Gre Literature Test

Front 1

When is the approximate time when Beowulf was written?

Back 1

700-1000AD

Front 2

John Gower

Back 2

Friend of Chaucer, had T&C dedicated to him

Front 3

John Gower Confessio Amantis

Back 3

Lover’s Confession). Unlike his previous works, Gower wrote the Confessio in English at the request of Richard II who was concerned that so little was being written in English. It is a collection of tales and exempla treating of courtly love. The framework is that of a lover complaining first to Venus, and later in the work, confessing to her priest, Genius. The Confessio , completed around 1390, is an important contribution to courtly love literature in English. Some of the stories have their counterparts in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , and one of the stories later served as the source for Shakespeare’s Pericles , in which Shakespeare had Gower appear in the Chorus.

Front 4

Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Back 4

Ezra Pound’s 1920 poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” is a landmark in the career of the great American modernist poet. In the poem, Pound uses two alter egos to discuss the first twelve years of his career, a period during which aesthetic and literary concerns fully engaged Pound’s attention. The poem reconstructs literary London of the Edwardian period, recreating the dominant feeling about what literature should be and also describing Pound’s own rebellious aesthetic beliefs. The poem also takes us to the catastrophe of the early twentieth century, World War I, and bluntly illustrates its effects on the literary world. The poem then proceeds to an “envoi,” or a send-off, and then to five poems told through the eyes of a second alter ego.

In the first section of the poem, Pound portrays himself as “E. P.,” a typical turn-of-the-century aesthete, and then in the second he becomes “Mauberley,” an aesthete of a different kind. Both E. P. and Mauberley are facets of Pound’s own character that, in a sense, the poem is meant to exorcise.

Front 5

Identify: E. P. ODE POUR L’ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start –
No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

Back 5

Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Front 6

Identify:

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment Cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.

Back 6

Ezra Pound

“The Lake Isle“

This poem is a mile parody of W.B. Yeats’ “The lake Isle of Innisfree”

Front 7

Identify:

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

Back 7

Ezra Pound, The River Merchant's Wife

Front 8

Identify:

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Back 8

Ezra Pound In a Station of the Metro

Front 9

Gertrude Stein

Back 9

After moving to Paris in 1903 she started to write in earnest: novels, plays, stories, librettos and poems. Increasingly, she developed her own highly idiosyncratic, playful, sometimes repetitive and sometimes humorous style. Typical quotes are

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

and

“Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle.”

as well as

“The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable.”

These stream-of-consciousness experiments, rhythmical word-paintings or “portraits”, were designed to evoke “the excitingness of pure being” and can be seen as an answer to Cubism in literature. Many of the experimental works such as Tender Buttons have since been interpreted by critics as a feminist reworking of partiarchal language. These works were loved by the avant-garde, but mainstream success initially remained elusive.

Her first published book, Three Lives (1909), the stories of three working-class women, has been called a minor masterpiece. The three stories are “The Good Anna,” “Melanchtha,” and “The Gentle Lena.”

Front 10

Identify: She may count three little saisies very well
By multiplying to either six nine or fourteen
Or she can be well mentioned as twelve
Which they may like which they can like soon
Or more than ever which they wish as a button
Just as much as they arrange which they wish
Or they can attire where they need as which say
Can they call a hat or a hat a day
Made merry because it is so.

Back 10

Gertrude Stein Part I, Stanza XIII

Front 11

Identify: Which I wish to say is this
There is no beginning to an end
But there is a beginning and an end
To beginning.
Why yes of course.
Any one can learn that north of course
Is not only north but north as north
Why were they worried.
What I wish to say is this.
Yes of course.

Back 11

Gertrude Stein Part V, Stanza XXXVIII

Front 12

HD

Back 12

Hilda Doolittle, prominently known only by her initials H.D., was an American poet, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her association with the key early 20th-century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, although her later writing represents a move away from the Imagist model and towards a distinctly feminine version of modernist poetry and prose.

Doolittle was one of the leading figures in the bohemian culture of London in the early decades of the century. Her work is noted for its use of classical models and its exploration of the conflict between lesbian and heterosexual attraction and love that closely resembled her own life. Her later poetry also explores traditional epic themes, such as violence and war, from a feminist perspective.

Front 13

Identify: Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us—
Cover us with your pools of fir.

Back 13

HD Oread

Front 14

Identify:

Never more will the wind
cherish you again,
never more will the rain.

Never more
shall we find you bright
in the snow and wind.

The snow is melted,
the snow is gone,
and you are flown:

Like a bird out of our hand,
like a light out of our heart,
you are gone.

Back 14

HD Never More will the wind

Front 15

Identify:

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the luster as of olives
where she stands,
And the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the main,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

Back 15

HD Helen

Front 16

Identify:

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are
nor as Orion’s sapphires, luminous;

yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.

Back 16

HD Star Wheel in purple

Front 17

Marianne Moore

Back 17

Her most famous poem is perhaps the one entitled, appropriately, “Poetry,” in which she hopes for poets who can produce “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” It also expressed her idea that poetry is not written in meter, but in more natural forms. She composed hers in “syllabics”. Robinson Jeffers likewise disavowed meter as a natural part of poetry. Moore went even further than Jeffers, wholly denying meter.

Front 18

Identify:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician–
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Back 18

Marianne Moore Poetry

Front 19

Robert Frost:

Back 19

He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech.[1] His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.

Front 20

Identify: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Back 20

Robert Frost Mending Wall

Front 21

Identify:

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth –
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth –
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.

Back 21

Robert Frist Design

Front 22

Identify: As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less that two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.

Back 22

Robert Frost Meeting and Passing

Front 23

Identify: There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound–
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Back 23

Robert Frost Mowing .

Front 24

Identify: These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods –
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

Back 24

Robert Frost Spring Pools

Front 25

How does the Reeve quite the Miller?

Back 25

He tells a tale where students make a fool out of a dishonest and greedy miller.

Front 26

The Miller's Tale

Back 26

Nicholar persuades Alisoun, his landlord's wife, to spend the night with him by means of an elaborate scheme. He tells the landlord that through astrology he has found that there will be a second flood. He proposes they wait silently overnight for it in separate tubs suspended from the rafters and cut them from the roof when the water comes up........

Front 27

The Wife of Bath's Tale

Back 27

Begins with mention of absence of fairies in modern day. Knight in King Arthur's court rapes a woman. He should have been punished by death but the queen intercedes and is allowed to create his punishment. Sends him out on quest to find out what women want, gives him 1 yr & 1 day to discover and if he fails, he dies. Every woman says something different. On his way back sees 24 dancing women and an old hag. They exchange favors. He must take her as his wife. She gives him the choice b/w her being ugly & faithful or beautiful & unfaithful. He lets her choose, & she becomes fair & faithful and they are happy.

Front 28

What does the hag tell the knight that all women want in the WOB Tale?

Back 28

"To have the sovereignty as well upon their husband as their love, and to have mastery their man above."

Front 29

The Nun's Priest's Tale

Back 29

The Chanticleer & the Fox. Beast fable popularized by Chaucer. 625 line poem. Monk's depressing accounts of despots and fallen heroes, also parodies them. Has ideas in common with earlier tales with the marriage b/w Chanticleer & Pertelote echoing the domestic lives depicted in Franklin's & Tale of Melibee.

Front 30

The Nun's Priest's Tale plot

Back 30

World of talking animals who reflect both human insight & error. Protagonist is Chanticleer. Dreams of his approaching doom. Wakes his wife Pertelote, tells him he has indigestion. Chanticleer predicted his doom correctly. Fox that killed his mother and father grabs him by the neck. The fox is being chased through the woods while carrying Chanticleer who convinces him to tell pursuers to stop. When the fox does, Chanticleer escapes and flies up a tree, not to be tricked by the fox again.

Front 31

Chanticleer

Back 31

Rooster who prophesizes his own doom, but manages to out-trick the fox who tricks him

Front 32

Troilus and Criseyde

Back 32

By Chaucer

Front 33

How many lines is Troilys and Criseyde?

Back 33

8239

Front 34

What form is Troilus and Criseyde?

Back 34

Rhyme Royal

Front 35

Rhyme Royal

Back 35

Seven line stanzas rhyming ababbcc

Front 36

How many books is Troilus and Criseyde?

Back 36

Five

Front 37

Significance of Troilus and Criseyde

Back 37

The first major work of Engish literature, sometimes called the first English novel b/c of concern with characters' psychology. Shakespeare also composed a version.

Front 38

Where does the story of Troilus and Criseyde come from?

Back 38

Boccaccio's Il Filostrato

Front 39

Who does Chaucer credit Troilus and Criseyde to?

Back 39

Lollius, wrongly assumed in the Middle Ages to have written about Troy.

Front 40

How did Chaucer change Boccaccio's story of Troilus and Criseyde?

Back 40

He made it deeper and more poetic

Front 41

Who called Chaucer the "father of English poetry?"

Back 41

John Dryden

Front 42

Where is Troilus and Criseyde set?

Back 42

Troy during the Trojan war

Front 43

Troilus

Back 43

Priam's son, in love with Criseyde

Front 44

Troilus and Criseyde plot

Back 44

Troilus is scornful of love until he sees Criseyde in a temple & falls in love with her. Pandare (his friend) overhears him say he loves her, and offers to help him meet her. Time passes and T & C become friends until Pandare arranges for them to spend a night together. C learns that her father (prophet who has fled to Greeks) is making her leave Troy and join him. T & C separated. C turns to Diomede for protection & forgets T even though they send letters. T finds brooch he gave C in D's cloak & knows she betrayed him. Tries to kill D but cannot.

Front 45

What is the first movement of Troilus and Criseyde?

Back 45

From woe to wele, a rise to happiness, when P arranges the night for the lovers.

Front 46

What do the stanzas after Troilus learning the truth about Criseyde suggest?

Back 46

These stanzas suggest Christian & moralizing readings of the story at odds with the main narratorial tone. Also invites Chaucer's friends Gower and Strode to correct the work if necessary and includes a final prayer from Dante's Divine Comedy

Front 47

What kind of romance is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?

Back 47

Arthurian

Front 48

What were the names of the 3 religious poems also found in the Gawain manuscript?

Back 48

Pearl, Patience and Purity

Front 49

What is the name of the revival that Gawain belongs to?

Back 49

Alliterative Revival

Front 50

Alliterative Verse

Back 50

Pretends that a written story/poem is an oral story/poem, wants reader to "listen" to a story the author "heard"

Front 51

Beheading Game

Back 51

Present in Gawain, a supernatural challenger offers to let his head be cut off in exchange for a return blow

Front 52

What was the earliest written occurrence of the motif of the beheading game?

Back 52

Middle Irish tale Bricriu's Feast

Front 53

What is Sir Gawain being tested against?

Back 53

A moral and Christian ideal of chivalry

Front 54

Brutus Books

Back 54

The foundation stories that trace the origins of Rome and Britain back to the destruction of Troy

Front 55

Poetic form of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Back 55

Stanzas that contain group of alliterative lines. Number of lines varies. line is longer, does not contain a fixed number/pattern of stresses like classical alliterative measure of OE pietru. Each stanza closes w 5 short lines rhyming a b a b a

Front 56

Medieval Social Theory

Back 56

Society made up of 3 estates

Front 57

3 Estates of Medieval Social Theory

Back 57

Nobility, church, everyone else

Front 58

Nobility

Back 58

Composed of a small hereditary aristocracy, mission on earth was to rule over and defend the body politic

Front 59

Church (3 Estates)

Back 59

Duty was to look after the spiritual welfare of that body

Front 60

Everyone Else (3 Estates)

Back 60

Large mass of commoners who were supposed to do the work that provided for its physical needs.

Front 61

Name a large influence on Chaucer's writing (esp. Canterbury Tales)?

Back 61

The 3 Estates, as well as how different factors played into where you fell on the social strata. Also the growing middle class and its increasingly important role in the church and state.

Front 62

What was Chaucer's first important original poem?

Back 62

The Book of the Duchess, elegy in form of dream vision commemorating John of Gaunt's first wife, duchess of Lancaster.

Front 63

How many tales was The Canterbury Tales supposed to contain?

Back 63

120

Front 64

How many of the Canterbury Tales were actually completed?

Back 64

22

Front 65

When was The Canterbury Tales written?

Back 65

1386

Front 66

Which saint were the pilgrims petitioning in the Canterbury Tales?

Back 66

Saint Thomas Becket

Front 67

Motifs present in the Knight's Tale

Back 67

Classical setting, mythology, romance plot, themes of fortune and destiny

Front 68

Fabliau

Back 68

Short story in verse that deals satirically, often grossly and fantastically as well as hilariously, with intrigues and deceptions about sex or money (and often both of these elements in the same story)

Front 69

Lollard

Back 69

Derogatory term for followers of the reformist polemicist John Wycliffe

Front 70

Exemplum

Back 70

Illustration or example of

Front 71

What is the Pardoner's Tale an exemplum of?

Back 71

the scriptural text "Avarice is the root of all evil"

Front 72

Animal Fable

Back 72

Literary genre familiar from Aesop's fables in which animals, behaving like human beings, point to a moral. Often functioned as elementary texts to teach boys Latin

Front 73

What genre does the Nun's Priest's Tale fall under?

Back 73

Animal Fable

Front 74

What is the Nun's Priest's Tale a satire of?

Back 74

Learning and moralizing of the pretentious rhetoric by which medieval writers sometimes sought to elevate their works.

Front 75

What is the allegorical theme invoked at the end of the Canterbury Tales?

Back 75

That life on earth is a pilgrimage.

Front 76

Ballade

Back 76

A verse form of three or more stanzas, each with an identical rhyme scheme and the same last line, the refrain. Often ends in an envoy in which the poem is addressed or sent to a friend or to a prince/princes in general.

Front 77

John Gower's Life Span

Back 77

1330-1408

Front 78

Who does John Gower associate himself with?

Back 78

John the Baptist and John the Evangelist

Front 79

What are Gower's Mirour and Vox Clamantis satires of?

Back 79

The Estate System

Front 80

What did Hoccleve's My Compleinte reflect?

Back 80

His depression

Front 81

Genre & Form of Piers Plowman

Back 81

Religious allegory/dream vision in alliterative verse

Front 82

Dream Vision

Back 82

Common medieval type in which the author presents the story under the guise of having dreamed it.

Front 83

Theme of Langland's Piers Plowman

Back 83

The history of Christianity

Front 84

What does the word Passus mean in Piers Plowman?

Back 84

Latin for "step" demonstrates the poem's basic divisons

Front 85

First Narrative of Piers Plowman

Back 85

Passus 2-4, the attempt of earthly justice to control the disruptive energies of the profit economy represented by "Lady Mede"

Front 86

What is the take on pilgrimage presented in Piers Plowman?

Back 86

The truest form of pilgrimage is no pilgrimage at all, all classes of society should stay home and work harmoniously for the production of material food by agricultural workers, with knights helping plowmen and protecting the church, while priests pray for both workers and knights.

Front 87

Does the ideal society described in Piers Plowman succeed?

Back 87

No, it falls apart in Passus 6

Front 88

What do Marian lyrics often celebrate?

Back 88

The mysteries of the natural world and thus defy any simple division of medieval lyric into "secular" or "religious" poetry.

Front 89

The "Showings or "Revelations"

Back 89

Sixteen mystical visions received by the woman known as Julian of Norwich.

Front 90

Anchorite

Back 90

Religious recluse confined to an enclosure where he or she has vowed never to leave.

Front 91

Mystery Plays

Back 91

Sequence or cycle of plays based on the Bible and produced by city guilds, the organizations representing the various trades and crafts.

Front 92

"Thirteeners" Stanza

Back 92

Present in the Wakefield Second Shepards' Play, rhyming ababababcdddc

Front 93

Frequent Topics of Medieval Lyrics

Back 93

The itemization of the beloved's beauties, the joyous return of spring

Front 94

Who is Sir Thomas Malory famous for writing about?

Back 94

King Arthur

Front 95

Common theme of Sir Thomas Malory's historical romance

Back 95

Nostalgia for an ideal past that never truly existed

Front 96

Style of Sir Thomas Malory's writing that contributed to his success?

Back 96

Terse and direct prose style with naturalistic dialogue

Front 97

Explain the kind of chivalry present in Sir Thomas Malory's Arthurian tales

Back 97

Primarily devoted to the fellowship and competitions of aristocratic men. Fighting consists mainly of single combats in tournaments, chance encounters, and battle. Commoners rarely come into view.

Front 98

What does Sir Thomas Malory hold highest in his Arthurian tales?

Back 98

An aristocratic male code of honor for which his favorite word is "worship." Men win or lose "worship" through their actions in war and love.

Front 99

Who is the most "worshipful" of Arthur's knights?

Back 99

Sir Lancelot, the "head of all Christian knights."

Front 100

Robert Henryson's writing shares similar topics with what other author?

Back 100

Chaucer, between Troilus and Criseyde/The Testament of Cresseid, and The Nun's Priest's Tale/The Cock and the Fox

Front 101

Characteristics of John Skelton's poetry

Back 101

Mixed high and low styles and playing bawdy and scatological verbal games with the Catholic liturgy; shocking

Front 102

Who/what influenced Sir Thomas More's Utopia

Back 102

Plato's Republic

Front 103

What group hailed Sir Thomas More's Utopia

Back 103

Communists

Front 104

What was the goal of Sir Thomas More's Utopia?

Back 104

A meditation on the ideal commonwealth, but not necessarily a call to action/change

Front 105

What is expressed in many of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder's poems?

Back 105

The intense longing for "steadfastness" and an escape from the corruption, anxiety, and duplicity of the court.

Front 106

How does Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder frequently represent himself in his poems?

Back 106

As a plain-speaking and steadfast man, betrayed by the :doubleness of a fickle mistress or the instability of fortune.

Front 107

What did Sir Thomas Wyatt introduce to English?

Back 107

The Sonnet, a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter with a complex, intertwining rhyming scheme.

Front 108

What was a common tone in Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry?

Back 108

Bitterness, anger, passion, cynicism, longing

Front 109

How did Sir Thomas Wyatt portray women?

Back 109

Cynically

Front 110

Whose poetry is closely linked to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey?

Back 110

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Front 111

What form did Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey use/develop in his poetry?

Back 111

The English Sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet, all in iambix pentameter. abab cdcd efef gg

Front 112

Who was the first English poet to publish in blank verse?

Back 112

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Front 113

What issues with Lutheranism did Thomas More address in his Dialogue concerning Heresies?

Back 113

Luther's denial that Christians could contribute toward their own salvation through their good works, and his objection to Luther's account of biblical interpretation.

Front 114

What did Roger Ascham oppose in The Schoolmaster?

Back 114

The use of corporal punishment in schools.

Front 115

What did Roger Ascham advocate for in The Schoolmaster?

Back 115

"Double Translation" as the most effective way of acquiring a sound Latin style. Students would translate a passage from Latin to English, and then without consulting the original, translate the English back to Latin

Front 116

How did John Foxe see life?

Back 116

The apocalyptic struggle between good and evil

Front 117

Sir Thomas Hoby

Back 117

Translated Castiglione's Il Cortegiano

Front 118

What do Elizabeth I's poems detail?

Back 118

Actual events in her life. Show her to be agile, poised and self-conscious as a writer.

Front 119

What kind of language did Edmund Spencer use in The Shepheardes Calendar?

Back 119

Archaic, in homage to Chaucer

Front 120

Spenserian Sonnet

Back 120

9 lines with a hexameter line at the end

Front 121

What is one of the categories Edmund Spenser's writing falls under?

Back 121

Renaissance Neoplatonism

Front 122

What was Edmund Spenser's work influenced by?

Back 122

Puritanism in the early days

Front 123

Pastoral Poetry

Back 123

shepherds among their flocks piping on their flutes and singing songs of love, sadness and complaint. Influential classical form.

Front 124

How were the singers of Pastoral Poetry depicted?

Back 124

Simple rustics who inhabited a word in which human beings and nature lived in harmony

Front 125

Allegory

Back 125

Extended metaphor

Front 126

What is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene an allegory of?

Back 126

Both moral qualities like Friendship, Justice, Chastity, and Love, as well as an allegory of Queen Elizabeth I.

Front 127

What kind of poem is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene?

Back 127

An epic

Front 128

What is the form of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene?

Back 128

Nine line stanzas of closely interlocking rhymes (ababbcbcc) with the first 8 lines with 5 stresses each (iambic pentameter) and the final line with 6 stresses (iambic hexameter or Alexandrine).

Front 129

What does Book 1 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene focus on?

Back 129

The adventures of Redcrosse who achieves the quest he undertakes and kills the dragon, and wins Una as his bride. Spiritual allegory, separated from the one true faith and aided by interventions of divine grace that reunite him with him where he triumphs.

Front 130

How does Book 3 of Edumund Spenser's The Faerie Queene differ from Book 1?

Back 130

Book 3 is more romancelike, with many characters, interwoven stories, and heightened attention to women.

Front 131

What principles are Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene built around?

Back 131

A commitment to a life of constant struggle and a profound longing for rest. A celebration of human heroism and a perception of ineradicable human sinfulness. A vision of evil as terrifyingly potent force and a vision of evil as mere emptiness and filth. A faith in the supreme value of visionary art and a recurrent suspicion that art is dangerously allied to graven images and deception.

Front 132

What are Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion a portrait of?

Back 132

His marriage and courtship

Front 133

What are some of the motifs in Edmund Spenser's AMoretti and Epithalamion?

Back 133

Frustration and longing, but overall joyous possession

Front 134

Epithalamion Genre

Back 134

Elements include an invocation of the muses, a celebratory description of the procession of the bride, the religious rites, the singing and dancing at the wedding party, the preparations for the wedding night, and the sexual consummation of the marriage

Front 135

What poems did Sir Walter Ralegh write in response to and who were they written by?

Back 135

Marlowe's Passionate Shepard and The Lie

Front 136

Where did Sir Walter Ralegh write his History of the World

Back 136

In prison

Front 137

Where does Sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World begin?

Back 137

Creation

Front 138

What does Sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World emphasize?

Back 138

The providential punishment of evil princes

Front 139

Euphuism

Back 139

Prose style developed by John Lyly in his prose romance Euphues with features of an elaborately patterned sentence structure based on comparison and antithesis and a wealth of ornament including proverbs, incidents from history and poetry, and fanciful similes drawn from contemporary science, classical texts or the author's own imagination.

Front 140

What does Sir Philip Sidney defend in The Defense of Posey?

Back 140

Poetry and all imaginative literature against its attackers. He also greatly exalts the role of poet, the freedom of the imagination, and the moral value of fiction.

Front 141

What is Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella known for?

Back 141

Being the first of the Elizabethan sonnet cycles.

Front 142

What is the purpose of a sonnet cycle (in particular Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella)?

Back 142

An exploration of the lover's state of mind and soul, the contradictory impulses, intense desires, and frustrations that haunt him.

Front 143

Name the differences/changes made between Sir Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia and New Arcadia

Back 143

Old Arcadia was completed in 5 "books" whereas New Arcadia was revised and condensed into 3, published posthumously. New Arcaidia has a more interwoven plot and elevated tone of moral and heroic high seriousness.

Front 144

Explain some of the stylistic elements of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella

Back 144

Petrarchian anatomy of love, sisplaying shifting and often contradictory states (hope and despair...) Repetition. Seemingly revealing of his own life & relationship with Penelope Devereux, although he was a very private man.

Front 145

What was unique about Mary (Sidney) Herbert, Countess of Pembroke's psalm translations?

Back 145

She recreated them as English poems, used stanzaic and metrical patterns and imagery.

Front 146

Describe Christopher Marlowe's use for his character Tamburlaine

Back 146

The vehicle for the expression of boundless energy and ambition, the impulse to strive ceaselessly for absolute dominance.

Front 147

What were some of the things Christopher Marlowe was arrested for?

Back 147

Atheism, sedition and homosexuality.

Front 148

What is odd about Christopher Marlowe's plays based on his personal life?

Back 148

He was arrested for atheism and homosexuality, however his plays depicted very conventional religious ideas.

Front 149

What do the heroes of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus have in common?

Back 149

They all portray heroes who passionately seek power. They are overreachers, striving to get beyond the conventional boundaries established to contain the human will.

Front 150

Problem Plays/Dark Comedies

Back 150

Comedies of Shakespeare's that were more biting in tone, uneasy with comic conventions, ruthlessly questioning the values of the characters and the resolutions of the plots.

Front 151

Patterns of Shakespeare's romances

Back 151

Fluid plot, interest in moral and emotional life less of the adolescents and more of their parents. Patterns of loss and recovery, suffering and redemption, despair and renewal.

Front 152

What do John Donne's 5 satires and elegies reveal about him?

Back 152

That he was extremely fascinated by and critical of English society

Front 153

Name some of the topics of John Donne's satires

Back 153

Foppish and obsequious courtiers, bad poets, corrupt lawyers and a corrupt court, as well as "true religion"

Front 154

Whose approval was John Donne seeking to get when he wrote Pseudo-Martyr?

Back 154

James I

Front 155

What "category" is John Donne often grouped into with Herbert, Vaughn...?

Back 155

Metaphysical poets

Front 156

What event inspired John Donne's Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary?

Back 156

The death of Elizabeth I

Front 157

What did John Donne analyze in his Anatomy of the World?

Back 157

The corruption, decay, and disintegration of the world in all its aspects

Front 158

Who was the first Englishwoman to publish a substantial volume of original poems?

Back 158

Aemilia Lanyer

Front 159

From what perspective does Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum stem from/lean towards?

Back 159

Feminist

Front 160

What role does Ben Jonson often play within his writing?

Back 160

A witty and honet judge of men and women

Front 161

What kind of values did Ben Jonson admire? Examples?

Back 161

Classical values, enumerated in "Inviting a Friend to Supper," moderation, civility, graciousness, pleasure that delights without enslaving

Front 162

From what other forms did Ben Jonson derive inspiration from for Volpene?

Back 162

Roman comedy, commedia dell'arte, medieval beast fables

Front 163

Ode

Back 163

Originally a classical form, a lyric poem in an elevated style, celebrating a lofty theme, a noble personage, or a grand occasion.

Front 164

How does Ben Jonson imitate the classic form of the ode in The Ode on Cary and Morison?

Back 164

He uses a triple division of turn, counterturn, and stand. Turns and counterturns rhyme in couplets with line lengths varying in all stanzas according to uniform scheme. 12 line stands follow a more complex/strict design.

Front 165

Who is described as the "most prolific, self-conscious, and impressive female author of the Jacobean era?"

Back 165

Mary Wroth

Front 166

Who did Pamphilia and Amphilanthus represent in Mary Wroth's real life that are paralleled in her Petrarchan lyric sequence?

Back 166

Wroth and her lover

Front 167

What was the Petrarchan lyric sequence typically used for?

Back 167

The major genre for analyzing a male lovers passions, frustrations and fantasies, sometimes career anxieties.

Front 168

What does Mary Wroth's use of a typically male style of writing say about the source of the writing?

Back 168

Demonstrates how female desire is the source and center of the relationship. Celebrates the woman lover-poet's movement from bondage to making the choice of constancy.

Front 169

What two works is John Webster most famous for?

Back 169

The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil

Front 170

What do John Webster's most famous works have in common?

Back 170

Both set in Roman Catholic Italy and both evoking the common jacobean stereotype of that land as a place of sophisticated corruption.

Front 171

What genre did Sir Francis Bacon create with his New Atlantis?

Back 171

Scientific Utopia

Front 172

What topic did Sir Francis Bacon's essays revolve around?

Back 172

Topics "Civil and Moral"

Front 173

What were some stylistic elements present in Sir Francis Bacon's essays?

Back 173

Aphoristic structure, curt, disjunctive style, cool objectivity and sententiousness. Rarely uses "I" but speaks in a way suggesting he is speaking for the people.

Front 174

What does Robert Burton promise in the title of his Anatomy of Melancholy?

Back 174

An analysis of all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of melancholy

Front 175

How is Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy divided?

Back 175

Three parts, Causes and Effects, the Cures, and the two principle kinds, Love Melancholy and Religious Melancholy

Front 176

What is the problem with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy?

Back 176

Melancholy is universal, many of Burton's categories collapse on each other

Front 177

Who does Robert Burton cite in his Anatomy of Melancholy?

Back 177

Every authority who wrote about any aspect of melancholy, including Scripture.

Front 178

What does Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy assume?

Back 178

That knowledge of psychology and not science is humankind's greatest need.

Front 179

What is George Herbert struggling to do in his poems that comprise The Temple?

Back 179

Define his relationship to God

Front 180

What did George Herbert use to attempt to reach his goal in The Temple?

Back 180

Biblical metaphors invested with the tensions of relationships familiar in his own society (king and subject, lord and courtier...)

Front 181

How does George Herbert represent his relationship with God in The Temple?

Back 181

As a friend of a friend, the major source of his anxieties

Front 182

What does George Herbert eventually realize about his relationship with Christ through his poems?

Back 182

That his relationship is always radically unequal, it is both initiated by God as well as enabled by him, and a paradox.

Front 183

How does George Herbert answer his paradoxical relationship with God?

Back 183

He creates a Biblical poetic form that goes against traditional poetic styles. He depends on God's art (The Bible)

Front 184

What heritage does Henry Vaughan term himself in Olor Iscanus?

Back 184

The Silurist. Silures were an ancient tribe from Southeast Wales, where some of the features of Vaughan's poetry derive from.

Front 185

What is one unifying motif in Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans?

Back 185

Pilgrimage, though the arrival at the destination is typically deferred.

Front 186

What type of poet was Richard Crashaw?

Back 186

Devotional

Front 187

What deeply influenced Richard Crashaw's poetry?

Back 187

The Counter-Reformation, reacted against Protestant austerity by linking heightened spirituality to vivid bodily experiences.

Front 188

What influenced Richard Crashaw's Latin epigrams?

Back 188

Jesuit epigram style, among the best by an Englishman

Front 189

What type of poem made up the majority of Robert Herrick's Hesperides?

Back 189

Carpe diem love poems

Front 190

What themes did Robert Herrick often use in his writing?

Back 190

Metammorphosis and celebration, the idea of the good life (Love devoid of high passion), the creation of poetry as a bulwark against the ravages of time

Front 191

What does Thomas Carew emphasize in his writing?

Back 191

Natural sensuality, the need for union between king and subject

Front 192

What was Thomas Carew criticizing in his writing?

Back 192

The Neoplatonic artifice of the Caroline court.

Front 193

What notes are characteristic to Thomas Carew's writing?

Back 193

Frank sexuality and emotional realism

Front 194

What does Thomas Carew do in his writing to emulate John Donne's masculinity of style?

Back 194

Uses energetic runover couplets, quick changes of rhythms and images, and vigorous "strong lines"

Front 195

What ideals are presented in Richard Lovelace's To Althea, from Prison?

Back 195

Cavalier ideals of women, wine and royalism

Front 196

What to Katherine Philips poems encourage between women?

Back 196

Comradery, the ideal female friendship

Front 197

Name some characteristics of Andrew Marvell's poetry

Back 197

Elegance, limpid style, paradoxes, complexities in tone, use of dramatic monologue

Front 198

What does Andrew Marvell defend in The Rehearsal Transposed? What is he against?

Back 198

Puritain dissenters, censorship

Front 199

Name a poem Andrew Marvell is known for

Back 199

To His Coy Mistress

Front 200

Who was Robert Filmer arguing against in Patriarcha?

Back 200

Continental political theorists who had critiqued James I's treatises on monarchy

Front 201

Why did Margaret Cavendish meet more criticism than praise?

Back 201

Because it was deemed disgraceful for a woman to be writing about her desires, opinions, personal circumstances, and aspirations to fame and authorship

Front 202

What Western concepts did John Milton's works deal with?

Back 202

Companionate marriage, the new science, freedom of the press, religious liberty and toleration, & republicanism, among others

Front 203

What was unique about the political interventions written by John Milton?

Back 203

They demonstrated "remarkable courage and independence of thought."

Front 204

What topics did John Milton address in his political interventions?

Back 204

Church government, divorce, education, freedom of the press, regicide, and republicanism

Front 205

Describe John Milton's Paradise Regained

Back 205

Resonated with repression and moral/political challenges the Puritan dissenters faced after the Restoration. Treats Jesus' Temptation in the Wilderness as an intellectual struggle through which the hero comes to understand both himself and his mission through which he defeats Satan...

Front 206

What does John Milton defend in Areopagitica?

Back 206

Intellectual liberty, widespread religious toleration, with restrictions on Roman Catholicism

Front 207

What did John Milton's Aeropagitica influence?

Back 207

The conception of freedom of speech, press and thought

Front 208

What was unique about John Milton's Sonnets?

Back 208

They covered unconventional topics such as personal crises, political issues or personages, friends and friendship, historical events

Front 209

What is John Milton's Paradise Lost really about?

Back 209

Human condition, the Fall that caused our downfall, the promise and means of restoration, knowing and choosing, free will

Front 210

Who are the main characters in John Milton's Paradise Lost?

Back 210

Satan, Beezebub, Abdiel, Adam and Eve

Front 211

What are the themes of John Milton's Paradise Lost linked to?

Back 211

The political questions at stake in the English Revolution and the Restoration

Front 212

What kind of poet was John Dryden?

Back 212

Impersonal, commenting on matters of public concern

Front 213

Describe John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe

Back 213

A satire cast in the form of a mock-heroic episode of Thomas Shadwell, a playwright

Front 214

In what way did John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe satire Thomas Shadwell?

Back 214

Dryden ridiculed Shadwell by using devices of mock epic, treating the low/mean/absurd with grand language, lofty style and solemn one of epic poetry, creating a disparity between subject and style.

Front 215

What does John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners describe?

Back 215

The author's transformation from a self-doubting sinner to an eloquent and fearless Baptist preacher

Front 216

What is the basic metaphor of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress?

Back 216

That life is a journey

Front 217

What was the style of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress modeled after?

Back 217

The English Bible

Front 218

What does John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding aim to do?

Back 218

Explore the human mind in general by closely watching one particular mind

Front 219

How does John Locke treat religion in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding?

Back 219

He leans toward restraining rather than encouraging religious speculations

Front 220

How does John Lock see identity in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding?

Back 220

He sees selfhood not derived from an identity of soul but from the consciousness of present and past actions

Front 221

What qualities make Samual Butler's Hudibras a travesty or burlesque?

Back 221

It takes a serious subject and debases it by using a low style/distorts it by grotesque exaggeration.

Front 222

What was unique about Aphra Behn's plays?

Back 222

They included casts with women "with warm bodies and clever heads"

Front 223

What characteristics of Aphra Behn's writing has led readers to believe that she was raised Catholic?

Back 223

Her references to nuns and convents, her praise for prominent Catholic lords

Front 224

What made Aphra Behn's writing somewhat controversial?

Back 224

Her denouncement of arranged marriages, her exploration of the sexual feelings of women...

Front 225

What three categories does Aphra Behn's Oroonoko fall under?

Back 225

Memoir, Travel narrative, and biography

Front 226

How does Aphra Behn represent the "primitive Indians and noble Africans" in Oroonoko?

Back 226

As living by a code of virtue, principles of fidelity and honor that Christians ignored

Front 227

How do most Restoration comedies (Including William Congreve's The Way of the World) begin?

Back 227

With the struggle for power, sex and money and end in marriage that viewed property rather than romance as the basis of marriage

Front 228

What is unique about William Congreve's characters in The Way of the World?

Back 228

In addition to the hero and Heroine and the villains, the rest of the characters serve as foils to each other

Front 229

What did Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal to the Ladies advocate?

Back 229

The founding of a monastic school or retreat for women where a rigorous wide-ranging education could be combined with moral and religious discipline

Front 230

How did Mary Astell feel about marriage?

Back 230

She felt it was often a trap for women, believed that women should be guided by reason, not only in choosing a mate but in choosing whether or not to marry at all.

Front 231

What was unique or special about Daniel Defoe's writing?

Back 231

He wrote fictitious auto-biographies, and used highly realistic language and speech in order to demonstrate the identity of the character

Front 232

What qualities "conspired to keep Anne Finch's poems in the shade"?

Back 232

She was an aristocrat, her nature was retiring, she was a woman

Front 233

What did Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea's poems celebrate?

Back 233

Solitude, being alone

Front 234

What was Henry Fielding satirizing with Shamela?

Back 234

Shamela was a parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Virtue Rewarded

Front 235

What did Matthew Prior's An Epitaph question?

Back 235

The guarantee of virtue that a country life without ambition seemed to promise

Front 236

What tone did Mary Jones take in her Miscellanies in Prose and Verse?

Back 236

Droll, despairing of fame

Front 237

How did Laurence Sterne invite suspicion to the thoughts and pauses in his character's thoughts?

Back 237

The copious use of dashes

Front 238

What set George Crabbe's The Village apart from other poems about rural life?

Back 238

Realism and gloom

Front 239

What were Jonathan Swift's satires about?

Back 239

Corruptions in religion and learning

Front 240

What were some of the stylistic qualities of Jonathan Swift's writing?

Back 240

Clear, simple diction, uncomplicated syntax, economy and conciseness of language, tension and control with fierce indignation

Front 241

What does Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels satire?

Back 241

Human failings, the defective political, economic, and social institutions that they call into being

Front 242

What satirical device does Jonathan Swift use in Gulliver's Travels?

Back 242

The imaginary voyage

Front 243

What did Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele set out to do in the Spectator?

Back 243

Break down the distinction between educating and entertaining readers

Front 244

What form of poetry did Alexander Pope use?

Back 244

The heroic couplet

Front 245

How did Alexander Pope introduce metrical variety into his writing despite the use of a rigid form?

Back 245

Free substitution of trochees and spondees for the normal iambs, arranging phrases and clauses of different lengths within single lines and couplets

Front 246

What was Alexander Pope's goal in An Essay on Man?

Back 246

To formulate a widely acceptable system of obvious, familiar truths.

Front 247

How is Alexander Pope's Essay on Man split?

Back 247

Into 4 epistles

Front 248

Explain each of the epistles in Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

Back 248

1. Asserts the essential order and goodness of the universe and the rightness of our place in it. 2. to show how we may attain an psychological harmony that can become the basis of a virtuous life through the cooperation of self love and passions. 3. the individual in society which was created through the cooperation of self love and social love. 4. happiness, which lies within the reach of all for it is dependent on virtue which becomes possible when self love is transmuted into love of others and God

Front 249

What does Alexander Pope suggest about his own role in writing the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot?

Back 249

That he cannot be defined by any role he puts himself in as the author of the poem

Front 250

What does Alexander Pope's first Duncaid celebrate?

Back 250

the triumph of the hordes of Grub Street

Front 251

What does Alexander Pope's The New Duncaid satire?

Back 251

Politics, Society, Education, and Religion

Front 252

How does Alexander Pope's The New Duncaid End?

Back 252

A great apocalypse, with a yawn that signals the death of Logos

Front 253

What do Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's poems reveal about her?

Back 253

The mind of a woman who is not willing to accept the stereotypes imposed on her by men

Front 254

What does Alexander Pope satire in his Epistle 2. To a Lady?

Back 254

Stereotypes on women, women are fickle, frail and subordinate to men. Much of the poem undermines the prejudices by showing the real difficulties of women's lives

Front 255

How does Mary Leapor feel about her position as a woman as depicted in An Essay on Woman

Back 255

Pessimistic based on her experiences

Front 256

What theme is often expressed in Samuel Johnson's writing?

Back 256

The vanity of human wishes, the dangerous but all pervasive power of wishful thinking

Front 257

Describe the style of writing that Samuel Johnson developed in his writings

Back 257

Balanced, extended sentences, phrases or clauses moving to carefully controlled rhythms, general language, polysyllabic

Front 258

How many words were included in Samuel Johnson's dictionary

Back 258

40,000 with illustrative quotations and excellent definitions

Front 259

How does Samuel Johnson represent Shakespeare in his Preface to Shakespeare?

Back 259

Points out his faults as well as his virtues and finds that his truth to life surpasses that of all other modern writers

Front 260

How did John Locke feel about slavery?

Back 260

He believed all men were born free, however invested in two enterprises predicated on slavery

Front 261

What does John Locke express about slavery in his second Treatise?

Back 261

That he both detested the condition of slavery and allowed its justification

Front 262

How did Mary Astell respond to John Locke's Treatise on slavery?

Back 262

She undermines him by saying that if all men are born free, how are all women born slaves?

Front 263

How does James Thomson's Liberty portray British freedom?

Back 263

The culmination of the progress of European civilization

Front 264

How does David Hume view the freedom of the press in his Of the Liberty of the Press?

Back 264

He celebrates it, believes that liberty produces a stronger, richer social fabric

Front 265

What was William Collins' goal for Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects?

Back 265

To create a new poetry, more lyrical and fanciful than that of Alexander Pope's generation

Front 266

What form is Dante Allghieri's Divine comedy in?

Back 266

Terza rima

Front 267

Terza Rima

Back 267

Tercets or groups of three lines with interlocking rhymes (aba, bcb, cdc...)

Front 268

Name the parts of Dante Allghieri's Divine Comedy

Back 268

Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Each is divided into Cantos

Front 269

Who is the narrator of Dante Allghieri's Divine Comedy?

Back 269

Dante himself

Front 270

What is Dante Allghieri's Divine Comedy about?

Back 270

An account of Dante's own journey, guided by the ancient Roman poet Virgil, through the nine levels of Hell. During this journey he encounters and holds conversations with the souls of the damned. At the end, at the bottom of Hell, he must face Satan and figure out how to escape the underworld.

Front 271

Who is Beatrice in Dante's Divine Comedy?

Back 271

His muse and inspiration. Out of love she initiates his journey because she believes he has strayed from a righteous path and that this divine journey will save him. She leaves her seat in Heaven to descend to Hell where she asks Virgil to serve as his guide. She meets Dante in Earthly Paradise (Purgatorio) and acts as his guide through Heaven.

Front 272

Sherwood Anderson timeline

Back 272

1876-1941

Front 273

Describe Sherwood Anderson's prose style?

Back 273

Derived from everyday speech

Front 274

What short story established Sherwood Anderson as a short story author?

Back 274

Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Front 275

What type of influence did Sherwood Anderson have?

Back 275

He influenced the American short tory writing between WWI-II

Front 276

Describe Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio

Back 276

A picture of life in a typical small Midwestern town, as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants. Episodic. Often compared to Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology

Front 277

Identify: "The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of () had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint his dreams of his manhood."

Back 277

Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

Front 278

What is the most prevalent image in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach?

Back 278

The sea. Includes the visual imagery, expresses illusion, and auditory imagery to express reality.

Front 279

Identify: "But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar/ Retreating to the breath/ Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear/ And naked shingles of the world."

Back 279

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach 24-28

Front 280

What happens in the final stanza of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach?

Back 280

The speaker makes his last attempt to hold onto illusion, forced to face reality

Front 281

What is the repeating line in WH Auden's In Memory of WB Yeats?

Back 281

"Today was a cold, dark day."

Front 282

Honore de Balzac

Back 282

French journalist and writer, one of the creators of realism in literature.

Front 283

What is the name of Honore de Balzac's collection of novels and short stories?

Back 283

La Comedie humaine, derived from Dante's Divine Comedy

Front 284

Name some of the titles of Honore de Balzac's pieces in The Human Comedy

Back 284

Le Pere Goriot, Les Illusions Perdues, Les Paysans, La Femme de Trente Ans, and Eugenie Grandet.

Front 285

What is the primary setting of Honore de Balzac's books?

Back 285

ParisW

Front 286

What stands out about the setting of Honore de Balzac's books?

Back 286

The old aristocracy, new financial wealth, middle-class trade, demi-monde, professionals, servants, young intellectuals, clerks, criminals....

Front 287

Name some of Honore de Balzac's recurring characters

Back 287

Eugene Rastignac, came from an impoverished provincial family to Paris, pursued wealth, had many mistresses, gambled, and was a successful politician. Henry de Marsay appeared in 25 novels

Front 288

What religion was Samuel Beckett?

Back 288

Protestant

Front 289

How did Samuel Beckett's own life influence his plays?

Back 289

His first play, Eleutheria, mirrors his own move from Dublin, revolves around a young man's efforts to cut himself loose from his family and social obligations

Front 290

When did Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premier?

Back 290

January 5, 1953

Front 291

What language were Samuel Beckett's major plays written in?

Back 291

French

Front 292

What is the name of another notable play by Samuel Beckett?

Back 292

Endgame

Front 293

Name the characters from Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Back 293

Estragon, Vladimir, Lucky, Pozzo, a boy

Front 294

Name the characters from Samuel Beckett's Endgame

Back 294

Hamm, Clov, Nagg, Nell

Front 295

Aphra Behn

Back 295

1640-1689

Front 296

Name some accomplishments of Aphra Behn's work

Back 296

Most prolific dramatist of the Restoration after Dryden, pioneering work in prose narrative made her famous

Front 297

Describe Aphra Behn's Satyr on Doctor Dryden

Back 297

Critique on Dryden's conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. Protestant rebuttal to Dryden's anti-Protestantism in MacFlecknoe

Front 298

What is the subtitle for Aphra Behn's Oroonoko?

Back 298

The Royal Slave

Front 299

Name the characters in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Back 299

Oroonoko: African prince & later a slave to the English who called him Caesar; Imoinda: O's lover, also enslaved, sometimes called Clemene; Jamoan: Opposing warrior chief who, conquered by O, becomes his vassal; The King of Coramantien: whom Oroonoko serves and later betrays and who betrays him; Shop Captain: slave-runner; Trefrey: English colonist, supposedly sympathetic plantation overseer; William Byam: Colony's deputy governor; Colonel Martin: English colonist; Bannister: Wild Irishman

Front 300

What happens in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko?

Back 300

Prince has gotten to know Behn while a slave in Guiana, she is a sympathetic listener, he tells her his story. He is successful in battle-> falls in love with a young woman who has also caught the eye of the king. O and I pursue their love secretly, are discovered, I is sold into slavery. O is a slave owner, despairs, is nearly defeated in battle by J's army, but is not. O and his men are lured onto an English ship by a captain who had previously bought and sold slaves with O, they are taken as slaves to Guiana. O reunited with I, noble bearing attracts praise. Circumstances force him to rebel against masters and lead an army of ex-slaves to seek freedom. Ends with O's capture, wife murdered, and O is tortured and executed by English slave-owners

Front 301

What type of writer was Robert Browning and what was he noted for?

Back 301

Poet, noted for mastery of dramatic monologue

Front 302

What is notable about the narrators of Robert Browning's best works?

Back 302

People from the past reveal their thoughts and lives as if speaking or thinking aloud.

Front 303

Identify: "I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! You need not clap your torches to my face. Zooks, what's to blame? you think you see a monk! What, 'tis past midnight, and you go the rounds, and here you catch me at an alley's end Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?"

Back 303

Opening, Robert Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi

Front 304

Identify: "The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake" I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria; straight She shut the cold out and the storm."

Back 304

Opening, Robert Browning, Porphyria's Lover

Front 305

Identify: "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands...."

Back 305

Opening, Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Front 306

Identify: "Your hand, sir, and good-bye: no lights, no lights! The street's hushed, and I know my own way back, Don't fear me! There's the grey beginning. Zooks!"

Back 306

Closing, Robert Browning, Fra Lippo Lippi

Front 307

Identify: "Porphyria's love: She guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard. And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, and yet God has not said a word!"

Back 307

Closing, Robert Browning, Porphyria's Lover

Front 308

Albert Camus

Back 308

Born in Algeria, degree in philosophy, relocated to France.

Front 309

Which of Albert Camus' plays are considered to be the most important?

Back 309

Caligula (1938) and Cross Purpose (1944)

Front 310

Albert Camus Caligula

Back 310

A young Roman emperor comes face to face with the terrible lack of meaning in the universe after the senseless death of his beloved sister Drusilla. In order to teach the world the true nature of life, Caligula goes on a murderous spree, killing indiscriminately. When this fails, he chooses to court his own assassination.

Front 311

Albert Camus The Plague

Back 311

1940's Algeria, Dr. Rieux discovers a dead rat preoccupied with wife's impending departure to sanatorium. Marks the beginning of an epidemic of bubonic plague that will besiege the city until the following February. Over the long 10 months, Rieux, his acquaintances, friends, colleagues, and fellow citizens labor with indiv. and social transformations caused by illness. Separation, isolation and penury become the common lot of distinct characters whose actions, thoughts, and feelings constitute a dynamic tableau of man imprisoned.

Front 312

Albert Camus The Stranger

Back 312

At the beginning, Msr. Mersault's mother dies. Mersault is then forced to go to the home he sent her in order to pay his last respects. After the funeral, Mersault returns home and the next day begins a relationship with Marie. Shortly after his return home he befriends Raymond, his neighbor/pimp. Mersault, Marie and Raymond decide to go to the beach and recognize the brother of Raymond's ex-girlfriend. Mersault goes for a walk to the stream and shoots the Arab an 5 times. He is taken away and put in jail. At triel, he seals his fate by his existentialistic ways. Sentenced to the guillotine and the novel ends, reader wanting closure.

Front 313

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Back 313

English Romantic poet, Biographia Literaria

Front 314

What did Samuel Taylor Coleridge do in his Biographia Literaria?

Back 314

Propounded the organic principle as the constitutive definition of the poem: the whole is in every part and every part can be found in the whole. The poem is that species of composition characterized, unlike works of science, by the immediate purpose of pleasure, and also by special metric and phonetic arrangements; it produces delight as a whole and this delight is compatible with the distinct gratification generated by each part

Front 315

Explain Samuel Taylor Coleridge's primary and secondary imagination in terms of poetry

Back 315

A great poem is the product of the primary imagination. The secondary imagination dissolves, disperses, scatters, in order to re-create the material of the primary imagination, represents creation as against vision

Front 316

What concept did New Critics borrow from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poetic?

Back 316

Contextualism

Front 317

Explain Samuel Taylor Coleridge's idea of contextualism

Back 317

The poem is a product of the form-creating man; has an independent existence, within the organic system of mutual relationships among the terms that made up the context of the poem. Thus, the poem was regarded outside any and all non-poetic contexts

Front 318

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel background

Back 318

First part written in 1797. Fragment. Wanted to include it in the 1800 Lyrical Ballads but it was not yet finished. Was published incomplete in 1816. Beginning of a medieval tale about a demon or witch. Written in a strange meter of four stresses to a line and varying number of unstressed syllables

Front 319

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel Part 1

Back 319

Midnight in Landdale Castle. Everyone is asleep but Christabel (daughter of Sir Leoline, lord of the castle) Christabel is roaming the woods, thinking about lover, knight to whom she is betrothed but is far away. Hears a moaning from oak tree, discovers beautiful pale lady, barefoot with jewels in her hair, begs for help (Geraldine). Tells Christabel she was abducted from home by 5 warriors, tied her to white horse and brought her to the tree & left vowing to return. Begs C for help. Walk back to castle, at the entrance G falls and needs to be carried. This hints that G is demon and cannot pass on her own through doorway that has been blessed. C prays to the Virgin and G cannot join. Ashes in fireplace flame up as G passes. Undress for sleep in C's chamber. Lie down, C wrapped in G arms. C sleeps, guardian spirit of dead mother driven away by G. Poet has led reader to believe G is entrapping C or trying to seduce her to capture her soul but says "Saints will aid if men call."

Front 320

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Christabel Part 2

Back 320

Morning. G and C rise and dress, but C is uneasy about sinister influence of G. Visit Sir Leoline, G introduces herself as daughter of Lord Roland de Vaux, once Sir Leoline's closest friend but now bitter enemy. Sir L is captivated by beauty of G who embraces and kisses him, tells bard Bracey to travel to Lord R's castle and invite him to Langdale Castle. Sir L challenges 5 scoundrels who kidnapped G to appear at a tournament to defend their honor in 1 week. Seeing G's influence over her father, C asks the guest be sent home at once. Sir L captivated by G and in fury at breech of hospitality responds angrily to C who cannot express her fears bc her tongue has been bewitched by G. Ends with poet's meditation about irrational anger of a parent toward an innocent child.

Front 321

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan

Back 321

Author mentions an anodyne in intro which he took before writing. Drug was laudanum opium dissolved in alcohol and the vision was an opium dream.

Front 322

William Congreve, The Way of the World

Back 322

Lady Wishfort has daughter Mrs. Fainall, a niece Millamant and a nephew Sir Wilfull Witwould. M has 2 admirers, Witwould and Petulant. M's $ is held by LW& if M marries w/o LW's consent half of $ goes to MF. Mirabell has previously had an affair with MF but is now in love with M. When MF was thought to be pregnant Mirabell arranged for her to marry Fainall. Mirabell has angered Mrs. Marwood by rejecting her advances and Lady Wishfort by flirting with her to gain entry to her house where M and her maid Mincing also live. MB plans to get both M and her $ by dressing his servant Waitwell as his uncle Sir Rowland and have him seduce LW. She will agree to marry him to disinherit Mirabell and be publicly embarrassed when he is revealed to be only a servant. MB will then be able to step in and release her from contract on condition that he has M and $. He has married Waitwell to Lady Wishforts servant Foible as security that morning. When they discover his plan, Fainall and Mrs. Marwood try to turn the tables by revealing MF affair with MB on condition that LW turn over all her estate to Fainall.

Front 323

Hart Crane

Back 323

1899-1932 American poet whose life ended when he committed suicide by jumping from a boat. Writes about NY a lot in his collection of poems called The Bridge. Always talks about ships and technology.

Front 324

Identify: "Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath An embassy.' Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured. And wrecks passed without song of bells, The calyx of death's bounty giving back A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, the portent wound in corridors of shells."

Back 324

At Melville's Tomb, Hart Crane

Front 325

Name two authors who wrote poems about John Donne and the titles of those poems

Back 325

Ben Jonson, To Donne and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On Donne's Poetry

Front 326

Describe the plot of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

Back 326

Begins in August, meeting to settle differences of K family. Fyodor (extravagant buffoon) travels with 2nd son Ivan. Old F's youngest son Alyosha is with Father Zossima (wise elder A respects/lives with). Dmitri (oldest son) appears and is mad at father over whether he owes father debts or f owes him inheritance. Katerina Ivanova has proposed marriage to Dmitri. D and father are in competition for love of Grushenka, f has taken out 3,000 rubles to bribe her away from D. D threatens to kill father but not G. A is confidante of brothers, tells I of his love for K and poem showing his pessimism, The Grand Inquisitor, before leaving for Moskow on the advice of Smerdyakov. FZ dies and controversy arises at the monastery about his possible sainthood. Goes on with evermore confused loves and the murder of Fyodor which it transpires that one of the brothers accidentally encouraged. D in a lengthy trial and is exiled to Siberia.

Front 327

John Dryden

Back 327

1631-1700

Front 328

What was John Dryden awarded?

Back 328

The poet Laureate of England in 168W

Front 329

Why did John Dryden lose his title?

Back 329

He was stripped of it because of religious differences when William and Mary came into power.

Front 330

Besides poetry, what other types of writing did John Dryden do?

Back 330

Playwriting, adapted a number of Shakespeare plays

Front 331

John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel

Back 331

Poem, allegory, using Biblical characters and environment in place of England in Dryden's time. Satire on the Whig leader, Shaftesbury. Began what is regarded as "The finest of all political satires."

Front 332

Name some of the characters of John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel and who they are mirrors of

Back 332

David (King Charles II) Michal (Katherine of Baragna, Charles' wife, unable to have children) Absalom (Duke of Monmouth, Charles' oldest son, illegitimate) Architophel (Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the Whig party) Saul (Cromwell) The Jews (The English)

Front 333

Identify: "In pious times, e'r Priest-craft did begin, Before Polygamy was made a sin' When man, on many, multiply'd his kind, E'r one to one was, cursedly, confind: When Nature prompted, and no law deny'd Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride; Then, Israel's monarch, after Heaven's own heart, His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart To Wives and Slaves; And wide as his Command Scatter'd his Maker's Image through the Land

Back 333

John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel

Front 334

John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe

Back 334

An attack on Thomas Shadwell, a contemporary of Dryden's. Details Shadwell's (Mac Flecknoe's) succession to the throne of dullness. 217 lines long. Imitates Aeneid.

Front 335

Identify: "All humane things are subject to decay, And, when Fate summons, Monarchs must obey: This Fleckno found, who, like Augustus, young Was call'd to Empire, and had govern'd long: In Prose and Verse was own'd, without dispute Through all the Realms of Non-sense, absolute."

Back 335

John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe

Front 336

John Dryden All For Love characters

Back 336

Antony, Cleopatra, Octavia (Antony's wife), Ventidius (Antony's general), Alexas (C's servant), Doladella (A's friend). Retelling of Antony and Cleopatra story, heroic tragedy

Front 337

TS Eliot

Back 337

1888-1965 Look for a poem that's in German, Greek, many other languages. Broken up into some sections

Front 338

Identify: "April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers."

Back 338

TS Eliot The Wasteland opening lines

Front 339

Identify: "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam ceu chelidon O swallow swallow Le Prince d'Aquitaine la tour aboile These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then lle fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe."

Back 339

TS Eliot The Wasteland closing lines

Front 340

Identify: "Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question Oh, do not ask, What is it? Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michaelangelo."

Back 340

TS Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Front 341

How many plotlines are present in George Etheridge's The Man of Mode or Sir Fopling Flutter?

Back 341

Two interwoven plots, Dorimant rids himself of his mistress Mrs. Loveitt with the aid of Bellinda (whom he is seducing). In doing this he meets the wise Harriet Woodvil, whom he appears to fall in love with but she will not have his games. Even when he proposes marriage she makes him follow her into the country to hear her answer. Young Bellair has been ordered by his father to marry Harriet but he loves Emilia. With help of Lady Townely he outwits father who has also fallen from Emilia but in the end blesses sons choice.

Front 342

Who is said to be the basis for the character of Dorimant in George Etheridge's The Man of Mode or Sir Fopling Flutter?

Back 342

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

Front 343

Morality Play

Back 343

Medieval drama. Evolved side by side with mystery plays. Composed individually and not in cycles. Moralities employed allegory to dramatize the moral struggle Christianity envisions universal in every individual.

Front 344

Everyman

Back 344

Short 900 line play, portrays complacent Everyman who is informed by Death he is approaching his end. Play shows hero's progression from despair and fear of death to a "Christian resignation that is the prelude to redemption." First E is deserted by false friends (Casual companions, kin, wealth). Falls back on Good Deeds, Strength, Beauty, Intelligence and Knowledge. Assist him in making his Book of Accounts but at the end he must go to the grave alone except for Good Deeds. We can take nothing with us from the world that we have received, only what we have given.

Front 345

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Back 345

Fourth novel and author's favorite because he says it was his "most splendid failure." Depicts the decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family, divided into 4 parts, each told by different narrator.

Front 346

Describe the characters in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

Back 346

Benjy Compson: Idiot, youngest child, narrates first section. Key to the novel's title. Castrated after allegedly sexually assaulting a young girl. Quentin: Section has flashbacks to fewer moments in the past and less depicted than B's section but because he is more intellectual and abstract, section is more fragmented. Nearly all flashbacks except minor memories (breaking leg) and those with conversations with father concern C's sexuality or Q's reaction. Commits suicide. Candace (Caddy): Centerpiece of book, played a different role to each of brothers. Caring & maternal to B, Virgin/whore upset propriety of Southern womanhood to Q and object of envy and detestation who ruined chance at success to J. Does not have her own section. Jason: Confirmed sadist, reveled in cruelty to others including mother and black servant Dilsey. Childless bachelor, represents end of Compson dynasty since Q committed suicide in 1910 and B was castrated. Commits B to state asylum in 1933 and sold Old Compson Place to a man wishing to open a boarding house.

Front 347

From what play does William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury derive its title?

Back 347

Macbeth

Front 348

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Back 348

Emily Grierson, aging spinster in Jefferson, death and funeral drew attention of entire town. No one had seen inside of her house for 10 years. Unnamed narrator, some identify as the town or a representative voice from it, in a seemingly haphazard manner relates key moments in E's life, including death of her father and brief fling with Yankee road paver Homer Barron. Sometimes regarded as symbolic of changes in the South during the representative period.

Front 349

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Back 349

Published after Sound and Fury, also told in stream-of-consciousness fashion by 15 different speakers in 59 chapters. Bundren family's quest to Jefferson to bury dead matriarch, Addie, among her people against threats of flood and fire, explores nature of grieving, community and family.

Front 350

Identify: "If it had just been me when Cash fell off of that church and if it had just been me when pa aid sick with that load of wood fell on him, it would not be happening with every bastard in the county coming in to stare at her because if there is a God what the hell is He for. It would just be me and her on a high hill and me rolling the rocks down the hill at their faces, picking them up and throwing them down the hill faces and teeth and all by God until she was quiet..."

Back 350

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

Front 351

Describe the characters in William Fualkner's As I Lay Dying

Back 351

Cash: carpenter, broke his leg trying to get casket across river, Anse (dad) almost kills him by making cast out of cement. Darl: most prolific voice. Clairvoyant. Committed at end for burning down a barn. Goes crazy and talks about himself in 3rd person. Dewey Dell" Only daughter, pregnant by Lafe and trying to get an abortion. Mad at Daryl because he figured out she was pregnant, main one wanting to commit him. Jewel: (think Scarlet Letter) illegitimate child of Addie and Rev Whitfield. She likes him best, he only has one monologue. Only Daryl knows he's illegitimate. Vardamann: Youngest child. Catches a fish the day his mom dies and starts calling his mom the fish. Thinks Dr. Peabody killed his mom.

Front 352

Describe the plot of Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary

Back 352

Emma Believes herself to be in a novel. Charles Bovary is a country physician who, after unhappy 1st marriage, marries daughter of a patient. Emma is eager to leave father's farm but finds marriage less romantic and satisfying than expected. C is not a prince. Even at work he is more like a vet than a surgeon. E is disgusted, develops relationship with Leon Dupuis, young lawyer. Refuses to sleep with him but regrets it after he leaves town. Meets Rodolphe Boulanger, wealthy landowner who seduces E to pass time. Brief affair. When B abandons E, E returns to Leon, giving in to mutual passion. Affair has air of desperation. Exhausts her limited funds on trips to visit lover and love gifts. Knowing husband will discover affair when financial situation is revealed E OD's on arsenic and dies miserably.

Front 353

EM Forester

Back 353

1879-1970

Front 354

Describe the characters in EM Forester's Howard's End

Back 354

Margaret Schlegel: Helen and Tibby's older sister, main character, middle class, marries Henry Wilcox. Helen S: M's beautiful sister, pregnant by Leonard Bast. Tibby S: Younger brother. Mrs. Munt: M, H, T's aunt. Henry Wilcox: Patriarch of W family, British businessman. Ruth W: Henry's first wife, owner of Howard's End. Dies. Wants Mar. to have HE. Family ignores her. Charles, Paul Evie: Henry's children. C causes Leonard's death. Leonard and Jacky Bast: Poor young clerk and his wife

Front 355

Oliver Goldsmith

Back 355

1728-1774

Front 356

Who was Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer dedicated to?

Back 356

Samuel Johnson

Front 357

Describe the plot of Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer

Back 357

Hero is Charles Marlow, wealthy young man forced by family to consider potential bride whom he has never met. Anxious about meeting her bc he suffers from shyness and can only behave naturally with women of a lower class. Sets out with friend to travel home of prospective inlaws, Hardcastles, but they become lost. While Bride is awaiting arrival, her half brother, Tony Lumpkin while out riding comes across 2 strangers, and realising their identity, plays a practical joke by telling them they are a long way from their destination and will have to stay at overnight inn. The inn is his parents house. When they arrive, their hosts who have been expecting them go out of their way to make them welcome but they behave rudely. Meanwhile T's sister, Kate, learns of the error and acquainted with suitor's shyness, masquerades as serving-maid to get to know him. He falls in love and plans to elope, but everything is sorted out and they live happily ever after

Front 358

What year was Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard written?

Back 358

1751

Front 359

Thomas Gray

Back 359

5th and only surviving of 12 children. Escaped abusive father when uncle took him to Eton. Friends with Horace Wapole (wrote first Gothic novel, Castle of Otranto) and Richard West. Went through 4 editions in 2 months, and 11 in a short time, besides being imitated, satirized, translated into many languages and constantly pirated. 4 line stanzas abab

Front 360

Identify: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast The little tyrant of his fields withstood; Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood..."

Back 360

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard opening lines

Front 361

Describe the setting of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Back 361

Set in the bars and cafes of Paris and the bull-rings of Pamplona during the Festival of San Fermin and the running of the bulls in the 1920s.

Front 362

Explain the general plot of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Back 362

About a group of young Americans and English expatriates in Paris trying to enjoy their lives after the first World War. Spans a few weeks in the lives of Jake, Brett and friends.

Front 363

What is the significance of alcohol in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also RIses?

Back 363

Alcohol plays a large role in the story, characters often reveal their true selves when they are drunk

Front 364

Describe the narrator of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Back 364

Jacob Barnes (Jake). American from Kansas City now living in Paris and working as a writer/newspaper reporter. Impotent after being wounded in the war but deeply in love with Brett (Lady Brett Ashley) who inherited her title from her husband. Brett seeking a divorce but reveals she is actually a shallow person who loves to tease men and have affairs with them because she is incapable about having deep feelings for anyone

Front 365

Describe the relationship between Jake and Brett in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Back 365

Jake watches Brett's relationships with men calmly but is always aware of his inadequacies and feelings for her. Every time she breaks up with someone or is feeling depressed she turns to Jake.

Front 366

Describe the ending of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Back 366

After being rejected by Pedro Romero, the bullfighter who falls for Brett but breaks it off to avoid losing respect in his country, B turns to J for support. Story ends with B telling J they should be together but can't because he's impotent. As they ride in taxi through Spanish capital, B laments that she and J could've had wonderful time together. J responds "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?"

Front 367

What is unique about the structure of Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants

Back 367

Story is told largely through dialogue

Front 368

Review the plot of Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants

Back 368

Opens with description of setting, rural Spain. Railway station b/w 2 rails. Hot, no shade or trees. 2 central characters, American man and a girl sitting at table, waiting for train to Madrid. Girl notes white hills look like white elephants. Man's reaction suggest tension b/w pair. On 3rd drink, man discusses operation he thinks girl should have (abortion). Tells girl it is natural, and he will be there to support her, and they will go on as before afterward. Girl is unsure. They agree they know many who have before, girl says sarcastically they were "so happy" after. Questions if things will be as they were and if man will still love her. Man tries to reassure her, things will be better when he doesn't have to worry. Girl seems persuaded, she will do it to make things fine and because she doesn't care about herself. Girl wanders to edge of station and looks at scenery. Relationship has been changed. Man tries to placate her, she tells him to stop talking. Tells him it is too late to make things better, implies girl is unreasonable, she tells him things are fine.

Front 369

Explain the significance of the scenery in Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants

Back 369

The differences in the scenery on either side of the track mirror the girl's feelings about the choice she needs to make. One side is barren and lifeless while the other is fertile and full of life.

Front 370

Robert Herrick

Back 370

Born in Cheapside in 1951, father committed suicide in 1592 by jumping out the 4 story window. Got both bachelors and masters and was the eldest of the "sons of Ben" Cavalier poets who idolized Ben Jonson

Front 371

Give some of the titles of Robert Herrick's Upon Julia poems

Back 371

Upon Julia's Bracelet, Ribbon, Breasts, Clothes, Bed, Recovery, Hair Filled With Dew, Voice....

Front 372

Identify: "Display thy breasts, my Julia, there let me Behold that circummortal purity: Between whose glories, there my lips I'll lay, Ravished in that fair Via Lactea

Back 372

Robert Herrick Upon Julia's Breasts

Front 373

What poem can Robert Herrick's To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time (1640s) be compared to?

Back 373

Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress

Front 374

Identify: "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a-flying; And that same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven the sun The higher he's a-getting, The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he's to setting"

Back 374

Robert Herrick To The Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Front 375

Plot summary of Homer's The Illiad

Back 375

10th year of war b/w Greeks and Trojans, Chryses (priest of Apollo) comes to Greek camp to ask for return of his daughter Chryseis who had been captured during a raid & given as prize to Agamemnon. A refuses to return girl, Chryses begs Apollo to punish Greeks. --> plague. Few days later, Achilles, greatest of Greek warriors, calls assembly of Greek forces to discuss how they can bring plague to end. Prophet Calchas explains why Apollo is angry w/ G's and proposes Agamemnon give up Chryseis. A agrees if Briseis, prize of Achilles is given to him. Achilles protests but Agamemnon sends men to take her away. Achilles is mad at Agamemnon and refuses to take any further part in fighting. Also asks his mother, Thetis to persuade Zeus to humble Agamemnon & G's. Since Zeus favors Thetis he agrees. Next day Agamemnon marshals Greek forces, excluding Achilles & his men, attacks T's. G's succeed in efforts due to Diomedes brilliant fighting. Second day, gods, following Z's orders, begin to help T's, and G's are driven back by T's. At the end of the day, T's do not even return home for protection, so confident that they camp on the plain, ready for onslaught on G camp next day. Worrying about loss of day, Agamemnon realizes how dependent he is on Achilles. --> sends an embassy to Achilles to admit he was wrong, offers to restore Briseis & many other gifts to rejoin fighting but Achilles refuses. To restore morale of G forces, Odysseus and Diomedes make successful night attack upon camp of one of Trojan allies but when fighting begins 3rd day, T's, with help of gods, again drive G's into retreat. All G heroes, except Aias are wounded and forced to leave battle. --> T's succeed in breaking through G wall and are at point of setting fire to their ships. Worried about defeat of G's Patroclos goes to Achilles and begs him to return to fight. Achilles agrees to let men help in battle and lends Patroclos his armor for the fight.Reappearance of Achilles' forces temp. turns the tide of the battle in favor of the G's, & unable to force T's back. Hector is successful in killing Patroclos and stripping the armor of Achilles from his body. Suffering loss of Patroclos and armor, G's are easily pushed by T's into full retreat again. Achilles learning of the events of the day has had enough. Death of Patroclos motivates him to rejoin. He returns to G camp, shouts his battle cry, T's tremble in fear and retreat, Z makes the decision to let gods help on both sides of fighting.

Front 376

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

Back 376

Poem in couplets, one line longer than a sonnet. Fall of mankind, Margaret is a pearl, Catholic, to a young child

Front 377

Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldngrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor sparse a sigh Though words of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sorrow's springs are the same. Nor mouth had, nor no mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It is the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.

Back 377

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

Front 378

Langston Hughes, Raisin in the Sun

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Poem, but Lorainne Hansberry has a play by the same name.

Front 379

What is the title of the poem that Lorainne Hansberry's play Raisin in the Sun is based off of?

Back 379

Harlem: A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes

Front 380

Identify: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore//And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over//Like a syrupy sweet> Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.//Or does it explode?

Back 380

Langston Hughes, Harlem: A Dream Deferred

Front 381

Explain the beginning of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

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Some students are having a tour through the London Hatcheries. Henry Foster and Lenina Crowne, employees, have been dating each other too often, going against state rules. L's friend Fanny warns her against promiscuity. --> she decides to date Bernard Marx who is intelligent but not like others of his caste.

Front 382

Plot summary of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

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Novel opens in 632 AF (After Ford, god of the New World). Civilization has been destroyed by a great war. Then there is another war, Nine Years War, ushers in era of Ford, ensuring stability through dictatorship.

Front 383

Explain how the society works in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

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Based on rigid caste system. Higher of 5 castes have superior tasks, lower perform menial roles. 10 controllers hold all power in the world and peace is maintained by conditioning infant minds and by soothing adults with the tranquilizer, soma. Population is further controlled through scientific methods; marriage is forbidden and children aren't born, they are produced in embryo factory.

Front 384

Eugene Ionesco

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Romanian born, educated in France. Wanted to learn English--> purchased a set of records produced by the Assimil conversation method, began to transcribe short, simple-minded exercises. Made the strangeness of the nonsensical sentences the basis of his first play, The Bald Soprano

Front 385

Name some of Eugene Ionesco's plays

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The Bald Soprano, Rhinoceros, The Chairs, Jack or The Submission, The Lesson, The Killer, Exit the King, Macbett, Journeys among the Dead.

Front 386

Name the characters from The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco

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Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Martin, Mary the Maid, The First Chef

Front 387

Henrick Isben A Doll's House

Back 387

Set during the century between Torvald Helmer and wife Nora. Treats her as if she were an animal, calls her "my little lark" and various other animals. Treats her like a dog or small child. She has struck a bargain with Nils Krogstad for money when Torvald was sick. Must pay Krogstad back or he will reveal her deception. Her friend, Mrs. Linde, attempts to intervene but does not work. At the end, Nora realizes she has been living like a doll and leaves Torvald

Front 388

Identify: "Our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll wife, just as at home as I was Papa's doll child; and here the children have been my dolls...that is what our marriage has been."

Back 388

Henrick Isben A Doll's House

Front 389

Ben Jonson, Volpene

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Author celebrates the joy of a good trick. Emphasizes the fun and humor of deceit, does not overlook its nastiness and in the end punishes the deceivers.

Front 390

Summary of Ben Jonson's Volpene

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Centers around wealthy Volpene, has no wife or children, pretends to be dying and with the help of servant Mosca, eggs on several greedy characters who hopes to be made Volpene's sole heir. Volpene pursues the scheme partly out of greed and his love of getting the best of people. Cannot resist temptation to outsmart those around him ie. lawyer Voltore, merchant Corvino , old Corbaccio and foolish English travelers Sir Politic and Lady Would-Be. Mosca is thrilled with manipulations. Self-love proves his undoing as for Volpene. Both become so entranced by their lies they cannot stop their scheming before they betray themselves

Front 391

Samuel Johnson

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1709-83

Front 392

How many works of fiction did Samuel Johnson complete?

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1, History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

Front 393

Summary of Samuel Johnson's History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia

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R leaves easy life of the Happy Valley, accompanied by his sister Nekayah, her attendant Pekuah and philosopher Imlac. Journey takes them to Egypt, where they study the various conditions of men's lives before returning home in "a conclusion in which nothing is concluded."

Front 394

What is Samuel Johnson's History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia a satire of?

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Optimism. It is also an expression of truth about the human mind and its infinite capacity for hope.

Front 395

What does Samuel Johnson do in his Preface to Shakespeare?

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Uses it as a foundation for general statements about man, nature, and literature. Key words are universal and nature

Front 396

What type of lens does Samuel Johnson use in the Preface to Shakespeare and how is it made evident?

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A Neo-Classical, demonstrated in his concern with the universal rather than with the particular

Front 397

What is the praise that Samuel Johnson bestows upon Shakespeare in his Preface?

Back 397

His plays are "just representations of general nature."

Front 398

What quality did Samual Johnson attribute to being the reason for Shakespeare's success throughout time in his Preface?

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His knowledge of human nature "The pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth." For this reason Shakespeare has outlived his century and reached the point at which his works can be judged solely on their own merits

Front 399

What issues with Shakespeare does Samuel Johnson present in his Preface to Shakespeare?

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Shakespeare's disregard of "poetic justice" Johnson believed that literature is essentially didactic. J convinced the writer should show the vrtuous rewarded and the evil punished, and S ignores this "sacrifices virtue to convenience." "It is the writer's duty to make the world better." "disregard for distinctions of time and place" Dislikes S's bawdry, might have rested with the indelicacy of the ladies and gentlemen at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I rather than S. Hates S's use of puns. "A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."

Front 400

James Joyce, Ulysses

Back 400

Takes place in 18 chapters spaced about 1 hour apart, starting at 8 AM Thursday June 16, 1904 ending in early hours of June 17. Central parallel to Homer is that Bloom's wife Molly (like Penelope in Homer) is being courted by a suitor, Blazes Boylan. In order to win her back, Bloom must negotiate 12 trials, his Odyssey

Front 401

James Joyce, Ulyses basic plot

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Adventures of advertising salesman Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904, details relationship with wife, Molly and surrogate son Stephan Dedalus. Central parallel to Homer is that Molly (like Penelope in Homer) is being courted by a suitor, Blazes Boylan. In order to win her back, Bloom must negotiate 12 trials, his Odyssey

Front 402

John Keats

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1795-1821. English poet, born in London. Considered one of the greatest. Son of livery stable keeper, attended school at Enfield, became friend of Charles Cowden Clarke, headmaster's son, encouraged early learning. Apprenticed to a surgeon (1811), came to know Leigh Hunt & his literary circle, gave up surgery in 1816 to write poetry. First volume appeared in 1817. Died at 26 of Tuberculosis in Rome.

Front 403

What was included in John Keats' first volume of poems in 1817?

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"I stood tip-toe upon a little hill," "sleep and poetry" "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer."

Front 404

How did John Keats' poetry differ from Wordsworth's "nature as religion"?

Back 404

Focuses on more depressing subjects

Front 405

What did John Keats feel was the deepest meaning of life?

Back 405

It lay in the apprehension of material beauty although his mature poems reveal his fascination with a world of death and decay.

Front 406

John Keats, Endymion

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First long poem, when he was 21. 4000 lines of the love of the moon goddess Cynthia for the young shepard Endymion. Written in heroic couplets

Front 407

Heroic couplets

Back 407

Rhymed lines of iambic pentameter

Front 408

Identify:A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways

Back 408

John Keats Endymion

Front 409

John Keats, Isabella/The Pot of Sweet Basil

Back 409

Written in ottava rima, stanza form Byron brought back from Italy.

Front 410

What is John Keats Isabella/The Pot of Sweet Basil adapted from?

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Boccaccio's Decameron

Front 411

Plot of John Keats' Isabella/The Pot of Sweet Basil

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Isabella and Lorenzo fall in love with each other, but he is in a society class beneath her, she is from a wealthy family and lives with her 2 brothers. They are secretly in love but don't speak of it. She falls ill and L braves risk of being shunned. Ill because she loves L and is pining away. When he speaks of his love for her, her spirits are lifted and they begin to steal secret moments together. Brothers overhear and see them and because he is lower class and unable to support her financially, plot to murder him so that she has no chance to marry him against their wishes. Slay him in the forest and bury him. Return and tell I they sent him on business far away. Pines for L and starts to fade in beauty b/c of loss of love and life w/o L. L appears to her in a vision and tells her that her brothers killed her and where he is buried. Takes a nurse with her, unearth his grave. Removes his head from his body, wraps in a scarf, plants it in a pot and covers it with basil. Cares for basil with tears and love, laments and grieves like widow. Brothers confused and steal it, discover L's head and destroy it. I is also destroyed and cries for her sweet basil.

Front 412

Identify: "Fair Isabel, poor simple Isabel! Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love's eye! They could not in the self-same mansion dwell Without some stir of heart, some malady; They could not sit at meals but feel how well it soothed each other to be the other by; They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep But to each other dream, and nightly weep."

Back 412

John Keats, Isabella, The Pot of Sweet Basil

Front 413

John Keats, Hyperion

Back 413

Fragment, planned as an epic poem to tell of the dethronement of Saturn and the earlier gods by Jupiter and the other divinities of Olympus and esp. of the overthrow of Hyperion, the sun-god by Apollo. Imitated Milton's style, echoed his phrases, reproduced situations from Paradise Lost.

Front 414

Identify: "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer's day Robs not one light seed from the feather'd grass, but where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds Press'd her cold finger closer to her lips."

Back 414

John Keats, Hyperion Book 1

Front 415

What inspired John Keats' Eve of St. Agnes?

Back 415

The upheaval in Keats' life

Front 416

What rhyme scheme does John Keats use in Eve of St. Agnes?

Back 416

Spenserian stanza

Front 417

Spenserian stanza

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8 lines of iambic pentameter followed by a single alexandrine, a 12 syllable iambic line. Final line has a caesura or break after the first 3 feet. Rhyme scheme is ababbcbbc

Front 418

What is John Keats Eve of St. Agnes briefly about?

Back 418

Madeline and her fiance Porphyro. Joining of the brave poetic spirit, P with the innocent receptacle of the poet, M is found w/i story.

Front 419

Identify: "He follow'd through a lowly arched way, Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume; And as she mutter'd "Well-a'well-a-day!" He found him in a little moonlight room, Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb. "Now tell me where is Madeline," said he, "O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom "Which none but secret sisterhood may see, "When they St. Agnes' wool are weaving piously."

Back 419

John Keats Eve of St. Agnes

Front 420

John Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Back 420

Ballad-like. Poet meets a knight by a woodland lake in late autumn. Man has been there for a long time, dying. Knight says he met a beautiful, wild-looking woman in a meadow. Visited with her, decked her with flowers. She did not speak but looked and sighed as if she loved him. Gave her his horse to ride and walked beside them. Saw nothing but her, she leaned over in his face and sang a mysterious song. Spoke a language he could not understand but was confident she said she loved him. He kissed her to sleep and fell asleep himself. Dreamed of kings, princes, warriors all pale as death, shouted they were the woman's slave and now he was too. He awoke the woman was gone and the knight was left on a cole hillside. 2 versions.

Front 421

Identify: "Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing."

Back 421

John Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci manuscript 1

Front 422

John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Back 422

Written after Keats heard a Nightingale outside his window and started musing about death. Horatian Ode with iambic pentameter lines and one with iambic trimeter.

Front 423

Identify: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,--That hou, light winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

Back 423

John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Front 424

What was the inspiration of John Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn?

Back 424

Inspired by a Wedgwood copy of a Roman copy of a Greek vase.

Front 425

What poem were the famous lines "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and "That is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Back 425

John Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn

Front 426

What meter is John Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn in?

Back 426

Iambic Pentameter

Front 427

Identify: "Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, IN Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstsy?"

Back 427

John Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn

Front 428

Identify: "O Attic shape! Fair attitude with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, then ours, a friend to man, to whom say'st "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" ---that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Back 428

Closing lines of John Keats Ode to a Grecian Urn

Front 429

John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Back 429

Author's first poem. Petrarchan/Italian Sonnet (octet and sestet)

Front 430

Petrarchan/Italian Sonnet (octet and sestet)

Back 430

Octave presents a situation, attitude or problem that the sestet comments upon or resolves

Front 431

Identify: "Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demense; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific'and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Back 431

John Keats On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer

Front 432

Pastoral lyric

Back 432

Poetry that expresses emotions in an idyllic setting. It is related to the term "pasture," and is associated with shepherds writing music to their flocks. Tradition goes back to David in the Bible and Hesiod the Greek poet

Front 433

What meter is Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love in?

Back 433

Quatrains of iambic tetrameter

Front 434

What influence has Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love had on the literary world?

Back 434

Many have used this poem to start their own ex. John Donne, Robert Herrick, C. Day Lewis and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Front 435

When was Christopher Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to His Love published and what did this result in?

Back 435

Published after his death in 1599 and sometimes attributed to Shakespeare as result

Front 436

Identify: "Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hill and valley, dale and field, And all the craggy mountains yield There we will sit upon the rocks, And see the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals."

Back 436

Christopher Marlowe The Passionate Shepherd to his Love

Front 437

What form is Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus in?

Back 437

Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter for main plot, five acts composed of 4, 3, 3, 7, 3 scenes. All but last scene begins with a chorus delivering a transitional epilogue. Subplot passages involving Wagner are usually in prose and use colloquial diction to comic effect

Front 438

Describe the characters in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Back 438

Faustus, a German professor at Wittenberg who has turned magician. Wagner, Faustus' servant. Mephistopholis, the tempting demon. Lucifer, his lord. Several other small characters including scholars who hope to learn from Faustus, troop of clowns, set of high status characters like the pope or the emperor, Faustus' good and bad angels, 7 deadly sins.

Front 439

Summary of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

Back 439

The scholar seeks the ultimate wisdom and with it the ultimate power, but becomes obsessed wih power to the neglect of his spirit. A demon, summoned, tempts him to surrender his soul for a brief period of exotic earthly powers. His servant and a gang of comic characters, in a subplot, mirror Faustus' search for earthly power but with markedly less success and --> risk to their souls. Faustus trades his spirit for illusions like his vision of Helen, a dumbshow (silent play) or metadrama that occurs within his own life's play and mocks his ambitions. Unlike Goethe's Faust, Marlowe's Faustus remains confident in his own damnation until the end, and therefore he is correct, though also morally wrong. Marlowe's own view of Faustus' career remains much more complex, however, since he shares many qualities with the necromancer.

Front 440

Andrew Marvell

Back 440

Born in 1621 in Winstead-in-Holderness. Friend of John Milton who recommended him for the post of Assistant Latin Secretary to the Council of State in 1653, finally got the job in 1657. Most of his poetry was not published during his lifetime. Number of satires published in his lifetime . Mostly thought of a metaphysical poet

Front 441

Andrew Marvell The Rehearsal Transposed

Back 441

Satire published in 2 parts, a rebuttal of the opinions of the Archdeacon of Canterbury, Samuel Parker

Front 442

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

Back 442

Poem is in 2 halves. First half flatters by setting out what would be proper lengths of time in which to adore her, if there was sufficient time. But having set her up, he follows on by telling her that there wasn't the time. 46 lines long in heroic couplets

Front 443

Identify: "Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness Lady were no crime. We would sit down and think which way To walk, and pass our long love's day. Thou by the Indian Grange's side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews.

Back 443

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

Front 444

Identify: "But at my back I always hear Times winged chariot hurrying near; Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life; Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we make him run.

Back 444

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

Front 445

Claude McKay

Back 445

1889-1948 One of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, known for socialist politics. Different from the others because he adheared to old forms to write his protest poetry. Wrote book Home to Harlem

Front 446

Name Claude McKay's sonnets

Back 446

The Lynching, Harlem Dancer, America, Africa, If We Must Die

Front 447

Identify: "The sun sought thy dim bed and brought forth light, The sciences were sucklings at thy breast; When all the world was young in pregnant night Thy slaves toiled at thy monumental best. Thou ancient treasure-land, thou modern prize, New peoples marvel at thy pyramids! The years roll on, thy sphinx of riddle eyes Watches the mad world with immobile lids. The Hebrews humbled them at Pharaoh's name. Cradle of Power! Yet all things were in vain! Honor and Glory, Arrogance and Fame! They went. The darkness swallowed thee again. Thou art the harlot, now thy time is done, Of all the mighty nations of the sun.

Back 447

Claude McKay, Africa

Front 448

Identify: "Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway; Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes Blown by black players upon a picnic day. She sang and danced on gracefully and calm, The light gauze hanging loose about her form; To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm Grown lovelier for passing through a storm. Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise, The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls, Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze; But looking at her falsely-smiling face, I knew her self was not in that strange place.

Back 448

Claude McKay, Harlem Dancer

Front 449

Identify: "If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed in vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Back 449

Claude McKay, If We Must Die

Front 450

Identify: "Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand."

Back 450

Claude McKay, America

Front 451

Plot summary Herman Melville Moby Dick

Back 451

Told by Ishmael, young man who wants to go to sea as a sailor to seek adventure and excitement. He signs on the whaling ship Pequod along with new Indian friend Queequeg who he met at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford. Q is native of Fiji Islands and an excellent harpooner. Capt of ship is dark brooding Ahab, obsessed with hunting the giant sperm whale Moby Dick. MD had previously bitten off Ahab's leg and A wants revenge. The P leaves Nantucket on Xmas for the Pacific, along journey, I introduces the ship's members. Starbuck = chief mate, Stubb = 2nd mate, Flask = 3rd mate. 3 Harpooners: Q, Tashtego and Daggoo. I gives lots of info about hunting sperm whales. I discovers MD is temperamental and capable of sinking whaling ship. While hunting MD, crew catches several sperm whales. On first sighting of a whale, I falls into the ocean after boat is capsized. Another time, Pip cabin boy is thrown over and left for dead, later rescued and declared mentally insane from experience. P meets several other ships, A asks all of them if they've seen MD. A gets excited that MD is alive makes a new harpoon and splinters ivory leg. P enters the Pacific ocean, Starbuck and Stubb wish they left. P enters Japanese sea where MD is often seen. Typhoon hits ship. A spies the Rachel, crew explains MD destroyed a whole boat of crewmen, incl. capt's son. Soon after P meets MD. MD attempts twice in 2 consecutive days. 3rd day, A drives harpoon into MD's side. MD drives head into side of P smashing bow. A refuses to give up, throws another harpoon as ship is sinking, rope gets entwined around A's neck and drags him into water. Everyone drowns except I who is rescued by the Rachel. Portrait of life at sea & American whaling industry during 1800s.

Front 452

Herman Melville Benito Cereno plot summary

Back 452

After entering harbor at St. Maria off the cost of Chile, Capt. Amasa Delano sees another ship approaching, old and majestic Spanish galleon. Has tattered sails and wanders newarly running aground even though manned. CAD has small boat lowered and teken over to ship to offer assistance. Met by skeletal Spanish capt Benito Cereno and attentive black servant Babo and crew. CAD offers his aid but no one seems excited about it. CAD gets stry of ship's troubles and observes many odd proceedings. BC tells why ship is so tattered and broken, they tried to round Cape Horn and hit bad weather. Disease broke out on board killed all but few Spaniards and many Africans. Then stuck in calm water for 2 months. Came to get food and water, everyone is starving and dying of thirst. Everything is explainable except 2 months of calm. As he spends the day on the ship CAD sees several strange things. Babo is devoted but seems rather forward and inappropriate. Africans are in charge, CAD feels threatened. Many times BC is reduced to trembling and speechless gagging. CAD asks many questions. Babo says they are on a strict schedule. Shocked at the poor manner in which BC runs the ship and CAD pities him. By the time the crew of CAD's ship returns, CAD decided to wash his hands of the weirdness. Makes sure BC's ship has minimum supplies, leaves BC. As they push off BC jumps on boat with CAD. Babo jumps in after and tries to stab him. CAD realizes the African slaves revolted and control the ship. When the small boat pulls away Babo is prisoner and BC is cargo. A shroud falls from BC's boat with human skeleton that says "Follow your leader."

Front 453

Identify: "I am a rather elderly man. the nature of my avocations for the last 30 years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written: I mean the law copyists or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and privately, and if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile , and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener the strangest I ever saw or heard of."

Back 453

Herman Melville Bartleby The Scrivener opening line

Front 454

Identify: "Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring: "the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:" he whom it would relieve, nor eats or hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who dies unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamites. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

Back 454

Herman Melville Bartleby The Scrivener closing lines

Front 455

George Meredith

Back 455

1828-1909 gave advice to Gissing and Hardy while a reader for a publishing company. Rejected one of Samuel Johnson's works. Wrote An Essay on Comedy

Front 456

George Meredith An Essay on Comedy

Back 456

Author emphasizes the importance of intelligence and insight to comedy. Focusing mainly on Moliere and Restoration drama, identifies central elements of high comedy, speaking highly of the role of women in comedy

Front 457

How does George Meredith define comedy in An Essay on Comedy

Back 457

"the fountain of sound sense"

Front 458

Describe George Meredith's The Egoist

Back 458

About Sir Willoughby Patterene, a highly narxissistic gentleman, in his quest to find a socially acceptable wife. In W's youth his aunts nurtured his narcissism. Self proclaimed "son of the house" Reference to Louis XIV who believed that he was the center of the entire universe. Throughout the narrative W has little luck with women. "His first fiance, Constantia Durham, abandons him three weeks before the wedding; the second, Clara Middleton, grows to abhor the cynosure, leaving Wiloughby to court Laetitia Dale, daughter of a cottager on the Patterene estate, whom Willoughby had once renounced as being below his station."

Front 459

Pastoral Elegy

Back 459

The pastoral tradition in English literature, the tradition of dealing with characters under the guise of poetic shepherds in an idyllic environment, has its roots in classical literature, Vergil and Theocritus are two of the most notable poets who wrote in the pastoral vein. All nature helps out to mourn the loss.

Front 460

John Milton, Lycidas

Back 460

Monody, the author bewails a learned friend, unfortunately drowned in his passage from CHester on the Irish Seas and by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then in their height

Front 461

Identify: "Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear, I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme."

Back 461

John Milton, Lycidas

Front 462

Milton, Aeropagitica

Back 462

Milton's response to Henry VIII's Licensing Order that outlawed printing without author's consent. KEYWORD cloistered virtue, Milton considered this ironic because of free choice.

Front 463

What are the Four Major Arguments of Milton's Aeropagitica?

Back 463

Who are the inventors of licensing? The Catholic church. What is to be thought of reading? It is a necessary acquisition of knowledge of good and evil in a fallen world. This Order is ineffectual in suppressing "scandalous, seditious and libelous books." This Order will discourage learning and the pursuit of truth. They, who to states and governors of the Commonwealth direct their speech, High Court of Parliament, or, wanting such access in a private condition, write that which they forsee may advance the public good; I suppose them, as at the beginning of no mean endeavour, not a little altered and moved inwardly in their minds: some with doubt of what will be the success others with dear of what will be the censure; some with hope, others with confidence of what they have to speak.

Front 464

What form is John Milton, Comus written in?

Back 464

Heroic couplets

Front 465

Summarize John Milton Comus

Back 465

Comus is a pagan god invented by Milton, son of Bacchas and Circe, who waylays travelers and transforms their faces to those of magical beasts. Comus attempts to enchant a lady who has been separated from her brothers in the guise of a shepherd. The brothers are told by an attendant spirit Thyrsis (also disguised as a shepherd) and try and find the cottage where Comus has taken her. The spirit give the brothers a root, Comus tries to make the lady drink a magic potion but her Chastity is so strong it's as though she's possessed by some superior power. The brothers burst in, but they haven't secured Comus's wand, so Thyrsis invokes Sabrina, another minor goddess with a song "Sabrina fair/ Listen where thou art sitting." Sabrina arrives and everyone is set free.

Front 466

Identify: "The Star that bids the Shepherd fold, Now the top of Heav;n doth hold, And the gilded Car of Day, His glowing Axle doth allay In the steep Atlantick stream, And the slope of Sun his upward beam Shoots against the dusky Pole, Pacing toward the other gole Of his Chamber in the East. Mean while welcom Joy and Feast, Midnight shout and revelry, Tipsie dance and Jollity. Braid your Locks with rosie Twine Dropping odours, dropping Wine."

Back 466

John Milton Comus

Front 467

Moliere, Tartuffe

Back 467

Comedy in 5 acts, relates the story of an attempt by an irreclaimable hypocrite to destroy the domestic happiness of a citizen who, charmed by his seeming piety has received him as a prominent guest. In painting such a portrait, this lively assailant of Parisian foibles was in a new element, though one that proved to him perfectly congenial. His genius had a serious side, and on that side he was unquestionably at his best, the character of Tartuffe being drawn with a strength and precision which few dramatists have equalled.

Front 468

Moliere The Misanthrope characters

Back 468

Alceste, Celimene, Philinte, Oronte and Arsinee

Front 469

Flannery O'Connor

Back 469

1925-1964, born in Savannah, GA. Only child of a Catholic family. Belongs to the same Southern Gothic school of literature as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers

Front 470

What did the Southern Gothic school of literature that Flannery O'Connor belonged to focus on?

Back 470

The decaying South and its damned people

Front 471

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

Back 471

Short story about a southern family driving through Georgia on the way to Florida. In the title story a grandmother, her son Bailey and daughter-in-law and their three children, June Starr, John Wesley, and a baby are on a car journey. They encounter an escaped criminal called the Misfit and his two killers Hiram and Bobby Lee. The family is casually wiped out by them when the grandmother recognizes the Misfit from his Wanted poster. The hallucinating grandmother murmurs "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" The Misfit shoots her and says: "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Front 472

Eugene O'Neill

Back 472

1888-1953. America's first major playwright. Wrote Morning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Desire Under the Elms

Front 473

What is Morning Becomes Electra, Eugene O'Neill based on?

Back 473

The Oresteia cycle of the classical Greek playwright Aeschylus.

Front 474

Morning Becomes Electra, Eugene O'Neill

Back 474

Situated this story of family murder and divine retribution in Civil War America

Front 475

Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night

Back 475

Deeply autobiographical. Tells of the Tyrones. Youngest son (Edmond) sent to a sanitarium to recover from tuberculosis. Despises father for sending him. Mother Mary is wrecked by narcotics and older brother by drink

Front 476

Plato, The Republic

Back 476

Socrates is the main character and narrator of the action. Divided into 10 books.

Front 477

What is the central theme of Plato's The Republic?

Back 477

Justice, the organization of the Good Life.

Front 478

Other themes of Plato's The Republic

Back 478

Knowledge, The well-ordered life must be guided by wisdom, which in turn depends on a particular kind of education. The place of poetry and art in a good society and the philosopher's relationship to the political community.

Front 479

Describe Plato's The Republic in summary

Back 479

An examination of the Good Life, that is, of the possibility of harmonizing the various excellences of human souls and societies into a visionary model of the Good Life for all.

Front 480

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

Back 480

Didactic poem in heroic couplets, begun as early as 1705, published anonymously in 1711.

Front 481

What is Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism a response to?

Back 481

An ongoing critical debate, which centered on the question of whether poetry should be "natural" or written according to predetermined "artificial" rules inherited from the classical past

Front 482

Outline of Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism

Back 482

Discussion of the rules of taste which ought to govern poetry, which enable a critic to make sound critical judgements. Pope also comments upon the authority which ought properly to be accorded to the classical authors who dealt with the subject, concludes that the rules of the ancients are in fact identical with the rules of Nature:poetry and painting that is like religion and morality actually reflect natural law. Then he discusses the laws by which a critic should be guided, critics exist to serve poets not attack them. Provides instances of critics who had erred in one fashion or another. The deadliest critical sin. Final section of the poem discusses moral qualities and virtues inherent in the ideal critic who is also the ideal man, and who no longer exists in the degenerate world of the early 18th century.

Front 483

Alexander Pope

Back 483

1688-1744

Front 484

Alexander Pope, The Duncaid

Back 484

Mock-epic making fun of bad writers. He and Swift and some others formed the Scriblerus club dedicated to the ridicule of folly.

Front 485

Identify: "YET, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night! Of darkness visible so much be lent As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent. Ye Pow'rs! whose Mysteries restor'd I sing, To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing, Suspend a while your Force inertly strong, Then take at once the Poet and the Song

Back 485

Opening lines, Alexander Pope The Duncaid

Front 486

Who was Alexander Pope's strongest defender?

Back 486

Byron, said Pope was "The moral poet of all civilisation"

Front 487

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock summary

Back 487

Belinda gets up for the day's social activities after sleeping late. Gaurdian sylph, Ariel warned her in a dream that some disaster will befall her and promises to protect her to the best of his abilities. B takes little notice. Elaborate ritual of dressing and primping, travels on Thames River to Hampton Court Palace, ancient royal residence outside of London where group of wealthy young socialites are having a party. Among them is Baron who has already made up his mind to steal a lock of B's hair. Ba has risen early to perform an elaborate set of prayers and sacrifices to promote success. Partygoers arrive, tense game of cards, Pope describes as a battle. Followed by coffee. On 3rd try, Ba gets B's hair. B furious. Umbriel, mischievous gnome journeys down to Cave of Spleen to get a sack of sighs and flask of tears he gives to B. Clarissa, aided Ba in crime, urges B to give up anger in favor of good humor and sense, moral qualities that outlast vanities. Falls on deaf ears. B initiates scuffle b/w ladies and gentlemen, attempts to get hair back. Lock is lost in confusion of mock battle, poet consoles B with the suggestion that it has been taken up to heavens and immortalized as a constellation

Front 488

Marcel Proust

Back 488

Born to bourgeois parents in Paris. Father doctor, mother rich and cultured Jewish family.

Front 489

When was the first part of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past published?

Back 489

1912

Front 490

How many volumes was Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past?

Back 490

7

Front 491

How is the plot line of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past?

Back 491

Not clear and continuous

Front 492

Who is the narrator of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of things Past?

Back 492

Marcel but not Marcel Proust though he resembles Proust in many ways. Initially ignorant, slowly begins to grasp the essence of the hidden reality.

Front 493

What happens at the end of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past?

Back 493

Narrator Marcel is sitting down to write a novel like the one presented to the reader. His childhood memories start to flow when he tastes a madeleine cake dipped in linden tea such as he was given as a child.

Front 494

Identify: "And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine."

Back 494

Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past

Front 495

Sir Walter Raleigh

Back 495

Much of his work was written during his long imprisonment in the Tower of London and his most famous poems include All the World's a Stage, The Lie and the Pilgrimage.

Front 496

Who is Sir Walter Raleigh's Cynthia, The Lady of the Sea in praise of

Back 496

Queen Elizabeth I

Front 497

What are Sir Walter Raleigh's prose works about?

Back 497

Accounts of his voyages and expeditions and an unfinished History of the World

Front 498

What poem is Sir Walter Raleigh's The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd a mirror of and how does he create this?

Back 498

Marlowe's poem, uses the same meter and references.

Front 499

What does the persona of the poem set up about Sir Walter Raleigh's The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd?

Back 499

Sets up a hypothetical set of questions that undermine the intelligence of the man's offer because all that he offers is transitory. Reverses his image into negative ones

Front 500

Identify: "If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd's tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and by thy Love//But Time drives flocks from field to fold; When rivers rage and rocks grow cold; And Philomel becometh dumb; The rest complains of cares to come.//The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckoning yields' A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall. //The gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, --In folly ripe, in reason rotten.// Thy belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy coral clasps and amber studs, All these in me no means can move To come to thee and be thy love. But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love."

Back 500

Sir Walter Raleigh The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

Front 501

Carl Sandburg

Back 501

1876-1967. Most widely read poet during the 20s and 30s. Best known for poem about life in Chicago

Front 502

What is Carl Sandburg's poetry known for?

Back 502

Using simple language in his poems to celebrate the working people using the cadences of ordinary speech as his meter and rhyme.

Front 503

Identify: "Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders: // They tell me you are wicked and I believe them for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys. And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gynman kill and go free to kill again..."

Back 503

Chicago, Carl Sandburg

Front 504

Identify: "The dago shovelman sits by the railroad track Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna. A train whirls by, and men and women at tables Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils, Eat steaks running with brown gravy, Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee. The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna, Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy, And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day's work Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils Shake hardly at al in the cut glass vases Standing slender on the tables in the dining car."

Back 504

Child of the Romans, Carl Sandburg

Front 505

Identify: "Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work// I am the grass; I cover all.// And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductors "What place is this? Where are we now."

Back 505

Grass, Carl Sandburg

Front 506

Identify: "When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin in the dust, in the cool tombs. // And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ' in the dust, in the cool tombs. // Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Back 506

Cool Tombs, Carl Sandburg

Front 507

William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I

Back 507

While King Henry's England is threatened by rebellion, the king's scapegrace son Hal haunts the taverns of London, his companions crew of rogues and thieves led by the dissolute knight, Sir John Falstaff. The Earl of Northumberland and his fiery son Hotspur scheme to overthrow the crown. Can Hal be brought to a sense of his duty as Prince of Wales? Or will the influence of Falstaff prove too strong? The issue is decided when Hal, Hotspur, and Falstaff come together at the climatic battle of Shrewsbury

Front 508

Characters of Shakespeare's The Tempest

Back 508

Prospero: rightful duke of Milan, magician.

Gonzalo: a good old counselor

Miranda: Prospero's daughter

Trinculo: Alonso's jester

Ferdinand: son of the king of Naples

Stephano: Alonso's drunk butler

Ariel: bird-like spirit, servant of Prospero

Adrian and Francisco: attendants to Naples

Caliban: Half man half beast

Master of the Ship

Alonso: King of Naples

Boatswain

Sebastian: Alonso's traitorous brother

Mariners

Antonio: Prospero's usurping brother

Iris, Ceres, Juno: Spirits of the pageant

Gonzalo: counselor

Nymphs and reapers

Front 509

Act I Shakespeare's Tempest

Back 509

Tempest at sea batters ship of King of Naples who is returning from wedding of King's daughter in Africa. On nearby island, P who has lost his realm, controls the sea and brings to shore his usurping brother and other old enemies aboard the ship. P and his daughter M came to the isle after being set adrift by brother, Antonio. Only the assistance of G allowed their survival. On isle, P commands spirit of woods, Ariel who has been the agent of the tempest. Also rules over island's only other occupant, Caliban, born of the witch Sycorax. Prospero brings all voyagers safely ashore, scatters them in groups about the island. Ferdinand is led by Ariel's singing to P's cave. Miranda instantly falls in love.

Front 510

Act II Shakespeare's Tempest

Back 510

Stranded in another part of the island, Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio and Gonzalo think Ferdinand is dead. Alonso and Gonzalo fall asleep, Sebastian and Antonio remain awake, plotting the death of the other 2. Ariel wakes the victims just in time. On another part of the island, Trinculo the jester encounters Caliban. Stephano joins them and provides Caliban with liquor and engages his devotion.

Front 511

Act III Shakespeare's Tempest

Back 511

Stephano and Trinculo engage Caliban in a plot to kill Prospero and seize the island Miranda exchanges vows with Ferdinand whom Prospero has set upon a labor of log bearing as a testament of his devotion. On the shore, Ariel mocks the royal party with a vanishing banquet and appears in the form of a Harpy to remind them of their crime against Prospero and his daughter

Front 512

Act IV Shakespeare's Tempest

Back 512

At the cave, Prospero produces a pre-wedding masque for Ferdinand and Miranda, which is peopled with the spirits of goddesses and numphs. Remembering the threat of Caliban's plot, the magician abrupyly stops the masque and sends Ariel to punish the conspirators, whom Ariel pursues in the form of hunting dogs and drives through filthy ditches

Front 513

Act V Shakespeare's Tempest

Back 513

Royal party is now brought, spell-bound by Ariel's music, to Prospero who reveals himself to them, orders Antonio to restore his dukedom and warns Sebastian against further plots. Alonso is allowed a view within the cave of Ferdinand and Miranda playing at chess. Ariel brings in the conspirators and Caliban submits himself to his true master. All prepare to sail to Naples the next day.

Front 514

Shakespeare Macbeth

Back 514

King Duncan and his son Malcolm encounter a bloody sergeant who reports than Macbeth and Banquo have fought for the king. D punishes the Thane of Cawdor who has turned traitor and gives title to Macbeth. M and B encounter 3 weird sisters on the heath. Prophesy that M will become Thane of Cawdor and King and B will be the father of kings. They disappear, Ross and Angus arrive and greet Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor. Lady M receives letter from M telling her of prophecy. He arrives at Dunsinane, she pushes him to make the prophecy true and kill the king who is staying there. M and B discuss prophecies and M imagines daggers floating around him. Everyone's asleep, M kills the king and rejoins Lady M horrified. Takes the daggers and puts blood on sleeping guards to blame them. M and wife go to clean up, knocking at the gate. Macduff and Ross arrive and see murdered King. M murders sleeping guards. Princes, Malcolm and Donalbain flee because they are afraid. Suspicion falls on them. M crowned king. M afraid of B and heirs arranges to have B and Fleance murdered, F escapes. M haunted by B's ghost. M seeks sisters again, 3 new prophecies: Beware Macduff, no one born of woman will harm him, never be vanquished until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Show him B's heirs will eventually rule Scotland. They leave, M learns Macduff has fled to Malcolm in England and orders Macduff's family murdered. Macduff learns of this, steels his resolve to march on Scotland with Malcolm, Donalbain, Ross and Siward. At castle, Lady M sleepwalks distraught. Doctor says no hope for her. Prepares coming battle, confident in protection offered him. Lady M kills herself. Messenger reports that BW moving toward Dunsinane but really Malcolm's soldiers are disguising w/ tree branches. Battle begins and it seems like M will win until finds Macduff was not born of woman but C section. M continues but is killed, Malcolm is king.

Front 515

George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man

Back 515

One of Shaw's earliest plays. First produced in London in 1894. Set in Bulgaria in 1885

Front 516

Plot of George Bernard Shaw Arms and the Man

Back 516

A soldier barely escapes from battle during wartime and finds himself hiding in daughter's room of most prominent family in town. Impending marriage plans thrown into pandemonium. War b/w Bulgaria and Serbia, Serbian soldiers are fleeing. Serbian soldier surprises Raina, heroine by entering her bedroom for shelter. Serbian officer is Swiss mercenary soldier fighting on the Serbian side, name is Captain Bluntschli. Raina has been dreaming of her fiance Sergius and how valiantly he led Bulgarians to victory. B is a soldier who prefers chocolates to bullets. Chocolate cream soldier.

Front 517

Characters in George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man

Back 517

Raina: Heroine, only child of Major Petkoff and Catherine, Romantic and romantic notions of love and war.

Catherine: Raina's mother, middle-aged affected woman wishes to pass off as a Viennese lady. Imperiously energetic and good looking

Sergius: Handsome, good position in the army, supposed to be brave. Supposed to be in love with Raina but flirts with Louka, family servant

Bluntschli: Swiss professional soldier fighting for Serbs. Believes it is better to be armed with chocolates than ammunition. Contrast to Sergius: he is of middling stature and undistinguished appearance" energetic and carries himself like a soldier

Front 518

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Back 518

1792-1822, English Romantic poet who rebelled against English politics and conservative values. Shelley was considered with his friend Lord Byron a pariah for his life style. Drew no essential distinction between poetry and politics, and his work reflected the radical ideas and revolutionary optimism of the era. Employed mythological themes and figures from Greek poetry that gave an exalted tone for his visions.

Front 519

Percy Bysshe Shelley, To Wordsworth

Back 519

utilizes Wordsworth's favorite form, the sonnet, and interweaves several critical allusions to Wordsworth's early poetry

Front 520

Identify: "Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know That things depart which never may return; Childhood and youth, friendship, and love's first glow, Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. These common woes I feel. One loss is mine Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore. Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar: Thou has like to a rock-built refuge stood Above the blind and battling multitude: In honoured poverty thy voice did weave Songs consecrate to truth and liberty. Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be."

Back 520

Percy Bysshe Shelley, To Wordsworth

Front 521

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mount Blanc

Back 521

Vale of Chamouni, highest point in Europe, Shelley had sudden understanding of workings of his mind which is involved in a constant exchange of info with his environment. Stresses that his mind passively partakes in this exchange implying that he is merely a vehicle for the reception and transmission of information.

Front 522

What theme is present in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mount Blanc?

Back 522

The poetic mind acts as a passive receiver and transmitter, is recurrent in Romantic poetry

Front 523

Identify: "The everlasting universe of things Flow through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark--now glittering-no", reflecting gloom Now lending splendor, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings 5 Of waters-with a sound but half its own, Such as a feeble brook will oft assume In the wild woods, among the mountains lone, Where waterfalls around it leap forever, Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river 10 over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves..."

Back 523

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mount Blanc

Front 524

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

Back 524

Tells of Shelley's decision to devote his life to the pursuit of ideals. Broken up into 12 line stanzas

Front 525

What does "intellectual" refer to in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual beauty

Back 525

The ideal Platonic spirit apprehended by the mind, over the faint and fleeting information of the senses.

Front 526

Identify: "

THE AWFUL shadow of some unseen Power

Floats though unseen among us, visiting

This various world with as inconstant wing

As summer winds that creep from flower to flower,

Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,

5

It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,

Like memory of music fled,

10

Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery. (."

Back 526

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

Front 527

Percy Byshhe Shelley, Ozymandias

Back 527

Greek Name for Ramses II, 14 line poem

Front 528

Identify: "I met a traveler from a unique land--My name is Ozymandias, King of Kinds: Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!"

Back 528

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Front 529

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

Back 529

Actually in Terza Rima (interlocking rhyme), wind is bringer of life.

Front 530

Identify: O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The wing'd seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow."

Back 530

Percy Bysshe Shelley Ode to the West Wind

Front 531

Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark

Back 531

Invokes Milton's thanks to his "Celestial patroness" Strange meter: 3 lines trochiac trimeter (/u/u/u) and one alexanderine (hexameter) Wordsworth also has a poem of this title

Front 532

Identify: "Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert' That from heaven or near it Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art..."

Back 532

Percy Bysshe Shelley To a Skylark

Front 533

Identify: "Up with me! up with me into the clouds! For thy song, Lark, is strong; Up with me, up with me into the clouds! Singing, singing, With clouds and sky about thee ringing, Lift me, guide me till I find That spot which seems so to thy mind!..."

Back 533

Wordworth, To a Skylark

Front 534

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, (An Elegy on the Death of John Keats

Back 534

Written in Spenserian stanzas like Keats' Eve of St. Agnes. Pastoral elegy, call to mourning. Did not know Keats well but sympathized with treatment by the Tory press.

Front 535

Identify: "I weep for Adonais- he is dead! O, weep for Adonais! though our tears Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head! And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me Died Adonais; till the Future dares Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be An echo and a light unto eternity!"

Back 535

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais opening lines

Front 536

Identify: "The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the tempest given; The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, The soul of Adonais, like a star, Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are."

Back 536

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais closing lines

Front 537

What inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley to write his essay A Defense of Poetry?

Back 537

An ironic statement by Thomas Love Peacock in The Four Ages of Poetry that said poetry was no longer useful because of the progress in technology and science.

Front 538

Outline of Percy Bysshe Shelley Defense of Poetry

Back 538

Begins by distinguishing b/w reason and imagination, reason is a lesser faculty. Imagination sees values and relationships --> a creative faculty. Traces the development of poetry from early "savage" times to mature civilizations. Believes that the function of poetry is to give order to the world and therefore pleasure. Poetry makes people better by softening their natures, enlarging their sympathies, encouraging love but not being narrowly moralistic. Poets do not try to teach. Poetry does not come from reason or will but form the mind in moments of inspiration. The poet is happy in the operations of his own mind because he turns all things to loveliness. Proposes a never written second part to discuss contemporary poetic practice. Felt he was living in an era of great poetry at a time when enormous social and political upheaval was inspiring poetry. The spirit of age gave power to each indiv. poet.

Front 539

Identify: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Back 539

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defense of Poetry

Front 540

Identify: "We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practice; we have more scientific and economic knowledge than can be accomodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes...We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun our conception...The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world has for want of the poetical faculty proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave."

Back 540

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defense of Poetry

Front 541

Richard Sheridan

Back 541

1751-1816, wrote The School for Scandal

Front 542

Malapropism

Back 542

Derived from Richard Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, continually trying to impress with long words but using t

Front 543

Richard Sheridan's The Rivals Characters/plot

Back 543

Faulkland is an exaggeration of the sensitive, jealous lover. His girl, Julia, is fairly insipid, but this is necessary because the audience should instantly appreciate that his fears spring entirely from his own mind, and have no basis in her behaviour or inclinations. ack Absolute is a typical young hero, rather in the mould of Fielding's Tom Jones. Lydia Languish, however, is not just the more interesting of the two of them, but the play's main character. (Having the major character in the play female is unusual for the period.) She is a hopeless romantic, addicted to the novels frequently condemned by contemporaries as responsible for the corruption of the morals of young ladies. In her desperate search for romance, Lydia rejects the fate of marriage to a young nobleman which is the allotted fate for a young lady of fortune. She wants to elope with a penniless man, forcing Jack, who would be the sort of suitor of whom Lydia's family would approve, to disguise himself as a poor army officer. Enjoying her clandestine meetings with "Ensign Beverley", Lydia is enraged when she discovers that he is, in fact, a gentleman - and is only mollified when Jack persuades her that he is only pretending to be rich to trick her family so that he can spend more time with her.

Front 544

Identify: "Illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory" "'T is safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion" "A progeny of learning" "A circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge" "He is the very pine-apple of politeness!" "If I reprehend anything in this world, it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!"

Back 544

Richard Sheridan The Rivals

Front 545

Richard Sheridan

Back 545

(1751-1816)

Front 546

Richard Sheridan School for Scandal

Back 546

Brothers Joseph and Charles Surface, and their cousin Maria, are orphans in the care of their uncle, Sir Peter Teazle. Both brothers wish to marry Maria. Lady Sneerwell, a malicious gossip and founder of The School for Scandal, wants to marry Charles and spreads false rumours about an affair between Charles and Lady Teazle in an attempt to make Maria reject Charles. Meanwhile, Joseph is attempting to seduce Lady Teazle. The brothers have a rich uncle, Sir Oliver, whom they have never met, and who visits them both incognito to test their characters before deciding which of them shall inherit his fortune. He finds that Joseph is a sanctimonious hypocrite, and that Charles is a generous libertine, and prefers Charles.

Front 547

Identify: "Here is the whole set! a character dead at every word" "I leave my character behind me" "Here's to the maiden of bashful fifteen;
Here's to the widow of fifty;
Here's to the flaunting, extravagant quean,
And here's to the housewife that's thrifty!
Let the toast pass;
Drink to the lass;
I 'll warrant she 'll prove an excuse for the glass."

Back 547

Richard Sheridan School for Scandal

Front 548

Sir Phillip Sidney

Back 548

1554-1585. Had been contemplating the problem of the poet's role in society. Could have been responding to Stephen Gosson, whose "school of Abuse" blamed playwrights/theatre/poets for leading English society astray.

Front 549

What does Sir Phillip Sidney argue in Defense of Poesy

Back 549

Poets were the first philosophers, first brought learning to humanity, have the power to conceive new worlds of being and to populate them with new creatures. Superior to the world of historians who must be content with truth of happenstance. Defines the essential formal characteristics of the various genres of poetry, defends poetry against the charge that it is composed of lies and leads to one sin.

Front 550

Sophocles, Odeipus Rex

Back 550

12 years before play begins, Oedious has been made King of Thebes in gratitude for freeing the people from the Sphinx. Laius, the former king had recently been killed, and so O marries Queen Jocasta. Another deadly pestilence is raging and O must rescue people. Creon, J's brother, has just returned at the very moment from Apollo's oracle with the announcement that all will be well if Laius' murderer found and cast from city. To find murderer, O sends for blind seer, Tiresias. T says O is criminal. O is mad and says it's a scam for C to get throne. J intervenes. Says seers are not infallible, cites old prophecy that her son should kill his father and have children by his mother. Prevented its fulfillment by abandoning infant son in the mountains, says Laius been killed by robbers at junction of 3 roads on way to Delphi. This makes O uneasy because he killed a man matching Laius' description at that spot when he was leaving Corinth to avoid fulfilling the same prophecy. Aged messenger arrives from Corinth to say King Polybus, O's dad, is dead and O is king of Corinth. O refuses to return until his mother is dead too. Messenger assures him he is not the son of Polybus and Merope, was found from house of Laius in mountains. Confirmed by shepherd J hired to get rid of her son. Prophecy has been fulfilled. J hangs herself and O stabs out his eyes, exiles himself which he had promised for murderer of Laius.

Front 551

What theory does Gertrude Stein fall under

Back 551

Modernist

Front 552

Gertrude Stein

Back 552

1874-1946. Most famous for autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (her own autobiography composed through the eyes of her lover). More avant-garde than contemporaries ex. Tender Buttons, where ordinary words and objects become separated from each other. Complete and utter randomness. Wanted to paint verpal portraits of people without telling stories.

Front 553

Whose work was inspired by Gertrude Stein?

Back 553

Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway

Front 554

Identify: "Out of kindness comes redness and our of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and it is disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

Back 554

A Box, Gertrude Stein

Front 555

Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Back 555

Great comic novel published between 1759 and 1767 in 9 separate volumes.

Front 556

Plot of Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Back 556

Tells the life story of TS, narrator, beginning with his conception. Is not born until 4th volume because he tells so much about his family. Realizes it is hopeless, it takes more time to tell the story than live his life, readers have been taken in by a cock and bull story

Front 557

What was odd about Lawrence Sterne's writing style in Tristram Shandy?

Back 557

Each page was characterized by an intricate system of hyphens, dashes, asterisks and crosses, esp. dash. often treated as words, small type area and generous spacing and margins emphasizes visibility.

Front 558

Wallace Stevens

Back 558

1879-1955, typical modernist searching for something to bind his life now that religion etc fails. Was a lawyer, composed poems to and from office. Poems include "The Snowman, Sunday Morning, Death of a Soldier, Of Modern Poetry"

Front 559

Identify: "The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir. // It has to be living, to learn of the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, And, like an insatiable actor..."

Back 559

Of Modern Poetry, Wallace Stevens

Front 560

Identify: "Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound. Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulcher..."

Back 560

Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens

Front 561

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Back 561

1667-1745

Front 562

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels lands

Back 562

Lilliput: tiny people that try to bind G to ground. Take G to capital city in wagon where he meets royalty. Becomes weapon against people of Blefscu. L's have disagreement over proper way to crack egg. G pees on L castle to stop fire.
Brobdingnag: Land of giants. Farmer finds him and treats G like animal, is sold to queen for musical talents. G is repulsed by size and enormous flaws. Everyone is ignorant. Giant animals and bugs almost kill him.

Laputa: Floating island of theoreticians and academics oppress land below called Balnibarbi. Residents out of touch with reality. Takes side trip to Glubbdubdrib people conjure up figures from history who are less impressive in real life. Visits Struldbrugs who are senile immortals who are really stupid.
Houyhnhnm: Rational horses who rule and Yahoos (humanoid creatures) who serve them. G learns lang. and teaches them constitution of England. Enlightened but banished for looking like Yahoo. picked up by Portuguese ship realizes that all humans are like the Yahoos

Front 563

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam AHH

Back 563

Written as a pastoral elegy like Milton's Lycidas and Shelley's Adonais.

Front 564

Identify: "I held it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things. //But who shall so forecast the years and find in loss a gain to match Or reach a hand thro' time to catch The far-off interest of tears?

Back 564

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam AHH opening stanza

Front 565

Identify: "The market boat is on the stream And voices hail it from the brink; Thou hear'st the village hammer clink, And see'st the moving of the team. //Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name For what is one, the first, the last, Thou, like my present and my past, Thy place is changed; thou art the same."

Back 565

Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam AHH last stanza

Front 566

Alfred Tennyson

Back 566

1809-1892

Front 567

Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses

Back 567

70 lines in blank verse paragraphs, whole thing is a monolgue interieur, represents the old hero, his dangers past but nothing left but to stay at home and be happy, growing tired of inaction and resolving to set forth again in quest of new adventures

Front 568

Identify: "It little profits that an idle king By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those That loved me, and alone; on shore, ....

Back 568

Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses, First stanza

Front 569

Identify: "To sail beyond the sunset and the baths Of all the western stars, Until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and haven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Back 569

Alfred Tennyson, Ulysses, First stanza

Front 570

Alfred Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters

Back 570

Lotophagi: fabulous people who occupied the north coast of Africa and lived on the lotus, which brought forgetfulness and happy indolence. Appear in the Odyssey. Odysseus landed among them, some of his men ate the food. Forgot their friend and home and had to be dragged back to the ships.

Begins in some sort of 9 line meter but eventually changes

Front 571

Identify: " "Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, "This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon." In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. Full-faced above the valley stood the moon; And like a downward smoke, the slender stream Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem."

Back 571

Alfred Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters First stanza

Front 572

Identify: "But they smile, they find a music centered in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong; Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil, Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine, and oil; Till they perish and they suffer'some, 'tis whisper'd down in hell Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel. Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more."

Back 572

Alfred Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters Last stanza

Front 573

Dylan Thomas

Back 573

Welsh poet, 1914-1953

Front 574

Villanelle

Back 574

Repeated 1st and 3rd lines. 19 lines long.

Front 575

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Back 575

Villanelle

Front 576

Identify: "Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.//Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night.//Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.//Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. //Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.//And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Back 576

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Front 577

Henry David Thoreau

Back 577

Transcendentalist. Moved into Emerson's house and became his handyman. Lived there from 1841 to 1843.

Front 578

What is the theme of Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Back 578

Self-realization and self-fulfillment. Self-actualization is attained through human unity with nature. Every aspect is focused on this idea.

Front 579

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Back 579

Text is autobiographical, non-fiction recounting of HDT's stay at Walden Pond, every event in the text is essentially factual. Action is comprised of the events that happen during the 2 years in the woods. Feels society has strayed too far from the pursuit of excellence and purity. Claims that mankind has become to ambitious and greedy. People have strayed from simple lives by Nature's example. Decides to move to woods, builds a small cabin, plants a garden, lives of produce or capture. Isolated from people, occasional visitors. Spends time observing nature, wildlife and seasons and contemplating nature of man and the universe. Reflects on the differences and similarities between society and nature. Returns after 2 years, writes down story along with interpretation of events. Encouragement and motivation for society to purify itself.

Front 580

Identify: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

Back 580

HDT Walden Pond

Front 581

Identify: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

Back 581

HDT Walden Pond

Front 582

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

Back 582

Begins stating there should be no gov't. Objects to standing army and current "Mexican war." Realizes that the immediate need is not for no gov but for better gov. Majorities usually rule because they are strongest physically, policies based on expediencies. Asks whether it is not better to decide right and wrong by conscience which everyone has. A corp has no conscience, although conscientious people may be a corp with a conscience. Undue respect for law leads to soldiers marching to wars against their wills, common sense, and consciences. Some men have let themselves become machines, serving state with bodies. Others like lawyers and politicians serve state with heads. Reformers and martyrs serve state with their consciences also, usually treated as enemies. Declares he cannot associate with American gov't because it is slave gov't. Appeals to right of revolution and case of 1775. Become a military state and honest men ought to rebel. Criticizes southern slave owners and northern merchants and farmers who care more about commerce than humanity. Voting is like playing a game with right and wrong. Suggests individuals refuse to pay quota into treasury.

Front 583

Identify: "The government is best which governs least."

Back 583

HDT Civil Disobedience

Front 584

Identify: "it is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right."

Back 584

HDT Civil Disobedience

Front 585

Virgil, The Aeneid, Book 1

Back 585

After several years of wandering, Trojans are leaving Sicily for Italy, Juno, chief, continued resentment for all things Trojan, arouses a strom that drives them off course to Carthage. Welcomed by Queen Dido, settled Carthage after escaping her brother who killed her husband. Venus makes Dido fall in love with Aeneas to thwart Juno. At banquet Dido asks to hear stories of wanderings

Front 586

Virgil Aeneid, Book 2

Back 586

Intense flashback to Fall of Troy, Trojan Horse, death of Priam, Aeneas's loss of wife Creusa while he escapes with his father, Anchises and sun, Lulus, called Ascanius.

Front 587

Virgil Aeneid Book 3

Back 587

Aeneas contines narrative with telling of 6 years wandering. Inclued founding of several ill-fated settlements, encounter with Harpies (potentially so Aeneas can share experience with Jason and the argonauts), a meeting Hector's wido, Andromache (now married to Helenus, son of Priam); Apollo's prophetic advice, including instructions to see the Sibyl at Cumae; landing on the island of the Cyclops and meeting Achaemenides (Aeneas shares an experience with Odysseus) and finally to Sicily where we learn at the end of the book, Anchises dies.

Front 588

Virgil Aeneid Book 4

Back 588

Love affair between A & D. Jupiter sends Mercury to order A to leave Carthage and fulfill divine mission to found ROme. Immediately realizes he must sacrifice his personal happiness to his national and religious duty. Tries to explain to Dido but she takes no explanation and when he leaves she kills herself.

Front 589

Virgil Aeneid Book 5

Back 589

Trojans return to Sicily and hold funeral games for Anchises. Juno causes Trojan women to set fire to ships but Jupiter puts fire out. While on final leg of journey, helmsman Palinurus is swept overboard by god Sleep.

Front 590

Virgil Aeneid Book 6

Back 590

Trojans land at Cumae in Italy (instructed by Apollo) and Aeneas descends with the Sibyl to underworld in order to consult ghost of father. Sees Dido while there. Future heroes of Roman history pass in pageant before him, returns to upper world resolute.

Front 591

Virgil Aeneid Book 7

Back 591

Trojans reach the Tiber, welcomed by King Latinus, recognizes Aeneas as stranger referred to in an oracle as the one who would marry his daughter Lavinia. Already betrothed to Turnus the Rutulian. Juno intervenes and ensures T will fight the Trojans. War.

Front 592

Virgil Aeneid Book 8

Back 592

A visits Evander (Arcadian living on site of rome (pallanteum)) to seek help. Evander's son Pallas heads to Arcadian contingent. Venus has shield made for son A and on it are pics from future Roman history. Description reminds us why A has to fight T.

Front 593

Virgil Aeneid Book 9

Back 593

A is away, T achieves great deeds. Nisus and Euryalus are killed. T breaks into Trojan camp but b/c of pride and overconfidence, fails to open gates so forces can join him. Escapes by jumping into the Tiper.

Front 594

Virgil Aeneid Book 10

Back 594

A returns with Pallas and war continues. T seeks out P and kills him, boating over him and stripping off sword belt. A rages over battlefield, killing Lausus whose father, Mezentius recklessly engages A and is killed.

Front 595

Virgil Aeneid Book 11

Back 595

Funeral for P. Truce for burial of dead is made but shortly resumes. Deeds and death of Camilla, Italian warrior-maiden described.

Front 596

Virgil Aeneid Book 12 and subsequent events told by Juno

Back 596

Single combat arranged b/w A and T. Truce is broken by Juturna, T's sister who is instigated by Juno and A is wounded. On Olympus, J accepts defeat on condition that Italians shall be dominant in Trojan-Italian stock from which the Romans will descend. A pursues T as Achilles pursued Hector in Iliad and wounds him. T begs for mercy. A hesitates, but sees P's sword belt on T and kills him. A founds Lavinium. 3 years later, Ascanius succeeds him and rules for 30 years before moving settlement to Alba Longa. Alban king rules for 300 years until Romulus, grandson of Numitor founds Rome.

Front 597

What does Candide mean in Voltaire's Candide

Back 597

Innocent.

Front 598

Voltaire Candide plot

Back 598

Candide is innocent young man living in castle of the Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia. C lacks knowledge of outside world. Believes this castle is best place to live in, ideal. One day he and Cunegonde, Barons daughter are seen romantic. He is kicked out. Goes on many adventures. Eyes opened to reality. Sees that everything does not happen for the best as philosophers and metaphysician Pangloss told him in castle. In Europe and America he encounters misery. Meets a number of people from various walks of life. Comes across many philosophers ranging from extreme optimism of Pangloss to bleak pessimism of Martin. Experiences love and selflessness of Jacques and extreme cruelty and selfishness of drunken sailor, kindness of old lady who is daughter of Pope and a princess, always ready to help despite suffering a lot herself. Reaches Eldorado and feels peace but leave to find Cunegonde. Finds her and she has become ugly but they get married and he and the rest of people mentioned live together plant a garden and bask in their ideals.

Front 599

John Webster, Duchess of Malfo

Back 599

Published in 1623, may be an Elizabethan tragedy but also psychological horror

Front 600

John Webster Duchess of Malfi plot

Back 600

Duchess inherits realm as a widow, is urged by brothers Ferdinand Duke of Calabria and Cardinal to marry again. At first she vows to never remarry, eventually falls for steward, Antonio Bologna. Hide marriage until she becomes obv. pregnant and delivers a son. Brothers realize, assume child born out of wedlock. F learns truth, Duchess realizes he and cardinal will not be wiling for her land to descend to child by Antonio. Attack her lands and take her prisoner, torture her by showing her signs as though Antonio and children are dead. Brothers attempt to drive her insane in captivity. Even her jailor is moved. One of best known non-Shakespearean plays of period

Front 601

Eudora Welty, Death of a Traveling Salesman plot

Back 601

Protagonist been off work due to flu damaged his heart. Back on road and fully recovered but heart keeps lurching and clutching, trying to speak. Car inexplicably falls into a ravine, goes to nearest farmhouse for help. Woman tells him "sonny" will help her, thinks he is her son but he is her husband, woman is pregnant. Farm wife is dowdy, frumpy, prematurely aged, within her there is life and evidence of having been loved but within him there is nothing. Sleeps overnight at their house and leaves in the morning. Profoundly changed by meeting with farm couple, but didn't tell them because he does not understand it. Needs to reform his life but keeps the emotion bottled up inside him, words unspoken. Gets back to car, back on highway, symbolizes rootless life, pressure in his heart is so great it bursts and he dies.

Front 602

Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray

Back 602

Employs lush language and many musings on "art for arts sake". Basil Halliwell paints portrait of young English aristocrat Dorian Gray. D makes deal with devil he will always look as young and beautiful as portrait. Soon realizes he has his wish but all his indiscretions and real age are painted on picture while he remains young. Lord Henry takes D out in perpetuity as D's life becomes more and more debauched. Actress, Sibyl Vance commits suicide over D. D kills B after showing him painting. D kills self by stabbing portrait, reverts to original and D lies old and dead.

Front 603

Identify: "But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect in itself is a mode of exaggeration and destroys the harmony of any face."

Back 603

Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray

Front 604

Identify: "The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them."

Back 604

Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray

Front 605

William Carlos Williams

Back 605

1883-1963. Known for disagreements with other modernists. Wrote stories, plays and autobiographies as well as poems. Most memorable achievement is 5 books of poetry about humble and downtrodden Northern NJ city of Paterson. Studs unpretentious dramatic work with ancient newspaper articles, anecdotes, letters from friends/admirers. One was AG, young poet from Paterson (Allen Ginsberg)Died same year he was awarded Pulitzer Prize for literature.

Front 606

Identify: "I have eaten/the plums/ that were in/ the ice box// and which/you were/ probably/ saving/ for breakfast//forgive me/ they were delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold."

Back 606

William Carlos Williams, This is Just to Say

Front 607

Identify: "When the world takes over for us And the storm in the trees Replaces our bitter consciences (Like ships, female to all seas) When the few last yellow leaves Stand out like flags on tossed ships At anchor--our minds are rested // Yesterday we sweated and dreamed Or sweated in our dreams walking At a loss through the bulk of figures That appeared solid, men or women, but as we approached down the paved Corridor, melted--was it I? -- like smoke from bonfires blowing away

Back 607

William Carlos Williams, Lear

Front 608

Identify: "According to Brueghal When Icarus fell It was spring //A farmer was ploughing His field The whole pageantry//of the year was Awake tingling Near//the edge of the sea Concerned With itself"

Back 608

William Carlos Williams Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Front 609

Identify: "so much depends/upon//a red wheel/barrow//glazed with rain/water//beside the white/chickens"

Back 609

William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

Front 610

Identify: "The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

Back 610

William Wordsworth, The World is Too Much With Us

Front 611

Characters in William Wycherley, The Country Wife

Back 611

(1673)

Mr. and Mrs. Pinchwife: Margery and Bud P represent a hostile marriage between an old (or older man) and a young woman, a May/December marriage
Mr. Horner: runs around cuckolding all of the husbands including Mr. P while he pretends to be a eunuch
Also: Sir Jasper Fidget, Mrs. Squeamish, Mrs. Dainty Fidget

Front 612

Identify:
"Horn: A quack is fit for a pimp, as a midwife for a bawd; they are still but in their way, both helpers of nature. Well, my dear doctor, hast thou done what I desired?
Quack: I have undone you for ever with the women, and reported you throughout the whole town as bad as a eunuch, with as much trouble as if I made you one in earnest."

Back 612

William Wycherley, The Country Wife

Front 613

John Gower

Back 613

Poet and friend of Chaucer, born around 1330.

Front 614

What work did Chaucer dedicate to John Gower?

Back 614

Troilus and Criseyde

Front 615

Confessio Amantis, John Gower

Back 615

Lover's Confession, written in English at request of Richard II. Collection of tales and exemplar treating of courtly love. Important contribution to courtly love literature in English. Some stories have their counterparts in Canterbury Tales, one of the stories is source for Shakespeare's Pericles, had Gower appear in Chorus

Front 616

Plot of John Gower's Confessio Amantis

Back 616

A lover complaining first to venus and later confessing to her priest, Genius.

Front 617

Julian of Norwich

Back 617

1342-1413, one of the greatest English Mystics. Name comes from Church of St. Julian in Norwich where she occupied a cell adjoining the church as an anchoress. At 30, suffering severe illness and believing on her deathbed, had a series of intense visions. Later became her major work Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love 1393. Believed to be the first book written by a woman in the English language.

Front 618

Margery Kempe

Back 618

1373-1440 MK has vision that called her to leave aside the "vanities" of this world. Saw a vision of Christ at her bedside. Started a brewery and a grain mill, both failed. Tempted by sexual pleasures and social jealousy for some years. Later fully responded to spiritual calling. Negotiated a chaste marriage with her husband, began making pilgrimages around Europe to sites that were holy to her. These stories comprised most of her book.

Front 619

Book of Margery Kempe

Back 619

Considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. The best insight available that points to the middle class experience in the Middle Ages. Admittedly unusual among the more traditional holy exemplars such as Julian of Norwich. Often depicted as an "oddity" or even a "madwoman." Recent scholarship on vernacular theologies and popular practices of piety suggest that she wasn't as odd as she appears

Front 620

Mystery plays

Back 620

One of the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Developed from representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with antiphonal song. As they became more popular, more vernacular elements were introduced and non-clergy began to participate. Became increasingly secular, began to be performed entirely in the vernacular and were moved out of churches by 13th or 14th cent. Taken over by guilds, each guild taking responsibility for a particular piece of scriptural history. Developed into a series of plays dealing with all major events in the Christian calendar, from Creation to Day of Judgment.

Front 621

Miracle plays

Back 621

Performed in Latin, re-enacted episodes from the lives of the saints.

Front 622

Robert Henryson

Back 622

1425-1500. Scottish poet remarkable for his relationship to Chaucer. Wrote a conclusion to Chaucer's Troilus.

Front 623

Robert Henryson, Morall Fabillis of Esope

Back 623

Collection of 13 fables, chiefly based on versions of Anonymous, John Lydgate and William Caxton.

Front 624

Robert Henryson Testament of Cresseid

Back 624

Supplements Chaucer's tale of Troilus with the story of the tragedy of Cresseid. Description of C's leprosy, meeting with Troilus, his sorrow and charity and her death give poem high place

Front 625

Style of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Back 625

Written in verse stanzas that end with the "bob and wheel." Bob is a very short line and wheel is a trimeter quatrain. 5 lines together rhyme ABABA. Obscure poetic device. Alliterative Revival of the Fourteenth Century

Front 626

Alliterative Revival of the 14th Century

Back 626

relies on the agreement or pair of stressed syllables at the beginning of the line with (usually) a third and fourth at the end of the line. Line always finds a "breath point" at some point after the first two stresses, dividing the line into 2 half-lines, separated by the pause called a caseura

Front 627

Sir Thomas Malory

Back 627

1405-1471 wrote the first major Arthurian romance. Work of prose.

Front 628

The Wife's Lament Genre

Back 628

Elegy (lament for things and/or persons lost, often lost to death)

Front 629

The Wife's Lament Form

Back 629

Four-stress lines of varying syllable lengths, divided in halves by a caesura, often indicates a breath pause. Prose translation obscures many of the work's poetic features

Front 630

The Wife's Lament characters:

Back 630

Narrator, woman married to a man from a distant community which is hostile to her, and her husband

Front 631

The Wife's Lament summary

Back 631

Narrator makes the case that her grief deserves to be told in song because she is exiled from her own kin and from her husband, doomed to poverty amid a wilderness and surrounded by hostile neighbors, facing old age alone

Front 632

William Langland, Piers Plowman

Back 632

Apocalyptic Middle English allegorical narrative. Written in unrhymed alliterative verse, divided into sections called passus. Considered to be one of the early great works of English literature.

Front 633

William Langland Piers Plowman plot

Back 633

Concern's narrator's quest for the true Christian life in the terms of the medieval Catholic mind. Entails a series of dream-visions and an examination into the lives of three allegorical characters, Do-Wel, Do-Bet and Do-Best, sought by P.

Front 634

Identify: "In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne, I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were, In havite as an heremite unholy of werkes, Wente wide in this world wondres to here. Ac on a May morwenynge on Malverne hills Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte. I was wery forwandred and wente me to reste Under a brood bank by a bourne seyde; And as I lay and lenede and loked on the watres, I slombred into a slepynd, it sweyed so murye..."

Back 634

William Langland, Piers Plowman, opening

Front 635

Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great

Back 635

1587, established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. INtended to only write part 1 but popularity prompted him to write part 2

Front 636

Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great Part 1 plot

Back 636

Play opens in Persepolis. Persian emoeror, Mycetes, dispatches troops to dispose of Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd/nomadic bandit. In the same scene, Mycetes' brother Cosroe plots to overthrow Mycetes and assume the throne. Scene shifts to Scythia, where T is wooing, capturing and winning Zenocrate, daughter of the Egyptian king. Confronted by Mycetes' soldiers, he persuades first the soldiers, then Cosroe to join him in a fight against M. Although he promises Cosroe the Persian throne, T reneges on this promise and, after defeating M, takes personal control of the Persian Empire. T is suddenly powerful and decides to pursue further conquests. Campaign against Turkey yields him the Turkish king Bajazeth and wife Zabina as captives. Keeps them in a cage and uses B as footstool. Conquers Africa and names himself emperor of that continent, sets his eyes on Damascus. Egyptian sultan--> father in law. Z (wife) wants him to spare father. Complies, makes Sultan a tributary king. Play ends with wedding of Zenocrate and T and the crowning of the Z as Empress of Persia.

Front 637

Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great Part 2 plot

Back 637

T grooms his sons to be conquerors in his wake as he continues to conquer his neighboring kingdoms. One of his sons, Calyphas wants to stay with mother and not risk death, T is mad. Sees son as coward, kills him in anger after battle he refuses to fight. During this time, Bajazeth's son, Callapine, plans to avenge father's death. While attacking Islamic nation, burns a copy of the Qu'ran, claims to be greated than God. Suddenly struck ill and dies, giving power to remaining sons, still aspiring to greatness.

Front 638

Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander

Back 638

Love story of Leander, the hero and Hero, priestess of Venus. Live in different cities, Abydos and Sestos, separated from each other by the gulf known as Hellespont. L swims across but attracts the attention of Neptune, who makes advances to him which L, not understanding, rejects. Breaks safely away, reaches hero, sex. Story breaks off there.

Front 639

Ending of Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander

Back 639

Publisher ended insinuating something was missing, many readers agree, assume that L is meant to drown. Others argue that Marlowe wanted poem to end there like Tamburlaine. Poem was already nontraditional because of Neptune's interest in L. Also foreshadows an untimely tragic ending by giving rejected Neptune strong motive to drown L. Likely author would have continued poem if he had lived.

Front 640

Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

Back 640

Play is in blank verse and prose in 13 scenes, (1604) or 20 scenes (1616). Blank verse reserved for main scenes, prose used in comic scenes.

Front 641

Edmund Spenser

Back 641

Spenserian Stanza, language is purposely antique, imitation of Chaucer

Front 642

Spensarian Stanza

Back 642

ABABBCBCC. First 8 lines in iambic pentameter, last is iambic hexameter (called Alexandrine)

Front 643

Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar

Back 643

First poem to earn him notability, collection of eclogues. Written from the point of view of various shepherds throughout the months of the year. Suggested that it is an allegory, as implied by cyclical structure. Diversity of forms and meters ranging from accentual syllabic to purely accentual. Central Characters are Colin Clout, Hobbinol and Rosalind

Front 644

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Back 644

Author's major contribution to ENglish poetry. Long allegory in the epic form of Christian virtues, tied into England's mythology of King Arthur. Intended to complete 12 books of the poem but only wrote 6 before death. Creates an allegory: Characters of his far off Faerie Land meant to have symbolic meaning in the real world. Characters include Britomart, Duesa, Redcrosse and Una.

Front 645

Identify: "Lo I am the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far unfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; Whose prayses having slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng: Fierce warres and faithful loves shall moralize my song."

Back 645

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen

Front 646

Edmund Spenser, The Amoretti and the Epithalamion

Back 646

Amoretti is a sonnet cycle or sequence composed of 89 sonnets. The Epithalamion is a wedding song derived from Latin originals. Composed in 24 immensely complex 18-line stanzas whose rhyme schemes vary but use Spenser's typical concatenation strategy to link each stage of the stanza together.

Front 647

Identify: "Fresh Spring, the herald of loves mighty king, IN whose cote-armour richly are displayd All sorts of flowers, the which on earth do spring, In goodly colours gloriously arrayd- Goe to my love, where she is carelesse layd, Yet in her winters bowre not well awake; Tell her the joyous time wil not be staid, Unlesse she doe him by the forelock take; Bid ger therefore her seife soone ready make, To wayt on Love amongst his lovely crew; Where every one, that misseth then her make, Shall be by him amearst with penance dew. Make haste, therefore, sweet love, whilst it is prime; For none can call againe the passed time."

Back 647

Edmund Spenser, Whilst it is Prime

Front 648

Identify: "Somtyme he wolde gaspe Whan he sawe a waspe; A fly or a gnat, He wolde flye at that And prytely he would pant Whan he saw an ant; Lorde, how wolde hop After the greesop! And whan I sayd, Phyp, Phyp, Than he wold lepe and skyp, And take me by the lyp."

Back 648

John Skelton, Phyllyp Sparrowe, example of skeltonics

Front 649

Identify: "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part, Nay, I have done: you get no more of me, And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart, That thus so cleanly I myself can free. Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows, And when we meet at any time again Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath, When his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies, When faith is kneeling by his bed of death, And Innocence is closing up his eyes, Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life though might'st him yet recover."

Back 649

Michael Drayton, "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part (Idea LXI), Shakespearean sonnet

Front 650

Sir Phillip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella

Back 650

First of the famous English sonnet sequences. Probably composed in the early 1580s. Nativized the key features of his Italian model, Petrarch: variation of emotion from poem to poem, attendant sense of an ongoing, but partly obscure, narrative. The philosophical trappings, the musings on the act of poetic creation itself. Experimented with rhyme scheme, served to free the English sonnett from the strict rhyming requirements of the form. The 108 sonnets are interrupted by 11 songs of varying forms, usually shorter lines than the sonnets pentameters.

Front 651

Why is Sir Phillip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella considered a sonnet cycle?

Back 651

It tracks in linked sonnets the progressive rise and fall of a love relationship.

Front 652

Characters of Sir Phillip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella

Back 652

The lover, characterized as the star lover (astro-phil) and the beloved "stella" or star. Also speaks to entities he allegorically personifies as "Reason," "Love," "Love," Queen Virtue," "Sleep," "The Moon," "Patience," "Desire," "Dawn," and others. The court surrounding them is populated by friends (loyal) and enemies (jealous) and various others including her fool of a husband.

Front 653

Sir Phillip Sidney The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

Back 653

Sidney's most ambitious work, romance that combines pastoral elements with a mood derived from the Hellenistic model of Heliodorus. A highly idealized version of the shepherd's life adjoins with stories of jousts, political treachery, kidnappings, battles and rapes. Narrative follows the Greek model" stories are nested within each other, and different story-lines are intertwined.

Front 654

Sir Phillip Sidney, A Defence of Poesy

Back 654

Written before 1583. Generally believed to be in part motivated by Stephen Gosson, former playwright who dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in 1579. Integrates a number of classical and Italian precepts on fiction. Essence of defense is that poetry, by combining the livliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtus. Also offers important comments on Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan stage.

Front 655

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Back 655

1503-1542 worked alongside Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey to introduce the sonnet into English.

Front 656

Identify: "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, But as for me, helas, I may no more. The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind. Yet may I by no means my wearied mind Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore Fainting I follow. I leave on therefore, Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind. Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, As well as I may spend his time in vain. And graven with diamonds in letters plain There is written, her fair neck round about: Noli me tangere for Caesar's I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

Back 656

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Whoso List to Hunt

Front 657

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

Back 657

1517-1547, continued in Wyatt's footsteps on the English sonnet form. Established form used by Shakespeare, 3 quatrains and a couplet, ababcdcdefef gg

Front 658

Identify: "Description of spring, Wherein every thing renews, save only the lover. The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings, With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale. The nightingale with feathers new she sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs, The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he slings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale; The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flower's bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs!"

Back 658

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Description of spring

Front 659

Sir Walter Ralegh, The nymph's reply to the shepherd

Back 659

Written in response to Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd to his Love

Front 660

Identify: "Three things there be that prosper up apace And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far; But on a day, they meet all in one place, And when they meet they one another mar: And they be these: The wood, the weed, the wag. The wood is that which makes the gallow tree; The weed is that which strings the hangman's bag; The wag, my pretty knave, betokeneth thee. Mark well, dear boy, whilst these assemble not, Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild, But when they meet, it makes the timber rot; It frets the halter, and it chokes the child. Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray We part not with thee at this meeting day. The Author's Epitaph, Made By Himself.

Back 660

Sir Walter Ralegh, To His Son

Front 661

Identify: "When to her lute Corrina sings, Her voice reuiues the leaden stringes, And doth in highest noates appeare, As any challeng'd eccho cleere; But when she doth of mourning speake, Eu'n with her sighes the strongs do breake.//And as her lute doth liue or die, Led by her passion, so must I, For when of pleasure she doth sing, My thoughts enjoy a sodaine spring, But if she doth of sorow speake, Eu'n from my hart the strings doe breake."

Back 661

Thomas Campion, When to her lute Corrina sings

Front 662

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

Back 662

1558-1594, the first extant Elizabethan revenge tragedy

Front 663

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy plot

Back 663

Begins with the ghost of Don Andrea, Spanish nobleman killed in recent battle with Portugal. Accompanied by spirit of Revenge, tells story of death. Killed in hand-to-hand combat with Portuguese prince Balthazar after falling in love with Bel-Imperia & having secret affair. When facing judges to assign him to his place in the underworld, they are unable to reach a decision and send him back to palace of Pluto and Proserpine, King & Queen of Underworld. P decides Revenge should accompany him back to living world, & after passing through gates of horn, this is where he finds himself. R promises that by play's end, DA will see his revenge. DA returns to scene of battle, finds that Spanish have won. B was taken prisoner shortly after DA's death by DA's good friend Horatio, son of Hieronimo, Knight Marshal of Spain. Dispute between Ho and Lorenzo, son of Duke of Castille, brother of BI over who actually captured prince. King of Spain decides to compromise b/w them letting Ho have ransom money to be paid for B and Lo will keep captured prince at his home. In Portugal, Viceroy (ruler) mad with grief, believes son to be dead, is tricked by Villuppo into arresting innocent noble, Alexandro, for B's murder. Negotiations begin b/w Portuguese ambassador and Spanish king to ensure B's return and peace b/w S&P. In Spain, B falls in love with BI but her servant Pedringano says BI is in love with Ho who also loves her. Makes B mad. Ho also incurs hatred of Lo and fight over B's capture and the fact that lower-born Ho now consorts with Lo's sister. 2 nobles decide to kill Horatio, successfully do with aid of Pedringano and B's servant Serberine during an evening rendezvous between Ho and BI. BI taken away before Hieronimo stumbles onto scene to see dead son. In Portugal, Al escapes death when Portuguese Ambassador returns from Spain with news that B is still alive. Villuppo is then sentenced to death. In Spain, Hi is almost driven insane by his inability to find justice for his son. Receives a bloody letter in BI's hand identifying Lo and B as murderers. Lo gets worried about Hi's erratic behavior and acts in Machiavellian manner to eliminate all evidence surrounding crime. Tells Pedringano to kill Serberine for gold but arranges so P is immediately arrested after crime. Leads P to believe that a pardon is hidden in a box brought to execution by messenger boy, prevents P from exposing Lo before hanged. Negotiations continue b/w Spain and Portugal centering on diplomatic marriage b/w B and BI. Ironically, letter is found on P's body that confirms Hi's suspicion over Lo and B, but Lo is able to deny Hi access to king, making royal justice unavailable. Hi vows to revenge himself privately on 2 killers, using deception and a false show of friendship to keep Lo off guard. Marriage between BI and B is set, Viceroy travels to Spain to attend ceremony. Hi is given responsibility over entertainment for marriage ceremony, uses it to exact revenge. Devises a play to be performed at ceremonies and convinces Lo and B to act. BI, now confederate in Hi's plot for revenge, also acts in play. Isabella kills herself. Plot of tragedy mirrors plot of play as a whole. Hi is role of hired murderer, during action of play, Hi's charcter stabs Lo's character and BI stabs B's character before killing herself. After play is over Hi reveals to guests that all stabbings were done with real knives, Lo, B, and BI are all dead. tries to kill himself but King and Viceroy and Duke stop him. Bites out his own tongue. Tricks Duke into giving him a knife, then stabs Duke himself and dies. Revenge and Andrea have final words. Andrea assigns Hi, BI, Ho, and I to happy eternities. Rest of characters assigned to various tortures and punishments of Hell.

Front 664

Shakespeare Henry IV Characters

Back 664

Henry IV: King of England, not actually old, but when play opens, prematurely worn down by worries. Nurses guilty feelings about winning throne through civil war that deposed Richard II. Reign has not brought end to strife in England, starts even bigger civil war. Vexed by irresponsible antics of son, Harry. Regal, proud, aloof, not main character. Center of power and stability though largely secondary.

Prince Harry: Son of Henry IV, will become Henry V. Prince of Wales, friends call him Hal. Sometimes called Harry Monmouth. Spends time hanging around highwaymen, robbers and whores, plans to transform himself into prince, regal qualities emerge as play unfolds. Closest thing play has to protagonist: complex and impressive mind is generally at the center of the play, though Shakespeare is often ambiguous

Hotspur: Son and heir of Earl of Northumberland, nephew to Earl of Worcester. Real name is Henry Percy, also called either of these. Earned nickname from fierceness in battle, hastiness of action. Member of powerful Percy family of North, helped bring Henry IV to power, feels king has forgotten debt to them.

Sir John Falstaff: Fat old man b/w 50-65 hangs around taverns on wrong side of London, makes living as thief, highwayman, mooch. Harry's closest friend, acts as mentor. Only one who can match Harry's wit

Earl of Westmoreland: nobleman and military leader who is close companion and valuable ally of King Henry IV

Lord John of Lancaster: Younger son of Henry younger brother of Hary. Wise and valiant in battle despite youth.

Sir Walter Blunt: loyal and trusted ally to king

Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester: Hotspur's uncle, shrewd, manipulative, mastermind of Percy rebellion

Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland: Hotspur's faher. Northumberland conspires and raises troops on Percy side, but claims he is sick before Battle of Shrewsbury and does not bring troops.

Edmund Mortimer: Earl of March, Welsh rebel Owain Glyndwr's son in law.Conflation of 2 separate historical figures.

Owain Glyndwr: leader of Welsh rebels and father of Lady Mortimer. Joins with Percys in their insurrection against King Henry. Well-read and educated, claims to be able to command great magic.

Archibald, Earl of Douglas: Leader of large army of Scottish rebels against King Henry.

Sir Richard Vernon: Relative and ally of the Earl of Worcester

Archbishop of York: has grievance against KH, conspires with Percys

Ned Poins, Bardolph and Peto: Hal's friends

Gadshill: Hal's friend

Mistress Quickly: Hostess of Boar's Head Tavern

Front 665

Identify: "Yea, there thou mak'st me sad and mak'st me sin In envy that my Lord Northumberland Should be the father to so blest a son-- A son who is the theme of honour's tongue, Amongst a grove the very straightest plant, Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride--Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him See riot and dishonor stain the brow Of my young Harry. O, that it could be proved That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged In cradle clothes our children where they lay, And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!"

Back 665

Shakespeare, Henry IV, I.i

Front 666

Identify: "I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. If all the year were playing holidays To sport would be as tedious as to work; But when they seldom come, they wished-for come, And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. So, when this loose behavior I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men's hopes; And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation glitt'ring o'er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. I'll so offend to make offence a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will."

Back 666

Shakespeare, Henry IV I.ii Prince Harry to Falstaff and friends

Front 667

Shakespeare King Lear characters

Back 667

Cordelia: Lear's youngest daughter, disowned. King of France marries her for her virtue alone. Remains loyal to Lear despite cruelty toward her, forgives him, displays mild and forbearing temperament toward evil sisters.

Goneril: Lear's ruthless oldest daughter, wife to duke of Albany. Jealous, treacherous, amoral. Audience would have been shocked by aggressiveness. Challenges Lear's authority, initiates affair with Edmund, wrestles military power away from husband.

Regan: Lear's middle daughter, wife to duke of Cornwall. As ruthless and aggressive as G. Competing for Edmund

Gloucester: Nobleman loyal to Lear whose rank, earl, is below duke. Adulterer, bastard son Edmund. Fate parallel to lear: misjudges which child to trust. Appears weak but later demonstrates bravery

Edgar: Gl's older, legitimate son. Starts gullible, disguised as mad beggar to evade father's men, carries impersonation further to aid lear and GL, finally appears as armored champion to avenge brother's treason.
Edmund: GL's younger, illegitimate son. Resents status as bastard, schemes to usurp GL's title and possessions from Edgar. Formidable character, succeeding in almost all schemes and wreaking destruction on all other characters.

Kent: Nobleman of same rank as GL loyal to Lear. Most of play disguised as peasant calling self "Caius"

Albany: Husband of Goneril. Good at heart, eventually denounces cruelty of Goneril, Regan and Cornwall

Cornwall: Husband of Regan. Domineering, cruel, violent

Oswald: Steward/chief servant in G's house. Obey;s mistress' commands helps her conspiracies.

Front 668

Identify: "Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty According to my bond; no more nor less."

Back 668

Shakespeare King Lear I.i

Front 669

Shakespeare Othello characters

Back 669

Othello: Protagonist and hero. Christian Moor and general of armies of Venice, eloquent and physically powerful figure, respected by those around him. Easy prey to insecurities because of age, life as soldier and race. Free and open nature, Iago uses to twist love for wife into powerful and destructive jealousy.
Desdemona: Daughter of Venetian senator Brabanzio. Secretly married before play begins. Stereotypically pure and meek, also determined and self-possessed. Equally capable of defending marriage, jesting with Iago and responding with dignity to O's incomprehensible jealousy.

Iago: Ensign villian. 28. Desires O's demise because he has been passed over for promotion o lieutenant, never clearly expressed, seem to originate in obsessive, almost aesthetic delight in manipulation and destruction.

Michael Cassio: O's lieutenant. Young inexperienced soldier. Position resented by Iago. Truly devoted to O, extremely ashamed after fighting on Cypres & losing place. I uses C's youth, good looks, and friendship with D to play on O's insecurities about D's fidelity.

Emilia: I's wife, D's attendant. Cynical worldly woman, deeply attached to mistress and distrustful of husband.

Roderigo: Jealous suitor of D. Young rich foolish, convinced if he gives I all his money, I will help him win D's hand. Agrees to help I kill C thinking C is another rival for D.

Bianca: Prostitute in Cyprus, favorite customer is C, teases with promises of marriage

Brabanzio: D'a father, blustering and self-important senetor. Friend of O, betrayed when they marry.

Duke of Veince: official authority in Venice, has respect for O. Reconciles O and B in Act I scene iii, sends O to Cyprus

Montano: Gov of Cyprus before O.

Lodovico: One of B's kinsmen, messenger from Venice to Cyprus. Arrives with letters announcing O is replaced with C

Graziano: B's kinsman accompanies L to Cyprus. Mentions Ds father has died

Clown: O's servant. Reflect and distort action and words of main plots

Front 670

Identify: "Were I the Moor I would bot be Iago. In following him I follow but myself; Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so for my peculiar end. For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, 'tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am."

Back 670

Shakespeare Othello Iago I.i

Front 671

Shakespearean sonnet

Back 671

abab cdcd efef gg. 3 quatrains and a couplet, usually break between octave and sestet

Front 672

Identify: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds to shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimer, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death bring thou wander'st in his shade When all eternal lines to time thou grow'st, So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

Back 672

Shakespeare Sonnet 18

Front 673

Identify: "

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.

‘Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.

So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes."

Back 673

Shakespeare Sonnet 55

Front 674

Identify: "

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

Back 674

Shakespeare Sonnet 116

Front 675

Identify: "

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground

And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare."

Back 675

Shakespeare Sonnet 130

Front 676

Alexander Pope

Back 676

One of the major figures of the Restoration. Almost exclusively heroic couplets.

Front 677

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

Back 677

1712, mock heroic, 2 cantos. Republished in 1714 in 5 canto version. Based on incident involving Pope's friends, Arabella Fermor and suitor, Lord Petre. Satirizes a petty squabble by comparing it to the epic world of the gods.

Front 678

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

Back 678

Nearest thing in 18th cent English writing to what might be called neo-classical manifesto. Comes closer to handbook or guide, in style of Horace's Ars Poetica. Articulated hrough a more consciously epigrammatic style than anything found elsewhere in Pope's poetry. Built upon series of maxims or pithy apothegms, such as "To Err is Humane; to forgive, Divine," or "For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread."

Front 679

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Back 679

Philosophical poem, heroic couplets, published between 1732 and 1734. Intended to be the centerpiece of a proposed system of ethics to be put forth in poetic form: fragment of a larger work which Pope planned but did not live to complete. Attempt to justify, as Milton had attempted to vindicate, the ways of God to Man, a warning that man himself is not, as, in his pride, he seems to believe, the center of all things. Not explicitly Christian, makes the implicit assumption that man is fallen and unregenerate and that he must seek his own salvation. Consists of 4 epistles, addressed to Lord Bolingbroke, derived from some of B's own fragmentary writings and Earl of Shaftsbury. Sets out to demonstrate no matter how imperfect, complex, inscrutable and disturbingly full of evil the Universe may appear to be, does function in a rational fashion and is perfect work of God.

Front 680

What is Alexander Pope's conclusion to The Essay on Man?

Back 680

We must learn to accept our position in the Great CHain of Being, a middle state, below angels and above beasts, in which we can, at least potentially, lead happy and virtuous lives.

Front 681

Alexander Pope The Duncaid

Back 681

Expresses Pope's dismay concerning the feared loss of Britain's literary, cultural and ethical inheritance. Takes the idea of the personified goddess of Dulness being at war with reason, darkness at war with light, and extends it to a full Aeneid parody. Celebrates a war rather than a mere victory and a process of ignorance. Pope picks his champion of all things insipid Lewis Theobald and Colley Cibber.

Front 682

Who was Alexander Pope's The Duncaid based on?

Back 682

Lewis Theobald, Pope's nemesis in editing Shakespeare. Colley Cibber, Pope's poetic nemesis who because laureate over Pope.

Front 683

What was Alexander Pope's The Duncaid based on?

Back 683

Loosely based on Dryden's MacFlecknoe, however Pope's is more fully developed satirical anti-epic, attacking those who had slandered him over many years, in a poem more than 4 times the length.

Front 684

Alexander Pope Eloisa to Abelard

Back 684

Ovidian heroic epistle inspired by the 12th century story of Eloisa's illicit love for, and secret marriage to, her teacher Pierre Abelard, perhaps the most popular teacher and philosopher in Paris, and the brutal vengeance her family exacts when they castrate him, not realizing that they had married. It is from this poem that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes from.

Front 685

Alexander Pope, To a Lady

Back 685

The target of the satire appears at first to be aristocratic and wealthy women, the venom that Pope expends upon them clearly spreads to encompass women as a sex. Presents serious problems of interpretation. He attacks the entire female sex. His misogyny weakens his satire. The Lady to whom it is addressed and whom it praises so glowingly at the end, was Pope's closest female friend, Martha Blount

Front 686

Identify: "Nothing so true as what you once let fall 'Most Women have no Characters at all.' Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair."

Back 686

Alexander Pope, To A Lady

Front 687

Identify: "Cou'd our First Father, at his toilsome Plough, Thorns in his Path, and Labour on his Brow, Cloath'd only in a rude, unpolish'd Skin, Cou'd he a vain Fantastick Nymph have seen, In all her Airs, in all her antick Graces, Her various Fashions, and more various Faces; How had it pos'd that Skill, which late assign'd Just Appellations to Each several Kind! A right Idea of the Sight to frame; T'have guest from what New Element she came; T'have hit the wav'ring Form, or giv'n this Thing a Name."

Back 687

Anne Finch, Adam Pos'd

Front 688

Aphra Behn

Back 688

First known English woman to earn her living as a writer. Famous for prose work Oroonoko (1688) and comic Restoration dramas The Rover and The Lucky Chance. Also wrote poetry and translated works from French and Latin. One of sources was commedia dell'arte

Front 689

What is John Bunyan famous for

Back 689

Pilgrim's Progress, work of prose, major work of the Restoration.

Front 690

John Bunyan

Back 690

Very religious, imprisoned in 1660 for preaching without a license, spent 12 years in jail.

Front 691

John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress

Back 691

Allegory told by a dreamer. Published in 2 parts, 1678 and 1684. Dreamer sees a man, Christian, clothed in rags with burden on back leaving house behind knowing it will burn down. Book has told him so. Has to flee his family who think he is crazy and escape City of Destruction. On advice of Evangelist begins journey through many allegorical places. Each character in place and dream is given appropriate name. ex. Hopeful and Faithful, Cheating Mr. Legality, evil Giant Despair. Format like Spenser's Faerie Queene. Second part concerns the Christiana, Christian's wife, inspired to follow on similar pilgrimage.

Front 692

Name some of the places in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Back 692

The Slough of Despond, The House Beautiful, the Valley of Humiliation, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, Celestial City

Front 693

Identify: "As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and, not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?

Back 693

John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

Front 694

John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel

Back 694

Political allegory that uses biblical figures and events to stand in for a political crisis current in Dryden's time. Absalom, Achitophel, King David, Written in heroic couplets

Front 695

John Dryden, All for Love

Back 695

1677. Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, represents turning point in career as dramatist. Abandoning practice of composing plays in rhymed couplets, shows mastery of an artist at height of powers. Creates genuine emotion and dramatic tension within rigorous strictures of neoclassical theatre; unities of time place and action are strictly observed, but loses none of its power. Dryden's Cleopatra is meek, Antony is astute great man in crisis.

Front 696

Differences between Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Dryden's All For Love

Back 696

SHakespeare's ranges widely over time and place, epic but often awkwardly meandering sense of scope. Dryden's tightly focused composition allows greater degree of emotional intensity and insight. SHakespeare motivated primarily by passion of history's most famous lovers, Dryden's interest lies in clash between personal and political

Front 697

Identify: "Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpassed; The next in majesty; in both the last. The force of Nature could no further go. To make a third, she joined the former two."

Back 697

John Dryden, Epigram on Milton

Front 698

Identify: "From harmony, from Heav'nly harmont This universal frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay, And cound not heave her head, The tuneful voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead. Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, In order to their stations leap, And music's pow'r obey."

Back 698

John Dryden A Song For St. Cecilia's Day beginning

Front 699

Identify: "How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year! My hasting days fly on with full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th. Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, That I to manhood am arrived so near, And inward ripeness doth much less appear, That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th. Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure even To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven; All is: if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task-Master's eye."

Back 699

John Milton How Soon Hath Time

Front 700

Identify: "What needs my SHakespear for his honour'd Bones The labour of an age in piled Stones, Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame, What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thy self a live-long Monument. For whilst to th'shame of slow-endeavouring art, Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu'd Book, Those Delphik lines with deep impression took, Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving, Dost make us Marble with too much conceaving; And so Sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie, That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die."

Back 700

John Milton On Shakespeare

Front 701

What are John Milton's major points in Aeropagitica?

Back 701

Books are not the sole purveyors of evil or destructive information, so attempts to halt the flow of evil or destructive information by regulating book publishing would be ineffective

You would need inhumanly perfect individuals to serve as judges or personal biases and misunderstandings would creep into the system and damage the chances that "good" books had publication.
Even "bad" books can serve a constructive purpose by strengthening an individual's resistance to faulty or evil ideas.

Front 702

Identify: "For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a voill the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. IN know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. ANd yet on the other hand unlesse warinesse be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a resonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth, but a good Booke is the pretious life0blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life."

Back 702

John Milton Aeropagitica

Front 703

John Milton, Comus plot

Back 703

Masque about the attempted seduction of a girl by Comus, supernatural being. Lady stands firm, secure in the sanctity of her virginity, and her brothers eventually come to her rescue.

Front 704

John Milton, Comus

Back 704

Early example of work. Certain elements of Lucifer in Paradise Lost can be seen in Comus. Dedicated to Earl of Bridgewater, his children are in primary roles.

Front 705

John Milton Of Education

Back 705

Contribution to the contemporary debate about methods of education which in turn was part of larger discussion about how the Church should be organized and State should be governed. Generally agrees with humanistic theory of education. Marked by 2 or 3 outstanding characteristics, all prominent in Milton's treatise.

Front 706

3 Characteristics mentioned in John Milton's Of Education

Back 706

A clearer consciousness among teachers and students, of education as a discipline for active life.
Insistence upon more extensive reading of ancient writers

Attitude of severe and hostile criticism toward medieval education and culture.

Front 707

John Milton Samson Agonistes plot

Back 707

Retells story of Hebrew hero Samson from Book of Judges. Concentrates on Samson after betrayed by Delilah, blinded and held prisoner by Philistines. Resists temptation to become despondent and allows hair to grow after Philistines cut it, destroys leadership of P's by pulling lard building down on them and himself.

Front 708

What did John Milton have in common with his hero of Samson Agonistes

Back 708

They both devoted their lives to their counries.

Front 709

John Milton Lycidas

Back 709

Pastoral elegy dedicated to memory of Edward King who had been drowned when his ship sank in Irish Sea off coast of Wales. 193 lines, irregularly rhymed

Front 710

John Milton Lycidas topic/plot

Back 710

Shepherd who mourns drowned friend, Lycidas, alluding to immortal fame of a poet. Metaphor of shepherd for priests is explored. Both preparing to become ministers, death of one is severe loss to flock. Contains metaphors for corruption of Catholic church

Front 711

Themes of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Back 711

Satirical view of state of European gov't

Inquiry into whether man is inherently corrupt or whether men are corrupted

Restatement of the older ancients v. moderns controversy in Battle of the Books

Front 712

Jonathan Swift, A modest Proposal

Back 712

Children should be eaten, treated the same way as food

Front 713

Jonathan Swift A Tale of a Tub

Back 713

Divided between various forms of digression and sections of a "tale." Enormous parody with smaller parodies in it

Front 714

What is Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub an allegory for?

Back 714

Concerns the adventures of 3 brothers attempting to make their way in the world, represents 3 branches of Christianity. Peter--> Roman Catholic. Jack --> Jack of Leyden, various dissenting Protestant churches whose modern descendants = Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Mennonites... Martin --> Martil Luther, Middle born and middle standing.

Front 715

Jonathan Swift A Tale of a Tub plot

Back 715

3 Brothers given 3 coats by father and they have his will to guide them. The brothers are forbidden to make any changes to coats, do nearly nothing but alter coats from start. Coat represents practice of Christianity the allegory of the narrative is supposed to be an apology for British church's refusal to alter its practice according to Puritan demands

Front 716

Hudibrastic

Back 716

Term derived from Samuel Butler's Hudibras. Refers specifically to couplets of rhymed terameter lines used in Hudibras, generally to any deliberate, humorous, ill-rhymed couplets. All lines have 8 syllables and are iambic tetrameter couplets. Swift's chosen poetic style.

Front 717

Samuel Butler, Hudibras

Back 717

Mock heroic poem from 17th century, title comes from Spenser's Faerie Queene. Satirical polemic upon Roundheads, Puritans, Presbyterians and other factions involved in English Civil War. Clearly influenced by Rabelais and Don Quixote. Iambic tetrameter in closed couplets with surprising feminine rhymes.

Front 718

Plot of Samuel Butler, Hudibras

Back 718

Sir Hudibras, knight errant who is described dramatically and with laudatory praise that is so thickly applied to be absurd and the conceited and arrogant person is visible beneath. Praised for knowledge of logic despite appearing stupid throughout but religious fervor is mainly attacked. Knight and squire sally forth, come upon people bear-baiting. This is anti-Christian, attack baiters and capture one after defeating bear. Defeated group rallies and renews attack capturing knight and squire. Argue on religion. Knights imprisoned condition is reported by Fame to widow Hudibras has been wooing and she comes to see him. Complains that he does not really love her and he promises to flagellate himself if she sets him free. Promises and debates with Ralpho how to avoid fate and R suggests that oath breaking is next to saintliness. H tries to convince R of nobility of accepting beating in stead but declines offer. Interrupted by skimmington, women celebrated, men made fools. Knight pelted with rotton eggs and chased away. Visits astrologer, Sidrophe, to ask how he should woo widow but they get into argument and knight and squire run off believing killed S. Picks up H going to widow's house to explain details of whipping he promised to give self and R had already told her what happened. Group rushes in and gives him beating and confesses sins by extension the sins of Puritans. H visits lawyer, convinces him to write letter to widow. Poem ends with exchange of letters, H arguments rebuffed by widow.

Front 719

Scriblerus Club

Back 719

Informal group, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell. Began as project of satirizing abuses of learning wherever might be found, led to Memoris of Martinus Scriblerus. Second edition of Duncaid also contains work attributed to Martinus Scriblerus

Front 720

Colley Cibber, Love;s Last Shift

Back 720

Story of a last shift/trick a virtuous wife, Amanda is driven to in order to reform and retain out of control rakish husband Loveless. Loveless has been away for 10 years between brothel and bottle, no longer recognizes wife when he returns to London. Acting part of high class prostitute, Amanda inveigles Lovelss into her luxurious house and treats him to night of his dreams, confessing true identity in morning. Loveless is so impressed by faithfulness, becomes reformed immediately. Minor part that was a great success was fop Sir Novelty Fashion, written for author to play. Flirts with all the women, more interested in own exquisite appearance and witticisms

Front 721

Wililam Wychrley, Country Wife

Back 721

Aristocratic and anti-Puritan ideology, sexually explicit. Based on many plays by Moliere, colloquial dialogue, complicated fast paced plot, Rake's trick of pretending impotence in order to safely have affair with married women, the arrival in london of young inexperienced country wife, discovers joys of town life, esp. men. 3 sources and 3 plots

Front 722

3 plots of Wililam Wycherley's Country Wife

Back 722

Horner's impotence trick

Married life of Pinchwife and Margery

Courtship of Harcourt and Alithea

Front 723

Robert Blair

Back 723

Scottish poet, sole work = The Grave 1743. Poem written in blank verse, much less conventional. Religious subject contributed to great popularity, especially in Scotland. Extends to 767 lines of various merit, some passages rise to great sublimity, others sink to commonplace.

Front 724

What did Robert Blair's The Grave inspire?

Back 724

Inspired William Blake to undertake a series of 12 illustrative designs, engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti, published in 1808

Front 725

Robert Burns

Back 725

Late 1700s. Best known of poets who have written in Lowland Scots. Collected folk songs from across Scotland, usually revising and adapting. Wrote Auld Lang Syne and Scots Wha Hae. Influenced Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferugsson. Familiarity of Classical, Biblical and English lit.

Front 726

How is Robert Burns usually classified and who did he influence?

Back 726

Proto-romantic, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley. Hugh MacDiarmid

Front 727

Identify: "O my Luve's like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June: O my Luve's like the melodie That's sweetly play'd in tune. As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve the still, my Dear, Til a' the seas gang dry. Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun: And I will luve thee still, my Dear, While the sands o'life shall run. And fare thee weel, my only Luve! And fare thee weel, awhile! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho' it were ten thousand mile!"

Back 727

Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose

Front 728

Identify: "When chapman billies leave the street, And drouthy neibors, neibors, meet; As market days are wearing lat, And folk begin to tak the gate, While we sit bousing at the nappy, And' getting fou and unco happy, We think na on the lang Scots miles, The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles, That lie between us and our hame, Where sits our sulky, sullen dame, Gathering her brows like gathering storm, Nursing her wrath to keep it warm. This truth fand honest Tam o'Shanter, As he frae Ayr ae night did canter: Auld Ayr, wham ne'er a town surpasses, For honest men and bonie lasses).

Back 728

Robert Burns, Tam O'Shanter: A tale

Front 729

Identify: "A fond kiss, and then we sever; A farewell, and then forever! Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee, Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee. Wo shall say that Fortune grieves him, While the star of hope she leaves him? Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me; Dark despair around benights me. I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy, Nothing could resist my Nancy; But to see her was to love her; Love but her, and love forever. Had we never lov'd say kindly, Had we never lov'd say blindly, Never met--or never parted-- We had ne'er been broken-hearted. Fare thee well, thou first and fairest! Fare thee well, thou best and dearest! Thine be like a joy and treasure, Peace. enjoyment, love, and pleasure! A fond kiss, and then we sever; A farewell, alas, forever! Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee, Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee!"

Back 729

A Fond Kiss Robert Burns

Front 730

Thomas Gray

Back 730

1716-1771

Front 731

Identify: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. // Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; // Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wand'ring near her secret bow'r Molest her ancient solitary reign. // Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade, Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap, Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep....

Back 731

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Front 732

Identify: "'Twas on a lofty vase's side, Where China's gayest art had dyed The azure flowers that blow, Demurest of the tabby kind, The pensive Selima, reclined, Gazed on the lake below. // Her conscious tail her joy declared; The fair round face, the snowy beard, The velvet of her paws, Her coat, that with the tortoise vies, Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes, She saw; and purred applause. //Still she gazed; but 'midst the tide Two angel forms were seen to glide, The genii of the stream: Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue Through richest purple to the view Betrayed a golden gleam...

Back 732

Thomas Gray On the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes

Front 733

Identify: "'Ruin seize thee, ruthless King! Confusion on thy banners wait, Tho'fanned by Conquest's crimson wing They mock the air with idle state. Helm, nor Hauberk's twisted mail, Nor even thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail To save thy secret soul from nightly fears, From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears!' Such were the sounds, that o'er the crested pride Of the first Edward scatter'd wild dismay, 10 As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side He wound with toilsome march his long array. Stout Glo'ster stood aghast in speechless trance: 'To arms!' cried Mortimer, and couch'd his quiv'ring lance."

Back 733

The Bard Thomas Gray beginning

Front 734

Ben Jonson

Back 734

1572-1637, English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. Best known for Volpene and The Alchemist, lyrics, influence on Jacobean and Caroline poets, theory of humours, contentious personality, and friendship/rivalry with Shakespeare

Front 735

Identify: "To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy book and fame; While I confess thy writings to be such As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much. 'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways Wre not the paths I meant unto thy praise; For the seeliest ignorance on these may light, Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance The truth, but gropes, and urgest all by chance; Or crafty malice might pretend this praise, And think to ruin where it seemed to raise. These are, as some infamous bawd or whore Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more? ..."

Back 735

To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare Ben Jonson

Front 736

Identify: "Thou are not, Penshurst, built to envious show Of touch, or marble; nor canst boast a row Of polish'd pillars, or a roof of gold: Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told; Or stair, or courts; but stand'st an ancient pile, And these grudg'd at, art reverenced the while. Thou joy'st in better marks, of soil, of air, Of wood, or water; therein thou are fair...."

Back 736

To Penhurst Ben Jonson

Front 737

Idenitfy: "Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy. Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. Oh I could lose all father now! For why Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's range, And if no other misery, yet age! Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie Ben Jonson his best place of poetry For whose sake henseforth all his vows be such As what he loves may never like too much."

Back 737

Ben Jonson, On My First Son

Front 738

Ben Jonson, Volpene

Back 738

The Fox in Italian, black comedy 1606, one of finest in Jacobean period

Front 739

Volpene Ben Jonson plot

Back 739

V takes a long illness to pique expectations whoaspire to his fortune. Mosca tells each, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, in their turns that they are to be named V's heir. Mosca announces V'd impending death. Hopefull heirs shower him with gifts. Corbaccio disinherits his own son for Volpene. Corvino offers his wife. Complications ensue and just as V is about to be outsmarted by Mosca, reveals in open court and characters are punished according to crime and situation.

Front 740

Robert Herrick

Back 740

Cavalier poet, associated to the carpe diem theme because of his poem "To the Virgins, Make Much of Time" Reputation rests on Hesperides, collection of lyric poetry, and Noble Numbers, spiritual work published together in 1648. Well known for bawdy style, referencing lovemaking and female body. Bawdy poems focus on Julia

Front 741

What poem is Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time often compared to?

Back 741

Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress

Front 742

Identify: "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day Tomorrow will be dying. The Glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he's a getting, The sooner will his race be run, and nearer he's to setting. That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer; But being spent, the wors, and worst, Times still succeed the former. Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may go marry: For having lost buyt once your prime You may forever tarry."

Back 742

Robert Herrick To the Virgins To Make Much of Time

Front 743

Identify: "Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows That liquifaction of her clothes. Next, when I cast mine eyes and see That brave vibration each way free; O how that glittering taketh me!

Back 743

Robert Herrick Upon Julia's Clothes

Front 744

Identify: "Display thy breasts, my Julia--there let me Behold that circummortal purity, Between whose glories there my lips I'll lay, Ravish'd in that fair via lactea."

Back 744

Robert Herrick Upon Julia's Breasts

Front 745

Identify: "Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee, The shooting stars attend thee; And the elves also, Whose little eyes glow Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee. No Will-o'-th'-Wisp mislight thee, Nor snake or slow-worm bite hee; But on, on thy way, Not making a stay, Since ghost there's none to affright thee. Let not the dark thee cumber: What though the moon does slumber? The stars of the night Will lend thee their light Like tapers clear without number. Then, Julia, let me woo thee, Thus, thus to come unto me; And when I shall meet Thy silvr'y feet My soul I'll pour into thee."

Back 745

The Night Piece, to Julia Robert Herrick

Front 746

Identify: "GET up, get up for shame, the blooming morn
Upon her wings presents the god unshorn.
See how Aurora throws her fair
Fresh-quilted colours through the air:
Get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see
The dew bespangling herb and tree."

Back 746

Robert Herrick Corinna's Going A-Maying

Front 747

Thomas Carew

Back 747

Cavalier poet, his elegy to Donne contrasts from the otherwise bawdy, worldly and cynical nature of his poetry

Front 748

Identify: "CAN we not force from widow’d poetry,
Now thou art dead, great Donne, one elegy,
To crown thy hearse ? Why yet did we not trust,
Though with unkneaded dough-baked prose, thy dust,
Such as the unscissor’d lecturer, from the flower
Of fading rhetoric, short-lived as his hour,
Dry as the sand that measures it, might lay
Upon the ashes on the funeral day ?
Have we nor tune nor voice ? Didst thou dispense
Through all our language both the words and sense ?
‘Tis a sad truth. The pulpit may her plain
And sober Christian precepts still retain ;
Doctrines it may, and wholesome uses, frame,
Grave homilies and lectures ; but the flame
Of thy brave soul, that shot such heat and light,
As burn’d our earth, and made our darkness bright,
Committed holy rapes upon the will,
Did through the eye the melting heart distil,
And the deep knowledge of dark truths so teach,
As sense might judge what fancy could not reach,
Must be desired for ever. So the fire,
That fills with spirit and heat the Delphic choir,
Which, kindled first by thy Promethean breath,
Glow’d here awhile, lies quench’d now in thy death."

Back 748

Thomas Carew An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul's, Dr. John Donne

Front 749

Andrew Marvell

Back 749

often grouped with the ‘metaphysical poets.” Marvell is easy to pick out because of his rhyme schemes, but since the type of schemes he favored were popular at the time, it is also easy to confuse him with his contemporaries.

Front 750

Identify: "Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate."

Back 750

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

Front 751

Identify: "My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,
But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt,
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds itself betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect loves, nor lets them close;
Their union would her ruin be,
And her tyrannic pow’r depose.

Back 751

Andrew Marvell The Definition of Love

Front 752

Identify: "When I beheld the Poet blind, yet bold,
In slender Book his vast Design unfold,
Messiah Crown’d, Gods Reconcil’d Decree,
Rebelling Angels, the Forbidden Tree,
Heav’n, Hell, Earth, Chaos, All; the Argument
Held me a while misdoubting his Intent,
That he would ruine (for I saw him strong)
The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song,
(So Sampson groap’d the Temples Posts in spight)
The World o’rewhelming to revenge his Sight.
Yet as I read, soon growing less severe,
I lik’d his Project, the success did fear;
Through that wide Field how he his way should find
O’re which lame Faith leads Understanding blind;
Lest he perplext the things he would explain,
And what was easie he should render vain."

Back 752

Andrew Marvell On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost

Front 753

George Herbert

Back 753

poems are characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits that was favored by the metaphysical school of poets. They include almost every known form of song and poem, but they also reflect Herbert’s concern with speech–conversational, persuasive, proverbial. Carefully arranged in related sequences, the poems explore and celebrate the ways of God’s love as Herbert discovered them within the fluctuations of his own experience.

Front 754

Identify: "

WHEN God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by ;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can :
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way ;
Then beautie flow’d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottome lay.

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature :
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse :
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast."

Back 754

George Herbert The Pulley

Front 755

Identify: " STRUCK the board, and cry’d, No more ;
I will abroad.
What ? shall I ever sigh and pine ?
My lines and life are free ; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit ?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me bloud, and not restore
What I have lost with cordiall fruit ?
Sure there was wine,
Before my sighs did drie it : there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the yeare onely lost to me ?
Have I no bayes to crown it ?
No flowers, no garlands gay ? all blasted ?
All wasted ?
Not so, my heart : but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures : leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away ; take heed:
I will abroad.
Call in thy deaths head there : tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wilde,
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Childe :
And I reply’d, My Lord."

Back 755

George Herbert The Collar

Front 756

Identify: "

LORD, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poor:

With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories :
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne:
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.

With thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day thy victorie,
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Back 756

George Herbert Easter Wings

Front 757

Identify:

A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant reares,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch’d the same.
A H E A R T alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name;
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine,
And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine.

Back 757

George Herbert The Altar

Front 758

John Donne

Back 758

1572-1631 Jacobean metaphysical poet. His works include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and sermons

Front 759

Identify: "FOR God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love ;
Or chide my palsy, or my gout ;
My five gray hairs, or ruin’d fortune flout ;
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve ;
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his Honour, or his Grace ;
Or the king’s real, or his stamp’d face
Contemplate ; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

Back 759

The Canonization John Donne

Front 760

Identify: "MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper’d swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do."

Back 760

The Flea John Donne

Front 761

Identify: "BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time."

Back 761

John Donne The Sun Rising The poem is an aubade

Front 762

Aubade

Back 762

A poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn

Front 763

Identify: "Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me."

Back 763

Holy Sonnets XIV John Donne

Front 764

Identify: Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;
For those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou’rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke ; why swell’st thou then ?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.

Back 764

Holy Sonnets X John Donne

Front 765

Identify: "

COME live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.

There will the river whisp’ring run
Warm’d by thy eyes, more than the sun ;
And there th’ enamour’d fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

If thou, to be so seen, be’st loth,
By sun or moon, thou dark’nest both,
And if myself have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legs with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poor fish beset,
With strangling snare, or windowy net.

Back 765

The Bait John Donne

Front 766

Richard Lovelace

Back 766

English poet and nobleman, born in Woolwich, today part of south-east London . He was one of the cavalier poets, and a noted royalist.
He was imprisoned briefly in 1648 for supporting the Royalists during the time of Oliver Cromwell

Front 767

Identify: "

I.
TELL me not (Sweet) I am unkinde,
That from the Nunnerie
Of thy chaste breast, and quiet minde,
To Warre and Armes I flie.

II.
True ; a new Mistresse now I chase,
The first Foe in the Field;
And with a stronger Faith imbrace
A Sword, a Horse, a Shield.

III.
Yet this Inconstancy is such,
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Deare) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

Back 767

Richard Lovelace To Lucasta on Going to the Warres

Front 768

Identify: "

I
WHEN Love with unconfined wings
Hovers within my Gates ;
And my divine Althea brings
To whisper at the Grates ;
When I lye tangled in her haire
And fettered to her eye;
The Gods that wanton in the Aire,
Know no such Liberty.

II
When flowing Cups run swiftly round
With no allaying Thames,
Our carelesse heads with Roses bound,
Our hearts with Loyall Flames;
When thirsty griefe in Wine we steepe,
When Healths and draughts go free,
Fishes that tipple in the Deepe,
Know no such Libertie.

III
When (like committed linnets) I
With shriller throat shall sing
The sweetnes, Mercy, Majesty,
And glories of my KING;
When I shall voyce aloud, how Good
He is, how Great should be;
Enlarged Winds that curle the Flood,
Know no such Liberty.

IV
Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
Nor Iron bars a Cage;
Mindes innocent and quiet take
That for an Hermitage;
If I have freedome in my Love,
And in my soule am free;
Angels alone that sore above,
Injoy such Liberty.

Back 768

Richard Lovelace "To Althea from Prison"

Front 769

John Henry, Cardinal Newman

Back 769

Widely considered the best prose writer of his day.

Front 770

John Henry, Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

Back 770

"A defense of one's life" classic defense of the religious opinions of John Henry Newman, published in 1864 in response to what he saw as an unwarranted attack on Roman Catholic doctrine by Charles Kingsley.

Front 771

John Henry, Cardinal Newman The Idea of a University

Back 771

Addresses the idea of the university as "the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery of experiment and speculation

Front 772

John Ruskin

Back 772

Invented the term "pathetica fallacy

Front 773

Pathetic Fallacy

Back 773

Description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings

Front 774

John Stuart Mill

Back 774

1806-1873 English philosopher and political economist, influential liberal thinker of 19th century. Advocate of utilitarianism

Front 775

John Stuart Mill On Liberty

Back 775

1859 Most memorable point is "over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. Compelled to say this due to tyranny of the majority wherein through control of etiquette and morality, society is an unelected power that can do horrific things.

Front 776

John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women

Back 776

Progressive work in which Mill changes the mistreatment of women from a philosophical, moral, and economic perspective.

Front 777

John Stuart Mill What is poetry

Back 777

Defines poetry as expression of the self to the self.

Front 778

Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus

Back 778

Meaning The tailor re-tailored. Meant to be commentary on thought and early life of German philosopher Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (God-Born Devil-Sht), author of "Clothes: their Origin and Influence". was intended to be factual and fictional, serious and satirical, speculative and historical. Commented on its own formal structure while forcing reader to confront problem of where truth is to be found. Imaginary philosophy of clothes holds that meaning is to be derived from phenomena, continually shifting over history as cultures reconstruct themselves in changing fashions, power-structures and faith-systems

Front 779

Names to associate with Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus

Back 779

Blumine, Dumbdrudge Hofrath Heushrecke Weissnichtwo

Front 780

Charles Dickens David Copperfield plot

Back 780

Deals with the life of David Copperfield from childhood to maturity and deals with issues of child labor. Protagonist later called Trotwood Copperfield by some. David is also name of hero's father who died before he was born.

Front 781

Charles Dickens David Copperfield characters

Back 781

Edward Murdstone: Young David's cruel stepfather who caned him for falling behind in his studies. D reacted by biting Murdstone, who then sent him to Salem House--Private school owned by friend Mr. Creakle. After D's mother died, M sent him to work in a blacking factory. Appeared at Betsy Trotwood's house after D ran away. Shows signs of repentence when confronted with D's aun but later in book married another woman and applied old principles of "firmness"
James Steerforth: A close friend of David of a romantic and charming disposition; though well-liked by most, proves himself to be lacking in character by seducing and later abandoning Emily. Eventually drowns at Yarmouth with Ham Peggotty who was trying to rescue him.

Front 782

Charles Dickens The Pickwick Papers

Back 782

The novel's main character, Mr. Pickwick is a king old gentleman, founder of Pickwick Club. Mr. Pickwick travels with his friends, Mr. Nathaniel Winkle, Mr. Augustus Snodgrass, and Mr. Tracy Tupman, and their adventures are the chief theme of the novel.

Front 783

Charles Dickens Bleak House

Back 783

Plot concerns a long-running legal dispute (Jarndyce and Jarndyce_ which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. Dickens's assault on the flaws of the British judiciary system is based in part on his own experiences as a law clerk. Harsh characterization of the slow, arcane Chancery law process gave voice to widespread frustration with the system, helping to set the stage for its eventual reform in the 1870s

Front 784

Charles Dickens Bleak House characters

Back 784

Esther Summerson: orphan

Caddy Jellyby: Friend of Esther

Front 785

Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby plot

Back 785

Lengthy novel centers around life and adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, young man who must support his mother and sister after his father dies. His Uncle Ralph, who thinks Nicholas will never amount to anything, plays the role of an antagonist

Front 786

Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby

Back 786

The tone of the work is burlesque. Dickens takes aim at what he perceives to be social injustices. Many memorable characters introduced, including Nicholas' malevolent uncle Ralph and villainous Wackford Squeers who operates a squalid boarding school where N is tutor

Front 787

Charles Dickens Great Expectations characters

Back 787

Pip: Orphan, protagonist. Trained as a blacksmith, low but skilled and honest profession. Strives to rise above class after meeting Estella Havisham.

Joe Gargery: Pip's brother-in-law, and his first father figure. Joe represents the poor but honest life that Pip rejects

Miss Havisham

Estella: Miss Havisham's adopted daughter

Front 788

Charles Dickens Hard Times

Back 788

1854 One of a number of state-of-the-nation novels published around the same time. Novel is unusual in that it is not et in London which Dickens usually does but fictitious Victorian industrial town of Coketown. Follows the classical tripartite structure of novels. There is no min protagonist. Criticism is that the intricate plots and eventual denouement mean several characters involved only to represent ideas of Dickens, usually at expense of development as human beings = straw men and women.

Front 789

State of the nation novel

Back 789

aimed to highlight the social and economic pressures some people were under.

Front 790

Explain the tripartite structure of Dickens' Hard Times

Back 790

Titles of each book related to proverbial aphorism "As you sow, so shall you reap." Interpretation = whatever is effected upon or done in present will have a direct effect on what happens later. Book I = Sowing, Book II= Reaping Book III= Garnering. Deliberate motif used and have to be bared in mind when reading book and analyzing its narrative and content

Front 791

Charles Dickens Hard Times Characters

Back 791

Mr. Thomas Gradgrind: utilitarian who is the founder of the educational system in Coketown. "Eminently practical" is his recurring description throughout the novel and practicality is something he aspires to. He represents the stringency of "fact" statistics and other materialistic pursuits. Only after daughter's breakdown comes to realization things like poetry, fiction etc aren't "destructive nonsense."
Josiah Bounderby: Business associate of G. Bombastic, thunderous merchant given to peroration. Employs many other central characters of novel and rise to prosperity shown to be example of social mobility. Marries G'd daughter, Louisa, 25 years younger. Main target of D's attack on supposed moral superiority of wealthy, revealed to be utter hypocrite in sensational comeuppance at end of novel.
Louisa G/B: Unemotional, distant and eldest child of G. Taught to abnegate emotions, finds it hard to express herself clearly, saying as a child she has "unmanageable thoughts." Married to B very logical and businesslike manner, represents emphasis on factuality and business ethos of education. Marriage is disaster & tempted into adultery by James Harthouse yet resists.
Stephen Blackpool: Referred to by fellow "hands" is improvident, indigent worker at B's mills. Life is strenuous, married to constantly inebriated wife who comes and goes. Forms close bond with Rachael, female coworker. After dispute with B, dismissed from Coketown mills forced to work elsewhere. Whilst absent accused of complicity in crime he did not commit, trying to vindicate himself falls into a pit, seriously injures himself, rescued but dies.

Front 792

Oliver Twist Charles Dickens characters

Back 792

Oliver Twist, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Artful Dodger, Noah Claypole, Mr. Brownlow

Front 793

CHarles Dickens Oliver Twist Plot

Back 793

O is boy born in workhouse, has no idea of parents' identity. Mother Agnes died in childbirth. Chosen by chance as scapegoat by other starving boys, and is made to go and ask for an extra helping at a mealtime (please, sir, I want some more.) As a result, sold by workhouse as an undertaker's apprentice. Cruelty he suffers at hands of older apprentice named Noah Claypole makeshim run away, finds way to London, taken under wing of Artful Dodger, boy criminal. D introduces O to friends, including Fagin the Jew, criminal mastermind and brutal ally Bill Sikes. O taught pickpocketing but never participates. Shown kindness by Bill's 17 year old mistress Nancy. After robbery goes wrong in which O is lookout, taken into home of wealthy man, Mr. Brownlow. Unknown efforts made by O's 1/2 brother Monks to locate him and prevent him from obtaining inheritance and begins to expect O is son of niece. Sikes and Nancy snatch Oliver back and S takes him on burglary planning to get him criminal record as favour to Monks. O left behind when burglary goes wrong and adopted into home of Rose Maylie. Restored to Mr. B.
Meanwhile M & F are plotting to go after O again and kidnap or kill him. Nancy is fearful scenario and goes to Rose Maylie and Brownlow to divulge plot of evil pair. Keeps secret meetings hidden until Noah Claypole (fallen out w same undertaker who employed O and moved to London to seek fortune) agrees to spy on N and gives info to F & S. In fit of rage, S murders N and is killed while being pursued by an angry mob. M forced to explain secrets and give inheritance to O, moves to America, dies in prison. F arrested and hanged. Rose Maylie marries longtime sweetheart Harry and O lives happily with Mr. Brownlow

Front 794

Charlotte Bronte

Back 794

1816-1855. English novelist, eldest of 3 sisters

Front 795

Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre

Back 795

J is poor orphan w/joyless childhood. Wealthy aunt, widowed Mrs. Reed is caregiver since parents death. Unkind to J telling her she is below them. J is plain intelligent and passionate, has visions/vivid dreams. Tensions escalate, J sent to Lowood, boarding school run by Brocklehurst. Branded a liar, malnourished. Miss Temple, headmistress J admires clears her. Befriends Helen Burns, very intelligent, patient and believes in God. J responds to injustices with her temper, H accepts earthly sufferings, including premature death from consumption (TB. Epidemic of typhoid, conditions in Lowood improve as J finds her place in the institution, becomes teacher. Miss T marries and moves away, J changes careers. Gets job at Thornfield. Life is quiet, J teaching young French girl Adele, spends time with housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax. owner Rochester arrives. Slowly become acquainted with & respect each other. R creates elaborate set-up by pretending to court Miss Blanche Ingram until Jane can't bear it anymore. R admits it was to make J jealous and that he really loves J. She loves him too and they are engaged despite differences in social status, age, experience. Jane is young, innocent, 19, R is nearly 40 and worldly. J wants to stay modest and plain, R gives her many presents. Wedding interrupted by lawyer, declares Mr. Rochester is married to Bertha Mason, Creole from Jamaica he had to marry to secure estate, resides in attic of Thornfield Hall, explaining odd events. R says he will take J abroad, but J will not sacrifice morals and will not accept status of mistress. J leave Thornfield in night with little money and nowhere to go. Wanders for days, finds safety under an alias with vicar, St. John Rivers and sisters. Bond and J is given position as village schoolteacher. SJ learns J's identity and learns they are her cousins. J inherits money from an uncle. Cousins left without money but she splits with all 4 so they are all secure. This gives SJ means to go to India as missionary. Proposes to J and wants her to come. J knows SJ doesn;t really love her. J nearly gives in but hears R's voice calling her in the wind, feels need to respond. Travels to Thornfield, finds it abandoned by fire. R lost hand, eye, and sight in other eye trying to save B from flames she caused. B dies. Finds where he is, cabin called Ferndean. Reconciles with R, Has a son, R gains part of sight back

Front 796

Emily Bronte

Back 796

wrote under name Ellis Bell

Front 797

Emily Bronte Wurthing Heights

Back 797

Published in 1847. Sometimes non-linear. Narrated by Lockwood, renting house from Heathcliff. House = Thrushcross Grange, close to Wuthering Heights. Mostly narrated to L by housekeeper, Nelly Dean.

Front 798

Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights Plot

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Begins with Mr. Earnshaw, original proprietor of WH brings back dark-skinned foundling Heathcliff from Liverpool. E's children Hindley and Catherine don't like him but H wins C's heart, which Hi doesn't like, sees H as interloper of father's affections. Hi is sent to college by father. C&H inseparable. E dies, Hi comes home with wife, Frances. Takes over WH brutalizes H, forcing him to work as hired hand. H&C remain friends. Dog bite requires C to stay at Linton estate Thrushcross Grange for weeks, matures and grows attached to Edgar Linton. F dies after birth of Hi's child Hareton. Loss leaves Hi to turn to alcohol. After that C becomes engaged to E, H leaves. C married to E for 3 years, H returns, amassed wealth. Duped Hi into owing him WH. H learns and takes advantage of crush E's sister Isabella has on him and seduces and elopes with her to E's despair.

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Fanny Burney

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1752-1840. English novelist and diarist. Published first novel Evelina in 1778. Revelation of authorship brought her immediate fame by narrative and comic power. Published Cecilia in 1782 and Camilla in 1796. Admired by Jane Austen, about the entry into the world of a young, beautiful, intelligent but inexperience girl.

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Fanny Burney Evelina

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Title character abandoned by father, Sir John Belmont, thought he would receive a fortune from marriage. E's mother dies in childbirth, E raised in seclusion by Mr. Villars, guardian. Grows to be beautifyl and intelligent. Travels to London to see friend, Mrs. Mirvan. Introduced to society, falls in love with handsome Lord Orville. Ill-bread relatives and vulgar grandmother, Mme. Duval, as well as attentions of Sir Clement Willoughby frustrate happines. To attain her station in London society, E's friends contact B to get him to acknowledge his daughter. B announces that he has had his daughter with him since mother's death. Nurse had passed her own child to B. B discovers imposition, recognizes E and E marries Lord Orville

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George Eliot

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1819-1880. Pen name of Mary Ann Evans. English novelist. One of the leading writers of Victorian era. Novels largely set in provincial England, known for realism and psychological perspicacity

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George Eliot Middlemarch

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Interweaves stories of various friends, acquaintances, relations in town of Middlemarch. Demonstrates genuine compassion for each of her characters yet seeds portraits with critical and cynical assessments of human hypocrisy and weaknes. Tart on topic of gender relations and limited role of women. Virginia Woolf described as "one of the few English novels written for grown up people."

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George Eliot Middlemarch plot

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Dorothea Brooke is beautiful and serious-minded who yearns for knowledge and power to help others. Rejects a titled man in favor of Reverend Edward Cassaubon, middle-aged clergyman who will teach her and engage her in great works. Marriage is terrible mistake, C disdains her efforts to assist him in research, D realizes the meanness of intellectual ambitions. Makes acquaintance of poor relation, Will Ladislaw, admires and matches her passion and ambition. C dies suddenly, D inherits fortune, tries to use it for good of others despite indignation on finding in terms of will that she is forbidden to marry Will. Gives up inheritance to find true happiness in W. D's works bring her in contact with Dr. Tertius Lydgate who plans to build and run a hospital in anticipation of typhus reaching Middlemarch. L falls in love with pretty and impractical Rosamond Vincy, financial improvidence puts L in debt to the disreputable attorney Bulstrode, attempts to conceal scandal in his past led him to evil. B never clears his name but finds true sympathy from his wife. L becomes successful enough London dr. but never achieves happiness at home or scientific greatness. Fred Vincy, R's irresponsible brother takes step down socially and economically but up in integrity and hard work, allies himself with Gart family and marries plain but kindhearted Mary Garth. Along with D, pursuit of true love is deemed socially unacceptable. Sensible and loving. Publishes historical volume for boys, nobody believes a woman could have written it.

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George Eliot Silas Marner plot

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Set in early years of 19th cent. Silas Marner was weaver. Living in industrial town, highly thought of member of Dissenting church. Engaged to be marred to female member of the church nd thought future happiness assured. Betrayed by fellow parishioner, blamed him for a theft he did not commit. Expelled from congregation. Found our later his former fiancee married the man betrayed him. Later went to settle in village of Reveloe where he lived as recluse who existed only for work and hoard of money until that money was stolen by son of Squire Cass, town's leading land owner, causing him to be heartbroken. Soon, orphaned child came to Raveloe. Not known by people there, really child of Godfrey Cass, eldest son of squire. Mother was woman of low birth, G refused to clarify her as wife and woman, Molly, went to seek out G for revenge but never made it there and died on the way. S named child Eppie after deceased mother Hephzibah and changed her life completely. Symbolically, lost material gold to have it replaced by golden-haired Eppie. Later, gold is found and restored. G wanted to take her back when she was young woman but refused to go back with him and second wife, Nancy Lammeter. Eppie marries local boy Aaron son of Dolly Winthrop.

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George Eliot Adam Bede 1859

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Young workman of 26 in town of Hayslope in Loamshire. Foreman of carpentry yshop where brother, Seth works. Novel opens in workshop with argument among men about religion. Learn that Dinah Morris, methodist preacher whom Seth is in love with will speak in village that evening. Seth goes to prayer meeting and proposes to Dinah who refuses him. Meanwhile A has gone home and found out from mother, Lisbeth that father, Thias has gone off drinking instead of finishing coffin he was contracted for. Adam works all night and finishes coffin and delivers with Seth in morning. Find drowned body of father in brook on the way home. Joshua Rann, parish clerk informs Mr. Irwine, local Anglican clergyman that the Methodists are stirring up dissension in Hayslope. Mr. I and Arthur Donnithorne, grandson and heir of local landowner, ride over to see D at the Hill Farm, tenanted by Poysers, D's aunt and uncle. Mr. I speaks to D and impressed by religious sincerity. A flirts with another of P's nieces Hetty Sorrel, flattered by attentions. Mr. I informs D of TB's death and goes to B's cotage and comforts Lisbeth. Arthur learns on same occasion that Hetty will be at the Chase, his manor, in 2 days time and places himself so as to meet her in a grove on the grounds. After taking with her he is ashamed with himself for being attracted to mere farm girl but cannot break the spell and later intercepts her again in same grove and kisses her. Ashamed of behavior again, decides to tell Mr. I hoping confession will cure his passion. Speaks to clergyman at Broxton parsonage the following morning, loses his nerve and says nothing about Hetty. D has encouraged Hetty to come to her if she ever needs help, Hetty repulses offer. D leaves for her home in Snowfield Stonyshire the next day. TB is buried, A reflects that now he can begin to look forward to marriage, in love with Hetty. Goes to the Hall Farm and finds that Hetty seems more friendly towards him than in the past. Doesn't realize that thoughts are of Arthur, hopes rise. Visting Bartle Massey, local schoolmaster learns that the keper of Chase woods has had storke that the job may be offered to him. A's marriage prospects look bright from financial and emotional viewpoint. Arthur's 21st birthday arrives and all tenants of estate gather for celebration. Round of toasts at dinnrtime and everyone wishes Arthur well. A is offered job as keeper of woods and accepts it. Games in which townspeople compete in the afternoon and dance in evening. A discovers that Hetty is wearing locket looking like lover's token but dismisses it. Locket is gift from Arthur, carrying on secret affair with Hetty. 3 weeks later, A is passing through grove when he finds Arthur and H in embrace. Furious, fights Arhur, knocks him out. Arthur revives, A forces him to promise to write note to Hetty breaking off relationship. Arthur writes note to give to A to deliver. Leaves and joins regiment in south of England. A delivers note, tries to soften blow. Before reading, H refuses to believe Arthur wants to break up, thinks they will marry. Reads it, is in despair. Wants to leave home and work as maid, but P's won't let her. Begins to think marrying A will be good. D has written letter to Seth and Mrs. P verbally routed Squire Donnithorne, Ar's grandfather who was bent on making a sharp deal with respect to P's farm. A notices H's attitude does not change, concludes there was nothing serius with Ar. Proposes and wedding set for following spring. A is happy and spends 3 months preparing. H is depressed, contemplates suicide, pregnant by Arthur. Decides to run away to Ar. Tells P's going to visit D. Travels for 7 days, H is sick, tired and poor in Windsor. Befriended by innkeeper and wife who tell her Ar's left for Ireland. H faints but next day gets money from innkeeper in exchange for jewelry Ar given her, heads back north to go to D. 5 days of traveling, spirits give out, wanders open fields. Spends part of night by pond, can't summon courage to kill herself so she resumes journey on foot to D. H does not return A goes to D to bring her back. Discovers she has never been there, tries to trace her. Realizes she's probably gone to Ar, wants to go to Ireland. Stops at parsonage to tell Mr. I plans, learns H is in prison for murdering baby. A and Mr. I go to Stoniton to jail, Mr. I tells P's Adam stays. Ar's grandfather dies, Ar comes home. Trial against H begins, A sits in room in despair. Mr. I and Bartle Massey bring news of trial progressing. H might be guilty, A refuses to believe. Goes to courtroom, witnesses give evidence against H, jury returns verdict of guilty and judge gives death sentence. Ar returned home, gets note from Mr. I about situation, left for Stoniton. On evening after, D comes to prison. Gets H to confess and makes her pray. D goes and asks A to se H before she dies. Goes day of execution forgives H. Taken to place of execution. At last second, Ar comes with reprieve. H's sentence is exile. Next day A and Ar meet where they fought. Ar repentant and goes to war. Asks A's forgiveness, agrees. 18 months later A goes to D and asks to comfort ailing mother. D goes to cottage and stays to help L. Blushes when A speaks to her. L tells A that D loves him. A surprised, realizes he does too. Goes to D and proposes. D wants to say yes but can't. She will return to work among poor and think. A agrees, D leaves. Month passes, A anxious and goes to D. Meets her on hill, she accets. Month passes, marrid. Lated D and S are home with D's kids. A comes home who has been to see Ar who has been away and came home changed H is dead everyone is content.

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Henry Fielding

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Portrays a world of mixed morality in which rght and wrong are not always clear. Cavalier and hilarious. Stimulated by disapproval of the moral and social implications of Richardson's Pamela or Virtue Rewarded and its critical and clerical over-praising.

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Differences between Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson

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Richardson: attempts to promote public morality through the depiction of archetypally virtuous and villanous men and women. Sober
Fielding: Portrays a world of mixed morality, right and wrong are not always clear. Cavalier and hilarious

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Henry Fielding An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews In Which, the many notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations of a Book called Pamela are exposed and refuted.

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Ironization. Fielding turns Pamela into Shamela whose amoral manipulation of Mr. Booby into marriage and cuckoldry are revealed in her "actual" semi-literate letters, which are sent by a sensible clergyman to one of the clerical fools who moved in part by its pornographic tendencies cried "Pamela" as an ultimate guide to morality

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Henry Fielding The History of Adventures of Joseph Andrews

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Begins with a transgendering of Pamela's resistance to seduction in whihc high comedy is made out of Joseph Andrews' resistance to losing his virginity out of wedlock. J is though to be servant class brother to Pamela who has become Mrs. Booby and a snobby parvenu

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Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling

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Title character is handsome, brave, generous young man of uncertain parentage and hearty appetites, faithful to beloved in spirit if not flesh. Combination of vice & virtue fully realized. 3 dimensional hero unusual in Eng. lit of its day. Author openly mocks moral rigidity of fashionable writers and critics while simultaneously acknowledging frailties of characters and celebrating their good natures.

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Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones A Foundling characters

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Tom Jones, Sophia Western Blifil, Squire Allworthy, Lady Bridget

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Identify: "An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money. In the former case, it is well known that the entertainer provides what fare he pleases; and though this should be very indifferent, and utterly disagreeable to the taste of his company, they must not find any fault; nay, on the contrary, good breeding forces them outwardly to approve and to commend whatever is set before them. Now the contrary of this happens to the master of an ordinary. Men who pay for what they eat will insist on gratifying their palates, however nice and whimsical these may prove; and if everything is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to d-n their dinner without control."

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Opening words to Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones a Foundling

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Jane Austen Sense and Sensibilty characters

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Marianne Dashwood, Elinor Dashwood, Lucy Steel, John Willoughby, Colonel Brandon

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Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice

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Story of a mother attempting to marry off her daughters

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Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice characters

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Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Bennet, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Charles Bingley, George Wickham

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Samuel Butler The Way of all Flesh

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The Way of All Flesh is a semi-autobiographical novel by Samuel Butler which attacks Victorian era hypocrisy. Written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family. It represents the diminishment of religious outlook from a Calvinistic approach, which is presented as harsh. Butler dared not publish it during his lifetime, but when it was published, it was accepted as part of the general revulsion against Victorianism

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Samuel Butler Erewhon

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1872

an anagram for “Nowhere,” is a satire of Victorian society.

The first few chapters of the novel, dealing with the discovery of Erewhon, are in fact based on Butler’s own experiences in New Zealand, where as a young man he was a sheep farmer for about four years (1860-1864) and where he explored parts of the interior of the South Island. (One of the country’s largest sheep farms, located in this region, is named Erewhon in his honour)

The greater part of the book consists of a description of Erewhon. The nature of this nation is clearly intended to be ambiguous. At first glance Erewhon appears to be a utopia, yet it soon becomes clear that this is far from the case. Yet for all the failings of Erewhon it is also clearly not a dystopia (or anti-utopia), an undesirable society such as that depicted by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a satirical utopia Erewhon has sometimes been compared to Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the image of Utopia in this case also bearing strong parallels with the self-view of the British Empire at the time.

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What aspects of Victorian society does Samuel Butler satire in Erewhon

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riminal punishment, religion and anthropocentrism. In Erewhon law, offenders are treated as if they were ill, whilst ill people are looked upon as criminals, for example. Another feature of Erewhon is that there are no machines, because they are considered to be dangerous: they might develop consciousness and supersede humankind. This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin’s evolution theory;

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Samuel Richardson

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1689-1761 major 18th century writer best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753)

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Samuel Richardson Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded

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epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, first published in 1740. It tells in the first person the story of the virtuous lady’s maid Pamela and the modest and agonized delicacy, yet determination, with which she rebuffs and reforms her aristocratic would-be seducer Mr B and is rewarded with marriage to him. Told through Pamela’s probingly introspective letters and diary, Pamela is widely considered a seminal influence on the direction the novel form was to take towards psychological analysis and self-examination.

The heroine, Pamela Andrews, is a maid whose master makes unwanted advances towards her. She rejects him until he shows his sincerity by proposing a fair marriage to her. In the second part of the novel, Pamela attempts to accommodate herself to upper-class society and to build a successful relationship with her husband.

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Samuel Richardson Clarissa

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may well be the longest novel in the English language. The full volume of its third edition, the edition most extensively revised by Richardson, spans over one million words

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Samuel Richardson Clarissa plot

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Clarissa Harlowe, the tragic heroine of Clarissa, is a beautiful and virtuous young lady whose family has become very wealthy only in recent years and is now eager to become part of the aristocracy by acquiring estates and titles through advantageous pairings. Clarissa is forced by relatives to marry a rich but heartless man against her will and, more importantly, against her own sense of virtue. Desperate to remain free, she allows a young gentleman of her acquaintance, Lovelace, to scare her into escaping with him. However, she refuses to marry him, longing — unusually for a girl in her time — to live by herself in peace. Lovelace, in the meantime, has been trying to arrange a fake marriage all along, and considers it a sport to add Clarissa to his long list of conquests. However, as he is more and more impressed by Clarissa, he finds it difficult to keep convincing himself that truly virtuous women do not exist. The continuous pressure he finds himself under, combined with his growing passion for Clarissa, forces him to extremes and eventually he rapes her. Clarissa manages to escape from him, but remains dangerously ill. When she dies, however, it is in the full consciousness of her own virtue, and trusting in a better life after death. Lovelace, tormented by what he has done but still unable to change, dies in a duel with Clarissa’s cousin. Clarissa’s relatives finally realise the misery they have caused, but discover that they are too late and Clarissa has already died.

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Anne Radcliffe

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the hero is usually a gentleman of noble birth, likely as not in some sort of disgrace; the heroine, an orphan-heiress, high-strung and sensitive, and highly susceptible to music and poetry and to nature in its most romantic moods. A prominent role is given to the tyrant-villain. He is a man of fierce and morose passions obsessed by the love of power and riches. The villain can usually be counted on to confine the heroine in the haunted wing of a castle because she refuses to marry someone she hates. Whatever the details, Mrs. Radcliffe generally manages the plot and action so that the chief impression is a sense of the young heroine’s incessant danger. On oft-repeated midnight prowls about the gloomy passageways of a rambling, ruined castle, the heroine in a quiver of excitement (largely self-induced) experiences a series of hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. Her emotional tension is kept to the pitch by a succession of strange sights and sounds . . . and by an assorted array of sliding panels, trap doors, faded hangings, veiled portraits, bloodstained garments, and even dark and desperate characters.

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Anne Radcliffe The Italian charactrs

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Vincentio di Vivaldi Ellena Rosalba, mysterious monk Schedoni

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Anne Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho characters

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Montoni, Emily

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Horace Wapole The Castle of Otranto

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Claims to be a translation, events in it are supposed to have occurred in the 12th and 13th century Walpole writes as if by formula. The standard Gothic devices and motifs are all in place: moonlight, a speaking portrait, the slamming of doors, castle vaults, an underground passage, blasts of wind, rusty hinges, the curdling of blood, and above all, in practically every sentence, strong feelings of terror (“Words cannot paint the horror of the princess’s situation . . .”). But Walpole was the inventor of the formula

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Horace Wapole The Castle of Otranto plot

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When the story opens, the villainous Manfred, prince of Otranto, in order to get an heir to his estate, has arranged a marriage between his only son, Conrad, and the beautiful Isabella. But on the night before the wedding, Conrad is mysteriously killed (he is crushed by a giant helmet). Lest he should be left without male descendants, Manfred determines to divorce his present wife, Hippolita, who is past childbearing, and marry Isabella himself.

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MG Lewis The Monk

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one of the most extreme examples of horror Gothic, dealing as it does with such shocking topics as rape, matricide, and incest. In The Monk we see Gothic being taken to its limits – both in terms of subject matter and public acceptability. The storm of controversy the novel created on its publication in 1796 indicates that Lewis had gone well beyond the more sedate story-lines

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Differences between Anne Radcliffe and MG Lewis

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Where Radcliffe always provides a natural explanation for ostensibly supernatural phenomena, Lewis revels in the use of the supernatural as a plot device

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MG Lewis The Monk plot

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The Monk concerns itself with the career of the Capuchin monk Ambrosio, an apparent orphan who has been brought up under the care of his monastic order to become a charismatic preacher, idolised by the population of Madrid. At the start of the narrative Ambrosio is a model of piety, but he proves to be a very brittle character who only too easily succumbs to the temptations of the devil. The devil’s chosen instrument is the young monk Rosario, soon revealed to be a female in disguise (and then later a demon). As Matilda she seduces Ambrosio and becomes his accomplice in the career of sin that he proceeds to embark upon. Even before the seduction Ambrosio reveals himself to be motivated less by piety than pride and vanity, and in the first instance of the narrative’s obsession with perverted sexuality, expresses erotic longings towards a painting of the Virgin Mary (which turns out to be a likeness of Matilda).

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Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbervilles plot

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poorly received at the time of its initial publication. The poignant portrait of heroine Tess illustrates Hardy’s deep understanding of women.

The story concerns a simple country girl, Tess Durbeyfield, whose father’s pretensions to social status lead her into the company of the nouveau-riche d’Urberville family. In a scene which suggests rape, though it is open to interpretation, Tess is made pregnant by the rakish Alec d’Urberville. Tess returns home in disgrace, but the child she bears soon dies, leaving her free to leave her village once again to look for work. While employed as a milkmaid, she encounters the morally upright Angel Clare, who falls in love with her. After their marriage, she is honest with him about her past; though Angel is educated, he remains basically naive, and cannot reconcile his real affection for Tess, his wounded pride, and his image of Tess as a semi-pagan Mary figure.

Abandoned by Angel, Tess is lured into a liaison with Alec d’Urberville, who comes back into her life by chance. When Alec lays eyes on Tess once more, he ruthlessly hunts her down, determined to win her back into his life of sin. Tess, influenced by her desprate situation and the perception that her husband will never rejoin her, yeilds to Alec’s determination and allows him to support her while she lives with him. Eventually Angel returns, repentant, to reclaim her, and Tess murders Alec in order to be with her legal husband. They flee together, but the police catch up with them at Stonehenge, in a memorable finale. Tess is hanged for the murder of Alec.

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Thomas Hardy the Mayor of Casterbridge plot

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set in the fictional town of Casterbridge (based on the town of Dorchester in Dorset). Hardy subtitled the novel “The Life and Death of a Man of Character”.

Under the influence of alcohol, Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, sells his wife and daughter in a country fair to a sailor. Once sober, he swears never to touch liquor again.

Eighteen years later, Henchard, now a successful grain merchant and the Mayor of Casterbridge, is reunited with Susan, the wife he gave away at a country fair. The return of his wife and daughter sets in motion a decline in his fortunes. The daughter, Elizabeth Jane, soon falls in love with Donald Farfrae, whom Henchard has employed as an assistant. Until his wife’s death, Henchard is unaware that Elizabeth Jane is not his own child, but that of the man who “bought” Susan from him. He conceals the secret from her. His growing resentment of Donald Farfrae leads to his standing in the way of a marriage between Donald and Elizabeth Jane.

In the meantime, Henchard’s former mistress, Lucetta, arrives in town, and attracts Donald, who marries her. Rumours spread of her previous relationship with Michael Henchard, and both are disgraced. Lucetta dies. When Newson, Elizabeth Jane’s real father, returns, Henchard, afraid of losing her companionship, pretends she is dead. By the time Elizabeth Jane, now married to Donald Farfrae and reunited with Newson, goes looking for Henchard to forgive him, he has died.

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Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure

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last of Thomas Hardy’s novels, first published in 1895.

Called “Jude the Obscene” by at least one reviewer, Jude the Obscure received so harsh a reception from scandalized critics that Hardy stopped writing fiction altogether, producing only poetry and drama for the rest of his life. It was first published under the title The Simpletons; and then Hearts Insurgent in the European and American editions of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine

The novel is often thought of as Thomas Hardy’s best work, not only for the elaborate structuring of the plot, where small and subtle details lead to the character’s ruin, but in the themes of the book. Such themes include how human loneliness and sensuality can stop a person from trying to fulfill his dreams; how, when free from the trap of marriage, one’s dreams will not be fulfilled if one is of a lower status; how the educated classes are often more like sophists than intellectuals; how living a libertine life full of integrity and passion will be condemned as scandalous in conservative society; and how religion is nothing but a mistaken sense that the tragedies that wear down an individual are the result of having sinned against a higher being

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Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure Plot

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Jude Fawley, a stonemason who yearns to be a scholar at “Christminster”, a city modelled on Oxford, England. Denied entry into the university, Jude is manipulated into an unwanted marriage with a country girl, Arabella, who soon deserts him. He becomes obsessed with his cousin, Sue Bridehead, even after she marries his former schoolteacher. Sue is attracted to the normalcy of her married life but quickly finds the relationship an unhappy one because, inherently, she is a libertine like Jude.

When Jude and Sue begin to live together, employers, who find out about this illicit relationship and its bastard children, dismiss Jude from his employment—and landlords continually evict them. Jude’s eldest son (from his first marriage to Arabella), also called Jude but known as “Little Father Time”, after observing the problems he and his siblings are causing their parents, hangs Sue’s two children and then himself. The child leaves a pathetically misspelled note that reads: Done because we are too menny.

This tragedy ends Jude’s relationship with Sue who returns to her first husband, Phillotson, after experiencing extreme religious guilt. After being tricked yet another time into remarrying Arabella, Jude falls ill and makes one last trip to Sue. Sue first confirms her intense love for him then leaves him forever, evincing the moral stranglehold of the church. Jude returns home and dies alone as Arabella is out courting his doctor.

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Thomas Hardy Far from the Madding Crowd

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The title is apt, as the life of the book’s heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, living in the quiet rural village of Weatherbury is indeed disrupted by the “madding crowd”. After shunning the first man to love her, the shepherd Gabriel Oak, she is courted by two others: the lonely and repressed farmer Boldwood, and the charming but faithlessSergeant Troy. The role of fate is clearly established, with each twist and turn in the book being more luck than the choice of one of the characters. The book is widely seen as Hardy’s first masterpiece.

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Identify:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An agèd thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

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Thomas Hardy The Darkling Thrush

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Identify:

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgement-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worm drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God cried, “No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening. . . .

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From Channel Firing Thomas Hardy

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William Thackeray Vanity Fair

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Title is a reference to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

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William Thackeray Vanity Fair plot

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Story opens at Miss Pinkerton's Academy for young ladies, we meet Becky Sharp (strong willed nd cunning young woman determined to make her way into society) and Amelia Sedley (Good natured though simple minded). Book accompanies Becky and Amelia's life through happy times and sorrowful days b/w London, Brighton, the countryside, and Waterloo. A completes studies at Miss Pinkerton's, invites B to her home. B meets A's lover George Osborne and her brother Joseph, clumsy and vainglorious official who serves inIndia. B entices and hopes to marry him for money and status but fails as result of J's shyness and foolish act in party at Vauxhall. B leaves for baronet Pitt Crawley's home to serve as governess. Behavior gains favor of Sir Pitt who proposes to B who rejects him. SP's sister Miss Crawley was wman of $$$ whihc was source of conflict b/x members of Crawley family who fought for her inheritance. Captain Rawdon Crawley, nephew of Miss Crawley was the inheritor and favorite of her aunt. B succeeded in gaining R's heart and they elope. MC is mad b/c of B's low birth, disinherited nephew. B tries to regain wealth and status, A's father goes bankrupt. G is persuaded by Dobbin to marry A in spite of poverty. Napoleon escapes Elba and reorganized army. G and William Dobbin are sent to Brussels to fight French army. In Brussels G meets with B. Before B and G could run away he is sent to Waterloo and killed leaving A and son George. Dobbin loves A but leaves before he can tell her. B and R went to Paris. Returned to London leaving debt in France. B's relationship with Lord Steyne discoverd by R who abandons wife and moves abroad. B becomes wanderer. A's son G grew up grandfather takes him away. J and Dobbin return. D professes love for A but she could not accept. D reconciles with A and father in law. G's grandfather dies and A and son are wealthy. A, J, G, and D go to Germany where they find poor Becky. D tells A his feelings, she rejects him again. B shows A G's note to run away together, and A realizes the truth about him and goes to D. B seduces J. Dies suspiciously after signing money to B, hinted she murdered him.

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Alfred Lord Tennyson Ulysses

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written in 1833 but not published until 1842. It is narrated by an aged Ulysses who has become dissatisfied with his life as king of Ithaca. Ulysses has spent years fighting the Trojans (as described in the Iliad) and trying to return home (which is the subject of The Odyssey), but now that his journey is complete he feels restless and yearns to get back out into the world. He is an “idle king” who is not satisfied with his duties in Ithaca. He declares his intent to leave the throne to Telemachus (“He works his work, I mine”) and gather up all of his old sailors for one final voyage:

Tennyson questions what becomes of the hero after the quest. The man who could outwit the Fates could not grow old. Although many readers have accepted the last lines of the poem as inspirational, it is not clear that Tennyson intended them as such. Ulysses’s call to action is suicidal and proud. He intends to die contending, rather than in peace.

Front 841

Identify:

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

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Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

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Alfred Lord Tennyson In Memoriam AHH

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long poem by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It is a requiem for the poet’s Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a stroke in Vienna in 1833, but it is also much more. Written over a period of 17 years, it can be seen as reflective of Victorian society at the time, and the poem dicusses many of the issues that were beginning to be questioned. It is the work in which Tennyson reaches his highest musical peaks and his poetic experience comes full circle. It is generally regarded as one of the great poetic works of the British 19th century.

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Alfred Lord Tennyson The Lady of Shalott

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The poem (of which Tennyson wrote two versions: one in 1833, of twenty verses, the other in 1842 of nineteen verses) is based loosely upon a story from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur concerning Elaine of Astolat, a maiden who falls in love with Lancelot, but dies of grief when he cannot return her love. Tennyson returned to the story in “Lancelot and Elaine” (in his 1859 Idylls of the King). However the original story of Elaine is quite different from that of the Lady, who is never named and who is, it seems, not quite human

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Identify:On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

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Alfred Lord Tennyson beginning of The Lady of Shalott

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Alfred Lord Tennyson Mariana

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“Mariana of the Moated Grange” first appears in Shakespeare’s dark comedy Measure for Measure and is the inspiration for the poem. In Shakespeare’s work, Mariana waits in a grange for her lover, who has deserted her. At the end of Shakespeare’s work, Mariana is re-united with her lover. However, there is no happy ending in Tennyson’s work.

Mariana follows a common theme in much of Tennyson’s work: that of despondent isolation. The subject of Mariana is a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection with society. The isolation defines her existence, and her longing for a connection leaves her wishing for death at the end of every stanza. In order to properly portray her horrible plight, Tennyson uses strong imagery to express a parallel between the woman’s dilapidated environment and her inner mental/social state. Tennyson’s greatest strength may possibly be his ability to create scenery and use this scenery to embody a human’s emotional state.

Different stanzas in the poem reflect on either day, night, or her life as a whole. The end result is obvious, that in her current state, hours, days, weeks, months all blend into nothing. They merely create a dull smear of despondency that is her life.

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Identify: "

With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, ‘The night is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, ‘The day is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low,
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, ‘The night is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak’d;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,
Or from the crevice peer’d about.
Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then, said she, ‘I am very dreary,
He will not come,’ she said;
She wept, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!’

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Alfred Lord Tennyson Mariana

Front 847

Identify: "Old Fitz, who from your suburb grange,
Where once I tarried for a while,
Glance at the wheeling Orb of change,
And greet it with a kindly smile;
Whom yet I see as there you sit
Beneath your sheltering garden-tree,
And while your doves about you flit,
And plant on shoulder, hand and knee,
Or on your head their rosy feet,
As if they knew your diet spares
Whatever moved in that full sheet
Let down to Peter at his prayers;
Who live on milk and meal and grass;
And once for ten long weeks I tried
Your table of Pythagoras,
And seem’d at first ‘a thing enskied’
(As Shakespeare has it) airy-light
To float above the ways of men,
Then fell from that half-spiritual height
Chill’d, till I tasted flesh again
One night when earth was winter-black,
And all the heavens flash’d in frost;
And on me, half-asleep, came back
That wholesome heat the blood had lost,
And set me climbing icy capes
And glaciers, over which there roll’d
To meet me long-arm’d vines with grapes
Of Eshcol hugeness; for the cold
Without, and warmth within me, wrought
To mould the dream; but none can say
That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought,
Who reads your golden Eastern lay,
Than which I know no version done
In English more divinely well;
A planet equal to the sun
Which cast it, that large infidel
Your Omar; and your Omar drew
Full-handed plaudits from our best
In modern letters, and from two,
Old friends outvaluing all the rest,
Two voices heard on earth no more;
But we old friends are still alive,
And I am nearing seventy-four,
While you have touch’d at seventy-five,
And so I send a birthday line
Of greeting; and my son, who dipt
In some forgotten book of mine
With sallow scraps of manuscript,
And dating many a year ago,
Has hit on this, which you will take
My Fitz, and welcome, as I know
Less for its own than for the sake
Of one recalling gracious times,
When, in our younger London days,
You found some merit in my rhymes,
And I more pleasure in your praise.

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Alfred Lord Tennyson To E. Fitzgerald

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Alfred Lord Tennyson The Idylls of the King

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a sequence of poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson which portrays the Coming of Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, Guinevere, the decline of Camelot and finally “The Passing of Arthur”, the poem Tennyson wrote first, and which inspired the sequence. The episodic poems, are not an epic either in structure or tone, but take their elegaic sadness from the idylls of Theocritus: like the Alexandrian poems an idealized, distant, pastoral review of a lost time. When the poems were published as a set there was a dedication to one, unidentified at first,
And indeed He seems to me

Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight,

whom in the course of its development, the reader finds is the late Prince Albert: the Idylls of the King are often read as an allegory of the social conflicts and malaises of mid-Victorian England. There are twelve poems in the suite. For the first poem written, “Morte d’Arthur” Tennyson adapted the well-known title of Sir Thomas Malory’s prose romance, which had fixed the imagery of Arthur in the English imagination. The downfall of Arthur lies, not in himself nor in his act of incest with his faery sister, but in the faithless Guinevere.

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Identify:

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill:
But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

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Alfred Lord Tennyson Break, Break, Break

Front 850

Christina Rossetti

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an English poet and the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Their father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political asylum seeker from Naples, and their mother, Frances Polidori, was the sister of Lord Byron’s friend and physician, John William Polidori.

Born in London and educated privately, she suffered ill-health in her youth, but was already writing poetry in her teens. Her engagement to a painter, James Collinson, was broken off because of religious differences (she was High Church Anglican). This experience is credited with inspiring her most popular poem ‘Remember’. She refused to marry Charles Cayley, whom she was deeply in love with, because of religious reasons.

Many of her poems were written for children. “Goblin Market” seemed like a children’s nursery rhyme with its talk of goblins. However, it was really an allegory for temptation. It is similar to the story of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve.

Christina rejected the social world of her brother’s “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”, preferring “my shady crevice — which crevice enjoys the unique advantage of being to my certain knowledge the place assigned me.”

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CHristina Rossetti Goblin Market

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Goblin Market deals implicitly with the ambiguous nature of the female role in Victorian society and is highly allusive to Biblical imagery (notably the Forbidden Fruit in the Garden of Eden and The Fall).

The main characters are two girls, Laura and Lizzie, who hear the goblins hawk their merchandise of exotic fruit each day. Laura is tempted by the fruit, while Lizzie warns her away, then runs from the goblins with her ears covered to avoid hearing their voices.

Laura purchases fruit from the goblins with a lock of her hair, then eats a great deal. The next day, she longs to buy more, and spends the afternoon in depressed anticipation. At evening, however, only Lizzie can hear the goblins. Laura grows sick and weak with longing for the goblin-fruit, until finally Lizzie takes pity on her and goes to buy more fruit from the goblins, bringing a silver penny to pay them.

When the goblins discover Lizzie refuses to eat any of the fruit and wants to bring it to someone else, they grow very angry and try to persuade her to eat. She resists them and returns home with the juice of the goblin fruits in her mouth and on her lips, though she does not dare swallow. She allows Laura to kiss her and taste the juice from her skin; Laura is eager to do so, but soon finds that the juice burns like a fire in her blood. After Lizzie cares for her through a long night of sickness, however, Laura recovers and is her old self again.

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Identify: Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

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Christina Rossetti Remember

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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an English poet, painter and translator. The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti was born in London, England and originally named Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti. His family and friends called him “Gabriel”, but in publications he put the name Dante first, because of its literary associations. He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti and the critic William Michael Rossetti and a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt

Front 854

Identify:

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell;
Unto thine ear I hold the dead-sea shell
Cast up thy Life’s foam-fretted feet between;
Unto thine eyes the glass where that is seen
Which had Life’s form and Love’s, but by my spell
Is now a shaken shadow intolerable,
Of ultimate things unuttered the frail screen.

Mark me, how still I am! But should there dart
One moment through thy soul the soft surprise
Of that winged peace which lulls the breath of sighs, -
Then shalt thou see me smile, and turn apart
Thy visage to mine ambush at thy heart
Sleepless with cold commemorative eyes.

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Dante Gabriel Rosetti A Superscription

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DG Rossetti The Ballad of Dead Ladies

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ossetti especially, but Victorian artists generally, celebrated beautiful women as the expression of the highest beauty in art or nature. In this poem, a translation of Francois Villon’s “Ou sont les neiges d’antan,” Rossetti catalogs women in history who were worthy of such celebration. Although it is unlikely that the painters were responding to this poem specifically, they certainly chose subjects for their paintings according to the same impulse

Front 856

Identify:

Tell me now in what hidden is
Lady Flora the lovely Roman? Flora
Where’s Hipparchia, and where is Thais,
Neither of them the fairer woman?
Where is Echo, beheld of no man, Echo
Only heard on river and mere,–
She whose beauty was more than human?…
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Where’s Heloise, the learned nun,
For whose sake Abeillard, I ween,
Lost manhood and put priesthood on?
(From Love he won such dule and teen!)
And where, I pray you, is the Queen
Who willed that Buridan should steer
Sewed in a sack’s mouth down the Seine?…
But where are the snows of yester-year?

White Queen Blanche, like a queen of lilies,
With a voice like any mermaiden,–
Bertha Broadfoot, Beatrice, Alice,Joan
And Ermengarde the lady of Maine,–
And that good Joan whom Englishmen
At Rouen doomed and burned her there,–
Mother of God, where are they then?…
But where are the snows of yester-year?

Nay, never ask this week, fair lord,
Where they are gone, nor yet this year,
Except with this for an overword,–
But where are the snows of yester-year?

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DG Rossetti and several Victorian painters The Ballad of Dead Ladies

Front 857

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh

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Poem written in 9 books

Front 858

Identify: OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others’ uses, will write now for mine,–
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh beginning

Front 859

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnets from the Portuguese

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written ca. 1845–1846 and first published in 1850, is a collection of forty-four love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The poems largely chronicle the period leading up to her 1846 marriage to Robert Browning. The collection was acclaimed and popular even in the poet’s lifetime and it remains so today.

Elizabeth was initially hesitant to publish the poems, feeling that they were too personal. However, Robert insisted that they were the best sequence of English-language sonnets since Shakespeare’s time and urged her to publish them. To offer the couple some privacy, she decided that she might publish them under a title disguising the poems as translations of foreign sonnets. Therefore, the collection was first to be known as Sonnets from the Bosnian, until Robert suggested that she change their imaginary original language to Portuguese, probably after his nickname for her: “my little Portuguese.”

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Identify: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints!—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnett 43

Front 861

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Much of Hopkins’ historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry. Prior to Hopkins most Middle English and Modern English poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English’s literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating groups of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure running rhythm, and though he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous exampleBritish Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Much of Hopkins’ historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry. Prior to Hopkins most Middle English and Modern English poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English’s literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating groups of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure running rhythm, and though he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous example British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest Much of Hopkins’ historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry. Prior to Hopkins most Middle English and Modern English poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English’s literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating groups of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure running rhythm, and though he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous example. Also saw sprung rhythm as a way to escape the constraints of running rhythm which he said inevitably pushed poetry written in it to become same and tame.

Front 862

Sprung rhythm

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structured around feet with a variable number of syllables generally between one and four syllables per foot with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot

Front 863

Identify:

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

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Gerard manley Hopkins The Windhover

Front 864

Identify:

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

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Gerard Manley Hopkins Carrion Comfort

Front 865

Identify:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

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Pied Beauty Gerard Manley Hopkins

Front 866

Identify:

to a young child

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

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Spring and Fall Gerard Manley Hopkins

Front 867

Identify:

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?

Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

Back 867

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend Gerard Manley Hopkins

Front 868

John Keats

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John Keats was one of the principal poets in the English Romantic movement. During his short life, his work was the subject of constant critical attacks, and it was not until much later that the significance of the cultural change which his work both presaged and helped to form was fully appreciated. Keats’s poetry is characterised by an exuberant love of the language and a rich, sensuous imagination; he often felt that he was working in the shadow of past poets, and only towards the end of his life was he able to produce his most original and most memorable poems.

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John Keats Endymion

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John Keats starts off the poem Endymion with the line “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”. In this epic, Keats takes the tale of Endymion, the shepherd who falls in love with Selene, the moon goddess, and adds the details to their story. It starts by painting a rustic scene of trees, rivers, herders, and sheep. They gather around an alter and pray to Pan, god of shepherds and flocks. As the youths sing and dance, the elder men sit and talk about how life would be like in the shades of Elysium. However, Endymion is trancelike, participating in none of their discourse. His sister takes him away and brings him to her resting place where he sleeps. After he wakes, he tells Peona of his encounter with Selene, and how much he loved her.

Book I gives an account of Endymion’s dreams and experiences and give the background for the rest of the poem.
Book III reveals Endymion’s enduring love, and he begs the Moon not to torment him any longer.
Book IV, “And so he groan’d, as one by beauty slain.” He is miserable, till quite suddenly he comes upon her. She then tells him of how she tried to forget him, to move on, but that in the end, “‘There is not one,/ No, no, not one/ But thee to comfort a poor lonely maid;'”

Front 870

Identify: A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

Back 870

John Keats Endyyyon

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John Keats The Eve of St. Agnes

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A long poem, “The Eve of Saint Agnes” was written immediately after Keats met Fanny Brawne, who would eventually become his fiancée in October 1819. The basis of the poem is the superstition that a woman would see her future husband if she performed a certain ritual on the eve of Saint Agnes. If she were to go to bed without looking behind her back, her future partner would appear in a dream, eat with her and kiss her. In his original version, Keats emphasised the sensuality but his publishers persuaded him to change the wording so as to avoid a controversy. The main characters are Madeline and Porphyro. Porphyro sings to her “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

Front 872

Identify: ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

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John Keats The eve of st. Agnes first stanza

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The Mansion of Many Apartments

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a theory of the poet John Keats, expressed in his letter to John Hamilton Reynolds dated Sunday, 3 May 1818.

I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors the rest being as yet shut upon me – The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain as long as we do not think – We remain there a long while, and notwithstanding the doors of the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by awakening of the thinking principle – within us – we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, than we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders, and think of delaying there for ever in delight.

Keats thought that people were capable of different levels of thought. People who did not consider the world around them (probably people who did not write poetry) remained in the thoughtless chamber. Even though the door to move on to the next “apartment” was open, they had no desire to think any deeper and to go into that next apartment.

When you did move on into the next chamber, you would for the first time have a choice of direction, as from this apartment there were several different park passages. Keats believed that he when he wrote the letter was at this point, as was William Wordsworth when he wrote Tintern Abbey.

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Negative Capability

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a theory of the poet John Keats, expressed in his letter to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, 21 December 1817.

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason

Keats believed that great people (especially poets, whom he considered to almost be on another level to the rest of humanity) had the ability to accept that not every thing can be resolved – being capable of remaining negative on something. Keats was a Romantic and believed that truth does not lie in science and philosophical reasoning, but in art. In art the aim is not, as in science, to solve problems, but rather to explore them. Hence, accepting that there may not be a solution to vexing problems is important to artists.

Front 875

Identify: MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 5
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken; 10
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

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John Keats On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Front 876

Identify: She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

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She Walks in Beauty Lord Byron

Front 877

Lord Byron Manfred

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1817 poem by Lord Byron, and considered by some to be his response to the ghost story craze sweeping through England at the time, Manfred is a dramatic poem very much in the tradition of Goethe’s Faust

Front 878

Identify: Mandred: The lamp must be replenish’d, but even then
It will not burn so long as I must watch.
My slumbers– if I slumber– are not sleep,
But a continuance of enduring thought,
Which then I can resist not: in my heart
There is a vigil, and these eyes but close
To look within; and yet I live, and bear
The aspect and the form of breathing men.
But grief should be the instructor of the wise;
Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
Philosophy and science, and the springs
Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world,
I have essay’d, and in my mind there is
A power to make these subject to itself–
But they avail not: I have done men good,
And I have met with good even among men–
But this avail’d not: I have had my foes,
And none have baffled, many fallen before me–
But this avail’d not: Good, or evil, life,
Powers, passions, all I see in other beings,
Have been to me as rain unto the sands,
Since that all-nameless hour. I have no dread,
And feel the curse to have no natural fear
Nor fluttering throb, that beats with hopes or wishes
Or lurking love of something on the earth.
Now to my task.–

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Lord Byron Manfred

Front 879

Byronic Hero

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A theme that pervades much of Byron’s work is that of the Byronic hero, an idealised but flawed character whose attributes include:

* being a rebel
* having a distaste for social institutions
* being an exile
* expressing a lack of respect for rank and privilege
* having great talent
* hiding an unsavoury past
* being highly passionate
* ultimately, being self-destructive

Not only is the character a frequent part of his work, Byron’s own life could cast him as a Byronic hero. The literary history of the Byronic hero in English can be traced from Milton, especially Milton’s interpretation of Lucifer as having justified complaint against God. One of Byron’s most popular works in his lifetime, the closet play “Manfred,” was loosely modeled on Goethe’s anti-hero, Faust. Byron’s influence was manifested by many authors and artists of the Romantic movement during the 19th century and beyond. An example of such a hero is Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

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Lord Byron Childe Harold's Pilgrimages

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A long narrative poem about masculinity. In Byron’s poem, the main character is portrayed as a dark brooding man, who doesn’t like society and wants to escape from the world because of his discontent with it. It deals with the underdog and Military might. Byron uses gothic literature imagery to get sublime nature, representing adventure, such as climbing mountains for sport. Previous to this, mountain climbing had been thought of as being associated with evil. Instead this poem deals with engaging and conquering the dark side of nature. The poem describes the travels and reflections of a world-weary young man who, disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign lands.

(Note: The term childe was a medieval title for a young man who was a candidate for knighthood.)

**It has four cantos written in Spenserian stanzas, which consist of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a one alexandrine (a twelve syllable iambic line), and rhyme ababbcbcc.

Front 881

Identify:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

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Matthew Arnold Dover Beach

Front 882

Identify:

YES! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour–

Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain–
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who order’d, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renters vain their deep desire?–
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

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Matthew Arnold To Margaurite Continued

Front 883

Matthew Arnold Culture and Anarchy

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A typical passage will include either the words “sweetness and light” or the word “philistine,” a term he popularized.

Front 884

Identify:

I
I weep for Adonais–he is dead!
Oh, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: “With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!”

II
Where wert thou, mighty Mother, when he lay,
When thy Son lay, pierc’d by the shaft which flies
In darkness? where was lorn Urania
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes,
‘Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise
She sate, while one, with soft enamour’d breath,
Rekindled all the fading melodies,
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath,
He had adorn’d and hid the coming bulk of Death.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats beginning

Front 885

Identify: The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark–now glittering–now reflecting gloom–
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters–with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

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Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni Percy Bysshe Shelley

Front 886

Percy Bysshe Shelley Ode to theeWest Wind

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The rhyme scheme of the poem is ABA BCB CDC DED FF, and it is written in iambic pentameter.

Front 887

Identify:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

II
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull’d by the coil of his crystàlline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

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Percy Bysshe Shelley Ode to the West Wind

Front 888

Percy Bysshe Shelley Ozymandias

Back 888

a famous 1818 sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This short poem, probably Shelley’s most famous due to its frequent appearance in anthologies, combines a number of great themes — the arrogance and transience of power, the permanence of real art and emotional truth, the contradictory and critical character of the relationship between artist and subject — with striking imagery, a setting that merges exotic distance (Egypt, Ozymandias, the desert) with the more familiar and topical (Napoleon I of France and a European, presumably English, traveller/commentator — an echo of the viator of classical epitaphs), and virtuoso diction.

Front 889

Identify: I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley Ozymandias of Egypt

Front 890

Identify: Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship, and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley To Wordsworth

Front 891

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

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Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1820. It is inspired by Aechylus’s Prometheus Bound and concerns the final release from captivity of Prometheus.

Front 892

Identify: Vanity, saith the preacher, vanity!
Draw round my bed: is Anselm keeping back?
Nephews–sons mine . . . ah God, I know not! Well–
She, men would have to be your mother once,
Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was!
What’s done is done, and she is dead beside,
Dead long ago, and I am Bishop since,
And as she died so must we die ourselves,
And thence ye may perceive the world’s a dream.
Life, how and what is it? As here I lie
In this state-chamber, dying by degrees,
Hours and long hours in the dead night, I ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” Peace, peace seems all.

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Beginning Robert Browning The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church

Front 893

Identify: am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!
You need not clap your torches to my face.
Zooks, what’s to blame? you think you see a monk!
What, ’tis past midnight, and you go the rounds,
And here you catch me at an alley’s end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar?
The Carmine’s my cloister: hunt it up,
Do,–harry out, if you must show your zeal,
Whatever rat, there, haps on his wrong hole,
And nip each softling of a wee white mouse,
Weke, weke, that’s crept to keep him company!

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Robert Browning Fra Lippo Lippi

Front 894

Identify: That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Frà Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myselfthey turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not
Her husband’s presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say “Her mantle laps
Over my Lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat”: such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace — all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men, — good! but thanked
Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech — (which I have not) — to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark” — and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
–E’en then would be some stooping, and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master’s known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

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Robert Browning My Last Duchess

Front 895

Identify: The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listen’d with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneel’d and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soil’d gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And call’d me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o’er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could to-night’s gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I look’d up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipp’d me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laugh’d the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untighten’d next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blush’d bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propp’d her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorn’d at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gain’d instead!
Porphyria’s love: she guess’d not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirr’d,
And yet God has not said a word!

Back 895

Robert Browning Porphyria's Lover

Front 896

Identify: With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots ;
Rhyme’s sturdy cripple, fancy’s maze and clue,
Wit’s forge and fire-blast, meaning’s press and screw.

Back 896

On Donne's Poetry Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Front 897

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Biographia Literaria

Back 897

Coleridge’s thesis is that the imagination is the supreme faculty of the human intellect, and its cultivation is both a prerequisite and the aim of poetry. For him, “imagination” is the process of keenly perceiving the phenomena of the world and self, and then re-expressing phenomena through the creative faculties of the poet’s whole being, the mind and the soul, the rational and the irrational.

All that is necessary to identify this passage is the following information:
Coleridge always capitalizes the words “Imagination” and “Fancy,” which recur throughout the work.

Front 898

Identify:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Back 898

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Front 899

William Blake Songs of Innocence

Back 899

Songs of Innocence is a collection of illustrated lyrical poetry, published by William Blake in 1789. Its companion volume is Songs of Experience.

Blake believed that innocence and experience were “the two contrary states of the human soul,” and that true innocence was impossible without experience. Songs of Innocence contains poems either written from the perspective of children or written about them. This collection includes “The Lamb.”

Front 900

Identify:

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight;
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and he is mild;
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are called by His name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee!
Little Lamb, God bless thee!

Back 900

William Blake The Lamb

Front 901

William Blake Songs fo Experrrnce

Back 901

The Songs of Experience is a poetry collection, forming the second part of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Many of the poems appearing in Innocence have a counterpart in ‘Experience’, with quite a different perspective of the world. The disastrous end of the French Revolution caused Blake to lose faith in the goodness of mankind, explaining much of the volume’s sense of despair. Blake also believed that children lost their innocence through exploitation and from a religious community which put dogma before mercy. This collection includes “The Tyger.”

Front 902

Identify:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Back 902

The Tyger William Blake

Front 903

Identify:

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

Back 903

William Blake Mock On Mock On Voltaire, Rousseau

Front 904

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Back 904

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793, is the most complex work of Blake’s early years. It consists of 24 Plates (as well as three further Plates under the separate title “A Song of Liberty”) and has at its heart an opposition between Heaven, conceived as an image of restraint and passivity, and Hell, an image of energy and action. Both of these “contraries”, Blake claims, are necessary for human life; but there is little doubt as to which is more to his taste. In the fourth Plate we hear the voice of the Devil, making three crucial claims which in turn underpin Blake’s own world-view:

1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

This rejection of reason as the touchstone of the human in favour of a revaluation of the body and its desires is pursued throughout the Marriage, perhaps most famously in some of the “proverbs of Hell” which comprise Plates 7 to 10 of the poem. Some of the best-known, frequently to be found as recently as the 1960s as emblematic graffiti, are the following:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
Exuberance is Beauty.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

Some of these aphorisms, especially the last-quoted, may appear mystically anarchic; but it must be remembered that Blake is trying to assert a different set of values against the received wisdom of his day. Later in the poem, the narrator has an encounter with an “Angel”, who threatens him with Hell for his beliefs; but the narrator counters by delving into his own imagination and showing the “Angel” that his vision of Heaven and Hell is merely an extension of his belief in the changelessness of society, and that an alternative vision, based on change and potentiality, is also possible.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be seen as a kind of treatise on how to think beyond confining limits, on how to value energy and excitement and not to be restrained by conventional patterns of thought. If it speaks in its title of a “marriage”, the reader is nonetheless at liberty to question whether this marriage will necessarily be a smooth one, and whether what is really at stake here is an eternal battle between order and chaos, between reason and energy, between social constraint and imaginative freedom.

Front 905

William Blake Visions of the Daughters of Albion

Back 905

The central action of Visions of the Daughters of Albion is clear. The maiden Oothoon, accepting love, goes fearlessly to her lover Theotormon, but her happiness is short-lived. She is raped by a figure of violence, Bromion, but worse, Theotormon thereafter regards her as defiled; in his jealousy he ties Oothoon and Bromion back to back, and it is with this unmoving scene that the poem concludes. What, then, is the poem about? At one level, it is clearly about sexual jealousy and about double standards. In the last part of the poem, Oothoon has a long and very powerful speech on these themes:

I cry, Love! Love! Love! Happy, happy love, free as the mountain wind!
Can that be love that drinks another as a sponge drinks water,
That clouds with jealousy his nights, with weepings all the day,
To spin a web of age around him, grey and hoary, dark,
Till his eyes sicken at the fruit that hangs before his sight?
Such is self-love that envies all, a creeping skeleton
With lamplike eyes watching around the frozen marriage bed.

But it also needs to be remembered that alongside this indictment of the curtailment of sexual freedom, Oothoon is referred to as the ‘soft soul of America’, and throughout the poem there runs a critique of both British oppression of the colonies and also the American slave trade.

Front 906

Identify:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls ;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Back 906

William Blake London

Front 907

D. H. Lawrence

Back 907

David Herbert Lawrence was one of the most important, prolific and certainly controversial English writers of the 20th century, whose output spans novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. These works, taken together, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, sexuality, and instinctive behaviour, making him iconic in an age influenced by Freud and Nietzsche.

Lawrence’s unsettling opinions earned him many enemies and he endured hardships, official persecution, censorship and the misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in voluntary exile, self defined as a ‘savage pilgrimage’. At the time of his death his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice challenged this widely held view; describing him as ‘the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation’. Later the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence’s fiction within the canonical ‘great tradition’ of the English novel. He is now valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists have questioned the attitudes to women and sexuality to be found within his works.

Front 908

D.H. Lawrence The Rainbow

Back 908

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen.

It follows three generations of the Brangwen family, focusing in particular on the sexual dynamics of its characters.

Lawrence’s frank treatment of sexual desire and the power plays within relationships as a natural and even spiritual force of life, though perhaps tame by modern standards, caused The Rainbow to be prosecuted in an obscenity trial in late 1915, as a result of which all copies were seized and burnt. After this ban it was unavailable in Britain for 11 years, although editions were available in the USA.

Front 909

D.H.Lawrence Women in Love

Back 909

It was a sequel to The Rainbow (1915), following the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Gudrun Brangwen, an artist, pursues a destructive relationship with Gerald Crich, an industrialist. Lawrence contrasts this pair with the love that develops between Ursula and Rupert Birkin, an alienated intellectual who articulates many opinions associated with the author. The novel ranges over the whole of British society at the time of the First World War and eventually ends high up in the snows of the European Alps.

Like most of his works, Women in Love caused controversy over its sexual subject matter, and was only initially published for five years after it was first written. One early reviewer said of it “I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps – festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven.”

Front 910

DH Lawrence Sons and Lovers

Back 910

tells the story of Paul Morel, a young man and a budding artist. This autobiographical novel is a brilliant evocation of life in a working class mining community.

Front 911

DH Lawrence The Odour of Chrysanthemums

Back 911

The stry’s main character awaits her husband’s return from work in the mines, but he has been suffocated in a cave-in. The woman reflects on her unhappy marriage.

Front 912

DH Lawrence The Horse Dealer's Daughter

Back 912

This story is about a girl named Mabel who tries to commit suicide by drowning herself in a pond. A young doctor, Joe Ferguson, saves her. She then believes that he loves her. Although this idea never occurred to Joe, he begins to find that he indeed loves her. However, Mabel thinks she is “too awful” to be loved, and finds that when Joe declares over and over that he wants her and that he loves her, she is more scared about that than of Joe not wanting her.

Front 913

DH Lawrence Edgar Allen Poe

Back 913

This essay extensively describes Poe’s writing style, which he describes as mechanical and scientific. He says that Poe’s stories are not stories at all, but a series of cause and effect. He says the Poe does not look at the human side of characters and instead treats them as inanimate objects with human characteristics (but still human).

Front 914

DH Lawrence Thomas Hardy

Back 914

Lawrence chastises writers such as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy, who, he argues, defile their own passionate impulses when in their emplotted judgments they side with social law against the primitive nature of their characters.

Front 915

Identify: The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bath-sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to finish? Man alive, not mere bits. Even the Lord is another man alive, in a burning bush, throwing the tablets of stone at Moses’s head.

Back 915

DH Lawrence Why the Novel Matters

Front 916

EM Forster

Back 916

Forster’s views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often features characters attempting to understand each other (‘only connect…’, in the words of Forster’s famous epigraph to Howards End) across social barriers. His humanist views are expressed in the non-fictional essay “What I believe.” Sexuality is another key theme in Forster’s works and it has been argued that Forster’s writing can be characterized as progressing from heterosexual love to homosexual love. All of his major work was published by 1924.

Front 917

EM Forster Where Angels Fear to Tread

Back 917

Names to know:
~Caroline Abbott
~Lilia Herriton

On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and travelling companion Caroline Abbott, widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with both Italy and a handsome Italian much younger than herself, and decides to stay. Furious, her dead husband’s family send Lilia’s brother-in-law and his sister to Italy to prevent a misalliance, but they arrive too late. Lilia marries the Italian and in due course becomes pregnant again. When she dies giving birth to her child, the Herritons consider it both their right and their duty to travel to Monteriano to obtain custody of the infant so that he can be raised as an Englishman.

Front 918

EM Forster Room with a View

Back 918

Names:
~Charlotte Bartlett
~Lucy Honeychurch
~Mr. Emerson
~George Emerson
~Mr. Beebe
~Eleanor Lavish
~Cecil Vyse

A Room with a View tells the story of a young Englishwoman whose encounter with a handsome young man in Florence may interfere with her marriage plans.

Front 919

EM Forster Howards End

Back 919

Names:
~Margaret, Helen, and Tibby Schlegel
~Charles, Paul and Evie Wilcox

On the one hand are the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and their brother Tibby, who care about civilized living, music, literature, and conversation with their friends; on the other, the Wilcoxes, Henry and his children Charles, Paul, and Evie, who are concerned with the business side of life and distrust emotions and imagination. Helen Schlegel is drawn to the Wilcox family, falls briefly in and out of love with Paul Wilcox, and thereafter reacts away from them.

Margaret becomes more deeply involved. She is stimulated by the very differences of their way of life and acknowledges the debt of intellectuals to the men of affairs who guarantee stability, whose virtues of ‘neatness, decision and obedience … keep the soul from becoming sloppy’. She marries Henry Wilcox, to the consternation of both families, and her love and steadiness of purpose are tested by the ensuing strains and misunderstandings. Her marriage cracks but does not break. In the end, torn between her sister and her husband, she succeeds in bridging the mistrust that divides them. Howards End, where the story begins and ends, is the house that belonged to Henry Wilcox’s first wife, and is a symbol of human dignity and endurance.

Front 920

EM Forster A Passage to India

Back 920

Names:
~Adela Quested
~Dr. Aziz
~The Marabar Caves

A Passage to India deals with the tensions between natives of India and British colonials when a white woman, Adela Quested, accuses a native man, Dr. Aziz, of attempted rape. The accusation takes place after Adela’s unidentified traumatic experience while touring a local natural attraction, the Marabar Caves. The ensuing court trial increases the racial tension between the Indians and the British, threatening to tear apart the colonial society of Chandrapore, India.

Front 921

EM Forster The Road to Colonus

Back 921

Names:
~Mr. Lucas
~Ethel Lucas

Mr. Lucas, an Englishman, is growing old. He has always wanted to visit Greece and has finally achieved this, accompanied by his unmarried daughter, Ethel, who will, it has been assumed, dedicate her life to taking care of him in his old age. In Greece, Mr. Lucas becomes restless and resistant to the idea of an expected passive, peaceful death from old age. He wants to “die fighting.” Something mysterious happens: he finds a great old hollow tree from which a spring of water flows. He climbs into the tree and experiences an epiphany: he suddenly sees all things as “intelligible and good.”

But when the rest of his party find him, he is oddly repelled by them. He does not feel that anyone can share the revelation he has experienced, and he becomes afraid that if he leaves the place he will lose the feeling himself. He decides not to leave, and says he plans to stay at an inn near the old tree, but the others are horrified, and force him to leave with them.

Back in England, some time later, Ethel is now about to be married. Mr. Lucas has become a perpetually disgruntled old man, complaining about everything (especially the sound of water in the plumbing–the mystical Greek spring has been reduced to this annoyance–he says, “there’s nothing I dislike more than running water”). His sister, Julia, whom he hates, is going to take care of him once Ethel is married.

Then a gift arrives from a friend in Greece, wrapped in a Greek newspaper. In it Ethel reads the news that on the night they left, the old tree was blown down, and fell on the family who kept the inn nearby, killing them all. Ethel is upset, and says how lucky it was that they hadn’t stayed there that night, calling it a “marvellous deliverance,” but Mr. Lucas dismisses the story without interest. He no longer cares.

This story is a retelling of Oedipus.

Front 922

EM Forster What I Believe

Back 922

In this essay Forster outlines his creed as a secular humanist.

E.M. Forster starts out by saying that he does not believe in creeds; but there are so many around that one has to formulate creed of one’s own in self defence. Three values are important to Forster: tolerance, good temper and sympathy.

Forster cautiously welcomes democracy for two reasons:
* It places importance on the individual (at least more than authoritarian regimes)
* It allows criticism

Thus, he calls for “two cheers for democracy” (also the title of the book which contains his essay) but argues that three are not necessary.

Forster goes on to argue that, although the state ultimately rests on force, the intervals between the use of force are what makes life worth living. Some people may call the absence of force decadence; Forster prefers to call it civilization.

Front 923

EM Forster Aspects of the Novel

Back 923

The major idea to come out of this book of criticism is the idea of “flat” characters and “round” characters. Forster believed that Dickens was a strong writer of both types.He also asserts that novles should strive to be more than just stories. He differentiates between “form” and “content.” He differentiates between a story (“the king died.”) and a plot (“the queen then died of grief.”).

Front 924

James Joyce

Back 924

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an expatriate Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his short story collection Dubliners (1914), and his novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939).Although most of his adult life was spent outside the country, Joyce’s Irish experiences are essential to his writings and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. His fictional universe is firmly rooted in Dublin and reflects his family life and the events and friends (and enemies) from his school and college days. Due to this, he became both one of the most cosmopolitan and one of the most local of all the great English language modernists.

Front 925

James Joyce Dubliners

Back 925

Kate Morkan and Julia Morkan – Sisters who throw an Epiphany party.
* Lily – Maid, insulted by Gabriel Conroy when he asks about her love life.
* Gabriel Conroy – Professor, the main character of the story.
* Gretta Conroy – Gabriel’s wife.
* Miss Ivors – Fellow professor, very patriotic about Ireland.
* Michael Furey – Gretta’s first childhood love.

Front 926

Identify:

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

Back 926

James Joyce Dubliners

Front 927

James Joyce Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man

Back 927

It is the story of the growth and education of Stephen Dedalus, named after the Grecian mythological craftsman Daedalus.

A Portrait is one of the key examples of the Künstlerroman in English literature. Joyce’s novel traces the intellectual and religio-philosophical awakening of young Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question and rebel against the Catholic and Irish conventions he has been brought up in. He finally leaves for Paris to pursue his calling as an artist.

Front 928

Identify:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.

O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.

He sang that song. That was his song.

O, the green wothe botheth.

When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

Back 928

James Joyce Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man

Front 929

Identify: APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Back 929

James Joyce Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man declaration of Stephen Dedalus

Front 930

James Joyce Ulysses

Back 930

Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main character, Leopold Bloom, during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title alludes to the hero of Homer’s Odyssey (Latinized version Ulysses), and there are many parallels, both implicit and explicit, between the two works (e.g. the correlations between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). June 16 is now celebrated by Joyce’s fans worldwide as BloomsdayI

Front 931

Identify: STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.

Back 931

James Joyce Ulysses opening

Front 932

Identify: INELUCTABLE MODALITY of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.

Back 932

James Joyce Ulysses Stephen wandering on the beach

Front 933

Identify: . . . and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Back 933

James Joyce Ulysses Closing words of Molly

Front 934

Identify: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

Back 934

James Joyce Finnegan's Wake opening

Front 935

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

Back 935

Heart of Darkness is a novella (published 1902) by Joseph Conrad. This highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story, or frame tale, narrated by a man named Marlow to colleagues at an evening gathering. It details an incident earlier in Marlow’s life, a visit up the Congo River to investigate the work of Kurtz, a Belgian trader in ivory in the Congo Free State.

Front 936

Joseph Conrad Lord Jim

Back 936

The novel falls into two parts, a psychological tale about Jim‘s moral lapse aboard the pilgrim ship Patna, and an adventure story about Jim’s rise and fall amongst the people of Patusan, a native-ruled state somewhere in the interior of one of the islands of the East Indies. Some critics have said that the second part of the story is inferior to the first, but it is necessary to the working out of the psychological drama established in the first part.

The novel is remarkable for its sophisticated manipulation of point of view. The bulk of the novel is told in the form of a story recited by the character Marlow, and the conclusion is presented in the form of a letter from Marlow.

Front 937

Joseph Conrad The Secret Sharer

Back 937

The Secret Sharer is narrated by a sea captain many years after the event has happened, which reveals its significance. The story takes place during his first command of a merchant ship. His new ship is anchored at the head of the Gulf of Siam, “at the starting point of a long journey.” There is no suggestion that it is a journey involving special hazards. The young man leans on his “ship’s rail as if on a shoulder of his trusted friend.” He feels that he is a stranger to the ship. He is something of a stranger to himself. He is the youngest man on board except the second mate. He is inexperienced, considering his position, which involves the fullest responsibility.

The Captain’s “strangeness” makes him sleepless and he decides to set anchor-watch. He sets himself to remain to remain on deck during the earlier part of the night. One result is that he goes to pull a rope ladder, which is on the side of the ship. He sees a naked man clinging to it. As soon as the stranger knows he is speaking to the Captain, he introduces himself as one Leggatt. He is obviously a good swimmer for he has been in the water practically since nine o’clock. The question for the swimmer now is whether he should let go of this ladder and go on swimming till he sinks from exhaustion or to come on board.

The Captain of the ship feels this is no mere formula of desperate speech, but a real alternative in the view of a strong soul. He gathers from this that he is young. In fact, it is only the young who are confronted by such clear issues. But at that time, it is pure intuition on his part. A mysterious communication is established between the two in the face of the silent, darkened tropical sea. The Captain too is young enough to make no comment. The man in the water begins suddenly to climb up the ladder. The Captain hastens away from the rail to fetch some clothes. In a moment, the stranger conceals his damp body in a sleeping-suit of the same gray-stripe pattern as the one which the Captain wears, like his double. It is thus that the secret sharing begins. The “mysterious communication” between the two is established before the Captain learns anything of Leggatt’s circumstances.

Leggatt soon tells his story. He has swam from “The Sephora,” a ship at anchor two miles away. He has been the first mate on board the ship. During the crisis of a terrible storm, he has seized and strangled an incompetent and disobedient member of the crew. Now he has made a bid to escape the law. The Captain accepts at once, without any indication of internal debate, that it is his duty to harbor Leggatt. However, it is difficult for the Captain to remain unperturbed. The dangers of the situation and a degree of identification with Leggatt make it almost impossible for him to preserve a rational behavior before his officers and crew.

Leggatt remains self-possessed. “Whenever was being driven distracted, it was not he.” But the Captain knows what he must do. He must steer sufficiently near the land to give the fugitive a fair chance to swim to safety. In this shore beneath “the black mass of Koh-ring.” Consequently, his ship is in terrible danger. All those on board the ship are amazed and shocked. Finally, Leggatt departs and it is all over. The ship is saved by a hat, which the Captain has given him for protection against the sun. In fact, it serves at a crucial moment to show when the vessel has gathered stern way. Already the ship is drawing ahead. The Captain is alone with her. No one in the world should stand now between them, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection. It is the perfect communion with the season with his first communion with the seamen with his first command. The Captain is in time to catch a glimpse of his white hat, which is left floating on the water. It marks the spot where the secret sharer of his cabin as though he were his second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment. He is now “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.”

Front 938

Virgina Woolf

Back 938

Virginia Woolf is by reputation one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. Though she is commonly regarded by many as feminist, it should be noted that she herself deplored the term, as she felt it suggested an obsession with women and women’s concerns. She preferred to be referred to as a “humanist” .

Between the World Wars, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and her essay A Room of One’s Own

Front 939

Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway

Back 939

Mrs Dalloway details one day in Clarissa Dalloway‘s life about post-World War I England.

The novel follows Clarissa Dalloway throughout a single day in post-Great War England in a stream of consciousness style narrative. The basic story is that of Clarissa’s preparations for a party she is to host that evening. Using the interior perspective of the novel, Woolf moves back and forth in time, and in and out of the various characters’ minds to construct a complete image, not of just Clarissa’s life, but capturing the Edwardian social structure in the space of a single day.

Because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce’s Ulysses, a text that is commonly hailed as one of the greatest novels of the Twentieth Century. Woolf herself derided Joyce’s masterpiece, even though Hogarth Press, run by her and her husband Leonard, initially published the novel in England. Fundamentally, however, Mrs Dalloway treads new ground and seeks to portray a different aspect of the human experience.

Front 940

Identify: "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark." she added."

Back 940

To the Lighthouse opening Virginia Woolf

Front 941

Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own

Back 941

The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics. In one section,Woolf invented a fictional “Shakespeare’s Sister”, Judith, to illustrate that a woman with Shakespeare’s gifts would have been denied the same opportunities to develop them because of the doors that were closed to women. Woolf also examines the careers of several female authors, including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. The author subtly refers to several of the most prominent intellectuals of the time, and her hybrid name for the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge – Oxbridge – has become a well-known term in English satire.

The title comes from Woolf’s conception that to be a successful writer, a woman needed space of her own in which to work and enough money to support herself. It also refers to any author’s need for poetic license and the personal liberty to create art.

A Room of One’s Own is written with supreme irony and sarcasm over the power-balance between men and women, and it is commonly accepted that Virginia Woolf succeeds in convincingly getting her view across to the reader. However one may analyze this book, it nevertheless stands out as one of the most important feminist essays of the early 20th century.

Front 942

George Bernard Shaw

Back 942

1856-1950 Born in Dublin but working in London, Shaw was a freethinker, feminist, socialist, and vegetarian whose more than 50 plays dealt with social issues of his day. Shaw’s plays focus on the conflict between thought and belief.

Front 943

GBS Pygmalion

Back 943

Shaw used Pygmalion, the mythological sculptor who fell in love with his creation, as the basis for his play. It is the story of Professor Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, who wagers that he can turn a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, into the toast of London society merely by teaching her how to speak with an upper-class accent. In the process, he becomes fond of her and attempts to direct her future, but she rejects his domineering ways and marries a young aristocrat.

Front 944

GBS Arms and the Man

Back 944

Arms and the Man is a comedy, the title of which comes from the opening words of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Arma virumque cano” (Of arms and the man I sing). The play was first produced in 1894, and published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s Plays Pleasant volume. Shaw’s plays often point out the hypocrisy or worthlessness of Victorian values, and Arms and the Man is no exception. Its satirical target is the people who think war is “glorious” or “noble.”

The play takes place during the 1885 Serbo-Bulgarian War. Its heroine, Raina, is a young Bulgarian woman engaged to one of the heroes of that war, whom she idealizes. One night, a Swiss voluntary soldier to the Serbian army bursts into her bedroom and begs her to hide him, so that he is not killed. Raina complies, though she thinks the man a coward, especially when he tells her that he doesn’t carry rifle cartridges, but chocolates. During the course of the play, Raina comes to realize the hollowness of her romantic idea and her fiancé’s values, and the true nobility of the “chocolate-cream soldier.”

Front 945

GBS Man and Superman

Back 945

This title comes from Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas about the “Superman.” The plot centers around John Tanner, author of “The Revolutionist’s Handbook and Pocket Companion” and a confirmed bachelor, and the lovely Ann’s persistent efforts to make him marry her. Ann is referred to as “The Life Force” and represents Shaw’s view that in every culture, it’s the women who force the men to marry them, rather than the men taking the initiative.

Front 946

GBS Major Barbara

Back 946

The story is about an officer in The Salvation Army, Major Barbara Undershaft, who becomes disillusioned by social ills and the willingness of her Christian denomination to accept money from armament manufacturers, which includes her own father.

Front 947

GBS Mrs. Warren's Profession

Back 947

The story centers on the relationship between Mrs. Warren, a prostitute, described by Shaw as “on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old blackguard of a woman,” and her daughter, Vivie. More than about prostitution, the play explores the conflicts of the new women of the Victorian times – the middle-class girls who wanted greater social independence in work and education.

Other themes include criticism of the sexual triteness of the times and a want for greater social sexual awareness.

Front 948

JM Synge

Back 948

came form a middle-class Protestant background, Synge’s writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view

Front 949

JM Synge The Playboy of the Western World

Back 949

(1907)– an unflattering portrayal of the working class Irish. It is set in a cottage in County Mayo (on the North-West coast of Ireland) during the early 1900s. It tells the story of Christy Mahon, a young man supposedly running away having killed his father. Christy arrives at the cottage, and the locals are more interested in vicariously enjoying his story than in condemning his morality.

Front 950

Oscar Wilde

Back 950

Oscar Wilde was an Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, poet, short story writer and Freemason. One of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day, known for his barbed and clever wit, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned after being convicted in a famous trial for gross indecency (homosexual acts).

Front 951

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Ernest

Back 951

Algernon, a wealthy young Londoner, pretends to have a friend named Bunbury who lives in the country and frequently is in ill health. Whenever Algernon wants to avoid an unwelcome social obligation, or just get away for the weekend, he makes an ostensible visit to his “sick friend.” In this way Algernon can feign piety and dedication, while having the perfect excuse to get out of town. He calls this practice “Bunburying.”

Algernon’s real-life best friend lives in the country but makes frequent visits to London. This friend’s name is Ernest…or so Algernon thinks. When Ernest leaves his silver cigarette case at Algernon’s rooms he finds an inscription in it that claims that it is “From little Cecily to her dear Uncle Jack”. This forces Ernest to eventually disclose that his visits to the city are also examples of “Bunburying,” much to Algernon’s delight.

In the country, “Ernest” goes by his real name, John Worthing, and pretends that he has a wastrel brother named Ernest, who lives in London. When honest John comes to the city, he assumes the name, and behaviour, of the profligate Ernest. In the country John assumes and more serious attitude for the benefit of Cecily, who is his ward.

John himself wishes to marry Gwendolen, who is Algernon’s cousin, but runs into a few problems. First, Gwendolen seems to love him only because she believes his name is Ernest, which she thinks is the most beautiful name in the world. Second, Gwendolen’s mother is the terrifying Lady Bracknell. Lady Bracknell is horrified when she learns that John is a foundling who was discovered in a handbag at a railway station.

John’s description of Cecily appeals to Algernon who resolves to meet her. Algernon soon gets the idea to visit John in the country, pretending that he is the mysterious brother “Ernest.” Unfortunately, unknown to Algernon, John has decided to give up his Bunburying, and to do this he has announced the tragic death of Ernest.

A series of comic misunderstandings follows, as Algernon-as-Ernest visits the country (as a dead man, as far as the hosts are aware), and John shows up in his mourning clothes. There he encounters John’s ward, Cecily, who believes herself in love with Ernest – the non-existent brother she has never met. After Lady Bracknell arrives, it is discovered that John is a nephew of Lady Bracknell who was lost by Miss Prism, Cecily’s governess, who was then working for Lady Bracknell’s sister. It is also discovered that John’s real name is Ernest. It is suggested at the end of the play that Ernest/John will marry Gwendolyn and Algernon will marry Cecily. The play contains many examples of Wilde’s famous wit.

Front 952

Oscar Wilde The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Back 952

Somewhat confusingly, The Ballad of Reading Gaol is not the work that Wilde wrote while imprisoned for moral (in his case, homosexual) offences in 1895. That work was De Profundis, published five years after his death, in 1905. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was written after his release and in France, in 1897, though it was published in 1898. His works during this exile were published under the name Sebastian Melmouth, and this is the most famous. He would die in 1900. The poem is written in memory of “C.T.W.” who died in Reading prison in July 1896 and it traces the feelings of an imprisoned man towards a fellow inmate who is to be hanged. They are “like two doomed ships that pass in storm”, and Wilde creates a solemn funereal tone in his rhyme made sad and familiar by certain repeated phrases (“each man kills the thing he loves”, “the little tent of blue/ Which prisoners call the sky”). The narrator’s emotions are filtered through an uncertainty about the law that has condemned them although he is certain that they are joined together in sin. There is a longing for the outside, innocence and crucially beauty, the last of which is undermined in the latrine-like cells. The poem seems to offer some limited comfort in the possibility of the thief’s entrance to Paradise. It is a work of startling contrasts between light and shade, drawn together with a keen eye and a sense of the beauty in sadness itself.

Front 953

Identify:

He did not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.

He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

Back 953

Oscar Wilde The Ballad of Reading Gaol beginning

Front 954

Samuel Beckett

Back 954

n Irish playwright, novelist and poet. Beckett’s work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and deeply pessimistic about human nature and the human condition, although the pessimism is mitigated by a great and often wicked sense of humor. His later work explores his themes in an increasingly cryptic and attenuated style. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

Front 955

Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot

Back 955

The play is in two acts. The plot concerns Vladimir (also called Didi) and Estragon (also called Gogo), who arrive at a pre-specified roadside location in order to await the arrival of Godot. Vladimir and Estragon appear to be tramps: their clothes are ragged and do not fit. They pass the time in conversation, and sometimes in conflict. Estragon complains of his ill-fitting boots, and Vladimir struts about stiff-legged due to a painful bladder condition. They make vague allusions to the nature of their circumstances and to the reasons for meeting Godot, but the audience never learns who Godot is or why he is important. They are soon interrupted by the arrival of Pozzo, a cruel but lyrically gifted man who claims to own the land they stand on, and his servant Lucky, whom he appears to control by means of a lengthy rope. Pozzo sits down to feast on chicken, and afterwards throws the bones to the two tramps. He entertains them by directing Lucky to perform a lively dance, and then deliver an ex tempore lecture on the theories of Bishop Berkeley. After Pozzo and Lucky depart, a boy arrives with a message he says is from Godot that he will not be coming today, but will come tomorrow. The second act follows a similar pattern to the first, but when Pozzo and Lucky arrive, Pozzo has inexplicably gone blind and Lucky has gone mute. Again the boy arrives and announces that Godot will not appear, also confessing that Godot beats him and makes him sleep in a barn. The much quoted ending of the play might be said to sum up the stasis of the whole work:

Vladimir: Well, shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

They do not move.

Front 956

Samuel Beckett Happy Days

Back 956

Winnie, the main character, is buried up to her waist in a tall mound of sand. She has a bag full of interesting artifacts, including a comb, a toothbrush and a revolver, which she strokes and pats lovingly. The harsh ringing of a bell demarcates waking and sleeping hours. Winnie is content with her existence: “Ah well, what matter, that’s what I always say, it will have been a happy day after all, another happy day.”

Her husband Willie is nearby, behind Winnie and moving on all fours. Winnie is unable to move, but Willie occasionally comes out and even reads the paper beside his wife (but not facing the stage).

In the second act, Winnie is now buried up to her head. She continues to speak, but can no longer reach her bag. At the conclusion of the play Willie crawls up to her, dressed immaculately. Winnie looks lovingly down at Willie, singing a song from the music box she examined in the first act.

Front 957

Sean O'Casey

Back 957

a major Irish dramatist and memorist. A committed nationalist and socialist, he was the first Irish playwright of note to write about the Dublin working classes. His plays are particularly noted for his sympathetic treatment of his female characters.

Front 958

Sean O'Casey The Plough and the Stars

Back 958

deal with the impact of the Irish Civil War on the working class poor of the city. The Plough and the Stars, an anti-war play, was misinterpreted by the Abbey audience as being anti-nationalist and resulted in scenes reminiscent of the riots that greeted Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907.

Front 959

William Butler Yeats

Back 959

Yeats played a part in the Irish Literary Revival, though as a dramatist his role was rather limited. To see more on Yeats and his poetry, check out my page on Yeats in the the poetry section.

Front 960

William Butler Yeats The Countess Cathleen

Back 960

dramatizes an Irish fable about those who sell their soul for food during the famine

Front 961

AE Housman

Back 961

English poet and classical scholar, now best known for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.

Front 962

Identify:

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

Back 962

AE Housman When I Was One and Twenty

Front 963

Identify:

‘TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure,
I’d face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.
’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all the springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more,
He sampled all her killing store;
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

Back 963

AE HOusman Terence this is stupid stuff

Front 964

Identify:

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honors out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round the early-laureled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s

Back 964

AE Housman To an Athlete Dying Young

Front 965

Dylan Thomas

Back 965

1914-1953. Welsh Poet and writer. Considered among greatest poets of 20th century mentioned among Frost, Yeats and Eliot. Vivid and fantastic imagery was rejection of trends in 20th cent. verse. Contemporaries altered to serious topical verse he gave himself over to emotions. More in alignment with Romantics. Remembered for radio play Under Milk Wood and poems.

Front 966

Identify:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because there words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Back 966

Dylan Thomas Do not go gentle into that good night, villanelle.

Front 967

Identify:

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Back 967

Dylan Thomas And Death Shall Have NNNDominion

Front 968

Identify:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying

Back 968

Dylan Thomas Fern Hill

Front 969

WH Auden

Back 969

English poet and critic, widely regarded as among the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Spend first part of his life in UK, emigrated to the US in 1939 and became a citizen.

Front 970

Identify: About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Back 970

WH Auden Musee des Beaux Arts

Front 971

Identify:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II
You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III
Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Back 971

WH Auden In Memory of WB Yeats

Front 972

Identify:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Back 972

WH Auden Lay your sleeping head, my love

Front 973

WB Yeats

Back 973

Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and public figure of Anglo-Irish (Protestant) ancestry. Brother of artist Jack Butler Yeats and son of John Butler Yeats. One of the driving foces behind the Irish Literary Revival and co-founded Abbey Theatre. Served as Irish Senator. Awarded Nobel Prize in literature in 1923 for "his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

Front 974

Identify:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Back 974

WB Yeats The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Front 975

Identify:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Back 975

WB Yeats When You Are Old

Front 976

Identify:

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Back 976

The Wild Swans at Coole

Front 977

Identify: Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Back 977

EB Yeats The Second Coming. Title of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart comes from this poem

Front 978

Identify:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Back 978

WB Yeats Sailing to Byzantium

Front 979

Identify:

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins, engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Back 979

WB Yeats Leda and the Swan

Front 980

Identify:

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

Back 980

WB Yeats Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

Front 981

Identify: Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

Back 981

Stanza VI from "Among School Children WB Yeats

Front 982

Identify: A doll in the doll-maker’s house
Looks at the cradle and bawls:
‘That is an insult to us.’
But the oldest of all the dolls,
Who had seen, being kept for show,
Generations of his sort,
Out-screams the whole shelf: ‘Although
There’s not a man can report
Evil of this place,
The man and the woman bring
Hither, to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.’
Hearing him groan and stretch
The doll-maker’s wife is aware
Her husband has heard the wretch,
And crouched by the arm of his chair,
She murmurs into his ear,
Head upon shoulder leant:
‘My dear, my dear, O dear,
It was an accident.’

Back 982

The Dolls WB Yeats

Front 983

Philip Larkin

Back 983

Early work shows influence of Yeats, later poetry influenced by Thomas Hardy. Well-known for use of slang and coarse language in his poetry, balanced by an antique word choice. Use of enjambmet and rhyme, highly structured but not rigid. Recurring theme of death. Romantic fatalism. Critic of modernism in contemporary art and literature. Skepticism is nuanced

Front 984

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river’s slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires -
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers –

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Identify:

Back 984

Here Philip Larkin

Front 985

Anne Bradstreet

Back 985

1612-1672 first published American woman writer

Front 986

All things within this fading world hath end,

Adversity doth still our joyes attend;

No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,

But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.

The sentence past is most irrevocable,

A common thing, yet oh inevitable.

How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,

How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,

We are both ignorant, yet love bids me

These farewell lines to recommend to thee,

That when that knot’s untied that made us one,

I may seem thine, who in effect am none.

And if I see not half my dayes that’s due,

What nature would, God grant to yours and you;

The many faults that well you know I have

Let be interr’d in my oblivious grave;

If any worth or virtue were in me,

Let that live freshly in thy memory

And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,

Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.

And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains

Look to my little babes, my dear remains.

And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,

These o protect from step Dames injury.

And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,

With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;

And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,

Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.

Back 986

Anne Bradstreet Before the birth of One of Her Children

Front 987

Identify:

In silent night when rest I took,

For sorrow near I did not look,

I waken’d was with thund’ring noise

And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice.

That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,”

Let no man know is my Desire.

I starting up, the light did spy,

And to my God my heart did cry

To straighten me in my Distress

And not to leave me succourless.

Then coming out, behold a space

The flame consume my dwelling place.

And when I could no longer look,

I blest his grace that gave and took,

That laid my goods now in the dust.

Yea, so it was, and so ’twas just.

It was his own; it was not mine.

Far be it that I should repine,

He might of all justly bereft

But yet sufficient for us left.

When by the Ruins oft I past

My sorrowing eyes aside did cast

And here and there the places spy

Where oft I sate and long did lie.

Here stood that Trunk, and there that chest,

There lay that store I counted best,

My pleasant things in ashes lie

And them behold no more shall I.

Under the roof no guest shall sit,

Nor at thy Table eat a bit.

No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told

Nor things recounted done of old.

No Candle ‘ere shall shine in Thee,

Nor bridegroom’s voice ere heard shall bee.

In silence ever shalt thou lie.

Adieu, Adieu, All’s Vanity.

Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide:

And did thy wealth on earth abide,

Didst fix thy hope on mouldring dust,

The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?

Raise up thy thoughts above the sky

That dunghill mists away may fly.

Thou hast a house on high erect

Fram’d by that mighty Architect,

With glory richly furnished

Stands permanent, though this be fled.

It’s purchased and paid for too

By him who hath enough to do.

A price so vast as is unknown,

Yet by his gift is made thine own.

There’s wealth enough; I need no more.

Farewell, my pelf; farewell, my store.

The world no longer let me love;

My hope and Treasure lies above.

Back 987

Anne Bradstreet Versus Upon the Burning of our HHuse

Front 988

Identify:

No more shall rise or set so glorious sun,
Untill the heavens great revolution.
If then new things their old forms shall retain,
Eliza shall rule Albion once again.

HER EPITAPH.

Here sleeps THE Queen, this is the royal Bed
Of th’ Damask Rose, sprung from the white and red,
Whose sweet perfume fills the all-filling Air:
This Rose is wither’d, once so lovely fair.
On neither tree did grow such Rose before,
The greater was our gain, our loss the more.
Another.
ere lyes the pride of Queens, Pattern of Kings,
So blaze it Fame, here’s feathers for thy wings.
Here lyes the envy’d, yet unparalled Prince,
Whose living virtues speak, (though dead long since).
If many worlds, as that Fantastic fram’d,
In every one be her great glory fam’d.

Back 988

Anne Bradstreet In Hounour of That High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth excerpt

Front 989

Identify:

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,

Made thee in rags, halting to th’ press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

The visage was so irksome in my sight;

Yet being mine own, at length affection would

Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.

I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,

And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.

I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,

Yet still thou run’st more hobbling than is meet;

In better dress to trim thee was my mind,

But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find.

In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.

In critic’s hands beware thou dost not come,

And take thy way where yet thou art not known;

If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;

And for thy mother, she alas is poor,

Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.

Back 989

Anne Bradstreet The Author to Her Book

Front 990

Identify: Farewell, dear babe, my heart’s too much content,
Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,
Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,
Then ta’en away unto eternity.
Blest babe, why should I once bewail thy fate,
Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate,
Sith thou art settled in an everlasting state.
By nature trees do rot when they are grown,
And plums and apples throughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown to have so short a date,
Is by his hand alone that guides nature and fate.

Back 990

In Memory of my Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Anne Bradstreet

Front 991

Cotton Mather

Back 991

Socially and politically influential Puritan minister, prolific author pamphleteer. Author of more than 450 books and pamphlets. One of the most influential religious leaders in America. Set the nation's "moral tone" sounded call for 2nd and 3rd gen Puritans whose parents left England.

Front 992

Cotton Mather Magnalia Christi Americana

Back 992

book written in 1702. Its title is in Latin, and is usually given the English title The Ecclesiastical History of New Englandas a translation. It consists of seven “books” collected into two volumes and details the religious development of Massachusetts, and other nearby colonies in New England from 1620 to 1698. An excerpt of the book is collected in the widely respected Norton Anthology which details the works and accomplishments of William Bradford. Other notable parts of the book are Mather’s descriptions of the Salem Witch Trials, in which he criticizes some of the methods of the court; his complete “catalogus” of all the students that graduated from Harvard College, and story of the founding of Harvard College itself; and his assertions that Puritan slaveholders should do more to convert their slaves to Christianity.

Front 993

John Winthrop

Back 993

1587-1649. elected gov of Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 and on April 8 1630 led party from England to New WOrld. Extremely religious, ascribed to Puritan belief that Anglican Church had to be cleansed of Catholic ritual. Convinced God would punish England for its heresy, believed English Puritans needed shelter away from England where they could remains safe during time of God's wrath. Wrote Journal which is a Puritan chronicle of MBC

Front 994

John Woolman

Back 994

(1720-1772) was an itinerant Quaker preacher, traveling throughout the American colonies, advocating against conscription, taxation, and particularly slavery.

A major tale in his journal deals with a turning point in his life in which he happened upon a robin’s nest with hatchlings in it. Woolman began throwing rocks at the mother robin just to see if he could hit her. He ended up killing the mother bird, but then remorse filled him as he thought of the baby birds who had no chance of surviving without her. He got the nest down from the tree and quickly killed the hatchlings, believing it to be the most merciful thing to do. This experience weighed on his heart, and inspired in him a love and protectiveness for all living things from then on.

At age 23 his employer asked him to write a bill of sale for a slave. He told his employer that he thought that slavekeeping was inconsistent with the Christian religion. Many Friends believed that slavery was bad–even a sin–but there was not a universal condemnation of it among Friends. Some Friends bought slaves from other people in order to treat them humanely and educate them. Other Friends seemed to have no conviction against slavery whatsoever.

His only work of notes is his Journal which is a Quarker spiritual autobiography.

Front 995

Jonathan Edwards

Back 995

Robert Lowell's Mr. Edwards and the Spider. Colonial American Congregational preacher and theologian. Known as one of the greatest and most profound American evangelical theologians. Work broad in scope, often associated with defense of Calvinist theology and Puritan heritage. Personal Narrative is Puritan autobiography recounts spiritual conversion

Front 996

Identify: "That God holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you and is dreadfully provoked."

Back 996

Jonathan Edwards

Front 997

Mary Rowlandson

Back 997

Colonial American woman who wrote description of 3 months with Native Americans. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is major piece of American lit genre of Captivity Narratives

Front 998

Identify: "I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without working in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other wayes with me. When all are fast about me, and no eye open, but his who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past, upon the awfull dispensation of the Lord towards us; upon his wonderfull power and might, in carrying of us through so many difficulties, in returning us in safety, and suffering none to hurt us. I remember in the night season, how the other day I was in the midst of thousands of enemies, and nothing but death before me; It is then hard work to perswade my self, that ever I should be satisfied with bread again. “But now we are fed with the finest of the Wheat, and, as I may say, With honey out of the rock.”

Back 998

Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

Front 999

Phyllis Wheatley

Back 999

Child prodigy and slave who learned to read and wrote remarkable pious poetry.Wrote poetic tribute on death of Calvinish George Whitefield received widespread acclaim in Boston. Poetry praised by many of leading figures of American Revolution inc. George Washington who thanked her for a poem she wrote about him. Thomas Jefferson did not praise her. Had to defend her literary ability in court. Concluded she had written the poems and signed an attestation published in preface to her book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Published in London because Boston refused. Some cite as first official recognition of African American lit.

Front 1000

What three elements did Phillis Wheatley use to make her poetry meaningful

Back 1000

Christianity, classicism, hierophantic solar worship

Front 1001

Identify: ‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d and join th’angelic train.

Back 1001

Phillis Wheatley On Being Brought from Africa to America

Front 1002

Identify:

‘WHILE an intrinsic ardor prompts to write,
The muses promise to assist my pen;
‘Twas not long since I left my native shore

The land of errors, and Egyptain gloom:
Father of mercy, ’twas thy gracious hand
Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.
Students, to you ’tis giv’n to scan the heights

Above, to traverse the ethereal space,
And mark the systems of revolving worlds.
Still more, ye sons of science ye receive
The blissful news by messengers from heav’n,

How Jesus’ blood for your redemption flows.
See him with hands out-stretcht upon the cross;
Immense compassion in his bosom glows;
He hears revilers, nor resents their scorn:

What matchless mercy in the Son of God!
When the whole human race by sin had fall’n,
He deign’d to die that they might rise again,
And share with him in the sublimest skies,

Life without death, and glory without end.
Improve your privileges while they stay,
Ye pupils, and each hour redeem, that bears
Or good or bad report of you to heav’n.

Let sin, that baneful evil to the soul,
By you be shun’d, nor once remit your guard;
Suppress the deadly serpent in its egg.

Ye blooming plants of human race divine,
An Ethiop tells you ’tis your greatest foe;
Its transient sweetness turns to endless pain,
And in immense perdition sinks the soul

Back 1002

To the University of Cambridge in New England

Front 1003

Edgar Allen Poe The Muders on the Rue Morgue

Back 1003

A short story from 1841 which features the brilliant deductions of Auguste Dupin and is one of the first detective stories (“The Purloined Letter” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” also feature Dupin). “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is almost certainly the first locked room mystery (a story in which the reader is presented with a puzzle and encouraged to solve it before finishing the story and being told the solution).

The detective Auguste Dupin investigates a series of baffling murders, whose victims are brutally killed in apparently inaccessible rooms along the rue Morgue, a street in Paris. Dupin reaches the astounding conclusion that killings were not murder per se but were carried out by a wild “Ourang-Outang,” (orangutan) the escaped pet of a sailor.

Front 1004

Edgar Allen Poe Annabel Lee

Back 1004

Annabel Lee is Poe’s last poem. Written in 1849, it was not published until shortly after his death that same year, appearing in two newspapers. Like Poe’s The Raven it tells of a man mourning a dead lover. It is unclear whether the character referred to a real person. Some say it for his wife, or a lover, and others that it was the product of Poe’s gloomy imagination. Annabel Lee is six stanzas, three with six lines and three with eight, with the rhyme pattern differing slightly in each one. The poem begins as if from a storyteller’s point of view, where Poe begins to explain the couple’s love, which dates from their growing up together.

Front 1005

Identify:

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee-

Annabel Lee dies because “the angels” envied the couple’s great love.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me -
Yes! – that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee

Back 1005

Edgar Allen Poe Annabel Lee

Front 1006

HL Mencken

Back 1006

A twentieth century journalist, satirist and social critic, a cynic and a freethinker, known as the “Sage of Baltimore” and the “American Nietzsche”. He is often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century.satirical style. Mencken, influenced heavily by Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift, believed the lampoon was more powerful than the lament; his hilariously overwrought indictments of nearly every subject (and more than a couple that were unmentionable at the time) are certainly worth reading as examples of fine craftsmanship.

Front 1007

HL Mencken The American Language

Back 1007

1919 book about changes Americans had made to the English Language.

Mencken was inspired by “the argot of the colored waiters” in Washington, as well as one of his favourite authors, Mark Twain, and his experiences on the streets of Baltimore. In 1902, Mencken remarked on the “queer words which go into the making of ‘United Statese.'” The book was preceded by several columns in The Evening Sun. Mencken eventually asked “Why doesn’t some painstaking pundit attempt a grammar of the American language… English, that is, as spoken by the great masses of the plain people of this fair land?” It would appear that he answered his own question.

In the tradition of Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary, Mencken wanted to defend “Americanisms” against the English, whom he increasingly detested.

The book discusses the beginnings of American variations from English, the spread of these variations, American names and slang over the course of its 374 pages. According to Mencken, American English was more colourful, vivid, and creative than its British counterpart.

Front 1008

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Back 1008

Harriet Elizabeth Beecher (1811-1896), an abolitionist, and writer of more than 10 books, the most famous being Uncle Tom’s Cabin which describes life in slavery, and which was first published in serial form from 1851 to 1852 in an abolitionist organ, the National Era, edited by Gamaliel Bailey. Her second novel was Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, another anti-slavery novel.

When Stowe met Abraham Lincoln in 1862 (during the Civil War), he allegedly greeted her, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”

Front 1009

Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin Characters

Back 1009

Uncle Tom, Shelby Family, Eliza, Tom Loker, Cassy

Front 1010

Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin plot

Back 1010

The book opens with a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby about to lose his farm due to massive debts. Even though he and his wife (Emily Shelby) believe they have a benevolent relationship with their slaves, Shelby decides to raise money by selling two of his slaves — Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and child, and Harry, the son of Emily Shelby’s maid Eliza — to a slave trader. Emily Shelby hates to do this because she had promised Eliza that Shelby would not sell her son, while her son, George Shelby, hates to see Tom go because he considers the slave to be his friend.

When Eliza overhears a conversation between the slave trader and his wife, she warns Uncle Tom, then takes Harry and flees to the North. The slave trader, Mr. Haley, pursues Eliza but she escapes capture by crossing into the free state of Ohio, so Haley hires a slave hunter named Tom Loker to bring Eliza and Harry back to Kentucky. Meanwhile, Eliza and Harry arrive in a safe Quaker settlement, where they are joined by Eliza’s husband George, who had escaped earlier. He agrees to go with his wife and child to Canada, via the Underground Railroad.

While all of this is happening, Uncle Tom is sold and taken down the Mississippi River by the slave trader to a slave market. On the boat, Tom meets a young white girl named Eva, who quickly befriends him. When Eva falls into the river, Tom saves her. In gratitude, Eva’s father, Augustine St. Clare, buys Tom from Haley and take him with the family to their home in New Orleans.

As George and Eliza attempt to reach Canada, they are cornered by Loker and his men, causing George to shoot Loker. Worried that Loker may die, Eliza convinces George and the Quakers to bring the slave hunter to a nearby Quaker settlement for medical treatment. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, St. Clare debates slavery with his cousin Ophelia, who opposes slavery but also hates black people. St. Clare, by contrast, says he feels no hostility against blacks but tolerates slavery because he is powerless to change it. To help Ophelia overcome her bigotry, he buys Topsy, a young black girl who was abused by her past master, and asks Ophelia to educate her.

After Tom has lived with the St. Clares for two years, Eva grows very ill. She eventually dies, but not before she has a vision of heaven, which she shares with the people around her. Her death has a profound effect on everyone. Ophelia resolves to love her slaves, Topsy says she will learn to trust others, and St. Clare decides to set Tom free as he promised to his daughter before her death. However, before he can do so St. Clare gets stabbed to death while trying to end a fight.

St. Clare’s cruel wife, Marie, sells Tom to a vicious plantation owner named Simon Legree. Tom is taken to rural Louisiana with other new slaves such as Emmeline, whom Legree purchased as a sex slave. Legree takes a strong dislike to Tom when he refuses Legree’s order to whip a fellow slave. Tom receives a severe beating, and Legree resolves to crush Tom’s faith in God. While at the plantation, Tom meets Cassy, who was Legree’s previous sex slave. Casey was previously separated from her daughter by slavery. When she became pregnant again she killed her child to save the child from the same fate.

At this time Tom Loker returns to the story. Loker is now a changed man after being healed by the Quakers. In addition, George, Eliza, and Harry obtained their freedom after they cross over into Canada. In Louisiana, Tom almost loses his faith in God due to the hardships of the plantation. However, he has two visions — one of Jesus and one of Eva — which renew his strength and faith. He encourages Cassy to escape, which she does so, taking Emmeline with her. When Tom refuses to tell Legree where Cassy and Emmeline have gone, the cruel master had him beaten to near death. As Tom is dying, he forgives Legree and Legree’s overseers. George Shelby (Authur Shelby’s son) arrives with money in hand to buy Tom’s freedom, but he is too late. He can only watch as Tom dies a martyr’s death.

On their boat ride to freedom, Cassy and Emmeline meet George Harris’s sister and travel with her to Canada, where Cassy realizes that Eliza is her long-lost daughter. The newly reunited family travel to France and eventually Liberia, the African nation created for former American slaves. George Shelby returns to the Kentucky farm, where, after his father’s death, he sets all the slaves free in honor of Tom’s memory. Before they go, he tells them to remember Tom’s sacrifice every time they look at his cabin and to lead a pious Christian life, just as Tom did.

Front 1011

Harriet Jacobs

Back 1011

published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl under the pseudonym Linda Brent.

Jacobs was one of many escaped slaves who wrote autobiographical narratives in an effort to shape opinion in the Northern states concerning the “peculiar institution” of slavery. She appealed mainly to middle-class white Christian women in the north, through her descriptions of slavery destroying the virtue of women through harassment and rape.

She criticized the religion of the South as being un-Christian, and as emphasizing the value of money (“If I am going to hell, bury my money with me,” says a particularly brutal and uneducated slaveholder). She described another slaveholder with the sentence, “He boasted the name and standing of a Christian, though Satan never had a truer follower.” Jacobs argued that these men were not exceptions to the general rule. The cruelty of slavery destroyed the virtue of an entire society, and “is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks”.

Much of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” is devoted to the protagonist’s struggle to free her two children (born out of wedlock through a consensual relationship with a white man who wasn’t her master), after she runs away herself. She spends seven years trapped in a tiny space built into her grandmother’s barn to occasionally see and hear the voices of her children.

Front 1012

Herman Melville Billy Budd

Back 1012

The plot follows Billy Budd, a seaman pressed into service aboard the HMS Bellipotent in the year 1797, when the British Navy was reeling from two major mutinies and was threatened by Napoleon’s military ambitions. Billy, suffused with innocence, openness, and natural charisma, is adored by the crew, but for unexplainable reasons arouses the antagonism of the ship’s Master-at-Arms, John Claggart, who falsely accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny. Brought before the Captain Edward Fairfax “Starry” Vere to answer to the charges, Billy is unable to find the words to respond, and lashes out seemingly involuntarily at Claggart, killing him with a single blow. Vere, an eminently thoughtful man whose name recalls the Latin words “veritas” (truth) and “vir” (man), is convinced of Billy’s innocence before God but insists on following the letter of the Mutiny Act and sentencing Billy to death, arguing that any appearance of weakness in the officers and failure to enforce discipline could stir the already-turbulent waters of mutiny throughout the British fleet. Condemned to be hanged from the ship’s yardarm at dawn the morning after the killing, Billy’s final words are, “God bless Captain Vere!”

Front 1013

Herman Melville Bartleby the Scribner

Back 1013

The narrator of the story is an unnamed lawyer with offices on Wall Street in New York City. He describes himself as doing “a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds.” He has three employees: “First, Turkey; second, Nippers; third, Ginger Nut,” each of whom is described. He advertises for a fourth, and Bartleby appears, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!”

At first Bartleby appears to be a competent worker, but later he refuses to work when requested, repeatedly uttering the phrase “I would prefer not to.” He is also found to be living in the lawyer’s office. Bartleby refuses to explain his behavior, and also refuses to leave when dismissed. The lawyer moves offices to avoid any further confrontation, and Bartleby is taken away. At the end of the story, Bartleby slowly starves in prison, finally expiring during a visit by the lawyer.

Front 1014

James Fenimore Cooper

Back 1014

(1789-1851)is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

In this book the hero is just arriving at manhood with the freshness of feeling that belongs to that interesting period of life, and with the power to please that properly characterizes youth. As a consequence he is loved; and, what denotes the real waywardness of humanity, more than it corresponds with theories and moral propositions, he is loved by one full of art, vanity and weakness, and loved principally for his sincerity, his modesty, and his unerring truth and probity.

–the preface which details the attraction between Judith and Natty.

Front 1015

Identify: “On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus, he who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.”

Back 1015

James Fenimore Cooper The Last of the Mohicans

Front 1016

Identify:

“We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily, for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.”

Back 1016

James Fenimore Cooper The Last of the Mohicans

Front 1017

Kate Chopin

Back 1017

Katherine O'Flaherty American author of short stories and novels

Front 1018

Kate Chopin The Awakening Characters

Back 1018

Edna Pontellier
* Robert Lebrun

Front 1019

Kate Chopin The Awakening

Back 1019

Published in 1899. The novel examines the smothering effects of late 19th-century social structures upon a woman whose simple desire is to fulfill her own potential and live her own life. It is a story of both courage and defeat, lyrically written and boldly poignant.

Front 1020

Kate Chopin The Awakening Plot

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Edna Pontellier, the wife of a successful New Orleans business man and the mother of two, vacations with her family at a seaside resort. She spends a lot of time with Robert Lebrun, a romantic young man who has decided to attach himself to Edna for the summer. After many intimate conversations, boating excursions, and moonlit walks, they both realize that they are developing romantic feelings for each other. Edna realizes that there is much within herself that has remained dormant throughout her adult life.

When vacation ends and the Pontelliers return to New Orleans, Edna frees herself from the trappings of her old life, including her social position, her role as a mother, and her role as a wife. Moving out of her husband’s house, she establishes herself in a cottage and hopes that Robert Lebrun will return soon from an extended business trip.

Upon Robert’s return, Edna discovers that he is unable to come to grips with her newfound freedom. Indeed, he seems hopelessly bound by the traditional values of the French Creole community. Simultaneously, she discovers that her husband has set in motion a plan that will essentially force her to move back into his house.

Edna thereupon returns to the seaside resort in the off-season. She makes arrangements for a lunch to take with her to the beach, and carries along a towel for drying off as well. Unable to resist the lure of the water, she swims out as far as she can and, having exhausted herself, drowns. Most readers interpret this final passage as a deliberate attempt at suicide.

Front 1021

Kate Chopin Story of an Hour characters

Back 1021

1. Mrs. Millard
2. Josephine
3. “Free! Body and soul free!”

Front 1022

Kate Chopin Story of an Hour pllt

Back 1022

This short story is about an hour in the life of the main character, Mrs. Millard. She is afflicted with a heart problem. Bad news has come about that her husband has died in a train accident. Her sister Josephine and Richard who is her husband’s friend has to break the horrifying news to her as gently as possible. They both were concerned that the news might somehow put her in great danger with her health. Ironically, Mrs. Millard reacts to the news with excitement. Even though the news is heartbreaking she is finally free from the depressing life she was living. She keeps whispering “Free! Body and soul free!”. She now is happy because she doesn’t have to live for anyone but herself now. At the end of the story, Mr. Millard opens the door and is surprised by Josephine’s cry. Mr. Millard didn’t have a faintest idea about the accident. With a quick motion, Richard tried to block Mr. Millard’s view of his wife but it was too late. The doctors said she died of a heart disease. The story ends with a short phrase “of joy that kills”

Front 1023

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Back 1023

Dunbar (1872-1906) is largely noteworthy (at least in his literary career) as a forerunner to the Harlem Renaissance, which ETS does stress.

Dunbar was a seminal African-American poet in the late 19th and early 20th century. Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 Lyrics of a Lowly Life. Born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had escaped from slavery, Dunbar died from tuberculosis at 34.

His first collection of poetry, Oak and Ivy was published in 1892 and attracted the attention of James Whitcomb Riley, the popular “Hoosier Poet”. Both Riley and Dunbar wrote poems in both standard English and dialect. His second book, Majors and Minors (1895) brought him national fame and the patronage of William Dean Howells, the novelist and critic and editor of Harper’s Weekly. He was closely associated with Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

He wrote a dozen books of poetry, four books of short stories, and five novels and a play. His essays and poems were published widely in the leading journals of the day. During his life, considerable emphasis was laid on the fact that Dunbar was of pure black descent, with no white ancestors.

Dunbar’s work is known for its colorful language and use of dialect.

Front 1024

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Back 1024

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister in a famous line of ministers; Emerson was later to become a Unitarian minister himself. He gradually drifted from the doctrines of his peers, then formulated and first expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his essay Nature.

Front 1025

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature

Back 1025

An essay published anonymously in 1836. It is in this essay where the foundation of transcendentalism is put forth, a belief system that espouses a non-traditional vision of nature. Building on his early lectures, Emerson defines nature as an all-encompassing divine entity inherently known to us in our unfettered innocence, rather than as merely a component of a world ruled by a divine, separate being learned by us through passed-on teachings in our experience.

Front 1026

Identify:

* Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generation beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
* Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.
* If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!
* Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.
* The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of a child.
* Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
* Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.
* Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.
* We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox.

* A man is a god in ruins.

Back 1026

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature

Front 1027

Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet

Back 1027

It is not about “men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in meter, but of the true poet.”

Front 1028

Identify: “Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love,–there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.”

Back 1028

Ralph Waldo Emerson Poet closing

Front 1029

Ralph Waldo Emerson Self Reliance

Back 1029

In the essay he formulates his philosophy of self-reliance an essential part of which is to trust in one’s present thoughts and impressions rather than those of other people or of one’s past self. This culminates in the quote: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”He stresses originality, believing in one’s own genius and living from within. From this springs the quote: “Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide.”

Front 1030

Identify:

Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
Repeats the music of the rain;
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
Through thee, as thou through the Concord Plain.

Thou in thy narrow banks art pent:
The stream I love unbounded goes
Through flood and sea and firmament;
Through light, through life, it forward flows.

I see the inundation sweet,
I hear the spending of the steam
Through years, through men, through Nature fleet,
Through love and thought, through power and dream.

Musketaquit, a goblin strong,
Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;
They lose their grief who hear his song,
And where he winds is the day of day.
So forth and brighter fares my stream,–
Who drink it shall not thirst again;
No darkness taints its equal gleam,
And ages drop in it like rain.

Back 1030

Ralph Waldo Emerson Two Rivers

Front 1031

Identify:

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.

They recon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
I am the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Back 1031

Ralph Waldo Emerson Brahma

Front 1032

Ralph Waldo Emerson The Dial

Back 1032

The Dial, which was a Transcendentalist periodical. Ohter names you should associate with the movement and the periodical are:

Henry David Thoreau
Margaret Fuller
Jones Very

Front 1033

Stephen Crane

Back 1033

(1871-1900) first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Crane released the book under a pseudonym and paid for the publishing himself. It was not a commercial success, though it was praised by several critics of the time.

This was followed by The Red Badge of Courage 1895, a powerful tale of the American Civil War. The book won international acclaim for its realism and psychological depth in telling the story of a young soldier facing the horrors and triumphs of war for the first time. Crane never experienced battle personally, but conducted interviews with a number of veterans, some of whom may have suffered from what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder. Because his depiction of the psychological as well as military aspect of war was so accurate, he was hired by a number of newspapers as a correspondent during the Greco-Turkish 1897 and Spanish-American wars 1898. In 1896 the boat in which he accompanied an American expedition to Cuba was wrecked, leaving Crane adrift for fourteen days. A result of the incident was Crane’s development of tuberculosis, which would eventually become fatal. He recounted these experiences in The Open Boat and Other Tales 1898. In 1897, Crane settled in England, where he befriended writers Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Shortly before his death, he released Whilomville Stories 1900, the most commercially successful of the twelve books he wrote. Crane died of tuberculosis, aged only 28, in Badenweiler, Germany.

Front 1034

Stephen Crane Maggie Girl of the Streets characters

Back 1034

Maggie Jimmie Pete

Front 1035

Stephen Crane Maggie Girl of the Streets plot

Back 1035

As the novel opens, Jimmie, a young boy, is leading a street fight against a troop of youngsters from another part of New York City’s impoverished Bowery neighborhood. Jimmie is rescued by Pete, a teenager who seems to be a casual acquaintance of his. They encounter Jimmie’s offhandedly brutal father, who brings Jimmie home, where we are introduced to his timid older sister Maggie and little brother Tommie, and to Mary, the family’s drunken, vicious matriarch. The evening that follows seems typical: the father goes to bars to drink himself into oblivion while the mother stays home and rages until she, too, drops off into a drunken stupor. The children huddle in a corner, terrified.

As time passes, both the father and Tommie die. Jimmie hardens into a sneering, aggressive, cynical youth. He gets a job as a teamster. Maggie, by contrast, seems somehow immune to the corrupting influence of abject poverty; underneath the grime, she is physically beautiful and, even more surprising, both hopeful and naïve. When Pete–now a bartender–makes his return to the scene, he entrances Maggie with his bravado and show of bourgeois trappings. Pete senses easy prey, and they begin dating; she is taken–and taken in–by his relative worldliness and his ostentatious displays of confidence. She sees in him the promise of wealth and culture, an escape from the misery of her childhood.

Front 1036

Theodore Dreiser

Back 1036

American naturalist author known for dealing with the gritty reality of life.

Front 1037

Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie Characters

Back 1037

1. Caroline (Carrie) Meeber

2. Hurstwood

Front 1038

Theodore Dresier Sister Carrie plot

Back 1038

Sister Carrie (1900 ) is a novel about a young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing American Dream by embarking on a life of sin rather than by hard work and perseverance.

Leaving her rural Wisconsin home, 18 year-old Caroline Meeber heads for Chicago, Illinois , where she wants to live with her older sister’s family. Soon, however, Carrie finds out that working in a sweatshop and living in a squalid and overcrowded apartment is not what she wants. When she meets a man named Drouet, a travelling salesman whose acquaintance she already made on the train to Chicago, she readily leaves behind her family—they never see “Sister Carrie” again—when he offers to look after her. Drouet installs her in a much larger apartment in return for her favours. Through Drouet, Carrie meets Hurstwood, the manager of a respectable bar. From the moment he sets eyes on her, Hurstwood is infatuated with the young girl, whereas for Carrie, Hurstwood is just a wealthy man past the prime of his life. Before long they start an affair, communicating and meeting secretly in the expanding, anonymous city. Although Hurstwood has a family and Carrie might conclude that he does, the lovers never talk about it and it never seems to occur to Carrie to ask.

One night, at his job, Hurstwood is presented with the opportunity to embezzle a large sum of money. He succumbs to the temptation and decides, on the spur of the moment, to leave everything behind and start a new life with Carrie. Under a pretext, he lures Carrie onto a northbound train and escapes with her to Canada . After a while, his guilty conscience makes him pay back most of the money, but there is no way he could return to his former life so the couple eventually decide to move to the East coast.

The second part of the book is set in New York City . Hurstwood and Carrie rent a flat where they live as man and wife under an assumed name. Gradually, Hurstwood realizes that finding a new job is not easy at all. As his money is slowly running out, the couple have to start economizing, which Carrie does not like at all. She starts looking for a job herself and finds employment at one of the many theatres. Her rise to stardom is sharply contrasted with Hurstwood’s downfall: she leaves him, and the rapidly ageing Hurstwood, overwhelmed by apathy, is left all alone, without a job and without any money. At one point, during a strike , he even works as a scab driving a Brooklyn streetcar . He joins the homeless of New York and finally, in a cheap hotel, puts an end to his life.

Front 1039

Theodore Dresier An American Tragedy characters

Back 1039

Clyde Griffiths

2. Robert Alden

3. Sondra Finchley

Front 1040

Theodore Dresier An American Tragedy plot

Back 1040

famous American novel, by Theodore Dreiser. Written in 1925, the book is the story of a young man Clyde Griffiths, whose troubles with women and the law take him from his religious upbringing in Kansas City to the fictional town of Lycurgus ,New York . Among Clyde’s love interests are the materialistic Hortense Briggs, the charming farmer’s daughter Roberta Alden and the aristocratic Sondra Finchley. The book is naturalistic in style, containing subject matter such as religion, capital punishment and abortion, and attempting to shed light on societal evils.

Clyde’s downfall begins when he takes a job as a bell-boy at a local hotel. The boys he meets are much more liberal than he, and they introduce Clyde to the world of alcohol and prostitution. Clyde enjoys his new lifestyle, and does everything in his power to win the affections of the flirtatious Hortense Briggs. But Clyde’s life is forever changed when a stolen car he is travelling in with friends kills a young child. Clyde is forced to flee Kansas City , and after a brief stay in Chicago , he reestablishes himself at the collar factory of his uncle in Lycurgus ,New York .

Although Clyde vows not to give in to women in the way that caused his Kansas City downfall, he quickly succumbs to the charms of Roberta Alden , a poor girl working under him at the factory. While Clyde initially feels fulfilled by Roberta, his ambition forces him to realize that he could never marry her. He dreams of the aristocratic Sondra Finchley , the daughter of a wealthy Lycurgus man, and a family friend of his uncle’s. As developments between him and Sondra begin to look promising, Roberta discovers that she is pregnant.

Trying unsuccessfully to secure an abortion of the child, Clyde procrastinates the decision while his relationship with Sondra continues to mature. As he realizes that he has a wonderful opportunity to marry into such an aristocratic family, Clyde hatches a diabolic scheme to drown Roberta in a manner that seems accidental.

Upon taking Roberta for a canoe ride in one of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York , Clyde loses the nerve to murder her — however, Roberta accidentally falls out of the boat and drowns, Clyde being too cowardly to save her. The trail of circumstantial evidence points to murder, and the local authorities are only too eager to convict Clyde. Following a sensational trial before an unsympathetic audience, and with no legal support from his wealthy relatives, Clyde is found guilty and sentenced to death. The jailhouse scenes and the correspondence between Clyde and his mother stand out as an exemplar of pathos in modern literature.

Front 1041

William Dean Howells

Back 1041

Howells was an American realist author. He wrote for various magazines, including Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine. He wrote his first novel, The Wedding Journey, in 1872, but his career took off with his first realist novel, A Modern Instance. His most famous novel is The Rise of Silas Lapham.

Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Henrik Ibsen and Leo Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputation in the United States. Nevertheless, Howells’s own reputation in American literature has waned somewhat, with his novels being considered “prudish.” According to him, the vast majority of people who would read his works were women and he wrote in a way that would not offend them. He believed that literature was potentially injurious and devoid of thought.

Today, Howells is most famous for his literary criticism and his editorial support of authors like Mark Twain, Thorstein Veblen and Henry James.

Front 1042

Identify:

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove — He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess — in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather — He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet — only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice — in the Ground –

Since then — ’tis Centuries — and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –

Back 1042

Emily Dickinson Because I could not stop for death

Front 1043

Identify:

I reason, Earth is short –
And Anguish — absolute –
And many hurt,
But, what of that?

I reason, we could die –
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?

I reason, that in Heaven –
Somehow, it will be even –
Some new Equation, given –
But, what of that?

Back 1043

I reason earth is short Emily Dickinson

Front 1044

Identify:

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

Back 1044

If I can stop one heart from breaking Emily Dickinson

Front 1045

Identify:

That after Horror — that ’twas us –
That passed the mouldering Pier –
Just as the Granite Crumb let go –
Our Savior, by a Hair –

A second more, had dropped too deep
For Fisherman to plumb –
The very profile of the Thought
Puts Recollection numb –

The possibility — to pass
Without a Moment’s Bell –
Into Conjecture’s presence –
Is like a Face of Steel –

That suddenly looks into ours
With a metallic grin –
The Cordiality of Death –
Who drills his Welcome in –

Back 1045

That after Horroe--That 'twas us Emily Dickinson

Front 1046

Henry Wasdworth Longfellow

Back 1046

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet who wrote many poems that are still famous today, including The Song of Hiawatha, “Paul Revere’s Ride” and Evangeline. He also wrote the first American translation of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.

Front 1047

Identify: The young Endymion sleeps Endymion’s sleep;
The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!
The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
The nightingale is singing from the steep;
It is midsummer, but the air is cold;
Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold
A shepherd’s pipe lies shattered near his sheep.
Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,
On which I read: “Here lieth one whose name
Was writ in water.” And was this the meed
Of his sweet singing? Rather let me write
“The smoking flax before it burst to flame
Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed.”

Back 1047

Keats Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Front 1048

Identify: Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Back 1048

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Paul Revere's Ride

Front 1049

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie

Back 1049

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Front 1050

Identify: This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

Back 1050

Prelude of Evangeline A Tale of Acadie Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Front 1051

Identify: In the Acadian land, on the shores of the Basin of Minas,Distant, secluded, still, the little village of Grand-Pre Lay in the fruitful valley. Vast meadows stretched to the eastward,
Giving the village its name, and pasture to flocks without number.

Back 1051

Start to part 1 of Evangeline Tale of Arcadie Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Front 1052

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Song of Hiawatha

Back 1052

The Song of Hiawatha is an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow based on the legends of the Ojibway Indians. Longfellow credited as his source the work of pioneering ethnographer Henry Rowe SchoolcraftA short extract of 94 lines from the poem was and still is frequently anthologized under the title Hiawatha’s Childhood (which is also the title of the longer 234-line section from which the extract is taken).

Front 1053

Identify: By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

Back 1053

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Song of Hiawatha

Front 1054

Oliver Weldell Holmes

Back 1054

a physician by profession but achieved fame as a writer; he was one of the best regarded American poets of the 19th century. He first attained national prominence with his poem “Old Ironsides” about the 18th century battleship USS Constitution, which was to be broken up for scrap; the poem generated public sentiment that resulted in the historic ship being preserved as a monument. One of his most popular works was The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.

In 1846, in a letter to William T. G. Morton, the dentist who was the first practicioner to publicly demonstrate the use of ether during surgery, Holmes coined the word anæsthesia.

Front 1055

Identify:

This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sail the unshadowed main,–
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,–
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn;
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:–

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

Back 1055

Oliver Weldell Holmes The Chambered Nautilus

Front 1056

Walt Whitman

Back 1056

Whitman’s poetry seems more quintessentially American; the poet exposed common America and spoke with a distinctly American voice, stemming from a distinct American consciousness. The power of Whitman’s poetry seems to come from the spontaneous sharing of high emotion he presented. American poets in the 20th century (and now, the 21st) must come to terms with Whitman’s voice, insofar as it essentially defined democratic America in poetic language. Whitman utilized creative repetition to produce a hypnotic quality that creates the force in his poetry, inspiring as it informs. Thus, his poetry is best read aloud to experience the full message.

Front 1057

Identify:

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

Back 1057

Walt Whitman Song of Myself

Front 1058

Identify:

1
COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!

2
For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, 5
We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!

3
O you youths, western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you, western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers! O pioneers

4
Have the elder races halted? 10
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied, over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden, and the lesson, Pioneers! O pioneers!

5
All the past we leave behind;
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O pioneers! 15

6
We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, as we go, the unknown ways, Pioneers! O pioneers!
pioneers.

Back 1058

Walt Whitman Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Front 1059

Identify: When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Back 1059

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer Walt Whitman

Front 1060

Identify:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

Back 1060

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd Walt Whitman

Front 1061

Walt Whitman Democratic Vistas

Back 1061

In this essay, Whitman justly criticizes America for its “mighty, many-threaded wealth and industry” that mask an underlying “dry and flat Sahara” of soul. He calls for a new kind of literature to revive the American population (“Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does”)

Front 1062

Identify: “We see our land, America, her literature, esthetics, &c., as, substantially, the getting in form, or effusement and statement, of deepest basic elements and loftiest final meanings, of history and man — and the portrayal, (under the eternal laws and conditions of beauty,) of our own physiognomy, the subjective tie and expression of the objective, as from our own combination, continuation, and points of view — and the deposit and record of the national mentality, character, appeals, heroism, wars, and even liberties — where these, and all, culminate in native literary and artistic formulation, to be perpetuated; and not having which native, first-class formulation, she will flounder about, and her other, however imposing, eminent greatness, prove merely a passing gleam; but truly having which, she will understand herself, live nobly, nobly contribute, emanate, and, swinging, poised safely on herself, illumin’d and illuming, become a full-form’d world, and divine Mother not only of material but spiritual worlds, in ceaseless succession through time — the main thing being the average, the bodily, the concrete, the democratic, the popular, on which all the superstructures of the future are to permanently rest.”

Back 1062

Walt Whitman Democratic Vistas

Front 1063

Carl Sandberg

Back 1063

Much of his poetry, such as “Chicago”, focused on Chicago, Illinois, where he spent time as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. His most famous description of the city is as “Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.”

Sandburg moved to Chicago in 1912, after living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he had served as secretary to Emil Seidel, Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor. Harriet Monroe, a fellow resident of Chicago, had recently founded Poetry at around this time. Monroe liked and encouraged Sandburg’s plain-speaking free verse style, strongly reminiscent of Walt Whitman. The 1916 Chicago Poems established Sandburg as a major figure in contemporary literature.

The Chicago Poems, and its follow-up volumes of verse, Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1920) represent Sandburg’s attempts to found a U.S. version of social realism, writing expansive verse in praise of American agriculture and industry. All of these tendencies are manifest in Chicago itself. Then, as now, Chicago was a hub of commodities trading, and a key financial center for agricultural markets. The city was also a center of the meat-packing industry, and an important railroad hub; these industries are also mentioned in the poem.

Front 1064

Identify: THE fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Back 1064

Carl Sandberg The Fog

Front 1065

e.e. Cummings

Back 1065

Edward Estlin Cummings, typically abbreviated E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, and playwright. Though a representation not endorsed by him, his publishers often mirrored his atypical syntax by writing his name in lower case, e. e. cummings.

Cummings, like Emily Dickenson, is probably best known for the unusual style used in many of his poems, which includes unorthodox usage of both capitalization and punctuation, in which unexpected and seemingly misplaced punctuation sometimes interrupt sentences and even individual words. Several of his poems are also typeset on a page in an unusual fashion, and appear to make little sense until read aloud.

Cummings’ poetry often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as satire and the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world.

While some of his poetry is free verse (with no concern for rhyme and scansion), many of his poems have a recognizable sonnet structure of 14 lines, with an intricate rhyme scheme. A number of his poems feature a typographically exuberant style, with words, parts of words, or punctuation symbols scattered across the page, often making little sense until read aloud—at which point the meaning and emotion become clear. As a painter, Cummings understood the importance of presentation, and used typography to “paint a picture” with some of his poems.[3]

In addition, a number of Cummings’ poems feature in part or in whole intentional misspellings; several feature phonetic spellings intended to represent particular dialects. Cummings also made use of inventive formations of compound words, as in “in Just-“, which features words such as “mud-lucious” and “puddle-wonderful”.

Many of Cummings’ poems address social issues and satirize society, but have an equal or even stronger bias toward romanticism: time and again his poems celebrate love, sex and spring. His talent extended to children’s books, novels, and painting. A notable example of his versatility is an Introduction he wrote for a collection of the comic strip Krazy Kat.

An example of Cummings’ unorthodox typographical style can be seen in his poems “the sky was candy luminous…” and “a leaf falls on loneliness”.

Front 1066

Identify:

a salesman is an it that stinks Excuse
Me whether it’s president of the you were say
or a jennelman name misder finger isn’t
important whether it’s millions of other punks
or just a handful doesn’t
matter and whether it’s in lonjewray

or shrouds is immaterial it stinks

a salesman is an it that stinks to please

but whether to please itself or someone else
makes no more difference than if it sells
hate condoms education snakeoil vac
uumcleaners terror strawberries democ
ra(caveat emptor)cy superfluous hair

or Think We’ve Met subhuman rights Before

Back 1066

e. e. Cummings a salesman is an it that stinks Excuse

Front 1067

e. e. Cummings Anthropos or the Future of Art

Back 1067

a short, one-act play that Cummings contributed to the anthology Whither, Whither or After Sex, What? A Symposium to End Symposiums . The play consists of dialogue between Man, the main character, and three “infrahumans”, or inferior beings. The word anthropos is the Greek word for “man”, in the sense of “mankind”.

Front 1068

e. e. Cummings Tom, A Ballet

Back 1068

based on Harriet Beecher Stowe ‘s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin . The ballet is detailed in a “synopsis” as well as descriptions of four “episodes”, which were published by Cummings in 1935. It has never been performed.

Front 1069

e. e. Cummings Santa Claus, A Morality

Back 1069

Probably Cummings’ most successful play. It is an allegorical Christmas fantasy presented in one act of five scenes. The play was inspired by his daughter Nancy, whom he was reunited with in 1946.

The play’s main characters are Santa Claus, his family (Woman and Child), Death, and Mob. At the outset of the play, Santa Claus’ family has disintegrated due to their lust for knowledge (Science). After a series of events, however, Santa Claus’ faith in love and his rejection of the materialism and disappointment he associates with Science are reaffirmed, and he is reunited with Woman and Child.

Front 1070

Ezra Pound The Cantoo

Back 1070

The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 120 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to present formidable difficulties to the reader. Strong claims have been made for it as one of the most significant works of modernist poetry of the twentieth century. As in Pound’s prose writing, the themes of economics, governance, and culture are integral to its content.

The most striking feature of the text, to a casual browser, is the inclusion of Chinese characters as well as quotations in European languages other than English. Recourse to scholarly commentaries is almost inevitable for a close reader. The range of allusion to historical events is very broad, and abrupt changes occur with the minimum of stage directions.

There is also a wide geographical spread; Pound added to his earlier interests in the classical Mediterranean culture and East Asia selective topics from medieval and early modern Italy and Provence, the beginnings of the United States, England of the seventeenth century, and details from Africa he had obtained from Leo Frobenius. References left without explanation abound.

Front 1071

Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Back 1071

Ezra Pound’s 1920 poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” is a landmark in the career of the great American modernist poet. In the poem, Pound uses two alter egos to discuss the first twelve years of his career, a period during which aesthetic and literary concerns fully engaged Pound’s attention. The poem reconstructs literary London of the Edwardian period, recreating the dominant feeling about what literature should be and also describing Pound’s own rebellious aesthetic beliefs. The poem also takes us to the catastrophe of the early twentieth century, World War I, and bluntly illustrates its effects on the literary world. The poem then proceeds to an “envoi,” or a send-off, and then to five poems told through the eyes of a second alter ego.

In the first section of the poem, Pound portrays himself as “E. P.,” a typical turn-of-the-century aesthete, and then in the second he becomes “Mauberley,” an aesthete of a different kind. Both E. P. and Mauberley are facets of Pound’s own character that, in a sense, the poem is meant to exorcise.

Front 1072

Identify: E. P. ODE POUR L’ELECTION DE SON SEPULCHRE
For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start –
No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn;
Capaneus; trout for factitious bait:

Back 1072

Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Front 1073

Identify:

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Give me in due time, I beseech you, a little tobacco-shop,
With the little bright boxes
piled up neatly upon the shelves
And the loose fragment Cavendish
and the shag,
And the bright Virginia
loose under the bright glass cases,
And a pair of scales
not too greasy,
And the votailles dropping in for a word or two in passing,
For a flip word, and to tidy their hair a bit.

O God, O Venus, O Mercury, patron of thieves,
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.

Back 1073

Ezra Pound The Lake Isle. Parody of WB Yeats' The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Front 1074

Identify:

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

Back 1074

Ezra Pound The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Front 1075

Identify:

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Back 1075

Ezra Pound In a Station of the Metro

Front 1076

Gertrude Stein

Back 1076

After moving to Paris in 1903 she started to write in earnest: novels, plays, stories, librettos and poems. Increasingly, she developed her own highly idiosyncratic, playful, sometimes repetitive and sometimes humorous style. Typical quotes are

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

and

“Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle.”

as well as

“The change of color is likely and a difference a very little difference is prepared. Sugar is not a vegetable.”

These stream-of-consciousness experiments, rhythmical word-paintings or “portraits”, were designed to evoke “the excitingness of pure being” and can be seen as an answer to Cubism in literature. Many of the experimental works such as Tender Buttons have since been interpreted by critics as a feminist reworking of partiarchal language. These works were loved by the avant-garde, but mainstream success initially remained elusive.

Her first published book, Three Lives (1909), the stories of three working-class women, has been called a minor masterpiece. The three stories are “The Good Anna,” “Melanchtha,” and “The Gentle Lena.”

Front 1077

Identify: She may count three little saisies very well
By multiplying to either six nine or fourteen
Or she can be well mentioned as twelve
Which they may like which they can like soon
Or more than ever which they wish as a button
Just as much as they arrange which they wish
Or they can attire where they need as which say
Can they call a hat or a hat a day
Made merry because it is so.

Back 1077

Gertrude Stein Stanzas in Meditation Part I Stanza XIII

Front 1078

Identify: Which I wish to say is this
There is no beginning to an end
But there is a beginning and an end
To beginning.
Why yes of course.
Any one can learn that north of course
Is not only north but north as north
Why were they worried.
What I wish to say is this.
Yes of course.

Back 1078

Gertrude Stein Stanzas in Meditation Part V Stanza XXXVIII

Front 1079

HD

Back 1079

H.D. (1886-1961)

Hilda Doolittle, prominently known only by her initials H.D., was an American poet, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her association with the key early 20th-century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, although her later writing represents a move away from the Imagist model and towards a distinctly feminine version of modernist poetry and prose.

Doolittle was one of the leading figures in the bohemian culture of London in the early decades of the century. Her work is noted for its use of classical models and its exploration of the conflict between lesbian and heterosexual attraction and love that closely resembled her own life. Her later poetry also explores traditional epic themes, such as violence and war, from a feminist perspective.

Front 1080

Identify: Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us—
Cover us with your pools of fir.

Back 1080

HD Oread

Front 1081

Identify:

Never more will the wind
cherish you again,
never more will the rain.

Never more
shall we find you bright
in the snow and wind.

The snow is melted,
the snow is gone,
and you are flown:

Like a bird out of our hand,
like a light out of our heart,
you are gone.

Back 1081

Never more will the wind HD

Front 1082

Identify:

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the luster as of olives
where she stands,
And the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the main,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

Back 1082

HD Helen

Front 1083

Identify:

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are
nor as Orion’s sapphires, luminous;

yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.

Back 1083

HD Stars wheel in purple

Front 1084

Marianne Moore

Back 1084

Her most famous poem is perhaps the one entitled, appropriately, “Poetry,” in which she hopes for poets who can produce “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” It also expressed her idea that poetry is not written in meter, but in more natural forms. She composed hers in “syllabics”. Robinson Jeffers likewise disavowed meter as a natural part of poetry. Moore went even further than Jeffers, wholly denying meter.

Front 1085

Identify:

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician–
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,”
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Back 1085

Poetry Maryanne Moore

Front 1086

Robert Frost:

Back 1086

He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes

Front 1087

Identify: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

Back 1087

Robert Frost Mending Wall

Front 1088

Identify:

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth –
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth –
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.

Back 1088

Robert Frost Designb

Front 1089

Identify: As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less that two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.

Back 1089

Robert Frost Meeting and Passing

Front 1090

Identify: There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound–
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Back 1090

Robert Frost Mowing

Front 1091

Identify: These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods –
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

Back 1091

Robert Frost Spring Pools

Front 1092

TS Eliot

Back 1092

Eliot was another American who lived in exile in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. He is important as both a poet and a critic. His “The Waste Land” is considered the poem of the Modernist canon, and his work as a New Historicist critic is no less noteworthy.

Front 1093

Objective Correlative

Back 1093

(1919): A term introduced by T.S Eliot in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” and defined as the set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which will set of a specific emotion in the reader.

Front 1094

TS Eliot Four Quartets

Back 1094

Four Quartets is the name given to four related poems by T. S. Eliot, collected and republished in book form in 1943. They had been published individually from 1935 to 1942. Their titles are Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.

The Four Quartets is considered by Eliot himself to be his masterpiece. It draws upon his study, over three decades, of mysticism and philosophy. Christian imagery and symbolism in the poems is abundant: he had converted to Anglicanism in 1927, and was a devout Christian. There are also numerous references to Hindu symbols and traditions, with which he had been familiar since his student days.

Front 1095

Identify: Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

Back 1095

TS Eliot Four Quartets

Front 1096

TS ELiot Journey of the Maji

Back 1096

The poem was written after Eliot’s conversion to Christianity and confirmation in the Church of England in 1927 and published in Ariel Poems in 1930. The poem is an account of the journey from the point of view of one of the magi. It picks up Eliot’s consistent theme of alienation and a feeling of powerlessness in a world that has changed. In this regard, with a speaker who laments outliving his world, the poem recalls Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, as well as a number of Eliot’s own works. The poem is, instead of a celebration of the wonders of the journey, largely a complaint about a journey that was painful, tedious, and seemingly pointless. The speaker says that a voice was always whispering in their ears as they went that “this was all folly”. The magus seems generally unimpressed by the infant, and yet he realizes that the incarnation has changed everything.

The birth of the Christ was the death of his world of magic, astrology, and paganism. The speaker, recalling his journey in old age, says that after that birth his world had died, and he had little left to do but wait for his own end.

dramatic monologue

the poem has a number of symbolist elements, where an entire philosophical position is summed up by the manifestation of a single image. For example, the narrator says that on the journey they saw “three trees against a low sky”; the single image of the three trees implies the historical future (the crucifixion) and the spiritual truth of the future

Front 1097

Identify:

‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Back 1097

TS Eliot Journey of the Maji

Front 1098

Identify:

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man
and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Back 1098

Thirteen Ways of looking at a blackbird Wallace Stevens

Front 1099

Identify:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Back 1099

Wallace Stevens Anecdote of the Jar

Front 1100

Identify:

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Back 1100

Wallace Stevens The Emperor of Ice Cream

Front 1101

Identify:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Back 1101

Wallace Stevens The Snow Man

Front 1102

William Carlos Williams

Back 1102

Many of his earlier poems are influenced by Dadaist and Surrealist principles. In general, he found modern art very inspiring. While Williams disliked Ezra Pound’s and especially T.S. Eliot’s (see The Waste Land) frequent use of allusions to foreign languages, religion, history or art, Williams drew his themes from what he called “the local.” He coined the expression “No ideas but in things”, his famous summation of his poetic method. What he meant is that poets should leave traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions aside and try to see the world through the eyes of an ordinary person. Williams wrote in “plain American which cats and dogs can read”, to use a phrase of Marianne Moore, another doubter of poetic meter. He was concerned with writing poetry in a recognizably American idiom.

Williams is best known for his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which is considered the model example of the Imagist movement’s style and principles (see also “This Is Just To Say”). He also coined the Imagist motto “no ideas but in things.” However, Williams did not personally subscribe to Imagist ideas, which were more a product of Ezra Pound and H.D.. Williams is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature, which rejected European influences in poetry in favor of regional dialogues and influences. In particular, his call for more regionalism in American literature came on the heels of his brief collaboration with Ezra Pound in editing an early draft of T.S. Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land.

Front 1103

Identify: By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Back 1103

Spring and All William Carlos Williams

Front 1104

Identify: Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it’s green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you.
We lived long together
a life filled,
if you will,
with flowers. So that
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.

Back 1104

William Carlos WIlliams Aspodel that greeny flower

Front 1105

Identify: According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
insignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Back 1105

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus William Carlos Williams

Front 1106

Identify: I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral–
for you have it over a troop
of artists–
unless one should scour the world–
you have the ground sense necessary.
See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ’s sake not black–
nor white either–and not polished!
Let it be weathered–like a farm wagon–
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh at small expense)
or no wheels at all:
a rough dray to drag over the ground.

Back 1106

Tract William Carlos Williams

Front 1107

Identify:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Back 1107

William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow

Front 1108

Edith Wharton House of Mirth

Back 1108

It is centered around Lily Bart, a New York socialite who attempts to secure a husband and a place in affluent society.

The title is taken from Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” In the Gillian Anderson version, she admits as much to Gus Trenor at the end of her downward spiral: “I have been such a fool.”

Of all of her best-known novels, “House of Mirth” seems the most tragic. The heroine, who is far from stupid, is so bound-up in her rigid principles, that she flatly refuses to grab hold of the virtual life-rafts thrown to her. Her lawyer friend, Lawrence Selden, would gladly have married her, but she thought him not rich enough. When Bertha Dorset’s husband asks for her help in a proposed divorce suit against his wife by reason of infidelity, Lily coldly stands aside, uninvolved. Had the trial gone forward, she might have become his second wife. A wealthy and doting Mr. Gryce, evidently taken with her, is impetuously snubbed as she decides not to meet him at church. Compelled by her reverence for honesty, in a disastrous move she admits her gambling debts to her dour and snippy Aunt Julia, who then disinherits her. Having repeatedly refused the help of her powerful friends, she alienates them all, and now must seek increasingly menial and disreputable (i.e. proletarian) work.

Front 1109

Edith Wharton Ethan Frome

Back 1109

It is set in turn-of-the-century New England, in the fictitious town of Starkfield, Massachusetts.In the novel, infidelity is explored as the title character wishes to feel vibrant and young again. His wife, Zenobia (nicknamed Zeena), is a hypochondriac and has led herself to believe that she is going to die. Her relatives send for her cousin, Mattie Silver, who needs work as she has been left penniless and an orphan.

He embarks on a chivalrous affair with his wife’s cousin, which culminates in Ethan nearly leaving his wife numerous times. When Mattie displeases Zeena, she sends her back to the city. Emotion overcomes Ethan, and he tells Mattie that he wants to live with her forever. They decide to sled into a bulky tree, so it will kill them instantly and they can be together in heaven. The accident paralyzes Mattie and leaves Ethan with many ailments.

The story is presented in a style reminscient of Peyton Place, in that a visitor to the town hears of the entire story not from Ethan, but from other villagers, like the visitor’s landlady, Mrs. Ruth Varnum Hale and the trolley operator, Harmon Gow.

Front 1110

Ethan Frome The Age of Innocence

Back 1110

The novel is set in the middle and upper classes of 1870s Old New York. Newland Archer, a lawyer set to enter into a marriage with the naïve but beautiful May Welland, must re-consider his choice with the intrusion of Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin. Ellen has returned to New York because she is trying to separate herself from a bad marriage. Newland is at first confused and then intrigued by Ellen, while he becomes more and more disillusioned with May, who is seen as the perfect product of Old New York society. When Ellen wants to divorce her husband, Newland convinces her otherwise and realizes how much he cares for her. He begs May to push up their wedding date but she refuses at first. He then admits to Ellen that he loves her and receives a telegram pushing up his wedding date.

Newland and May are married in the second part of the novel and Newland tried to forget about Ellen but sees her while he and May are in Newport. Ellen agrees that she will stay in America if they do not consummate their relationship. Newland soon discovers that Ellen’s husband wished she would return to him and she has refused. Ellen comes to New York to care for her sick grandmother and agrees to consummate her relationship with Newland. Suddenly, she decides to return to Europe inexplicably. May and Newland throw a farewell party for her and May tells Newland that she is pregnant and told Ellen so a few days before. Twenty-five years pass and Newland and his son are in Paris after May’s death. They arrange to meet Ellen in her Paris apartment but Newland changes his mind at the last minute, happy to live with his memories.

Front 1111

Ernest Hemmingway

Back 1111

American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His distinctive writing style is characterized by terse minimalism and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction. Hemingway’s protagonists are typically stoics, often seen as projections of his own character–men who must show “grace under pressure.” Many of his works are considered classics in the canon of American literature.

Hemingway, nicknamed “Papa,” was part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as described in his novel A Moveable Feast. Known as part of “the Lost Generation,” a name coined and popularized by Gertrude Stein, he led a turbulent social life, was married four times, and allegedly had various romantic relationships during his lifetime.

Front 1112

Ernest Hemmingway The SUn Also Rises

Back 1112

The novel is a powerful exposé of the life and values of the Lost Generation, a generation deeply scarred by World War I. The main characters are Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley. Barnes suffered an injury during World War I that makes him unable to consummate his relationship with Brett sexually.

Front 1113

Ernest Hemmingway For Whom the Bell Tolls

Back 1113

It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is given an assignment to blow up a bridge to accompany a simultaneous attack on the city of Segovia.

Behind enemy lines, with the guerrilla band of Pablo, he meets María, whose life has been shattered by the outbreak of the war. It is here that the story develops, as Pablo’s unwillingness to commit to the operation clashes with Jordan’s strong sense of duty, and even Jordan’s sense of duty clashes with his newfound love for life caused by the presence of María. A substantial portion of the novel is told through the thoughts of Robert Jordan, with flashbacks to meetings with Russians in Madrid and some reflections on his father and grandfather. Another character, Pilar, relates events that demonstrate the incredible brutality of civil war, in one case by the actions of a revolutionary mob and in another by those of governmental authorities.

Front 1114

Ernest Hemmingway A Farewell to Arms

Back 1114

The novel, a love story, draws heavily on Hemingway’s experiences as a young soldier in Italy. It tells the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, a young American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army during World War I. Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley. After he is wounded at the front by a trench mortar shell, she tends to him in the hospital during his recuperation, and their relationship develops. His recuperation and romance with the now pregnant Catherine ends abruptly when Henry must return to the front. Henry narrowly escapes death at the hands of fanatical Italian soldiers, who are executing officers separated from their troops during the Italians’ disastrous retreat following the Battle of Caporetto. He finds Catherine, and after a sojourn in an Italian resort, the couple flees to Switzerland on the eve of Henry’s arrest for deserting. In Switzerland, their child is born dead, and Catherine dies shortly after due to hemorrhages. A Farewell to Arms is an excellent example of the simple, terse prose style that made Hemingway famous.

Front 1115

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Back 1115

regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. In his own age, Fitzgerald was the self-styled spokesman of the “Lost Generation”, or the Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He crafted five novels and dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age. Many admire what they consider his remarkable emotional honesty. His heroes — handsome, confident, and doomed — blaze brilliantly before exploding, and his heroines are typically beautiful, intricate, and alluring.

Front 1116

F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Back 1116

Jay Gatsby is a young millionaire with a dubious and somewhat notorious past. He has no ties to the society of the rich in which he circulates, and no one quite knows how he made his fortune. Some believe he is a bootlegger. Rumors circulate of his “killing a man”, or being a German spy during the Great War and the possibility of his being a cousin of contemporaneous German ruler Kaiser Wilhelm. However, despite the glamorous parties he throws, with their countless gatecrashers whom he generously tolerates, Gatsby is a lonely man. All he really wants is to “repeat the past” – to be reunited with the love of his life and golden girl, Daisy. That’s why he was up to getting rich, not only, that he wouldn’t end like his father, a farmer, but also to regain Daisy. But Daisy is now Daisy Buchanan, married to the staid, respectable millionaire and famous polo player Tom Buchanan, and the couple now has a young child. For Gatsby, though, Daisy’s new status as mother and wife hardly constitutes an obstacle in conquering his love for her; and Daisy, feeling trapped and bored in her marriage with the unfaithful Tom, is flattered by the return of Gatsby’s attention.

The narrator of the novel is Nick Carraway, a young Wall Street trader at the height of the rising financial market in the 1920s, who is also Daisy’s cousin. Carraway has moved into the small bungalow next to a mansion owned by the millionaire Gatsby (a “factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy”). Eventually, Carraway cynically realizes that the rich, as respectable as they may seem superficially, are indeed “careless people,” and Tom and Daisy are no exception. Tom has a mistress, Myrtle, the wife of the gas station owner in the wasteland of ashes between the fabulous mansions on Long Island and New York City, located somewhere around present day Flushing, Queens, New York. Nick meets and quickly makes friends with Gatsby, though, and becomes his liaison with Daisy. One afternoon, after a confrontation between Tom and Gatsby over Daisy, Daisy runs over Myrtle while driving back from the city. Tom misleads Myrtle’s heartbroken husband George unintentionally, implying that the accident was Gatsby’s fault, and Gatsby is consequently shot by George Wilson. Wilson commits suicide immediately afterward. Hardly anyone, and not even Daisy, comes out to Gatsby’s funeral, and Nick, Gatsby’s sole remaining friend, must attend it alone, where he meets Gatsby’s father, a poor farmer. Gatsby is buried with the same mystery in which he suddenly appeared.

Front 1117

Identify: He believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluted us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Back 1117

F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Front 1118

F Scott Fitzgerald Babylon Revisited

Back 1118

Fitzgerald’s most renowned and most considered work of short fiction. A work that intimates the times as well as revealing a personal tragedy, the short story is his most often anthologized. Fitzgerald wrote the story amidst the turmoil of his own life, and that life is in many ways drawn out in “Babylon Revisited.” Fitzgerald’s consideration of the story as intensely personal cannot be doubted; that he evolved it into something universal makes it a masterful work.

It features the characters Charlie Wales and Helen Wales. It is the story of a father’s attempt to regain the custody of his daughter after recovering from the deathof his wife and his own alcoholism.

Front 1119

F Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise

Back 1119

The debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a wealthy and attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature and has a series of romances.

Front 1120

F Scot Fitzgerald Tender is the Night

Back 1120

In 1932, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was hospitalized for schizophrenia in Baltimore, Maryland, and the author rented the “La Paix” estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland to work on this book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It would be his first novel published in nine years, and the last novel that he would complete.

Front 1121

Henry James

Back 1121

James could easily be pushed out of the “modern” category, but he’s sufficiently in-between to qualify on this site. You can count on James’ long, involute syntax to make an appearance on your exam. He has a lot of testable material, so it’s best to focus on knowing A) his style, and B) the names of his characters. The guidebooks are pretty clear on what James’ style looks and feels like. Note that the most likely candidates for your test are The Beast in the Jungle, Portrait of a Lady, and The Turn of the Screw.

Front 1122

Henry James The Ambassadors

Back 1122

Mr. Lambert Strether is from Woollett, Massachusetts and he has come to Europe at the request of his employer, Mrs. Newsome. Mrs. Newsome’s son, Chad, has been in Paris for a long time and the Newsomes are worried that Chad will never return home. Strether is to bring Chad back home. Despite the assistance of his old friend, Waymarsh, and his new friend, Maria Gostrey, Strether is unable to fulfill this task. He is Mrs. Newsome’s “ambassador,” sent to Paris to protect her interests.

Strether arrives in Paris and his trip becomes a return to his own youth. He enjoys spending time with Chad’s young friends, Miss Barrace and Little John Bilham. Strether is charmed by the Countess, Madame de Vionnet, a married woman with whom Chad has begun a relationship. Quite impressed by the Countess, Strether agrees to help her as well – though he does not know how he will be able to appease both Mrs. Newsome and the Countess. From the very beginning, Strether’s plan is doomed to fail. He hopes to convince Mrs. Newsome that the Countess has been a positive influence on Chad and that Chad has changed for the better. Waymarsh gives Strether very sound advice: Strether should either follow his directions from Mrs. Newsome, or give up altogether. Strether rejects this advice and tries to find the compromise between two conflicting positions. Just when Chad seems willing to co back home to Woollett, it is Strether who convinces the young man to stay in Paris for a little while longer.

Strether’s fate quickly runs downhill. Mrs. Newsome sends her daughter, Sarah Pocock (Chad’s sister), to bring Chad home. Sarah arrives with her husband, Jim Pocock, and her sister-in-law, Mamie Pocock. It is suggested that Chad will return home to marry Mamie Pocock and continue in the family business: advertising. Unlike Strether, Sarah Pocock is not amused by Society and its trappings, nor is she impressed with the Countess, nor is she inspired by the architecture and atmosphere of Paris. Sarah intends to do her job and she does it quickly. It does not take very long for Chad to get himself ready to leave Paris. His condition to Sarah is that he will agree to return home if Strether gives him the word. Sarah turns to Strether, considering that the task has been completed – for how could Strether refuse? This is, however, exactly what Strether does.

Fearing that Chad will return home and live a miserable life in business, Strether looks at his own miserable life and is unable to condemn Chad to a similar fate. Strether knows that Chad will return home regardless of what he says. Still, Strether does not want the blot on his conscience. This move is costly for Strether: he will likely lose his job with the Newsomes. The possibility of his marriage with Mrs. Newsome is nullified as well. In sum, Strether, a man with very little money, has lost the opportunity to get a good deal more. In the end of the novel, the only solace that he has is in knowing that he has been true to his ideals and has gained nothing for himself.

Front 1123

Henry James The Beast in the Jungle

Back 1123

John Marcher, the protagonist, is re-aquainted with May Bartram, a woman he knew ten years earlier, who remembers his odd secret- Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a “beast in the jungle.”

May decides to take a flat nearby in London, and to spend her days with Marcher curiously awaiting what fate has in stall for John. Of course Marcher is a self-centered egoist, believing that he is precluded from marrying so that he does not subject his wife to his “spectacular fate”. So he takes May to the theatre and invites her to an occasional dinner, while not allowing her to really get close to him for her own sake. As he sits idly by and allows the best years of his life to pass, he takes May down as well, until the denouement wherein he learns that the great misfortune of his life was to throw it away, and to ignore the love of a good woman, based upon his preposterous sense of foreboding.

Front 1124

Henry James The Golden Bowl

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Adam Verver, a US billionaire in London, dotes on daughter Maggie, an innocent abroad. An impecunious Italian, Prince Amerigo, marries her even though her best friend, Charlotte Stant, an alabaster beauty with brains, no money, and a practical and romantic nature, is his lover. She and Amerigo keep it secret from Maggie that they know each other, so Maggie interests her widowed father in Charlotte, who is happy with the match because she wants to be close to Amerigo. Charlotte desires him, the lovers risk discovery, Amerigo longs for Italy, Maggie wants to spare her father pain, and Adam wants to return to America to build a museum. Amidst lies and artifice, what fate awaits adulterers?

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Henry James The Portrait of a Lady

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First published in 1881. It is the story of a young female American, Isabel Archer, who inherits a large amount of money, which left her to the Machiavellan schemings of two European expatriates. Like many of James’ novels, it is set mostly in Europe, notably Italy.

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Henry James The Aspern Papers

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A novella about the unsuccessful attempts of the biographer of a famous and long-dead poet (Jeffrey Aspern) to secure some papers from the poet’s aged former mistress and her homely daughter. It is set in Venice. The protagonist encourages the daughter’s growing infatuation withhim in order to get the papers.

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Henry James Daisy Miller

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This novella deals with the eponymous American girl and her courtship by Winterbourne, both of whom are expatriates in Italy and Switzerland. She is overly flirtatious and dies a tragic death.

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Henry James Turn of the Screw

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Originally published in 1898, it is a ghost story that has lent itself well to operatic and film adaptation.

Due to its style, The Turn of the Screw became a favorite text of New Criticism. The reader is challenged to determine if the protagonist, a nameless governess, is reliably reporting events or instead is some kind of neurotic with an overheated imagination. To further muddy the waters, her written account of the experience — a frame tale — is being read many years later at a Christmas house party by someone who claims to have known her.

An unnamed narrator listens to a manuscript read by a male friend from a former governess whom the latter claimed to know and who is now dead.

A young governess is hired by a man who has found himself responsible for his niece and nephew after the death of their parents. He lives in London and has no interest whatsoever in the children. The boy is at a boarding school. The girl, Flora, is living at his country home where she is cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. He gives the governess full charge of the children and makes it clear he never wants to hear from her again regarding them. The governess travels to her new employer’s house and begins her duties. Shortly thereafter, the boy, Miles, turns up after being expelled from his school. For some mysterious reason, the headmaster feels he is a threat to the other boys.

The governess begins to see and hear strange things. She learns that her predecessor, a Miss Jessel, and her lover Quint, a clever but abusive man, died under curious circumstances. Gradually, she becomes convinced that the pair are somehow using the children to continue their relationship from beyond the grave. The governess takes action against the perceived threat with tragic consequences.

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Henry James The Art of Fiction

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In his classic essay The Art of Fiction, he argued against rigid proscriptions on the novelist’s choice of subject and method of treatment. He maintained that the widest possible freedom in content and approach would help ensure narrative fiction’s continued vitality. James wrote many valuable critical articles on other novelists; typical is his insightful book-length study of his American predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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Willa Cather My Antonia

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considered the greatest novel by American writer Willa Cather. My Ántonia – pronounced with the accent on the first syllable of “Ántonia” – is the final book of the “prairie trilogy” of novels by Cather, a list that also includes O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark.

My Ántonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named Ántonia. The book’s narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for Ántonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views Ántonia’s life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens.I

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Willa Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop

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It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory. It is based on the careers of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy and Father Joseph Machebeuf.

The primary character is Bishop Jean Marie Latour, who travels alone from Cincinnati to New Mexico to take charge of the newly established diocese of New Mexico, which has only just become a territory of the United States. He is later assisted by his childhood friend Father Joseph Vaillant. At the time of his departure, Cincinnati is the end of the railway line west, so Latour must travel by riverboat to the Gulf of Mexico, and thence overland to New Mexico, a journey which takes an entire year. He spends the rest of his life establishing the Roman Catholic church in New Mexico, where he dies in old age. The novel is notable for its portrayal of two well-meaning and devout French priests who encounter a well-entrenched Spanish-Mexican clergy they are sent to supplant when the United States acquired New Mexico and the Vatican, in turn, remapped its dioceses. Several of these entrenched priests are depicted in classic manner as exempla of greed, avarice and gluttony, while others live simple, abstemious lives among the Indians. Cather portrays the Hopi and Arapaho sympathetically, and her characters express the near futility of overlaying their religion on a millennia-old Native culture. Cather’s vivid landscape descriptions are also memorable.

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Edith Wharton

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Born Edith Newbold Jones, to a wealthy New York family often associated with the phrase “Keeping up with the Joneses,” Edith combined her insights into the privileged classes with her natural wit to write novels and short fiction which are notable for their humor and incisiveness.

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Identify: Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her.

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F Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise

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William Faulkner

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distinctive style. Also, if you ever see the names Quentin Compson, of if you see the surnameSnopes, you’re looking at Faulkner. I won’t put a summary for all Faulkner’s works here, but know that the most likely candidates for the GRE are The Sound and the Fury, and the short story “A Rose for Emily.”

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William Faulkner Sound and the Fury

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The four parts of the novel relate many of the same episodes, each from a different point of view and therefore with emphasis on different themes and events. This interweaving and nonlinear structure makes any true synopsis of the novel difficult, especially since the narrators are all unreliable in their own way, making their accounts not necessarily trustworthy at all times.

The general outline of the story is the decline of the Compson family, a once noble southern family descended from civil war hero General Compson. The family falls victim to those vices which Faulkner believed were responsible for the problems in the reconstructed South: racism, greed, selfishness and, ultimately, psychological impotence. Especially in regard to the latter, the novel has been often described as having the thematic structure of a Greek tragedy. Over the course of the thirty years or so related in the novel, the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith and the respect of the town of Jefferson, and many of them die tragically.

A famous passage that may appear on the GRE, it is narrated by Quentin:

**The title of the novel is taken from Macbeth’s soliloquy in act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

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Identify:

“When the shadow of the sash appeared in the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”

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William Faulkner Sound and the Fury

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Identify: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
”Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing…

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Shakespeare Macbeth 5.5

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William Faulkner A Light in August

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The narrative structure consists of three connected plot-strands. The first strand tells the story of Lena Grove, a young pregnant woman who is trying to find the father, Lucas Burch, of her unborn child. With that purpose she leaves her home town and walks several hundred miles afoot to Jefferson, a town in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha county. There she is supported by Byron Bunch, an employee in the planing mill who falls in love with Lena and hopes to marry her. Bunch keeps secret that Lucas Burch is hiding in town under the alias Joe Brown. Lena is a simple child of nature, representing positive human qualities like innocence and endurance. Her journey in August and the birth of her child are symbolic of the eternal cycle of nature.

The narrative plot of Lena’s story is also circular; it builds a framework around the two other plot-strands. One of these is the story of the enigmatic character Joe Christmas.

One day he comes to the planing mill in Jefferson and asks for a job. The work at the planing mill is just a cover up for his illegal alcohol business. He has a sexual relationship with Joanna Burden, who is descended from a formerly powerful abolitionist family. She lets Joe live in the cabin behind her house. Joanna Burden’s brother and grandfather, two civil right activists, were both gunned down at daylight. Joanna Burden continues her ancestors’ struggle for Black emancipation, which makes her an outsider in the society of Jefferson, much like Christmas.

Her relationship with Christmas begins rather disturbingly, with an ambiguous episode in which sexual abuse is suggested, and it ends in disaster. As a result of sexual frustration and the beginning of menopause, she turns to religion. At the climax of her relation to Christmas, she tries to force him, by threatening him with a gun, to admit publicly his black ancestry and to join a black law firm. But the old gun jams and Christmas gets away. Joanna Burden is murdered soon thereafter. Her throat is slit and she is nearly decapitated. Her body is carried outside and her house is set on fire. The murder was presumably committed by Joe Christmas, but this is not explicitly narrated; one could argue that Burch murdered her. It appears that Lucas Burch/Joe Brown may have at least set the house on fire.

Thanks to a tip-off by Lucas Burch/Joe Brown, Christmas’ previous business partner in the moon-shining venture and the father of Lena’s child, Christmas is caught. During his unsuccessful escape attempt, Christmas is shot and castrated by a national Guardsman named Percy Grimm.

The third plot strand tells the story of Reverend Gail Hightower. He is obsessed by the past adventures of his Confederate grandfather, who was killed while stealing a few chickens from a farmer’s shed. Hightower’s community dislikes him because of his sermons about his dead grandfather, and because of the scandal surrounding his personal life: his wife committed adultery, and later killed herself, turning the town’s community against Hightower and effectively turning him into a pariah. The only character who does not turn his back on the Reverend is Byron Bunch, who visits Hightower from time to time. Bunch also tries to convince the Reverend to give the imprisoned Christmas an alibi, but Hightower initially refuses. When Christmas escapes from police custody he runs to Hightower’s house where and tries to hide. Hightower then accepts Byron’s suggestion, but it is too late as Percy Grimm is close behind.

At the end of the novel, the Reverend helps Lena to deliver her baby, a circumstance that helps him break his inner isolation and makes him feel his approaching death.

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William Faulkner A Rose for Emily

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story of an eccentric spinster, Emily Grierson. An unnamed narrator details the strange circumstances of Emily’s life and her odd relationships with her father who controlled and manipulated her, her lover Homer Barron, the townspeople of Jefferson who gossip about her, and her horrible secret. In her upstairs room, she hides Barron’s corpse, which explains the horrid stench that emits from Miss Emily’s house. The story’s subtle complexities continue to inspire critics while casual readers find it one of Faulkner’s most accessible works. The popularity of the story is due in no small part to its gruesome ending. The story explores many themes, including the society of the South at that time, the role of women in the South, and extreme psychosis.

In the story, the townspeople’s points of views on Emily actually reflect the society’s value at that moment to some extent. Although the townspeople don’t have direct contact with Emily, their views on her and her family greatly affect her life. Their praises and admiration influence her father to keep her sheltered longer than she actually needs to be. Her father controls her thoughts and lifestyle. Emily feels that she is released when her father is dead. She dives into love with Homer and neglects people’s judgments on her. When she realizes that Homer intends to leave her again, she makes sure that he would always be with her, whether he is alive or not. In his death Emily finds eternal love which is something no one could ever take away from her.

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Identify: We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

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William Faulkner A Rose for Emily

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Countee Cullen

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an American poet, one of the finest of the Harlem Renaissance. His most famous poems are “Yet Do I Marvel” and “Incident”, the latter of which describes a childhood trip to Baltimore marred by a racial slur. Countee Cullen was raised and educated in a primarily white community. Countee Cullen differed from many other poets of the Harlem Renaissance because he lacked the background to comment from personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black themes in his writing.

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Identify: I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

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Countee Cullen Yet Do I Marvel a Shakespearan Sonnet

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Identify:

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Countee Cullen Incident

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James Baldwin

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Most of Baldwin’s work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century United States. His work is notable for the deeply personal – even courageous – way in which he explores questions of identity and meaning. His novels mime all the complex, social and psychological pressures related to being both black and homosexual at a time well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups could be assumed.

His most important works are Notes on a Native Son (essays) and Go Tell it On the Mountain.

Go Tell it on the Mountain examines the role of the Christian Church in the lives of African-Americans, both as a source of repression and moral hypocrisy and as a source of inspiration and community. It also, more subtly, examines racism in the United States. The protagonist is John Grimes.

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James Weldon Johnson

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James Weldon Johnson was a leading African American author, poet, early civil rights activist, and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, he was the first African American accepted to the Florida bar. He served in several public capacities, including as consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua, but he is best remembered today for his writing, which included novels, poems, and collections of folklore.

His first major literary sensation was The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a fictional account of a light-skinned black man’s attempts to succeed and survive in the early 20th century. It was while serving as executive secretary of the NAACP from 1920 through 1931 that he released God’s Trombones, Seven Negro Sermons in Verse, one of the works he is best remembered for today

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Langston Hughes

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Like many writers of the post-WWI era, such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Hughes spent time in Paris during the early 1920s. For most of 1924 he lived at 15 Rue de Nollet. In November 1924 Hughes moved to Washington D.C. His first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. In 1929 he graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. In 1930, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature. Hughes, who claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the 1920s through the 1960s. Much of his writing was inspired by the blues and jazz of that era; an example is “Montage of a Dream Deferred”, from which a line was taken for the title of the play Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry.

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Identify:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–

And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
other poetry

Many of his poems are in the form of blues lyrics, such as the opening verse to “Po’ Boy Blues“:

When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
When I was home de
Sunshine seemed like gold.
Since I come up North de
Whole damn world’s turned cold.

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Langston Hughes Montage of a Dream Deferred

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Ralph Ellison

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Ellison’s most famous work is Invisible Man, which explores the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society, as seen from the perspective of a black man in the New York City of the 1940’s. In contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison created characters who are dispassionate, educated, articulate and self-aware. Through the protagonist, Ellison explores the contrasts between the Northern and Southern varieties of racism and their alienating effect. The narrator is “invisible” in a figurative sense, in that “people refuse to see” him, and also experiences a kind of dissociation.

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Richard Wright

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The grandson of slaves, Wright became a respected author, best known for his novel Native Son (1940). It tells the story of Bigger Thomas, an African-American of the poorest class, struggling to live in the Chicago, Illinois of the 1930s. His life, however, is doomed from the outset: after Bigger accidentally kills a white woman, he runs from the police, kills his girlfriend and is then caught and tried.

Wright is also renowned for the semi-autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which describes his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago, his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his difficulties with white employers and social isolation.

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Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God

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The main character, Janie, embarks on an epic journey. Her search for self-fufillment as a woman and as an African-American is paralleled with that of Odysseus as her journey takes her far and wide and pits her against the forces of nature and “monsters” that try to stop her from reaching self-actualization:

The main character, a black woman in her early forties named Janie Crawford, tells the story of her life and journey via an extended flashback to her best friend, Pheoby. Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three men.

Janie’s grandmother, Nanny, was a slave who was impregnated by a white man (Hurston implies that it was the slaveowner) and gave birth to a daughter. That daughter was raped as a teenager and became pregnant with Janie, but left Janie with Nanny and is not present in the novel. Nanny sees Janie kissing a neighborhood boy and fears that Janie will become a “mule” to some man, so she arranges for Janie to marry Logan Killicks, an older man and farmer who is looking for a wife to keep his home and help on the farm. Janie has the idea that marriage must involve love, forged in a pivotal early scene where she sees bees pollinating a pear tree and believes that marriage is the human equivalent to this natural process. Logan Killicks, however, wants a domestic helper rather than a lover or partner, and after he begins to hit Janie and to try to force her to help him with the hard labor of the farm, Janie runs off with the glib Joe (Jody) Starks, who takes her to Eatonville (which in reality was Hurston’s hometown).

Starks arrives in Eatonville (the United States’s first all-black community) to find the residents devoid of ambition, so he arranges to buy more land from the neighboring landowner, hires some local residents to build a general store for him to own and run, and has himself appointed mayor. Janie soon realizes that Joe wants her as a trophy. He wants the image of his perfect wife to reinforce his powerful position in town, as he asks her to run the store but forbids her from participating in the substantial social life that occurs on the store’s front porch.

After Starks dies, Janie finds herself financially independent and beset with suitors, some of whom are men of some means or have prestigious occupations, but she falls in love with a drifter and gambler named Tea Cake. She sells the store and the two head to Jacksonville and get married, only to move to the Everglades region soon after for Tea Cake to find work planting and harvesting beans. While their relationship has its ups and downs, including mutual bouts of jealousy, Janie now has the marriage with love that she had wanted.

The area is hit with a hurricane, and while Tea Cake and Janie survive it, Tea Cake is bitten by a rabid dog while saving Janie from drowning. He contracts the disease himself. He ultimately tries to shoot Janie with his pistol, but she shoots him with a rifle in self-defense. She is charged with murder. At the trial, Tea Cake’s black, male friends show up to oppose her, while a group of local white women is there to support her. The all-white jury acquits Janie, and she returns to Eatonville, only to find the residents gossiping about her and assuming (or perhaps wishing) that Tea Cake has run off with her money.

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Amiri Bakara

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(born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934 in Newark, New Jersey) is a American writer of poetry, drama, essays, and music criticism. Baraka is today most widely known for the fact that in 2002 the state of New Jersey made him poet laureate, but forced him out of that position a year later because of his poem Somebody Blew Up America.

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Identify:

Who are you, listening to me, who are you
listening to yourself? Are you white or
black, or does that have anything to do
with it? Can you pop your fingers to no
music, except those wild monkies go on
in your head, can you jerk, to no melody,
except finger poppers get it together
when you turn from starchecking to checking
yourself. How do you sound, your words, are they
yours? The ghost you see in the mirror, is it really
you, can you swear you are not an imitation greyboy,
that the sister you have you hand on is not really
so full of Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton is
coming out of her ears. You may even have to be Richard
with a white shirt and face, and four million negroes
think you cute, you may have to be Elizabeth Taylor, old
lady,

if you want to sit up in your crazy spot dreaming about
dresses,
and the say of certain porters’ hips. Check yourself,
learn who it is
speaking, when you make some ultrasophisticated point,
check yourself,
when you find yourself gesturing like Steve McQueen,
check it out, ask
in your black heart who it is you are, and is that image
black or white,

you might be surprised right out the window, whistling
dixie on the way in

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Amiri Baraka Poem for Half White College Students

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Anne Sexton

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The modern model of the confessional poet, one perhaps begun by the publication of Heart’s Needle, by W.D. Snodgrass. Sexton helped open the door not only for female poets, but for female issues; Sexton wrote about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, and adultery before such issues were even topics for casual discussion, helping redefine the boundaries of poetry. Sexton modeled for Boston’s Hart Agency. She committed suicide in 1974.

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Identify:

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

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The Truth the Dead Know Anne Sexton

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Identify:

it begins:

for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,
(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)

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Sylvia's Death Anne Sexton

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Elizabeth Bishop

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An American poet and writer, increasingly regarded as one of the finest 20th century poets writing in English.

A disciple of Marianne Moore, and a good friend of poets Robert Lowell and James Merrill, Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Early in her career, Bishop was regarded (and perhaps dismissed) as a “miniaturist,” a master of small poetic structures and descriptive detail. Careful reading of her work, however, reveals a sharp-edged confessional edge: her life story is told through poems which, though nominally addressing and describing other subject matter (including paintings, tourist destinations, etc.), in fact speak to true events (and to her, and the reader’s, underlying existential states). She was far from prolific: her Complete Poems is a relatively slim volume.

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Identify:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

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Elizabeth Bishop One Art

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Gwendolyn Brooks

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an award-winning African American woman poet. Although she also wrote a novel, an autobiography and some other prose works, she was noted primarily as a poet. Her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen, received a Pulitzer Prize, the first won by an African American.

Her poetry is rooted in the poor and mostly African-American South Side of Chicago. Although her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to using blues rhythms in free verse, her characters are often drawn from the poor inner city. Her bluesy poem “We Real Cool” is a favorite of the GRE.

Front 1159

Identify:

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?–
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

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The Mother Gwendolyn Brooks

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Identify:

…and guys I knew in the States, young
officers, return from the front crying and
trembling. Gay chaps at the bar in Los
Angeles, Chicago, New York…
–Lt. William Couch
in the South Pacific

We knew how to order. Just the dash
Necessary. The length of gaiety in good taste.
Whether the raillery should be slightly iced
And given green, or served up hot and lush.
And we knew beautifully how to give to women
The summer spread, the tropics of our love.
When to persist, or hold a hunger off.
Knew white speech. How to make a look an omen.
But nothing ever taught us to be islands.
And smart, athletic language for this hour
Was not in the curriculum. No stout
Lesson showed how to chat with death. We brought
No brass fortissimo, among our talents,
To holler down the lions in this air.

Back 1160

Gay Chaps at the Bar Gwendolyn Brooks

Front 1161

Identify:

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Back 1161

We Real Cool Gwendolyn Brooks

Front 1162

John Berryman

Back 1162

an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He is one of the figures acting as a bridge between the formally loose, socially aware poetry of the Beats and the personal, grieving poetry of Sylvia Plath. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman died by suicide in 1972.

For the sake of the GRE, all you need know is that his poems often feature a character named “Henry” and one named “Mr. Bones.” Be able to identify those names with Berryman.

Front 1163

Robert Lowell

Back 1163

American Confessionalist poet known for inspiring and teaching several literary superstars of the 1950s and 1960s, including Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.

With his 1959 volume Life Studies, however, he moved firmly into the confessionalist mode. Life Studies is best known for the oft-reprinted poem “Skunk Hour,” a poem that is primarily a description of a fading New England town, punctuated by two stanzas of what was, at the time, shocking personal confession, such as the declaration that “My mind’s not right.” Life Studies is widely viewed as one of the most influential and important books of poetry in the 20th century. The main theme of this work before publication was reputed by one wag to have centered around the uncommon behavior of inserting a wad of toilet paper into the groove of one’s anus after a particularly messy bowel movement and walking around the bathroom with underpants around the ankles making “quack-quack” sounds like a duck, although this may very well be an exaggeration.

He followed Life Studies with For the Union Dead, which was also widely praised, particularly for its title poem. Following this book, however, Lowell’s poetry became less and less popular and noticed. A minor controversy erupted when he incorporated private letters from his ex-wife into his poems. He was particularly criticized by his friend Elizabeth Bishop for this.

Front 1164

Identify:

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth

Corrupted its unstable cloth.
A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit’s foot–
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns step out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale’s spout–
The fisher’s fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and Creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums thrash to a whale’s rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher’s sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out.
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . .
On water the Man-Fisher walks.

Back 1164

The Drunken Fisherman Robert Lowell

Front 1165

Identify:

For Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island’s hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village,
she’s in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria’s century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season’s ill–
we’ve lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall,
his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl,
there is no money in his work,
he’d rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull,
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .

My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats,
‘Love, O careless Love . . . .’ I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat . . . .
I myself am hell,
nobody’s here–

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air–
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the
garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Back 1165

Skunk Hour Robert Lowell

Front 1166

Identify:

I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die
Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;

What are we in the hands of the great God?
It was in vain you set up thorn and briar
In battle array against the fire
And treason crackling in your blood;
For the wild thorns grow tame
And will do nothing to oppose the flame;
Your lacerations tell the losing game
You play against a sickness past your cure.
How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?

A very little thing, a little worm,
Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,
Can kill a tiger. Will the dead
Hold up his mirror and affirm
To the four winds the smell
And flash of his authority? It’s well
If God who holds you to the pit of hell,
Much as one holds a spider, will destroy
Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy

On Windsor March, I saw the spider die
When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:
There’s no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly–
It stretches out its feet
And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat;
Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat
Then sinews the abolished will, when sick
And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.

But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?
Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast
Into a brick-kiln where the blast
Fans your quick vitals to a coal–
If measured by a glass,
How long would it seem burning! Let there pass
A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze
Is infinite, eternal: this is death,
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death

Back 1166

Mr. Edwards and the Spider Robert Lowell refers to Jonathan Edwards

Front 1167

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

Back 1167

“Daddy” is one of Plath’s best-known poems, in part because of its vivid, sometimes brutal imagery. Daddy is perhaps in large part inspired by the early death of Plath’s father, when the poet was only ten years old. The poem describes Plath’s deep bitterness concerning the death of her father and her unresolved feelings toward him, with hints of her troubled relationship with the poet Ted Hughes. Daddy was posthumously published in Ariel in 1965.

Front 1168

Identify:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time –
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You –

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two –
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Back 1168

Sylvia Plath Daddy

Front 1169

Identify:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Back 1169

Sylvia Plath The Mirror

Front 1170

Alice Walker

Back 1170

Walker’s writings include novels, stories, essays and poems. They focus on the struggles of African-Americans, and particularly African-American women, against societies that are racist, sexist, and often violent. Her writings tend to emphasize the strength of black women and the importance of African-American heritage and culture.

Front 1171

The Color Purple Alice Walker

Back 1171

The Color Purple is an epistolary novel: that is, the book is written in the form of letters. The central character is Celie, a young woman who is sexually abused by her father (who, she later discovers, is her stepfather) and is forced to marry a widower with several children, who is physically abusive towards her.

When her husband’s mistress, singer “Shug” Avery, comes on the scene. Initially, Celie feels threatened by this effervescent, liberated version of feminity – a form that has previously been alien to her.

Like “Mr-“, Celie’s husband (Albert Johnson), Shug has little respect for Celie and the life she lives at first and continues in her lover’s footsteps, abusing Celie and adding to her humiliation.

In time, however, the two women bond, and Celie gradually learns what it means to become an empowered woman in her own right, through both sexual and financial emancipation and she finds the strength to leave her tyrannical husband.

This book is often argued to address many issues which are important to understanding African-American life during the early-mid 20th century. Its main theme is the position of the black woman in society, as the lowest of the low, put upon both because of her gender and her color. The book also deals with the idea of how Celie finds true emotional and physical love with Avery.

Front 1172

Carson McCullers

Back 1172

An American southern gothic writer. The Ballad of the Sad Café (1955) is the story of the chaos wrought on a woman’s life when her cousin Lymon Willis (a dwarf, both deformed and powerfully charismatic) enters her world.

Front 1173

Carson McCullers The HEart is a Lonely Hunter

Back 1173

Four lonely individuals, marginalized misfits in their families/communities, each obsessed with a vision of his or her place in the world, collect about a single deaf-mute with whom they share their deepest secrets. An adolescent who desires to write symphonies, an itinerant drunk who believes he must organize poor laborers, a black physician whose desire is to motivate his people to demand their rightful place in American society, and a cafe owner whose secret wish is sexually ambiguous, believes that the deaf Mr. Singer understands and validates his or her obsession. Singer, ironically obsessed with a friendship of questionable reciprocity, commits suicide when the friend dies.

Front 1174

Eudora Welty

Back 1174

Her first short story, “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” appeared in 1936. In 1941 she published her first collection of short stories, A Curtain of Green. Her novel, The Optimist’s Daughter , won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

Front 1175

Eudora Welty Delta Wedding

Back 1175

creatively unfolds through the overheard thoughts of the members of the Fairchild family. The oversized clan deals with a massive amount of external and internal issues that focus on both the unity and the conflict within this tight-knit Southern family. This novel does not focus on one person, place, or thing. The protagonist of Delta Wedding is the Fairchild family in that the author tells the story through the voices of the entire family. However, the character of George does stand out as the hero of the novel.

Front 1176

Eudora Welty Why I Live at the PO

Back 1176

Sister, the narrator of “Why I Live at the P.O.”, opens the story explaining why Mr. Whitaker broke up with her and married her sister, Stella-Rondo: she “[t]old him I was one-sided. Bigger on one side than the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I’m the same.” While this bit of dialogue may seem innocent initially, it refers to the folk belief that all women have one breast bigger than the other. Blunt interest in female sexuality is hardly characteristic of the prim southerner misrepresented in so much Welty criticism

Front 1177

Eugene O'Neil

Back 1177

an American playwright. More than any other dramatist, O’Neill introduced the dramatic realism pioneered by Chekhov, Ibsen, and Strindberg into American drama. Generally, his plays involve characters who inhabit the fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into dillusionment and despair.

Front 1178

Mourning Becomes Electra Eugene O'Neil

Back 1178

Mourning Becomes Electra updates the Greek myth of Orestes to the family of a Northern general in the American Civil War. Agamemnon is nowGeneral Ezra Mannon, Clytemnestra is his second wife Christine, Orestes is his son Orin, and Electra is his daughter Lavinia. As an updated Greek tragedy, the play features murder, adultery, incestuous love, and revenge, and even a group of townspeople who function as a kind of Greek chorus. Though fate alone guides characters’ actions in Greek tragedies, O’Neill’s characters have motivations grounded in 1930s-era psychological theory as well. The play can easily be read from a Freudian perspective, paying attention to various characters’ Oedipus complexes and Electra complexes.

It is divided into three plays of four to five acts each. In order, the three plays are titled Homecoming, The Hunted, and The Haunted. However, these plays are never produced individually, but only as part of the larger trilogy. Mourning Becomes Electra is thus extraordinarily lengthy for a drama, and in production is often cut down. Also, because of the large cast size, it is not performed as often as some of O’Neill’s other major plays.

Front 1179

Eugene O'Neil The Iceman Cometh

Back 1179

The Iceman Cometh stages the story of the whiskey-soaked and disillusioned denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon and the upheaval caused by the newly sober salesman Hickey, who — with all the annoying zeal of a recent convert — urges his former drinking companions to give up their “pipe dreams.”

Front 1180

Eugene O'Neil Long Day's Journey Into Night

Back 1180

Long Day’s Journey Into Night covers a fateful, heart-wrenching night at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones (the autobiographical representations of O’Neill himself, his brother, and their parents): James Tyrone Sr., an Irish-born retired actor who squandered his considerable gifts as a classical thespian to make a career playing one particular role in a commercially successful but artistically unfulfilling play; Edmund, the younger and more poetically inclined son, suffers from a respiratory condition and a deep disillusionment with the world around him after sailing the world as a deck hand; the elder son James Jr. (“Jamie“), an affable alcoholic and the object of stubborn repeated attempts by his father to be set up in business, despite his status as a confirmed ne’er-do-well; and the wife and mother of the family, Mary Cavan Tyrone, who lapses between self-delusion and the haze of her morphine addiction – the result of the shoddy ministrations of a quack doctor during her difficult labor and delivery of Edmund twenty-three years prior.

Front 1181

Flannery O'Connor

Back 1181

Considered an important voice in American literature, O’Connor wrote two novels, 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer in the vein of William Faulkner , often writing in a Southern Gothic style and relying heavily on regional settings and grotesques as characters. A “born” Roman Catholic , her writing is deeply informed by the sacramental, and the Thomist notion that the created world is charged with God. Her most famous work is a collection of short stories which includes the eponymous “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

Front 1182

Flannery O'Connor The Life You Save May Be Your Own

Back 1182

A one-armed tramp, appropriately named “Mr. Shiftlet,” walks up to a run-down farm where an old woman and her retarded daughter, Lucynell, are sitting on the front porch. Lucynell cannot talk. Mr. Shiftlet persuades the old woman to hire him for work around the farm and for repairing a car. She says she can feed him but not pay him. Over a period of a few weeks he repairs the car (which is what he really wants) and offers to marry Lucynell if her mother will give him some money

After the wedding Mr. Shiftlet takes Lucynell on a honeymoon, but abandons her in a country diner the first day, claiming she’s a hitchhiker. As he drives towards Mobile, he picks up a boy and begins to lecture him about being good to his mother. The angry boy jumps out of the car, and Mr. Shiftlet prays that God will “break forth and wash the slime from this earth.”

Front 1183

Saul Bellow

Back 1183

acclaimed Canadian-born American Jewish writer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and is best known for writing novels that investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening.

Front 1184

Saul Bellow Herzog

Back 1184

Herzog is a novel set in post-war America. It’s a story of a man, a Jew who has had two unsucessful marriages. The entire novel is about the life of the protagonist, how he copes with the tragedies, his unsent letters to his friends, famous people living or dead. The beauty of the novel lies in the dissection of Herzog’s mind. In typical Bellow style, the descriptions of emotions, physical features are simply brilliant. Herzog’s relationships are the central theme of the novel. It’s about relationships with not just women, friends, but also society and with himself. Many believe Herzog is autobiographical. There are many similarities between Herzog and Saul Bellow (Jewish, Chicago residents, failed marriages, etc.) Herzog’s Jewishness is very visible. One will possibly be reminded of Philip Roth’s novels when reading this. The setting is post-war America and for a traditional Jew this culture is very foreign. This adds subtle humor in the book even though Herzog is going through a tough phase. This book deserves a read and re-read. A thorough understanding of the book makes us think, try to find Herzog’s characteristics in our own selves and avoid the mistakes that Herzog commits.

Front 1185

Saul Bellow Seize the Day

Back 1185

It tells the story of Wilhelm Adler (a.k.a. Tommy Wilhelm) , a non-religious jewish New Yorker in his mid 40’s who is having a midlife crisis. He is financially irresponsible and leaves his family. His wife says that he is like a youngster; she has great confidence is his earning ability, however. Tommy doesn’t receive from his father what he wants most–he needs money to keep him going. The novel is set on Tommy’s “day of reckoning”, which leaves him a broken and humbled man. He is a familiar American type, the desperate man looking to get rick quickly. He thus falls for a con-artist. Tommy finds his surrogate father in a shady psychologist named Dr. Tamkin. The colorful Dr. Tamkin has put Tommy’s money into the commodities market. Tamkin, and the money, disappear when it becomes clear that Tommy’s father won’t be supplying any fresh money for speculation. The charlatan poses as a psychologist who offers “seize the day” type bromides. Tommy’s father, on the other hand, has always been all too prudent, and he seems to live for taunting Tommy about being more responsible.

Tommy has recently had two religious experiences. He had an “onrush of loving kindness” in an early part of the story, but at the end he offers a type of prayer to be delivered from the devil that plagues him. On the final page he is sobbing his heart out in a massive emotional release.

Front 1186

Saul Bellow Henderson the Rain King

Back 1186

Eugene Henderson is an unhappy millionaire and pig farmer who searches for meaning and purpose in his life. His desperation at home brings him on a pilgrimage to Africa, where he hopes to find a new meaning to his seemingly lacking life. After his first native encounter ends in disaster, he arrives in a new village that soon declares him Rain King. With a new found friendship with the native king, Dahfu, Henderson is brought unwillingly into the king’s ritualistic search of a lion thought to be the reincarnation of his predecessor. During this time, Henderson and Dahfu engage in disscussions that help to fill Henderson’s spiritual void. Following another disaster and narrow escape, Henderson returns, planning on becoming a doctor.

Henderson the Rain King (1959) follows a similar theme as his previous work, the short story Seize the Day (1956). Both feature men in or approaching middle age who are plagued by acute desperation and lack meaningful social contacts. While the first ends in a breakdown, Henderson the Rain King ends on a particularly upbeat note, at least in Henderson’s eyes. The philosophical discussions and ramblings that take place between Henderson and the natives and within himself serve as a precursor to Bellow’s next novel, Herzog (1964), which frequently engages in similar inquiries into life and meaning. It was said to be Bellow’s own favourite amongst his books.

Front 1187

Tennessee Williams

Back 1187

An American playwright. Genre critics maintain that Williams writes in the Southern Gothic style. He is known for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Front 1188

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie

Back 1188

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play, and its action is drawn from the memories of the narrator, Tom Wingfield. Tom is a character in the play, which is set in St. Louis in 1937. He is an aspiring poet who toils in a shoe warehouse to support his mother, Amanda, and sister, Laura. Mr. Wingfield, Tom and Laura’s father, ran off years ago and, except for one postcard, has not been heard from since.

Amanda, originally from a genteel Southern family, regales her children frequently with tales of her idyllic youth and the scores of suitors who once pursued her. She is disappointed that Laura, who wears a brace on her leg and is painfully shy, does not attract any gentleman callers. She enrolls Laura in a business college, hoping that she will make her own and the family’s fortune through a business career. Weeks later, however, Amanda discovers that Laura’s crippling shyness has led her to drop out of the class secretly and spend her days wandering the city alone. Amanda then decides that Laura’s last hope must lie in marriage and begins selling newspaper subscriptions to earn the extra money she believes will help to attract suitors for Laura. Meanwhile, Tom, who loathes his warehouse job, finds escape in liquor, movies, and literature, much to his mother’s chagrin. During one of the frequent arguments between mother and son, Tom accidentally breaks several of the glass animal figurines that are Laura’s most prized possessions.

Amanda and Tom discuss Laura’s prospects, and Amanda asks Tom to keep an eye out for potential suitors at the warehouse. Tom selects Jim O’Connor, a casual friend, and invites him to dinner. Amanda quizzes Tom about Jim and is delighted to learn that he is a driven young man with his mind set on career advancement. She prepares an elaborate dinner and insists that Laura wear a new dress. At the last minute, Laura learns the name of her caller; as it turns out, she had a devastating crush on Jim in high school. When Jim arrives, Laura answers the door, on Amanda’s orders, and then quickly disappears, leaving Tom and Jim alone. Tom confides to Jim that he has used the money for his family’s electric bill to join the merchant marine and plans to leave his job and family in search of adventure. Laura refuses to eat dinner with the others, feigning illness. Amanda, wearing an ostentatious dress from her glamorous youth, talks vivaciously with Jim throughout the meal.

As dinner is ending, the lights go out as a consequence of the unpaid electric bill. The characters light candles, and Amanda encourages Jim to entertain Laura in the living room while she and Tom clean up. Laura is at first paralyzed by Jim’s presence, but his warm and open behavior soon draws her out of her shell. She confesses that she knew and liked him in high school but was too shy to approach him. They continue talking, and Laura reminds him of the nickname he had given her: “Blue Roses,” an accidental corruption of the word for Laura’s medical condition, pleurosis. He reproaches her for her shyness and low self-esteem but praises her uniqueness. Laura then ventures to show him her favorite glass animal, a unicorn. Jim dances with her, but in the process, he accidentally knocks over the unicorn, breaking off its horn. Laura is forgiving, noting that now the unicorn is a normal horse. Jim then kisses her, but he quickly draws back and apologizes, explaining that he was carried away by the moment and that he actually has a serious girlfriend. Resigned, Laura offers him the broken unicorn as a souvenir.

Amanda enters the living room, full of good cheer. Jim hastily explains that he must leave because of an appointment with his fiancée. Amanda sees him off warmly but, after he is gone, turns on Tom, who had not known that Jim was engaged. Amanda accuses Tom of being an inattentive, selfish dreamer and then throws herself into comforting Laura. From the fire escape outside of their apartment, Tom watches the two women and explains that, not long after Jim’s visit, he gets fired from his job and leaves Amanda and Laura behind. Years later, though he travels far, he finds that he is unable to leave behind guilty memories of Laura.

Front 1189

Tennessee Williams A Street Car Named Desire

Back 1189

Blanche DuBois is a fading Southern belle whose pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask her nymphomania and alcoholism. After her ancestral southern plantation is “lost” (due to the “epic fornications” of her ancestors), Blanche arrives at her sister’s house in the French Quarter of New Orleans where the multicultural setting is a shock to her nerves. Stella, the sister, is just as addicted to sex as Blanche, and is willing to put up with Stanley’s crudity and lack of culture because of her need for a sexual partner.

The reference to the streetcar (tram) called Desire is ironic, as well as an accurate piece of New Orleans geography. Blanche has to travel on it to reach Stella’s home, the idea being that she has already indulged in desire before she arrives. Her sorrow is that the pleasure brought from desire is only short, just like the streetcar journey. It does not give her security. Still, she cannot return on the streetcar named Desire because she has only a one-way ticket.

Front 1190

Tennessee Williams Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Back 1190

It is the story of a Southern family in crisis, focusing on the turbulent relationship of a wife and husband, Maggie “The Cat” and Brick Pollitt, and their interaction with Brick’s family over the course of a weekend gathering at the family estate in Mississippi, ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of patriarch and tycoon “Big Daddy” Pollitt. Maggie, through wit and beauty, has escaped a childhood of desperate poverty to marry into the wealthy Pollitt family, but finds herself suffering in an unfulfilling marriage. Brick, an aging football hero, has neglected his wife and further infuriates her by ignoring his brother’s attempts to gain control of the family fortune. Brick’s indifference, and his nearly continuous drinking, date back to the recent suicide of his friend Skipper. Although Big Daddy has cancer and will not celebrate another birthday, his doctors and his family have conspired to keep this information from him and his wife. His relatives are in attendance and attempt to present themselves in the best possible light, hoping to receive the definitive share of Big Daddy’s enormous wealth.

Front 1191

Toni Morrison Song of Solomon

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Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon, brought her national attention. A family chronicle similar to Alex Haley’s Roots, the novel follows the life of Macon “Milkman” Dead III, a black man living in Chicago, Illinois, from birth to adulthood.

Morrison’s protagonist, Macon “Milkman” Dead III, derives his nickname from the fact that he was breastfed during childhood (Macon’s age can be inferred as he was wearing pants with elastic instead of a diaper, and that he later forgets the event, suggesting he was still rather young). Milkman’s father’s employee, Freddie, happens to see him through the window being breastfed by his mother. He quickly gains a reputation for being a “Momma’s boy” in direct contrast to his (future) best friend, Guitar, who is motherless and fatherless.

Milkman has two sisters, “First Corinthians” and “Magdelene called Lena.” The daughters of the family are named by putting a pin in the Bible, while the eldest son is named after his father. The first Macon Dead’s name was the result of an administrative error when Milkman’s grandfather had to register subsequent to the end of slavery.

Milkman’s mother (Ruth Foster Dead) is the daughter of the town’s only black doctor; she makes her husband feel inadequate, and it is clear she idolized her father, Doctor Foster, to the point of obsession. After her father dies, her husband claims to have found her in bed with the dead body, sucking his fingers. Ruth later tells Milkman that she was kneeling at her father’s bedside kissing the only part of him that remained unaffected by the illness from which he died. These conflicting stories expose the problems between his parents and show Milkman that “truth” is difficult or impossible to obtain. Macon (Jr.) is often violently aggressive towards Ruth because he believes that she was involved sexually with her father and loved her father more than her own husband. On one occasion, Milkman punches his father after he strikes Milkman’s mother, exposing the growing rift between father and son.

In contrast, Macon Dead Jr.’s sister, Pilate, is seen as nurturing—an Earth Mother character. Born without a navel, she is a somewhat mystical character. It is strongly implied that she is Divine—a female Christ-in spite of her name. Macon (Jr.) has not spoken to his sister for years and does not think highly of her. She, like Macon, has had to fend for herself from an early age after their father’s murder, but she has dealt with her past in a different way than Macon, who has embraced money as the way to show his love for his father. Pilate has a daughter, Reba, and a granddaughter named Hagar. Hagar falls desperately and obsessively in love with Milkman, and is unable to cope with his rejection, attempting to kill him at least six times.

Hagar is not the only character who attempts to kill Milkman. Guitar, Milkman’s erstwhile best friend, tries to kill Milkman more than once after incorrectly suspecting that Milkman has cheated him out of hidden gold, a fortune he planned to use to help his Seven Days group fund their revenge killings in response to killings of blacks.

Searching for the gold near the old family farm in Pennsylvania, Milkman stops at the rotting Butler Mansion, former home of the people who killed his ancestor to claim the farm. Here he meets Circe, an almost supernaturally old ex-slave of the Butlers. She tells Milkman of his family history and this leads him to the town of Shalimar. There he learns his great-grandfather Solomon was said to have escaped slavery by flying back to Africa, leaving behind twenty-one children and his wife Ryna, who goes crazy with loss. Returning home, he learns that Hagar has died of a broken heart. He accompanies Pilate back to Shalimar, where she is accidentally shot and killed by Guitar, who had intended to kill Milkman.

The novel ends on a poignant note. In an attempt to confront and reconnect with Guitar, Milkman leaps toward Guitar—and his own death, uttering his hard-won psychological truth: “if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.” Milkman’s death brings the novel full circle, from the initial suicide “flight” of insurance agent Robert Smith to the self-sacrificing “flight” by Milkman.

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Toni Morrison Beloved

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Beloved is loosely based on the life and legal case of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her child to prevent the child from being taken back into slavery. The book’s central figure is Sethe, who murdered her two-year-old daughter, Beloved, to save her from a life of slavery. The novel follows in the tradition of slave narratives but also confronts the more painful and taboo aspects of slavery, such as sexual abuse and violence. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award, a number of writers protested the omission.

The book follows the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver as they try to rebuild their lives after having escaped from slavery. Their home, 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, is haunted by a revenant, who turns out to be the ghost of Sethe’s daughter. Because of the haunting—which often involves things being thrown around the room—Sethe’s youngest daughter, Denver, is shy, friendless, and housebound, and her sons, Howard and Buglar,have run away from home by the time they are thirteen. Shortly afterward, Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe’s husband Halle, dies in her bed.

Paul D, one of the slaves from Sweet Home, the plantation where Baby Suggs, Sethe, Halle, he, and many other slaves had worked, arrives at 124. He tries to bring a sense of reality into the house. He also tries to make the family move forward and leave the past behind. In doing so, he forces out the ghost of Beloved. At first, he seems to be successful, because he leads the family to a carnival, out of the house for the first time in years. However, on their way back, they encounter a young woman sitting in front of the house. She has the distinct features of a baby and calls herself Beloved. Denver recognizes right away that she must be a reincarnation of her sister Beloved. Paul D, suspicious, warns Sethe, but charmed by the young woman, Sethe ignores him. Paul D is gradually forced out of Sethe’s home by a supernatural presence.

When made to sleep outside in a shed, he is cornered by Beloved, who has put a spell on him. She burrows into his mind and heart, forcing him to have sex with her, while flooding his mind with horrific memories from his past. Overwhelmed with guilt, Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it but cannot and instead says he wants her pregnant. Sethe is elated, and Paul D resists Beloved and her influence over him. But, when he tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. Stamp Paid reveals the reason for the community’s rejection of Sethe.

When Paul D asks Sethe about it, she tells him what happened. After escaping from Sweet Home and making it to her mother-in-law’s home where her children were waiting, Sethe was found by her master, who attempted to reclaim Sethe and her children. Sethe grabbed her children, ran into the tool shed and tried to kill them all, succeeding only with her oldest daughter. Sethe explains to Paul D, saying she was “trying to put my babies where they would be safe.” The revelation is too much for him, and he leaves for good. Without Paul D, the sense of reality and time moving forward disappears.

Sethe comes to believe that the girl, Beloved, is the daughter she murdered when the girl was only two years old; her tombstone reads only “Beloved”. Sethe begins to spend carelessly and spoil Beloved out of guilt. Beloved becomes angry and more demanding, throwing hellish tantrums when she doesn’t get her way. Beloved’s presence consumes Sethe’s life to the point where she becomes depleted and sacrifices her own need for eating, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger. In the climax of the novel, Denver, the youngest daughter, reaches out and searches for help from the black community. People arrive at 124 to exorcise Beloved, and it is revealed that Beloved was not getting fat, as previously alluded, but is in fact pregnant from her encounters with Paul D. While Sethe is confused and has a “rememory” of her master coming again, Beloved disappears.

At the outset, the reader is led to assume Beloved is a supernatural, incarnate form of Sethe’s murdered daughter. Later, Stamp Paid reveals the story of “a girl locked up by a white man over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that’s her”. Both are supportable by the text. Beloved sings a song known only to Sethe and her children; elsewhere, she speaks of Sethe’s earrings without having seen them.

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Chinua Achebe

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considered the father of the African novel in English as well as one of the world’s most acclaimed writers.

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Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart

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explores the forces that drive the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a leader in the Umuofia clan and the influences of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on his traditional Ibo (also spelled Igbo) community.

Things Fall Apart is considered one of the major works in African postcolonial literature because it presents the life, culture, and complexities of a traditional African people with breathtaking honesty, dignity and humanity. The story of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart has been compared in western countries to Greek tragedy, as the very characteristics that make Okonkwo a great leader in his clan (strength, inflexibility) lead ultimately to his death.

The title of the book comes from a poem, “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats, and is quoted in the frontpiece of the book:

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Nadine Gordimer

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Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923) is a South African (Jewish) novelist and writer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature and 1974 Booker Prize.

Nadine Gordimer’s subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. She was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to accommodate the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), was based largely on her own life and set in her home town. Her next three novels, A World of Strangers (1958); Occasion for Loving (1963), which focuses on an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman; and The Late Bourgeois World (1966) deal with master-servant relations in South African life. In 1974, her novel The Conservationist, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction.

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Euripides

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known primarily for having reshaped the formal structure of traditional Attic tragedy by showing strong women characters and smart slaves, and by satirizing many heroes of Greek mythology. His plays seem modern by comparison with those of his contemporaries, focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown to Greek audiences.

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Euripides Iphigenia at Aulis

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At the start of the play, Agamemnon is having second thoughts about whether he can go through with the sacrifice of his daughter, and he sends a second message to his wife, telling her to ignore the first missive. However, Clytemnestra never receives this message because it is intercepted by Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother, who is enraged that his brother has changed his mind.

To Menelaus, this is not only a personal blow (it is his wife, Helen , with whom the Trojan prince Paris ran off, and retrieving her is a main pretext for the war), but it also may lead to mutiny and the downfall of the Greek leaders if the rank and file discover Calchas’ prophecy and realize that their general put his family above their pride as soldiers.

The brothers debate, and eventually, each changes the other’s mind: Agamemnon is now ready to carry out the sacrifice, and Menelaus is convinced that it would be better to disband the Greek army than to have his niece killed. But by this time, Clytemnestra is already en route to Aulis with Iphigeneia and her baby brother, Orestes , making the decision of how to proceed all the more difficult.
Iphigeneia is thrilled at the prospect of marrying one of the great heroes of the Greek army, but she, her mother, and the groom-to-be in the supposed marriage soon discover the truth. Achilles is furious at having been used as a prop in Agamemnon’s plan to lure his family to Aulis, and he vows to protect Iphigeneia – as much to save the innocent girl as to take revenge on her father for besmirching his own honor.

Clytemnestra and Iphigeneia try in vain to persuade Agamemnon to change his mind, but the general believes he has no choice. But as Achilles prepares to defend the young woman by force, Iphigeneia has a sudden change of heart and decides that the heroic thing to do is to let herself be sacrificed. She is led off to die, with her mother Clytemnestra distraught over the decision.

However, in an addition to the play, a messenger arrives in the end to inform Clytemnestra that at the last minute, just as Agamemnon was about to kill their daughter, Artemis, apparently appeased, switched the body of Iphigeneia with that of a deer, which was sacrificed in the girl’s stead. Iphigeneia was swept off by the gods, thus paving the way for the plot of another of Euripides’ plays, Iphigeneia in Tauris .

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Euripides Medea

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Medea is a tragedy written by Euripides, based on the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. Along with the plays Philoctetes, Dictys and Theristai, which were all entered as a group, it won the third prize at the Dionysia festival. The plot largely centres on the protagonist in a struggle with the world, rendering it the most Sophoclean of Euripides’ extant plays. Euripides breaks with tradition, having a female lead with what in Greek drama were very male characteristics and by having a female chorus, the chorus was usually city elders. The play is notable in that either Medea or Jason can be viewed as the tragic hero.

The play tells the story of the jealousy and revenge of a woman betrayed by her husband. The concentrated action of the play is at Corinth, where Jason has brought Medea after the adventures of the Golden Fleece but has now left her to marry the daughter of King Creon (elsewhere known as Glauce, and also known in Latin works as Creusa – see Seneca the Younger’s Medea and Propertius 2.16.30). The play opens with Medea grieving over her loss, and her elderly nurse fearing what she might do to herself or her children.

Creon, also fearing what Medea might do, arrives determined to send Medea into exile. Medea pleads for one day’s delay. She then begins to plan the deaths of Jason, Glauce, and Creon. Meanwhile Jason arrives to confront her and explain himself. He believes he could not pass up the opportunity to marry a royal princess, as Medea is only a barbarian woman, but hopes to someday join the two families and keep Medea as his mistress. Medea, and the chorus of Corinthian women, do not buy his story. She reminds him that she left her own barbarian people for him (“I am the mother of your children. Whither can I fly, since all Greece hates the barbarian?”), and that she had caused Pelias, whom he feared, to be killed by his own daughters.
She refuses with scorn his base gifts, “Marry the maid if thou wilt; perchance full soon thou mayst rue thy nuptials.”

Next Medea is visited by Aegeus, King of Athens, who shares the prophecy that will lead to the birth of Theseus; Medea begs him to protect her, in return for her help in his wife conceiving a child. Aegeus does not know what Medea is going to do in Corinth, but promises to give her refuge in any case, provided she can escape to Athens.

Medea then returns to her scheming, plotting how she may kill Creus and Glauce. She decides to poison some golden robes (a family heirloom and gift from the sun god), in hopes that the bride will not be able to resist wearing them, and consequently be poisoned. Medea resolves to kill her own children as well, not because the children have done anything wrong, but because she feels it is the best way to hurt Jason. She calls for Jason once more, falsely apologizes to him, and sends the poisoned robes with her children as the gift-bearers.

“Forgive what I said in anger! I will yield to the decree, and only beg one favor, that my children may stay. They shall take to the princess a costly robe and a golden crown, and pray for her protection.”

The request is granted and the gifts are accepted. Offstage, while Medea ponders her actions, Glauce is killed by the poisoned dress, and Creon is also killed by the poison while attempting to save her. These events are related by a messenger.

“Alas! The bride had died in horrible agony; for no sooner had she put on Medea’s gifts than a devouring poison consumed her limbs as with fire, and in his endeavor to save his daughter the old father died too.”

Medea is pleased, and gives a soliloquy pondering her next action.

She rushes offstage with a knife to kill her children. As the chorus laments her decision, the children are heard screaming. Jason rushes to the scene to punish her for the murder of Glauce and learns that his children too have been killed. Medea then appears above the stage in the chariot of the sun god Helios; this was probably accomplished using the mechane device usually reserved for the appearance of a god or goddess. She confronts Jason, revelling in his pain at being unable to ever hold his children again:

“I do not leave my children’s bodies with thee; I take them with me that I may bury them in Hera’s precinct. And for thee, who didst me all that evil, I prophesy an evil doom.”

She escapes to Athens with the bodies. The chorus is left contemplating the will of Zeus in Medea’s actions.

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Characters from Homer's Odyssey

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Odysseus – The protagonist of the Odyssey. Odysseus fought among the other Greek heroes at Troy and now struggles to return to his kingdom in Ithaca. Odysseus is the husband of Queen Penelope and the father of Prince Telemachus. Though a strong and courageous warrior, he is most renowned for his cunning. He is a favorite of the goddess Athena, who often sends him divine aid, but a bitter enemy of Poseidon, who frustrates his journey at every turn.

Telemachus – Odysseus’s son. An infant when Odysseus left for Troy, Telemachus is about twenty at the beginning of the story. He is a natural obstacle to the suitors desperately courting his mother, but despite his courage and good heart, he initially lacks the poise and confidence to oppose them. His maturation, especially during his trip to Pylos and Sparta in Books 3 and 4, provides a subplot to the epic. Athena often assists him.

Penelope – Wife of Odysseus and mother of Telemachus. Penelope spends her days in the palace pining for the husband who left for Troy twenty years earlier and never returned. Homer portrays her as sometimes flighty and excitable but also clever and steadfastly true to her husband.

Athena – Daughter of Zeus and goddess of wisdom, purposeful battle, and the womanly arts. Athena assists Odysseus and Telemachus with divine powers throughout the epic, and she speaks up for them in the councils of the gods on Mount Olympus. She often appears in disguise as Mentor, an old friend of Odysseus.

Poseidon – God of the sea. As the suitors are Odysseus’s mortal antagonists, Poseidon is his divine antagonist. He despises Odysseus for blinding his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, and constantly hampers his journey home. Ironically, Poseidon is the patron of the seafaring Phaeacians, who ultimately help to return Odysseus to Ithaca.

Zeus – King of gods and men, who mediates the disputes of the gods on Mount Olympus. Zeus is occasionally depicted as weighing men’s fates in his scales. He sometimes helps Odysseus or permits Athena to do the same.

Antinous – The most arrogant of Penelope’s suitors. Antinous leads the campaign to have Telemachus killed. Unlike the other suitors, he is never portrayed sympathetically, and he is the first to die when Odysseus returns.

Eurymachus – A manipulative, deceitful suitor. Eurymachus’s charisma and duplicity allow him to exert some influence over the other suitors.

Amphinomus – Among the dozens of suitors, the only decent man seeking Penelope’s hand in marriage. Amphinomus sometimes speaks up for Odysseus and Telemachus, but he is killed like the rest of the suitors in the final fight.

Eumaeus – The loyal shepherd who, along with the cowherd Philoetius, helps Odysseus reclaim his throne after his return to Ithaca. Even though he does not know that the vagabond who appears at his hut is Odysseus, Eumaeus gives the man food and shelter.

Eurycleia – The aged and loyal servant who nursed Odysseus and Telemachus when they were babies. Eurycleia is well informed about palace intrigues and serves as confidante to her masters. She keeps Telemachus’s journey secret from Penelope, and she later keeps Odysseus’s identity a secret after she recognizes a scar on his leg.

Melanthius – The brother of Melantho. Melanthius is a treacherous and opportunistic goatherd who supports the suitors, especially Eurymachus, and abuses the beggar who appears in Odysseus’s palace, not realizing that the man is Odysseus himself.

Melantho – Sister of Melanthius and maidservant in Odysseus’s palace. Like her brother, Melantho abuses the beggar in the palace, not knowing that the man is Odysseus. She is having an affair with Eurymachus.

Calypso – The beautiful nymph who falls in love with Odysseus when he lands on her island-home of Ogygia. Calypso holds him prisoner there for seven years until Hermes, the messenger god, persuades her to let him go.

Polyphemus – One of the Cyclopes (uncivilized one-eyed giants) whose island Odysseus comes to soon after leaving Troy. Polyphemus imprisons Odysseus and his crew and tries to eat them, but Odysseus blinds him through a clever ruse and manages to escape. In doing so, however, Odysseus angers Polyphemus’s father, Poseidon.

Circe – The beautiful witch-goddess who transforms Odysseus’s crew into swine when he lands on her island. With Hermes’ help, Odysseus resists Circe’s powers and then becomes her lover, living in luxury at her side for a year.

Laertes – Odysseus’s aging father, who resides on a farm in Ithaca. In despair and physical decline, Laertes regains his spirit when Odysseus returns and eventually kills Antinous’s father.

Tiresias – A Theban prophet who inhabits the underworld. Tiresias meets Odysseus when Odysseus journeys to the underworld in Book 11. He shows Odysseus how to get back to Ithaca and allows Odysseus to communicate with the other souls in Hades.

Nestor – King of Pylos and a former warrior in the Trojan War. Like Odysseus, Nestor is known as a clever speaker. Telemachus visits him in Book 3 to ask about his father, but Nestor knows little of Odysseus’s whereabouts.

Menelaus – King of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon, and husband of Helen, he helped lead the Greeks in the Trojan War. He offers Telemachus assistance in his quest to find Odysseus when Telemachus visits him in Book 4.

Helen – Wife of Menelaus and queen of Sparta. Helen’s abduction from Sparta by the Trojans sparked the Trojan War. Her beauty is without parallel, but she is criticized for giving in to her Trojan captors and thereby costing many Greek men their lives. She offers Telemachus assistance in his quest to find his father.

Agamemnon – Former king of Mycenae, brother of Menelaus, and commander of the Achaean forces at Troy. Odysseus encounters Agamemnon’s spirit in Hades. Agamemnon was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus, upon his return from the war. He was later avenged by his son Orestes. Their story is constantly repeated in the Odyssey to offer an inverted image of the fortunes of Odysseus and Telemachus.

Nausicaa – The beautiful daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete of the Phaeacians. Nausicaa discovers Odysseus on the beach at Scheria and, out of budding affection for him, ensures his warm reception at her parents’ palace.

Alcinous – King of the Phaeacians, who offers Odysseus hospitality in his island kingdom of Scheria. Alcinous hears the story of Odysseus’s wanderings and provides him with safe passage back to Ithaca.

Arete – Queen of the Phaeacians, wife of Alcinous, and mother of Nausicaa. Arete is intelligent and influential. Nausicaa tells Odysseus to make his appeal for assistance to Arete.

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Homer The Iliad & The Odyssey

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Both Begin In Media Res (In the MIddle of things) Both written in dactylic hexameter

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The Iliad Homer Characters

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Achilles – The son of the military man Peleus and the sea-nymph Thetis. The most powerful warrior in The Iliad, Achilles commands the Myrmidons, soldiers from his homeland of Phthia in Greece. Proud and headstrong, he takes offense easily and reacts with blistering indignation when he perceives that his honor has been slighted. Achilles’ wrath at Agamemnon for taking his war prize, the maiden Briseis, forms the main subject of The Iliad.

Agamemnon (also called “Atrides”) – King of Mycenae and leader of the Achaean army; brother of King Menelaus of Sparta. Arrogant and often selfish, Agamemnon provides the Achaeans with strong but sometimes reckless and self-serving leadership. Like Achilles, he lacks consideration and forethought. Most saliently, his tactless appropriation of Achilles’ war prize, the maiden Briseis, creates a crisis for the Achaeans, when Achilles, insulted, withdraws from the war.

Patroclus – Achilles’ beloved friend, companion, and advisor, Patroclus grew up alongside the great warrior in Phthia, under the guardianship of Peleus. Devoted to both Achilles and the Achaean cause, Patroclus stands by the enraged Achilles but also dons Achilles’ terrifying armor in an attempt to hold the Trojans back.

Odysseus – A fine warrior and the cleverest of the Achaean commanders. Along with Nestor, Odysseus is one of the Achaeans’ two best public speakers. He helps mediate between Agamemnon and Achilles during their quarrel and often prevents them from making rash decisions.

Diomedes (also called “Tydides”) – The youngest of the Achaean commanders, Diomedes is bold and sometimes proves impetuous. After Achilles withdraws from combat, Athena inspires Diomedes with such courage that he actually wounds two gods, Aphrodite and Ares.

Great Ajax – An Achaean commander, Great Ajax (sometimes called “Telamonian Ajax” or simply “Ajax”) is the second mightiest Achaean warrior after Achilles. His extraordinary size and strength help him to wound Hector twice by hitting him with boulders. He often fights alongside Little Ajax, and the pair is frequently referred to as the “Aeantes.”

Little Ajax – An Achaean commander, Little Ajax is the son of Oileus (to be distinguished from Great Ajax, the son of Telamon). He often fights alongside Great Ajax, whose stature and strength complement Little Ajax’s small size and swift speed. The two together are sometimes called the “Aeantes.”

Nestor – King of Pylos and the oldest Achaean commander. Although age has taken much of Nestor’s physical strength, it has left him with great wisdom. He often acts as an advisor to the military commanders, especially Agamemnon. Nestor and Odysseus are the Achaeans’ most deft and persuasive orators, although Nestor’s speeches are sometimes long-winded.

Menelaus – King of Sparta; the younger brother of Agamemnon. While it is the abduction of his wife, Helen, by the Trojan prince Paris that sparks the Trojan War, Menelaus proves quieter, less imposing, and less arrogant than Agamemnon. Though he has a stout heart, Menelaus is not among the mightiest Achaean warriors.

Idomeneus – King of Crete and a respected commander. Idomeneus leads a charge against the Trojans in Book 13.

Machaon – A healer. Machaon is wounded by Paris in Book 11.

Calchas – An important soothsayer. Calchas’s identification of the cause of the plague ravaging the Achaean army in Book 1 leads inadvertently to the rift between Agamemnon and Achilles that occupies the first nineteen books of The Iliad.

Peleus – Achilles’ father and the grandson of Zeus. Although his name often appears in the epic, Peleus never appears in person. Priam powerfully invokes the memory of Peleus when he convinces Achilles to return Hector’s corpse to the Trojans in Book 24.

Phoenix – A kindly old warrior, Phoenix helped raise Achilles while he himself was still a young man. Achilles deeply loves and trusts Phoenix, and Phoenix mediates between him and Agamemnon during their quarrel.

The Myrmidons – The soldiers under Achilles’ command, hailing from Achilles’ homeland, Phthia.

The Trojans

Hector – A son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, Hector is the mightiest warrior in the Trojan army. He mirrors Achilles in some of his flaws, but his bloodlust is not so great as that of Achilles. He is devoted to his wife, Andromache, and son, Astyanax, but resents his brother Paris for bringing war upon their family and city.

Priam – King of Troy and husband of Hecuba, Priam is the father of fifty Trojan warriors, including Hector and Paris. Though too old to fight, he has earned the respect of both the Trojans and the Achaeans by virtue of his level-headed, wise, and benevolent rule. He treats Helen kindly, though he laments the war that her beauty has sparked.

Hecuba – Queen of Troy, wife of Priam, and mother of Hector and Paris.

Paris (also known as “Alexander”) – A son of Priam and Hecuba and brother of Hector. Paris’s abduction of the beautiful Helen, wife of Menelaus, sparked the Trojan War. Paris is self-centered and often unmanly. He fights effectively with a bow and arrow (never with the more manly sword or spear) but often lacks the spirit for battle and prefers to sit in his room making love to Helen while others fight for him, thus earning both Hector’s and Helen’s scorn.

Helen – Reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the ancient world, Helen left her husband, Menelaus, to run away with Paris. She loathes herself now for the misery that she has caused so many Trojan and Achaean men. Although her contempt extends to Paris as well, she continues to stay with him.

Aeneas – A Trojan nobleman, the son of Aphrodite, and a mighty warrior. The Romans believed that Aeneas later founded their city (he is the protagonist of Virgil’s masterpiece the Aeneid).

Andromache – Hector’s loving wife, Andromache begs Hector to withdraw from the war and save himself before the Achaeans kill him.

Astyanax – Hector and Andromache’s infant son.

Polydamas – A young Trojan commander, Polydamas sometimes figures as a foil for Hector, proving cool-headed and prudent when Hector charges ahead. Polydamas gives the Trojans sound advice, but Hector seldom acts on it.

Glaucus – A powerful Trojan warrior, Glaucus nearly fights a duel with Diomedes. The men’s exchange of armor after they realize that their families are friends illustrates the value that ancients placed on kinship and camaraderie.

Agenor – A Trojan warrior who attempts to fight Achilles in Book 21. Agenor delays Achilles long enough for the Trojan army to flee inside Troy’s walls.

Dolon – A Trojan sent to spy on the Achaean camp in Book 10.

Pandarus – A Trojan archer. Pandarus’s shot at Menelaus in Book 4 breaks the temporary truce between the two sides.

Antenor – A Trojan nobleman, advisor to King Priam, and father of many Trojan warriors. Antenor argues that Helen should be returned to Menelaus in order to end the war, but Paris refuses to give her up.

Sarpedon – One of Zeus’s sons. Sarpedon’s fate seems intertwined with the gods’ quibbles, calling attention to the unclear nature of the gods’ relationship to Fate.

Chryseis – Chryses’ daughter, a priest of Apollo in a Trojan-allied town.

Briseis – A war prize of Achilles. When Agamemnon is forced to return Chryseis to her father, he appropriates Briseis as compensation, sparking Achilles’ great rage.

Chryses – A priest of Apollo in a Trojan-allied town; the father of Chryseis, whom Agamemnon takes as a war prize.

The Gods and Immortals

Zeus – King of the gods and husband of Hera, Zeus claims neutrality in the mortals’ conflict and often tries to keep the other gods from participating in it. However, he throws his weight behind the Trojan side for much of the battle after the sulking Achilles has his mother, Thetis, ask the god to do so.

Hera – Queen of the gods and Zeus’s wife, Hera is a conniving, headstrong woman. She often goes behind Zeus’s back in matters on which they disagree, working with Athena to crush the Trojans, whom she passionately hates.

Athena – The goddess of wisdom, purposeful battle, and the womanly arts; Zeus’s daughter. Like Hera, Athena passionately hates the Trojans and often gives the Achaeans valuable aid.

Thetis – A sea-nymph and the devoted mother of Achilles, Thetis gets Zeus to help the Trojans and punish the Achaeans at the request of her angry son. When Achilles finally rejoins the battle, she commissions Hephaestus to design him a new suit of armor.

Apollo – A son of Zeus and twin brother of the goddess Artemis, Apollo is god of the arts and archery. He supports the Trojans and often intervenes in the war on their behalf.

Aphrodite – Goddess of love and daughter of Zeus, Aphrodite is married to Hephaestus but maintains a romantic relationship with Ares. She supports Paris and the Trojans throughout the war, though she proves somewhat ineffectual in battle.

Poseidon – The brother of Zeus and god of the sea. Poseidon holds a long-standing grudge against the Trojans because they never paid him for helping them to build their city. He therefore supports the Achaeans in the war.

Hephaestus – God of fire and husband of Aphrodite, Hephaestus is the gods’ metalsmith and is known as the lame or crippled god. Although the text doesn’t make clear his sympathies in the mortals’ struggle, he helps the Achaeans by forging a new set of armor for Achilles and by rescuing Achilles during his fight with a river god.

Artemis – Goddess of the hunt, daughter of Zeus, and twin sister of Apollo. Artemis supports the Trojans in the war.

Ares – God of war and lover of Aphrodite, Ares generally supports the Trojans in the war.

Hermes – The messenger of the gods. Hermes escorts Priam to Achilles’ tent in Book 24.

Iris – Zeus’s messenger.

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The Aeneid Virgil

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a Latin epic written by Virgil in the 1st century BC (between 29 and 19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is written in dactylic hexameter.

Virgil begins his poem with a statement of his theme (Arma virumque cano…, “I sing of arms and the man…”) and an invocation to his Muse (Musa, mihi causas memora…, “O Muse, relate to me the reasons…”). He then explains the cause of the principal conflict of the plot; in this case, the resentment held by Juno against the Trojan people. This is in keeping with the style of the Homeric epics, except in that Virgil states the theme and then invokes his Muse, whereas Homer invokes the Muse and then states the theme.

Also in the manner of Homer, the story proper begins in medias res, with the Trojan fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, heading in the direction of Italy. Juno stirs up a storm which is on the verge of sinking the fleet. Neptune takes notice: although he himself is no friend of the Trojans, he is infuriated by Juno’s intrusion into his domain, and stills the winds and calms the waters. The fleet takes shelter on the coast of Africa, where Aeneas gains the favor of Dido, queen of Carthage, a city which has only recently been founded by refugees from Tyre and which will later become Rome’s greatest enemy.

At a banquet given in the honor of the Trojans, Aeneas recounts the events which occasioned the Trojans’ fortuitous arrival. He begins the tale shortly after the events described in the Iliad, and tells of the end of the Trojan War, the ruse of the Trojan Horse, the sack of Troy by the Greek armies, and his escape with his son Ascanius and father Anchises, his wife Creusa having been separated from the others and subsequently killed in the general catastrophe. She was later turned into a minor goddess. He tells of how, rallying the other survivors, he built a fleet of ships and made landfall at various locations in the Mediterranean (including Thrace, Crete and Epirus) before being divinely advised to seek out the land of Italy (also known as Ausonia or Hesperia), where his descendants would not only prosper, but in time rule the entire known world. The fleet reached as far as Sicily and was making for the mainland, until Juno raised up the storm which drove it back across the sea to Carthage.

During the banquet, Dido realizes that she has fallen madly in love with Aeneas, although she had previously sworn fidelity to the soul of her late husband, Sychaeus, who was murdered by her cupidinous brother Pygmalion. Juno seizes upon this opportunity to make a deal with Venus, Aeneas’ mother, with the intention of distracting him from his destiny of founding a city in Italy. Aeneas is inclined to return Dido’s love, and during a hunting expedition, a storm drives them into a cave in which Aeneas and Dido presumably have sex, an event that Dido takes to indicate a marriage between them. But when Jupiter sends Mercury to remind him of his duty, he has no choice but to part. Her heart broken, Dido commits suicide by stabbing herself upon a pyre with a sword. Before dying, she predicts eternal strife between Aeneas’s people and hers; “rise up from my bones, avenging spirit” is an obvious invocation to Hannibal. Looking back from the deck of his ship, Aeneas sees Dido’s funeral pyre’s smoke and knows its meaning only too clearly. However, destiny calls and the Trojan fleet sails on to Italy.

Aeneas’s father Anchises having been hastily interred on Sicily during the fleet’s previous landfall there, the Trojans returned to the island to hold funeral games in his honor. Eventually, the fleet lands on the mainland of Italy and further adventures ensue. Aeneas descends to the underworld through an opening at Cumae, where he speaks with the spirit of his father and has a prophetic vision of the destiny of Rome. Returning to the land of the living, he leads the Trojans to settle in the land of Latium, where he courts Lavinia, the daughter of king Latinus. A war ensues between the Trojans and some of the indigenous peoples of Italy, which is brought to a close when Lavinia’s rejected suitor Turnus, king of the Rutuli, challenges Aeneas to a duel in which Turnus is slain.

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Virgil The Eclogues

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Written in around 37 BC, it consists of ten poems with a rural setting. (For this reason, they are sometimes known as “The Bucolics”.) Most of the individual poems are in the form of conversations between characters with names such as “Tityrus” (supposedly representing Virgil himself), “Meliboeus”, “Menalcas” and “Mopsus”.Psyche, in Roman mythology, beautiful princess loved by Cupid, god of love. Jealous of Psyche’s beauty, Venus, goddess of love, ordered her son, Cupid, to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest man in the world. Fortunately for Psyche, Cupid instead fell in love with her and carried her off to a secluded palace where he visited her only by night, unseen and unrecognized by her. Although Cupid had forbidden her ever to look upon his face, one night Psyche lit a lamp and looked upon him while he slept. Because she had disobeyed him, Cupid abandoned her, and Psyche was left to wander desolately throughout the world in search of him. Finally, after many trials she was reunited with Cupid and was made immortal by Jupiter, king of the gods.

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Virgil Cupid and Psyche

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The tale of Cupid and Psyche first appeared as a digressionary story told by an old woman in Lucius Apuleius’ novel, The Golden Ass, written in the second century CE. Apuleius probably used an earlier folk-tale as the basis for his story, modifying it to suit the thematic needs of his novel. Read on its own, it is for the most part a mixture of straightforward fairy tale and parody.

Psyche, in Roman mythology, beautiful princess loved by Cupid, god of love. Jealous of Psyche’s beauty, Venus, goddess of love, ordered her son, Cupid, to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest man in the world. Fortunately for Psyche, Cupid instead fell in love with her and carried her off to a secluded palace where he visited her only by night, unseen and unrecognized by her. Although Cupid had forbidden her ever to look upon his face, one night Psyche lit a lamp and looked upon him while he slept. Because she had disobeyed him, Cupid abandoned her, and Psyche was left to wander desolately throughout the world in search of him. Finally, after many trials she was reunited with Cupid and was made immortal by Jupiter, king of the gods.

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Various characters from Greek Mythology

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Niobe – A mortal woman in Greek mythology, Niobe, daughter of Tantalus and either Euryanassa, Eurythemista, Clytia, Dione, or Laodice, and the wife of Amphion, boasted of her superiority to Leto because she had fourteen children (Niobids), seven male and seven female, while Leto had only two. Apollo killed her sons as they practiced athletics, with the last begging for his life (Apollo would have spared his life, but had already released the arrow), and Artemis, her daughters. Apollo and Artemis used poisoned arrows to kill them, though according to some versions a number of the Niobids were spared (Chloris, usually). Amphion, at the sight of his dead sons, either killed himself or was killed by Apollo after swearing revenge. A devastated Niobe fled to Mount Sipylus in Asia Minor and turned into stone as she wept, or committed suicide. Her tears formed the river Achelous. Zeus had turned all the people of Thebes to stone and so no one buried the Niobids until the ninth day after their death, when the gods themselves entombed them.

Lamia – On the fringes of Greek mythology Lamia was one of the monstrous bogeys that terrified children and the naive, like her daughter Scylla, or Empousa. Laimos is the gullet, and she had a cannibal appetite for children that could be interpreted as a dangerous erotic appetite for men: harlots might be named “Lamia.”

Ariadne – In later Greek mythology, Ariadne’s divine origins were submerged and she became known as the daughter of King Minos of Crete, who conquered Athens after his son was murdered there. The Athenians were required to sacrifice seven young men and seven maidens each year to the Minotaur. One year, the sacrificial party included Theseus, a young man who volunteered to come and kill the Minotaur. Ariadne fell in love at the first sight of him, and helped him by giving him a magic sword and a ball of thread so that he could find his way out the Minotaur’s labyrinth. She ran away with Theseus after he achieved his goal, and according to Homer was punished by Artemis with death, but in Hesiod and most others accounts, he left her sleeping on Naxos, and Dionysus wedded her. With Dionysus, she was the mother of Oenopion.

Cassandra – In Greek mythology, Cassandra (“she who entangles men”) (also known as Alexandra) was a daughter of King Priam of Troy and his queen Hecuba, who captured the eye of Apollo and so was given the ability to see the future. However, when she did not return his love, he placed a curse on her so that no one would ever believe her predictions. Thus Cassandra foresees the destruction of Troy (she warns the Trojans about the Trojan Horse, the death of Agamemnon, and her own demise), but is unable to do anything about them. Coroebus and Othronus came to the aid of Troy out of love for Cassandra. Cassandra was the first to see the body of her brother Hector being brought back to the city.

Daphne – Pursued by Apollo who has been shot with an arrow by Eros, Daphne prays Pheneus to be turned into a tree, which later becomes sacred to Apollo.

Europa – was a Levantine woman in Greek mythology. There were two competing myths relating how Europa came into the Greek world: in the more familiar one she was seduced by the god Zeus in the form of a bull and carried away to Crete on his back, but according to Herodotus she was kidnapped by Minoans , who likewise were said to have taken her to Crete. The mythical Europa cannot be separated from the mythology of the sacred bull , which had been worshipped in the Levant.

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Albert Camus

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Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French author and philosopher and one of the principal luminaries of absurdism. Camus was the second youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he received the award in 1957.

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Albert Camus The Plague

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tells the story of medical workers finding solidarity in their labor as the Algerian city of Oran is swept by a plague. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

Generally taken as a metaphoric treatment of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II, The Plague is interpreted to mean much more. Camus uses extreme hardships (e.g., pain, suffering, and death) to represent our human world. The story is told through the narrative of the main character, Dr. Rieux, whose decidedly existential account of events in the story is not only helpful in exploring the philosophy of existentialism, but also in making this an allegory of the nature of life and suffering. Although his approach in the book is severe, he emphasizes the ideas that we ultimately have no control, irrationality of life is inevitable, and he further illustrates the human reaction towards the ‘absurd’. The Plague represents how the world deals with the philosophical notion of the Absurd, a theory which Camus himself helped to define.

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Albert Camus The Fall

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Set in Amsterdam, The Fall consists of a series of monologues by a self-proclaimed ‘judge penitent’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence, as he reflects upon his life to a stranger. Clamence tells us of his success, he enjoyed an upstanding role in society, esteem from fellows, and a rich sensuous life, and his ultimate ‘fall’ from grace.

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Albert Camus The Stranger

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The novel tells the story of an alienated man, who eventually commits a murder and waits to be executed for it. The book uses an Algerian setting, drawn from Camus’ own upbringing.

At the start of the novel, Meursault goes to his mother’s funeral, where he does not express any emotions and is basically unaffected by it. The novel continues to document the next few days of his life through the first person point-of-view. In these days, he befriends one of his neighbors, Raymond Sintes, a notorious local pimp. He aids Raymond in dismissing one of his Arab mistresses. Later, the two confront the woman’s brother (“the Arab”) on a beach and Raymond gets cut in the resulting knife fight. Meursault afterwards goes back to the beach and, in a heat-induced fit of lunacy, shoots the Arab five times.

At the trial, the prosecution focuses on the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother’s funeral, considered suspect by the authorities. The killing of the Arab apparently is less important than whether Meursault is capable of remorse. The argument follows that if Meursault is incapable of remorse, he should be considered a dangerous misanthrope and subsequently executed to prevent him from doing it again, and by executing, make him an example to those considering murder.

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Gustave Flaubert

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a French novelist who is counted among the greatest Western novelists, known especially for his first published novelMadame Bovary, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style, best exemplified by his endless search for le mot juste (“the precise word”).

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Gustave Flaubert The Sentimental Education

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The Sentimental Education describes the life of a young man (Frederic Moreau) living through the revolution of 1848 and the founding of the Second French Empire, and his love for an older woman. Flaubert based many of the protagonist’s experiences (including the romantic passion) on his own life.

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Honore de Balzac

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a French novelist. Along with Flaubert, he is generally regarded as a founding-father of realism in European fiction.His large output of novels and stories, collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, is a broad panorama of French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy

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Honore de Balzac Lost Illusions

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The story of a young, handsome, talented man, Lucian de Rubempre, who travels to Paris with a married woman to make his literary name. He loses the woman, betrays his talent, and sells out not only himself but his family, mistresses, etc. He dies in the end after making an unlikely comeback orchestrated by Balzac’s criminal matermind, Vautrin (who also figures prominently in Pére Goriot)

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Honore de Balzac Le Pere Goriot

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It is one of the series of novels to which Balzac gave the title of “The Human Comedy.” It is a comedy, mingled with lurid tragic touches, of society in the French capital in the early decades of the 19th century. The novel follows Eugene Rastignac’s entrance into heartless Parisian society. This heartlessness is embodied by the cruel fate of Goriot who has reduced himself to a state of squalour to provide his daughters with the material luxuries they desire. These daughters do not even come to visit him as he’s dying and Rastignac is the only attendent at his funeral

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Identify:

Identify: In vain, my children, have I brought you up,
Borne all the cares and pangs of motherhood,
And the sharp pains of childbirth undergone.
In you, alas, was treasured many a hope
Of loving sustentation in my age,
Of tender laying out when I was dead,
Such as all men might envy.
Those sweet thoughts are mine no more, for now bereft of you
I must wear out a drear and joyless life,
And you will nevermore your mother see,
Nor live as ye have done beneath her eye.
Alas, my sons, why do you gaze on me,
Why smile upon your mother that last smile?
Ah me! What shall I do? My purpose melts
Beneath the bright looks of my little ones.
I cannot do it. Farewell, my resolve,
I will bear off my children from this land.
Why should I seek to wring their father’s heart,
When that same act will doubly wring my own?
I will not do it. Farewell, my resolve.
What has come o’er me? Shall I let my foes
Triumph, that I may let my friends go free?
I’ll brace me to the deed. Base that I was
To let a thought of wickedness cross my soul.
Children, go home. Whoso accounts it wrong
To be attendant at my sacrifice,
Let him stand off; my purpose is unchanged.
Forego my resolutions, O my soul,
Force not the parent’s hand to slay the child.
Their presence where we will go will gladden thee.
By the avengers that in Hades reign,
It never shall be said that I have left
My children for my foes to trample on.
It is decreed.

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Euripides Medea, Medea's soliloquy

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Jean Racine Phedre

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Phèdre was a 1677 play by Jean Racine, based on both the play Hippolytus by Euripides, and a later Roman play Phaedra by Seneca the Younger. Due to its negative reception in the popular press, Racine abandoned writing for the public theater after this play (although later in his career he did write additional works on a royal commission). It is generally considered his finest work; it was chosen for inclusion in the Harvard Classics. Phèdre is the last secular tragedy of Racine before a long silence of twelve years, during which time he devoted himself to the service of King Louis XIV and to religion. In Phèdre, Racine again chose a subject already treated by Greek and Roman tragic poets. In the absence of her husband, King Thésée, Phèdre falls in love with Hippolyte, son of Thésée of a preceding marriage.

Every aspect of Phèdre was celebrated: the tragic construction, the depth of the personages and the wealth of the versification. In contrast to Euripides in Hippolytos kalyptomenos, Racine puts off Phèdre’s death until the end of the play. In this way, she has time to learn of Hippolyte’s death. Phèdre, at once guilty of causing misfortune and being victim to it, is most remarkable among Racine’s tragic heroes and heroines.

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Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea

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Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote La Nausée in 1938 while he was a college professor. The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected researcher in a town who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself, on his intellectual and spiritual freedom, evoking in the protagonist a sense of nausea.
Fresh from several years of travel, 30-year-old Antoine Roquentin settles in the French seaport town of Bouville to finish his research on the life of an 18th-century political figure. But during the winter of 1932 a “sweetish sickness” he calls nausea increasingly impinges on almost everything he does or enjoys — his research project, the company of “The Self-Taught Man” who is reading all the books in the library, a pleasant physical relationship with a cafe owner named Francoise, his memories of Anny, an English girl he once loved … even his own hands and the beauty of nature. Antoine is facing the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself; he embodies Sartre’s theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.

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Jean-Paul Sartre No Exit

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Originally published in French in 1944 as Huis Clos, the play features only four characters (one of whom appears for only a very limited time), and one set. No Exit is the source of the famous Sartreian maxim, “Hell is other people”.

The play begins with a bellhop leading a man named Garcin into a hotel room (the play portrays Hell as a gigantic hotel, and realization of where the action is taking place dawns on the audience in the opening minutes). The room has no windows and only one door. Eventually Garcin is joined by a woman (Inez), and then another (Estelle). After their entry, the bellhop bolts the door shut. All expect to be tortured, but no torturer arrives. Instead, they realize, they are there to torture each other, which they do effectively, by probing each other’s sins, desires, and unpleasant memories. At first, the three see events concerning them that are happening on earth, though they can only observe and listen, but eventually (as their connection to Earth dwindles and the living move on) they are left with only their own thoughts and the company of the other two.

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Moliere Tartuffe

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As the play begins, the well-off Orgon is convinced that Tartuffe is a man of great religious zeal and fervor. In fact, Tartuffe is a scheming hypocrite. By the time Tartuffe is exposed and Orgon renounces him, Tartuffe has legal control of Orgon’s finances and family, and is about to steal all of Orgon’s wealth and marry his daughter. Instead the king intervenes, and Tartuffe is condemned to prison. As a consequence, the word tartuffe is used in contemporary French, and also in English, to designate a hypocrite who ostensibly and exaggeratedly feigns virtue, especially religious virtue.

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Stendhal

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Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen-name Stendhal, was a 19th century French writer. He is known for his acute analysis of his characters’ psychology and for the dryness of his writing-style. He is considered one of the foremost and earliest practitioners of the realistic form, and his best novels are Le Rouge et le Noir (1830; The Red and the Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma).

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Stendhal The Red and the Black

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The Red and the Black is the story of Julien Sorel, the aesthete son of a carpenter in the fictional French village of Verrières, and his attempts to overcome his poor birth through posturing and telling people what they want to hear. The novel comprises two “books,” but each book has two major stories within it.

The first book introduces Julien, who would rather spend his time with his nose in books or daydreaming about being in Napoleon’s (by then defunct) army than work with his carpenter father and brothers, who beat him for his pseudo-intellectual tendencies. Julien ends up becoming an acolyte for the local Catholic Abbé, who later secures him a post as tutor for the children of the Mayor of Verrières, M. de Rênal. Julien acts as a pious cleric, but in reality has little interest in the Bible beyond its literary value and the way he can use memorized passages to impress important people. Over time, Julien begins an affair with the wife of M. de Rênal, one that ends badly when the affair is exposed throughout the town by a servant, Eliza, who had designs of her own on Julien. M. de Rênal then banishes Julien, who moves on to a seminary that he finds cliquish and stifling. The director of the seminary, M. Pirard, takes a liking to Julien, and when M. Pirard leaves the seminary in disgust at the political machinations of the Church’s hierarchy, he recommends Julien as a candidate for secretary to the diplomat and reactionary M. de la Mole.

Book II chronicles Julien’s time in Paris with the family of M. de la Mole. Julien tries to participate in the high society of Paris, but the nobles look down on him as something of a novelty – a poor-born intellectual. Julien, meanwhile, finds himself torn between his ambitions to rise in society and his disgust at the base materialism and hypocrisy of the Parisian nobility.

Mathilde de la Mole, the daughter of Julien’s boss, seduces Julien, and the two begin a comical on-again, off-again affair, one that Julien feeds by feigning disinterest in Mathilde at one point and using the letters written by a lothario he knows to woo a widow in the de la Mole’s social circle. Eventually, Julien and Mathilde reunite when she reveals she is pregnant with his child. M. de la Mole is livid at the news, but relents and grants Julien a stipend, a place in the army, and his grudging blessing to marry his daughter. But M. de la Mole relents when he receives a letter from Mme. de Rênal warning him that Julien is nothing but a cad and a social climber who preys on vulnerable women. (In a perfect example of irony, Julien had suggested to M. de la Mole that he write to Mme. de Rênal for a character reference.) On learning of this treachery and M. de la Mole’s decision to rescind all he had granted the couple, Julien races back to Verrières, buys bullets for his pistols, heads to the Church, and shoots Mme. de Rênal twice – missing once and hitting her shoulder blade the second time – during Mass. Although Mme. de Rênal lives, Julien is sentenced to death, in part due to his own rambling, anti-patrician speech at his trial. Mathilde attempts to bribe a high official to sway the judgment against Julien, but the trial is presided over by a former romantic rival for Mme. de Rênal’s affections.

The last few chapters show Julien in prison, reconsidering all of his actions over the three years during which the story takes place and considering his place in the world and the nature of society. Mme. de Rênal forgives Julien, and she and Mathilde both attempt to bribe and cajole local officials to overturn Julien’s death sentence. Julien’s affections, meanwhile, have returned to Mme. de Rênal. The novel closes with Julien’s execution; Mme. de Rênal, who pledged to Julien that she would not take her own life and that she would care for Mathilde’s baby, dies three days later, most likely of grief.

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Thomas Mann

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a German novelist, social critic, philanthropist and essayist, lauded principally for a series of highly symbolic and often ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual and an underlying eroticism informed by Mann’s own struggles with his sexuality. He is noted for his analysis and critique of the European and German soul in beginning of the 20th century using modernized German and Biblical myths as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

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Thomas Mann Buddenbrooks

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portrays the downfall of a wealthy mercantile family, the Buddenbrooks, over four generations. The book is generally understood as a portrait of the german bourgeois society from the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. The book displays Mann’s characteristic ironic and detailed style, and it was mainly this novel which made Mann gain the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

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Thomas Mann Death in Venice

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Aged Gustav von Aschenbach – a novelist in the novel, a composer in the film – travels to Venice, where he becomes obsessed with the androgynous beauty of an adolescent boy named Tadzio. An epidemic of Asiatic cholera has just broken out and von Aschenbach plans to leave but changes his mind because of Tadzio, even though he never even has the opportunity to talk to the boy. As his vacation continues, von Aschenbach’s entire existence begins to revolve around following this young boy, both a symbol of faded youth and of attractions that von Aschenbach never made reality.

The novel ends on the Lido beach where von Aschenbach is watching Tadzio play with his friends. The boy wanders out to sea but turns and finally shares eye contact with the old man, and von Aschenbach dies.

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Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain

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The protagonist is Hans Castorp, who visits his cousin Joachim Ziemßen in a sanatorium in Davos in the Swiss Alps before World War I. Castorp’s departure is repeatedly delayed by his failing health – what at first looks like a cold develops into the symptoms of tuberculosis. In the end, Castorp remains in the morbid atmosphere of the sanatorium for seven years. At the end of the novel, the war begins, Castorp is drafted into the military, and his imminent death on the battlefield is suggested.

During his stay, Castorp meets and learns from a variety of characters, who are together a microcosm of pre-war Europe. These include the humanist and encyclopedist Lodovico Settembrini (a student of Giosuè Carducci), the totalitarianist jesuit Leo Naphta, the hedonist Heer Peeperkorn, and his romantic interest Madame Chauchat.

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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a Colombian novelist, journalist, publisher, political activist, and Nobel laureate in literature. Born in the town of Aracataca in the department of Magdalena, he has lived mostly in Mexico and Europe and currently spends much of his time in Mexico City. Widely credited with introducing the global public to magical realism, he has secured both significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success. A growing consensus of literary scholars holds that García Márquez ranks alongside Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar as one of South America’s greatest 20th-century authors.

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude

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All of the events of One Hundred Years of Solitude take place in the fictional Colombian village of Macondo. The town is founded by José Arcadio Buendía, a strong-willed and impulsive leader who becomes deeply interested in the mysteries of the universe when a band of gypsies visits Macondo, led by the recurring Melquíades. As the town grows, the fledgling government of the country takes an interest in Macondo’s affairs, but they are held back by José Arcadio Buendía.

Civil war breaks out in the land, and Macondo soon takes a role in the war, sending a militia led by Colonel Aureliano Buendía, José Arcadio Buendía’s son, to fight against the conservative regime. While the colonel is gone, José Arcadio Buendia goes insane and must be tied to a tree. Arcadio, his illegitimate grandchild, takes leadership of the town but soon becomes a brutal dictator. The Conservatives capture the town, and Arcadio is shot by a firing squad.

The wars continue, with Colonel Aureliano narrowly avoiding death multiple times, until, weary of the meaningless fighting, he arranges a peace treaty that will last until the end of the novel. After the treaty is signed, Aureliano shoots himself in the chest, but survives. The town develops into a sprawling center of activity as foreigners arrive by the thousands. The foreigners begin a banana plantation near Macondo. The town prospers until a strike arises at the banana plantation. The national army is called in, and the protesting workers are gunned down and thrown into the ocean. At this time, Úrsula, the impossibly ancient widow of José Arcadio Buendía, remarks that “it was as if time was going in a circle”.

After the banana worker massacre, the town is saturated by heavy rains that last for almost five years. Úrsula says that she is waiting for the rains to stop so that she can die at last. The last member of the Buendía line, named Aureliano Babilonia (originally referred to as Aureliano Buendía, before he discovers through Melquíades’ parchments that Babilonia is his paternal surname), is born at this time. When the rains stop, Úrsula dies at last, and Macondo is left desolated.

Aureliano Babilonia is finally left in solitude at the crumbling Buendía house, where he studies the parchments of Melquíades, who has appeared as a ghost to him. He gives up on this task to have a love affair with his aunt, though he is unsure whether they are related. When she dies in childbirth and his son (who is born with a pig’s tail) is eaten by ants, Aureliano is finally able to decipher the parchments. The house, and the town, disintegrate into a whirlwind as he translates the parchments, on which is contained the entire history of the Buendía family, as predicted by Melquíades. As he finishes translating, the entire town is obliterated from the world.

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Jorge Luis Borges

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an Argentine writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. Best-known in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, and man of letters.

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Jorge Luis Borges The Library of Babel

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The story repeats the theme of Borges’s 1939 essay “The Total Library” (“La biblioteca total”), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story “The Universal Library” (“Die Universalbibliotek”).

Borges’s narrator describes how his universe consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains the bare necessities for human survival—and four walls of bookshelves. Though the order and content of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless, the inhabitants believe that the books contain every possible ordering of just a few basic characters (letters and punctuation marks). Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books. The narrator notes that the library must contain all useful information, including predictions of the future, biographies of any person, and translations of every book in all languages. Conversely, for any given text some language could be devised that would make it readable with any of an infinite number of different contents.

Despite—indeed, because of—this glut of information, all books are totally useless to the reader, leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. However, Borges speculates on the existence of the “Crimson Hexagon”, containing a book that contains the truth of all the other books; the librarian who reads it is akin to God.

This short story features many of Borges’s signature themes, including infinity, reality, cabalistic reasoning, and labyrinths. The concept of the library is often compared to Borel’s dactylographic monkey theorem; it is also overtly analogous to the view of the universe as a sphere having its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal employed this metaphor, and in an earlier essay Borges noted that Pascal’s manuscript called the sphere effroyable, or “frightful”.

Borges would examine a similar idea with his later story, “The Book of Sand”; in the later story, there is an infinite book rather than an infinite library.

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Henrik Ibsen

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an extremely influential Norwegian playwright who was largely responsible for the rise of the modern realistic drama. His plays were considered scandalous in much of society at the time, when Victorian values of family life and propriety were still very much the norm and any challenge to them considered immoral and outrageous. Ibsen’s work examined the realities that lay behind many facades, which the society of the time did not want to see.

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Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House

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It is sharply critical of Victorian marriage norms. It is considered a prime example of what is called The Well-Made Play (a genre with a neo-classical flavor, involving a very tight plot and a climax that takes place very close to the end of the story, with most of the story taking place before the action of the play; much of the information regarding such previous action would be revealed through thinly veiled exposition)

A Doll’s House is a scathing criticism of the traditional roles of men and women in Victorian marriage. As Ibsen wrote in his initial notes for the play, “There are two kinds of moral law, two kinds of conscience, one in man and a completely different one in woman. They do not understand each other; but in matters of practical living the woman is judged by man’s law, as if she were not a woman but a man.”

Ibsen has his protagonist, Nora, leave her husband in search of the wider world, after realizing that he is not the noble creature she has supposed him to be. Her role in the marriage is that of a doll, her house a “Doll’s House”, and indeed her husband Torvald refers to her incessantly as his little “starling” and as his “squirrel”. She is not even permitted a key to the mailbox. Ibsen noted, “A woman cannot be herself in contemporary society, it is an exclusively male society with laws drafted by men, and with counsel and judges who judge feminine conduct from the male point of view.” When she is blackmailed because of an improper act that she commits in order to save her husband’s life – forging her father’s name on a note – her husband shows disgust and horror at what she had done upon finding this out. His only concern is his own reputation, despite the love for him that prompts her to do it.

When the blackmailer (Krogstad) recants, it could all be over, and in a traditional Victorian drama all would then be resolved. For Ibsen, however, and for Nora, it is too late to go back to the way things were. Her illusions destroyed, she decides she must leave her husband, her children, and her Doll’s House to discover what is truly real and what is not. As Ibsen described it, “Depressed and confused by her faith in authority, she loses faith in her moral right and ability to bring up her children. A mother in contemporary society, just as certain insects go away and die when she has done her duty in the propagation of the race.”

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Henrik Ibsen An Enemy of the People

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Amongst other things, it is concerned with the irrational tendencies of the masses, and the hypocritical and corrupt nature of the political system that they support. Dr. Stockmann is the popular citizen of a small coastal town in Norway. The town has recently invested a large amount of public and private money towards the development of baths, a project led by Dr. Stockmann and his brother, the Mayor. The town is expecting a surge in tourism and prosperity from the new baths, said to be of great medicinal value and as such, the baths are the pride of the town. However, as the baths are starting to succeed, Dr. Stockmann discovers that waste products from the town’s tannery are contaminating the baths. He expects this important discovery to be his greatest achievement, and promptly sends a detailed report to the Mayor, with a proposed solution included.

But to his surprise, Stockmann finds it difficult to get through to the authorities. They seem unable to appreciate the seriousness of the issue and unwilling to address the problem. As the conflict ensues, the Mayor warns his brother that he should “acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community”. Stockmann refuses to accept this, and rents a hall in order to hold a town meeting and convince the people to close the baths.

The townspeople – eagerly awaiting the prosperity that the baths are believed will bring – refuse to accept Stockmann’s claims, as his friends and allies, who had explicity given support for his campaign, turn against him en masse. He is taunted and denounced as a lunatic, an “Enemy of the People.” In a scathing rebuke of both the Victorian notion of community and the principles of democracy, Dr. Stockmann proclaims that in matters of right and wrong, the individual is superior to the multitude, who are easily led by self-advancing demagogues. Stockmann sums up Ibsen’s denunciation of the masses, with the memorable quote “…the strongest man in the world is the man who stands most alone.“

With the entire town pitted against him, Stockmann considers leaving with his family; but he decides to stay and set up a school for poor children in the same hall where he was denounced as an enemy of the people. In doing so, he upholds the heroic ideal of defending the principles of truth and refusing to be silenced.

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Henrik Ibsen The Wild Duck

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The Wild Duck is considered by many to be Ibsen’s finest work, and it is certainly the most complex. It tells the story of Gregers Werle, a young man who returns to his hometown after an extended exile and is reunited with his boyhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals’ apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the “Summons of the Ideal”. Among these truths: Gregers’ father impregnated his servant Gina, then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child. Another man has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed. And while Hjalmar spends his days working on a wholly imaginary “invention”, his wife is earning the household income.

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Henrik Ibsen Hedda Gabbler

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The action takes place in a villa in Kristiania (present-day Oslo). Hedda Gabler, daughter of an impoverished General, has just returned from her honeymoon with Jørgen Tesman, an aspiring young academic – reliable but uninteresting. It becomes clear in the course of the play that she has never loved him, and she fears she may be pregnant. The reappearance of her former lover, Ejlert Løvborg, throws their lives into disarray. Løvborg, a writer, is also an alcoholic who has wasted his talent until now. Thanks to a relationship with Hedda’s old schoolmate, Thea Elvsted (who has left her husband for him), he shows signs of rehabilitation, and has just completed what he considers to be his masterpiece. This means he now poses a threat to Tesman, as a competitor for the university professorship which Tesman had believed would be his.

Hedda, apparently jealous of Mrs Elvsted’s influence over Ejlert, hopes to come between them. Tesman, on returning home from a party, finds the manuscript of Ejlert Løvborg’s great work, which the latter has lost while drunk. When Hedda next sees him, he confesses to her, despairingly, that he has lost the manuscript. Instead of telling him that the manuscript has been found, Hedda burns it, and encourages him to consider suicide . She tells her husband she has destroyed the manuscript to secure their future, so that he, not Løvborg, will become a professor.

When the news comes that Løvborg has indeed killed himself, Tesman and Mrs Elvsted are determined to try to reconstruct his book from what they already know. Hedda is shocked to discover, from the sinister Judge Brack, that Ejlert’s death, in a brothel, was messy and probably accidental. The judge appears to be blackmailing her. Leaving the others to discuss the situation, she goes into another room and shoots herself.

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Anton CHekhov

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a physician, major Russian short story writer and playwright. Many of his short stories are considered the apotheosis of the form while his playwriting career, though brief, has had a great impact on dramatic literature and performance.

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Anton Chekhov The Seagull

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This is the first of what are generally considered to be Anton Chekhov’s four major plays. It centers on the romantic and artistic conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ngénue Nina, the fading leading lady Irina Arkadina, her son the experimental playwright Konstantin Treplyov, and the famous middlebrow story writer Trigorin.

Like the rest of Chekhov’s full-length plays, The Seagull relies upon an ensemble cast of diverse, fully developed characters. In opposition to much of the melodramatic theater of the 19th century, lurid actions (such as Treplyov’s suicide attempts) are kept offstage. Characters tend to speak in ways that skirt around issues rather than addressing them directly, a concept known as subtext.

The play has a strong intertextual relationship with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Arkadina and Treplyov quote lines from it before the play-within-a-play in the first act (and the play-within-a-play device is itself used in Hamlet). There are many allusions to Shakespearean plot details as well. For instance, Treplyov seeks to win his mother back from the usurping older man Trigorin much as Hamlet tries to win Queen Gertrude back from Uncle Claudius.

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Anton CHekhov The Cherry Orchard

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Although the play is viewed by most as a tragicomedy, Chekhov called it a comedy and even claimed that it had many farcical elements.

Lyubov Ranevskaya returns to her Russian country house with her adopted daughter Varya, her 18-year old daughter Anya, and several other people. They stay there for almost a year. Ranevskaya, Varya, and Anya live there with Ranyevskaya’s brother, Gayev, a maid, Dunyasha and there are several other people that stay and visit throughout the play.

Ranevskaya’s main problem is the lack of money that is very troublesome for her. Throughout the play there are various solutions suggested to her, but she doesn’t do anything. The orchard is consequently sold in an auction to Yermolay Alekseyevich Lopakhin, a man whose ancestors were serfs on the property. In the end, the orchard is chopped down by Lopakhin.

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Anton CHekhov Three Sisters

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Four young people – Olga, Masha, Irina and Andrey Prozorov - are left stranded in a provincial backwater after the death of their father, an army general. They focus their dreams on returning to Moscow, a city remembered through the eyes of childhood as a place where happiness is possible.

Olga works as a teacher in a gymnasium, or a school. Masha is married to Fyodor Ilyich Kulygin, a teacher. At the time of their marriage, Masha was enchanted by his cleverness, but seven years later,she considers him to be rather stupid. Irina is the youngest sister, she dreams of going to Moscow and meeting her true love. Andrey is the only boy in the family. He is in love with Natasha Ivanovna.

The play begins on the first anniversary of their father’s death, also Irina’s name-day. It follows with a party. At this Andrey tells his feelings to Natasha.

Act two begins about 21 months later, Andrey and Natasha are married and have a child. Masha begins to have an affair with Aleksandr Ignatyevich Vershinin, a lieutenant commander who is married to a woman who constantly attempts suicide.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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considered one of the greatest of Russian writers, whose works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century fiction. His works often feature characters living in poor conditions with disparate and extreme states of mind, and exhibit both an uncanny grasp of human psychology as well as penetrating analyses of the political, social and spiritual states of Russia of his time. Many of his best-known works are prophetic precursors to modern-day thoughts.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from Underground

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It is considered the world’s first existentialist work. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as Underground Man), a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg.

The novel is divided into two rough parts. Part 1 falls into three main sections. The short introduction propounds a number of riddles whose meanings will be further developed. Section two, three and four deal with suffering and the enjoyment of suffering; sections five and six with intellectual and moral vacillation and with conscious “inertia”-inaction; sections seven through nine with theories of reason and advantage; the last two sections are a summary and a transition into Part 2. Part 1 focuses primarily on man’s desire to distinguish himself from nature. The narrator describes this as his spitefulness. It is elaborated into not only a spitefulness for authority and morality, but for causality itself. War is described as people’s rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history. Secondly, the narrator’s desire for pain and paranoia (which parallels Raskolnikov’s behavior in Crime and Punishment) is exemplified in a tooth ache, which he says he would love to have, and paranoia which he builds up in his head to the point he is incapable of looking his co-workers in the eye.

Part 2 focuses on three incidents. The first,the incident with the officer on the Nevsky Prospect illustrates the narrator’s theories on insults and suffering; the second, the farewell dinner for Zverkov is clearly connected with vacillation and “inertia”; the third and most crucial episode, that with the prostitute Liza, is the extension and embodiment of the narrator’s theories on reason and advantage, and of his views on the nature of man.

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Identify: I AM A SICK MAN…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious).

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky Notes from Underground beginning

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment

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The novel portrays the haphazardly planned murder of a miserly, aged pawnbroker and her younger sister by a destitute Saint Petersburg student named Raskolnikov, and the emotional, mental, and physical effects that follow.

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The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky characters

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Fyodor Karamazov
~ Dmitri Karamazov (Mitya, Mitka, Mitenka)
~ Ivan Karamazov (Vanya, Vanka, Vanechka)
~ Alexei (Alyosha) Karamazov (Alyoshka, Alyoshenka)
~ Pavel Smerdyakov: Was born from a mute woman of the street and is widely rumored to be the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov. When the novel begins Smerdyakov is Fyodor’s lackey and cook. He is a very morose and sullen man.
~ Agrafena Alexandrovna Svetlova (Grushenka, Grusha, Grushka): Is the local Jezebel and has an uncanny charm among men.
~ Zosima

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Identify: ALEXEY Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a landowner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov

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Leo Tolstoy

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Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists, particularly noted for his masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina; in their scope, breadth and realistic depiction of Russian life, the two books stand at the peak of realistic fiction. As a moral philosopher he was notable for his ideas on nonviolent resistance through his work The Kingdom of God is Within You, which in turn influenced such twentieth-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

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Leo Tolstoy What Is Art

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What Is Art? (1897) is a nonfictional essay by Leo Tolstoy in which he argues against numerous aesthetic theories which define art in terms of the good, truth, and especially beauty. In Tolstoy’s opinion, art at the time was corrupt and decadent, and artists had been misled.

What is Art? develops the aesthetical theories that bloomed at the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, thus criticizing the realistic position (held since Plato that regarded imitative position as the highest value) and the shallow, existing link between art and pleasure. Tolstoy addition to previously existing theories that stressed the emotional importance pivots on the value of communication-as-infection; which leads him to reject bad or counterfeit art since those are harmful to society inasmuch it damages the people’s ability to separate good art from bad art.

Tolstoy detaches art from non-art (or counterfeit art); art must create a specific emotional link between artist and audience, one that “infects” the viewer. Thus, real art requires the capacity to unite people via communication (clearness and genuineness are therefore crucial values). This aesthetic conception led Tolstoy to widen the criteria of what exactly a work of art is; he believed that the concept art embraces any human activity in which one emitter, by means of external signs, transmits previously experienced feelings. Tolstoy exemplifies this: a boy that has experienced fear after an encounter with a wolf and later relates that experience, infecting the hearers and compelling them to feel what he had experienced—that is a perfect example of a work art.

The good art vs. bad art issue unfolds into two directions, one is the conception that the stronger the infection, the better is the art. The other leads Tolstoy to the examination of whether that emotional link corresponds with the religion of the time. Good art, he claims, fosters those feelings that fit with the particular religion, while bad art inhibits such feelings. The problem Tolstoy sees is that the upper class has entirely lost its religion, and thus clings to the art that was good according to another religion. To cite one example, ancient Greek art extolled virtues of strength, masculinity, and heroism according to the values derived from its mythology. However, since Christianity does not embrace these values (and in some sense values the opposite, the meek and humble), Tolstoy believes that it is unfitting for people in his society to continue to embrace the Greek tradition of art.

Among other artists, he specifically condemns Wagner and Beethoven as examples of overly cerebral artists, who lack real emotion. Furthermore, the Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven), cannot claim to be able to “infect” their audience—as it pretends—with the feeling of unity and therefore cannot be considered good art.

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Leo Tolstoy War and Peace

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The novel tells the story of five aristocratic families (particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskis, and the Rostovs–the members of which are portrayed against a vivid background of Russian social life during the war against Napoleon (1805-14).) and the entanglement of their personal lives with the history of 1805–1813, specifically Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. As events proceed, Tolstoy systematically denies his subjects any significant free choice: the onward roll of history determines happiness and tragedy alike.

In his 365 chapters (roughly 1500 pages), some only a few pages in length, Tolstoy tells of birth and death, balls and battles, gossip and tragedy, military strategy and political philosophy. While roughly the first two-thirds of the novel concern themselves strictly with the fictional characters, the later parts of the novel, as well as one of the work’s two epilogues, increasingly contain highly controversial, nonfictional essays about the nature of war, political power, history, and historiography. Tolstoy interspersed these essays seamlessly into the story in a way which defies conventional fiction. Certain abridged versions removed these essays entirely, while others (published even during Tolstoy’s life) simply moved these essays into an appendix.

If there is a central character to War and Peace it is Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a wealthy count, who upon receiving an unexpected inheritance is suddenly burdened with the responsibilities and conflicts of a Russian nobleman. His former carefree behavior vanishes and he enters upon a philosophical quest particular to Tolstoy: how should one live a moral life in an imperfect world? He attempts to free his peasants and improve his estate, but ultimately achieves nothing. He enters into marriage with Prince Kuragin’s beautiful and immoral daughter Elena, against his own better judgment.

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Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina

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The novel, set among the highest circles of Russian society, is generally thought by the casual reader to be nothing more than the story of a tragic romance. However, Tolstoy was both a moralist and severe critic of the excesses of his aristocratic peers, and Anna Karenina is often interpreted overall as a parable on the difficulty of being honest to oneself when the rest of society accepts falseness.
Anna is the jewel of St. Petersburg society until she leaves her husband for the handsome and charming military officer, Count Vronsky. By falling in love, they go beyond society’s external conditions of trivial adulterous dalliances. But when Vronsky’s love cools, Anna cannot bring herself to return to the husband she detests, even though he will not permit her to see their son until she does. Unable to accept Vronsky’s rebuff, and unable to return to a life she hates, she kills herself.

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Intransitive vs. Transitive verbs

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Transitive verb has an object that it directly applies to ie. I kick Juan
An intransitive verb does not take a direct object ie. The plant has thrived on the windowsill

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Formalism

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approaches to interpreting or evaluating literary works that focus on features of the text itself (especially properties of its language) rather than on the contexts of its creation (biographical, historical or intellectual) or the contexts of its reception. Formalism was also a Russian movement spearheaded by Viktor Shklovsky, who contributed two of the movement’s most well-known concepts: defamiliarization and the plot/story distinction.

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New Criticism

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was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. n 1954, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled “The intentional fallacy“, in which they argued strongly against any discussion of an author’s intention, or “intended meaning.”

*I.A. Richards
*Wimsatt & Beardsley
* T.S. Eliot
* F.R. Leavis
* William Empson
* Robert Penn Warren
* John Crowe Ransom
* Cleanth Brooks

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Structuralism

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In literary theory structuralism is an approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of the West Side Story did not write anything “really” new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a “formula” with a symbolic operator between them would be “Boy +LOVE Girl”) despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other (“Boy’s Group -LOVE Girl’s Group”) and conflict is resolved by their death. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families (“Boy’s Family +LOVE Girl’s Family”) that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other (“Boy -LOVE Girl”) and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story’s structure is an ‘inversion’ of the first story’s structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed. Structuralistic literary criticism argues that the “novelty value of a literary text” can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.

Structuralism was pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure.

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Post-Structuralism

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Post-structural practices generally operate on some basic assumptions:

* Post-structuralists hold that the concept of “self” as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual is composed of conflicting tensions and knowledge claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to properly study a text the reader must understand how the work is related to their own personal concept of self. This self-perception plays a critical role in one’s interpretation of meaning.

* The meaning the author intended is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having one purpose, one meaning or one singular existence.

* A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted (perhaps even conflicting) interpretation of a text. It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables (usually involving the identity of the reader).

Major contributors included Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva.

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Deconstructionism

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Deconstruction’s central concern is a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and of metaphysics, including in particular the founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl, but also other sorts of texts, including literature. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a “logocentrism” or “metaphysics of presence” (also known as phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction.

One typical form of deconstructive reading is the critique of binary oppositions, or the criticism of dichotomous thought. A central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged or “central” over the other. The privileged, central term is the one most associated with the phallus and the logos.

Common terms include: Différance, Trace, Écriture, Hymen / Phallocentrism, Pharmakon

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Italian Sonnet

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Petrarchan rhyme scheme: a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-e, c-d-e.
Broken up into an octet and a sestet.

More than any other form, the sonnet is the most important in the eyes of ETS. Take pains to memorize the differences between the Italian, English, and Spensarian sonnet. This will help you not only on questions that directly address form and authorship, but it will help you contextualize questions generally. I have included in this section the curtal sonnet, which was invented by Gereard Manley Hopkins; however, ETS may not acknowledge the curtal sonnet as equal to other sonnet forms.

Italian Sonnet (Petrarchan)

There are two really important things to know about the Italian sonnet:

rhyme scheme: a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a, c-d-e, c-d-e.
Broken up into an octet and a sestet.

The chance of seeing an Italian sonnet on the exam is not great.

The major Italian sonneteers included Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300), but the most famous early sonneteer was Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374).

In its original form, the Italian sonnet was divided into an octave followed by a sestet in the topic or tone of the sonnet. The octave stated a proposition and the sestet stated its solution with a clear break between the two. Typically, the ninth line created a “turn” or volta, which signaled the move from proposition to resolution. Even in sonnets that don’t strictly follow the problem/resolution structure, the ninth line still often marks a “turn” by signalling a change in the tone, mood, or stance of the poem.

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The English Sonnet

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Shakespearian It is comprised of three quatrains and a final couplet in iambic pentameter.
Rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg.
Often, the beginning of the third quatrain marks the “turn”, or the line in which the poem’s mood shifts and the poet expresses a revelation or epiphany.

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SPenserian Sonnet

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three quatrains and a final rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter
rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee.

In a Spenserian sonnet there does not appear to be a requirement that the initial octet sets up a problem which the closing sestet answers as is the case with a Shakespearean sonnet. Instead, the form is treated as three quatrains connected by the interlocking rhyme scheme and followed by a couplet. The linked rhymes of his quatrains suggest the linked rhymes of such Italian forms as terza rima.

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Curtal Sonnet

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a form invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and used in three of his poems.

It is an eleven-line (or, more accurately, ten-and-a-half-line) sonnet, but rather than the first eleven lines of a standard sonnet it consists of precisely ¾ of the structure of a Petrarchan sonnet shrunk proportionally, so that the octave of a sonnet becomes a sestet and the sestet a quatrain plus an additional “tail piece.”

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Alexandrine

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Another name for iambic hexameter. final line of a Spenserian stanza

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Alliterative verse

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Verse tradition stemming from the Germanic lands and evidenced in Anglo-Saxon epics and Icelandic sagas. The alliterative line was normally written in two halves – with each half containing two strongly stressed syllables. Of the four stressed syllables two, three or even four would begin with the same sound. During the 14th century in England there was an alliterative revival which produced works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland.

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Apostrophh

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Verse tradition stemming from the Germanic lands and evidenced in Anglo-Saxon epics and Icelandic sagas. The alliterative line was normally written in two halves – with each half containing two strongly stressed syllables. Of the four stressed syllables two, three or even four would begin with the same sound. During the 14th century in England there was an alliterative revival which produced works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland.

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Aubade

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Poem or song of or about lovers separating at dawn

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assonance

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repetition of vowel sounds within a short passage of verse or prose

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Ballad

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The ballad stanza is a quatrain where the second and fourth lines rhyme. La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats is in ballad form. It usually features alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. The lines alternate between 8 and 6 syllables. Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a ballad.

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Blank verse

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a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter. It is widely associated with Shakespeare and Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was first used by the Earl of Surrey around 1540.

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Bob and wheel

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this is the mechanism used to end stanzas in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It consists of a short line (bob), followed by a trimeter quatrain (wheel).

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Breton Lay

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is a form of medieval French and English romance literature. Lais are short (typically 600-1000 lines), rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs. “The Franklin’s Tale” from the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is an example

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caesura

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an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. This may come in the form of any sort of punctuation which causes a pause in speech; such as a comma; semicolon; full stop etc. It is especially common and apparent in Old English verse.

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chiasmus

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a rhetorical construction in which the order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order in the first. (“Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure” –Byron)

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conceit

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an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. It is especially associated with the metaphysical poets.

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elegy

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a poem of mourning. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a good example. A subset of this classification is a pastoral elegy, in which the mourner is a shepherd. Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonais are both examples of pastoral elegies.

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End-stopped line

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A line of verse which ends with a grammatical break such as a coma, colon, semi-colon or full stop etc. It is the opposite of enjambment.

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Enjambment

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the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Its opposite is end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single linee

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epithalamium

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refers to a form of poem that is written for the bride or to celebrate a wedding generally.

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Eclogue

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poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. sometimes called bucolics

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euphistic prose

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tending to or resembling euphuism. of the nature of euphuism/characterized by. Abounding in highflown or affectedly refined expression. associated with John Lyly whose Euphues or Anatomy of Wit set fashion for decade before Shakespeare started writing and is a moral romance distinguished by elaborate style. Self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech

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fabliau

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comic works that typical concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy and foolish peasants. popular in medieval times

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feminine rhyme

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rhyme that matches 2 or more syllables at the end of the respective lines. Usually final syllable unaccented.

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Flat and round characters

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used to describe characters who do and do not develop over the course of a work respectively. Distinction was first made by EM Forster in Aspects of the novel

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Free verse

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term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme but that are still recognizable as poetry by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. Walt whitman

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Georgic

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Poem dealing with agriculture derived from Virgil's Georgics

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hamartia

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tragic mistake/flaw, derived from Aristotle's Poetics

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Heroic couplets

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rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. Associate with Restoration verse

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Homeric epithet

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Characteristic of homer's style to use recurring epithets ie. rosy fingered dawn or swift-footed Achilles. metric stop gaps

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Hudibrastic

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type of english verse named for Samuel Butler's Hudibras. Butler invented mock-heroic verse structure. Instead of Pentameter, lines in iambic tetrameter. Rhymes same as heroic verse

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Kunstlerroman

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Kind of Bildungsroman, novel about artist's growth to maturity

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Litotes

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Figure of speech in which speaker emphasizes magnitude of statement by denying its opposite

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Masculine rhyme

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rhyme that ends on a final stressed syllable instead of two rhyming syllables

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monody

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ode sung by one voice

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Neo-classical unities

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principles of dramatic unity popular in antiquity until after renaissance. Place, time and action

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Ottava Rima

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8 iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza= 3 rhymes following scheme abababcc

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Pathetic fallacy

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description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, sensations, and feelings coined by John Ruskin

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Picaresque novel

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popular subgenre of prose fiction usually satirical and depicts realistic and often humorous detail of the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by wits in corrupt society

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Poetic inversions

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inversion of normal grammatical word order. may range from single word moved from usual place to pair inverted

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Prosopopoeia

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rhetorical device in which speaker or writer communicates to audience by speaking as another person or object

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rhyme royal

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7 lines usually iambic pentameter

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roman a clef

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novel describing real life events behind facade of fiction

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sestina

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39 lines, 6 6line stanzas ending with triplet. uncommon

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Sprung rhythm

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poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. constructed from feet in which first syllable is stressed and may be followed by variable number of unstressed syllables. Gerard Manley Hopkins claims to discovered

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Sturm and drang

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German literary movement emphasized volatile emotional life of individual, especially associated with Goethe

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Synaethesia

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Description of sense impression in terms of another seemingly inappropriate sense. French symbolist poets and Keats

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Synecdoche

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metaphor in which part is whole, whole is part, species for genus, genus for species, stuff something is made is used for the thing. One of most common ways to characterize a character

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terza rima

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3 line stanza chain rhyme ababcbcdcded....

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Ubi sunt

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where are those who were here before us. Begins several latin medieval poems. Refers to tone

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Villanelle

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distinctive pattern of rhyme and repition 2 rhyme sounds and 2 alternating refrains resolve into concluding couplet.

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Spensarian

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fixed verse form invented by edmund spenser for The Faerie Queene. verse = 9 lines total, 8 iambic pentameter 5 feet, single line iambic hexameter, alexandrine, 6 feet. ababbcbcc.