for an after-life in paradise. Although she believes in God, she sometimes doubts His benevolence. Closely related to Dickinson‘s religious poetry are her poems concerning death and immortality. The themes rang over the physical as well as the psychological and emotional aspects of death. She looks at death from the point of view of both the living and the dying. Love is another subject Dickinson dwells on. One group of her love poems depicts the suffering and frustration love can cause. The other group of love poems focuses on the physical aspect of desire, in which Dickinson deals with, allegorically, the influence of the male authorities over the female. The poet stresses the power of physical attraction and expresses a mixture of fear and fascination for the mysterious magnetism between sexes. More than five hundred poems Dickinson wrote are about nature, in which her general skepticism about the relationship between man and nature is well revealed. On the one hand, as her romantic and transcendental predecessors she believes that a mythical bond between man and nature exists and that nature reveals to man things about mankind and universe. On the other hand, she feels strongly about nature‘s indifference to life and interests of human beings. Dickinson sees nature as both benevolent and cruel.
12. Comment on Eugene O‘Neil‘s dramatic experiments.
Answer: O‘Neil was a tireless experimentalist in dramatic art. He was constantly experimenting with new styles and forms for his plays, especially during the twenties when Expressionism was in full swing. Between 1920 and 1924 came his outstanding 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 the expressionistic experimentations, O‘Neil reached out to extend his mastery of the stage and worked up to the climax 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 (1926) and Lazarus Laughed (1927).
13. Comment on Robert Lee Frost‘s poetic style.
Answer: Robert Lee Frost has long been well known as a lyrical poet. It is difficult to classify him with the old or the new. He did not break up with the traditional rhythm and iambic pattern nor made any experiment on form. Instead, he learned from the tradition and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression. Images and metaphors in his poems are taken form the simple rural life and the pastoral landscape. Profound ideas are revealed under the disguise of the plain language and the simple form. What Frost did was to take symbols from the limited human world and the pastoral landscape to reach the universal meaning beyond the rustic scene. By using simple spoken language and conversational rhythms and treating seemingly trivial subjects, Frost achieves an effortless grace in his style. He
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combines traditional verse forms with a clear American local speech rhythm. He writes in both the metrical forms and the free verse, and sometimes he writes in a form that might be called semi-free or semi-conventional.
14. Analyze the themes in Eugene O‘Neil‘s plays.
Of all O‘Neil‘s plays, most of them are tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of human existence and plight: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration, etc. As a playwright, O‘Neil himself was making his lifelong endeavor to find the truth of life. In his writing, he is looking for an answer both psychologically and artistically, and his dramatic thought follows a tragic pattern running through all his plays, from a celebration of ―pipe dreams‖ 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 endeavor in finding the meaning of life results in a tragic failure.
15．What do you think of the image of Gatsby? What does his tragedy show?
Answer: The Great Gatsby shows the realistic picture of Jazz Age. The loss of an ideal and the disillusionment are exploited fully in the personal tragedy. Gatsby is a mythical figure whose intensity of dream partakes of a state of mind that embodies America itself; Gatsby‘s failure magnifies to a great extent the end of the American dream.
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