Other poems dealing with death: “My life closed twice before its close”
I heard a fly buzz—when I died"(我死时听到了苍蝇的嗡嗡声): She began to conceive of the process of dying.
3.Express a passionate and eternal love in a mournful tone.
“Wild nights—wild nights”  (p137)
4.see nature both kind and cruel.
Extol the magnificence of sunrise in “I’ll tell you how sun rise”, express mixed feeling of joy and grief at the coming of spring in “These are the days when birds come back”).
  In the meantime, reveal the cold indifference of nature. In “Apparently with no surprise”, Frost kills a happy flower without being punished while both the sun and God look on.
5.On the ethical level, emphasize free-will and human responsibility.
In “To fight aloud” and “A triumph may be”, she took the cause and cure as mainly within the individual. The individual’s highest duty is to resist anything that will do harm to man’s self-respect and spiritual heritage.
6.Show concern for the social politics.
 show sympathy for the poor and the weak in “The beggar lad dies early”(讨饭的小伙子夭逝了"If I can stop one heart from breaking” .
attack over emphasis on materialism and commercialism, give warm response to the expansion of America.
7.holds that beauty, truth and goodness are one.
In “I died for beauty”(我为美而死), discusses beauty and truth, concludes that the two are one.
Style:
1. Her poetry abounds in telling images. In the best of her poems, every word is a picture. So she is regarded as the precursor of Imagism poetry.
2. Her poetic idiom is noted for its conciseness, directness and plainest words.
Difference between Whitman and Dickinson: see p .133

Chapter Seven
Edgar Allan Poe （艾德加• 爱伦•坡）
(Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque 怪诞和阿拉伯风格的故事)
Life:
Poe’s childhood was a miserable one. When still very young, he lost both his parents, and was left in the care of John Allan, a Scottish-born trader, who was serious, strict, bad-tempered, and always angrily called Poe “the waster”. So they didn’t get along well.
At 17, he entered University of Virginia, but was indulged in drinking and gambling, and had at last $2,000 gambling debts. Furious, John Allan pulled him out of college. Then he went West Point, but was expelled because of his misbehavior. At 27, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia. As Poe earned a little money, they led a poor life. Poe drank heavily and could not even provide a warm fire for his young wife, who was dying of T•B. In 1847, Virginia died and Poe began to wander off in the middle of the night. He was usually found weeping by Virginia’s tomb. Two years later, he took a trip to the north. But one day, he was found lying on a pavement, unconscious. After four days of staying in the alcoholic ward of a hospital, he died. He was drunk and in poverty all his life.
Literary Career:
1. A poet of first rank
 His poetic theory:
a. Chief aim is beauty. Namely, to produce a feeling of beauty in the reader. Beauty can excite the sensitive soul to tears, so melancholy is the most reasonable of all the poetic tones. He concludes that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world.
b. Calls for “pure poetry”. He is opposed to the heresy of didactic. That is to say, the art does not lie in its message, not in what is being said, but in the way it is said. He stresses rhythm, defines true poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty”. It has great influence on the devotees of “art for art’s sake”. (Wilde)
Poems: peculiar, dreary, gloomy, ghastly, beautiful
Sonnet—to science （致科学）(science is personified. It is treated as a villain, because it has relieved the world of a lot of its myth and imagination. The universe was endowed with myth, and Poe tried to restore it to its beginning.)
Israfel (伊滋拉菲尔) Israfel, a perfect poet sings wildly well in heaven with his lute. This is an ideal world in the upper air.
To Helen (献给海伦)
The city in the sea
The Raven(乌鸦) A sense of melancholy over the death of a beloved beautiful young woman.
 On a snowstorm winter night, a young man was grieving for his lost lover. Then a raven, an ominous thing, stopped outside his window. Every time the young man said something, the raven answered “Nevermore”. The steady repetition of this word turned the young man gloomier.
2. A great writer of fiction  (He was interested in the subconscious condition of the mind. He depicts it with great accuracy. Thus he was regarded as father of psychoanalytic criticism. )

Fictions: two kinds: horror and detective
Horror fiction: (about resurrection, samsara, of souls, the terror of death, abnormal psychology.)
  His short fiction with its effects of terror and its supernatural trappings, made him a household name for American readers.
  His tales turn on the central theme that human mind would be healthy and alive if it were incapable of thought. But since it is mind and does possess the power of introspection and self-knowledge, then that very power and knowledge spell its death. In other words, thought is the constituent of the mind, but the act of thinking can be its undoing.(the cause of its ruin)
In his opinion, every mind is half mad or capable of slipping into insanity. So his fictional characters are mostly neurotics with no sense of identity, no place or origin, even no names. They are dislocated, alienated from society, wandering from place to place. They were driven to evil or insanity by unreasonable, irrational force, which to Poe is an elementary impulse in man.
Poe was sensitive enough to feel the pressure of the world, and his novels were about the disintegration of the self. So he was regarded as “a writer of nerves”. His exploration of mental and moral disease had opened up for literature a new order of existence.
The Fall of the House of Usher（厄舍古屋的倒塌）
Outline: A brother and a sister live in a decaying home. The sister with whom the brother may commit incest is so ill that the brother buried her alive and puts the coffin away in one part of the house. Then on a stormy night, the sister breaks out of her coffin and dies in the embrace of the brother, who also dies. The house collapses too.
Black Cat.（黑猫）A young man lived a comfortably off life. He was drunk most of the time. Every time he had much alcohol, he tortured his cat. One day, he even hanged it to death. That night, a fire broke out, and he was burnt to death. It is a story about wicked revenge.
The Masque of the Red Death （红色死亡的化装舞会）A pestilence called red death came to a party of upper class people and spread it to these coward. People died one after another.
The Cask of Amontillado Foe （一桶酒的故事）An Italian deceived his enemy into his basement, and suffocated him to death in the wall. The police came to his house, and he himself led them to his basement and showed them where he was.
Ligeie （利盖娅）
Detective story (He was regarded as father of detective story. In his story he employed induction, deduction and psychoanalysis, which showed that he was cool-headed. His story followed the pattern of locked-room-puzzle.
The Purloined Letter （被窃的信件）
The Gold Bud （金甲虫）
The Murders in the Rue Morque （莫格街凶杀案）
Chapter Eight
The Age of Realism (came in the latter half of the 19thC following the Civil War)

Background:
1. Labor force: After the Civil War, with the abolition of the slavery system, black slaves were set free. Great number of immigrants arrived, farmers moved to towns. Those provided enough labor force.
2. Natural Resources: Petroleum was found in sizeable quantity.