首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Comment on Darwin’s Biography of Copy of Verse Body Biographies can be wearisome contrivances, often too long and too detail
Comment on Darwin’s Biography of Copy of Verse Body Biographies can be wearisome contrivances, often too long and too detail
admin
2013-01-10
59
问题
Comment on Darwin’s Biography of Copy of Verse Body
Biographies can be wearisome contrivances, often too long and too detailed for their own good. Biographers make the mistake of spending too much time worshipping their subjects. Think of the authoritative three-volume life of Robert Frost by Lawrence Thompson, for example, and how the biographer passed, over the many years of its making, from hero worship to intense dislike of the poet he shadowed for almost a quarter of a century. Yes, too long and intense an acquaintance can lead to sourness.
As the bicentunary of Charles Darwin’s birth on February 12th approaches, it is good to welcome a biography which is relatively small, but in no way superficial or meager. Ruth Padel has achieved this feat by writing her great-great-grandfather’s life in a sequence of often quite short poems. Through her verses she seeks to capture the "voice" of Darwin. Ms Padel embeds many of Darwin’s own words—from his books or his letters—in her poems, and the results tend to give the sense of being jointly authored. Sometimes she shapes entire pieces of quotation into her own poetic passages. If this seems to be a bit of sly plagiarism, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels more like a skillful act of collaboration between the living and the dead, one melding easily with the other.
Why does this book work so well? How does it manage to say so much in so few words? Ms Padel seems to have caught the essence of the man’s character, as if in a butterfly net. She enters into his cast of mind, bringing across his hyper-sensitivity, his sense of fragility, his lifelong boldness, and the poems are a sequence of snapshots— often small, intermittent and delicately imagistic—of particularly crucial incidents in his life; of moments of intellectual illumination.
It is not easy to describe a whole life in relatively few words. You need to find some way of filling in the background. Ms Padel has overcome this problem by having paragraphs of notes run, in a single column, beside the texts of the poems so that they can be read side by side.
And why are poems a good way of illuminating a life such as Darwin’s? The best lyric poems—think of Keats or Shelley, for example—are moments of sudden insight. And Darwin, throughout, was in the grip of something very similar: a terrible, destabilizing sense of wonder. He sensed hints of the mar-velous everywhere he looked. All the sadder then —and this is something that Ms Padel does not explain—that, later in life, the man who carried with him on the Beagle Channel a copy of Milton’s "Paradise Lost" found that he could no longer enjoy poetry.
Which of the following is true according to the last two paragraphs?
选项
A、Biographies have to be written in the form of poems with notes.
B、It’s generally advisable to describe people’s life in fewer words.
C、Poem is the best way of depicting the wonderful life of Darwin.
D、Darwin’s life is filled with moments of sudden insights, as poetry suggest.
答案
D
解析
推理判断题。最后一段说诗歌像是一次次顿悟,而达尔文的人生也是如此,因此[D]项正确。[A]项“传记必须以诗歌加注的形式写成”说法过于绝对,与文意不符;[B]项“用更少的文字写传记通常是明智的”,这是第一段观点,最后两段并无此意;[C]错在best,原文用了good,并无“最”的语义,故排除。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/4DhK777K
0
专业英语四级
相关试题推荐
Onereasonhumanbeingscanthriveinallkindsofclimatesisthattheycancontrolthequalitiesoftheairintheenclosedsp
Onereasonhumanbeingscanthriveinallkindsofclimatesisthattheycancontrolthequalitiesoftheairintheenclosedsp
Whyarethedancesapprovedbytheeldersofthetribes?
TheEnglishlanguageexistsinaconditionofeverlastingdanger,itsAmericanbranchmostparticularly,assaultedasitisfrom
Hydrogenisoneofthemostimportantelementsintheuniverse______itprovidesthebuildingblocksfromwhichtheothereleme
Therearenotmanyteacherswhoarestrong______oftraditionalmethodsinEnglishteaching.
Ofallthesoldierstheyhadthe______ofbeingthefiercest,themostpatriotic,thetoughest.
Whatisthefirstguidelinetoinvestingaccordingtothespeaker?
Itwasdarkinthecavesoshe______amatch.
TwinstoImpairedFertilityofWomenAwomanwithatwinbrotherhasfewerchildren.Twinbrotherscanleavequiteanimpres
随机试题
化工废渣必须进行卫生填埋以减少其危害。()
仲裁委员会通过调解的方式,解决仲裁纠纷的文书是()
下列哪项不是头痛的病因病机
女,33岁,4年前始反复上腹痛,餐前出现,餐后缓解。今晨突然出现剧烈腹痛,来诊。查体:Bp80/40mmHg,体温38.9℃,上腹部压痛、反跳痛及肌紧张,肠鸣音减弱,RBC4.2×109/L,WBC22×109/L。
巴塞尔委员会将商业银行而临的风险划分为八大类,其中包括()。
2010年12月16日,甲公司与乙公司签订了一项租赁协议,将一栋经营管理用写字楼出租给乙公司,租赁期为3年,租赁期开始日为2011年1月1日,年租金为240万元,于每年年初收取。相关资料如下:(1)2010年12月31日,甲公司将该写字楼停止自用,准备出
细胞是生物体进行各种生命活动的基本单位,回答下列问题。多细胞生物中细胞与细胞之间的通讯是其生命活动所必需的,否则生物不能保持其完整性,往往是一种细胞向靶细胞发送信号,靶细胞经过信号接收、__________和响应3个阶段作出相应反应。
Pentium4微处理器物理地址的最大存储空间是( )。
Whataretheytalkingabout?
Readthisfollowingnewsaboutpersonalbranding.ChoosethebestwordorphrasetofilleachgapfromA,B,CorDontheoppos
最新回复
(
0
)