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and humor in his writing. He wrote in a clear and unpretentious sty1e with a c1ear and straightforward language. Selected Reading:
An Excerpt from Chapter l3 of The Man of Property
1. The outline of the story: The Man of Property is the first novel of the Forsyte trilogies which tell the ups and downs of the Forsyte family from 1886 to 1926. This novel centers itself on the Soames-Irene-Bosinney triangle. Soames Forsyte, a typical Forsyte, represents the essence of the principle that the accumulation of wealth is the sole aim of life, for he considers everything in terms of one's property. Irene, his young and beautiful wife, on the contrary, loves art and cherishes noble ideals of life. But Soames never pay any attention to her thoughts and feeling; he takes her merely as part of his own property. Thus, Irene is not happy about her marriage. In order to please his wife, Soames asks Bosinney, a young architect, to build a country house for them. Like Irene, Bosinney is also interested in art and not in practical things in life. During the designing and building of the house, the two come to enjoy a great deal of each other's company and finally fall in love with each other. Rumors arise and Soames wants his revenge. He sues Bosinney at the court for spending more money than stipulated. The conflict of the triangle ends tragically with Bosinney's death in a car accident and Irene's leaving Soames for good.
2. The theme of this novel: It is that of the predominant possessive instinct of the Forsytes and its effects upon the personal relationships of the family with the underlying assumption that human relationships of the contemporary English society are merely an extension of property relationships.
The harsh satire on this inhuman sense of property is brought out very effectively in the early chapters of the novel. But in the later part of the novel, the harsh tone gradually changes into a more tolerant one, and finally it becomes a distinctly sentimental one, thus weakening the effect of the novel.
Ⅲ.William Butler Yeats (1865-1939 )
W. B. Yeats was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family in Dub1in. He was
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brought up where old Irish way of 1ife and folk1ore were stil1 very strong. With a strong passion for Celtic 1egends, he read Irish poetry and the Gaelic sagas in translation. His youth was spent during the high tide of the Irish Nationalist Movement. He was a moderate nationalist. With the common cultural ideas of reviving the Irish literature, Yeats, Lady Gregory and John Synge organized the Irish National Dramatic Society and opened the Abbey Theater in 1904. Yeats served as its director and wrote more than 20 p1ays for the theater. In 1923, he was awarded NobeI Prize for 1iterature. 1. Yeats's literary ideas:
Not content with any dogma in any of the established religious institutions, Yeats built up for himself a mystical system of beliefs. In choosing the mystical belief of cyclical history over the modern conception of progress, Yeats owed a great deal to the Italian philosopher Vico, and the German philosopher Nietzsche. He believed that history, and life, followed a circular, spiral pattern consisting of long cycles which repeated themselves over and over on different levels. And symbols 1ike \winding stairs,\\tops,\\and \were part of his elaborate theory of history, which had obviously become the central core of order in his great poems. Yeats later disagreed with the idea of \should not be an end in itself but the expression of conviction and the garment of noble emotion. To write about Ire1and for an Irish audience and to recreate a specifically Irish literature -- these were the aims that Yeats was fighting for as a poet and a playwright.
2．The three periods of Yeats's poetic creation and their respective features: Generally, his poetic career starting in the romantic tradition and finishing as a matured modernist poet can be divided into three periods according to the contents and sty1e of his poetry.
(1) As a young man in the last decades of the 19th -century, Yeats began his poetic career in the romantic tradition. The major themes are usually Celtic 1egends, local folkta1es, or stories of the heroic age in Irish history. Many of his early poems have a dreamy quality, expressing melancho1y, passive and self-indulgent feelings. The
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representative works are \Lake Isle of Innisfree,\\Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland\, dream-like atmophere and, musical beauty.
(2) Yeats turned from the traditional poetry to a modernist one during the first two decades of the 20th century. Ideologically, he responded to Nietzsche's works with great excitement; artistically, he came under the influence of French Symbolism and John Donne's metaphysical poetry; and poetically, he accepted the modernist ideas in poetry writing advocated by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Yeats began to write with realistic and concrete themes on a variety of subjects, exploring the profound and complicated human problems, such as life, love, politics, and religion. The early passive and dreamy mood was replaced by anger, disillusion and bitter satire. His style is both simple and rich, colloquial and formal, with a quality of metaphysical wit and symbolic vision, which indicates that Yeats has already been on his way to modernist poetry. The representative poems are \
(3) Yeats reached the last stage of his poetic creation when he was over fifty. He felt more bitter and more disillusioned. Yeats came to realize that eternal beauty could only live in the realm of art. His concern has turned to the great subjects of dichotomy, such as, youth and age, love and war, vigor and wisdom, body and soul, and life and art. And this dichotomy has brought constant tensions in his works and revealed the human predicament. In this last period, Yeats has developed a tough, complex and symbolical style. The representative poems are \Swan\
3．Yeats as a dramatist and his contribution to modern theater:
He wrote verse plays in most of the cases. He wrote more than 20 plays in a stretch of 48 years. The stories of his early plays all came from the Irish myth or legends. His sucessful plays include The Countess Cathleen (1892), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), The Shadowy Waters (1900) and Purgatory (1935).
In his later phase of dramatic career, in order to reflect \deeps of the mind,\Yeats began experimenting with techniques such as the use of masks, of ritualized
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actions, and of symbolic languages together with the combination of music and dance. In a certain way, his experiments anticipated the abstract movement of modern theater. However, even in his plays Yeats has remained a lyrical poet. His plays are enjoyed more for the beauty of their language than for dramatic situations. Selected Readings: 1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
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