Lecture 8 The Confessional School

单击此处编辑母版标题样式,*,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,Lecture EightThe Confessional School(Robert Lowell),Robert Lowell was called the father of the confessional poets.,I.The Confessional School and Robert Lowell,1.Features of,The Confessional School,A ruthless,excruciating self-analysis of ones own background and heritage,ones own most private desires and fantasies etc.,and the urgent“Ill-tell-it-all-to-you”impulse.,Please refer to page 356 of the textbook.,2.,Robert Lowells Lifestory,Robert Lowell(19171977)was born in Boston,as the son of Robert Traill Spence Lowell.Other members of the distinguished,intellectual family included the poet and critic James Russell Lowell and the poet Amy Lowell.,Lowell began writing at St.Marks School,where his teacher was the poet Richard Eberhart.He studied English literature at Harvard.When his parents rejected the woman he proposed to marry,he broke from his family.On the advice of a psychiatrist,he transferred to Kenyon College(Ohio).There he studied poetry and criticism,graduating in 1940.,His teachers included John Crowe Ransom(1888-1974),who was a member of the Agrarian Movement.In 1940 Lowell converted Roman Catholicism and married against his parents will the writer Jean Stafford-they divorced eight years later.In 1949 Lowell married the novelist and critic Elisabeth Hardwick.However,two years earlier Lowell had met the poet Elizabet Bishop,who influenced deeply his work.Lowell fantasized marrying her and dedicated to Bishop his poem Skunk Hour in LIFE STUDIES(1959).,After graduating,Lowell moved on a fellowship to Louisiana State University,where he worked with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks.Although Lowell tried to enlist in the armed forces during WW II,he declared himself a conscientious objector by the time he was called for service.In 1943 he served five months of a prison sentence for refusing the draft.It is possible that the experiences of imprisonment played some role when his mental health later collapsed.In 1944 appeared Lowells first collection of poetry,the autobiographical LAND OF UNLIKENESS.In it Lowell used Christian symbolism and juxtaposed the world of grace to the urban life.His second book,LORD WEARYS CASTLE(1946),which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize,marked a return to the New England milieu.,These two early books are among Lowells confessional works,others were LIFE STUDIES(1959),which won the National Book Award in 1960,and THE DOLPHIN(1973).In THE MILLS OF THE KAVANAUGHS(1949)Lowell blended classical myths with New England landscape.The work contained a narrative poem of some 600 lines and five other poems.The Quaker Graveyeard in Nantucket referred to such sources as Henry David Thoreaus,Cape Cod,Herman Melvilles,Moby-Dick,and the Bible.Captain Ahab and his pursuit of the great whale is a central image in the poem.,In 1949 Lowell was hospitalized for mania at Baldpate Hospital in Georgetown,Massachusetts.In McLeans Hospital,during one of his periodic incarcerations,he composed his famous love poem Walking in the Blue.,Lowell received the Harriet Monroe Poetry award in 1952 and the Guinness Poetry Award(shared with W.H.Auden,Edith Sitwell,and Edwin Muir)in 1959.In the 1950s,Lowell spent a few years abroad.He settled in 1954 in Boston,where he worked as a teacher at the University of Boston(1955-60).During this decade he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Cincinnati and Harvard University.The 1950s saw also the emergence of the Beat Generation,but in the tradition-conscious Boston,the influence of the movement was not earth-shattering.,In the 1960s Lowell was active in the civil-rights and antiwar campaigns.He made a number of widely published political gestures,refusing among others to attend the White House Festival of the Arts because of opposition to the Vietnam war.Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making public commitments,he once said.From 1963 to 1970 he was a teacher at Harvard.,In 1972 Lowell divorced from his second wife.During the 1970s Lowell lived in England,where he was a visiting fellow at All Souls College,Oxford(1970),visiting lecturer at the University of Essex(1970-72)and at the University of Kent(1970-1975).In 1973 Lowell published three collections of poetry.,Lowell died of heart failure in a taxi on September 12,1977,in New York.At the time of his death,he was returning to Elizabeth and his daughter,after breaking with Caroline.His last collection was DAY BY DAY,in which he used free verse like he had done in his early works.Lowells record of his domestic history received posthumously in 1978 the National Book Critics Circle Award.,3.,Appreciations on A Poem by Robert Lowell,Memories of West Street and Lepke,Only teaching on Tuesday,book-worming,in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,I hog a whole house on Bostons,hardly passionate Marlborough Street,where even the man,scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,has two children,a beach wagon,a helpmate,and is a