SECTION IV

Time-35 minutes

27 Questions

　

Directions: Each passage in this section is followed by a group of questions to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage. For some of the questions, more than one of the choices could conceivably answer the question. However, you are to choose the best answer, that is, the response that most accurately and completely answers the question, and blacken the corresponding space on your answer sheet.

Three kinds of study have been performed on Byron. There is the biographical study-the very valuable examination of Byron's psychology and the events in his life. Escarpit's 1958 work is an example of this kind of study and biographers to this day continue to speculate about Byron's life. Equally valuable is the study of Byron as a figure important in the history of ideas; Russell and Praz have written studies of this kind. Finally, there are studies that primarily consider Byron's poetry. Such inerary studies are valuable however only when they avoid concentrating solely on analyzing the verbal shadings of Byron's poetry to the exclusion of any discussion of biographical considerations. A study with such a concentration would be of questionable value because Byron's poetry, for the most part, is simply not a poetry of subtle verbal most part, is simply not a poetry of subtle verbal meanings. Rather, on the whole, Byron's poems record the emotional pressure of certain moments in his life. I believe we cannot often read a poem of Byron抯 we often can one of Shakespeare's without wondering what events or circumstances in his life prompted him to write it.

No doubt the fact that most of Byron's poems cannot be convincingly read as subtle verbal creations indicates that Byron is not a "great" poet. It must be admitted too that Byron's literary craftsmanship is irregular and often his temperament disrupts even his lax literrary method (although the result an absence of method has a significant purpose: it functions as a rebuke to a cosmos that Byron feels he cannot understand). If Byron is not a "great" poet his poetry is nonetheless of extraordinary interest to us because of the pleasure it gives us: Our main pleasure in reading Byron's poetry is the contact with a singular personality. Reading his work gives us illumination-self-understanding-after we have seen our weaknesses and aspirations mirrored in the personality we usually find in the poems. Anyone who thinks that this kind of illumination is not a genuine reason for reading a poet should think carefully about why we read Donne's sonnets.

It is Byron and Byron's idea of himself that hold his work together (and that enthralled early nineteenth-century Europe Different characters speak in his poems, but finally it is usually he himself who is speaking a far cry from the impersonal poet Keats. Byron's poetry alludes to) Greek and Roman myth in the context of contemporary affairs, but his work remains generally of a piece because of his close presence in the poetry. In sum, the poetry is a shrewd personal performance, and to shut out Byron the man is to fabricate a work of pseudocriticism.

1. Which one of the following titles best expresses the main idea of the passage?

(A) An Absence of Method. Why Byron is Not a "Great" Poet

(B) Byron: The Recurring Presence in Byron's Poetry

(C) Personality and Poetry. The Biographical Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Poetry

(D) Byron's Poetry: Its Influence on the imagination of Early-Nineteenth-Century Europe

共8页: 1 [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] 下一页