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重点论文网    文科论文    英语论文    论汤姆斯.哈代的战争诗
创建时间:01-20

论汤姆斯.哈代的战争诗

 The View on the War Poems by Thomas Hardy
Abstract: Thomas Hardy is considered both as the greatest novelist and poet in the transitional period of the 19th century and the 20th century. In this essay it analyses the war poems of Hardy. In his war poems he criticized the meaningless wars, the narrow patriotism and the misery of the human which caused by the brutal wars. Hardy used different writing skills, such as the juxtaposition; satire; and writing from different angles. He sympathized the people in wars; he also took his poems as a weapon to awake the consciousness of the people and strongly resisted rulers who waged wars.

Key Words: War poems; Wexsess; Narrow patriotism; Juxtaposition; Satire

    Thomas Hardy is one of the most famous novelists in the transition period between the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century. His famous novels including Far from the Madding Crowd; The Return of the Native; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Jude the Obscure, and so on. Beside as a significant naturalist novelist, his name as a poet is more and more noticeable. “It was Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973) which first drew attention to Hardy’s position as a major influence on modern English verse”. (Geoffrey Harvey 1986, 47) and Philip Larkin regarded Hardy as the greatest poet in the 20th century with highly respect. (1986, 46) Especially in the 80s, Hardy as the poet is more outstanding than he as a novelist. And in China, Hardy’s novels were read widely, so did his poems.
He was one of the greatest British poets in the late 19th and early 20th century who played a transitional part in the British poetry development. As a prose writer he is the last of the 19th century. As a poet he belongs to the 20th century. Being a transitional poet, Hardy possessed both the characters of Victorian literary and the 20th century. We call him a Victorian because in his first 60 years, he lived in the 19th century, and during the 60 years he formed his own ideas and belief. But he was also a modern man. In many critics’ eyes that Hardy seems much more like a modern writer than the Victorian. Through he lived in the countryside, “he could not help being influenced by the contemporary intellectual climate” (Merryn Williams 2005), such as the Darwinian, which we can not only get the evidence in his series of the character and environment fictions, but also from his poems.
Hardy started his writing career as a poet, and ended with it. But at first he didn’t have a chance to publish his poems, then he turned to the novel creation, but poetry was always he loved. So at the climax of his career, he returned to poetry resolutely and finally he was successes. He thought that writing the novels was just a way of earning and the poetry was the one he pursued in his life.
Hardy has 8 collections of poetry and one epic drama The Dynast. In all his collections, he gave us his feelings, experience, impression and ideas on six basic topics or themes included love; religion; nature; time; death and wars of human natures. In this essay, I just analysis one of the topic of Hardy’s poetry that is the war poems. 
    Hardy had experienced 3 wars in his life: the Franco - Prussian war in 1870-1871; the South African war in 1899-1902; the First World War in 1914-1918. In fact he had a contradiction view on wars. On one hand he was interested in the ancient wars, when he was young he got the ideas of wars from the folk and literary works, and he was yearning for the war field where the heroes; the grand and magnificent fighting scenes. On the other hand, he was worried about the painful effect that wars bought to the human. He created almost 40 poems about his feeling of the crucial wars. His novel The Trumpet-Major and The Dynast are both about the wars. The Dynast was setting in the Napoleonic war. As the amplifying of his reading and the breaking of the Franco - Prussian war in 1870, his idea about wars had changed dramatically. He began to consider the differences between the ancient wars and the modern wars. “He thought the warriors fighting for honor in the ancient wars and they had a character of frank and forthright, while in the modern wars, there are only cheating, savage and brutality.” (颜学军2006) We can find such idea in his poem Then and Now:
When battles were fought 
With a chivalrous sense of should and ought, 
In spirit men said, 
"End we quick or dead, 
Honour is some reward! 
Let us fight fair -- for our own best or worst; 
So, Gentlemen of the Guard, 
Fire first!" 
In the first section he described the scene of ancient war and they were fight for ideals and honor even at the cost of their life “End we quick or dead”. And in the last section he contrasted the modern war with the ancient war:
But now, behold, what 
Is war with those where honour is not! 
Rama laments 
Its dead innocents; 
Herod howls: "Sly slaughter 
Rules now! Let us, by modes once called accurst, 
Overhead, under water, 
Stab first."
In the poem the modern war is just revenge, killing and betray. The honor and sprite both had gone with time. Such juxtaposition of the two expressed he was disillusioned in the war. 
However, we must confess that Hardy had a limited view on the wars in the poem. He took the war in the past as fighting for honor, for example, the knights. But in fact it was not true. Hardy was deeply infl

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