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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

WILLIAM BLAKE

William Blake (1757-1827), English artist, mystic and poet wrote Songs of Innocence (1789): a poetry collection written from the child’s point of view, of innocent wonderment and spontaneity in natural settings which includes “Little Boy Lost”, “Little Boy Found” and “The Lamb”;

ittle 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, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

The Shepherd

How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot!
From the morn to the evening he strays;
He shall follow his sheep all the day,
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.

For he hears the lambs' innocent call,
And he hears the ewes' tender reply;
He is watchful while they are in peace,
For they know when their shepherd is nigh.



The Echoing Green

The sun does arise,
And make happy the skies;
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring;
The skylark and thrush,
The birds of the bush,
Sing louder around
To the bells' cheerful sound;
While our sports shall be seen
On the echoing green.

Old John, with white hair,
Does laugh away care,
Sitting under the oak,
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say,
'Such, such were the joys
When we all--girls and boys -
In our youth-time were seen
On the echoing green.'

Till the little ones, weary,
No more can be merry:
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end.
Round the laps of their mothers
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest,
Are ready for rest,
And sport no more seen
On the darkening green.


The Lamb

Little lamb, who made thee?
Does 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, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Does 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!


The Little Black Boy

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O my soul is white!
White as an angel is the English child,
But I am black, as if bereaved of light.

My mother taught me underneath a tree,
And, sitting down before the heat of day,
She took me on her lap and kissed me,
And, pointing to the East, began to say:

'Look on the rising sun: there God does live,
And gives His light, and gives His heat away,
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday.

'And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

'For, when our souls have learned the heat to bear,
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice,
Saying, "Come out from the grove, my love and care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice."'

Thus did my mother say, and kissed me,
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black, and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy,

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father's knee;
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him, and he will then love me.


The Blossom

Merry, merry sparrow!
Under leaves so green
A happy blossom
Sees you, swift as arrow,
Seek your cradle narrow,
Near my bosom.
Pretty, pretty robin!
Under leaves so green
A happy blossom
Hears you sobbing, sobbing,
Pretty, pretty robin,
Near my bosom.

The Chimney-Sweeper

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'Weep! weep! weep! weep!'
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved; so I said,
'Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.'

And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind:
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.


The Little Boy Lost

'Father, father, where are you going?
O do not walk so fast!
Speak, father, speak to your little boy,
Or else I shall be lost.'

The night was dark, no father was there,
The child was wet with dew;
The mire was deep, and the child did weep,
And away the vapour flew.


The Little Boy Found

The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wandering light,
Began to cry, but God, ever nigh,
Appeared like his father, in white.

He kissed the child, and by the hand led,
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, through the lonely dale,
Her little boy weeping sought.


Laughing Song

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;

When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene;
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing 'Ha ha he!'

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of 'Ha ha he!'


The Divine Image

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is God our Father dear;
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine:
And Peace the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine:
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.


Holy Thursday

'Twas on a holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two, in red, and blue, and green:
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white as snow,
Till into the high dome of Paul's they like Thames waters flow.

O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among:
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor.
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.


night

The sun descending in the West,
The evening star does shine;
The birds are silent in their nest,
And I must seek for mine.
The moon, like a flower
In heaven's high bower,
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.

Farewell, green fields and happy groves,
Where flocks have took delight,
Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves
The feet of angels bright;
Unseen, they pour blessing,
And joy without ceasing,
On each bud and blossom,
And each sleeping bosom.

They look in every thoughtless nest
Where birds are covered warm;
They visit caves of every beast,
To keep them all from harm:
If they see any weeping
That should have been sleeping,
They pour sleep on their head,
And sit down by their bed.

When wolves and tigers howl for prey,
They pitying stand and weep;
Seeking to drive their thirst away,
And keep them from the sheep.
But, if they rush dreadful,
The angels, most heedful,
Receive each mild spirit,
New worlds to inherit.

And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold:
And pitying the tender cries,
And walking round the fold:
Saying: 'Wrath by His meekness,
And, by His health, sickness,
Is driven away
From our immortal day.

'And now beside thee, bleating lamb,
I can lie down and sleep,
Or think on Him who bore thy name,
Graze after thee, and weep.

For, washed in life's river,
My bright mane for ever
Shall shine like the gold,
As I guard o'er the fold.'

A Dream

Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangled spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

'O my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.'

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, 'What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?'

'I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!'


On Another's Sorrow

Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?

Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear -

And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?

And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.

Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.

O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.



Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471), English translator and compiler, who is generally held to have been the author of the first great English prose epic, Le Morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur). It is believed that he was an English knight of Warwickshire, that he saw military service in France, and that he spent many years in prison for political offences and civic crimes. Le Morte d'Arthur (1469-1470) was supposedly composed while the author was in prison. It was published in 1485 by the first English printer, William Caxton. It is a compilation and translation from old French sources (with additions from English sources and the compiler's own composition) of most of the tales about the semi-legendary Arthur, king of the Britons, and his knights. One of the outstanding prose works of Middle English, it is divided into 21 books. The work is imbued with compassion for human faults and nostalgia for the bygone days of chivalry. The poetic prose is noted for its colour, dignity, simplicity, and melodic quality.

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Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313-1375), Italian poet and humanist, a great author of lasting importance.

Boccaccio was perhaps born in Paris, the illegitimate son of a Florentine merchant and a French noblewoman. Reared in Florence, he was sent to study business in Naples about 1323. He abandoned these studies for canon law and gave that up for classical and scientific studies. He took part in the life of the court of Robert d'Anjou, king of Naples. The king is supposed to have had an illegitimate daughter, Maria de Conti d'Aquino. Although proof of her existence has not been established, she is said to have been Boccaccio's mistress and to have inspired a great deal of his work. She is, perhaps, the Fiammetta immortalized in his writings.

Returning to Florence in about 1340, Boccaccio performed various diplomatic services for the city government, and in 1350 he met the celebrated poet and humanist Petrarch, with whom he maintained a close friendship until Petrarch's death in 1374. In 1362 Boccaccio was invited to Naples by a friend, who promised him the patronage of Queen Joanna of that city. A cold reception at the court of the queen led him to seek the hospitality of Petrarch, who was then in Venice (1363). Rejecting Petrarch's offer of a home, however, he returned to his estate in Certaldo (near Florence). Boccaccio's last years, in which he turned to religious meditation, were brightened by his appointment in 1373 as lecturer on Dante. His series of lectures was interrupted by his illness in 1374, and he died the next year.

Boccaccio's most important work is Il Decamerone (Ten Days' Work), which was begun in 1348 and completed in 1353; it was first translated into English, as The Decameron, in 1620. This collection of 100 witty, high-spirited stories is set within a framework: a group of friends, seven women and three men, all “well-bred, of worth and discretion”, to escape an outbreak of the plague have taken refuge in a country villa outside Florence. There they entertain one another over a period of ten days (hence the title) with a series of stories told by each member of the party in turn. Each day's storytelling ends with a canzone, a song for dancing sung by one of the storytellers; these canzoni represent some of Boccaccio's most exquisite lyric poetry. At the conclusion of the 100th tale, the friends return to their homes in the city. The Decameron is the first and finest prose masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance. It is notable for the richness and variety of the tales, which alternate between solemnity and earthy humour, for the brilliance of the craftsmanship, and for its penetrating character analysis. In this work Boccaccio gathered material from many sources: the French fabliau, Greek and Latin classics, folklore, and observations of contemporary Italian life. The Decameron broke away from literary tradition in that, for the first time in the Middle Ages, Boccaccio presented man as the shaper of his own destiny, rather than at the mercy of divine grace.

Boccaccio's other writings include three works thought to be inspired by his love for “Fiammetta”: his first long prose romance Il filocolo (c. 1336), L'amorosa Fiammetta (Amorous Fiammetta, 1343-1344), both stories of rejected lovers; and Il corbaccio (The Old Crow, c. 1354). His Il filostrato (c. 1338) and Teseida (1340-1341) are poems in ottava rima, a verse form he brought to perfection (see Versification). He also wrote a life of Dante, with a commentary on the Divine Comedy, and a number of scholarly, scientific, and poetic works in Latin, including De Claris Mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women, 1360-1374). Among illustrious English writers who were influenced by Boccaccio's works and used them as source material are Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, and John Dryden. The structure of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for example, which also employs the frame story device, is modelled on that of The Decameron

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Chaucer, Geoffrey (c. 1343-1400), one of the greatest English poets, whose masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, was one of the most important influences on the development of English literature. His life is known primarily through records pertaining to his career as a courtier and civil servant under the English kings Edward III and Richard II.



Canterbury Pilgrims Chaucer devised the framework of a pilgrimage to Canterbury to create the 12 narratives of differing literary styles that comprise his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales. The Tales are a masterful combination of such medieval genres as courtly love, allegory, and exemplary story, and are related in a dramatic and vivid manner, using both prose and verse forms. This 15th-century illustration shows the pilgrims en route to Canterbury.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York
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The son of a prosperous London wine merchant, Chaucer may have attended the Latin grammar school of St Paul's Cathedral and may have studied law at the Inns of Court. In 1357 he was page to the Countess of Ulster, Elizabeth, the wife of Prince Lionel, third son of Edward III; there, he would have learned the ways of the court and the use of arms. By 1367 Chaucer was an esquire (shield-bearer) to Edward. In about 1366 he married Philippa Roet, a lady-in-waiting to the queen and afterwards in the service of John of Gaunt, who was Duke of Lancaster and Edward's fourth son. Chaucer served as comptroller of customs for London from 1374 to 1386 and clerk of the king's works from 1389 to 1391, in which post he was responsible for maintenance of royal buildings and parks. About 1386 Chaucer moved from London to a country residence probably in Greenwich, then in Kent, where in 1386 he was justice of the peace and member of Parliament. He travelled on several diplomatic missions to France, one to Spain in 1366, and two to Italy, where he encountered the works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio (later to influence his own writing), from 1372 to 1373 and in 1378. In the last year of his life, Chaucer leased a house within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. After his death, he was buried in the abbey (an honour for a commoner), in what has since become Poets' Corner.

II EARLY WORKS

Chaucer wrote for, and may have read his works aloud to, a select audience of fellow courtiers and officials, which doubtless sometimes included members of the royal family. The culture of the English upper class was still predominantly French, and Chaucer's earliest works were influenced by the fashionable French poets Guillaume de Machaut and Jean Froissart and by the great 13th-century dream allegory Le Roman de la Rose, by the French poets Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The common theme of these works is courtly love.

Chaucer claimed to have translated Le Roman de la Rose, but if he did, all that survives is a fragment. His first important original work, The Book of the Duchess, is an elegy for John of Gaunt's first wife, Blanche, who died in 1369, and shows the influence of contemporary French poetry and of Ovid, Chaucer's favourite poet. In a dream the poet encounters a grieving Black Knight (Gaunt) who movingly recounts his love and loss of “good fair White” (Blanche). The House of Fame and Parlement of Foules, also dream poems, show the influence of Dante and of Boccaccio. The unfinished House of Fame, a poem of more than 2,000 lines, give a humorous account of the poet's frustrating journey in the claws of a giant golden eagle (the idea is from Dante) to the palace of the goddess Fame. In the Parlement he witnesses an inconclusive debate about love among the different classes of birds. All three dream visions, written from about 1373 to about 1385, contain a mixture of comedy and serious speculation about the puzzling nature of love.

In this period, Chaucer also translated and adapted religious, historical, and philosophical works: a life of St Cecilia; a series of medieval “tragedies”, brief lives of famous men cast down by adverse fortune; and a translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae (The Consolation of Philosophy), written by the Roman philosopher Anicius Boethius to proclaim his faith in divine justice and providence. The latter work profoundly influenced Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385) and The Knight's Tale, both adapted from romances by Boccaccio.

Troilus, a poem of more than 8,000 lines, is Chaucer's major work besides The Canterbury Tales. It is the tragic love story of the Trojan prince Troilus, who wins Criseyde (Cressida), aided by the machinations of his close friend, her uncle Pandarus, and then loses her to the Greek warrior Diomede. The love story turns into a deeply felt medieval tragedy, the human pursuit of transitory earthly ideals that pale into insignificance beside the eternal love of God. The poem ends with the narrator's solemn advice to young people to flee vain loves and turn their hearts to Christ. Chaucer's characters are psychologically so complex that the work has also been called the first modern novel.

In the “Prologue” to The Legend of Good Women (c. 1386), another dream vision, the god of love accuses Chaucer of heresy for writing of Criseyde's unfaithfulness and assigns him the penance of writing the lives of Cupid's martyrs—faithful women who died for love. After completing eight of these legends, Chaucer probably abandoned the work and by 1387 was engaged on his masterpiece.

III THE CANTERBURY TALES

Geoffrey Chaucer Fourteenth-century English poet and public servant Geoffrey Chaucer wrote verse renowned for its humour, understanding of human character, and innovations in poetic vocabulary and metre. His masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), tells the tale of Englishmen and women on a pilgrimage to St Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. The pilgrims emerge as complex characters through the stories they tell and through their interactions, which act as transitions between the different tales. This excerpt from the Tales (read by an actor) comes from “The General Prologue” in which Chaucer introduces the characters and establishes the work’s framework.(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./Culver Pictures
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The Tales is a collection of stories set within a framing story of a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral, the shrine of St Thomas à Becket. The poet joins a band of pilgrims, vividly described in the General Prologue, who assemble at the Tabard Inn, Southwark, for the journey to Canterbury. Ranging in status from a Knight to a humble Ploughman, they are a microcosm of 14th-century English society.

The Host proposes a storytelling contest to pass the time; each of the 30 or so pilgrims (the exact number is unclear) is to tell four tales on the round trip. This device enabled Chaucer to present a varied assortment of literary genres: saint's life, allegorical tale, courtly romance, or a mixture of these genres. Chaucer completed less than a quarter of this plan. The work contains 22 verse tales (two unfinished) and two long prose tales; a few are thought to be pieces written earlier by Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales, composed of more than 18,000 lines of poetry, is made up of separate groups of one or more tales with links introducing and joining stories within a group.

The tales represent nearly every variety of medieval story at its best. The special genius of Chaucer's work, however, lies in the dramatic interaction between the tales and the framing story. After the Knight's courtly and philosophical romance about noble love, the Miller interrupts with a deliciously bawdy story of seduction aimed at the Reeve (an officer or steward of a manor); the Reeve takes revenge with a tale about the seduction of a miller's wife and daughter. Thus, the tales develop the personalities, quarrels, and diverse opinions of their tellers. The prologues and tales of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner are high points of Chaucer's art. The Wife, an outspoken champion of her gender against the traditional anti-feminism of the Church, initiates a series of tales about sex, marriage, and nobility (“gentilesse”). The Pardoner gives a chilling demonstration of how his eloquence in the pulpit turns the hope of salvation into a vicious confidence game. Although Chaucer in this way satirizes the abuses of the Church, he also includes a number of didactic and religious tales, concluding with the good Parson's sermon on penitence; this is followed by a personal confession in which Chaucer “retracts” all his secular writings, including Troilus, and those Canterbury tales that “incline towards sin”. Like the ending of Troilus, the retraction is a reminder that Chaucer's genius was always subject to orthodox piety.

IV SIGNIFICANCE

Kelmscott Chaucer The Kelmscott Chaucer was published in 1896 by William Morris’ company, the Kelmscott Press. The designs of Morris’ books were influenced by medieval texts, but the actual type and floral decorative elements were Morris originals. The illustrations for this book were done by Edward Burne-Jones.Art Resource, NY/Scala

Chaucer greatly increased the prestige of English as a literary language, using it at a time when much court poetry was still written in Latin or Anglo-Norman, and extended the range of its poetic vocabulary and metres. He was the first English poet to use the iambic pentameter, the seven-line stanza called rhyme royal, and the couplet later called heroic. His system of versification depends on sounding many e's in final syllables that are silent (or absent) in modern English. Nevertheless, Chaucer dominated the works of his 15th-century English followers and the so-called Scottish Chaucerians. For the Renaissance, he was the English Homer. Edmund Spenser paid tribute to him as his master; many of the plays of William Shakespeare show thorough assimilation of Chaucer's comic spirit. John Dryden, who modernized several of the Canterbury tales, called Chaucer the “father of English poetry”. Since the founding of the Chaucer Society in England in 1868, which led to the publication of the first reliable editions and translation into modern English of his works, Chaucer's reputation has been securely established as a great English poet, loved for his wisdom, humour, and humanity.

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I INTRODUCTION

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Tennyson, Alfred, Lord or Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (1809-1892), English poet, one of the great representative figures of the Victorian age. His writing encompasses many poetic styles and includes some of the finest idyllic poetry in the language.

Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, on August 6, 1809. His initial education was conducted largely by his clergyman father, Dr. George Clayton Tennyson. The boy showed an early interest and talent in poetic composition, writing original poems in a variety of metres and also successfully imitating the style of such famous poets as Lord Byron, whom he greatly admired. By the time he was 15, Tennyson had produced several blank-verse plays and an epic. Some of his boyhood poetry was published in collaboration with his brother Charles in Poems by Two Brothers (1827). During his youth he also wrote The Devil and the Lady, published posthumously in 1930, which reveals an astonishing knowledge of Elizabethan dramatic verse.

II POETIC DEVELOPMENT

Tennyson’s Ulysses These lines open Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses (recited here by an actor), in which Ulysses, the now-aged hero of Homer’s renowned epic, gathers a band of followers and sets out on another voyage. In this poem, Tennyson responds to the early death of his close friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, claiming that life must be lived fully, even as one begins to grow old. Hallam’s death caused a lifelong conflict in Tennyson’s mind between faith and doubt, which influenced much of his writing.(p) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./Culver Pictures
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In 1827 Tennyson entered Trinity College, Cambridge University. While there he wrote a spirited blank-verse poem, Timbuctoo (1829), for which he received the Chancellor's Gold Medal, and published his first book on his own, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), which includes “Mariana”, with its haunting opening:

With blackest moss the flower-pots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds looked 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!”



In the summer of 1830, with his close friend Arthur Hallam, Tennyson joined a Spanish revolutionary army, but participated in no military engagements.

In 1831, following the death of his father, Tennyson left Cambridge without completing a degree. His second volume, Poems (1832), contains such familiar lyrics as “The Lady of Shalott”, “Oenone”, “The Palace of Art”, “The Lotos-Eaters”, and “A Dream of Fair Women”, but was severely criticized by the reviewers. The sudden death of his friend Hallam in 1833 and the discovery that three of his brothers were suffering from mental illness produced in Tennyson a profound spiritual depression, and he vowed to refrain from issuing any more of his verse for a period of ten years. During this time he devoted himself to reading and meditation. While refusing to publish, he did continue to write, producing, for example, The Two Voices (1834), a philosophical poem on death and immortality.

In 1842, at the end of his self-imposed period of silence, Tennyson won wide acclaim with the publication of his two-volume Poems. This collection, containing such works as “Morte d'Arthur”, an idyll based on Arthurian legend, “Locksley Hall”, “Ulysses”, and the poignant lyric “Break, Break, Break” (“Break, break, break, / On thy cold grey stones, O Sea! / And I would that my tongue could utter / The thoughts that arise in me”), firmly established Tennyson's position as the foremost poet of his day.

III MATURE WORKS

Tennyson's first long poem after gaining literary recognition was The Princess (1847), a romantic treatment in musical blank verse of the question of women's rights. In 1850 he published one of his greatest poems, In Memoriam, a tribute to the memory of Arthur Hallam. Although the loose organization of this series of lyrics, written over a period of 17 years, and the intensely personal character of the poem perplexed many of the readers of Tennyson's day, In Memoriam has since taken its place as one of the great elegies in English literature: “In Memoriam is unique”, wrote the 20th-century critic and poet T. S. Eliot. “It is a long poem made by putting together lyrics, which have only the unity and continuity of a diary, the concentrated diary of a man confessing himself.”

In 1850 Tennyson married Emily Sarah Sellwood, whom he had been waiting to marry since 1836. Enormously popular among the reading public, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Great Britain the same year, succeeding William Wordsworth in this honour. He settled with his bride at Twickenham, near London, three years later moving to his estate, Farringford, near Freshwater on the Isle of Wight. There he resided for at least a part of each year for the remainder of his life.

In December 1854 “The Charge of the Light Brigade” was published in the magazine The Examiner; it was written, as one of the duties of his laureateship, to celebrate a memorable action by a British cavalry unit in the Crimean War which had taken place just months before, on October 25. In the following year Maud, and Other Poems was published.

With the composition of Idylls of the King (begun in 1859 and completed in 1885), Tennyson returned to the subject of the Arthurian cycle. He dealt with the ancient legends in an episodic rather than a continuous narrative structure, the result being a loosely strung series of metrical romances. Rich in medieval pageantry and vivid, noble characterization, the poems contain some of Tennyson's best writing.

Among the poet's other works are the moving narrative of love and self-sacrifice Enoch Arden (1864); the historical dramas Queen Mary (1875), Harold (1876), and Becket (1884); Ballads and Other Poems (1880); Tiresias and Other Poems (1885); Demeter and Other Poems (1889); and The Death of Oenone and Other Poems (published posthumously, 1892). Tennyson was made a peer in 1884, taking his seat in the House of Lords as Baron Tennyson of Freshwater and Aldworth. He died at Aldworth House, Haslemere, Surrey, on October 6, 1892.

IV LITERARY IMPORTANCE

further reading
These sources provide additional information on Tennyson, Alfred, Lord.

Few poets have produced acknowledged masterpieces in so many different poetic genres as Tennyson; he furnished perhaps the most notable example in English letters of the eclectic style. His consummately crafted verse expresses in readily comprehensible terms the Victorian feeling for order and harmony, but he has more often been admired than imitated, and has often been fiercely criticized and condemned. “He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet,” wrote W. H. Auden, “he was also undoubtedly the stupidest”; “Imperialist, racist, reactionary, sexist,” according to poet and critic Tom Paulin, “Tennyson is in brilliant command of a dead language. The words he marshals belong to a brigade of cheap, brittle alloys which lack any natural spring or give.” Yet many would still concur with T. S. Eliot's judgement: “Tennyson is a great poet, for reasons that are perfectly clear. He has three qualities which are seldom found together except in the greatest poets: abundance, variety, and complete competence.”

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.




Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-1586), English poet, courtier, and soldier, who in life was the embodiment of the Elizabethan ideal of gentlemanly virtue, and whose devotion to poetry served as an inspiration for the future of English verse.

Sidney was born in Penshurst, Kent, and was educated at Christ Church College, Oxford University. A favourite of Elizabeth I, he was sent on several diplomatic missions. He retired from court for a time after incurring the queen’s displeasure, but in 1583 was restored to favour and knighted. He was considered by many Protestants in Europe as the possible leader for a Protestant League against Catholic Spain. In 1585 he was appointed governor of Flushing in the Netherlands, and in 1586 he joined an expedition sent to aid the Netherlands against Spain. Sidney died of wounds that he received in a raid on a Spanish convoy at Zutphen in the Netherlands. Legend has it that, when mortally wounded, Sidney gave his cup of water to another soldier, with the words “Thy need is greater than mine”. His death was considered a national loss and he was widely mourned.

None of Sidney’s works were published during his lifetime; many of them, however, circulated in manuscript. Written in the tradition of the Canzoniere by Petrarch, his sequence of 108 sonnets entitled Astrophel and Stella (1591) was in turn influential for later sonnet sequences, including that of Shakespeare. The sonnets celebrate a hopeless love affair, and are striking in their technical sophistication and wide-ranging tone, from the comic to the serious, from the parodic (“You that do dictionary’s method bring / Into your rhymes, running in rattling rows”) to the confessional (“‘Fool,’ said my muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”). His pastoral romance, Arcadia (1590), combines verse with prose in what was the first considerable work in English in this form; it became a model for later pastoral poetry. His other major work is An Apology For Poetry, published also as The Defence of Poesie (both 1595), a masterful demonstration of rhetorical argument and a powerful statement of humanist values. Sidney defends poetry against Puritan objections to imaginative literature, and challenges the influential rejection of poetry by Plato as the work of “liars”. He claims for the poet the creative role of “maker”, one who joins imagination with morality to “delight and teach”. Of that real world that holds historians and philosophers to facts and figures, he writes: “Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden”.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.



Spenser, Edmund (c. 1552-1599), English poet, who bridged the medieval and Elizabethan periods, and who is most famous for his long allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene.

Edmund Spenser Best remembered for his epic poem, The Faerie Queene (Books I-III published in 1590, Books IV-VI in 1596), 16th-century writer Edmund Spenser ranks as one of the most important English poets in history. Regarded as a masterpiece of English literature, The Faerie Queene contains a blend of chivalric romance and moral and historical allegory. Spenser invented a unique nine-line stanza, now known as the Spenserian stanza, for use in the poem.The New York Public Library


II LIFE AND WORKS

Spenser was born in London, where he attended the Merchant Taylors’ School. He then went on to Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, where he took a degree in 1576. In 1579 he entered the service of the English courtier Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and met the English poet Sir Philip Sidney, to whom he dedicated his first major poem, The Shepheardes Calender (1579). This work demonstrates the great poetic flexibility of the English language. It is a series of 12 pastoral poems, or eclogues, written in a variety of metres (see Versification) and employing a vocabulary of obsolete words and coined expressions to give a suggestion of antiquity:

A Shepeheards boye (no better doe him call)

When Winters wastful spight was almost spent,

All in a sunneshine day, as did befall,

Led forth his flock, that had bene long ypent.

So faynt they woxe, and feeble in the folde,

That now unnethes their feete could them uphold.



All as the Sheepe, such was the shepeheards looke,

For pale and wanne he was, (alas the while,)

May seeme he lovd, or else some care he tooke:

Well couth he tune his pipe, and frame his stile.

Tho to a hill his faynting flocke he ledde,

And thus him playnd, the while his shepe there fedde.



(“First Eclogue”, 1—12)



Words such as “woxe” (grew), “unnethes” (scarcely), and “playnd” (lamented) were already archaic by the time that Spenser was writing. However, through the use of these archaisms, and in the figure of the singing shepherd Colin Clout, the pastoral conventions of Virgil and other Classical authors are given an assumed English ancestry. The concern with national history and destiny demonstrated here is further evidenced in the “Fourth Eclogue”, which is “purposely intended to the honor and prayse of our most gracious sovereigne, Queene Elizabeth”, as Spenser writes in the brief note that prefaces it.

III THE FAERIE QUEENE

While residing with the Earl of Leicester in London, Spenser began to write The Faerie Queene, and in 1580 he was appointed secretary to Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton, the new lord deputy of Ireland. Thereafter, Spenser lived mostly in Ireland, near Cork, where he completed his great allegory. In 1589 he was visited by the English poet, courtier, and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, who recognized the merit of the poem and brought Spenser to England to publish it and to make the poet known to Elizabeth I.

For The Faerie Queene, Spenser originated a nine-line verse stanza, now known as the Spenserian stanza—the first eight lines are iambic pentameter, and the ninth, iambic hexameter; the rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. The melodious verse, combined with Spenser’s sensuous imagery and deliberate use of archaic language evocative of the medieval past (as in the earlier Shepheardes Calender), serve not only to relieve the high moral seriousness of his theme but to create a complex panorama of great splendour: the work blends religious and historical allegory with chivalric romance. In this fashion, it reproduces the thematic concerns of The Shepheardes Calender, if in a far more ambitious form. Queen Elizabeth herself is made the centre of an elaborate allegorical scheme. As Spenser explained in an introductory letter to Raleigh that prefaced the poem, “In that Faerie Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent person of our soveraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land.” Yet the poem that results does not follow the design outlined in this letter, and was never in fact completed. It has been particularly prized for the vivid allegory of episodes such as the visit of the Knight of Temperance to the Cave of Mammon in Book II, or the evocation of the tempting but dangerous Bowre of Blisse in Canto xii of the same Book:

Thus being entred, they behold around

A large and spacious plaine, on every side

Strowed with pleasauns, whose faire grassy ground

Mantled with greene, and goodly beautifide

With all the ornaments of Floraes pride,

Wherewith her mother Art, as halfe in scorne

Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride

Did decke her, and too lavishly adorne,

When forth from virgin bowre she comes in th’early morne.



Spenser received an enthusiastic reception, and his poem was hailed on the publication of its first three books in 1590. Unable to secure further patronage, however, he remained in England for about a year and published a collection of short poems entitled Complaints (1591) before returning to Ireland. On his return, in the same year, he wrote Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. This work, published in 1595, was dedicated to Raleigh; in the pastoral mode, it recounts Spenser’s experiences at the English court and concludes with praises of the simple country life. In 1594 Spenser married and celebrated the event in his “Epithalamion”, a wedding song, considered the most beautiful example of this genre in English literature. It was printed in 1595 as the climax to a group of exceptionally vivid love sonnets, the Amoretti. Dramatizing the wedding day, this “song made in lieu of many ornaments, / With which my love should duly have bene dect [adorned]”, as the poem’s concluding stanza puts it, depicts the bride’s progress from her awakening in the morning, through the marriage and festivities, to the marriage bed at night. It is an unashamedly joyful celebration of love and its consummation.

In 1596 Spenser took three more books of The Faerie Queene to London for publication. While in England he completed a prose work, Veue of the Present State of Ireland, which was not issued until 1633—long after his death. In this work, his advocacy of a vigorously active Protestant role for England attests to a deep hostility to the native Catholic Irish—the Veue argues for a reformation of Ireland that is tantamount to a complete destruction of Irish culture, if not the Irish themselves. He also published at this time Fowre Hymnes (1596), poems in honour of love and beauty. For a double wedding of two daughters of the nobility in 1596, Spenser composed the “Prothalamion”, one of his loveliest shorter lyrical poems. Again disappointed of royal patronage, he returned to Ireland. In October 1598 his castle was sacked and burned by Irish rebels, and Spenser fled to London, where he died on January 13, 1599. After his death his poetic style was imitated and perpetuated by a group of writers who shared his religious and political convictions—his influence on Milton can be partly attributed to such factors. Yet his lush and expansive imagination and vigorous approach to structure also made him a powerful influence on later generations, particularly Romantic poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.



Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), English poet and playwright, recognized in much of the world as the greatest of all dramatists.

II LIFE

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 William Shakespeare ranks as perhaps the most famous writer in the history of English literature. Shakespeare employed poetry and verse within his dramatic comedies, tragedies, and histories, and he also composed notable individual poems. His poems include a series of 154 sonnets, unusually arranged as three quatrains and a couplet; the development was original enough for it to become known as the Shakesperian sonnet. Sonnet 18 (recited by an actor) comes from The Sonnets of Shakespeare (printed in 1609).(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./© Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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A complete, authoritative account of Shakespeare’s life is lacking; much supposition surrounds relatively few facts. His day of birth is traditionally held to be April 23; it is known he was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. The third of eight children, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a locally prominent merchant, and Mary Arden, daughter of a Roman Catholic member of the landed gentry. He was probably educated at the local grammar school. As the eldest son, Shakespeare ordinarily would have been apprenticed to his father’s shop so that he could learn and eventually take over the business, but according to one apocryphal account he was apprenticed to a butcher because of reverses in his father’s financial situation. In recent years, it has more convincingly been argued that he was caught up in the secretive network of Catholic believers and priests who strove to cultivate their faith in the inhospitable conditions of Elizabethan England. At the turn of the 1580s, it is claimed, he served as tutor in the household of Alexander Houghton, a prominent Lancashire Catholic and friend of the Stratford schoolmaster John Cottom. While others in this network went on to suffer and die for their beliefs, Shakespeare must somehow have extricated himself, for there is little evidence to suggest any subsequent involvement in their circles. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a farmer. He is supposed to have left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local justice of the peace. Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway produced a daughter, Susanna, in 1583 and twins—a boy and a girl—in 1585. The boy died 11 years later.

Shakespeare apparently arrived in London in about 1588, and by 1592 had attained success as an actor and a playwright. Shortly thereafter, he secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. The publication of Shakespeare’s two fashionably erotic narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and of his Sonnets (published 1609, but circulated previously in manuscript) established his reputation as a gifted and popular Renaissance poet. The Sonnets describe the devotion of a character, often identified as the poet himself, to a young man whose beauty and virtue he praises and to a mysterious and faithless dark lady with whom the poet is infatuated. The ensuing triangular situation, resulting from the attraction of the poet’s friend to the dark lady, is treated with passionate intensity and psychological insight. They are prized for their exploration of love in all its aspects, and a poem such as “Sonnet 18” is one of the most famous love poems of all time.

While the poem may be familiar, it is less well known that it is an exquisite celebration of a young man’s beauty. The fact that 126 of the 154 sonnets are apparently addressed by a male poet to another man has caused some critical discomfort over the years. However, Shakespeare’s modern reputation is based mainly on the 38 plays that he apparently wrote, modified, or collaborated on. Although generally popular in his day, these plays were frequently little esteemed by his educated contemporaries, who considered English plays of their own day to be only vulgar entertainment.

Shakespeare’s professional life in London was marked by a number of financially advantageous arrangements that permitted him to share in the profits of his acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, later called the King’s Men, and its two theatres, the Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars. His plays were given special presentation at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I more frequently than those of any other contemporary dramatists. It is known that he risked losing royal favour only once, in 1599, when his company performed “the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II“ at the request of a group of conspirators against Elizabeth. They were led by Elizabeth’s unsuccessful court favourite, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and by the Earl of Southampton. In the subsequent inquiry, Shakespeare’s company was absolved of complicity in the conspiracy.

After about 1608, Shakespeare’s dramatic production lessened and it seems that he spent more time in Stratford. There he had established his family in an imposing house called New Place, and had become a leading local citizen. He died on April 23, 1616, and was buried in the Stratford church.

III WORKS

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Although the precise date of many of Shakespeare’s plays is in doubt, his dramatic career is generally divided into four periods: the first period, involving experimentation, although still clearly influenced by or imitating Classical models; the second period, in which Shakespeare appears to achieve a truly individual style and approach; a third, darker period, in which he wrote not only his major tragedies but also the more difficult comedies, known as the “problem plays” because their resolutions leave troubling and unanswered questions; and his final period, when his style blossomed in the romantic tragicomedies—exotic, symbolic pieces which while happily resolved involve a greater complexity of vision.

These divisions are necessarily arbitrary ways of viewing Shakespeare’s creative development, since his plays are notoriously hard to date accurately, either in terms of when they were written or when they were first performed. Commentators differ and the dates in this article should be seen as plausible approximations. In all periods, the plots of his plays were frequently drawn from chronicles, histories, or earlier fiction, as were the plays of other contemporary dramatists.

A First Period

Shakespeare’s first period was one of experimentation. His early plays, unlike his more mature work, are characterized to a degree by formal and rather obvious construction and often stylized verse.

Four plays dramatizing the English civil strife of the 15th century are possibly Shakespeare’s earliest dramatic works. Chronicle history plays were a popular genre of the time. These plays, Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (c. 1590-1592) and Richard III (c. 1593), deal with the evil results of weak leadership and of national disunity fostered for selfish ends. The cycle closes with the death of Richard III and the ascent to the throne of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, to which Elizabeth belonged. In style and structure, these plays are related partly to medieval drama and partly to the works of earlier Elizabethan dramatists, especially Christopher Marlowe. Either indirectly through such dramatists or directly, the influence of the Classical Roman dramatist Seneca is also reflected in the organization of these four plays, in the bloodiness of many of their scenes, and in their highly coloured, bombastic language. Senecan influence, exerted by way of the earlier English dramatist Thomas Kyd, is particularly obvious in Titus Andronicus (c. 1590), a tragedy of righteous revenge for heinous and bloody acts, which are staged in sensational detail. While previous generations have found its violent excesses absurd or disgusting, some directors and critics since the 1960s have recognized in its horror the articulation of more contemporary preoccupations with the meanings of violence.

Shakespeare’s comedies of the first period represent a wide range. The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592), an uproarious farce in imitation of Classical Roman comedy, depends for its appeal on the mistakes in identity of two sets of twins involved in romance and war. Farce is not so strongly emphasized in The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1592), a comedy of character. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1592-1593) depends on the appeal of romantic love. In contrast, Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1595) satirizes the loves of its main male characters as well as the fashionable devotion to studious pursuits by which these noblemen had first sought to avoid romantic and worldly ensnarement. The dialogue in which many of the characters voice their pretensions ridicules the artificially ornate, courtly style typified by the works of the English novelist and dramatist John Lyly, the court conventions of the time, and perhaps the scientific discussions of Sir Walter Raleigh and his cohorts.

B Second Period

Shakespeare’s second period includes his most important plays concerned with English history, his so-called joyous comedies, and two major tragedies. In this period, his style and approach became highly individualized. The second-period historical plays include Richard II (c. 1595), Henry IV, Parts I and II (c. 1597), and Henry V (c. 1599). They cover the span immediately before that of the Henry VI plays. Richard II is a study of a weak, sensitive, self-dramatizing, but sympathetic monarch who loses his kingdom to his forceful successor, Henry IV. In the two parts of Henry IV, Henry recognizes his own guilt. His fears for his own son, later Henry V, prove unfounded, as the young prince displays an essentially responsible attitude towards the duties of kingship. In an alternation of masterful comic and serious scenes, the fat knight Falstaff and the rebel Hotspur reveal contrasting excesses between which the prince finds his proper position. The mingling of the tragic and the comic to suggest a broad range of humanity became one of Shakespeare’s favourite devices.

Outstanding among the comedies of the second period is A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595-1596). Its fantasy-filled insouciance is achieved by the interweaving of several plots involving two pairs of noble lovers, a group of bumbling and unconsciously comic townspeople, and members of the fairy realm, notably Puck, King Oberon, and Queen Titania. These three worlds are brought together in a series of encounters that veer from the magical to the absurd and back again in the space of only a few lines. In Act 3, for example, Oberon plays a trick on Titania while she sleeps, employing Puck to anoint her with a potion that will cause her to fall in love with the first creature she sees on waking. As luck would have it, she opens her eyes to the sight of Bottom the weaver, himself adorned by Puck with an ass’s head. Yet the comic episode of the Queen of the Fairies “enamoured of an ass” (4.i.76) echoes the play’s more profound concerns with the nature of the real.

Subtle evocation of atmosphere, of the sort that characterizes this play, is found also in the tragicomedy The Merchant of Venice (c. 1594-1598). The Renaissance motifs of masculine friendship and romantic love in this play are portrayed in opposition to the bitter inhumanity of a Jewish usurer named Shylock, whose own misfortunes are presented so as to arouse understanding and sympathy. While this play undoubtedly deals in the currency of European anti-Semitism, its exploration of power and prejudice also enables a humanist critique of such bigotry. As Shylock himself says, confronted by the double standards of his Venetian opponents:

He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason?—I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
(3.i.50-63)



The type of quick-witted, warm, and responsive young woman exemplified in this play by Portia reappears in the joyous comedies of the second period.

The witty comedy Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598-1599) is marred, in the opinion of some critics, by an insensitive treatment of its female characters. However, Shakespeare’s most mature comedies, As You Like It (c. 1599) and Twelfth Night (c. 1601), are characterized by lyricism, ambiguity, and the attraction of beautiful, charming, and strong-minded heroines such as Rosalind. In As You Like It, the contrast between the manners of the Elizabethan court and those current in the English countryside is drawn in a rich, sweet, and varied vein. Shakespeare constructed a complex pattern between different characters and between appearance and reality. He used this pattern to comment on a variety of human foibles. In that respect, As You Like It is similar to Twelfth Night, in which the comical side of love is illustrated by the misadventures of two pairs of romantic lovers and of a number of realistically conceived and clowning characters in the sub-plot. Yet there is a darker side even to these plays. In Twelfth Night, the conventional resolution is disrupted by the exclusion of Malvolio, a figure who has served as the butt of the comic sub-plot. Rather than participate in the concluding scene of forgiveness and reconciliation, he storms off stage with the words “I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you!” (5.i.377). Another comedy of the second period is The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597); this play is a farce about middle-class life in which Falstaff reappears as the comic victim.

Two major tragedies, differing considerably in nature, mark the beginning and the end of the second period. Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), famous for its poetic treatment of the ecstasy of youthful love, dramatizes the fate of two lovers victimized by the feuds and misunderstandings of their elders and by their own hasty temperaments. On the other hand, Julius Caesar (c. 1599) is a serious tragedy of political rivalries, less intense in style than the tragic dramas that followed.

C Third Period

Extract from Macbeth William Shakespeare is generally considered the greatest dramatist in the history of literature and the finest poet writing in the English language. His brilliant works are celebrated for their comprehensive understanding of the human condition. In this excerpt from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth (recited by an actor), Macbeth meditates on the futility of human endeavours.(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./Culver Pictures
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Shakespeare’s third period includes his greatest tragedies and his so-called dark or bitter comedies. The tragedies of this period are the most profound of his works and those in which his poetic idiom became an extremely supple dramatic instrument capable of recording the passage of human thought and the many dimensions of given dramatic situations. Hamlet (c. 1601), his most famous play, goes far beyond other tragedies of revenge in picturing the mingled sordidness and glory of the human condition. Hamlet feels that he is living in a world of deceit and corruption. It is the precipitous marriage of his mother to Claudius, his uncle, that is the source of his unease: the wedding has taken place barely two months after the sudden death of Hamlet’s father, the king. His suspicions are spectacularly confirmed by the appearance of the dead king’s ghost. Confirming that he was murdered by Claudius, the ghost urges Hamlet to revenge. Yet this injunction is the trigger for a dramatic exploration of Hamlet’s self-doubt, an introspective torment that leads him to the brink of suicide in perhaps the most famous Shakespearean line of all, “To be, or not to be, that is the question” (3.i.58). As Hamlet recognizes, his hesitancy is akin to the sleep of oblivion:

And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
(3.i.86-90)



Yet in regaining “the name of action”, Hamlet brings about the self-destruction that his indecision had only mimicked. Through such density of character and language the play commands the affection and attention that is still accorded it today.

Othello (c. 1602-1604) portrays the growth of unjustified jealousy in the protagonist, Othello, a Moor serving as a general in the Venetian army. The innocent object of his jealousy is his wife, Desdemona. In this tragedy, Othello’s evil lieutenant, Iago, draws him into mistaken jealousy in order to ruin him. King Lear (c. 1604-1606), conceived on a more epic scale, deals with the consequences of the irresponsibility and misjudgement of Lear, a ruler of early Britain, and of his councillor, the Duke of Gloucester. The tragic outcome is a result of giving power to his evil offspring, rather than to his good offspring. Lear’s daughter Cordelia displays a redeeming love that makes the tragic conclusion a vindication of goodness, though a bleak resolution because Cordelia dies. This conclusion is reinforced by the portrayal of evil as self-defeating, exemplified by the fates of Cordelia’s sisters and of Gloucester’s opportunistic son. Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606-1607) is concerned with a different type of love, namely the middle-aged passion of the Roman general Mark Antony for the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. Their love is glorified by some of the most sensuous poetry written by Shakespeare, as in this description of the Egyptian queen by Antony’s friend, Enobarbus:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne
Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description. She did lie
In her pavilion—cloth of gold, of tissue—
O’er picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature.
(2.ii.198-208)



In Macbeth (c. 1606), Shakespeare depicts the tragedy of a great and basically good man who, led on by others and because of a defect in his own nature, succumbs to murderous ambition. In getting and retaining the Scottish throne, Macbeth dulls his humanity to the point where he becomes capable of any amoral act. As with Hamlet, this retreat from a full humanity is paradoxically accompanied by a heightened self-awareness; yet for Macbeth there is no redemption, only a descent into a bleak nihilism. Human existence, as he sees it, amounts to nothing:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
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.
(5.iv.18-27)



Three other plays of this period suggest a bitterness that these tragedies more successfully contain, because the protagonists do not seem to possess greatness or tragic stature. In Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), the most intellectually contrived of Shakespeare’s plays, the gulf between the ideal and the real, both individually and politically, is skilfully evoked. In Coriolanus (c. 1608), another tragedy taking place in antiquity, the legendary Roman hero Caius Marcius Coriolanus is portrayed as unable to bring himself either to woo the Roman masses or to crush them by force. Timon of Athens (c. 1607) is a similarly bitter play about a character reduced to misanthropy by the ingratitude of his sycophants. Because of the uneven quality of the writing, this tragedy is considered to be a collaboration, quite possibly with Thomas Middleton.

The two comedies of this period also are dark in mood. In the 20th century these plays gained the name of “problem plays” because they do not fit into clear categories or present easy resolution. All’s Well That Ends Well (c. 1598-1604) and Measure for Measure (c. 1604) are both plays that question accepted patterns of morality without offering the comfort of solutions.

D Fourth Period

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The fourth period of Shakespeare’s work comprises his principal romantic tragicomedies. Towards the end of his career, Shakespeare created several plays that, through the intervention of magic, art, compassion, or grace, often suggest redemptive hope for the human condition. These plays are written with a grave quality differing considerably from his earlier comedies, but they end happily with a reunion or final reconciliation. The tragicomedies depend for part of their appeal upon the lure of a distant time or place, and all seem more obviously symbolic than most of his earlier works. To many critics, the tragicomedies signify a final ripeness in Shakespeare’s own outlook, but other authorities believe that the change reflects only a change in fashion in the drama.

The romantic tragicomedy Pericles, Prince of Tyre (c. 1606-1608) concerns the title character’s painful loss of his wife and the persecution of his daughter. After many exotic adventures, Pericles is reunited with his loved ones. In Cymbeline (c. 1609-1610) and The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610-1611), characters suffer great loss and pain, but are reunited. Perhaps the most successful product of this particular vein of creativity, however, is what may be Shakespeare’s last complete play, The Tempest (c. 1611), in which the resolution suggests the beneficial effects of the union of wisdom and power. In this play Prospero, deprived of his dukedom and banished to an island, confounds his usurping brother by employing magical powers and furthering a love match between his own daughter and the son of one of his enemies. Shakespeare’s poetic power reached great heights in this beautiful, lyrical play, and in Prospero’s surrender of his magical powers at its conclusion, some critics—perhaps fancifully—have seen Shakespeare’s own relinquishment of the theatre’s “rough magic”.

Two final plays, sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare, presumably are the products of collaboration. A historical drama, Henry VIII (c. 1613) was probably written with the English dramatist John Fletcher, as was The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1613; published posthumously, 1634), a story of the love of two noble friends for one woman.

E Literary Reputation

Shakespeare’s reputation as perhaps the greatest of all dramatists was not achieved during his lifetime. Though his contemporary Ben Jonson declared him “not of an age, but for all time”, early 17th-century taste found the plays of Jonson himself, or Thomas Middleton, or Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, equally worthy of praise. Only in the Restoration period—some 50 or more years after Shakespeare’s death—did his reputation begin to eclipse that of his contemporaries. This is not to say that the late 17th- and early 18th-century theatre treated his plays with anything like reverence. When they were performed, it was most often in versions rewritten for the fashions of the age, purged—as their adaptors maintained—of their coarseness and absurdities. These alterations could be very significant: in one version of King Lear popular throughout the 18th century Lear and Cordelia are reprieved at the play’s conclusion, transforming a tragedy into a tragicomedy! Perhaps paradoxically, it was exactly this fondness for adapting Shakespeare that kept his plays in the repertoire while those of Jonson, Middleton, and others went down to obscurity. Also, during the first half of the 18th century Shakespeare began to be afforded the role of English national poet, a process that reached its culmination in the installation of a memorial statue in Westminster Abbey in 1741 and a huge Jubilee festival, staged in 1764 to celebrate the bicentenary of his birth.

The Romantic movement, particularly the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, did much to shape both Shakespeare’s international reputation and the account of his achievement that has persisted ever since. Romantic authors claimed Shakespeare as a great precursor of their own literary values: his work was celebrated as an embodiment of universal human truths, an unequalled articulation of the human condition in all its nobility and variety. In later Victorian Britain this view was married to the moralistic “civilizing” mission of educationalists and empire builders, while American writers looked to Shakespeare as a foundation stone of their own distinct cultural identity. The years since World War I have if anything cemented these positions: the establishment of institutions such as the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Britain, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in the United States, has ensured that his work has remained a central icon of Western culture. The claim that his plays have the power to transcend their historical moment and speak to all humanity now underlies an insistence on Shakespeare’s continuing relevance to our own situation: as the title of a seminal book by Jan Kott put it, Shakespeare is “our contemporary”.

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These sources provide additional information on Shakespeare, William.

Nevertheless, there have always been dissenters. Writers of the stature of Leo Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw were prepared to offer devastatingly negative judgements on the plays and their author, while others have advanced eccentric theories designed to prove that such great plays could not have been written by someone of Shakespeare’s obscure origins and limited education. In their own way, recent Shakespearean scholars have also contributed to a demythologizing of the bard that some think threatens the security of his reputation. Yet even as the focus of such activities Shakespeare remains central to the work of literary critics, to theatre throughout the world, to Western accounts of national and cultural identity, and to the British tourist industry. These are not positions he will be allowed to surrender easily

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Kyd, Thomas (1558-1594), English dramatist, born in London and educated at the Merchant Taylors' School, London. Kyd (or Kid) was one of the most important dramatists of the early Elizabethan period. His Spanish Tragedy (c. 1580) was one of the most popular plays of his day. His use of shocking and horrifying melodramatic situations was imitated by subsequent English dramatists, such as Shakespeare in his Titus Andronicus. Many experts believe that Shakespeare used a play (now lost) attributed to Kyd as a source for Hamlet; other plays sometimes attributed to Kyd are The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda (c. 1588) and The First Part of Jeronimo (1605). Kyd was a close friend of Christopher Marlowe, with whom he was implicated in charges of heresy and atheism. Kyd was imprisoned and released shortly thereafter, but died in disgrace and poverty a year later.

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Marlowe, Christopher (1564-1593), English playwright and poet, considered the first great English dramatist and the most important Elizabethan dramatist before William Shakespeare, although his entire activity as a playwright lasted only six years. Earlier playwrights had concentrated on comedy; Marlowe worked on tragedy and advanced it considerably as a dramatic medium. His masterpiece is The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.

Born in Canterbury on February 6, 1564, the son of a shoemaker, Marlowe was educated at the University of Cambridge. Going to London, he associated himself with the Admiral's Men, a company of actors for whom he wrote most of his plays. He was reputedly a secret agent for the government and numbered some prominent men, including Sir Walter Raleigh, among his friends, but he led an adventurous and dissolute life and held unorthodox religious views. In 1593 he was denounced as a heretic; before any action could be taken against him, in May of that year he was stabbed to death in a tavern brawl at Deptford supposedly over payment of a dinner bill, though the circumstances of his death remain mysterious.

By revealing the possibilities for strength and variety of expression in blank verse, Marlowe helped to establish the verse form as the predominant form in English drama. He wrote four principal plays, three of which were published posthumously: the heroic dramatic epic Tamburlaine the Great (1590), about the 14th-century Mongol conqueror; Edward II (1594), which was one of the earliest successful English historical dramas and a model for Shakespeare's Richard II and Richard III; The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (written c. 1589; published 1604), one of the earliest dramatizations of the Faust legend; and the tragedy The Jew of Malta (1633). In each of these dramas one forceful protagonist with a single overriding passion dominates. Marlowe was also the author of two lesser plays: Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, completed by the English dramatist Thomas Nashe (1594); and Massacre at Paris (1600). Some academics believe Marlowe also wrote parts of several of Shakespeare's plays. Each of Marlowe's important plays has as a central character a passionate man doomed to destruction by an inordinate desire for power. The plays are further characterized by beautiful, sonorous language and emotional vitality, which is, however, at times unrestrained to the point of bombast.

As a poet Marlowe is known for “The Passionate Shepherd” (1599), which contains the lyric “Come Live with Me and Be My Love”. Marlowe's mythological love poem, Hero and Leander, was unfinished at his death; it was completed by George Chapman and published in 1598. Marlowe also translated works of the ancient Latin poets Lucan and Ovid.

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Bacon, Francis, 1st Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans (1561-1626), English philosopher and statesman, one of the pioneers of modern scientific thought.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) The most influential and versatile English writer of the 17th century, Francis Bacon wrote on a broad range of topics, including ethics, philosophy, science, law, history, and politics. Bacon helped usher in the era of modern scientific thought by developing a reasoning process called induction. Induction is the process by which general conclusions are drawn from particular situations.The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty/E. Witty


II LIFE

Bacon was born on January 22, 1561, at York House, in the Strand, London, and educated at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Elected to the House of Commons in 1584, he served until 1614. He wrote letters of sound advice to Queen Elizabeth I, but his suggestions were never implemented, and he completely lost favour with the queen in 1593, when he opposed a bill for a royal subsidy. He regained the respect of the court, however, with the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603. Bacon proposed schemes for the union of England and Scotland and recommended measures for dealing with Roman Catholics. For these efforts he was knighted on July 23, 1603, was made a commissioner for the union of Scotland and England, and was given a pension in 1604. His Advancement of Learning was published and presented to the king in 1605. Two years later he was appointed Solicitor-General.

In the last session of the first Parliament held in February 1611 under James I, the differences between Crown and Commons grew critical, and Bacon took the role of mediator, despite his distrust of James’s chief minister, Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury. On Salisbury’s death in 1612, Bacon, in order to gain the king’s attention, wrote several papers on statecraft, particularly on relations between Crown and Commons. In 1613 he was appointed Attorney-General.

In 1616 Bacon became a privy counsellor, and in 1618 he was appointed Lord Chancellor and raised to the peerage as Baron Verulam. In 1620 his Novum Organum was published, and on January 26, 1621, he was created Viscount St Albans. In the same year he was charged by Parliament with accepting bribes. He confessed but said that he was “heartily and penitently sorry”, and he submitted himself to the will of his fellow peers, who ordered him fined, imprisoned at the king’s pleasure, and banished from Parliament and the court. After his release, he retired to his family residence at Gorhambury. In September 1621 the king pardoned him but prohibited his return to Parliament or the court. Bacon then resumed his writing, completing his History of Henry VII and his Latin translation of The Advancement of Learning (De Augmentis). In March 1622 he offered to make a digest of the laws, with no further consequence despite repeated petitions to James I and James’s successor, Charles I. He died in London on April 9, 1626.

III WORKS

Bacon’s writings fall into three categories: philosophical, purely literary, and professional. The best of his philosophical works are The Advancement of Learning (1605), a review in English of the state of knowledge in his own time, and Novum Organum; Or, Indications Respecting the Interpretation of Nature (1620).

Bacon’s philosophy emphasized the belief that people are the servants and interpreters of nature, that truth is not derived from authority, and that knowledge is the fruit of experience. Bacon is generally credited with having contributed to logic the method known as ampliative inference, a technique of inductive reasoning. Previous logicians had practised induction by simple enumeration, that is, drawing general conclusions from particular data. Bacon’s method was to infer by use of analogy, from the characteristics or properties of the larger group to which that datum belonged, leaving to later experience the correction of evident errors. Because it added significantly to the improvement of scientific hypotheses, this method was a fundamental advancement of the scientific method.

Bacon’s Novum Organum successfully influenced the acceptance of accurate observation and experimentation in science. In it he maintained that all prejudices and preconceived attitudes, which he called “idols”, must be abandoned, whether they be the common property of the race owing to common modes of thought (“idols of the tribe”), or the peculiar possession of the individual (“idols of the cave”); whether they arise from too great a dependence on language (“idols of the marketplace”), or from tradition (“idols of the theatre”). The principles laid down in the Novum Organum had an important influence on the subsequent development of empiricism.

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These sources provide additional information on Bacon, Francis, 1st Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans.

Bacon’s Essays, his chief contributions to literature, were published at various times between 1597 and 1625. His History of Henry VII (1622) shows his abilities in scholarly research. In his fanciful New Atlantis Bacon suggested the formation of scientific academies. His professional works include Maxims of the Law (1630), Reading on the Statute of Uses (1642), pleadings in law cases, and speeches in Parliament. The theory that Bacon, rather than an obscure actor from Stratford-upon-Avon, is the true author of the plays of William Shakespeare has been thoroughly discredited.

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I INTRODUCTION

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Locke, John (1632-1704), English philosopher, who founded the school of empiricism and defended the idea of a social contract.

II LIFE

Locke was born in the village of Wrington, Somerset, on August 29, 1632. He was educated at the University of Oxford and lectured on Greek, rhetoric, and moral philosophy at Oxford from 1661 to 1664. In 1667 he began his association with the English statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, to whom Locke was a friend, adviser, and doctor. Shaftesbury secured for Locke a series of minor government appointments. In 1669, in one of his official capacities, Locke wrote a constitution for the proprietors of the Carolina Colony in North America, but it was never put into effect. In 1675, after the liberal Shaftesbury had fallen from favour, Locke moved to France. He returned to England in 1679, but in view of his opposition to the succession of the king’s Catholic brother to the throne, he soon found it expedient to return to the Continent. From 1683 to 1688 he lived in Holland, and following the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the accession of a Protestant monarch, Locke returned once more to England. The new king, William III, appointed Locke to the Board of Trade in 1696, a position from which he resigned because of ill health in 1700. He died in Oates on October 28, 1704.

III EMPIRICISM

John Locke Empiricists such as John Locke founded their metaphysics in the observable world, not in purely theoretical creations. In contrast to rationalists such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, who placed great emphasis on the use of reason to obtain knowledge, Locke thought that our knowledge of the world should rely on everyday experience, scientific observation, and common sense. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding portrays each individual as a blank slate. Each person’s experiences become notations on the slate and make him or her distinct from other people.Hulton Deutsch

Locke’s empiricism held that all knowledge other than deductive reasoning must be based on sensory experience. Empiricist ideas were put forward by the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon early in the 17th century, but Locke gave the doctrine a systematic expression in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). He regarded the mind of a person at birth as a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which experience imprinted knowledge. He rejected the belief in innate ideas, a concept that derived originally from Plato. See Epistemology.

IV POLITICAL THEORIES

Locke’s political ideas were formed through theoretical reflection, practical engagement, and religious commitment. Although he believed that God had designed human beings and given them reason, and thus the ability to know natural laws, he rejected theories of his day that claimed a divine origin for human government as such, or for certain rules in particular. In his Two Treatises of Government (1690), Locke attacked the divine right theory put forward by the Anglican theologian Robert Filmer. Instead, he argued that sovereignty resides in the people, and that government gains its authority only from the transfer of individual rights by means of a contract. In developing this social contract argument, Locke in some ways drew upon, but also criticized, the views of Thomas Hobbes. For Locke, individuals must consent to government if it is to be legitimate; their consent can be explicit or tacit.

Because government exists only to further the security and liberty of the people, revolution can be justified if the people collectively come to find the government intolerably oppressive. This aspect of Locke’s theory arguably derives from his involvement in Shaftesbury’s plots against the accession of a new Catholic ruler. So long as government remains legitimate it must protect individual rights and control its own power through a system of checks and balances. Locke was also a powerful advocate of religious toleration by the state. However, he rejected toleration of atheists, whom he believed had no grounds for loyalty or truthfulness, and of Catholics, whom he believed were loyal to an alien power, the pope.

Locke’s influence on modern philosophy has been profound. His empiricism continues to influence many thinkers, and his political theory arguably influenced the American War of Independence and has inspired many liberals since. Among his other works are Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).

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Dryden, John (1631-1700), English poet, dramatist, and critic, who was the leading literary figure of the Restoration.

Dryden was born to a Puritan family in Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, and was educated at Westminster School and at the University of Cambridge. Around 1657 he went to London as clerk to the chamberlain to the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Dryden’s first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), was written in memory of Cromwell. After the Restoration, however, Dryden became a Royalist and celebrated the return of King Charles II in two poems, Astraea Redux (1660) and Panegyric on the Coronation (1661). In 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, sister of his patron, the courtier and playwright Sir Robert Howard.

In 1662 Dryden began to write plays as a source of income. His first attempts, including the comedy The Wild Gallant (1663), failed, but The Rival Ladies, a tragicomedy written in 1664, was a success. During the next 20 years, Dryden became the most prominent dramatist in England. His comedies, including An Evening’s Love; or, the Mock Astrologer (1668), Ladies à la Mode (1668), and Marriage à la Mode (1672), are broad and bawdy; one of them, The Kind Keeper; or, Mr Limberham (1678), was banned as indecent, an unusual penalty during the morally permissive period of Restoration theatre. His early heroic plays, written in rhymed couplets, are extravagant and full of pageantry. Among them are the semi-opera The Indian Queen (written with Sir Robert Howard in 1664); this work contains some of the most famous music of his contemporary, the English composer Henry Purcell. Other works of this period are The Indian Emperor; or, the Conquest of Mexico by the Spanish (1665) and The Conquest of Granada (1670). One of his later tragedies in blank verse, All for Love; or, the World Well Lost (1678), a version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, is considered his greatest play and one of the masterpieces of Restoration tragedy.

In his poem Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden wrote of the events in the “Wonderful Year” of 1666, chiefly of the English naval victory over the Dutch in July and of the Great Fire of London in September. In 1668 he wrote his most important prose work, Essay Of Dramatick Poesie, the basis for his reputation as the founder of English literary criticism (see Literary Criticism).

Dryden was appointed Poet Laureate in 1668 and historiographer royal in 1670. In 1681 he wrote his first and greatest political satire, Absalom and Achitophel; a masterful parable in heroic couplets, it employs biblical characters and incidents to ridicule the Whig attempt to make the Duke of Monmouth, rather than the Duke of York (the future King James II), successor to King Charles II. Reworking Milton’s great poem of religion and politics, Paradise Lost, Dryden explores ideas of anarchy and order, monarchy and popular discontent: “Religion and redress of grievances: / Two names that always cheat and always please.” His other major verse satires, all written in or about 1682, are The Medall; the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, written in collaboration with the poet and playwright Nahum Tate; and MacFlecknoe, a vigorous attack on the English playwright Thomas Shadwell (“Who stands confirmed in full stupidity”), which later influenced Alexander Pope to pen his mock-heroic poem The Dunciad.

Although Dryden had defended his adherence to Protestantism in the poem Religio Laici (1682), he became a Roman Catholic in 1685, and because James II, an avowed Roman Catholic, came to the throne in that year his motive was assumed to be self-interest. The poet then wrote The Hind and the Panther (1687), a metrical allegory in defence of his new faith. The Glorious Revolution (1688) and the resulting succession of the Protestant king William III did not change Dryden’s religious views, but he lost his laureateship and his pension because of them.

Dryden returned to writing for the stage but without much success. He then began a new career as a translator, the most important of his translations being The Works of Virgil (1697). During the same period he wrote one of his greatest odes, “Alexander’s Feast” (1697), which, like an earlier ode, “A Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day” (1687), was written for a London musical society and set to music by Purcell. In 1699 Dryden wrote the last of his published works, metrical paraphrases of Homer, the Latin poet Ovid, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, under the title Fables Ancient and Modern; its preface is one of his most important essays.

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Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), English poet, who, modelling himself after the great poets of classical antiquity, wrote highly polished verse, often in a didactic or satirical vein. In verse translations, moral and critical essays, and satires that made him the foremost poet of his age, he brought the heroic couplet, which had been refined by John Dryden, to ultimate perfection.

Pope was the son of a London cloth merchant. His parents were Roman Catholics, which meant that, as a result of the severe anti-Catholic laws of William III, he was barred from studying at university. Thus, although he was educated by priests until he was 12 years old, Pope was primarily self-taught, reading widely in English letters, as well as in French, Italian, Latin, and Greek. A devastating illness, probably tuberculosis of the spine, struck him in childhood, leaving him deformed. He never grew taller than 4ft 6in and he was subject to violent headaches and fevers. Perhaps as a result of this conditon, he was hypersensitive and exceptionally irritable, referring famously in his poem “An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot” (1735) to “this long disease, my life”. He was a bitterly quarrelsome man and attacked his literary contemporaries viciously and often without provocation, although to some he was warm and affectionate; he had long and close friendships, for example, with Jonathan Swift and John Gay.

Pope's literary career began in 1704, when the playwright William Wycherley, pleased by Pope's verse, introduced him into the circle of fashionable London wits and writers, who welcomed him as a prodigy. He first attracted public attention in 1709 with his Pastorals, and two years later published his Essay on Criticism, a brilliant exposition of the canons of taste. His most famous poem, The Rape of the Lock (first published 1712; revised edition published 1714) is a fanciful and ingenious mock-heroic based on the true story of a quarrel between two Catholic families, the Fermors and the Petres, which had resulted from Lord Petre's having cut off a lock of the hair of Arabella Fermor. Pope deployed all his satiric talents in describing this ridiculous spectacle, both opining and delighting “What dire offence from am'rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things”.

He continued to experiment in subject matter and theme, in 1713 publishing Windsor Forest, a celebration of the Peace of Utrecht, and in 1714 producing “The Wife of Bath”, which, like his “The Temple of Fame” (1715), was imitative of the works of the same title by the 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. In 1717 a collection of Pope's works containing the most noteworthy of his lyrics was published. His translation of Homer's Iliad was published in six volumes from 1715 to 1720 and a translation of the Odyssey followed (1725-1726). He also published a (much reviled) edition of Shakespeare's plays (1725).

From 1713 Pope was a member of the so-called Scriblerus Club—a group of friends who met to discuss literature and to concoct parodies of pedantic scholarship—and with his friend Swift he wrote scornful and very successful critical reviews of those whom they considered inferior writers; in 1727 they began a series of parodies of the same writers. These hapless adversaries hurled insults at Swift and Pope in return, and in 1728 Pope lampooned them in one of his best-known works, The Dunciad, a satire celebrating dullness, which ridiculed poets and writers who “painful vigils keep, / Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep”. He later enlarged the work to four volumes, the final one appearing in 1743. In 1734 he completed his Essay on Man. Pope's last works, Imitations of Horace (1733-1739), were attacks on political enemies of his friends. He died in 1744.

Pope used the heroic couplet with exceptional brilliance and great flexibility, exploiting its natural capacity for antithetical and epigrammatic statement and using it as a base to craft many poignant and witty formulations, such as “For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”, “To err is human; to forgive, divine” (from An Essay on Criticism) and “Hope springs eternal in the human breast” (from An Essay on Man). He also skilfully used poetic devices such as puns, allusions, chiasmus, and zeugma, as in this famous passage from The Rape of the Lock:

Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law,
Or some frail China jar receive a Flaw,
Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
Forget her Pray'rs, or miss a Masquerade,
Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball.



The humour lies in the placing together, as if they are of the same importance, of things which are clearly different; it satirizes people who have so lost their sense of value that losing one's heart is no worse than losing a necklace, for instance. Such work combines the wit of poetry with the vigour of prose, and Pope's great success with the heroic couplet helped to make it the dominant poetic form of the 18th century

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Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), Anglo-Irish satirist and political pamphleteer, considered one of the greatest masters of English prose and one of the most impassioned satirists of human folly and pretension. His pamphlets, prose, letters, and poetry were all marked by highly effective and economical language.

Jonathan Swift Jonathan Swift aimed his witty, imaginative, and often bitter satire at such subjects as politics, literature, and human society. Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s masterpiece, satirizes humankind and its various institutions, though parts of the tale have become a classic of children’s literature.Culver Pictures

Swift was born in Dublin on November 30, 1667, and educated at Trinity College in the city. His father was a lawyer whose family had gone to Ireland after the Restoration. His cousin was the poet John Dryden. He obtained employment in England in 1689 as secretary to the diplomat and writer Sir William Temple, a distant relative of his mother. Swift's relations with his employer were not amicable, and in 1694 he went back to Ireland, where he took religious orders. Effecting a reconciliation with Temple, he returned to Temple's household in 1696. There he supervised the education of Esther Johnson, daughter of the widowed companion to Temple's sister. Swift remained with Temple until Temple's death in 1699. Swift's stay, although frequently marred by quarrels with his employer, gave him the time for an immense amount of concentrated reading and for writing.

II EARLY WRITINGS

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Among Swift's earliest prose work was The Battle of the Books (1704), a burlesque of the controversy then raging in literary circles over the relative merits of ancient and modern writers. In this work Swift championed the ancients and, with mordant satire, attacked the pedantry and sham scholarship of his day. His Tale of a Tub (1704) is the most amusing of his satirical works and the most strikingly original. (“Good God!” he is reported to have said, “what a genius I had when I wrote that book”). In it Swift ridiculed with matchless irony various forms of pretentious pedantry, mainly in literature and religion. The book gave rise to grave doubts concerning Swift's religious orthodoxy, however, and it is thought that because Queen Anne was offended, Swift lost his chance for ecclesiastical preferment in England. He certainly took a pragmatic, if contentious, line on religious faith in his An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), stating, “I conceive some scattered notions about a superior power to be of singular use for the common people, as furnishing excellent materials to keep children quiet when they grow peevish, and providing topics of amusement in a tedious winter-night”.

Although nominally a Whig, Swift differed from his party on many important questions. In 1710 a Tory government came to power in England, and Swift was quickly won over to its ranks. He then turned his biting satire against the Whigs in a series of brilliant short pieces, assumed the editorship of The Examiner, the official Tory publication, and produced a number of pamphlets, in all of which he defended the policies of the Tory administration. Of these papers the most eloquent and influential was The Conduct of the Allies (November 1711), in which Swift charged that the Whigs had prolonged the War of the Spanish Succession out of self-interest. The pamphlet was instrumental in procuring the dismissal of John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, the commander-in-chief of the British armies.

III STELLA AND VANESSA

Swift began his Journal to Stella in 1710; Stella was his private name for Esther Johnson, who was then living in Dublin. This series of intimate letters, with its terms of endearment drawn from the language of the nursery, reveals a curious aspect of the great satirist's enigmatic personality. Scholars are unsure of Swift's exact relationship with Stella; they may have been secretly married. Another significant woman in Swift's life was Esther Vanhomrigh, daughter of a Dublin merchant of Dutch descent. Vanhomrigh (whom Swift also taught and whom he referred to as Vanessa) became passionately enamoured of him, but he did not return her love.

With fellow poets Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot, Swift founded the Scriblerus Club, a group of friends who met to discuss literature and to concoct parodies of pedantic scholarship. In 1713, he was appointed dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. The following year the Tory administration fell, and Swift's political power was ended. In 1724 and 1725 he anonymously issued his Drapier's Letters, a series of highly effective pamphlets that secured the end of the royal patent granted to an Englishman coining copper halfpence pieces in Ireland. Swift was trying to protect the Irish people from a further debasement of their currency. For his championing of their cause in these essays and in A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift became a hero of the Irish people. A Modest Proposal embodies the mordantly ironic suggestion that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food to the wealthy, thus turning an economic burden to general profit: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London”, he writes, “that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

IV GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

Swift's masterpiece, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, more popularly titled Gulliver's Travels, was published anonymously in 1726; it met with instant success. Swift's satire was originally intended as an allegorical and acidic attack on the vanity and hypocrisy of contemporary courts, statesmen, and political parties, but in the writing of his book, which is presumed to have taken more than six years, he incorporated his ripest reflections on human society. Gulliver's Travels is, therefore, a savagely bitter and sometimes indecent work, mocking all humankind. Nonetheless, it is so imaginatively, wittily, and simply written that the first book became and has remained a favourite children's story.

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Swift's later years, after the deaths of Stella and Vanessa, were overshadowed by a growing loneliness and dread of insanity (the poet Edward Young reported that Swift had once pointed to the withered crown of a tree and remarked, “I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top”). He suffered frequent attacks of vertigo, and a period of mental decay ended with his death on October 19, 1745. He was buried in his own cathedral beside the coffin of Stella. He had long imagined his own death, and in his poem “Verses on the Death of Dr Swift” (1739) he had predicted reactions to his demise: “Poor Pope will grieve a month, and Gay / A week, and Arbuthnot a day. / St John himself will scarce forbear / To bite his pen, and drop a tear. / The rest will give a shrug, and cry, / 'I'm sorry—but we all must die!'.” His epitaph, written by Swift himself in Latin, reads “Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, D.D., dean of this cathedral, where burning indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go, traveller, and imitate if you can a man who was an undaunted champion of liberty.”

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Defoe, Daniel (c. 1660-1731), English novelist and journalist, whose work reflects his diverse experiences in many countries and in many walks of life. Besides being a brilliant journalist, novelist, and social thinker, Defoe was a prolific author, producing more than 500 books, pamphlets, and tracts.

Defoe was born in London about 1660, the son of a candle merchant named Foe. Daniel added the fashionable “De” to his name in about 1700. He was educated for the Presbyterian ministry but decided instead to go into business. He became a hosiery merchant, and his business gave him frequent opportunities to travel throughout western Europe.

An opponent of the Roman Catholic King James II, in 1685 Defoe took an active part in the unsuccessful rebellion led by the Duke of Monmouth against the king. In 1692 his business went into bankruptcy, but subsequently he acquired control of a tile and brick factory. He obtained a government post in 1695 and subsequently wrote “An Essay Upon Projects” (1697), a remarkably keen analysis of matters of public concern, such as the education of women. Especially noteworthy among his writings during the next several years was the satiric poem “The True-Born Englishman, A Satyr” (1701), an attack on beliefs in racial or national superiority, which was directed particularly towards those English people who resented the new king, William III, because he was Dutch.

The following year Defoe anonymously published a tract entitled “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters”, which satirized religious intolerance by pretending to share the prejudices of the Anglican Church against Nonconformists. In 1703, when it was found that Defoe had written the tract, he was arrested and given an indeterminate term in jail for seditious libel. Robert Harley, the speaker of the House of Commons, secured his release in November 1703, probably on the condition that he agree to become a secret agent and public propagandist for the government.

During his imprisonment Defoe's business had been ruined and again he faced serious financial losses, so he turned to journalism for his livelihood. From 1704 to 1713 he issued a triweekly news journal entitled The Review, for which he did most of the writing. Its opinions and interpretations were often independent, but generally The Review leaned towards the government in power. Defoe wrote strongly in favour of union with Scotland, and his duties as a secret agent may have entailed other activities on behalf of union, which was achieved in 1707. In 1709 he wrote a History of the Union. During this period he also published “The True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs Veal” (1706), a popular ghost story.

Defoe's first and most famous novel, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, appeared in 1719, when he was almost 60 years old. A fictional tale of a shipwrecked sailor, it was based on the adventures of a seaman, Alexander Selkirk, who had been marooned on one of the Juan Fernandez Islands off the coast of Chile. The novel, full of detail about Crusoe's ingenious attempts to overcome the hardships of the island, is widely regarded as one of the first English novels. He wrote sequels, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and The Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, and more novels including Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720) and Captain Singleton (1720). The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (1722) retells the adventures of a London prostitute, and is one of the great early English novels. It is in this last work that Defoe displayed his insight into human nature and his interest in motives for certain courses of action. He also showed his concern for those suffering from poverty. Among his other important writings are A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), Roxana (1724), A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-1727), and A General History of the Pirates (1724-1728). Defoe was also the author of a number of treatises or books of moral advice, including The Complete English Tradesman (1726) and The Complete English Gentleman (1728-1729), which offered wise sayings such as “Pleasure is a thief to business” and “We must distinguish between a man of polite learning and a mere scholar: the first is a gentleman and what a gentleman should be; the last is a mere book-case, a bundle of letters, a head stuffed with the jargon of languages, a man that understands every body but is understood by no body”.

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Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784), English poet, critic, essayist, and lexicographer, a major figure in 18th-century literature as an arbiter of taste, renowned for the force and balance of his prose style and witty conversation.

II EARLY LIFE

Samuel Johnson English lexicographer and writer Samuel Johnson ranked as one of the most important literary figures of the latter part of the 18th century. Nicknamed both “Dictionary Johnson” and the “Great Cham of Literature” (Cham is an archaic word meaning Khan), Johnson compiled and wrote the Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. Johnson was the subject of one of the greatest biographies ever written, James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. (1791).The New York Public Library

Johnson, usually referred to as Dr Johnson by his contemporaries and later generations, was born in Lichfield on September 18, 1709, the son of a bookseller. He attended the local school, but his real education was informal, conducted primarily among his father's books as he read and studied the classics, which influenced his style greatly.

In 1728 Johnson entered Pembroke College, Oxford. A brilliant but eccentric young man, he was plagued by a variety of ailments from which he suffered the rest of his life. He left university in poverty, without taking a degree and having suffered the first of two emotional breakdowns. During this time of despondency his reading of devotional literature led him to a profound religious faith.

After his father died in 1731, Johnson tried teaching and later organized a school in Lichfield. His educational ventures were not successful, however, although one of his students, David Garrick, later famous as an actor, became a lifelong friend. At the age of 26 Johnson married Elizabeth Jarvis Porter, a widow about 20 years his senior, who brought a measure of calm and self-confidence to his life.

In 1737 Johnson, having given up teaching, went to London to try the literary life. Thus began a long period of hack writing for the Gentleman's Magazine. In 1738 his first important poem London, was published anonymously and was an immediate success, running to three editions and winning him high praise from Alexander Pope. Johnson's long, sonorous poem The Vanity of Human Wishes, based on the tenth satire of the Latin poet Juvenal, appeared in 1749; generally considered Johnson's finest poem, it marked the beginning of a period of great activity. It used the careers of historical figures such as Galileo and Wolsey to show the dangers of political ambition. He founded his own periodical, The Rambler, in which he published, between 1750 and 1752, a considerable number of eloquent, insightful essays on literature, criticism, and moral theory which reflect the social and literary conditions of the time.

III THE DICTIONARY

Beginning in 1747, while busy with other kinds of writing and always burdened with poverty, Johnson was also at work on a major project—compiling a dictionary commissioned by a group of booksellers. After more than eight years in preparation, the Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755. This remarkable work contains about 40,000 entries elucidated by vivid, idiosyncratic, still-quoted definitions and by an extraordinary range of illustrative examples. The work was well received, opposed only by “The Criticks of the coffeehouse whose outcries are soon dispersed in the air and are thought on no more”. Its success did not, however, alleviate his desperate financial situation.

IV LATER WRITINGS

Despite anxieties about his productivity, Johnson published another periodical, The Idler, between 1758 and 1760; and in 1759, to pay for his mother's funeral, he hurriedly completed Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, a prose romance about a young man's search for a happy life.

“Dictionary Johnson” (as he has been called) was now a celebrity. In 1764 he and the eminent English portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had greatly admired Johnson's Life of Savage, founded The Club; its membership included such luminaries as Garrick, the statesman Edmund Burke, the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and a young Scottish lawyer, James Boswell. From their first meeting in 1763 Johnson and Boswell were drawn to each other; for the next 21 years Boswell minutely observed and recorded the conversation and activities of his hero. Boswell's monumental Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the greatest biographies ever written, was published in 1791.

Trinity College in Dublin awarded Johnson an honorary doctorate of civil law in 1765, the same year that he published his edition of Shakespeare, in eight volumes, with its acute commentary on the characters in the plays. He also corrected textual corruptions to Shakespeare's works, explained obscure language, and even examined the sources that Shakespeare had consulted. Sometime after 1760 Johnson experienced a second mental breakdown. The great hospitality of his friend Hester Lynch Thrale brought him some peace, and her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) provides valuable insights into the mind and heart of Johnson during this period of personal turmoil. It was during this time at Thrale's house that he wrote a number of political pamphlets expressing his views on political morality, such as The False Alarm (1770), The Patriot (1774), and Taxation No Tyranny (1775). In 1773 he was well enough to undertake and enjoy a trip with Boswell to Scotland and the Hebrides, a trip vividly recounted in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).

Johnson's last major work, The Lives of the English Poets, was begun in 1778, when he was nearly 70 years old, and completed—in ten volumes—in 1781. It was written, he said, with “the honest desire of giving useful pleasure”. The work is a distinctive blend of biography and literary criticism written with no plan or uniformity of design. Johnson died three years later on December 13, 1784.

V MODERN INTEREST IN JOHNSON

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Nineteenth-century biographers fostered the image of Johnson as an awkward, unkempt eccentric, whose conversation was certainly lively and memorable, but whose literary influence was slight. A full-scale scholarly evaluation of Johnson's contributions as a writer began only in the mid-20th century. His literary criticism is now seen as the foundation of the 20th-century New Criticism. The psychological study Samuel Johnson (1944), by American critic Joseph Wood Krutch opened up new ways of thinking about the man and his work. The most comprehensive and penetrating scholarship has been that of Walter Jackson Bate, another American literary scholar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Samuel Johnson (1977). In these studies Johnson emerges as a troubled but undaunted man, compassionate to the poor and oppressed, relentless in his quest for truth, a humanist par excellence. His writing, in defence of reason against the wiles of unchecked fancy and emotion, championed the values of artistic and moral order.

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Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), English poet, born in London and educated at Eton College and the University of Cambridge. In 1741-1742 he began to write poetry in English rather than Latin, producing a fragment of a Racinian tragedy, Agrippina (published 1775), and his first odes. In 1750 he finished the poem for which he is best known, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, and sent it to his friend, the author Horace Walpole, at whose insistence it was published in 1751.

Living at Cambridge, Gray wrote The Progress of Poesy (1754). In 1757 he refused an appointment as Poet Laureate. He became professor of history and modern languages at Cambridge in 1768. Among his poems are “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1747), “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West” (1775), and the major works The Progress of Poesy (1754), and The Bard (1757). In the intervals of his scholastic duties he travelled widely throughout Britain in search of picturesque scenery and ancient monuments, recording his impressions in his Journal (1775). Thomas Gray is considered a forerunner of the Romantic poets.

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Blake, William (1757-1827), English poet, painter, and engraver, who created a unique form of illustrated verse; his poetry, inspired by mystical vision, is among the most original, lyric, and prophetic in the English language. His work in the literary and visual arts marks a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment in favour of the new Romantic movement.

William Blake English poet and artist William Blake wrote verse inspired with mystical vision and abounding in complex symbolism. Blake explored the possibility of human perfection in the collection Songs of Innocence (1789), while he considered the nature of evil in Songs of Experience (1794), the two series of poems embodying “the two contrary states of the human soul”. Blake also juxtaposed poems from the first collection with corresponding poems from the second. For example, “The Lamb” from the first collection provides a gentle counterpart to “The Tyger” (excerpt recited by an actor), from the second.(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./Culver Pictures
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Blake, the son of a hosier, was born on November 28, 1757, in London, where he lived most of his life. Largely self-taught, he was, however, widely read—his poetry shows the influence of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, for example, and of Swedenborgianism (see Swedenborg, Emanuel). As a child, Blake wanted to become a painter, and by the age of 12 he was diligently collecting prints. He was also writing poetry: the lyric “How sweet I roam’d from Field to Field” is thought to have been written before he was 12. Blake was sent to a good drawing school when 10 years old and at the age of 14 was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver. The young Blake had to draw the monuments in the old churches of London, a task that he thoroughly enjoyed.

After his seven-year term was over, he studied briefly at the newly formed Royal Academy in 1778, but he rebelled against the aesthetic doctrines of its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, an advocate of Neo-Classicism who took a very academic approach to the study of art. Blake preferred to draw from his imagination. There is a well-known story that, as a child, he returned home from a walk saying he had seen a tree filled with angels, their wings sparkling. This angered his father as a lie, but his mother intervened to save him from a beating. Blake continued to see such “visions” throughout his life. As an adult he was recorded as saying to a friend, “[y]ou can see what I do if you choose. Work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is done”. At the Royal Academy, he did, however, establish friendships with such artists as John Flaxman and Henry Fuseli, whose work may have influenced him.

In 1782, Blake married Catherine Boucher, who proved a devoted wife. In 1784 they set up a print-sellers’ shop with another engraver and Blake’s brother, Robert, who died in 1787. During this period, Flaxman introduced Blake to a wide circle of literary friends and financed the publication of his first volume, Poetical Sketches (1783). At about this time, also, Blake wrote the satirical fragment An Island in the Moon that makes fun of scientific dilettantism, and includes such characters as “Inflammable Gas”, thought to be Joseph Priestley. The print-sellers’ shop failed after three years, and for the rest of his life Blake eked out a living as an engraver and illustrator. His wife helped him to print the illuminated poetry for which he is famous today.

II EARLY POETRY

The Lamb William Blake, poet, painter, and engraver, created a unique form of illustrated verse in which word and picture are intimately related. The Lamb, from his Songs of Innocence (1789), concerns the innocence of childhood; the poem is counterbalanced by The Tyger in Songs of Experience (1794).Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The volume published by Flaxman was a collection of Blake’s youthful verse. Amid its traditional derivative elements are hints of his later innovative style and themes. As with all his poetry, this volume reached few contemporary readers. In 1789, unable to find a publisher for his Songs of Innocence, he and his wife engraved and printed them at home, and also produced The Book of Thel. Both these early works display stylistic and ideological characteristics that become more marked in Blake’s later work. The Book of Thel represents the maiden, Thel, lamenting change and mutability by the banks of a river, where she is comforted by the lily, the cloud, the worm, and the clod. Yet the final section, with its vivid and horrible images of death, seems to contradict the explicit Christian message of the rest of the poem. Blake also wrote Tiriel around 1789, although it was not published until 1874. Songs of Innocence, now probably Blake’s most famous work, is written in a lyric style of great freshness and directness. Here is the “Nurse’s Song” from Songs of Innocence, quoted in full:

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.

“Then come home, my children, the Sun is gone down
“And the dews of night arise,
“Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
“Till the morning appears in the skies.””No, no, let us play, for it is yet day
“And we cannot go to sleep;
“Besides in the sky the little birds fly
“And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.””Well, well, go & play till the light fades away
“And then go home to bed.”
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
And all the hills echoed.



In 1794, disillusioned by the apparent impossibility of human perfection, Blake issued Songs of Experience, employing the same lyric style, and often using the same titles and themes as in Songs of Innocence, but perverting the sing-song rhythms so that they seem sinister and resonant with a darker meaning. Here is the “Nurse’s Song” from Songs of Experience:

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And whisp’rings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.

Then come home my children, the Sun is gone down,
And the dews of the night arise;
Your spring & your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.



Innocence and Experience, “the two contrary states of the human soul”, are contrasted here, and both series of poems take on greater resonance when read together. The innocence of childhood is contrasted with the corruption and repression of the adult world. Blake’s subsequent poetry develops the implication that true innocence is impossible without experience, transformed by the creative force of the imagination.

III BLAKE AS ARTIST

As was to become his custom, Blake illustrated the Songs with designs that demand an imaginative reading of the complicated dialogue between word and picture. His precise method of illuminated printing is not known. The most likely explanation is that he wrote the words and drew the pictures for each poem on a copper plate, using some liquid impervious to acid, which, when applied, left the text and illustration in relief. Ink or colour wash was then applied, and the printed picture was finished by hand in watercolours.

Blake has been called a pre-Romantic because he rejected Neo-Classical literary style and modes of thought. His favourite tenet was that “all things exist in the human imagination alone”. He loathed Isaac Newton and John Locke—both heroes of the Enlightenment—and in his painting, too, he shunned 18th-century conventions. His style made great use of the line: in repudiation of the painterly academic style, Blake referred back to the medieval tomb statuary he copied as an apprentice. It is perhaps this insistence on strong linear patterning in his work that attracted some of the artists in the Art Nouveau movement to his work at the end of the 19th century. The influence of Michelangelo also is identifiable in Blake’s radical foreshortening and exaggerated muscular form in one of his best-known illustrations, popularly known as The Ancient of Days, the frontispiece to his poem Europe, a Prophecy (1794). In 1791 he designed and engraved six plates to “Original Stories for Children” by Mary Wollstonecraft. At weekly dinners he met the leading radicals and freethinkers of his age, including Wollstonecraft, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, Henry Fuseli, and Thomas Paine, but although Blake ardently espoused their political views, and walked around London in the revolutionary bonnet rouge, he did not sympathize with their religious beliefs at all.

Much of Blake’s painting and engraving was on religious subjects: illustrations of the work of John Milton, and The Life of Cowper, undertaken for his friend and patron William Hayley between 1804 and 1808. Milton was Blake’s favourite poet (although he rejected Milton’s Puritanism). In 1793 the Blakes had moved to Lambeth and Blake set about the 537 illustrations for Night Thoughts by Edward Young, only 43 of which were published. A commission from Robert Hartley Cromek for engraved illustrations to Robert Blair’s poem, The Grave, was abandoned before completion by Cromek, and Blake, who was not paid for the work he had done, found that his designs had been engraved by an inferior craftsman without his permission.

Such frustrations and disappointments marked Blake’s later years. Despite his extraordinarily hard work, he achieved very little recognition for his painting, engraving, or his poetry in his own day, although he did have several devoted followers: the watercolourist Samuel Palmer, for example, and the painter John Linnell, who commissioned Blake in 1821 to illustrate the Book of Job. Blake and his wife were living in increasing poverty, and Linnell’s commission rescued them for some years. Inventions to the Book of Job, 21 illustrations now among Blake’s most famous work, were published in 1826. At the end of his life, Blake was engraving illustrations to Dante’s La Divina Commedia; he had completed only seven when he died on August 12, 1827. Not long before he died, he wrote to his friend George Cumberland: “I have been very near the gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life, not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays.” His wife outlived him.

IV THE PROPHETIC BOOKS

The so-called Prophetic Books were the major project of Blake’s life. In a series of poems written from 1789 onward, Blake created a complex personal mythology and invented his own symbolic characters to reflect his social concerns. A true original in thought and expression, he declared in one of these poems “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s”. Poems such as The French Revolution (1791), America, a Prophecy (1793), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), and Europe, a Prophecy (1794) all express his condemnation of 18th-century political and social tyranny, and his contempt for literary convention and restraint. The “Preludium” to The (First) Book of Urizen invokes the visionary imagination: “Eternals! I hear your calls gladly / Dictate swift winged words & fear not / To unfold your dark visions of torment”. Much of the prophetic poetry dramatizes the conflicts between Urizen, the symbol of repressive morality, and Orc, the Promethean arch-rebel. The Book of Urizen (1794) is specifically concerned with theological tyranny, and the dreadful cycle set in motion by the mutual exploitation of the sexes is vividly described in “The Mental Traveller” (c. 1803). It was in 1803, also, that Blake was arrested and charged at Chichester with high treason, for having “uttered seditious and treasonable expressions, such as ‘D—n the King, d—n all his subjects’”. Blake maintained that “the whole accusation is a wilful Perjury”, and he was acquitted. This incident perhaps serves as a reminder that freethinking was not readily tolerated in Blake’s time, and the espousal of radical views necessarily set him apart from the rest of his generation. He often expresses this feeling of social isolation: “O why was I born with a different face? / Why was I not born like the rest of my race?” he rhymed in a letter to Thomas Butts in 1803. Among the Prophetic Books is a prose work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), which owes much to the ideas of Swedenborg and develops Blake’s idea that “without Contraries is no progression”. It includes the “Proverbs of Hell”, such as “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”.

The great visionary epics came late in Blake’s career. Milton (1804-1808), Vala, or The Four Zoas (that is, aspects of the human soul, 1797; rewritten after 1800), and Jerusalem (1804-1820) have neither traditional plot, characters, rhyme, nor metre; the rhetorical free-verse lines demand new modes of reading. They envision a new and higher kind of innocence, the human spirit triumphant over reason, as a quotation from Jerusalem illustrates: “Awake, Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion, / Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time; / For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day / Appears upon our Hills. Awake, Jerusalem, and come away!”

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Blake died largely unknown, and for many years he was considered, by William Wordsworth among others, to have been insane and merely an interesting oddity. It was only later in the 19th century that his work was rediscovered by Algernon Swinburne and W. M. Rossetti: the latter brought out an edition in 1874 that added previously unknown poems to the canon and excited a new interest. W. B. Yeats produced a three-volume edition in 1893. Blake, although rightly acknowledged today as a great poet and artist, perhaps remains the poet’s poet. His work has influenced poets as diverse as the Beat Generation of the 1950s, W. H. Auden, and Emily

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Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), English novelist, born in Derbyshire. He was apprenticed to a printer in his youth and later set up his own printing shop in London. Richardson became known as a gifted letter writer, and in 1739 he began to write a volume of model letters for the use of the country reader that appeared as Familiar Letters (1741). While engaged in writing the form letters he also wrote and published the celebrated novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (2 volumes, 1740), telling, in the form of letters, the story of a young maid-servant's defence of her honour. Clarissa; or the History of a Young Lady (7 volumes, 1747-1748), which explores and reexplores the same events from the points of view of several of the characters, is considered his best work. Like Pamela, it was praised for its moral tone, sentimentality, and understanding of emotions and the feminine mind. His last important work was The History of Sir Charles Grandison (7 volumes, 1753-1754), in which he presented his ideal of a true Christian gentleman.

All of Richardson's novels are in epistolary form (a series of letters)—a structure that he refined and developed—which allowed him to reveal the stream of inner thoughts of his characters. For this reason, Richardson is considered a founder of the English modern novel. Henry Fielding parodied Pamela in An apology for the life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741) and The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his Friend, Mr. Abraham Adams (1742).

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Fielding, Henry (1707-1754), English novelist, playwright, journalist, and barrister, credited with his contemporary Samuel Richardson for establishing the tradition of the English novel.

Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, Somerset, educated at Eton College, and studied law in London and at the University of Leiden. From 1729 to 1737 he was a theatrical manager and playwright in London. In 1740 he was called to the Bar; as a justice of the peace for Westminster from 1748 and for Middlesex from 1749, he worked hard to reduce crime in London. His Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) remains a valuable social document of the period. He also engaged actively in politics, producing three volumes of political journalism: The True Patriot (1745), The Jacobite’s Journal (1747), and The Covent Garden Journal (1752).

Of his 25 plays written in many different forms, the most popular was the burlesque Tom Thumb (1730; revised as The Tragedy of Tragedies, 1731). His sharp and witty attacks on the Whig prime minister Robert Walpole and his government in Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register (1737) established Fielding as one of the leading dramatic satirists of his day. They also led effectively to the end of Fielding’s drama career, with the latter play said to be the cause for Walpole’s stringent Licensing Act of 1737, which required all plays to be submitted for censorship by the Lord Chamberlain.

With drama no longer an option, Fielding turned to fiction, at first also in the satiric vein. His brief but highly successful Apology for the life of Mrs Shamela Andrews (1741) is a witty attack on the enormously popular Samuel Richardson novel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). Richardson offers a servant-girl heroine who, by retaining her (sexual) virtue, eventually marries the wealthy but initially dissolute Mr B. In contrast, Fielding attacks what he sees as Pamela’s mercenary and hypocritical conduct by writing letters which purport to be the true views of the sexually dissolute and scheming Shamela. Fielding returned to the theme in his first major novel, The History and Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr Abraham Adams (1742), in which he presents the reader with a genuinely if naively virtuous brother for Pamela and his adventures along the road. The parody is soon left behind, however, as Fielding provides a more positive moral stance in the interchange between the adventures of the quixotic Parson Adams and his own narrative interjections. It is here too that Fielding begins to work out his own novelistic practice in a series of important opening chapters to each volume of the work. Miscellanies (3 vols., 1743) contains not only essays, plays, poems, and his little-known satire, A Journey from this World to the Next, but also The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, a work in which Fielding returns to his attacks on Walpole. As in The Beggar’s Opera (1728) by John Gay, Fielding stresses the similarities between a life in politics and a life of crime, where “greatness” is a morally dubious virtue.

Fielding’s major achievement is the enormously influential The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), recognized by critics as one of the great English novels. In Tom Jones, Fielding offers us not individuals, in the manner of much 19th-century fiction, but human types, characters, and behaviour to be found through all periods of human history. This complex and intricately balanced tale was judged by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to be one of the three most perfect plots ever. Tom, a foundling, is taken in by the enlightened and benevolent Squire Allworthy, falls in love with Sophie, daughter of the bluff Tory Squire Western, is cast out through the machinations of Allworthy’s nephew Blifil, undergoes a series of rumbustious and sexual adventures along the road, but finally is united with Sophie, discovers himself to be the son of Allworthy’s sister, and learns to temper his natural exuberance and generosity with a degree of prudence. Fielding was highly influenced by Don Quixote by the 16th century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, but also lays claim to a new form of English writing, the comic-epic in prose, and with it a moral seriousness and legitimacy for the novel. For all the good-humoured action, he invites his reader to engage seriously in “exercise of judgment and penetration”. In this respect, Fielding participates in a much broader movement within English culture of the 18th century. His emphasis on conversation marks the increasing significance of a “public sphere” which values the individual in terms of the ability to engage in rational debate which will in turn lead to enlightened understanding.

His last novel, Amelia (1751), was the author’s own favourite; despite its theme of married love, it is the darkest of his fictions, concerned as it is with justice, the English penal system, and human suffering. Illness forced Fielding to relinquish his post as a magistrate in 1753, but he had achieved a reputation for honesty and fearlessness in fighting crime in the City of London. His journey to Portugal in 1754, where he travelled for reasons of health, is the subject of Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). Published posthumously, it is a touching chronicle of family life. Fielding is highly regarded for his innovations in the development of the novel. Although he was not the first novelist, he was the first major writer to break away from the epistolary method. Not only was he of great influence in the 18th century, but by devising a new theory and structure he laid the foundations for the works of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the Victorian domestic novelists. He died in Lisbon on October 9, 1754, and is buried in the English cemetery there.

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Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), English poet, one of the most accomplished and influential of England's Romantic poets, whose theories and style created a new tradition in poetry.

Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumbria, and educated at St John's College, Cambridge University. He developed a keen love of nature as a youth, and during school holidays he frequently visited places noted for their scenic beauty. In the summer of 1790 he took a walking tour through France and Switzerland. After receiving his degree in 1791 he returned to France, where he became an enthusiastic convert to the ideals of the French Revolution (1789-1799). His lover, Annette Vallon of Orléans, bore him a daughter in December 1792, shortly before his return to England but he did not see the child until she was nine years old due to the outbreak of war between England and France. Disheartened by the outbreak of hostilities between France and Great Britain in 1793, Wordsworth nevertheless remained sympathetic to the French cause.

Although Wordsworth had begun to write poetry while still a schoolboy, none of his poems was published until 1793, when An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches appeared. These works, although fresh and original in content, reflect the influence of the formal style of 18th-century English poetry. The poems received little notice, and few copies were sold.

Wordsworth's income from his writings amounted to little, but his financial problems were alleviated for a time when in 1795 he received a bequest of £900 from a close friend. Thereupon he and his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, went to live in Racedown, Dorset. The two had always enjoyed a warmly sympathetic relationship, and Wordsworth relied greatly on Dorothy, his devoted confidante, for encouragement in his literary endeavours. Her mental breakdown in later years was to cause him great sorrow, as did the death of his brother John. William had met the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an enthusiastic admirer of his early poetic efforts, and in 1797 he and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden, Somerset, near Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. The move marked the beginning of a close and enduring friendship between the poets. In the ensuing period they collaborated on a book of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798, which foreshadowed 20th-century developments in poetry with their new style, new vocabulary, and new subjects.

This work is generally taken to mark the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English poetry. Wordsworth wrote almost all the poems in the volume, including the memorable “Tintern Abbey”; Coleridge contributed the famous “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Representing a revolt against the artificial Classicism of contemporary English verse, Lyrical Ballads was greeted with hostility by most leading critics of the day.

In defence of his unconventional theory of poetry, Wordsworth wrote a “Preface” to the second edition of Ballads, which appeared in 1800 (actual date of publication, 1801). His premise was that the source of poetic truth is the direct experience of the senses. Poetry, he asserted, originates from “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Rejecting the contemporary emphasis on form and an intellectual approach that drained poetic writing of strong emotion, he maintained that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material of which poetry could and should be made. Far from conciliating the critics, the “Preface” served only to increase their hostility. Wordsworth, however, was not discouraged, continuing to write poetry that graphically illustrated his principles.

Before the publication of the “Preface”, Wordsworth and his sister had accompanied Coleridge to Germany in 1798 and 1799. There Wordsworth wrote several of his finest lyrical verses, the “Lucy” poems, and began The Prelude. This introspective account of his own development was completed in 1805 and, after substantial revision, published posthumously in 1850. Many critics rank it as Wordsworth's greatest work.

Returning to England, William and his sister settled in 1799 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Westmorland, a beautiful spot in the English Lake District. The poet Robert Southey as well as Coleridge lived nearby, and the three men became known as the Lake Poets. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, who is portrayed in the charming lyric “She Was a Phantom of Delight”. In 1807 Poems in Two Volumes was published. The work contains much of Wordsworth's finest verse, notably the superb “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, the autobiographical narrative “Resolution and Independence”, and many of his well-known sonnets.

In 1813 Wordsworth obtained a sinecure as distributor of stamps for Westmorland at a salary of £400 a year. In the same year he and his family and sister moved to Rydal Mount, a few kilometres from Dove Cottage, and there the poet spent the remainder of his life, except for periodic travels.

Wordsworth's political and intellectual sympathies underwent a transformation after 1800. By 1810 his viewpoint was staunchly conservative. He was disillusioned by the course of events in France culminating in the rise of Napoleon; his circle of friends, including the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, also influenced him in the direction of orthodoxy.

As he advanced in age, Wordsworth's poetic vision and inspiration dulled; his later, more rhetorical, moralistic poems cannot be compared to the lyrics of his youth, although a number of them are illumined by the spark of his former greatness. Between 1814 and 1822 his publications included The Excursion (1814), a continuation of The Prelude but lacking the power and beauty of that work; The White Doe of Rylstone (1815); Peter Bell (1819); and Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822). Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems appeared in 1835, but after that Wordsworth wrote little more. Among his other poetic works are The Borderers: A Tragedy (1796; published 1842), Michael (1800), The Recluse (1800; published 1888), Laodamia (1815), and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1822). Wordsworth also wrote the prose works Convention of Cintra (1809) and A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (1810; reprinted with additions, 1822).

Much of Wordsworth's easy flow of conversational blank verse has true lyrical power and grace, and his finest work is permeated by a sense of the human relationship to external nature that is religious in its scope and intensity. To Wordsworth, God was everywhere manifest in the harmony of nature, and he felt deeply the kinship between nature and the soul of humankind.

The tide of critical opinion turned in his favour after 1820, and Wordsworth lived to see his work universally praised. In 1842 he was awarded a government pension, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate. Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount, on April 23, 1850, and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard.

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), English poet, critic, and philosopher, who was a leader of the Romantic movement.

II DEVELOPMENT

Samuel Taylor Coleridge A leader of the Romantic movement, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote poetry, essays, and criticism during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. As a poet, Coleridge crafted lyric verse with dream-like imagery and complex symbolism. Coleridge’s criticism, most notably his Biographia Literaria (1817), had a profound influence upon 19th and early 20th-century schools of critical thought.Culver Pictures

Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, on October 21, 1772, the son of a vicar. From 1791 until 1794 he studied classics at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and became interested in French revolutionary politics. His heavy drinking and debauchery incurred massive debts which he attempted to clear by entering the army for a brief period. Eventually, his brother paid for him to be discharged on a plea of insanity. At university he absorbed political and theological ideas then considered radical, especially those of Unitarianism. He left Cambridge without a degree and joined his university friend, the poet Robert Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a Utopian society in Pennsylvania. Based on the ideas of William Godwin, this new society was dubbed “Pantisocracy”. In 1795 the two friends married sisters, Sara and Edith Fricker. Not only did Coleridge’s marriage to Sara proved extremely unhappy, but he also became estranged from Southey, who departed for Portugal that same year. Coleridge remained in England to write and lecture, editing a radical Christian journal, The Watchman, from his new home in Clevedon. In 1796 he published Poems on Various Subjects, which included “The Eolian Harp” and his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton”.

In June 1797 Coleridge met and began what was to be a lifelong friendship with the poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The years 1797 and 1798, during which the friends lived near Nether Stowey, in Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge’s life. The two men anonymously published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads (1798), that became a landmark in English poetry; it contained the first great works of the Romantic school (see Romanticism (literature)). The 1800 edition of the book contained a preface by Wordsworth, written at Coleridge’s request. This piece offered an explanation of the thinking behind the collection, arguing that “the real language of men” should be part of poetic diction. The relationship between the imagination of the poet and the beauty of the natural world was also a central concern.

III CONVERSATIONAL POEMS

Critical interest in Coleridge has focused on the poems he wrote in the 1790s. One of the major achievements of this period was his development of the Conversational or Conversation poem. Deeply personal, these works are emotional meditations upon experiences from everyday life. “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” (1797) relates the poet’s frustration when injury prevents him from taking a walk with friends. Through the faculty of his imagination, he participates in their pleasure, and realizes that the tree bower under which he is convalescing also possesses a profound beauty, arguing that:

Nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;

No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty!



“The Nightingale” (1798) moves from the poet’s admission that the bird’s conventional associations with melancholy are a human construct, but then goes on to relate the intense experience of observing his son’s delight in birdsong and moonlight. “Frost at Midnight” (1798), perhaps Coleridge’s most powerful work in this style, is quietly meditative in tone. This gentle quality is provided by the poem’s lack of artificial, self-conscious devices. There are few end-stopped lines, and even fewer full rhymes, so the rhythm of the poem is subtle and unforced, successfully suggesting the rhythms of real speech. The poem’s speaker reflects on the silence of the night as he watches over his sleeping child. As in the other Conversational works, the mind of the poet and his environment are brought into intimate contact. Here, the evocative but ambiguous phrase, “the secret ministry of frost” is the mystic agency of the poet’s imaginative journey. In “dim sympathy” with the wintry night’s silence, he muses on an unhappy urban childhood, spent in “the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim”, and resolves that this will not be the case for his son. Coleridge returns from his thoughts with a touching and unpretentious expression of joy in the sight of his sleeping child: “My babe so beautiful it thrills my heart”.

IV SUPERNATURAL POEMS

The opening poem of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is, in a precise historical sense, the only true ballad in the book. Conforming to the genre’s traditional rules of metre, it is a kind of pastiche: an attempt to construct a historical artefact in the way that aristocrats of the period were enhancing their parks and gardens with picturesque ruins. The diction of the poem is scattered with archaisms such as “unhand me, grey-beard loon! “ The 1798 edition had used the mock-medieval spelling “Ancyent Marinere”. Later, Coleridge added prose glosses in the style of a 17th-century scholar.

The poem is essentially a narrative one, and describes a meeting between the title character and a guest at a wedding. The Wedding Guest expects to hear an amusing anecdote from the Mariner, but finds himself listening to the story of a horrific supernatural ordeal. The Mariner tells how his rash act of killing an albatross brings ghostly retribution upon the crew of his ship. The dead bird is hung around his neck to indicate his cursed status. The ship is adrift in a stagnant sea alive with “slimy things”. Dying of thirst, the men are visited by a spectre, the “Night-mare Life-in-Death”. Adrift on a ship of dead men, the Mariner is released when, looking at the slimy “water-snakes”, he blesses them for their strange beauty. The albatross falls from his neck, but for his crime he is condemned to wander the Earth, preaching reverence for all creatures.

The poem achieves the stated aims of Lyrical Ballads with its strong, simple rhythms and repetitions, creating the impression that it is a product of oral rather than written culture:

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound.



As well as emphasizing its balladic features, the insistent rhymes allude to the irresistible supernatural powers that take control of the ship, and give urgency to the Mariner’s narration. This urgency is a cursed one: “I pass, like night, from land to land”, he declares, compelled to relate his story with his “strange power of speech”. There is much strangeness in the poem that is hard to interpret consistently. Centrally, the momentous killing of the albatross seems a totally motiveless act.

The similarly supernatural poem “Christabel” (1798, revised 1800) is presented as a fragment: Coleridge drafted but never completed a second part. It is a fantasy with a medieval setting influenced by the conventions of Gothic fiction. Like the “Ancient Mariner”, it is narrative-based rather than reflective, and tells the story of a baronet’s daughter who discovers a mysterious woman in the forest that surrounds her castle home. This woman, Geraldine, appears to be the victim of an abduction, but in fact is a predatory, vampire-like entity. Coleridge gives her malignity a strongly erotic edge, placing much emphasis on Geraldine’s desire to look at Christabel’s naked body—”a sight to dream of, not to tell! “ Exclamations such as this are urgently addressed to the reader, a convention also borrowed from Gothic fiction.

V “KUBLA KHAN: OR, A VISION IN A DREAM” (1798)

Coleridge claimed that “Kubla Khan” was the product of a hallucinatory dream experienced after he had taken opium“in consequence of a slight indisposition”. On awaking, he began to commit the experience to paper, but was interrupted by “a person on business from Porlock”. On returning to his desk, he found that the intensity of his impressions had faded. The poem claims to be “scattered lines and images” from a longer, forgotten work. Whether the story is true or not, the poem takes the unrecapturable nature of such dreams as its theme. It opens with sumptuous images of a mythic land, in which a powerful ruler orders the construction of a fabulous palace.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.



Coleridge conveys the idea of harmony and order with Latinate syntax, strong monosyllabic rhymes, and the percussive beat of alliteration. The poem offers sensual images of an oriental paradise: there are “gardens bright with sinuous rills” and “many an incense-bearing tree”. With a powerful sense of movement, the poem follows the progress of the river Alph in order to focus on a violent natural force beyond the palace walls: a “chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething”. Coleridge describes this place with a mass of contradictory adjectives: it is “holy”, “enchanted”, and “savage”, its massive force like that of a living being. If, as it has been suggested, this place is a metaphor for the imagination, its blasts might be compared to Wordsworth’s definition of the poetic process as “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”.

The second half of the poem considers the fading of the dream, and the speaker’s attempt to recapture it. He finds that his attempt to communicate his vision to others threatens to alienate him from those people.

VI AFTER THE LYRICAL BALLADS

In the autumn of 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a trip to the Continent; Coleridge soon went his own way, spending much of his time in Germany. During this period he lost early sympathy with political radicalism and became interested in German philosophy, especially the 18th-century Idealism of Immanuel Kant and the 17th-century mystical writings of Jakob Boehme, and in the literary criticism of the 18th-century dramatist G. O. E. Lessing. Coleridge studied German and translated into English the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the Romantic poet Friedrich von Schiller. These studies made him the most influential English interpreter of German Romanticism. By this time Coleridge had become addicted to opium, which he used to ease the pain of rheumatism. In 1800 he returned to England, and shortly thereafter settled with family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District. In 1804 he went to Malta as secretary to the governor. He returned to England in 1806. Between 1808 and 1819 he gave his famous series of lectures on literature and philosophy; the lectures on Shakespeare were partly responsible for a renewed interest in the playwright. In this period Coleridge also wrote on religion and political theory. Financial donations and grants supplemented his literary income.

In 1816 Coleridge, still addicted to opium and now estranged from his family, took residence in the London home of an admirer, the doctor James Gillman. There he wrote his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. He argues that the process of writing poetry should be an organic one that involved the poet’s whole being:

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.

Other writings were published while he was in seclusion at the Gillman home, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and On the Constitution of Church and State (1830). He died in London on July 25, 1834.

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Despite the fact that his best-known works were written by 1800, and that several of these remain unfinished, Coleridge’s status as a major poet has remained secure. The dramatic end to his period of poetic production, and his habit of leaving work incomplete have become legendary, and he even turned these problems into the subject of a poem, “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), an agonizing expression of his desire for poetic inspiration.

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Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824), known as Lord Byron, English poet, who was one of the most important and versatile writers of the Romantic movement.

II EARLY DEVELOPMENT

Byron was born on January 22, 1788, the son of Captain John (“Mad Jack”) Byron and Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress whose fortune he had squandered. Jack Byron died in France in 1791, and the young Byron was brought up in Aberdeen by his temperamental mother and a Calvinist nurse, who, according to Byron, initiated him sexually when he was nine years old. It is widely believed that he was born with a club foot; certainly, Byron was forced to undergo painful and unsuccessful medical treatments throughout his childhood.

Inheriting the title of Baron Byron in 1798 from his great-uncle, Byron moved with his mother to Newstead Abbey, his ancestral estate, and was educated at Harrow School and—intermittently—at Trinity College, Cambridge University. Here he was notorious for loose living and radicalism, and was described by a tutor as “a young man of tumultuous passions”. He left, without a degree and deeply in debt, in 1807 to pursue an extravagant lifestyle in London.

Byron’s collection of lyrics, Hours of Idleness, published the same year, was harshly attacked in the Edinburgh Review, prompting Byron’s lively satirical response, “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” (1809). Written in heroic couplets, this poem shows the influence of Alexander Pope, whom Byron admired greatly. In 1817 he declared his astonishment at: “the ineffable distance in point of sense—harmony—effect—and even Imagination Passion—and Invention—between the little Queen Anne’s Man [Pope]—and us of the lower Empire ... “.

III FAME

In 1812 the publication of Cantos I and II of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage made Byron famous. A rambling narrative in Spenserian stanzas, the poem had been written while travelling across Europe to Greece, where Byron had swum the Hellespont (like Leander in Greek mythology) and engaged in a series of romantic adventures. The melancholy hero of Childe Harold, brooding on his own estrangement, captured the imagination of the English public:

And now I’m in the world alone
Upon the wide, wide sea;
But why should I for others groan,
When none will sigh for me?



Handsome and personally magnetic, Byron was fêted by London society and he circulated in every fashionable set. In 1813 he wrote that “The great object of life is Sensation—to feel that we exist—even though in pain—it is this ‘craving void’ which drives us to Gaming—to Battle—to Travel ... “. Byron also had a series of scandalous love affairs, including one with Lady Caroline Lamb, who famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, and later fictionalized him in her novel Glenarvon.

With the wildly successful publications—Byron was, in modern terminology, a best-seller—of the Eastern tales, The Bride of Abydos and The Giaour in 1813, and The Corsair and Lara in 1814, the myth of the Byronic hero intensified. Byron wrote of his poetry, “it is the lava of the imagination, whose eruption prevents an earthquake”, and his rapid style of composition (The Bride of Abydos was written in four days) is reflected in the energy and fluency of his verse. In 1815 the Hebrew Melodies were published, with music. As these lines from “She Walks in Beauty” suggest, Byron’s lyrical power itself has a musical quality, derived from his technical confidence:

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.



In 1815 Byron married the heiress and keen mathematician Annabella Milbanke, whom he had described in earlier letters as “the Princess of Parallelograms”, writing: “I should like her more if she were less perfect.” The marriage ended after a year, Annabella leaving him after the birth of their daughter, probably because of suspicions of his sexual relationship with his half-sister, Augusta, to whom he was deeply attached. It is likely that Byron did in fact father one of Augusta’s children.

IV EXILE FROM ENGLAND

Under a cloud of scandal, and accused of “every monstrous vice”, Byron left England (the “tight little Island”, as he described it) for ever in 1816, travelling first to Switzerland, where he met Percy Shelley and Mary Shelley. Claire Clairmont, the half-sister of Mary Shelley, followed Byron and later gave birth to his daughter. In Switzerland, Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon; two acts of a play, Manfred; and Canto III of Childe Harold. Canto III, according to the Edinburgh Review, showed “the same stern and lofty disdain of all mankind” as Byron’s earlier work, “but mixed ... with deeper and more matured reflections, and a more intense sensibility to all that is grand and lovely in the external world”. Personal meditation is interwoven with reflections on world events and figures such as Napoleon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Byron called Canto III his “favourite”, writing: “I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies.”

V ITALY

Excerpt from Byron's Don Juan Although a Romantic poet, Lord Byron had much in common with the neo-Classical poets Dryden and Pope; like them, he wrote exquisitely expressed satirical verse, using his poetry as a vehicle for his contempt for the mores of his day. Byron's epic masterpiece, the 16,000-line Don Juan (1819-1824), is a satire on English society (excerpt recited by an actor).(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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Byron travelled to Italy, and entered a phase of frantic sexual promiscuity in Venice. Eventually, he settled into an uneasy harmony as the cavaliere servente (lover) of Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of an elderly Italian count. In Beppo (1818), Byron used ottava rima, a galloping verse form well suited to him, to tell a light-hearted, bawdy story of Italian social mores, dotted with comparisons to English society and a certain amount of self-mockery:

But I am but a nameless sort of person
(A broken Dandy lately on my travels),
And take for rhyme, to hook my rambling verse on,
The first that Walker’s Lexicon unravels,
And when I can’t find that, I put a worse on,
Not caring as I ought for critics’ cavils.



Beppo gracefully and wittily turns the Byronic myth back on itself, and Byron wrote of it: “It will at any rate show ... that I can write cheerfully.” Byron adopted ottava rima again in Don Juan, a brilliant mock epic, the first two cantos of which were published anonymously in 1819. Blackwood’s magazine denounced Don Juan as “a filthy and impious poem”. To the suggestion of his publisher, John Murray, that it should be edited, Byron had replied, “I will have none of your damned cutting and slashing”, and “Do you suppose I could have any intentions but to giggle and make giggle?”.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe expressed admiration for Don Juan, and Byron later dedicated his poem “Werner” to the German poet. In 1820 Byron continued with Cantos III and IV of Don Juan and became embroiled in the Italian patriotic movement. Teresa Guiccioli left her husband in 1821, and Byron moved with her from Ravenna to Pisa, producing a string of verse dramas that year, including Sardanapalus and Cain, which were disappointingly received and have rarely been performed.

In 1821 the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, made a veiled attack on Byron in the preface to his poem “A Vision of Judgement”. Byron retaliated with “The Vision of Judgement” (1822), a fierce and cruel satire. Too controversial to be published by John Murray, this poem was printed in the first edition of The Liberal, the journal that Byron produced in collaboration with Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt.

VI GREEK INDEPENDENCE

Three issues of The Liberal were produced, before the death of Shelley and a quarrel with Hunt put an end to the venture. Byron became impatient for action, and on hearing of the Greek War of Independence against the Turks, he set sail for Cephalonia in July 1823. By January 1824, after various mishaps, he had joined the Greek insurgents at Missolonghi, where he formed the “Byron Brigade” and poured energy and financial support into the cause, although dismayed at the internal divisions among the Greek forces. That month, depressed by an unrequited passion for a Greek boy, and feeling his age, he wrote his final lyric, “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year”:

If thou regret’st thy youth, why live?
The land of honourable death
Is here:—up to the field, and give
Away thy breath!



Byron contracted a fever, was bled repeatedly by his doctors, and died at Missolonghi on April 19, 1824. His body was taken to England, denied burial at Westminster Abbey, and finally entombed in the ancestral vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead. Byron’s memoirs were destroyed after his death by John Murrray.

VII CRITICAL RECEPTION

During his lifetime, Byron’s popularity was immense and he was considered by many, including Shelley, to have produced some of the greatest poetry of his age. His role in the Romantic movement—which influenced European and American thought, art, and politics well into the late 19th century—was central, although, ironically, he judged himself and contemporaries such as William Wordsworth and Robert Southey to be following “a wrong revolutionary poetical system”, holding the Neo-Classicist Pope in higher esteem. More than anyone, Byron came to typify the idea of the Romantic hero, rejecting convention and tyranny, and striving for individual liberty.

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These sources provide additional information on Byron, George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron.

While the sheer lyrical beauty of Byron’s best work, his technical inventiveness with versification, and his wit have ensured his continued critical importance, Byron’s significance is often seen to reside in his life rather than in his work. Bertrand Russell places him among the major forces for change in the 19th century in A History of Western Philosophy (1945), arguing that “[L]ike many other prominent men he was more important as a myth than as he really was”, and that his resonance was greatest outside England: “Abroad, his way of feeling and his outlook on life were transmitted and developed and transmuted until they became so wide-spread as to be factors in great events.”

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Austen, Jane (1775-1817), major English novelist whose elegant, satirical, and witty fiction was highly influential in the development of the novel.

II LIFE

Jane Austen English author Jane Austen crafted satirical romances set within the confines of upper-middle-class English society. Her books were known for their sharp attention to the details of everyday life, and her skilful treatments of character and situation marked Austen as an astute observer of human nature. Pride and Prejudice (1813), one of her best-known works, follows Mrs. Bennet’s attempts to find a suitable husband for each of her five daughters. Here, an actor recites the novel’s famous first lines.(p) 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./(p) 1995 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./The New York Public Library
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Austen was born near Basingstoke, in the parish of Steventon, of which her father was rector. Jane was the youngest of seven children. The family was cultivated and prosperous, although not rich. Austen's great uncle was the Master of Balliol College, Oxford University, and her father, himself an accomplished scholar, taught her at home and encouraged her reading and her writing. She and her sister were sent briefly to the Abbey School in Reading. Austen acquired the standard accomplishments of young ladies of her class and time: she learnt French and Italian, could draw and sing well, and embroidered; she is recorded as having been “especially great in satin-stitch”. Less conventionally, she read widely and particularly enjoyed the novels of Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Samuel Richardson, and Fanny Burney, and the poetry of George Crabbe and William Cowper. In the summer, she would take part in private theatricals in a barn near the family home.

Her family was a lively and happy one. Of her five brothers, two became admirals and two clergymen, and another inherited the property and took the name of a second cousin, Mr Knight. Austen's only sister, Cassandra, died unmarried in her 70s in 1845. It was to Cassandra that Austen wrote many of her letters when one of them had made an occasional visit to an uncle at Bath, or to London, to visit one of their brothers. Cassandra drastically edited these letters after Jane's death, taking out all mentions of romantic interests or personal problems. It is known, however, that Austen had several suitors and once accepted a proposal of marriage, only to reconsider and reject it the following morning. It is also thought that she met a gentleman at Lyme with whom she developed a close relationship, and that they might have become engaged, but he died very suddenly. Like her sister, Austen died unmarried.

Austen was described by a contemporary as “a clear brunette with a rich colour, hazel eyes, fine features, and curling brown hair”. Henry Austen, in the Biographical Notice that was published posthumously with Persuasion (1818), remarked: “Of personal attractions she possessed a considerable share. Her stature was that of true elegance”. She was fond of children, and they of her, and some of her most engaging letters were written to her nephews and nieces.

Austen started writing fiction very young; Love and Friendship was written when she was only 14 years old, A History of England (“by a partial, prejudiced, and ignorant historian”) when she was 15, and A Collection of Letters and Lesley Castle around the age of 16. Lady Susan is also an early work. In her early 20s she wrote the sketches Elinor and Marianne, and First Impressions. Her father offered First Impressions to a publisher in 1797 who rejected it by return of post, without reading it. Undeterred, Jane Austen rewrote Elinor and Marianne in 1797-1798, and renamed it Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey was written immediately afterwards, in 1798-1799.

After this flurry of literary activity, there seems to have been a pause. Until she was 25 Jane lived at Steventon, but in 1801 the family moved to Bath. In 1803, Northanger Abbey was sold to the publishers Crosby and Sons for £10 but they did not publish it. Later, the firm was happy to sell the manuscript back to her brothers for £10, unaware that it was the work of the famous Jane Austen. Jane spent some weeks at Lyme in 1804, and it is thought that she began The Watsons the same year, although it was never finished, and she probably abandoned it upon her father's death in 1805. The remaining family members moved to Southampton and then in 1809 they moved again to a cottage in Chawton, in Hampshire, on the property of her brother, Mr Knight. The death of her father and the relocation of the family may account for the lack of literary output during these years. In 1809, Jane revised Sense and Sensibility once again, and at around the same time First Impressions was reworked and renamed Pride and Prejudice. Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, and Pride and Prejudice in 1813.

In 1811, at Chawton, Austen began a second period of intense productivity. She wrote her novels sitting in the busy family parlour. She embarked first upon Mansfield Park (1814), then Emma (1816); Persuasion, her last finished novel, was published posthumously in 1818, with Northanger Abbey. She started another novel, Sanditon, in 1817, but was never to finish it.

Austen's work was immediately well received, and in 1815, Sir Walter Scott praised it highly in the Quarterly Review; this would have been gratifying to Austen, since she was a great admirer of Scott's Waverley novels. The Prince Regent kept a set of her works in each of his residences, and in 1815, when Austen was in London nursing her brother through an illness, the Prince Regent sent his chaplain, Mr Clarke, to show her Carlton House, and also requested that she dedicate her next novel to him. Despite her strong disapproval of his moral character, she dutifully and “most respectfully” dedicated Emma to the Prince. Her work was also admired by the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although her novels were published anonymously, their authorship was an open secret to her family and friends. At her death, the four of her novels which had been published had already made more than £700, a reasonably large sum at that time, although she never became rich as a result of her writing.

From 1816 onward, Austen's health had not been good, and in May 1817 she moved from Chawton to Winchester so that she could be closer to Mr Lyford, a well-known doctor. Her health declined badly, and she was nursed by her sister Cassandra, and attended upon by two of her brothers who were clergymen in the area. It has since been suggested that she died of what is now known as Addison's disease, and it is recorded by her family that she suffered the pain and physical decline with great courage and cheerfulness. She died quietly on July 18, 1817 and was buried in Winchester Cathedral.

III LITERARY ACHIEVEMENT

Jane Austen's Novels © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Austen's six finished novels represent an extraordinary achievement and an important development in the history of the English novel. To her nephew, J. Edward Austen, she was self-deprecating about her work, writing of “ the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour”, and to her niece, Anna Austen, she announced “3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on”. Yet there is nothing limited about her novels. Sir Walter Scott wrote in 1815, “the big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me”. Austen turned her back on the Gothic novel form, of which an example is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, first published in 1818, the same year as Persuasion and Austen's own satire of the Gothic form, Northanger Abbey. Instead, eschewing melodramatic plot contrivances and supernatural interventions, Austen wrote domestic fiction, putting the dynamics of human relationships into a sharp and often critical focus.

A Early Work

Her early novels, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, she later criticized as too brilliant and light, but they remain her best-loved and funniest books. Sense and Sensibility tells the story of Elinor, with her “strength of understanding” and “coolness of judgement”, and her younger sister, Marianne, whose “excess of ... sensibility” leads her to respond with imprudent haste to the romantic overtures of Mr Willoughby, only to discover her mistake too late and fall into inconsolable grief and illness. Her sister, Elinor, meanwhile, is repressing with effort her own love for Edward Ferrars. The book is at once a high-paced comedy and a serious examination of a society which unfairly requires women to perform in public while simultaneously maintaining strict limits of privacy. Elinor hides her feelings, Marianne displays hers, and both are thoroughly unhappy as a result.

Pride and Prejudice, a similarly high-spirited book, which chronicles the fortunes of the five Bennet sisters and their marital prospects, opens with the famous line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” This is typical of Austen's authorial voice, which she uses to comment wryly on the conduct of her characters, and indeed, on the values of society itself. Henry Austen, in his Biographical Notice, wrote: “Everything came finished from her pen; for on all subjects she had ideas as clear as her expressions were well chosen”; and brilliance of finish, poise, and elegance indeed characterize her use of language throughout her writing. Austen's novels are often described as “witty”, but hers is not a superficial or facile wit: it is rather a wit which penetrates the depths of human character, and then surfaces again with a finely turned phrase that records everything seen there.

Northanger Abbey is a romping satire on the Gothic novel form which opens: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine.” Catherine comes from a thoroughly happy, healthy family which shows no signs whatsoever of the “Romantic” decline or tragedy which conventionally mark the earliest years of a Gothic heroine. Nevertheless, Catherine reads so many spine-chilling Gothic horror stories that she begins to see mysteries everywhere, until Henry Tilney has to remind her, “Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable.” Catherine has been so busy constructing her own fantastic fictions, that she has ceased to notice the real, ordinary drama that is playing around her.

B Later Work

The later three novels are less sparkling and the narrative is slower and more reflective. In Mansfield Park, Austen succeeds in representing a larger and more various collection of characters and locations than in her earlier work. At one level the book is a protracted love story played out between Fanny Price, the poor niece and protégé of Sir Thomas Bertram, and her cousin Edmund. Fanny, a quiet and serious girl, watches with pain Edmund's fascination with the worldly and attractive Mary Crawford, who has arrived from London with her brother to stay in the area. At another level, though, the book explores difficult contemporary issues, such as the influence of environment over character, and it also rehearses some of the conflicts caused by the rapid social change from an agricultural to an urban-based economy at the time Austen was writing.

Emma, which followed it, is a similarly mature work. Emma Woodhouse is “handsome, clever, and rich” but has “a disposition to think a little too well of herself”. The novel minutely charts the development of Emma's moral character, from egotistical arrogance and insensitivity to a better understanding of the responsibilities which accompany her social power. Austen's control of the reader in Emma is quite astonishing. While making the reader like Emma, she also makes all her faults clear, and the reader can see Emma walking into trouble, while Emma herself cannot. Emma is a technical tour de force, and also includes some of Austen's most memorable comic characters, such as Emma's hypochondriac father, Mr Woodhouse.

Persuasion is Austen's last finished novel, although she did not have time to make her usual scrupulous revisions to it. It is undoubtedly the saddest of her books: in the unfinished Sanditon, which she started to write after Persuasion, it seems that she intended to return to a buoyant, satirical mood. It has been suggested that Persuasion was written in memory of the young man Austen had hoped to marry, and the novel's tone is certainly elegiac. The heroine, Anne Elliot, is introduced not as the “very pretty girl” that she had been a few years before, but as a woman, whose “bloom had vanished early”. A love story involving Anne and Captain Wentworth which comprises “six years of separation and suffering” is the subject of the book, and even the conventional happy ending does little to alleviate the sense of disappointment and longing which permeates its pages. Its intimacy and depth make it arguably the finest of Austen's novels.

further reading
These sources provide additional information on Austen, Jane.

In both her letters and her fiction, Austen displayed a profound understanding of human motivations, a sharp and flexible intelligence, and also, importantly, a very human sympathy. Although some criticisms have been levelled at her (Charlotte Brontë, for instance, found her work lacking in passion), she has maintained a consistently strong readership and has been elevated to cult status by some critics. Such critics tend to read her work as feminine and genteel, but there has been a more recent wave of criticism which has pointed to Austen's vicious portrayals of a society which represses women, and looked at the ways in which she explores issues of class, economics, and social change in her work.

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Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), Scottish novelist, poet, historian, and biographer, whose work as a translator, editor, and critic, together with his novels and poems, made him one of the most prominent figures in English Romanticism. He was born in Edinburgh on August 15, 1771. Trained as a lawyer, he became a legal official, an occupation that allowed him to write.

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II EARLY WORK

A broad knowledge of ballads and legends helped direct Scott's literary activity. His translations of German Gothic romances in 1796 gained him some note, but he first achieved eminence with his edition of lowland ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, in 1802-1803. His first narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), brought him huge popularity. Following this success, he wrote a series of Romantic narrative poems, which included Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), The Bridal of Triermain (1813), and The Lord of the Isles (1815). In 1813, he was offered the Poet Laureateship of England, and declined, recommending Robert Southey for the post. He also published editions of the writings of the English poet John Dryden in 1808 and of the English satirist Jonathan Swift in 1814.

III NOVELS

Scott's declining popularity as a poet, in part caused by the competition of Lord Byron, led him to turn to the novel. Waverley (1814) began a new series of triumphs. It was immediately recognized and enjoyed by a large audience. More than 20 historical novels followed in rapid succession, including Guy Mannering (1815), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Rob Roy (1817), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), Quentin Durward (1823), and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). His success was due to his outstanding literary gifts as a storyteller, master of dialogue, acute observer of society's mores and attitudes, and vivid portrayal of Roma (Gypsies), outlaws, and itinerants. He was also renowned for his rich literary style that combined vigour, lyric beauty, and clarity of description. As well as establishing the form of the historical and regional novel, Scott influenced the form of the short story with “The Highland Widow” and “The Two Drovers”. Although he published this fiction anonymously, his identity became an open secret. Scott used his enormous profits to construct a baronial seat in the Scottish lowlands called Abbotsford. In 1820 he was made a baronet.

Scott was entangled with the printing firm of James Ballantyne and the publishing house of Archibald Constable, which both failed in the economic crisis of 1826. Refusing the easy recourse of bankruptcy, Scott strove for the rest of his life to repay a debt of more than £120,000. He completed the epic poem Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827) and wrote several new novels. After a series of strokes, he died at Abbotsford on September 21, 1832. By the sale of copyrights, all of Scott's debts were settled by 1847.

IV EVALUATION

further reading
These sources provide additional information on Scott, Sir Walter.

Scott is the first major historical novelist. In his portraits of Scotland, England, and the Continent from medieval times to the 18th century, he showed a keen sense of political and traditional forces and of their influence on the individual. Although his plots are sometimes hastily constructed and his characters sometimes stilted, these works remain valuable for their compelling atmosphere, epic dignity, and clear understanding of human nature. James Fenimore Cooper in America, Honoré de Balzac in France, and Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray in England were among the many who learned from Scott's panoramic studies of the interplay between social trends and individual character. In Great Britain, he created an enduring interest in Scottish traditions, and throughout the Western world he encouraged the cult of the Middle Ages, which strongly characterized Romanticism. His poems were frequently set to music, for example, by Schubert, and his novel The Bride of Lammermoor was turned into the opera Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti.

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Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870), English novelist and one of the most popular writers in the history of literature. His ability to combine comedy, pathos, and social satire in his serialized novels won him thousands of contemporary readers, and many of his characters, such as Mr Micawber, Mrs Gamp, Mr Pickwick, Quilp, and Uriah Heep, have entered the British national consciousness.



Illustration from Oliver Twist English artist George Cruikshank illustrated many famous works of literature by writers such as Robert Burns, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Daniel Defoe, but his most famous collaboration was with Charles Dickens. This illustration comes from Oliver Twist, and represents the scene in which Oliver, who is hungry, asks Bumble, the beadle in charge of Oliver's orphanage, for more gruel. Oliver does not know that such a request is considered insolent, and that his innocent question will provoke the anger of Bumble, and the astonishment of the other boys.Hulton Deutsch
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Charles Dickens English author Charles Dickens is today considered one of the most significant European novelists. Although Dickens typically wove social criticism, strong character development, and powerful detail into novels about contemporary 19th-century society, the same techniques are found in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), one of his infrequent ventures into historical fiction. A Tale of Two Cities takes place during the French Revolution. The book’s opening lines, recited by an actor, set a tone of ambiguity for the story of a man’s discovery of his own conscience in the midst of tumultuous historical forces.Archive Photos/(p) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.


II EARLY LIFE

Dickens was born near Portsmouth: his father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. The happiest period of Dickens's troubled childhood was spent in Chatham, although the family moved around a great deal. By early 1824, the family was in financial trouble and the 12-year old Dickens was sent to work for a few months at a shoe-polish warehouse on the banks of the Thames. A few days later, his father was arrested for debt. Dickens recalled this painful experience in the early chapters of David Copperfield (1849-1850), and it seemed to haunt him all his life: he called it “the secret agony of my soul”. His father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison and, except for Charles, who had lodgings in Camden, and his sister, who was studying music, all the family lived in the prison with him like the Dorrit family in the first part of Little Dorrit (1855-1857). In the summer of 1824, after Dickens's father's case was heard by the Insolvency Court, the family was allowed to leave the prison but Dickens continued to work in the warehouse until 1825, when his father sent him to school at Wellington House Academy.

In 1827, Dickens worked as a junior clerk for a firm of solicitors in Holborn, but he hated the law, and was drawn instead to journalism. He learnt shorthand and began freelance reporting at the Doctors' Commons Courts, and in 1831-1832 he was making shorthand reports of Parliamentary debates for the London papers. He met and wanted to marry Maria Beadnell, but she seems to have rejected him; the comic portrait of Flora Casby in Little Dorrit is said to have been inspired by Dickens's meeting with Maria again later in life. By 1832 he was writing for his uncle's publication, the Mirror of Parliament, and the liberal paper, the Morning Chronicle.

III LITERARY CAREER

Novels of Charles Dickens © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

At this time, Dickens was toying with the idea of an acting career, and he remained fascinated by the theatre throughout his life, often directing and acting in shows to raise money for charitable causes and friends in distress. However, when the Monthly Magazine accepted his story, “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (1833), Dickens was diverted into his subsequent literary career. He published a series of sketches of daily life in London in the Evening Chronicle, using the pseudonym “Boz”, his younger brother's childhood nickname. Through this work, he met his wife, Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the Evening Chronicle's co-editor; they married in 1836. Meanwhile, a London publisher had suggested reprinting a volume of similar sketches to accompany illustrations by the celebrated artist George Cruikshank. The result was the popularly acclaimed Sketches by Boz (1836). It was followed by The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, which was serialized in monthly instalments, beginning in April 1836; although not immediately successful, it gradually became popular and by its last instalment in November 1837, Pickwick was selling 40,000 copies. It came out in volume form immediately. Dickens was only 25 years old, but he was already famous.

In November 1836, Dickens had accepted the editorship of the new periodical Bentley's Miscellany, and he started to serialize Oliver Twist in the magazine, with illustrations by Cruikshank. The now-famous story of the workhouse boy who asks for more gruel introduced a new genre of “social problem fiction” which was much imitated throughout the 1840s. Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), was also serialized in monthly episodes, but Dickens was feeling the strain of his extraordinary productivity, and he broke off his editorship of Bentley's Miscellany acrimoniously in 1839. In 1840, Dickens established his own weekly miscellany called Master Humphrey's Clock, in which he serialized his novel The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841); the story's child-heroine, Little Nell, captured the hearts of both the British and American public. His first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), was also serialized in the magazine, but this story proved less popular and sales of the Clock declined. Dickens's health was not strong, and at the end of 1841, Master Humphrey's Clock was wound up.

Early in 1842, Dickens and his wife visited America, where he was received as a literary hero. While in America, Dickens spoke for the abolition of slavery and against the piracy of foreign books in America, the latter being a practice which had adversely affected his own earnings. His popularity in America, however, was damaged by his sharp and critical American Notes (1842), and was further eroded by his use of American stereotypes in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844), a novel which also failed to catch the imagination of the British public, despite its considerable moral depth.

A Christmas Carol (1843) was much more successful, and became the first of a series of Christmas books (The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man). In 1844 Dickens and his family spent some time in Italy, which inspired “Pictures from Italy”, published in the Daily News. In 1846 he visited Switzerland with his family to concentrate on his writing, and there he began Dombey and Son. This is usually cited as the point where Dickens's fiction matured; the largely episodic structure of his earlier work gives way to more complex, ambitious, and multi-plotted narratives. It could be argued, though, that his early work displays similar imaginative connection and complexity. Dombey and Son was immediately successful, the first number selling 25,000 copies. The death of Paul Dombey apparently “flung the nation into mourning”. The novel combines elements of realism and comedy with elements of fairy tale; Florence Dombey and Captain Cuttle are described, for instance, as like “a wandering princess and a good monster in a story book”.

Dickens was also becoming more active as a social reformer. In 1847 he collaborated with the wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts to open Urania Cottage, a rehabilitation centre for London prostitutes, an association which lasted until 1858. Dickens took a very active interest in the project, interviewing new admissions himself and keeping a journal of the women's progress. He was also very active in the growing campaign to establish writing as a profession, and he set up the short-lived Charitable Guild of Literature and Art in 1851 with Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

In 1849-1850 Dickens earned around £7,000 from the serialization of David Copperfield, which he had always considered to be his best novel. In 1850 Dickens had once again started his own weekly paper, this time called Household Words. This venture was more successful, largely due to the serialization of his own work. Bleak House ran from 1852 to 1853, and was the product of a difficult time for Dickens, who described himself as “confoundedly miserable”. His wife was ill, and after a terrible operation without anaesthetic, his father died. His infant daughter, Dora, also died suddenly from convulsions at this time.

Bleak House is a wild and disturbed book; even the river Thames, “had a fearful look, so overcast and secret, sweeping away so fast between the low flat lines of shore: so heavy with indistinct and awful shapes, both of substances and shadow: so deathlike and mysterious”. Famous for its withering social satire, Bleak House allowed Dickens to demonstrate how society is interconnected, by linking within his narrative such characters as the illiterate and abused Jo, the crossing sweeper, with the supercilious Lady Dedlock. To reinforce this, Dickens uses sustained, connecting metaphors in the novel, of infectious disease, for example, and of the London fog: “Fog everywhere...Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all around them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.” This description of the fog echoes the obscurity and concealment that surrounds the Chancery case that forms the mainspring of the plot. Bleak House can fairly be called one of the earliest detective novels, with Inspector Bucket featuring as one of the first detectives in literature. The structure of the novel is sophisticated, with two narrative voices, that of the narrator, and that of Esther Summerson, which sometimes seem to be contradicting one another, thus adding to the pervasive sense of suspense and mystery.

Dickens's industrial novel, Hard Times, followed in 1854, alongside North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. In Hard Times, Dickens satirizes the theories of political economists through such exaggerated characters as Mr Bounderby, the self-made man, and Mr Gradgrind, the Utilitarian schoolmaster. Little Dorrit was serialized monthly between 1855 and 1857, and earned Dickens almost £12,000, more money than any of his other novels. Little Dorrit is a complex exploration of the symbolism of imprisonment, a suspenseful mystery story, and a wide-ranging satire on contemporary society. Perhaps it is most famous for Dickens's invention of the Circumlocution Office, the archetype of all bureaucracies, where “whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—How NOT TO DO IT”.

Even during this highly productive period, Dickens continued to organize and appear in amateur theatricals, and in 1857 he went to Manchester to perform in The Frozen Deep by Wilkie Collins, where he met the young actress, Ellen Ternan, who appears to have become his mistress. His marriage had not been happy for some years, and in 1858 Dickens formally separated from his wife, printing announcements in The Times and Household Words denying that any third party was involved in the separation. Punch refused to carry this announcement, and Dickens subsequently broke with its publishers, Bradbury and Evans, who had previously published his novels. He wound up Household Words which they also published and in April 1859 began All the Year Round in its place. The first novel to appear in All the Year Round was his historical novel of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), which stands out in his work as a story of incident and event rather than of character.

This success was soon followed by Great Expectations (1860-1861), which marked a return to the more familiar Dickensian style of narrative. Its main character, Pip, remarks, “I can as clearly see with my own eyes any scene which I am describing as I see you now”, which could be read as a comment on Dickens's own highly visual imagination. He often said that he seemed to see his characters as he wrote about them. In 1858, Dickens had begun the lucrative practice of reading publicly from his own work, and this and the editorship of the new paper consumed a great deal of his energy in the 1860s. His last finished novel is the dark and powerful Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865), which opens with a “a strong man with grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty” dredging a dead body out of the Thames; the whole novel revolves around an ill-lit and dirty London that perhaps bears a closer resemblance to the city of Dickens's childhood rather than the metropolis of the 1860s.

IV FINAL YEARS

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was unfinished when Dickens died. In 1864 his health was beginning to show signs of severe strain and he collapsed while giving a public reading of his work. He was advised by doctors that he must rest but, in defiance of this advice, he embarked on a gruelling schedule of readings, including a tour of America in 1867-1868, which made him £19,000, but probably hastened his death. He was also feeling the increasing strain of keeping his liaison with Ellen Ternan secret. He seems to have established her in a series of houses on the outskirts of London and to have fitted frequent trips to see her around his other many and pressing engagements. He finally exhausted himself to the point of death, and died of a stroke in 1870, apparently in the dining room of his house in Gad's Hill, although it has been suggested that he in fact died at Ellen Ternan's house and was taken back to Gad's Hill already dead. He was buried at Westminster Abbey.

further reading
These sources provide additional information on Dickens, Charles John Huffam.

Dickens was undoubtedly one of the most important literary figures of the 19th-century. He revived and transformed the serialized, illustrated novel, and captured the public imagination with his emotive and exciting fiction. As a novelist, he can perhaps be accused of sentimentality, sensationalism, and an inability to portray female characters as other than angels or monsters, but nevertheless, he was an unashamedly popular writer who gave a new plausibility to the profession of authorship. His espousal of campaigns for social reform has also been criticized as capricious and unsystematic, but through his fiction he did much to highlight the worst abuses of 19th-century society and to prick the public conscience.

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article
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863), English novelist and humorist, one of the foremost exponents of the 19th-century realistic novel, exemplified by his two most famous works, Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond.

Thackeray was born on July 18, 1811, in Calcutta, India, into a wealthy English merchant family. In 1829 Thackeray entered the University of Cambridge. Leaving the university without taking his degree, he attempted to develop his literary and artistic abilities, first as the editor of a short-lived journal and subsequently as an art student in Paris. In 1840, despite a series of financial reverses and the mental illness of his wife, Thackeray produced The Paris Sketchbook, a series of reprints of his contributions to various literary journals. Comic Tales and Sketches (1841) contained the Yellowplush Papers, Major Gahagan, and the Bedford Row Conspiracy. After joining the staff of the humorous journal Punch in 1842, he published the Irish Sketchbook in 1843 and Cornhill to Cairo in 1847.

Thackeray began the serial publication of his great satirical novel Vanity Fair early in 1847, quickly establishing a reputation as one of the major literary figures of his time. In such subsequent novels as Pendennis (1848), Henry Esmond (1852), The Newcomes (1853), and The Virginians (1857), he broadened his observation of social situations to various eras and locales. These widely acclaimed works brought Thackeray new recognition. He became a principal competitor of his great contemporary, Charles Dickens, with whom he frequently disagreed on the nature of the novel as a vehicle for social commentary.

After lecturing in the United States, Thackeray edited The Cornhill Magazine (1860-1862). He contributed two of his lesser novels, Lovel the Widower and The Adventures of Philip, to the journal, and his work with the magazine suggested ideas for his humorous essays, The Roundabout Papers. In 1862 he gave up his editorship because he was unwilling to refuse manuscripts, but he continued to work for the magazine, beginning his last novel, Denis Duval, shortly before his death on December 24, 1863, in London.

Thackeray is particularly noted for his exquisitely humorous and ironic portrayals of the middle and upper classes of his time. His narrative skill and vivid characterizations are strikingly evident in his masterpiece Vanity Fair, an elaborate study of social relationships in early 19th-century England. The character of Becky Sharp, a scheming adventuress, is drawn with consummate skill, serving as a model for the heroines of many later novels. Thackeray saw moralizing as a writer's duty and much of his work concentrates on subjects such as hypocrisy, vanity, and people's secret emotions. Thackeray's keen awareness of social eccentricity is seen also in his short works, especially in The Rose and the Ring (1855), in which his own clever drawings accent the text.

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Brontë, name of three English novelists, also sisters, whose works have become respected classics.

Emily Brontë In this extract from Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, Mr Lockwood, one of the main characters, relaxes in the knowledge that the spirits of his dead acquaintances are finally at rest.(p) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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II THE BRONTË FAMILY

Major Works of the Brontës © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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The Brontës were the exceptional literary family of an Irish clergyman, Patrick Brontë, and Maria Branwell, the daughter of a prosperous Cornish merchant. Mrs Brontë bore six children, five daughters and one son and died in 1821 at the age of 37. In 1820 the Reverend Brontë had taken up the perpetual curacy of Haworth, in Yorkshire. After his wife died, her unmarried sister, Miss Elizabeth Branwell, came to live at the parsonage to care for the children. Although they appreciated her efforts, she apparently did not become a second mother to them. The two elder Brontë daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, both died in childhood of tuberculosis which they developed at Cowan Bridge, a school for the daughters of clergymen. Both Charlotte and Emily had also briefly attended the school but were withdrawn after the deaths of their sisters. Their father undertook to educate them himself, although this education seems to have been largely self-administered by his daughters, and unrestricted by him.

The children read through their father's library, and also read the local newspaper and Blackwood’s Magazine. They all began to write stories at an early age and to produce miniature magazines of their own. Charlotte and her brother, Patrick Branwell (always known simply as Branwell), collaborated in imagining and chronicling the fantastic world of Angria, which they invented in 1829, and which Charlotte continued to write about until 1839. The two younger children, Emily and Anne, created their own kingdom, Gondal, in 1834, which they continued to write about until 1845. One hundred tiny volumes of the Angria chronicles survive, but none of the Gondal stories. In the isolated parsonage with no other children, these fantasized places became very powerful for their creators.

After 1845, when the sisters were reunited at Haworth, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne, all having worked away from home as governesses, they agreed to try writing as a means of earning money to support themselves. Their brother, Branwell, had fallen into dissolute habits and was unable to hold down a job between his increasingly frequent bouts of drinking. Despite the time they spent away from each other, the three surviving Brontë daughters had developed remarkably strong creative bonds with one another. Nevertheless, each sister's work is distinct. Not constricted by the conventional 19th-century limitations on female imagination, all three sisters challenged the dominant idea of “womanhood” with their intense and painful accounts of female experience. The novels and poems remain uncompromisingly truthful and intense and have continued to be widely read and studied.

III ANNE BRONTË (1820-1849)

Anne was only a year old when her mother died. Unlike her sisters, she was not sent away to school until 1836, but educated mainly at home. She is thought to have been more influenced than her sisters by her aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, who was a Methodist. Anne was the most docile and shy of the sisters and displayed strong religious feeling throughout her life. Her sister Charlotte described her as “naturally sensitive, reserved, and dejected”. In 1836 she was sent for one year to Roe Head school; in 1839 she became governess to the Ingham family at Blake Hall and was subsequently employed by the Robinson family in Thorp Green, near York, where she stayed for five years. Anne was a good governess and seems to have been the least unhappy of the sisters in her situation. Her time with the Robinsons was disrupted, however, by the arrival of her brother Branwell as tutor to the family: his affair with Mrs Robinson resulted in their both being sent back to Haworth in 1845.

Some of Anne's poetry was published with that of her sisters in a volume arranged by Charlotte in 1846, but the collection went unnoticed. Anne used her memories of her life as a governess for her first novel, Agnes Grey, which appeared in the same volume as Emily's Wuthering Heights in 1847. Anne used the name Acton Bell as her pseudonym. Neither novel made much critical impact. After the immense success of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) was published by an unscrupulous publisher, Thomas Newby, with the implication that it was also Charlotte's work. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall graphically depicts Branwell's alcoholism through the character of Huntingdon; a subject that was considered a shocking one for a woman writer to have chosen at this time. This novel is now considered Anne's masterpiece. Anne's only trip outside of Yorkshire was with Charlotte to visit their London publisher and thereby to prove their separate identities in 1848. After the deaths of Branwell and Emily that year, Anne, whose health had never been strong, became seriously ill. Charlotte and a friend took her to Scarborough where she died quietly at the age of 29 in 1849, leaving Charlotte and their father alone as the only surviving members of the family. Although less attention has been paid to Anne's writing than to that of her sisters, recent critical work has begun to analyse her individual talent, both as a poet and as a novelist.

IV CHARLOTTE BRONTË (1816-1855)

Charlotte Brontë The English novelist Charlotte Brontë wrote several outstanding novels under the pseudonym Currer Bell. Jane Eyre, her most famous, describes the life of a young orphan, who eventually triumphs over adversity and marries the enigmatic but fundamentally decent Rochester. Brontë’s work manages to combine romance with shrewd satirical detail to entertaining and provoking effect.The New York Public Library

Charlotte, like her sisters, was sent to Cowan Bridge school, which she later portrayed as the cruel institution Lowood in Jane Eyre (1847). Charlotte always believed that the deaths in 1825 of her two elder sisters were aggravated by the unhealthy conditions at Cowan Bridge and that her own health was permanently affected by her time there. Charlotte and Emily were withdrawn from the school and from 1831 to 1832 Charlotte attended a better school at Roe Head, where she met Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, who were to remain her friends for life. She taught at Roe Head from 1835 to 1838, and in 1839 she left home, like her sisters, to be a governess. Her first two positions were short and unhappy. Despite her misery, during this time she rejected two proposals of marriage, suggesting the independence of her spirit.

In 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to study and teach at a boarding school, the Pensionnat Héger, in some hopes of returning to Yorkshire to establish a school of their own. Emily was homesick, but Charlotte found the experience stimulating. At the end of the year they were called back to Haworth by their aunt's death. In 1843 Charlotte returned alone to the Pensionnat to continue her studies for a further year. She suffered greatly from her unrequited love for her teacher, Monsieur Héger, to whom she wrote passionate letters after her return to England in 1844.

The sisters' project to found a school at Haworth proved hopeless, and following her “discovery” of Emily's poetry in 1845, Charlotte proposed to publish it with poems by herself and Anne in a volume entitled Poems by Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell: Charlotte's pseudonym was Currer Bell. The volume appeared at their own expense in 1846, but was hardly noticed and sold only two copies. Despite this discouraging start, the sisters resolved to continue in their efforts to earn money by their writing, and so each of them set to work on a novel, or returned to one already started.

Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, was never published in her lifetime, but her sisters' novels were brought out in a joint edition in 1848 by Thomas Newby. Charlotte had begun Jane Eyre on a visit to Manchester in 1846, where she had arranged for her father to have an operation to remove a cataract from his eye. Smith and Elder published Jane Eyre in 1847 and it was an immediate success. Newby quickly and opportunistically brought out The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë in 1848, and encouraged rumours that Acton, Ellis, and Currer Bell were, in fact, the same person. Charlotte and Anne visited Smith and Elder in July 1848 to make themselves known as the separate authors. Their alcoholic brother, Branwell, died in September 1848, and only three months later their sister, Emily, also died. Anne died the following summer in Scarborough, leaving Charlotte alone and grieving for her lost sisters at the age of 33. Throughout this terrible time she was writing Shirley, her “industrial novel”, which appeared in 1849 to enthusiastic reviews.

In 1850, Charlotte met and befriended Elizabeth Gaskell who was later to write her biography. Charlotte's last complete novel, Villette (1853), considered by some to be her greatest, drew heavily on her memories of Brussels. In 1854 she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who had courted her for many years. It promised to be a happy marriage, but Charlotte died only a few months later, possibly from an illness associated with pregnancy. Charlotte was perhaps the most dynamic of the sisters; it was she who arranged her father's operation and corresponded with publishers, and it was she who had friends outside the family, unlike her sisters. The English novelist Harriet Martineau described her in 1849 “in a deep mourning dress, neat as a Quaker's, with her beautiful hair smooth and brown, her fine eyes blazing with meaning, and her sensible face indicating a habit of self-control”. Her work was occasionally criticized as coarse and vulgar and it was partly in order to counter this view that Elizabeth Gaskell wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), which gives a well-researched account of her friend's life, while insisting on Charlotte's fortitude and virtue in the face of great trials, and completely omitting the episode of her infatuation with the married Monsieur Héger. The Professor was also published, posthumously, in 1857. Charlotte Brontë is justly famous to this day for her challenging and psychologically exact writing, and Jane Eyre is one of the most famous novels in the English language.

Jane Eyre is the story of an orphan who is ill-treated first by her aunt and then at a dreadful school, Lowood, before she more happily becomes a governess at Thornfield Hall, teaching the daughter of the mysterious and Byronic Mr Rochester. Rochester and Jane fall in love and are about to marry when it transpires that he is already married to a mad woman, Bertha, who has been confined to the upper floors of Thornfield Hall. Jane flees in dismay, coincidentally finding her cousins and discovering she is to be the recipient of a legacy. Turning down a proposal of marriage from one of her cousins, the Reverend St John Rivers, she instead returns to Rochester, alerted by what seems to be a telepathic message; Thornfield Hall has burned down, and Rochester has been blinded while trying unsuccessfully to save his wife from the blaze. Jane, now financially independent, can now marry her physically dependent former employer, Rochester; a reversal of roles which has made the novel interesting to feminist critics.

Jane Eyre is notable as a pacy, adventurous romance, although at the time it was considered an inappropriate book for young ladies to read, and indeed for a young lady to have written; Brontë's novels were accused by certain contemporaries of coarseness. The novel is also significant for its use of images from dreams, as is Villette, making them interesting precursors of the psychological novels of the late 19th century and also fruitful texts for Freudian critics (see Criticism, Literary: Later 20th-Century Trends).

V EMILY JANE BRONTË (1818-1848)

At the age of six, Emily shared her sister Charlotte's unhappy experience at Cowan Bridge school, and was sent with Anne to Roe Head school in 1836. Emily hated being away from home and returned after a few months. Of all the sisters she was the most passionately attached to the moorlands around Haworth, which have a powerful presence in her poetry and in her novel, Wuthering Heights. In 1837, Emily was a governess at Law Hill School, near Halifax, and in 1842 she went to Brussels with Charlotte to study and teach at the Pensionnat Héger, but she returned to Haworth at the end of the year because of her aunt's death and stayed there for what remained of her life.

further reading
These sources provide additional information on Brontë.

A selection of her poems was first published in 1846, but attracted little attention. Wuthering Heights, a haunting and passionate saga set in Yorkshire, was written between October 1845 and June 1846, and was published by Thomas Newby in December 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, to the bewilderment of the reading public. It was only after her death that the book became widely accepted as one of the most important novels of the 19th century. Her poetry is also now considered as among the most significant of the period, with its wild landscapes and its longing, individual voice. Best known are “The Night is Darkening Around Me” and the visionary “No Coward Soul is Mine”. Emily certainly seems to have been “no coward soul”, although very little writing apart from her poems and Wuthering Heights survives her. She had no close friends and did not write letters. Charlotte told Elizabeth Gaskell that much of her portrayal of the independently minded and courageous Shirley Keeldar in Shirley was based on Emily. Charlotte also reported that throughout her last consumptive illness, extremely painful in its later stages, Emily refused all drugs and medical attention. She died in December 1848. Although Emily achieved no fame in her lifetime, her extraordinarily individual and powerful writing continues to fascinate readers and critics today.

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Eliot, George (1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Anne or Marian Evans, English novelist, whose novels, with their profound feeling and broad intellectual range, raised her immediately to the first rank of English writers.

Eliot was born in the Warwickshire parish of Chilvers Coton, the daughter of a land agent in the service of the Newdigate family of Arbury Hall. She was sent to boarding school at the age of five, first locally, then in Nuneaton where she met and befriended Maria Lewis, who introduced her to evangelicalism, which the young Eliot took up enthusiastically. At the age of 13 she was sent to the Miss Franklins' school in Coventry, where she was further influenced by the Baptists at Cow Lane Chapel. As a young woman, she was evangelically severe and self-critical: in 1840 she wrote: “I need rigid discipline, which I have never yet had.” In 1836 her mother died and Eliot took over the running of her father's house. Around this time she made the acquaintance of Charles and Caroline (Cara) Bray, a free-thinking couple who lent her a book by Charles Hennel, Caroline's brother, An Inquiry into the Origins of Christianity (1838), which rejected Christianity as divine revelation, but maintained that it was “the purest form yet existing of natural religion”.

In 1842 doubts about Christianity led Eliot to stop going to church for a time, which caused a temporary but painful rupture in relations with her father in whose house she was still living. Through the Brays she was asked to complete a translation from the German The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, which appeared anonymously in 1846. Her father died in 1849, leaving her a small inheritance. She travelled abroad after his death, and spent a winter in Geneva reading intensively and pondering her future. In 1850 she met John Chapman, the publisher, and became a contributor to the Westminster Review, a leading intellectual periodical of the time; the following year she accepted unpaid work as an assistant editor on the journal, and moved to London as a paying guest in Chapman's house on the Strand. She published a translation of Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach in 1854, and she came to accept Feuerbach's view of religious belief as an imaginative necessity for mankind rather than a divinely revealed “truth”. Around this time she was developing a friendship with the journalist and author, George Henry Lewes, with whom she left for Germany in 1854, spending the autumn in Weimar, where Lewes was researching his Life of Goethe (1855), while Eliot worked on her translation of Ethics by Spinoza, which was never published in her lifetime. Eliot and Lewes returned to Britain calling themselves husband and wife, and set up house together. Lewes was unable to divorce his wife, although she had openly borne children to his friend, Thornton Hunt, because he had condoned her adultery, so he and Eliot were never able to marry. This scandal isolated Eliot from polite society until her immense fame eventually outweighed the irregularities of her personal life.

Eliot was interested in the work of the French positivist philosopher, Auguste Comte; the ideas of the primacy of science and the rejection of superstition and irrationality are clearly at work in her fiction, and can perhaps be traced back to her reading of the philosopher. With encouragement from Lewes, she wrote the story of The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton (1856), and Lewes negotiated with John Blackwood for its anonymous publication in Blackwood's Magazine as the first in a series of Scenes of Clerical Life. Lewes was to devote much of his energy over the ensuing years to protecting and encouraging Eliot in her writing, about which she was morbidly under-confident.

The three Scenes were very well received, and Eliot was encouraged to attempt a full-length novel, which became Adam Bede (1859). Meanwhile, speculation about the identity of “George Eliot” was growing, and after Adam Bede, she was forced reluctantly to reveal her identity, mainly because a man called Joseph Liggins was pretending to be the author of her work. Adam Bede was an extraordinary success. Set in the Midlands during the Methodist revival, it describes the lives of simple, working people with a respect and fidelity to detail which represented a firm departure from what Eliot had called the “mind and millinery” school of fiction in her 1856 article, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”. The Times declared that Adam Bede was “a first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once amongst the masters of the art”. Eliot's reputation was assured.

In 1860 Eliot published The Mill on the Floss, the most autobiographical of her novels. Also written around this time, although not published until 1878, was The Lifted Veil, a Gothic novella narrated by a man who has visions of future events. In 1860, Eliot and Lewes visited Florence, and he suggested that she could base a novel around the story of Girolamo Savonarola. She returned the following year to research her historical novel, Romola, but interrupted it to write Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861). Silas Marner is the fairy tale-like story of an old miser brought back to the world of human relations by the accidental arrival of a small child, Eppie. Its emphasis on the redemptive power of human love exemplifies George Eliot's strong belief in humanity's duty to itself. Romola appeared in The Cornhill Magazine in 1862-1863, but proved less popular than her previous work. It has remained the least-known of Eliot's novels, and its 15th-century Florentine setting and abundant historical detail make it initially less accessible than her fiction about England. It contains, however, some of Eliot's finest writing, and the description of Romola's realization of the faithlessness of her husband, Tito, is sharply and poignantly described.

By now, Eliot was a rich woman and was giving substantial assistance to Lewes in the financial support of his many dependants. After Romola, Eliot was much occupied with a long poem, The Spanish Gypsy (1868). Her next novel, Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), was her version of the “social problem novel”. Written amidst agitation over the Reform Bill (see Reform Bill: Reform Bill of 1867), the eponymous hero of Felix Holt is a conservative radical who preaches restraint to the working classes. In 1869, she began work on another novel, which was to become one of the most famous in the English language, Middlemarch: A Tale of Provincial Life (1871-1872). It appeared in eight parts, and was immensely successful. Virginia Woolf later described Middlemarch as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. The range of the book is wide, and the ease with which Eliot makes allusions to philosophy, science, literature, and art is impressive.

Her last novel was even more ambitious. Published in parts in 1876, Daniel Deronda takes on the vast subject of Judaism, and through the characters of Daniel and Mordecai, explores ideas of race and nationhood. It also incorporates what is perhaps Eliot's greatest study of a human relationship in the portrayal of Gwendolen Harleth's unhappy marriage to the languorously cruel Grandcourt. Despite the intellectually challenging sections on Judaism, the book was immediately popular and successful. Eliot was working on a series of essays that was to be published as The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) when Lewes died in 1878. Desperate with grief for a time, she devoted herself to editing Lewes's unfinished Problems of Life and Mind (1874-1879), and gradually re-entered social life. In 1880 she married John Walter Cross, a banker who had been the Lewes's friend and financial adviser for many years. The marriage was short-lived, however: Eliot died just before Christmas 1880. Cross wrote an adulatory biography, The Life of George Eliot (1885), which attempts to make her extraordinary life seem less unconventional. Eliot was buried in Highgate cemetery, in a grave touching Lewes's. Although she is chiefly remembered for her novels, Eliot also wrote a considerable number of poems, among the most notable of which are Brother and Sister (1869), a sequence of sonnets which recalls her happy childhood; “The Legend of Jubal” (1874); and “Armgart” (1871).

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Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928), prolific English novelist and poet. Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on June 2, 1840, and educated in local schools and later privately. His father, a stonemason and builder, apprenticed him early to a local architect engaged in restoring old churches. From 1862 to 1867 Hardy worked for an architect in London and later continued to practise architecture, despite ill health, in Dorset. Meanwhile he was writing poetry, though with little success. He then turned to novels, finding them more saleable, and by 1874 he was able to support himself by writing. In the same year Hardy married his first wife, Emma Gifford, whom he met while on business in Cornwall. Their marriage lasted until her death in 1912, which prompted Hardy to write his collection of poems titled Veteris Vestigiae Flammae (Vestiges of an Old Flame). These poems are some of Hardy's finest, and describe his meeting Emma and his subsequent loss. In 1914 Florence Dugdale became Hardy's second wife. She also became his biographer after his death in Dorchester, on January 11, 1928.

II EARLY WORKS: NOVELS

Thomas Hardy's Novels © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Hardy anonymously published two early novels, Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). The next two, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), written in his own name, were well received. In the latter he portrayed his beloved Dorset as the imaginary county of Wessex. Some lesser works followed, including The Hand of Ethelbertha (1876) and A Laodicean (1881), as well as The Woodlanders (1887) and two volumes of short stories, Wessex Tales (1888) and Life's Little Ironies (1894).

Along with Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy's best novels are The Return of the Native (1878), which is his most closely knit narrative; The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891); and Jude the Obscure (1895). All are pervaded by a belief in a deterministic universe and are influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin, whose The Origin of Species (1859) Hardy read in 1862, and by the physics of the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. In Hardy's bleak world-view the fate of the individual is occasionally altered by chance, but human will invariably loses when it attempts to challenge the forces of necessity. Hardy argued that his belief in determinism was a comfort as much as a curse: “Pessimism,” he said, “is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it, you may gain.”

Through intense, vivid descriptions of the heath, the fields, the seasons, and the weather, Hardy's Wessex attains a physical presence in the novels and acts as a mirror of the psychological conditions and the misfortunes suffered by the characters. In The Woodlanders, for example, “The bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead born child”, while at the beginning of The Return of the Native, Egdon Heath is described and personified in great detail:

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some people who have long lived a past, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.



Hardy tended to view his characters with irony and sadness: the critic G. K. Chesterton wrote that he “became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot”. In Victorian England, Hardy did indeed seem a blasphemer, particularly in Jude the Obscure, which treated sexual attraction as a natural force unopposable by human will. Although he enjoyed the admiration of the London literary world, he was annoyed by reviewers' constant references to his “pessimism”; and criticism of Jude the Obscure was so harsh that he announced he was “cured” of writing novels and determined to return to writing poetry. He wrote in his journal at the time: “I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion—hard as a rock—which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting ... If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have left him alone.”

III LATER WORKS: POETRY AND DRAMA

Hardy's early collections of poetry, Wessex Poems (1898) and Poems of the Past and Present (1901), brought together old and new poems, while in The Dynasts, written between 1903 and 1908, he created what some consider his most successful poetic work. An unstageable epic drama in 19 acts and 130 scenes, it deals with the role of England during the Napoleonic Wars, a period of history that had always fascinated Hardy (the wars had ended only 25 years before his birth, and he remembered his grandmother telling him stories about the threat of invasion by Napoleon). Hardy's perspective in The Dynasts is the same as in his novels, with the characters' actions determined by fate and cruel necessity. Hardy's later short poems, both lyric and visionary, were published as Time's Laughing Stocks (1909), Satires of Circumstances (1914), Moments of Vision (1917), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows, Far Fantasies (1925), and Winter Words (1928).

Although the first edition of Hardy's Collected Poems, published in 1930, contains nearly 1,000 poems the critic F. R. Leavis famously claimed that Hardy's rank as a major poet “rests upon a dozen poems”, among them “Neutral Tones”, “The Self-Unseeing”, and “The Convergence of the Twain”. Yet it is the quantity as well as the quality of Hardy's poetry that has served as an inspiration to later generations of poets: “I love the great Collected Hardy,” wrote the poet Philip Larkin, “which runs for something like 800 pages. One can read him for years and years and still be surprised”; “No English poet, not even Donne or Browning, employed so many and so complicated stanza forms,” enthused W. H. Auden.

Hardy's poetry certainly is remarkable for its massive range of complicated forms and rhythms, but also for its great simplicity of language, from the jaunty rhyming and repetition of “When I Set Out for Lyonnesse” (“When I set out for Lyonnesse, / A hundred miles away, / The rime was on the spray, / And starlight lit my lonesomeness / When I set out for Lyonesse / A hundred miles away”), to the poignant evocation of loss conveyed by the breakdown of the metre in the last verse of “The Voice” (“Thus I; faltering forward, / Leaves around me falling, / Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward, / And the woman calling”). Not all of the poems are great, but even the worst of them are good and strangely moving; as the critic William Empson explains it, “Probably it is the complacence of the man, which saw no need to try to reconcile the contradictions; the same complacence which could be satisfied with a clumsy piece of padding to make a lyric out of a twaddling reflection. No doubt he needed this quality to win through as he did. Most people who are admired for 'unpretentious integrity' have it.”

Many of Hardy's later poems are acts of farewell, to friends, family, and indeed to himself, as in the magnificent and querulous “Afterwards”:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things?'



further reading
These sources provide additional information on Hardy, Thomas.

Hardy was honoured with the Order of Merit, honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866-1946), English author and political philosopher, most famous for his science fiction romances that variously depict alien invasion, terrifying future societies, and transformed states of being.

Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in Bromley, Kent, the son of a professional cricketer and a domestic servant. By the time he was 16, he had failed in three apprenticeships to two drapers and a pharmacist. He won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science, but, although he was a gifted student, his interest in journalism and politics led him to fail his exams in 1887. Working as a science tutor, he married his cousin, Isabel, in 1891, but left her for a student, Amy Catherine Robbins, three years later. They married in 1895, Wells arbitrarily deciding that she would henceforth be known as “Jane”.

Literary recognition came with his novella, The Time Machine (1895), which described a journey to ad 802701, when humanity has evolved into two distinct species, the child-like Eloi, and the Morlocks, brutish workers in subterranean industries. Between periods of mental breakdown, Wells produced a remarkable series of novels that used science to dramatize anxieties about human development. These included The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), in which a vivisectionist attempts to elevate animals to human status by a series of hideous medical operations. In The Invisible Man (1897), a megalomaniac scientist, John Griffin, uses invisibility to terrify a community. The War of the Worlds (1898) is a fantasy of reverse colonization, in which humanity is powerless to prevent the invasion of Earth by technologically advanced aliens. The First Men in the Moon (1901) describes an ant-like society run along strict utilitarian lines.

Between 1902 and 1906, Wells was involved with the Fabian Society, but soon quarrelled with its leaders, whom he later parodied in The New Machiavelli (1911). Beatrice Webb thought him “an interesting but unattractive personality”. Wells became increasingly fascinated by a vision of the future in which an elite of superhumans would rule the world along rational, scientific lines. A political treatise, Anticipations (1901), predicted a future shaped by eugenics, in which the reproduction of “servile types” of human would be regulated. For Wells, this included all non-white races. A Modern Utopia (1905) and The World Set Free (1914) depict similar societies, the latter describing the growth of a rationalist state in the aftermath of atomic war. Men Like Gods (1923) teleports a group of contemporary English people into this civilization, and the novel prompted Aldous Huxley to write Brave New World (1932) in protest.

Other novels dealt with less outlandish subjects, but retained an interest in social and political ideas. Kipps (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910) are concerned with members of the lower-middle class and their aspirations. Tono-Bungay (1909) is a satire on Edwardian capitalism, in which a family grows rich on the sales of a harmful patent medicine. Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) dramatized the average Englishman's responses to World War I.

Wells's many extra-marital affairs impacted upon his fiction, and several of his novels argue against lifelong monogamy. A version of his relationship with the novelist Amber Reeves features in Ann Veronica (1909), in which a young woman escapes her authoritarian family to find sexual freedom. Marriage (1912) and The Passionate Friends (1913) offer similar social critiques. A critical review of the former by Rebecca West in the feminist journal, the Freewoman, led to a meeting, and subsequently to a ten-year relationship that produced a son, Anthony West, in 1914. Other partners included Elizabeth von Armin, playwright and novelist, and Moura Budberg, secretary to Maxim Gorky, whom he met on his trip to Russia in 1920. “Jane” Wells died in 1927.

Wells and a team of editors produced an internationally popular two-volume historical work, The Outline of History (1920). His later writings were increasingly pessimistic. The Shape of Things to Come (1933), published in the year that Hitler came to power, predicted global conflict in 1939. Produced at the end of World War II, his final book, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), argued that “the end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded”. He died on August 13, 1946, in London.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.



Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour (1850-1894), Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet, several of whose books have become classics of children's literature.

Major Works of Robert Louis Stevenson © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh, the son of Thomas Stevenson, a lighthouse engineer. Under his father's influence, he studied engineering and then law at the University of Edinburgh. Literature, and a bohemian lifestyle among the personalities of the Edinburgh underworld, had more claim on his attention than his studies.

Stevenson suffered from a chronic bronchial condition and spent much of his life travelling abroad in search of climates which would benefit his health. His earliest works are descriptions of these journeys: An Inland Voyage (1878) describes a canoe trip through Belgium and France in 1876; Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) is an account of a journey on foot through mountains in southern France in 1878. Subsequent travels took him by ship and train to California (1879-1880), where in 1880 he married Frances Osbourne, an American divorcee whom he had first met in France. He related his impressions of his stay in a Californian mining camp in The Silverado Squatters (1883), and the following year returned to settle for three years in Bournemouth, England. Other travels took him on a pleasure cruise across the South Seas, and to the leper colony on the island of Molokai. Stevenson recorded these experiences in In the South Seas (1896) and his defence of the controversial Belgian priest who cared for the lepers of Molokai in Father Damien (1890). In 1888 his travels ended in Samoa, where he and his wife settled in a final effort to restore his health. He died there, of a brain haemorrhage, on December 3, 1894, and was buried on a mountaintop behind Vailima, his Samoan home.

II FICTION AND DRAMA

Treasure Island In 1883 Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the children’s adventure story Treasure Island about a young boy racing against pirates to find buried treasure. Pictured is the protagonist, Jim Hawkins, who has been captured by Long John Silver, the peg-legged pirate.This illustration is by Newell Convers Wyeth, father of Andrew Wyeth. He was a famous illustrator in his day, and his illustrations for Treasure Island are among the best-known of all his work.Culver Pictures

Stevenson's modern reputation rests on his fiction, most of which has remained in print since publication. Treasure Island (1883), the first of his many tales of high adventure, centres around the activities of a young boy, Jim Hawkins, and his involvement with a gang of pirates seeking the hidden loot of the late Captain Flint. The novel features memorable characters such as the sinister pirate, Blind Pew, the one-legged Long John Silver, and Ben Gunn, a man driven insane after he is marooned on the island by Flint. It was followed by his most startling work, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), a book whose eponymous characters are now a byword for split personality. Scientist Henry Jekyll formulates a drug that releases the brutal, decadent side of his nature, transforming him into a creature whom he names Edward Hyde. The personification of Jekyll's dark, ungratified desires, Hyde wreaks havoc, and eventually overpowers his “civilized” alter ego. The novel is a powerful moral allegory that suggests the shadowy nature of human personality, anticipating some of the theories of the pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Calling on his experiences among the prostitutes and criminals of Edinburgh, Stevenson also illustrates the potential for degradation and savagery that existed beneath the civilized veneer of his society.

These two works made Stevenson a literary celebrity, a status he maintained with a series of exciting adventure novels. Set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion, the action of Kidnapped (1886) is triggered by a stolen inheritance. Young David Balfour falls in with the Highlander outlaw Alan Breck, and the pair are witnesses to the murder of Colin Campbell, the king's steward on the estate of Ardshiel. This strand of the plot is only resolved in the sequel, Catriona (1893). Other novels of this genre include The Black Arrow (1889) and The Master of Ballantrae (1889). His masterpiece is considered to be The Weir of Hermiston (1896), a novel that remained unfinished at his death. Stevenson's short stories were published as The New Arabian Nights (1882) and Island Nights' Entertainments (1893). With his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, he produced The Wrecker (1892), The Ebb-Tide (1894), and the blackly comic novel The Wrong Box (1889). He also collaborated with the poet and periodical editor William Ernest Henley, on whom Stevenson based the character of Long John Silver. Their friendship resulted in four relatively unsuccessful plays, the first of which was Deacon Brodie (1880), the story of a notorious Edinburgh burglar. This was followed by Beau Austin (1884), Admiral Guinea (1884), and Macaire (1885). Stevenson's eclectic journalism, literary reviews, and biographical essays were collected in Virginibus Peurisque (1881), Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), and Memories and Portraits (1887).

III POETRY

Much of Stevenson's poetry registers his preoccupation with the relationship between sin and innocence, and continually returns to images of the sleeping, ill, or isolated child. In an early poem, “Stormy Nights”, he recalls night terrors inspired by his parents Calvinist conception of Hell:

Do I not know, how, nightly on my bed
The palpable close darkness shutting round me,
How my small heart went forth to evil things,
How all the possibilities of sin
That were yet present to my innocence
Bound me too narrowly,
And how my spirit beat
The cage of its compulsive purity.



The critically underestimated poems of A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) also construct the child's bedtime as a moment of dark ambiguity. His famous characterization of sleep as “The Land of Nod” records this in its reference to the place of Cain's exile. Other poems of the collection consider the irrecoverable nature of the past—”From a Railway Carriage” reflects on industry s transformation of the landscape. Stevenson's poetry also includes lyrics in Scots, occasional poems, and translations of the Roman epigrammatist, Martial. Among his verse collections are Underwoods (1887), Ballads (1890), and Songs of Travel (1895).

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Major Works of Robert Louis Stevenson
TITLE
YEAR
GENRE

Admiral Guinea1
1884
Play
Ballads
1890
Poetry
Beau Austin1
1884
Play
The Black Arrow
1889
Novel
Catriona
1893
Novel
A Child's Garden of Verses
1885
Poetry
Deacon Brodie1
1880
Play
The Ebb-Tide2
1894
Novel
Familiar Studies of Men and Books
1882
Collected journalism, reviews, and essays
Father Damien
1890
Travelogue
An Inland Voyage
1878
Travelogue
In the South Seas
1896
Travelogue
Island Nights' Entertainments
1893
Short Stories
Kidnapped
1886
Novel
Macaire1
1885
Play
The Master of Ballantrae
1889
Novel
Memories and Portraits
1887
Collected journalism, reviews, and essays
The New Arabian Nights
1882
Short Stories
The Silverado Squatters
1883
Travelogue
Songs of Travel
1895
Poetry
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
1886
Novel
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes
1879
Travelogue
Treasure Island
1883
Novel
Underwoods
1887
Poetry
Virginibus Peurisque
1881
Collected journalism, reviews, and essays
The Weir of Hermiston
1896
Novel
The Wrecker2
1892
Novel
The Wrong Box2
1889
Novel
1 collaboration with William Ernest Henley2 collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne
Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia. © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.




Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865-1936), English writer and Nobel laureate, who wrote novels, poems, and short stories, most of them set in India and Myanmar (Burma) during the time of British rule.

Kipling was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, where his father was principal of a new art school. He was named “Rudyard” after the reservoir at Stoke-on-Trent in England, where his parents had become engaged. At the age of six he was sent to be educated in England. He spent five miserable years at a foster home in Southsea where he was beaten and humiliated, years that he described in his story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep”. In 1878, he was sent to Westward Ho!, a United Services College in Devon, which was later to appear in his novel Stalky and Co.(1899), which questioned the public school ethic. In 1881, Schoolboy Lyrics was published privately. Kipling returned to India in 1882 and from then until 1889 he edited and wrote stories for the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, India, experimenting, as he put it, with “the weight, colour, perfume, and attributes of words in relation to other words”. Some of these stories and poems appeared in collections: Departmental Ditties (1886), a volume of satirical verse dealing with civil and military barracks life in British colonial India, and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).

Kipling’s literary reputation was established with six stories of English life in India, published in India between 1888 and 1889. They were “Soldiers Three”, “The Story of the Gadsbys”, “In Black and White”, “Under the Deodars”, “The Phantom Rickshaw”, and a story for children, “Wee Willie Winkie”. In 1889, Kipling returned to England and continued to write. In 1891 he published The Light that Failed, a long narrative about a blind war artist and an experiment in the fin de siècle decadent style. Barrack-Room Ballads, which contains the popular poems “Danny Deever”, “Mandalay”, and “Gunga Din”, was published in 1892, the year that Kipling married Caroline Balestier, an American. The couple travelled extensively in Asia and the United States, then lived briefly in Vermont where Kipling continued to write prolifically. It was during this period that much of his most popular work was written. Short fictional works dating to this time include Many Inventions (1893) and The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895), two collections of animal stories, which many consider his finest writing and that were immediately very successful.

Kipling, however, did not get on well with the American way of life, and the growing Kipling family returned to England in 1896. Captains Courageous, a story of the sea and Kipling’s most American book, followed in 1897, and Stalky and Co. in 1899. It was in 1899, too, that the Kiplings’ eldest child, Josephine, died, an event from which neither parent ever fully recovered. Kim, a picaresque tale of Indian life that is generally regarded as his masterpiece, was published in 1901. The family finally settled at “Batemans” in Sussex in 1902 and Just So Stories for Little Children was published—the book that Kipling had planned to write for his daughter. A collection of verse, The Five Nations (1903) contains the well-known poem “Recessional” written for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897. Puck of Pook’s Hill, another children’s book, was published in 1906. In 1895, Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate, but in 1907 he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, thus becoming the first English author to be so honoured. Another book for children, Rewards and Fairies, came out in 1910.

Kipling wrote in a very accessible style and appealed to many readers beyond the literary world: he was, indeed, an enormously popular writer. As a poet he is remarkable for rhymed verse written in the slang used by the ordinary British soldier. His verse and his fiction revealed values that were intensely patriotic, paternalistic, and imperialist. By 1910, however, Kipling’s popularity had already passed its zenith. The mismanagement of the Boer War (South African Wars) at the turn of the century had presaged what was to become a growing reaction against high Victorian imperialism. The catastrophe of World War I shocked and altered the national consciousness in a way to which Kipling never seemed to adapt. His only son, John, died in action in 1915 and after the war Kipling became very active on the War Graves Commission. By his perpetual endowment, the Last Post is sounded every evening at the Menin Gate in memory of all the war dead.

The later work of Kipling is rarely read, although some of his best writing dates from this time: A Diversity of Creatures (1917), his two-volume history of his son’s regiment; The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923); Debits and Credits (1926); and Limits and Renewals (1932). After the war he became an increasingly isolated and politically unattractive figure; he was angrily anti-democratic, energetically opposing women’s suffrage, for example. He was described by one newspaper as a “vindictive maniac”. For some years Kipling’s work was deeply unfashionable, but in recent years his reputation has been somewhat revived, partly through a new interest in schools and universities in the literature of the empire.

Kim tells the story of Kimball O’Hara, a young Irish boy in India (“[t]hough he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference”), who has a double identity, being both a sahib, or Englishman, and a native boy and chela, or follower, of the Tibetan lama he meets in Lahore. The lama is afforded great respect in the text, and Kim is an obedient follower: the lama himself says, in a moving scene, “Child, I have lived on thy strength as an old tree lives on the lime of a new wall”. Yet Kim is simultaneously involved in the “Great Game”—the British Secret Service—which recruits him because of his knowledge of indigenous culture. Thus, Kim combines his pilgrimage with the lama with his mission for the British government. Despite the fact that by 1901, when the book was published, Indian nationalism was a growing and significant phenomenon, no conflict between the Indian and the English sides of Kim develops in Kipling’s novel. As Edward Said has remarked, Kim constitutes a “major contribution” to what Francis Hutchins calls “the India of the imagination...which contained no elements of either social change or political menace”. Although Kipling idealizes British rule in India, this does not detract from the power of his writing in Kim. The description of the long journey that structures the novel includes many vivid vignettes of Indian life; for instance, this description of Kim and the lama walking down the Grand Trunk road:

[a] little later a marriage procession would strike into the Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the bride’s litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the haze, while the bridegroom’s bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch a mouthful from a passing fodder cart.



Kipling died on January 18, 1936, in London and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Something of Myself, published posthumously (1937), is an unfinished account of his unhappy childhood. Perhaps this account by George Orwell of the experience of reading Kipling is not atypical: “I worshipped Kipling at thirteen, loathed him at seventeen, enjoyed him at twenty, despised him at twenty-five, and now again rather admire him. The one thing that was never possible, if one had read him at all, was to forget him”.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.


Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950), Irish-born writer and Nobel laureate, considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote more than 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since the Irish-born Jonathan Swift, and the most readable music critic and best theatre critic of his generation. He was also an indefatigable writer of letters.

Major Works of George Bernard Shaw © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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Although in some ways he was both visionary and mystic, naturally shy and quietly generous, Shaw was the antithesis of “romantic”. Another Irish writer, W. B. Yeats, called him “a notorious hater of romance”, and Shaw could be ruthless as a social critic and highly critical of institutional power. Yet his writing is never heavy or overly didactic—even his most serious plays are enlivened by a comic irreverence that finds expression in animated dialogue of epigrammatic brilliance. Nevertheless, his plays have been described as “unemotional as a mushroom”, and Shaw himself once wrote that “what I call drama is nothing but explanation”; adding, in the Preface to his play Mrs Warren’s Profession, “I have spared no pains to make known that my plays are built to induce not voluptuous reverie but intellectual interest”. For Shaw, a man of deep political conviction, art always had a purpose, and throughout his long career he used his drama as a vehicle for his ideas.

Shaw was born on July 26, 1856, in Dublin. His impractical father, an unsuccessful and unhappy merchant, had emerged from the Protestant Irish gentry, and became an alcoholic. Shaw later described himself as “a social downstart”: a typical Shavian reversal of the common phrase “social upstart”. For extra income, his mother taught voice pupils. Shaw later remembered her as a distant and unaffectionate mother: “she did not concern herself much about us,” he recalled. After attending both Protestant and Catholic day schools, Shaw, at the age of 16, took a clerical job; thereafter he was self-educated, which perhaps accounts for the originality and independence of his thinking. When his parents’ marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London, and Shaw joined them there in 1876.

II EARLY CAREER

The next decade was one of frustration and near-poverty. Neither music criticism (written under the name of a family friend) nor a telephone company job lasted very long, and only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers: Cashel Byron’s Profession (1886), a novel about prizefighting as an occupation (anticipating the theme of prostitution as an antisocial profession in the play Mrs Warren’s Profession), and An Unsocial Socialist (1887). Shaw later estimated that he had earned less than £10 by his pen in the first nine years of his literary career. By the mid-1880s, Shaw discovered the writings of Karl Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became, and remained, a firm believer in vegetarianism, and he never drank spirits, coffee, or tea. He served on the Executive Committee of the newly founded (1884) Fabian Society between 1885 and 1911. The Fabians were middle-class socialists who aimed to transform British government and society through gradual “permeation”, rather than revolution, and Shaw’s socialism was never revolutionary: Lenin was to describe him as “a good man fallen among Fabians”, and in the later plays, Shaw arguably has lost faith in the political process.

Shaw supported women’s rights, equality of income, and the abolition of private property. He also campaigned for a simplification and reform of the English alphabet in the belief that this would benefit democracy. In 1889, Shaw edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in Socialism, and it is no accident that this entry into the political world approximately coincided with Shaw’s first experiments with dramatic writing. Through the Fabian Society’s founders, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Shaw met the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend, whom he married in 1898. They seem to have enjoyed a happy, if sexless, marriage.

Shaw’s early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to brilliant music columns, from 1888 to 1890 in the Star under the signature “Corno di Bassetto” (basset horn), and later under his own initials. Shifting to the Saturday Review as drama critic, a post he held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw made his name as a controversial writer and the champion of both the work of the German composer Richard Wagner—The Perfect Wagnerite was published in 1898—and the Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, about whom he had already written his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891). In this book, he analysed Ibsen’s work as a challenge and reversal of accepted beliefs, and applauded Ibsen’s use of paradox and contradiction in his work. Shaw contrasted the intellectual depth of Ibsen’s drama with the facile and superficial triviality of the contemporary London stage.

By the early 1890s Shaw was already well known as a public speaker and journalist. His first play, Widowers’ Houses (produced in 1892 with little success), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a flouting of the Romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theatre. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). These first seven works for the stage—the others were Candida (1895), The Philanderer (1894), Arms and the Man (1894), The Man of Destiny (1896), Mrs Warren’s Profession (1894), and You Never Can Tell (1897)—received brief runs at best or no productions at all. Mrs Warren’s Profession was banned by the censor as obscene. One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil’s Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1906), and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1899)) fared slightly better. The Devil’s Disciple, a spoof of 19th-century sentimental melodrama set in America during the American War of Independence, became a success in the United States because of its wit and the very melodramatic elements that Shaw had set out to satirize. Shaw’s next work, Man and Superman (1905), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions in the non-realistic, almost operatic third act, “Don Juan in Hell”, which has often been produced independently. Man and Superman is characterized by all the typical Shavian hallmarks. Subtitled “A Comedy and a Philosophy”, it reverses the received Mozartian idea: Don Juan becomes a man of virtue, and is assailed by predatory women; Shaw uses fantasy and dream devices on stage to add dimensions to the piece; and the whole play, in addition to being entertaining and witty, is a carefully orchestrated attack on evolutionary theory. As Shaw wrote to Henry James: “In the name of human vitality WHERE is the charm in that useless, dispiriting, discouraging fatalism which broke out so horribly in the eighteen-sixties at the word of Darwin, and persuaded people in spite of their own teeth and claws that Man is the will-less slave and victim of his environment? What is the use of writing plays?—what is the use of anything?—if there is not a Will that finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods with heaven for an environment, and if that Will is not incarnated in man....”

The destinies of individuals in the plays are represented as entirely bound up with the fate of society as a whole, and the human will is therefore of imperative importance. When Hector in Heartbreak House asks, “And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?”, Captain Shotover replies: “Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.” Yet, despite Shaw’s belief in the power of the human will—a belief that was to prompt his initially uncritical responses to Hitler and Mussolini in his play Geneva (1938) for example—the plays still leave their audiences with a sense of open-endedness and of irreducible complexity. It is this sense of difficulty and disillusionment that perhaps lends Shaw’s work, although some of it is strictly Victorian, its undeniable sense of modernity. Man and Superman ran in repertory with John Bull’s Other Island (1904), which was originally written for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, but rejected as a slur on the Irish character; the pair established Shaw’s popular reputation in London as playwright and sage.

III HIGH COMEDY

George Bernard Shaw Irish-born British writer George Bernard Shaw, author of more than 50 plays, rejected the romantic Victorian themes of his time and sought to bring about social reform through his dramatic portrayals of the ills of his time. Shaw wrote with mischievous humour and brilliant wit. In this passage from the play Man and Superman (1903), a character holds forth on the hypocrisy of the conventions of marriage (recited by an actor).Rex Features, Ltd./The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate. (p)1992 Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.
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“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh,” wrote Shaw in The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906). It is this double focus—on both the hilarious absurdity and the crushing seriousness of life—that blurs the distinctions between high drama and comedy in Shaw’s works. His mature comedies are, in fact, very serious plays. Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) are both vehicles for an examination of society’s complicity in its own evils. In Major Barbara, Shaw questions the easy habits of morality that vilify the principles and practices of a munitions manufacturer while applauding the members and benefactors of the Salvation Army. By the end of the play Barbara has realized that the Salvation Army’s solutions are inadequate and the power of Undershaft, the industrialist, must be confronted and redirected—as she puts it, “[t]here is no wicked side: life is all one”. Ideas of power and social intervention fascinated Shaw, and the action of Major Barbara pivots around the Platonic recommendation that “society cannot be saved until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek”. The former in fact happens in the play, when the Classical scholar, Adolphus Cusins, agrees to join Undershaft’s business.

In The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw uses a satire both on the professions and on the artistic temperament to make serious points about human suffering. Several discussion plays followed: Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny’s First Play (1911). Although Fanny became his longest-running hit up to that time, the most durable of the three has proved to be Misalliance. The mystical side of Shaw, meanwhile, found expression in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), about the sudden conversion of a horse thief, and in Androcles and the Lion (1913), which concerned true and false religious exaltation, and used the traditions of both the medieval mystery play and the Victorian Christmas pantomime.

Shaw’s comic masterpiece Pygmalion (1913; the basis for the musical comedy and film My Fair Lady) was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; but it also deals with issues of class and social power, and exposes the power politics between Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins. “Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I’m a slave now, for all my fine clothes,” opines Eliza after Higgins has transformed her into a “lady”, taking her away from her flower-selling and leaving her with nothing to sell but herself. When Eliza finally defies Higgins and reasserts her independence (“I’m not afraid of you and can do without you”), Higgins is impressed: “By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have...Now you’re a tower of strength: a consort battleship.” With few of the romantic implications at the end of My Fair Lady, Shaw’s play ends, more radically, with Eliza’s self-assertion.

IV THE POST-WAR YEARS

Pygmalion was as ebullient in its outlook as Shaw’s next major play, Heartbreak House (1919), exposing the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation, was pessimistic. The intellectual watershed of World War I explains the difference. Heartbreak House was subtitled “A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes”, and the influence of both Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy is apparent. Shaw was disgusted by the war, which he characterized as an ugly struggle between greedy imperial powers in his Common Sense About the War (1914). Attempting to find his way out of post-war pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah (1921); they explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed. Saint Joan (1923) was the play for which Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. In Shaw’s hands, Joan of Arc became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius.

V THE LAST PLAYS

Shaw continued to write into his 90s. His clear and informative Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism was published in 1928, and Everybody’s Political What’s What, a similar reference work, was published in 1944. Along with the novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932), these works remain useful compendia of his ideas. His last plays, beginning with The Apple Cart (1929), turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential. These were themes that he had handled before but he now approached them with a tragicomic and non-realistic extravagance that owed more to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes than to Ibsen. The best-known plays of this period are Too True to be Good (1932), Village Wooing (1934), The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935), In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1939), and Buoyant Billions (1948). To the end, Shaw continued to publish brilliantly argued prefaces to his plays, and to flood publishers with books and articles, and newspaper editors with cantankerous letters. Thousands of his sparkling personal letters have also been published, including those to English stage luminaries such as Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell.

further reading
These sources provide additional information on Shaw, George Bernard.

Shaw died in his country home at Ayot St Lawrence on November 2, 1950 at the age of 94. Although he founded no “school” of playwrights, by forging a drama combining moral passion and intellectual conflict, by his use of non-realistic devices on stage that widened the possibilities of the theatre, and by his dramatic, sometimes even confrontational, use of politics in his plays, Shaw’s work had a major and seminal influence on British drama. It is an influence that is still too often underestimated or forgotten. His bold, critical intelligence and sharp pen, brought to bear on contemporary issues, helped mould the thought of his own and later generations.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Major Works of George Bernard Shaw
TITLE
YEAR
GENRE

Androcles and the Lion
1913
Play
The Apple Cart
1929
Play
Arms and the Man 1
1894
Play
Back to Methuselah
1922
Suite of 5 plays
Caesar and Cleopatra 2
1907
Play
Candida 1
1897
Play
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion 2
1900
Play
Cashel Byron’s Profession
1886
Play
Common Sense About the War
1914
Essay
The Devil’s Disciple 2
1897
Play
Fanny’s First Play
1911
Play
Getting Married
1908
Play
Heartbreak House
1920
Play
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
1928
Essay
John Bull’s Other Island
1904
Play
Major Barbara
1905
Play
Man and Superman
1905
Play
The Man of Destiny 1
1897
Play
Misalliance
1910
Play
Mrs Warren’s Profession 1
1893
Play
The Philanderer 1
1893
Play
Pygmalion
1913
Play
The Quintessence of Isbenism
1891
Essay
Saint Joan
1923
Play
The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles
1935
Play
Too True To Be Good
1932
Play
An Unsocial Socialist
1887
Novel
Widower’s Houses 1
1892
Play
You Never Can Tell 1
1899
Play
1 Collected as Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898)2 Collected as Three Plays for Puritans (1901)
Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia. © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.



Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900), Irish-born writer and wit, who was the chief proponent of the aesthetic movement, based on the principle of art for art's sake. Wilde was a novelist, playwright, poet, and critic.

Major Works of Oscar Wilde © Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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II LIFE

Oscar Wilde Nineteenth-century Irish-born writer and intellectual Oscar Wilde led an eccentric life that fuelled his witty satires and epigrams on Victorian society. A member of the aesthetic movement in literature, Wilde advocated the idea of art for art’s sake. This selection comes from “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), a poem inspired by Wilde’s 18-month period of imprisonment.(p) 1992 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved./Culver Pictures
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He was born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. As a youngster he was exposed to the brilliant literary talk of the day at his mother's Dublin salon. Later, as a student at the University of Oxford, he excelled in classics, wrote poetry (his long poem Ravenna won the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878), and incorporated the Bohemian lifestyle of his youth into a unique way of life. At Oxford Wilde came under the influence of aesthetic innovators such as English writers Walter Pater and John Ruskin. As an aesthete, the eccentric young Wilde wore long hair and velvet knee breeches. His rooms were filled with various objets d'art such as sunflowers, peacock feathers, and blue china; Wilde claimed to aspire to the perfection of the china. His attitudes and manners were ridiculed in the comic periodical Punch and satirized in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera Patience (1881). Nonetheless, his wit, brilliance, and flair won him many devotees.

Wilde's first book was Poems (1881). His first play, Vera, or the Nihilists (1882), was produced in New York, where he saw it performed while he was on a highly successful lecture tour. Upon returning to England he settled in London and married in 1884 a wealthy Irish woman, Constance Lloyd, with whom he had two sons. Thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

In 1895, at the peak of his career, Wilde became the central figure in one of the most sensational court trials of the century. The results scandalized the Victorian middle class; Wilde, who had been a close friend of the young Lord Alfred Douglas, was accused by Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, of sodomy, an accusation that was upheld by the courts on Wilde's retrial in May 1895. Sentenced to two years of hard labour in prison, he emerged financially bankrupt and spiritually downcast. He spent the rest of his life in Paris, using the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. He was converted to Roman Catholicism before he died of meningitis in Paris on November 30, 1900.

III WORKS

Wilde's early works included two collections of fairy stories, which he wrote for his sons, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), and a group of short stories, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891). His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a melodramatic tale of moral decadence, distinguished for its brilliant, epigrammatic style. Although the author fully describes the process of corruption, the shocking conclusion of the story commits him to a moral stand against self-debasement. The critics still charged Wilde with immorality.

Wilde's most distinctive and engaging plays are the four comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), all characterized by adroitly contrived plots and remarkably witty dialogue. Wilde, with little dramatic training, proved he had a natural talent for stagecraft and theatrical effects and a true gift for farce. The plays sparkle with his clever paradoxes, among them such famous inverted proverbs as “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes” and “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing”.

In contrast, Wilde's Salomé is a serious drama about obsessive passion. Originally written in French, it was produced in Paris in 1894 with the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt. It was subsequently made into an opera by the German composer Richard Strauss. Salomé was also translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas and illustrated by English artist Aubrey Beardsley in 1894.

further reading
These sources provide additional information on Wilde, Oscar.

While in prison Wilde composed De Profundis (From the Depths; 1905), an apology for his life. Some critics consider it a serious revelation; others, a sentimental and insincere work. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), written at Berneval, France, just after his release and published anonymously in England, is the most powerful of all his poems. The starkness of prison life and the desperation of people interned are revealed in beautifully cadenced language. For years after his death the name of Oscar Wilde bore the stigma attached to it by Victorian prudery. Wilde, the artist, now is recognized as a brilliant social commentator, whose best work remains worthwhile and relevant.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Major Works of Oscar Wilde
TITLE
YEAR
GENRE

The Ballad of Reading Gaol
1898
Poem
De Profundis 1
1905
Letter
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
1888
Short Stories
A House of Pomegranates
1891
Short Stories
An Ideal Husband
1895
Play
The Importance of Being Earnest
1895
Play
Lady Windermere’s Fan
1892
Play
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories
1891
Short Stories
The Picture of Dorian Gray
1891
Novel
Poems
1881
Poetry
Ravenna
1878
Poem
Salomé 2
1894
Play
The Soul of Man under Socialism
1891
Political Essay
A Woman of No Importance
1893
Play
1 Published posthumously and only in part. Full text first published 19492 Suppressed. First performance 1896
Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia. © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Major Works of Oscar Wilde
TITLE
YEAR
GENRE

The Ballad of Reading Gaol
1898
Poem
De Profundis 1
1905
Letter
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
1888
Short Stories
A House of Pomegranates
1891
Short Stories
An Ideal Husband
1895
Play
The Importance of Being Earnest
1895
Play
Lady Windermere’s Fan
1892
Play
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories
1891
Short Stories
The Picture of Dorian Gray
1891
Novel
Poems
1881
Poetry
Ravenna
1878
Poem
Salomé 2
1894
Play
The Soul of Man under Socialism
1891
Political Essay
A Woman of No Importance
1893
Play
1 Published posthumously and only in part. Full text first published 19492 Suppressed. First performance 1896
Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia. © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.



Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904-1991), English novelist, playwright, essayist, travel writer, screenwriter, and author of short fiction.

Born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the son of a headmaster, Greene was educated at Balliol College, Oxford University. While still a student, he published a collection of poetry, Babbling April (1925). In 1926 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church, an act that would have a profound impact on his fiction. He worked for The Times (1926-1930) and then as a freelance writer. In 1935 he was film critic for the Spectator, and in 1940 was appointed its literary editor. He worked for the British Foreign Office in west Africa (1941-1943) and after World War II travelled widely.

Greene's earliest novels were The Man Within (1929), The Name of Action (1930), and Rumour at Nightfall (1931). His popularity came, however, with Stamboul Train (1932), a spy thriller published in the United States as Orient Express. This and subsequent novels such as England Made Me (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936), and The Ministry of Fear (1943), Greene later categorized as “entertainments”. He regarded Brighton Rock (1938) as his first legitimate novel. It was also the first in which reviewers identified recognizably Catholic themes. Set in the criminal underworld of the respectable seaside town, it focuses on Pinkie, a small-time racketeer. Like many of Greene's central characters, Pinkie is an alienated figure, operating in a violent and corrupt environment. Despite this context, Greene grants his character moments of visionary intensity, that centre on Pinkie's morbid horror of sex: “He watched her with his soured virginity, as one might watch a draught of medicine that one would never, never take; one would die first—or let others die.”

The fate of the novel's protagonists demonstrates “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God”, and Greene's fiction became increasingly concerned with themes of moral and spiritual struggle in a degenerate world. The Quiet American (1955) questions American involvement in Vietnam; Our Man in Havana (1958) is set during the last days of the Batista regime in Cuba, and tells the story of Wormold, an Englishman recruited to spy for MI6. Wormold cheats his employers by offering them diagrams of vacuum-cleaner parts as plans of a secret atomic installation. His small contribution to a larger world of deception and cruelty positions him “on the frontier of violence, a strange land he had never visited before”.

Subsequent major works include Loser Takes All (1955); A Burnt-Out Case (1961); The Comedians (1966); The Honorary Consul (1973); The Human Factor (1978); and The Tenth Man (1985). Greene's works are characterized by vivid local detail, exotic and often seedy settings (in Mexico, Liberia, Haiti, Vietnam), and a detached portrayal of characters under various forms of social, political, or psychological stress. His later fiction finds dwindling hope for the possibility of humanity's moral salvation. In Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980), the eponymous character considers the nature of God, concluding that “judging from the world he is supposed to have made, he can only be greedy for our humiliation”. The 1982 novel Monsignor Quixote, which confronts Marxism with Catholicism, is gentler in tone, however.

Greene's contact with the cinema was comprehensive. An influential critic, his writings on film were collected as Mornings in the Dark (1993). The Third Man (1950), another spy thriller directed by Carol Reed, was written especially for filming. As well as reviewing, he scripted, produced, and even acted (in Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine, 1976). Eighteen films were made of his work, and cinema was a strong influence upon his pacy plots and sharp dialogue. As an essayist, he compiled Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1952) and Collected Essays (1969), the latter mostly comprising studies of other writers. In the 1950s he wrote a series of children's stories and produced his most successful plays, The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), and The Complaisant Lover (1959). His travel writing focuses on dangerous and exotic areas of the world, and includes Journey Without Maps (1936), an account of his travels in Liberia, and The Lawless Roads (1939), describing journeys in Mexico. A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980) are his autobiographies. The former suggests that, like many of his characters, he had contemplated suicide. From 1966 Greene made his home on the French Riviera and spent much time travelling. He died in Vevey, Switzerland, on April 3, 1991.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965), American-born English poet, literary critic, dramatist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who is best known for his poem The Waste Land, one of the most widely discussed and influential literary works of the early 20th century. His plays, which rely on a colloquial use of unrhymed verse, attempted to revive poetic drama for the contemporary audience. Eliot's methods of literary analysis have been a major influence on English and American critical writing. According to the influential Canadian critic Northrop Frye: “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read.”

Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, into a distinguished New England family. His father was a businessman and his grandfather a Unitarian minister. His mother was a poet. He was educated at Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and the University of Oxford. He became a resident of London in 1915 and a naturalized British citizen in 1927. Between 1915 and 1919 he worked at various positions, including those of teacher, bank clerk, and as assistant editor of the literary magazine The Egoist. In 1915 he married Vivien Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was not a happy one and they separated in 1932-1933. Vivien died in 1947 and in 1957 Eliot married Valerie Fletcher.

Eliot's first collection of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), contains poems written in free verse and makes much use of the imagery of modern, cosmopolitan urban life: “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo. / The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes / Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”). Such contemporary language and imagery was still unusual in poetry of this period. Eliot's long poem in five parts, The Waste Land (1922), is an erudite work that expresses vividly his conception of the sterility of modern society in contrast with societies of the past. It became a landmark of Modernism (although Eliot later described it as “just a piece of rhythmical grumbling”).

During the 1920s Eliot developed his views on various literary, cultural, and religious subjects. His ideas about what he called the “objective correlative” and the “dissociation of sensibility” profoundly influenced literary criticism. In his collection of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot argued that the critic must develop a strong historical sense in order to judge literature from a proper perspective, and in a famous formulation in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” he dictated that the poet must be impersonal in the exercise of his craft: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality”. He believed that “Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult”. In the collection of essays For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), he famously described his position as that of a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. His other prose works include The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948), and On Poetry and Poets (1957).

As founder and editor of the magazine The Criterion from 1922 to 1939, Eliot provided a literary forum for many prominent contemporary writers, and in 1925 he joined the publishing house Faber and Gwyer (later Faber & Faber) as an editor, where he built up a list of poets representing the modern movement in British poetry, including Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin.

During the 1930s new qualities of serenity and religious humility became apparent in Eliot's poetry, notably in Ash Wednesday (1930), The Rock (1934), and his long verse play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), based on the martyrdom of St Thomas à Becket. Four Quartets (1943), considered by many critics his finest work, is influenced by the philosophy of F. H. Bradley and wrestles with great issues such as the meaning of time and redemption in a language rich with paradox: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” The poem is full of questions and self-doubt: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.”

Eliot's fame as a playwright dates from the commercial success of The Cocktail Party (1949), a modern drawing-room comedy which explores the meaning of salvation. Eliot's other plays include Sweeney Agonistes (1932), The Family Reunion (1939), The Confidential Clerk (1953), and The Elder Statesman (1958), but he is perhaps now most familiar to the theatre-going public as the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a book of verse for children which was adapted and made into the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats.

Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of Merit in 1948 and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He died on January 4, 1965, and is buried at East Coker, the village in Somerset from where his ancestor Andrew Eliot had emigrated to America in the 17th century.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.



Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914-1953), Welsh poet, short story writer, and playwright. Born in Swansea, Wales, on October 27, 1914, Thomas was the son of a teacher. In 1931, after grammar school, he became a local newspaper reporter. During 1934 and 1935, and intermittently thereafter, he lived in London, where 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936) made his reputation. The Map of Love (1939), a collection of short stories and poems, was followed by The World I Breathe (United States, 1939), and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), a short story sequence.

Thomas married Caitlin Macnamara in 1937 and the couple had three children; their relationship was often tempestuous. During World War II, after he had been rejected for military service on health grounds, Thomas worked in London scripting propaganda films. Two later screenplays, The Doctor and the Devils and Rebecca’s Daughters, were filmed in 1986 and 1992. He also had a fine speaking voice and was a frequent broadcaster. In 1946 he published Deaths and Entrances, then In Country Sleep and Other Poems (United States, 1952). His Collected Poems 1934-1952 (1952; United States 1953) was acclaimed and followed by Under Milk Wood (1954), his unfinished play for radio, first performed in New York in 1953.

From 1949 he lived at the Boat House in Laugharne (pronounced “Larn”), Carmarthenshire, a small Welsh seaside town, and made three successful reading tours to the United States that became legendary for his heavy drinking, wild behaviour, and financial fecklessness. In poor health and with his marriage in crisis, in October 1953 he began a fourth tour and planned an operatic collaboration with Igor Stravinsky. He died in New York on November 9, 1953 from the effects of alcohol and incorrect medication.

Thomas’s poems often draw on notebook drafts written in his teens. The difficult early poetry has Modernist elements, offers a neo-romantic contrast to the period’s social poetry, and at the same time has social content. His subjects include: “process” (bodily processes mirroring external natural forces); self and a repressive, particularly sexually repressive, suburban world; writing; relations with his father; and the Great War. Some regard him as a religious poet and certainly Biblical rhythms and imagery are often prominent. Conventional Christian belief is, however, at times countered by pantheistic tendencies and bleakly secular moments in his later poetry.

The tension between the thrusting energy of his poems and their strict forms in itself dramatizes the repression of the self by an essentially bourgeois world. Lines from “The force that through the green fuse”, an early “process” poem, bring together self and world, the presence of a superior inaccessible power that might be God or Nature, and dynamic, allusive, neo-Biblical language controlled by a strict syllabic count and consonantal rhymes:

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.



The poems and neo-surrealistic fiction of The Map of Love (1939) reflect the troubled 1930s—European Fascism, annexations and invasions, and the Spanish Civil War—and sound a recurring apocalyptic note. Some poems explore familial relations. Public and private combine in “After the Funeral”, on an aunt’s death, and “A saint about to fall”, on his son’s imminent birth into a violent world.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog marks a sea change to realist, often humorous stories comprising a “provincial autobiography”, while still suggesting the wider, darkening world. Thomas also began Adventures in the Skin Trade, an unfinished tale of a naive provincial in London. Deaths and Entrances (1946) contains more immediately approachable poetry, exploring personal relationships, a civilian’s experience of the London Blitz, and the act of writing. In this volume attempts at affirmation conflict with underlying uncertainty. The volume ends with “Fern Hill”, carefree childhood viewed by an adult conscious of Time’s tyranny and memory’s uncertainty. The well-known conclusion is typically complex:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.



After 1946 Thomas completed few poems, some of which were haunted by post-Hiroshima foreboding. For his dying father he wrote the famous “Do not go gentle into that good night”.

Under Milk Wood, a warm comedy about the imaginary Welsh seaside town of Llareggub (“buggerall” spelt backwards), is his most popular work. Also well known is the nostalgic “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” (1945). His letters are often brilliantly comic. As a lyric poet of originality and often startling beauty, he has been hugely influential, as Philip Larkin recognized when linking him with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden: three poets “who’ve altered the face of poetry”. He is still widely read. Dylan Thomas was a driven, troubled man, but for many he has achieved iconic status as the archetypal convention-flouting bohemian writer.

Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia © 1993-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.