"Oh captain, my captain" in "Dead Poets Society" comes from Whitman's first collection of poems, "Leaves of Grass", which had only 94 entries when it was published in New York in 1855. It includes 12 poems, and by the time of the 1882 edition, the number had increased to 372 poems; the American Civil War broke out in 1861, during this period, he wrote the "Drum Collection" which truly recorded the revolutionary war; after President Lincoln was assassinated, He wrote poems such as "Ah, Captain! My Captain!" and "The Barracks Are Quiet Today" that deeply expressed the American people's grief for Lincoln's assassination, expressing his deep condolences for Lincoln; in the famous "Mysterious" In the poem Trumpeter, he optimistically describes the future free world. Whitman is a famous democratic poet in the United States. He praised democratic freedom and reflected the American people's desire for democracy. He praised the people's creative labor and his poems gave people a positive and energetic spirit. "I walked into the jungle / Because I want life to be meaningful / I want to live profoundly..." is Shide Thoreau's contribution. He grew up in Concord Village, the center of the Transcendentalist Movement near Boston, and his father was a small business owner. Graduated from Harvard University at the age of 20, worked as a teacher and engaged in various manual labor. I met Emerson when I was a student. Under the influence of Emerson, I read the works of Coleridge, Carlyle and others, studied Eastern philosophical thoughts, and at the same time thought in the "self-help" spirit advocated by Emerson, forming a A set of independent insights. Thoreau's writings were based on his experiences in nature. In 1839, he and his brother went boating on the Merrimack River and wrote "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" (1849), which showed his views on nature, life and literary and artistic issues. His masterpiece "Walden" (1854) records the reclusive life he spent on the shores of Walden Pond near Concord from 1845 to 1847. In his paintings, nature, human beings and transcendentalist ideals blend together and become one. He was an important representative of the transcendentalist movement in the 19th century. Thoreau's articles are concise, powerful, simple and natural, rich in ideological content, and unique in American prose in the 19th century. His ideas had a great influence on the British Labor Party, India's Gandhi and the American black leader Martin Luther King. On February 4, 1846, Thoreau went to Concord to give a lecture on "On Thomas Carlyle and His Works" as planned. The lecture was over, but the audience was still unsatisfied and asked the speaker to talk about his life in the forest. Relatively speaking, they seemed to be more interested in this. In order to meet everyone's request, Thoreau prepared a topic called "The History of Myself", which was given on the 10th of that month. Unexpectedly, the audience's enthusiasm was unprecedentedly high, and they all asked him to give the lecture again in the next week's course, so that more people would come to listen. Inspired by this lecture, Thoreau organized his lecture outline, and after a long period of writing, he finally completed Walden, or Life in Woods. A masterpiece handed down from generation to generation. Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" was published in 1854 and is the most popular non-fiction book in American literature in the 19th century. So far, this book has appeared in more than two hundred editions and been translated into many languages. What is puzzling is that during the author's lifetime the book was regarded as a copycat and was often ignored. The first edition of 2,000 copies took more than five years to sell out. It was not until after the author's death that this book gradually received people's attention, and its evaluation began to change, that the significance of Thoreau's thoughts was realized by us. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837 and was a student with excellent academic performance. After graduation, he returned to his hometown to pursue a career in teaching. From 1841 he stopped teaching and turned to writing. With the support of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau took up residence in Concord and began his Transcendentalist practice. During this period, Thoreau gave up writing poetry and began to write essays. He first wrote for the Transcendentalist journal Dial, and later his articles appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. On July 4, 1845, the American Independence Day, 28-year-old Thoreau came alone to the shores of Walden Pond, two miles away from Concord, and built a cabin and lived there. After that, he compiled and published two books based on his observations and thoughts about life at Walden Pond, namely "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and "Walden". lake". While living in Walden Pond, Thoreau was arrested and imprisoned because he opposed Negro Slavery and refused to pay the "poll tax." Although he only stayed in jail for one night before his friends paid taxes on his behalf without his consent to get him out of jail, this night inspired him to think about many issues.
After he came out, some citizens asked him why so many people would rather go to jail than pay taxes. In order to explain this problem, he combined his own personal experience and wrote the famous political treatise "Resistance to Civil Government" (later renamed Civil Disobedience). The form of struggle he promoted that relied on individual strength and "non-violent resistance" had a great influence on India's Gandhi and the American black leader Martin Luther King. In 1947, Thoreau ended his solitary life and returned to his original village. He still maintained his simple life style and devoted his main energy to writing, lecturing and observing local flora and fauna. Sometimes, in order to earn extremely meager living expenses, he occasionally left the village to work in his father's pencil factory for a few days. Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, at the age of 44. In the eyes of his contemporaries at that time, he was just a man with paranoid ideas and weird behavior, a pursuer of Emerson. It was not until the turn of the century that he and his works became widely and deeply recognized. As one of his major works, "Walden" is a record of Thoreau's life and thoughts during two years, two months and two days in the woods of Wadden Pond. In view of the failure of his first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimalek River," he was extra cautious this time and did not rush to publish it but calmed down and re-wrote it to make it more perfect. In the next five years, he revised, supplemented, and improved it again and again. Sometimes, in order to make the content more harmonious and unified, he even changed the entire paragraph. In the book "Walden", there are many chapters about observation records of animals and plants. Thoreau spent a lot of time and energy observing the changes in birds, animals, flowers, grass and trees, so much so that his contemporaries misunderstood this book as a document about nature and ignored the philosophical content. content. In fact, Thoreau's contribution is based on these two aspects. In terms of natural observation, he had already published nature works by such people as Gibert White and John James Audubon. But it was only after Thoreau's work was published that he was recognized as the originator of nature essays. His previous works describing the natural world only appeared in the form of "letters", "narratives" and "magazine articles", reporting their discoveries about the natural world. It was Thoreau who made nature prose independent and gave it new concepts. If we compare Thoreau's passages about birds in Walden with Audubon's Birds of America, it is not difficult to find that Audubon's book is merely a scientific report, while Thoreau's article is Art creation about nature. The true loveliness of Thoreau's books is that he records his observations and experiences about nature in detail and gives them popular philosophical meaning. Thoreau actively advocates a concept of life, a simple lifestyle that is opposed to the increasingly rich modern material life. He can be called a practitioner of transcendentalism. "Walden" is a unique art, it is one of the earliest examples of prose works in modern American literature. Compared with the great writers of the same era, the style of this book is unique and even more full of 20th century prose than the genius writers such as Hawthorne, Melville and Emerson. This characteristic is embodied in the fact that its sentences are straight forward, concise and to the point. They are not at all as loose, sophisticated, pretentious and concrete as mid-Victorian prose, nor are they hazy and abstract. breath. By reading this book, we will be surprised to find that the style of this work written in the 19th century is very close to the works of Hemingway, Henry James and others, except that Thoreau's style is richer.