial property, died when Jefferson was fourteen, having provided him with a thorough classical education and leaving him some 5,000 acres of land. In 1760, Jefferson entered the College of William and Mary, where he is said to have studied fifteen hours a day. After being graduated, he followed the path taken by Patrick Henry and many other Southern statesmen: he studied law, was admitted to the bar, and, in 1768, was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses. The Revolution made Jefferson prominent as it did many public-minded Southerners.
Crevecoeur was educated at a Jesuit school in Normandy, where he learned English. He first saw the New World at the age of nineteen when he sailed to Canada to serve in the French and Indian War as a soldier and map maker. After being wounded and hospitalized, he traveled as a surveyor in upstate New York and in Vermont, under the name "James Hector St. John." He became a citizen of New York in 1765, soon married an American woman, and settled on a 120-acre farm which he named Pine Hill.
Little is known about the life of the first widely applauded American poet except that she happened to be a young black slave. Her name, Phillis Wheatley, was given her by the prosperous and cultivated Wheatley family of Boston, in whose household she began to serve shortly after she was brought over from Africa at about the age of seven. The Wheatleys were involved in missionary work to convert Indians and blacks to Christianity, and they raised the young girl as a Christian. They taught her to read and write English, probably in part so that she could read the Bible —which, by one account, she learned to do fluently only sixteen months after arriving in Boston. Soon she began to read Latin classics and English poets and to write poetry herself. In 1767 a Rhode Island newspaper published one of her poems, concerning a shipwreck. She was then about thirteen years old.
Лекция 4
Тақырыбы: First Harvest
1. Classicism and Romanticism
3. Washington Irving
4. James Fenimore Cooper
5. William Cullen Bryant
6. Edgar Allan Poe
The United States solidified as a nation during the period of major cultural change characterized by the shift from classicism to Romanticism. Although this change eventually affected every aspect of culture, including all the arts, education, philosophy, and even science, it was most immediately apparent in literature. The triumph in America of nineteenth-century Romanticism over eighteenth-century classicism was an intellectual revolution second in importance only to the political revolution that brought the nation into being.
Classicism rested first upon the belief that reason is the dominating characteristic both of nature and of human nature, and that both are governed by fixed, unchanging laws. In the popular eighteenth-century image, nature was viewed as a self-contained machine, like a watch, whose laws of operation could be rationally understood. Classicism emphasized reason over the imagination, the social over the personal, the common over the individual.
It is appropriate that the first American to achieve a notable reputation as a literary artist was born in the final year of the Revolutionary War and named after George Washington. Independence made Americans more aware of the distinctive qualities of their own culture and gradually created interest in a national literature. Although Washington Irving would benefit from this interest, he did not immediately recognize or pursue it. He came somewhat late to his career as a professional writer, and he established his reputation first in England with The Sketch Book, a book that was more English than American in both subject and spirit. His relation as a writer to native American materials would remain uncertain: his two most famous stories —"Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" —are adaptations of German folk tales to American settings. He was likely to describe even the western American wilderness through comparisons with Europe.
James Fenimore Cooper's literary importance, like that of Herman Melville, is largely a rediscovery of our own time. Although his novels were often immensely popular when they were published, they were read as adventure stories. As the taste for adventure fiction declined, so did Cooper's reputation, and his novels came to be thought of as tales suitable only for adolescent readers. In the 1920's, however, critics began seriously to reconsider Cooper's work and to find that his themes reached deep into the emerging American character and the social questions of his time. Today his stature as a major writer is firmly established.
Cooper, who produced thirty-three novels and a number of volumes of social comment and travel observations, had no early intention of becoming a writer. Born the son of a prominent judge and wealthy landowner, Cooper was raised on his family's enormous estate of 40,000 acres in what is now Cooperstown in upstate New York.
William Cullen Bryant's long life has a special relation to the great changes that transformed America in the nineteenth century. At the time of his birth, the new, small nation consisted of fifteen states, nearly all of them on the Atlantic coast, and most Americans were still farmers. By the time he died, westward expansion had carried settlement across the continent. The American population, swollen by millions of new immigrants, had increased ten times over. The Union had survived the ordeal of civil war to become a vast industrialized nation of thirty-eight states.
For fifty years Bryant was deeply involved in the political issues that tested the nation's ability to adapt traditional values to a new industrial society. At the age of thirty-one, he moved from his native region of rural Massachusetts to New York City and turned his major literary efforts from poetry to journalism. As editor of the influential newspaper, the New York Evening Post, he became a national spokesman for liberal causes both old and new — the abolition of slavery, freedom of speech and religion, the right of workers to organize in unions, the repeal of laws that imprisoned debtors, and the election of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. One aspect of Romanticism was its humanitarian concern for the "common man" and its hope for the democratic possibilities of American life. No Romantic poet was a more passionate warrior than Bryant in the service of those social ideals.
No other American writer's biography has been as distorted as Edgar Allan Poe's was for many years. The "Рое myth" portrayed a life that was spectacularly immoral when in fact it was only unusually miserable and dreary—and even dull. The legend of a Poe who combined "the fiend, the brute, and the genius" began early and persisted long. On the day of Poe's funeral, a literary rival and secret enemy published an anonymous letter that praised Poe's work but abused his character. He later followed with a "Memoir" that was full of malice, lies, and outright forgeries. As unlucky in death as he had been in life, Poe became the subject of a fantasy that matched the fantasies of his stories.
Лекция 5
Тақырыбы: The Flowering of New England
1. Literature in the American Renaissance
2. Transcendentalism
3. The Anti-Transcendentalism
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson
5. Nathaniel Hawthorne
6. Herman Melville
Spectacular, unrestrained growth characterized nearly every aspect of American life from the beginning of Andrew Jackson's administration in 1829 to the onset of the Civil War in 1861. Geographical expansion swept westward with the conquest of territory in the Southwest in the Mexican War (1846-1848) and the negotiation of new borders with the British in the Northwest. The earlier trickle of fur traders into the Western wilderness became a swelling stream of agricultural emigrants searching for new land and of treasure-seekers rushing to the newly discovered gold fields of California. The nation's population, which had doubled between 1790 and 1830, doubled again before 1870. But as America was growing it was changing. A nation that had developed its basic values in a context of farms, villages, and small cities had to face the new concentrations of population and economic power created by an industrial and urban society. The old and deep American belief in individualism, with its attendant promises of liberty and equality of opportunity, had to confront the sudden fact of a mass society in which many were barred by poverty or lack of education from any possibility of self-development. Reform was as much the spirit of the age as expansion, but its aim was less the creation of a new society than the recovery of the one originally promised in the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Thus, America was propelled by two forces: dissatisfaction with the present and optimism about the future. This optimism was based in part on the dynamic progress in science and technology. If America still lagged behind Britain and Europe in scientific research, it soon excelled in the practical application of scientific knowledge, in everything from soil and mineral surveys of wilderness lands to the invention and development of machine tools.
The rush of optimism that had at first characterized American expansion and reform also characterized American literature. Explosive technological growth in publishing and the increased size of the reading audience opened new opportunities to writers. Literary achievements during this period were of such high quality that the period is sometimes referred to as the American Renaissance. Within a single generation, American literature found its place among the great national literatures of the world. From obscure Massachusetts towns like Concord, Salem, and Pittsfield, as well as from Boston and New York, came books that are still read and admired the world over. As Emerson observed, "There is a moment in the history of every nation when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant, extends across the entire scale." Launched in part by the appearance in 1836 of Emerson's Nature, the period from 1840 to 1860 became just such a moment of ripened powers in American literature: a time when generative ideas about God, people, nature, and society came together in a creative tension that inspired great talents. Without in any way losing its nationalistic tone, American literature achieved a universal voice that spoke for people "across the entire scale."
A major source of these generative ideas was an intellectual movement that was neither a religion nor a philosophy nor a literary theory, although it had elements of all three. Put simply, transcendentalism is the view that the basic truths of the universe lie beyond the knowledge we obtain from our senses. Through the senses, we learn the facts and laws of the physical world, and through our capacity to reason we learn to use this information, creating, for instance, science and technology. But there is another realm of knowledge that goes beyond or transcends what we hear or see or learn from books. It is through intuition that we "know" the existence of our own souls and their relation to a reality beyond the physical world. Intuition, which Emerson called the "highest power of the Soul," is a power that "never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives . . . ."
Many writers were largely unaffected by the revolutionary ferment of transcendentalist ideas. Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—their lives centered upon Boston and Harvard College—had other intellectual sources for their work and held conceptions of poetry that were sharply different from Emerson's. These three authors were called the "Brahmins," after the highest caste in Hindu society. They were, in a sense, high-caste New Englanders — cultured and socially important individuals who represented good taste and distinguished achievement. Whittier found in his Quaker heritage his own tradition of spiritual inspiration, and he was little affected by the changing intellectual temper of the age. The poems of Emily Dickinson do show the effects of transcendentalist ideas, but as Dickinson's poems were not published during her lifetime, they played no part in the intellectual and literary life of the period.
"Great geniuses," Emerson once wrote, "have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them." This remark reflects Emerson's view that those who change our understanding of the world do so through the power of their ideas. Outwardly their lives may be unremarkable and leave little for cousins to remember. Their real life exists within the mind. Although it was not Emerson's intention, he might have been speaking of himself. For many who read and heard him, especially the young, his ideas were an intellectual awakening to a revolutionary sense of the world. To understand his life, we must turn not to the recollections of cousins but to his Journals where, from the age of sixteen, he recorded the life of his mind. Emerson is truly one of our "great geniuses" whose outer life yields a short biography.
Emerson, the romantic prophet who believed in the profound possibilities of each human being, himself confessed that he had not given enough weight to one major aspect of human experience. "I could never give much reality to evil," he admitted. To Nathaniel Hawthorne, evil was very real indeed. The doctrine of original sin, so important to his Puritan ancestors, was never very far from Hawthorne's view of life. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, where, a century before, women had been hanged as witches, he wrote, "I felt it almost a destiny to make Salem my home." The first of Hawthorne's American forebears was a stern judge, well known for his persecution of the Quakers. That man's son, John Hathorne, was active in prosecuting suspected witches and committed about one hundred of them to jail. Of these men, Hawthorne wrote, "I take shame upon myself for their sakes and pray that any curse incurred by them . .. may be now and henceforth removed." In Hawthorne's view, unlike that of the Puritans, the greatest sinners were so concerned with themselves that they coldly denied their sympathy to other human beings. He saw evil as a force that leaves its mark on generation after generation, and in his stories and novels he traced the effects of its corrupting presence.
Until I was twenty-five," Melville told Haw-orne, "I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have ;arcely passed, at any time between then and dw, that 1 have not unfolded within myself." fhen he sent this letter, Melville was working at )p speed on his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. It was is intellectual development that Melville dated rom his twenty-fifth year. It was then he began an rduous program of reading, and as he "swam hrough libraries" he found writers, especially Shakespeare, who fired his own imagination. But if lis imagination was set in motion by books, the experiences it would explore had been accumulated far from libraries. When he reached chat turning point in his early manhood, Melville already had an "education" that no other writer of his time could match. He had sailed the oceans and knew their "rimmed varieties of races and climes," and he had even lived briefly among cannibals. Probably no other writer of his century had so wide an acquaintance with the peoples, customs, and places of the world. Although he did not fully realize the value of this education at the time, Melville could look back through Ishmael in Moby-Dick and say that a whaling ship had been "my Yale College and my Harvard."
Лекция 6
Тақырыбы: The Flowering of New England
1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
2. Oliver Wendell Holmes
3. James Russell Lowell
4. Emily Dickinson
No other American poet, not even Robert Frost, has matched Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's popularity at the height of his career. During his lifetime his poetry was admired throughout Europe and translated into twenty-four languages. In America he was the poet who was everywhere read and everywhere quoted. His seventy-fifth birthday was observed in schoolrooms throughout the country. After his death, a bust of Longfellow was placed in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey, which contains the tombs or monuments of such famous English poets as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Longfellow was the first American poet to be so honored.
For Longfellow, poetry was less a special vision than an expression of the common knowledge and feelings of all who share in a culture. He believed his task was to create in memorable form a common heritage for Americans and in the process to create an audience for poetry. Through his poems, which were remarkably varied in form and meter, Longfellow shared with thousands of Americans the re-created past of "Paul Revere's Ride," the Plymouth Colony legend of The Courtship of Miles Standish, the Indian myths of The Song of Hiawatha, and a tragic episode of Canadian-American history in Evangeline. Walt Whitman wrote that Longfellow "strikes a splendid average, and does not sing exceptional passions, or humanity's jagged escapades. . . . On the contrary, his songs soothe and heal." America, Whitman concluded, "may be reverently thankful" for such a poet.
It would be hard to imagine the profession of literature in New England in the nineteenth century without the witty, energetic presence of Dr. Holmes. No one could more accurately represent one side of the New England tradition than this descendant of Anne Bradstreet, who had a gentleman traveler's easy familiarity with the great capitals of Europe but remained cheerfully convinced that "the Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. " A man of immense vitality and wide-ranging interests, he was a natural leader in the cultural life of his beloved city. He helped organize the Saturday Club, a group of writers and scientists (he himself was both) whose monthly meetings for informal conversations were long remembered for their intellectual brilliance; and he was one of the founders of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that gave New England writers, including Holmes, a national audience. Characteristically, it was also Holmes who first called his own class of Boston aristocrats the "Brahmins," after the high priests of the Hindu religion. The name was half-humorous, and he was quick to add that this group was a "harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy." But the remark was nevertheless revealing. Holmes felt both a certain reverence for the cultural aristocracy to which he belonged and a need to poke gentle fun at it. A mixture of traditional aristocratic social values and a democratic comic spirit was at the core of the man.
Although he wrote in many forms, Holmes is best remembered for his poems. With the notable exception of "The Chambered Nautilus," his best poetry is light verse. If his emotions were stirred, he could write passionately: "Old Ironsides" was written-to save the battleship Constitution from being scrapped. More often, poetry was for Holmes an exercise of wit and wordplay, a pleasure much like conversation. He had a modest estimate of his own talent, saying that his verse compared to major poetry as a tinkling instrument to the sound of a full band. Nevertheless, he observed, "I hold it to be a gift of a certain value to give that slight passing spasm of pleasure which a few ringing couplets often cause . . . ." Generations of readers have agreed that Holmes gives that pleasure.
Lowell's career was so varied that it might stand as a summary of the accomplishments of the Fireside Poets. He was Oliver Wendell Holmes's nearest rival in wit and cleverness, and Longfellow's in the ability to write in many verse forms. Like Whittier, Lowell was active in politics and worked as a journalist in the abolitionist movement. If as a sophisticated Harvard graduate he could not identify as closely with country life as Whittier did, he nevertheless invented in Hosea Biglow a rural New Englander whose vivid local dialect and salty opinions became widely known. Lowell was not only among the founders of The Atlantic Monthly, but served as its first editor, and later became a coeditor of the still more distinguished North American Review. Fame came quickly to this most versatile — and perhaps most gifted—of the Fireside Poets.
There were many honors and accomplishments in Lowell's long career: his professorship, his editorial positions, diplomatic service as American minister to both Spain and England, honorary degrees from major universities. No literary man wrote more thoughtfully about the Civil War than Lowell did in essays on the meaning of the Union and the causes of rebellion. In his "Commemoration Ode" at the end of the war, he was among the first of our writers to recognize the greatness of Abraham Lincoln. Still, Lowell's work lacked coherence and development, making his literary career a minor one. He himself recognized this failure, observing in old age that his life had been "mainly wasted" and that he had "thrown away more than most men ever had." As he later estimated, his poetry contained "good bits" — isolated achievements—rather than a clear line of major works.
Emily Dickinson rarely left Amherst, a small college town that preserved the sober church-centered ways of an older Puritan New England. Her father was a lawyer, a formidable man who dominated his family and who achieved some prominence in politics and was treasurer of Amherst College for forty years. Growing up in Amherst, she was much like other girls her age. Her letters to her friends and her brother, away at school, are full of wit and high spirits. But as she grew older, she became more reluctant to be drawn away from home, even for an hour at a time.
As far as is known, there were few important outward events in Emily Dickinson's life. The year 1862 seems to have been a turning point. In that year she wrote more poems than in any other, roughly a poem a day. In that year also, Charles Wadsworth, a Presbyterian minister and the man Emily loved, departed for San Francisco. Apparently she saw Wadsworth, an older man, only three or four times. Although he was kind to her, he did not return her love. It was about the time of his departure that she took to dressing entirely in white. During the last ten years of her life, she refused to leave her house and garden or to meet any strangers. In 1884 her health broke down, and two years later she died.
Лекция 7
Тақырыбы: Division and Discovery