(2) The one image in this poem: This poem is probably the most famous of all imagist poems. In two lines it combines a sharp visual image or two juxtoposed images (意象叠加) "Petals on a wet, black bough" with an implied meaning. The faces in the dim light of the Metro suggest both the impersonality and haste of city life and the greater transience of human life itself. The word "apparition" is a well-chosen one which has a two-fold meaning: Firstly, it means a visible appearance of something real. Secondly, it builds an image of a ghostly sight, a delusive and unexpected appearance.
(3) Pound uses the fewest possible words to convey an accurate image, which is the principle of the Imagist poetry. This poem looks to be a modern adoption of the haiku form of Japanese poetry which adapts the 3-line, 17 syllable and where the title is an intergral part of the whole. The poem succeeds largely because of its internal rhymes: station/apparition; Metro/petals/wet; crowd/bough. Its form was determined by the experience that inspired it, involving organically rather than being chosen arbitrarily.

　　2. The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
(1) Theme: It is an adaptation from the Chinese Li Po (701-762) named Rihaku in Japanese, which, by means of vivid images and shifting tones, describes the silky shy tenderness of the young wife writing to her absent husband the river-merchant.
The history of her feelings for her husband develops as the following: her bashfulness when she was a young girl, her spiritual affinity with him during the phase of their marriage, the material nature of her love at the time of his departure as well as her longing for his return when she grows old.
(2) use of images and allusion: In this poem Pound uses images such as "hair" "grown moss" "falling leaves" to suggest the passing years and growing age. Besides, Pound employs an allusion to "a story of a woman waiting for her husband on a hill." In Pound's version, the line emphasizes the otherworldly nature of her love during her marriage.

　　3. A Pact
This poem is about Pound's evaluation on Whitman. Pound started to find some agreement between "Whitmanesque" free verse, which he had attacked for its carelessness in composition, and the "verse libre" of the Imagists who showed more concern for formal values. In the poem Pound affirmed Whitman's contribution in the experiment on the form and content of American poetry and expressed his eagerness to communicate with Whitman..

Ⅱ. Robert Lee Frost (l874-l963)

一． 一般识记  His life and writing:
Frost is an important poet in the 20th century .He won the Pulitzer Prize four times and read poetry at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961.
He spent his early childhood in the Far West and later the family moved to New Hampshire. He went to Harvard but left in the middle because of his tuberculosis. When he was 28, he began to venture on writing.
二． 识记   His major works:
His first book A Boy's Will (1913), whose lyrics trace a boy's development from self-centered idealism to maturity, is marked by an intense but restrained emotion and the characteristic flavor of New Eng1and life. His second book, a volume of poems North of Boston (1914), is described by the author as "a book of people," which shows a brilliant insight into New England character and the background that formed it. Many of his major poems are collected in this volume, such as "Mending the Wall," in which Frost saw man as learning from nature the
zones of his own 1imitations, and "Home Buria1," which probes the darker corners of individual lives in a situation where man cannot accept the facts of his condition. Mountain Interval (19l6) contains such characteristic poems as "The Road Not Taken," "Birches". New Hampshire (1923) that won Frost the first of four Pulitzer Prizes includes "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", which stems from the ambiguity of the speaker's choice between safety and the unknown. The collection West-Running Brook (1928) poses disturbing uncertainties about man's prowess and importance. Collected Poems (l930) and A Further Range (1935) gathered Frost's second and third Pulitzer Prizes. Both translate modern upheaval into poetic materia1 the poet could skillfully control. Frost's fourth Pulitzer Prize was awarded for A Witness Tree (l942) which includes "The Gift Outright," the poem he later recited at President Kennedy's inauguration. Frost took up a religious question most notably in "After Apple-Picking:" can a man's best efforts ever satisfy God? A Masque of Reason (l945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) are comic-serious dramatic narratives, in both of which biblical characters in modern settings discuss ethics and man's re1ations to God.
三． 领会   1. His thematic concerns:
(1) Generally Frost is considered a regional poet whose subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in New England. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the 1oneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. But first and foremost Frost is concerned with his love of life and his belief in a serenity that only came from working usefully, which he practiced himself throughout his life.
(2) Frost wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man's life: the individual's relationships to himself, to his fellow-man, to world, and to his God. Profound meanings are hidden underneath the plain language and simple form. His poetry, by using nature as a storehouse of analogy and symbol, often probes mysteries of darkness and irrationality in the bleak and chaotic landscapes of an indifferent universe when men stand alone, unaided and perplexed.

　　2. His nature poems:
Robert Frost is mainly known for his poems concerning New England life. He learned from the tradition, especially the familiar conventions of nature poetry and of classical pastoral poetry, and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression. A poem so conceived thus becomes a symbo1 or metaphor, a careful, loving exploration of reality, in Frost's version, "a momentary stay against confusion." Many of his poems are fragrant with natural quality. Images and metaphors in his poems are drawn from the rural world, the simple country 1ife and the pastoral 1andscape. However, profound ideas are delivered under the disguise of the p1ain language and the simple form, for what Frost did is to take symbols from the limited human world and the pastoral landscape to refer to the great world beyond the rustic scene. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the 1oneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. But first and foremost Frost is concerned with his love of life and his belief in a serenity that only came from working usefully, which he practiced himself throughout his life.

　　3. Frost's style in language:
By using simple spoken language and conversational rhythms, Frost achieved an effortless grace in his style. He combined traditiona1 verse forms -- the sonnet, rhyming coup1ets, blank verse with a clear American local speech rhythm, the speech of New England farmers with its idiosyncratic diction and syntax. In verse form he was assorted; he wrote in both the metrical forms and the free verse, and sometimes he wrote in a form that borrows freely from the merits of both, in a form that might be called semi-free or semi-conventional.
四． 应用  Selected Readings:  　l. After Apple-Picking
This poem is so vivid a memory of experience on the farm in which the end of labor leaves the speaker with a sense of completion and fulfilment yet finds him blocked from success by winter's approach and physical weariness. On the one hand, Frost expressed his love of life and his belief in a serenity that only came from working usefully. On the other hand, the poet was concerned with individual's relationships to himself, to his fellow-man, to world, and to his God. He took up a religious question: can a man's best efforts ever satisfy God?
Besides this is a typical lyric poem describing the pastoral landscape in New England. Symbols and images from the pastoral landscape to refer to the great world beyond the rustic scene.
The language of this poem is characterized by simple spoken language and conversational rhythms, the combination of traditiona1 verse forms -- the sonnet, rhyming coup1ets, blank verse with the speech of New England farmers with its idiosyncratic diction and syntax. Frost wrote in both the metrical forms and the free verse, in a form that might be called semi-free or semi-conventional.

　　2. The Road Not Taken
(1) The theme: This poem seems to be about the poet, walking in the woods in autumn, hesitating for a long time and wondering which road he should take since they are both pretty. In reality, this is a meditative poem symbolically written. It concerns the important decisions which one must take in the course of life, when one must give up one desirable thing in order to possess another. Then, whatever the outcome, one must accept the consequences of one's choice for it is not possible to go back and have another chance to choose differently. In the poem, he followed the one which was not frequently travelled by. Symbolically, he chose to follow an unusual, solitary life; perhaps he was speaking of his choice to become a poet rather than some common profession. But he always remembered the road which he might have taken, and which would have given him a different kind of life.
(2) Language: This poem is written in classic five-line stanzas, with the rhyme scheme a-b-a-a-b and conversational rhythm. The poet uses "the road " to symbolize life's journey.

　　3. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
(1) The theme: This is a deceptively simple poem in which the speaker literally stops his horse in the winter twilight to observe the beauty of the forest scene, and then is moved to continue his journey. Philosophically and symbolically, it stems from the ambiguity of the speaker's choice between safety and the unknown.
(2) This poem suggests deep thought about death and about life. The strange attraction of death to man is symbolized by the dark woods silently filled up with the coldness of snow. Frost frequently uses the technique of symbolism in his poetry. Some critics think that the "village" stands for the human world, "woods" for nature, "horse" for the animal world, and "promises" for obligations. The poem represents a moment of relaxation from the burdensome journey of life, an almost aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation of natural beauty which is wholesome and restorative against the chaotic existence of modern man.
(3) The last stanza shows a kind of sad, sentimental but also strong and responsible feeling. The attraction of the beauty of the nature makes the speaker stop in the journey. He finally turns away from it, with a certain weariness and yet with quiet determination, to face the needs of life. This stresses the central conflict of the poem between man's enjoyment of nature's beauty and his responsibility in society. This shows a man's despairing courage to seek out the meaning of life.
In the last stanza, the three adjectives "lovely" "dark" "deep" reinforce one another. Not only do they represent beauty and terror of nature symbolized by the dark woods, but they also reveal the speaker's love for nature and human isolation from it. Besides, the word "sleep" here means "die" symbolically.
Ⅲ. Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

　　Eugene O'Neill is unquestionably America's greatest playwright. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times and was the only dramatist ever to win a Nobel Prize (1936). He is widely acclaimed "founder of the American drama."

一． 一般识记
His life and writing career: O'Neill was born in New York on October 16, 1888 into a theatrical family. He grew up in New London, Connecticut, and spent his early years with his parents on theatrica1 road tours. He received university education for one year and later traveled all over the world. He avidly read up on dramatic literature, and cultivated an interest in play writing. In 1914, he attended Professor George Pierce Baker's drama workshop at Harvard, where his career as a dramatist began. Since then, O'Neill had been wholly dedicated to the mission as a dramatist.
二． 识记His major plays:

 During all his career as a dramatist, O'Neill wrote and published about forty-nine plays altogether of various lengths. He wrote some one-act melodramatic plays at first, including Bound East for Cardiff (1916), which describes the dying sailor Yank and his dream about the security and peace which could never exist. 　　　O'Neill's first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, made a great hit and won him the first Pulitzer Prize. Its theme is the choice between life and death, the interaction of subjective and objective factors, and this theme is dramatized more explicitly in The Straw (1921) and Anna Christie (1921). Anna Christie is more of a success because it deploys the developing complexity of O'Neill's personal vision, showing us that life is a closed circle of possibi1ities from which it is impossible to escape.
Between 1920 and 1924 came his prominent achievements in symbolic expressionism: The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), All God's chillun Got Wings (1924), and Desire Under the 　Elms (1924). These plays are daring forays into race relations, class conflicts, sexual bondage, social critiques, and American tragedies on the Greek model. What is more, the expressionistic techniques are used in these plays to highlight the theatrical effect of the rupture between the two sides of an individual human being, the private and the public. Built on the success of these expressionistic experimentations, O'Neill reached out to extend his mastery of the stage and worked up to the summit of his career. He concerned himself with some non--realistic forms to contain his tragic vision in a
number of his plays, such as The Great God Brown (l926), which fuses symbolism, poetry, and the affirmation of a pagan idea1ism to show how materialistic civilization denies the life--giving impulses and destroys the genuine artist, and Lazarus Laughed (1927), which makes full use of the Bible, Greek choruses, Elizabethan tirades, expressionist masks, populous crowd scenes, and orchestrate laughter. With the winning of the third Pulitzer Prize for Strange Interlude (l928), O'Neill consolidated his experience of two decades of playwriting and paved the way to the honor of the Nobel Prize in 1936.
Late in his life, he produced the best and greatest plays of the modern American theater. The Iceman Cometh (l946) proves to be a masterpiece in the way it is a complex, ironic, deeply moving exploration of human existence, written out of a profound insight into human nature and constructed with tremendous skill and logic. Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956) can be read autobiographically. However, like most great works of literature, the play reaches beyond its immediate subject, dedicated not only to the life of the American family, but also "to the life of Man, to Life itself." As a product of hard-won art, Long Day's Journey Into Night has gained its status as a world classic and simultaneously marks the climax of O'Neill's literary career and the coming of age of American drama.

三． 领会1.Themes: O'Neill is always remembered for his tragic view of life and most of his plays deal with the basic issues of human existence and predicament: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration, etc. His characters in the plays are described as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives in different ways, some through love, some through religion, others through revenge, but all meet disappointment and despair. As a playwright, O'Neill himself was constantly wrestling with these issues and struggling with the perplexity about the truth of life. He was searching for an answer both psychologically and artistically, and his dramatic thought fol1owed a tragic pattern running through all his plays, from a celebration and exaltation of "pipe dreams," the romantic dream so to speak, to the doubt about the reality of the dream or the inevitability of the defeat. So, his final dramas became" transcendental," in the way that the dramatization of man's effort in finding the secret of life results in a reconciliation with the tragic impossibility.

　　2.O'Neill's experimentations in dramatic art: O'Neill's inventiveness seemingly knew no limits. He was constantly experimenting with new styles and forms for his plays.
(1) He introduced the realistic or even the naturalistic aspect of life into the American theater. He borrowed freely grom the best traditions of European dramas, be it Greek tragedies, or the realism of Ibsen, or the expressionism of Stringberg, and fused them into the organic of his own. In those expressionistic plays, abstract and symbolic stage sets are used to set off against the emotional inner selves and subjective states of mind; lighting and music are employed to convey the changes of mood.
(2) He borrowed freely from modern literary techniques such as the stream-of -consciousness device with the help of which he managed to reveal the emotional and psychological complexities of modern man. He made use of setting and state property to help in his dramatic representation
(3) As to his language, O'Neill frequently wrote the lines in dialect, or spelled words in ways which indicate a particular accent or manner of speech. This, sometimes, makes his plays difficult to read, but when they are spoken aloud, the sense becomes clear and the meaning is amplified by the accent.
O'Neill's ceaseless experimentation enriched American drama and influenced later playwrights.

　　3.Expressionism: It is used to describe the works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision, transforming nature rather than imitating it. In literature it is often considered a revolt against realism and naturalism, a seeking to achieve a psychological or spiritual reality rather than to record external events.
In drama, the expressionist work was characterized by a bizarre distortion of reality. Expressionist writers's concern was with general truths rather than with particular situations, hence they explored in their plays the predicaments of representative symbolic types rather than of fully developed individualized characters. Emphasis was laid on the internal, on an individual's mental state-the emotional content, the subjective reactions of characters, and symbolic or abstract representations of reality; hence the imitation of life is replaced in Expressionist drama by the ecstatic evocation of states of mind. In America, Eugene O'Neille's Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, etc. are typical plays that employ Expressionism to highlight the theatrical effect of the rupture between the two sides of an individual human being, the private and the public.