1 . Elizabeth Bishop is considered one of the best American poets of the 20th century. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Her dad died when she was just a baby and her mom never recovered from the loss. She went to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada when she was five. Eventually Bishop attended Vassar College, where she began to write poetry.

At Vassar she discovered Marianne Moore’s poetry and met Ms. Moore and began their life-long friendship. She later met poet Robert Lowell. She wrote tons and tons of letters to both of them, which is good for us because we would otherwise know very little of her personal life. Bishop published her first book of poetry in 1946 and wrote until her death in 1979. She would spend years working on a single poem. Her poems are not the result of hasty scribbling (匆忙乱写) on paper while eating breakfast. She would look through drafts of poems again and again and improve them until they were as close to perfect as she could get them.

Reading Elizabeth Bishop is like being transported to the very place, the very moment she’s writing about. She leads us to a microscope so we can see every smallest part of the scene. It seems that she’s always asking us to notice more, and more until the poem is so clear in our minds that it’s almost painful—like a light that’s too bright.

From ancient times to the present, People have been addicted to Poetry. There are various reasons     1    people write poetry. Some poems tell a story or describe something. Others try to convey certain emotions. The poems may not make sense and even seem     2     (contradict)but they are easy to learn and recite. List poems are one simple form of poems     3     lists things. It has a flexible line length and     4     (repeat) phrases which give both a pattern and a rhythm to the poem.     5     simple form of poem that students can easily write is the cinquain. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry that     6     (make) up of 17 syllables. It can give a clear picture and create     7     special feeling     8     (use) the minimum of words. Tang poems also make the English poetry     9     (color).There are so many different forms of poetry for you to choose from, you may     10     (eventual) want to write poems of your own.

10 . As William Shakespeare is to literature in English, so is the poet Du Fu to the Chinese literary tradition. “We have Dante, Shakespeare and Du Fu. These poets create the very values by which poetry is judged,” remarked Harvard Professor Stephen Owen in Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet, a BBC documentary that aired on April 7.

Aimed at introducing the charm and beauty of traditional Chinese literature to viewers around the globe, the documentary invited the famous British actor Ian McKellen, who played the wizard Gandalf in the film series The Lord of the Rings, to read 15 of Du’s poems that have been translated into English.

The one-hour film traces the poet’s life experiences in detail. Born in 712, Du lived in the reign of the Emperor Xuanzong of Tang(712—756), a time marked by extraordinary prosperity, inclusiveness and glorious cultural accomplishments.

However, as An Lushan’s rebel army floored the empire, the 43-year-old Du, the former civil servant at the Tang court, had to take his family out of his hometown, and faced starvation and sufferings. Through ups and downs, the poet never stopped writing and about 1,500 poems have been kept over the ages.

Even though he never held a high position in the government, Du still cared about common people. For example, in the poem My Cottage Unroofed by Autumn Gales, he wrote that “Could I get mansions covering ten thousand miles, I’d house all poor scholars and make them beam with pleasure”.

“That is why he is honored as the Poet Sage by later generations. A difficult life and his spirit of concern about the world helped him create so many masterpieces,” Shi Wenxue, a cultural critic based in Beijing, told the Global Times.

Without doubt Du is a cultural symbol of ancient China, but his brilliant works and core spirits have also inspired people outside China. As the documentary notes, his work represents a precious cultural heritage for the entire world, not just China.