Wordsworth, whose literary criticism, dry and forbidding though its aspect may be, is 33always illumined by a penetrating10 intelligence, Wordsworth touched upon this problem in his preface to Lyrical Ballads—touched on it and, as usual, had something of value to say about it. He is speaking here of the most important and the most interesting of the subjects which may, theoretically, be made into poetry, but which have, as a matter of fact, rarely or never undergone the transmutation: he is speaking of the relations between poetry and that vast world of abstractions and ideas—science and philosophy—into which so few poets have ever penetrated11. “The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist12, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which he is now employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated14 shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” It is a formidable sentence; but read it well, read the rest of the passage from which it is taken, and you will find it to be full of critical truth.
The gist13 of Wordsworth’s argument is this. All subjects—“the remotest discoveries of the chemist” are but one example of an unlikely poetic7 theme—can serve the poet with material for his art, on one condition: 34that he, and to a lesser15 degree his audience, shall be able to apprehend16 the subject with a certain emotion. The subject must somehow be involved in the poet’s intimate being before he can turn it into poetry. It is not enough, for example, that he should apprehend it merely through his senses. (The poetry of pure sensation, of sounds and bright colours, is common enough nowadays; but amusing as we may find it for the moment, it cannot hold the interest for long.) It is not enough, at the other end of the scale, if he apprehends18 his subject in a purely19 intellectual manner. An abstract idea must be felt with a kind of passion, it must mean something emotionally significant, it must be as immediate20 and important to the poet as a personal relationship before he can make poetry of it. Poetry, in a word, must be written by “enjoying and suffering beings,” not by beings exclusively dowered with sensations or, as exclusively, with intellect.
Wordsworth’s criticism helps us to understand why so few subjects have ever been made into poetry when everything under the sun, and beyond it, is theoretically suitable for transmutation into a work of art. Death, love, religion, nature; the primary emotions and the ultimate personal mysteries—these 35form the subject-matter of most of the greatest poetry. And for obvious reasons. These things are “manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” But to most men, including the generality of poets, abstractions and ideas are not immediately and passionately21 moving. They are not enjoying or suffering when they apprehend these things—only thinking.
The men who do feel passionately about abstractions, the men to whom ideas are as persons—moving and disquietingly alive—are very seldom poets. They are men of science and philosophers, preoccupied23 with the search for truth and not, like the poet, with the expression and creation of beauty. It is very rarely that we find a poet who combines the power and the desire to express himself with that passionate22 apprehension24 of ideas and that passionate curiosity about strange remote facts which characterize the man of science and the philosopher. If he possessed25 the requisite26 sense of language and the impelling27 desire to express himself in terms of beauty, Einstein could write the most intoxicating28 lyrics29 about relativity and the pleasures of pure mathematics. And if, say, Mr. Yeats understood the Einstein theory—which, in company with most other living poets, he presumably does not, any 36more than the rest of us—if he apprehended30 it exultingly31 as something bold and profound, something vitally important and marvellously true, he too could give us, out of the Celtic twilight32, his lyrics of relativity. It is those distressing33 little “ifs” that stand in the way of this happy consummation. The conditions upon which any but the most immediately and obviously moving subjects can be made into poetry are so rarely fulfilled, the combination of poet and man of science, poet and philosopher, is so uncommon34, that the theoretical universality of the art has only very occasionally been realized in practice.
Contemporary poetry in the whole of the western world is insisting, loudly and emphatically through the mouths of its propagandists, on an absolute liberty to speak of what it likes how it likes. Nothing could be better; all that we can now ask is that the poets should put the theory into practice, and that they should make use of the liberty which they claim by enlarging the bounds of poetry.
The propagandists would have us believe that the subject-matter of contemporary poetry is new and startling, that modern poets are doing something which has not been done before. “Most of the poets represented 37in these pages,” writes Mr. Louis Untermeyer in his Anthology of Modern American Poetry, “have found a fresh and vigorous material in a world of honest and often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their times; not only have their views changed, their vision has been widened to include things unknown to the poets of yesterday. They have learned to distinguish real beauty from mere17 prettiness, to wring35 loveliness out of squalor, to find wonder in neglected places, to search for hidden truths even in the dark caves of the unconscious.” Translated into practice this means that contemporary poets can now write, in the words of Mr. Sandburg, of the “harr and boom of the blast fires,” of “wops and bohunks.” It means, in fact, that they are at liberty to do what Homer did—to write freely about the immediately moving facts of everyday life. Where Homer wrote of horses and the tamers of horses, our contemporaries write of trains, automobiles36, and the various species of wops and bohunks who control the horsepower. That is all. Much too much stress has been laid on the newness of the new poetry; its newness is simply a return from the jewelled exquisiteness37 of the eighteen-nineties to the facts and feelings of ordinary life. There is nothing intrinsically novel or 38surprising in the introduction into poetry of machinery38 and industrialism, of labour unrest and modern psychology39: these things belong to us, they affect us daily as enjoying and suffering beings; they are a part of our lives, just as the kings, the warriors40, the horses and chariots, the picturesque41 mythology42 were part of Homer’s life. The subject-matter of the new poetry remains43 the same as that of the old. The old boundaries have not been extended. There would be real novelty in the new poetry if it had, for example, taken to itself any of the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has endowed the modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had worked out a satisfactory artistic44 method for dealing45 with abstractions. It has not. Which simply means that that rare phenomenon, the poet in whose mind ideas are a passion and a personal moving force, does not happen to have appeared.
And how rarely in all the long past he has appeared! There was Lucretius, the greatest of all the philosophic46 and scientific poets. In him the passionate apprehension of ideas, and the desire and ability to give them expression, combined to produce that strange and beautiful epic47 of thought which is without parallel in the whole history of 39literature. There was Dante, in whose soul the medi?val Christian48 philosophy was a force that shaped and directed every feeling, thought and action. There was Goethe, who focussed into beautiful expression an enormous diffusion49 of knowledge and ideas. And there the list of the great poets of thought comes to an end. In their task of extending the boundaries of poetry into the remote and abstract world of ideas, they have had a few lesser assistants—Donne, for example, a poet only just less than the greatest; Fulke Greville, that strange, dark-spirited Elizabethan; John Davidson, who made a kind of poetry out of Darwinism; and, most interesting poetical interpreter of nineteenth-century science, Jules Laforgue.
Which of our contemporaries can claim to have extended the bounds of poetry to any material extent? It is not enough to have written about locomotives and telephones, “wops and bohunks,” and all the rest of it. That is not extending the range of poetry; it is merely asserting its right to deal with the immediate facts of contemporary life, as Homer and as Chaucer did. The critics who would have us believe that there is something essentially50 unpoetical about a bohunk (whatever a Bohunk may be), and something essentially poetical about Sir Lancelot of the 40Lake, are, of course, simply negligible; they may be dismissed as contemptuously as we have dismissed the pseudo-classical critics who opposed the freedoms of the Romantic Revival51. And the critics who think it very new and splendid to bring bohunks into poetry are equally old-fashioned in their ideas.
It will not be unprofitable to compare the literary situation in this early twentieth century of ours with the literary situation of the early seventeenth century. In both epochs we see a reaction against a rich and somewhat formalized poetical tradition expressing itself in a determination to extend the range of subject-matter, to get back to real life, and to use more natural forms of expression. The difference between the two epochs lies in the fact that the twentieth-century revolution has been the product of a number of minor52 poets, none of them quite powerful enough to achieve what he theoretically meant to do, while the seventeenth-century revolution was the work of a single poet of genius, John Donne. Donne substituted for the rich formalism of non-dramatic Elizabethan poetry a completely realized new style, the style of the so-called metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. He was a poet-philosopher-man-of-action whose passionate 41curiosity about facts enabled him to make poetry out of the most unlikely aspects of material life, and whose passionate apprehension of ideas enabled him to extend the bounds of poetry beyond the frontiers of common life and its emotions into the void of intellectual abstraction. He put the whole life and the whole mind of his age into poetry.
We to-day are metaphysicals without our Donne. Theoretically we are free to make poetry of everything in the universe; in practice we are kept within the old limits, for the simple reason that no great man has appeared to show us how we can use our freedom. A certain amount of the life of the twentieth century is to be found in our poetry, but precious little of its mind. We have no poet to-day like that strange old Dean of St. Paul’s three hundred years ago—no poet who can skip from the heights of scholastic53 philosophy to the heights of carnal passion, from the contemplation of divinity to the contemplation of a flea54, from the rapt examination of self to an enumeration55 of the most remote external facts of science, and make all, by his strangely passionate apprehension, into an intensely lyrical poetry.
The few poets who do try to make of contemporary ideas the substance of their poetry, 42do it in a manner which brings little conviction or satisfaction to the reader. There is Mr. Noyes, who is writing four volumes of verse about the human side of science—in his case, alas56, all too human. Then there is Mr. Conrad Aiken. He perhaps is the most successful exponent57 in poetry of contemporary ideas. In his case, it is clear, “the remotest discoveries of the chemist” are apprehended with a certain passion; all his emotions are tinged58 by his ideas. The trouble with Mr. Aiken is that his emotions are apt to degenerate59 into a kind of intellectual sentimentality, which expresses itself only too easily in his prodigiously60 fluent, highly coloured verse.
One could lengthen61 the list of more or less interesting poets who have tried in recent times to extend the boundaries of their art. But one would not find among them a single poet of real importance, not one great or outstanding personality. The twentieth century still awaits its Lucretius, awaits its own philosophical62 Dante, its new Goethe, its Donne, even its up-to-date Laforgue. Will they appear? Or are we to go on producing a poetry in which there is no more than the dimmest reflection of that busy and incessant63 intellectual life which is the characteristic and distinguishing mark of this age?
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1
whatsoever
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| adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么 | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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consolidate
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| v.使加固，使加强；(把...)联为一体，合并 | |
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hereditary
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| adj.遗传的，遗传性的，可继承的，世袭的 | |
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6
poetical
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| adj.似诗人的；诗一般的；韵文的；富有诗意的 | |
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poetic
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| adj.富有诗意的，有诗人气质的，善于抒情的 | |
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8
peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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9
relevance
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| n.中肯，适当，关联，相关性 | |
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10
penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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11
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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12
botanist
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| n.植物学家 | |
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gist
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| n.要旨；梗概 | |
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contemplated
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| adj. 预期的 动词contemplate的过去分词形式 | |
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lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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16
apprehend
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| vt.理解，领悟，逮捕，拘捕，忧虑 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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apprehends
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| 逮捕，拘押( apprehend的第三人称单数 )； 理解 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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passionately
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| ad.热烈地，激烈地 | |
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passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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23
preoccupied
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| adj.全神贯注的，入神的；被抢先占有的；心事重重的v.占据（某人）思想，使对…全神贯注，使专心于( preoccupy的过去式) | |
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24
apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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requisite
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| adj.需要的，必不可少的；n.必需品 | |
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impelling
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| adj.迫使性的，强有力的v.推动、推进或敦促某人做某事( impel的现在分词 ) | |
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28
intoxicating
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| a. 醉人的,使人兴奋的 | |
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29
lyrics
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| n.歌词 | |
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30
apprehended
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| 逮捕，拘押( apprehend的过去式和过去分词 )； 理解 | |
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exultingly
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| 兴高采烈地，得意地 | |
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twilight
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| n.暮光，黄昏；暮年，晚期，衰落时期 | |
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distressing
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| a.使人痛苦的 | |
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uncommon
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| adj.罕见的，非凡的，不平常的 | |
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wring
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| n.扭绞；v.拧，绞出，扭 | |
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automobiles
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| n.汽车( automobile的名词复数 ) | |
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exquisiteness
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machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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psychology
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| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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40
warriors
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| 武士，勇士，战士( warrior的名词复数 ) | |
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41
picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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mythology
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| n.神话，神话学，神话集 | |
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43
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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44
artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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45
dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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46
philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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47
epic
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| n.史诗，叙事诗；adj.史诗般的，壮丽的 | |
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48
Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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49
diffusion
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| n.流布；普及；散漫 | |
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50
essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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51
revival
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| n.复兴，复苏，（精力、活力等的）重振 | |
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52
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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53
scholastic
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| adj.学校的，学院的，学术上的 | |
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54
flea
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| n.跳蚤 | |
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55
enumeration
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| n.计数，列举；细目；详表；点查 | |
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56
alas
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| int.唉(表示悲伤、忧愁、恐惧等) | |
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57
exponent
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| n.倡导者，拥护者；代表人物；指数，幂 | |
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58
tinged
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| v.（使）发丁丁声( ting的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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59
degenerate
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| v.退步，堕落；adj.退步的，堕落的；n.堕落者 | |
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60
prodigiously
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| adv.异常地，惊人地，巨大地 | |
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61
lengthen
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| vt.使伸长，延长 | |
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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