| Abstract: | English poetry teaching may begin with the analysis of the essence of poetry by examining the
fundamental differences among itself, prose, drama, and novel as four genres. Western literature,traditionally, approaches poetry by the method of “form and content,” but students in Chinese culture are generally used to the method of “language and Hsin-ching (the heart-mind).” Hsin-ching means the phenomenon of the existential state of the current situations of Hsin’s activities; briefly, itindicates
Hsin’s activities or human experience. The poet uses his poetic inner language to manifest the
substance, the static form, and the dynamic changes of his experience and then reveals, in the written language, the idiosyncratic features of his poetic creation. To explore poetry is equal to the analytical reading of the poet’s idiosyncratic use of the written language, his innerlanguage of recognition, and his Hsin-ching as the substantial experience itself. To teach a poem, basically, is to analyze its literature,
its language, its Hsin-ching, and the interrelation among the previous three realms, which are,apparently, different from one another and, yet, tightly combined into one. Affected by Greek rhetoric,English poetry teaching is chiefly based on the idea of classification in distinguishing the sound and the sense, the function of words, and the figures of speech, such as denotation and connotation, image,
simile, metaphor, metonymy, personification, allusion, tone, rhyme, apostrophe, symbol, allegory,paradox, overstatement, understatement, irony, and others, but these classes are too minute for theeginner to fully and quickly understand. Therefore, this thesis turns to emphasize the relation between
language and Hsin-ching, to focus on three main points of the poet’s creation: the use of image, the rhythm of language, and the self-revelation of Hsin-ching, and thereby, to reorganize the traditional readings into a better knowledge as a whole. The use of image may be discussed in the following aspects: the dominant single image, the juxtaposed double images, and the serial images, which may be linked in the synthetic way, or leap from one to another in the irrational way, or remain, separately, in the form of non-fixed substance. The self-revelation of Hsin-ching means that the poet may, consciously or unconsciously, manifest, in different degrees, his self through the poems, which may be
radically lyrical, or simply narrative, or objectively representative, or merely self-concealing-- in fact, he may either strongly expose or carefully conceal himself. In any case, the language of a poem reflects the poet’s Hsin-ching with varying degrees, and this reflection can be traced in the linguistic rhythm of
the poem. A few poems are selected here as examples for analysis, and the proposed method is applied to them so that a useful way of solution may be found to solve the common difficulties that are often faced by the student beginners with Chinese cultural background. |
