Although his letters rarely involve state affairs, they mainly talk about literature. It is this strong and unremitting ideological pursuit that makes his poems full of many (sometimes conflicting) metaphors. Before another despair came, he seemed to despair of life and poetry.
Hart Clarence was born in Graetz, Ohio, the only child in his family. His parents were rich, but they divorced when he was ten years old. As a child, he liked fantasy and dressing up well. He never forgot what he called "the curse of divorced parents" in Quaker Hill. He/Kloc-left school in Cleveland, Ohio at the age of 0/7.
Clay began to write poems when he was at school. There are many metaphors and images in his early poems. This is not only the strength of his mature works, but also the reason why his works are obscure.
Clays worked odd jobs for several years, worked as a clerk in new york, worked as an advertising writer and so on. He didn't do all these unsatisfactory jobs for a long time. During this period, he traveled to Europe, Cuba and other places alone or with his mother. In 19 19, the environment forced him to accept the job offered to him by his father in a shop in Akron. He didn't get along well with his father, so the job didn't last long. 1920, he finally settled in new york and tried to make a living by writing poems under the sponsorship of the banker Otto Kahn. 1923, he completed his first important long poem "The Wedding of Faust and Helen", which was later included in his first collection of poems "The White Building" (1926). In order to enable him to write poetry bridge, Kahn lent him money. Clay lived in Songdo Island near Cuba for several weeks and wrote some beautiful lyrics. These poems became an important part of the bridge. In two years of despair, he didn't write a word, then went to San Francisco and France, and had a poor harvest season. 1After returning to the United States in the autumn of 929, he completed the bridge by his own will rather than inspiration. 193 1 year, he won the Guggenheim research fund and went to Mexico to write an epic about montague [2], but at this time he was exhausted in Jiang Lang and faced with a complete mental breakdown. He wrote several short poems and formed Xiguan: a bunch of islands and broken towers;
At dawn, the rope with the bell pulls God.
Let me go, just like I left someone behind.
Death knell-wandering in the aisle of the cathedral
From the abyss to the cross of Jesus, out of the stairs of hell
It's getting colder and colder.
Although he officially married a woman for the first time on 1932, his sense of failure is irreparable. 1On April 27th, 932, on the way back to the United States from Mexico, he drowned himself from the passenger ship Orizaba.
It can be seen from his early poems that he is very familiar with the languages of Shakespeare, Weber and Marlowe. This has a great influence on his excellent metaphor style in his later period. French poet Jules Lafarge and his allegorical tone also attracted him. He translated La Vogue's collection of complaints. The influence of this symbolist master on him is very obvious in Chaplin and Black Hand Drumm. He wrote in Chaplin:
We made a moderate adjustment,
Be content with this casual comfort
As slow as the wind.
Put it in a big pocket.
However, the road he insists on is optimistic. He used James I's rich language to affirm Eliot's total denial of life in The Waste Land. 1923, he wrote in a letter: "I regard Eliot as a starting point and move in a completely different direction. As far as his situation is concerned, his pessimism makes sense, but I will try my best to use the knowledge and skills I can learn from him to set a more optimistic or (if I have to say this in an age full of doubts) more intoxicating goal. "
Clay's psychological guidance, but still style guidance, is Whitman.
Yes, Whitman
Raise your pace again and keep moving forward.
Not soon, not suddenly.-No, never from you.
Open my hand.
Whitman—
That's it-
Melville gave him a lot of inspiration and made symbolic use of the sea and its image. In the poem "Sailing" in "White Building", he used this image very powerfully:
But the eternal great moment,
The boundless flood, churning with the wind,
Sweep like brocade ...
In the marriage between Faust and Helen, he used conscious optimism to achieve his grand goal of transcending the material world. The three parts of the poem describe Faust as "my own symbol, an eternal figure full of poetry or imagination" in modern language, and remain faithful to Helen's "incarnation of this beauty". This poem seems to reach its climax in an extraordinary optimistic atmosphere under extremely unfavorable conditions:
Especially the praise over the years, they
Volatile bleeding on both hands, repeated stretching and slapping.
Imagination transcends despair,
Beyond trading, words and prayers.
Language, structure and image are all obscure. In the article "General Goals and General Theories", Clay tried to explain the structure and image of this language. His attempt is to build a bridge between classical experience and different realities in today's boiling and chaotic world, so I found' Helen' riding a tram, and people proposed to her and lured her to a bacchanalia party. Accompanied by a jazz band, the party was moved to the roof garden of a metropolis. I think the "purification" of the fall of Troy can be compared with the "purification" in the recent world war. He defended the obscurity of language and metaphor, saying that the structure of this poem is "an organic principle based on metaphorical logic". The implication is that metaphor is more powerful than logical thinking because it is more direct than logical thinking. It gives us some experience, not an idea. Metaphor has its own logic, which is completely different from thinking logic. To this end, he quoted an example from this poem, explaining that "the speed and height of an airplane" is much better implied by the idea of "moving quickly", because it also implies the contrast between the speed of an airplane and the static uplift of the earth. At the end of the paper, he said: "Language builds towers and bridges, but it always flows and changes as usual. "His explanation is enlightening, but it doesn't solve the basic problem of image congestion, and Clays doesn't mention the problem of auditory resonance. Although auditory resonance does not attach importance to interpretation, it runs through the whole poem. Even in the most difficult places, it can give the whole poem a sense of coherence and hint at an intoxicating goal.
"Sailing in White House" is a group of six poems, which will draw a transcendental conclusion-"There is no such thing in the world." The last paragraph is a eulogy-ecstasy must not be limited by time and the real world, but should be metaphysical and deformed in the imaginary world:
This tangible word is what it captures.
Static willow, fixed in it.
This is a dry answer.
His accent can only be heard in the farewell speech. In his letter, he clearly explained the importance of the bridge to clay. He compared it with Aeneas [3] in history and culture. "It is at least a symphony with an epic theme" and "its structure is as complicated as The Waste Land." Some critics think this is a romantic story with a huge project, but it doesn't make any sense. However, it is obvious that Clay's ultimate position as a poet must be judged according to this poem. In fact, Clay himself wants to do so.
Part of the ending of this poem was written in advance. Clay's conception of this poem has long been in his mind. He regards this poem as a "mysterious synthesis" of "America" "History and facts, places, etc. Everything must be transformed into an abstract form that can almost play a thematic role alone. " The Brooklyn Bridge has become a symbol of hope and the future, and the United States is moving towards Atlantis. This trip awakened people and places in American historical legends. Columbus, Boca Hondas, Rip, Van Winkle, Whitman, Melville, Poe and others all appear in the poem. The "Tunnel" part shows the disillusionment before reaching the bright Atlantis and the legendary epic hell, "-a song, a bridge of fire! Is it China? In the preface to Poetry: To Brooklyn Bridge, Clay put into practice the principle he put forward in Modern Poetry: "Unless robot poetry enters poetry naturally like a tree, poetry will completely lose its contemporary function. The first paragraph "Welcome Maria" is followed by "Preface Poetry", trying to introduce machines into poetry. In this passage, we can see that Columbus, inspired by the ideal of combining Chinese and Western cultures, arrived in China from the West Road: "It was dawn there-/Oh, our Indian kingdom was bathed in sunshine,/but all this was lost. Let this gondola dock quickly! "At this moment, new land must be discovered, and the modern bridge must lead to a world that imagination has never explored. Then, "there is a coast beyond desire! "
The second paragraph "Bohatan's daughter" is Amelia's symbolic "body". In this passage, there is a pure Boca Hondas, and all five sections describe the image of new york's declining materialism moving towards the idealized West, from the present to the past (and the future). In this process, the lover of the protagonist Boca Hondas was integrated. Through his sacrifice at the stake, he was reborn in a spiritual journey: "wrapped in that fire, I saw more guardians wake up/-flickering and rushing to the mountain like a trend."
The third paragraph "The Short Robe" is about the clipper sailing to China in the19th century: "Breaking the waves, the bottom of the boat is covered with green grass/locked in the ingenuity of the wind, all heading east." The fourth paragraph mainly describes that the pilot is the sailor's successor: "Cross the bright and clear sky, spread out, never sleep/cut off the edge of the last ray of light."
In the fifth paragraph, there are "three songs" with the theme of women, that is, "Body". In the sixth paragraph, Quaker Hill lamented the decline of the spirit of New England with autobiographical materials: "This used to be the land of hope."
In Tunnel, the settlement leading to hell is symbolically depicted as the settlement leading to the new york subway. "Whose head is swinging on the bulging iron railing? Whose body is smoking along the old railway track? " The tortured soul is cursed because it is a citizen of new york, and is routinely insulted every day. The end of this paragraph imitates Eliot:
You know, our painful kiss,
Ah, son of fire
Collect-
This poem gropes its way forward outdoors, and in the last section of Atlantis, the bridge is completed:
Ah, your understanding, it's a leap
Enter the intelligent area where larks return;
Where the rope can reach.
Sing in pairs in a pupa ...