论奥古斯丁时间观与罗伯特·潘·沃伦的诗歌创作

Augustinian Time and Robert Penn Warren’s Poetry

在20世纪美国作家中,罗伯特·潘·沃伦以博学多才的文艺复兴式人物著称,但沃伦文学生涯的核心成就是在诗歌领域。在六十余年的诗歌生涯中,沃伦有意识地将奥古斯丁时间观引入诗歌创作,一方面借鉴奥古斯丁时间的结构特征,通过探索时间向度的变化,展示生命的历程和自我的发现;另一方面挖掘奥古斯丁时间的生命和诗学内涵,通过对时间的体验,将时间的心灵和生命的属性赋予诗歌中的人和物。在对于奥古斯丁时间观的具体利用中,沃伦有意识地以亚里士多德时间观(表现为连续时间)作对比,赋予了两种时间更为广泛而又相互对立的价值内涵。沃伦诗歌的时间旅程,是在奥古斯丁时间观指引下穿越过去和现在、到达未来的旅程,它构成了沃伦终生以爱为主题的诗歌创作的重要部分。

Though living in the 20th century America, Robert Penn Warren is distinguished as a Renaissance man. His major achievement lies in the field of poetry, for which he earned the first Poet Laureate of the United States, and is esteemed as one of the greatest poets fully comparable to Thomas Hardy, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. In his sixty years of poetic career, Warren integrates the Augustinian time into his poetic creation in two ways. On the one hand, he imitates the structure of Augustinian time in his poems, i.e., to present the course of lives and the discoveries of selfness through changes brought by time. On the other hand, he explores the life-giving and poetic contents of Augustinian time, i.e., to bestow them on the people and things in his poems through their experiences of time. Also Warren’s poetry takes Aristotelian time as contrast of Augustinian time, thus giving the two concepts of time greater contrastive values. Warren’s poetic journey of time is one led by Augustinian time, through the past and the present to the future. Such poetic journey constitutes an important part of Warren’s love poetry.