2017英语专八阅读100篇高级篇附答案解析（75）

2016-12-21 15:48:13来源：网络

2017英语专八阅读100篇高级篇附答案解析（75）

　　He emerged,all of a sudden, in 1957: the most explosive new poetic talent of the Englishpost-war era. Poetry specialised, at that moment, in the wry chronicling of theeveryday. The poetry of Yorkshire-born Ted Hughes, first published in a bookcalled The Hawk in the Rain when he was 27, was unlike anythingwritten by his immediate predecessors. Driven by an almost Jacobean rhetoric,it had a visionary fervour. Its most eye-catching characteristic was Hughes’s ability to get beneath the skinsof animals: foxes, otters, pigs. These animals were the real thing all right,but they were also armorial devices-symbols of the countryside and lifeblood ofthe earth in which they were rooted. It gave his work a raw, primal stink.

　　It was notonly England that thought so either. Hughes’s book was also published inAmerica, where it won the Galbraith prize, a major literary award. But then, in1963, Sylvia Plath, a young American poet whom he had first met at CambridgeUniversity in 1956, and who became his wife in the summer of that year,committed suicide. Hughes was vilified for long after that, especially byfeminists in America. In 1998, the year he died, Hughes broke his ownself-imposed public silence about their relationship in a book of loose-weavepoems called Birthday Letters .In this new and exhilaratingcollection of real letters, Hughes returns to the issue of his first wife’s death, which he calls his big and unmanageable event . He felt his talent muffled by theperpetual eavesdropping upon his every move. Not until he decided to publishhis own account of their relationship did the burden begin to lighten.

　　The analysisis raw, pained and ruthlessly self-aware. For all the moral torment, thewriting itself has the same rush and vigour that possessed Hughes’s early poetry. Some books ofletters serve as a personalised historical chronicle. Poets’ letters are seldom like that, andHughes’s are no exception. His are about a life of literary engagement: almostall of them include some musing on the state or the nature of writing, bothHughes’s own or other people’s. The trajectory of Hughes’s literary career had him moving from obscurity to fame, and then, in theeyes of many, to life-long notoriety. These letters are filled with hiswrestling with the consequences of being the part-private, part-public creaturethat he became, desperate to devote himself to his writing, and yet subject toendless invasions of his privacy.

　　Hughes is anabsorbing and intricate commentator upon his own poetry, even when he isstanding back from it and good-humouredly condemning himself for itsfantasticalia, its pretticisms and its infinite verballifications . Healso believed, from first to last, that poetry had a special place in theeducation of children. What kids need , he wrote in a 1988 letter tothe secretary of state for education in the Conservative government, is aheadfull [sic] of songs that are not songs but blocks of refined and achievedand exemplary language. When that happens, children have theguardian angel installed behind the tongue . Lucky readers, big orsmall.

　　1.The poetry of Hughes’s forerunners is characteristic of______

　　[A] itsnatural, crude flavor.

　　[B] itsdistorted depiction of people’s daily life.

　　[C] itspenetrating sight.

　　[D] itsfantastical enthusiasm.

　　2.The word vilified most probably means _____

　　[A] tortured

　　[B] harassed

　　[C] scolded

　　[D] tormented

　　3.According to the third paragraph,Hughes’s collection of letters are _____

　　[A] personalrecollection of his life.