Playing the literary detective, Zacks takes us through the sordid tale. We know that "Over the centuries, novelists, relentless treasure hunters, and even historians have stoked [Captain Kidd's] pirate legend." Now, with this book, we not only get the story from the people who were there, but also from great writers of the 17th century. Zacks covers every angle to give us new insight into the man behind the legend: Captain Kidd.
The Mission at Sea
The mission itself seems rather straightforward. Captain Kidd was commissioned to capture pirate ships for a group of investors, who provided him with the finest cannon-fitted ship (the "Adventure Galley"), a crew, supplies, and a deadline. His job was to capture the ships, then bring the cargo back for his investors to divvy up. They would keep the greater share of the proceeds for themselves, and leave a portion for Kidd and his crew.
In accepting the mission, Captain Kidd had quite a lot to gain (his share of the proceeds), but he also had quite a lot to loose. When he left on his mission in 1696, he was already one of the wealthiest men in New York, and his investors had forced him to sign a bond.
According to Zacks, Captain Kidd would loose almost everything, and would possibly even be put in debtor's prison if he didn't bring back the booty on the agreed-upon schedule. But, as Zacks repeatedly points out, he didn't think he could fail. Even when his men mutinied, when he was low on food and supplies, and when his ship was in bad shape (leaking badly, and falling apart because they'd been in such a hurry to get the ship ready), he continued to believe that he would succeed in his mission.
The Legend
Legend has it that Captain Kidd was a bloody murderer, thief, and scoundrel. Zacks doesn't dispute the fact that Kidd murdered a man. He killed his gunner the first time his crew mutinied, which stopped their revolt for a time. Beyond that act, and some errors in judgment, Zacks maintains that much of Kidd's career has been blown way out of proportion.
Zacks says, "Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer, fabulously rich, burying treasure up and down the eastern seaboard." As a boy, Zacks says that he too dreamed of Kidd as "fierce, mustachioed, downing rums, slicing the air with his cutlass." Other writers have helped to add a flare to the legend as well.
Washington Irving described Kidd as "somewhat of a trader, something more of a smuggler with a considerable dash of the pickaroon."
But, how can we not imagine such wonderfully awful things about the pirate. It's such a good story, when you think about it. And, what writer wouldn't pick up on the drama of the tale, even if it's not based on anything resembling fact. We want to find our treasure map, even though Zacks says that no such thing has ever been discovered by scholars. Perhaps our imaginations are enough. Not all treasures are gold.
1. Tongue in cheek
Meaning - To pretend to be serious while joking
Origin - Probably came from the practice of biting one's tongue to suppress either a smile or outright laughter.
2. Pushing the envelope
Meaning - To approach or exceed known performance boundaries.
Origin - This expression came from the USAF test pilot program of the late 1940's. It meant flying an aircraft at or beyond its known performance envelope or recommended limits.
3. Fit to be tied
Meaning - To be furious.
Origin - This refers to the practice of bounding uncontrollable, dangerous people into strait-jackets.
4. Wing and a prayer
Meaning - Hopeful but unlikely to succeed.
Origin - An expression from the First World War. From an American Flyer who returned safely despite a badly damaged wing - he had been praying throughout, he said.
5. Pass the buck
Meaning - Pass off responsibility to someone else.
Origin - A marker known as a buck is used in card games to mark the player who is the current dealer. When the buck is passed to the next player, the responsibility for dealing is passed.
6. The buck stops here
Meaning - To take responsibility for something.
Origin - This expression is the opposite of the previous phrase "Pass the buck".
7. Stink to high heaven
Meaning - To have a very strong odor.
Origin - This expression probably originated from the well-known Shakespearean play 'Hamlet'. From a dialogue uttered by Hamlet's Uncle, the King of Denmark - "O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon it, A brother's murder."
8. Ducks in a row
Meaning - To have things in order.
Origin - This expression arises from the tidy habit that baby ducklings have of swimming in a straight row behind their mother.
9. Hell's half acre
Meaning - A long and frustrating trip.
Origin - This expression originates from the place in Idaho that is known as Hell's half acre that is a lava flow and has an irregular, surreal-looking terrain that is no picnic to navigate.
10. Face the music
Meaning - To accept the truth.
Origin - Originates from the British Military practice of playing the drums when someone was court marshaled.
11. Egg on your face
Meaning - To be embarrassed.
Origin - Yellow egg shows up vividly well on your face if you don't wipe your mouth after eating, and, unless you're really thick-skinned, that's embarrassing.
12. Sell yourself short
Meaning - Having a woeful amount of confidence in oneself.
Origin - This expression comes from short selling of stocks in the belief that their value is going down.
13. Crocodile tears
Meaning - Phony tears, usually shed to manipulate or exploit.
Origin - Sunning crocodiles often keep their mouths wide open and this pressurizes the tear glands to shed tears. It is thought that these fake tears - not produced from any emotional response - help in digesting the meal.
14. Sitting duck
Meaning - Vulnerable, easy prey.
Origin - A duck resting on the ground is easier to shoot than one that happens to be flying away.
15. Flash in the pan
Meaning - A thing of great promise that doesn't live up to expectations.
Origin - This expression comes from the Gold Rush days when prospectors glimpsed a flash of gold in their pan, but it actually came to nothing.
16. Albatross around your neck
Meaning - Weighed down by a past misdeed or deep shame.
Origin - This expression comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner". The captain in the poem killed an albatross (a symbol of good luck) and this was thought to be the reason for the wind dropping and the ship being rendered motionless.
17. Roll with the punches
Meaning - To brave through the hard times.
Origin - This is a boxing term - it means deflecting a direct hit.
18. When the chips are down
Meaning - Bleak times.
Origin - This is a gambling expression. Chips are used for money - if you're winning, you have a lot of them; if you're down on your luck, you don't have many.
19. Between a rock and a hard place
Meaning - Not left with any good choices.
Origin - This expression arises from the Greek Classics. Odysseus had to pass between the monster Scylla and the deadly whirlpool Charydbis.
20. I'll be a monkey's uncle
Meaning - Get off, it can't be true, I can't believe it, how can it be true?
Origin - We must blame Darwin for this one. Or rather the non-believers in his theory.
Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and feeling souls
Voltaire
In the simplest form, poetry can be defined as a form of literature containing an expression of feelings, emotions or experiences. One of the greatest distinction of poetry from prose is that poetry is written in metrical form. We often read a poem but do not know that it belongs to a particular poetic genre. Let us know more about the all different types of poems.
Types Of Poems
Acrostic: The word acrostic literally means a puzzle where you fill a square grid with words reading the same down as across. An acrostic poem is defined as a verse where the first letters (alphabets) of every line when read down form a single word or a message.
e.g- JACK
Jovial
Adorable
Cute
Kind
Ballad: Ballad is one of the most popular types of poems that tells a story. It is narrative and often contains recurrent refrain. Today Ballads are often misinterpreted as love songs.
e.g- Ballad of Semmerwater (Sir William Watson) or the Ballad of Father Gilligan (W. B. Yeats).
Blank Verse: This is a poetry form without a rhyme but containing a specific meter, i.e iambic pentameter.
e.g- All the verses in Shakespearean plays.
Burlesque: It is a type of poem where a serious subject is treated in a humorous, impudent and exaggerated manner. Burlesque is most used as theatrical entertainment.
e.g- Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
Canzone: The word Canzone means song in Italian. It is a Italian type of poem like a lyric, containing 5-6 stanzas. Canzone often has a short concluding stanza.
e.g- Sonnet XIII by Petrarch
Cinquain: A Cinquain is a poem of 5 lines of varied length and rhyme. The distinct feature of a Cinquain is that the first line consists of 1 word, the second of 2 words and so on.
Couplet: Couplet is a type of poem that contains only two lines that have rhyming words. Couplet is one of the terms of poetry.
e.g- Wit is like faith by such warm Fools profest
Who to be saved by one, must damn the rest.
(Alexander Pope)
Diamante Poem: This is one of the less popular types of poems. It consists of 7 lines structured in a specific manner. The first and the last line consists of only word; the second and the sixth line of 2 words; the third and the fifth line consists of 3 words; while the middle line contains four words. The verses of this poem resemble a diamond.
Elegy: An elegy is a sad and melancholic poem, usually about the death of an individual. Funeral poems or elegy is one of the most popular formats used in funeral and memorial services today.
e.g- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Thomas Gray)
Epic: An epic is a very long poem that contains story of the life of a heroic figure or a mythological character. Epic is a very old form of poetry.
e.g- Iliad, Odyssey (Homer), Mahabharata (Veda Vyaas) and Ramayana.
Free Verse: It is a type of poem that may or may not have a specific rhyme scheme or meter. The poet has a freedom to make use of any poetic devices in the poem.
e.g- Prometheus (Goethe)
Ghazal: It is a form of poetry common in Arabic, Persian and Urdu literature. A single Ghazal has 5-15 rhyming couplets that are usually based on the theme of love or divinity. The closing couplet often has the poet's signature.
e.g- Mirza Ghalib was a popular Ghazal poet.
Haiku: It is a Japanese type of poem containing three lines with 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively that are not rhymed. Haiku poems also contain a cutting word (kireji) and a season word (kigo).
e.g- Poems of Matsuo BashÅ
Idyll Poem: It is a short poem that describes pastoral life in idealized terms. It can also be a poem that tells a story about ancient heroes.
e.g- The Solitary Reaper (William Wordsworth)
Jintishi: It is a type of Chinese poem based on the four traditional tones. It generally has 8 lines that are in the form of 4 couplets. These poems are based on a variety of themes and subjects.
e.g- Du Fu was a famous poet who wrote Jintishi poems.
Lay: It is a long and narrative poem consisting of frequent refrains.
Limerick: A limerick is a form of poem that is humorous and witty and even obscene at times. It consists of a strict rhyme scheme.
e.g- Book of Nonsense (Edward Lear)
Lyric: It is a type of poem that resembles a song where the poet expresses his feelings and emotions, directly to the reader.
e.g- If (Rudyard Kipling)
Minnesang: It is a type of song that originated in Germany around 12th century. The theme or the subject of this poetry is love.
Narrative Poetry: A narrative is long and complex poem that has a plot or a story. There is a regular pattern of rhyme in this type of poem. Ballad, Idyll and epic are the different types of poems that fall in the category of narrative poetry.
e.g- Idylls of the King (Tennyson)
Ode: An Ode is a type of poem that is similar to lyric, but is serious and thoughtful. It is in the form of verses that are framed in three parts.
e.g- Ode to the West Wind (P.B. Shelley)
Pantoum: This poem type is similar to villanelle and it follow a specific pattern. The second and the fourth line of each stanza is repeated as the first and third line of the next stanza.
Pastourelle: It is a type of poem that usually depicts the life and romance of shepherds. It is an old French type of poem and is also known as pastoral poem.
Ruba'i: Ruba'i is a quatrain or a four line poem. This poem type is popularized by Arabian and Persian poets.
e.g- Omar Khayyam's poems.
Rondeau: It is one of the French poem types consisting of 13-15 lines. The significant features of this poem include presence of only 2 rhymes and repetition of first line as refrain.
Satirical Poetry: It is a type of poem that uses satire to mock injustice or any political issues.
e.g- Juvenal's Satires.
Sestina (Sestine): This is a type of poem with 6 stanzas. The lines are not rhymed but the end word of every line in the first stanza appears in other stanzas.
e.g- Ye Goat-Herd Gods (Philip Sidney)
Sijo: It is a Korean type of poem like a lyric of 3 lines. It has a pause after every line.
Sonnet: In simple terms, a sonnet can be defined as a poem of 14 lines. Sonnets are further divided as Shakespearean sonnets (3 quatrains and 1 couplet) and Italian sonnets (2 quatrains and a sestet)
e.g- Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Shakespeare)
Stave (Stev): It is a lyric like poetry from Scandinavia that usually has stanzas of four lines and one stressed syllable.
Tanka: It is a Japanese type of poem of 5 lines. The first and the third line of Tanka has 5 syllables whereas the rest 3 lines have 7 syllables.
e.g- To live is to break (Ueda Miyoji)
Villanelle: This is a 19 line poem having 5 triplets and a quatrain. There are refrains used in the initial stanza and again at the end of the quatrain.
e.g- Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas)
Robert Browning is one of the famous poets of the 19th century (Victorian period). He's particularly well-known for his early monologue, "My Last Duchess."
"My Last Duchess" is a great example of dramatic dialogue, a poetic form used to narrate and dramatize Victorian concerns. As a convention, each dramatic monologue should include:
* a fiction speaker/audience
* a symbolic setting
* talismanic props
* dramatic gestures
* an emphasis on speaker's subjectivity
* a focus on dramatics
* problematics of irony/non-irony
* involved reader's role-playing
The poem, "My Last Duchess" is based on incidents in the life of Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara in Italy. The duke's first wife, Lucrezia, died in 1561 — after they'd been married for 3 years. The background of the poem is interesting, but the text can be difficult to understand. The use of dramatic monologue works to separate the speaker from the poet (Browning), which forces the reader (you) to work hard to understand the words of the speaker and thus, hopefully, get a grasp on what the poet is saying.
We learn about the Duke by what he says and how he says it. Through him, we also learn about his wife, the last Duchess. We decipher something of how their relationship stood, what his expectations were, how she responded, etc.
In short, we learn a great deal about his character by hearing how he thought and felt about her. The Duke is manipulative, filled with family pride, and a feeling of ownership over even the memory of his deceased wife. We even get the impression that he might have murdered her — perhaps when "all smiles stopped altogether"?
Ultimately, we see what money and power can buy — not love. For this moral commentary in dramatic monologue, Browning draws from the traditions of Shakespeare's soliloquies, John Donne's poetry, and Hopkin's sonnets to offer readers that "truth broken into prismatic hues."
I remember us,
the way we used to be,
I'd hold you in my arms,
your smile so sweet to me,
But now when I see you,
you look right through me,
I feel so alone now,
but when I close my eyes...
...All I see is you.
The love we used to share,
gone up in whirl winds,
will I ever love,
or ever live again,
I am tired of crying,
and I am done trying,
To remember all about you,
but when I close my eyes...
...All I see is you.
All the love I am sending,
the memories I won't sell,
I know there must be an ending,
to the story I will tell,
I dream only of your love,
and happiness in life,
I try not to think of you,
but when I close my eyes...
..All I see is you.
John Donne (Pronounced as “Dun”) was an English poet of scholarly imagination and theological authenticity .He was a contemporary of Marlow and Shakespeare who joint him in the spirit and the supremacy of the revival era. It is hard to find another poet of Donne’s caliber so far versatility and scholarly inventiveness in English poetry is concerned.
Early life, education and marriage
Donne was born in Bradstreet, London in 1572 to a rich Catholic family and he was the eldest son of a wealthy iron merchant .John Heywood, a well-known dramatist, was his maternal uncle. Donne received his early education privately and then matriculated from oxford in 1584.It is said that he went to Cambridge for higher education but couldn’t receive a degree on account of his resistance to the swearword of thirty-nine articles. There are little information about his life from 1584-1592.He took admission as a law student to Lincoln’s Inn in May 1592.Like many other members of the Inns of Court he used to enjoy women’s company and cards: “Not dissolute but very neat, a great visitor of ladies, a great frequenter of plays, and a great writer of conceited verses.”
During these significant years, Donne studied law and religion. He also created a number of songs, elegies and satires when he was not even twenty-five. He visited Italy to go on Jerusalem but he was not permitted to do so. He also stayed in Spain where he studied the laws, the language and the arts of Spain. The strength of Italian life and literature and influence of Spanish philosopher and theologians subjugated his early poetry.
During that period he also met other Catholics who, like him, felt terribly the aggravation and harassment they were subject to. Donne wrote of that period: “I had my first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted religion (Catholicism), accustomed to the respite of death and hungry of an imagined martyrdom.” These were the days of inner conflict and his soul was dividing into Catholicism and Anglicanism. Ultimately, by 1597 he must have embraced the Church of England, when he joined the service of Sir Thomas Edgerton. But before 1597, Donne joined as a volunteer in two joint military and naval missions.
He would have got promotion and advancement in public service had he not committed the imprudence of toning a run-away marriage with Anne More who was daughter of Sir George More of Losely and niece of Edgerton’s second wife. Donne thought that this marriage would strengthen his claims to promotion contrary to this Edgerton dismissed him from the service. The settlement with Sir More, his father-in-law, saved him from a long custody. Donne’s sudden and irresponsible marriage meant the loss of a promising and stable public career. The years from 1601 to 1609 were full of financial problems and Donne had to depend on the generosity of his supporters. Sir Robert Druary, Lord Hay, Robert Carr used to help him in different ways.
Donne’s conversion of Anglicanism
Brought up among the Catholics in early age, his belief in the old faith struggled against the impact of the Established church. Donne wasn’t a hypocrite; he knew the wrongdoings of the Church of Rome; his intellectual spirit detached itself from Catholicism. It can’t be said that conversion to Anglicanism wasn’t due to opportunism or feasibility but of intellectual persuasions. Even then, in later life he felt some kind of spiritual unrest.
Two loves of Donne
Donne had two loves: poetry the mistress of his youth and divinity, the wife of his mature age. He believed in the joy of living and the seduction of poetry. Donne followed the middle path between blind faith and renovation. Donne’s satiric brilliance created expression in his satire on heresy and on women. His divine poems, likewise, show the conflict of faith and reason, of hope and despair, and the penitence of a soul which has undergone purgation of emotional familiarity.
Donne-The Dean of St. Paul’s
In 1619, Donne, the Chaplain accompanied his friend the Earl of Don caster to Germany. He was promoted to the post of Dean of St. Paul’s in1621.His sermons attracted large audiences. During his serious sickness he composed a few devotional poems including the hymns Since I am coming and Wilt thou forgive. During his sickness in 1630, he gave orders for his own monument which still stands in St.Pual’s. He died in London on 31st March 1631.
Donne left a deep and pervasive influence on English poetry. The metaphysical lyricists owed great debt to him. Sometimes, his followers outshined him in happy conceit, passion and paradoxical reasoning .And yet he gave a sincere and passionate quality to the Elizabeth lyric. He interwove argument with poetry. In spite of his intellectual content, his poems attract us with a sense of vision, an intensity of feeling, and a felicity of expression. He was one of those great poets who left a mark on the history of English poetry.
The works of John Donne are so vast and variant as they can’t be captivated in few lines. As he attempted love poems, religious poems, some prose work and translation of Italian and Spanish works etc. The great works of that great poet will be issued in another article on Donne’s works.
Read More..I have seen you a million times
And every time I see you
I fall in love with you all over again
My heart starts to race
My frown turns into a smile
And all my worries are now in my past
When you smile at me my heart melts
You give the sweetest hugs
Every time you hug me
Your smile is like a new day
Your sense of humor is like no other
The ability you have to make me smile
Your laugh is so soft and sweet
Just looking in your eyes
Makes me melt inside
Your lips look so soft
Soft enough to kiss
You, yourself relive me from all pain
Your hands are as soft as a pillow
The way you comfort me is amazing
To the girl whose beauty is present in all seasons
I tell you why you are beautiful, here are the reasons:
Your beauty extends into the heavens,
it goes on forever and never lessens.
Even when the clouds heighten
you are here and the world brightens.
You are like a fruit that constantly ripens
your beauty continues to grow no mater what happens.
My fondness for you constantly deepens
because every time I see you my heart starts to weaken.
You make everything else appear hollow
where ever you are loveliness is sure to follow.
You shine so bright you cast your own shadow
a beauty that others would love to borrow.
But try as they might your beauty they will never catch
because something like you they could never match.
Your beauty seems to increase with every breathe
it tests the limits my imagination can stretch.
It makes me question if what I am seeing is real
I only know it is true by the way that I feel.
Your beauty is so vast it can't be concealed
there is no hiding it your beauty is always revealed.
The power of your beauty is the world's greatest gift
the heaviest boulder it could easily lift.
A girl this perfect I never knew
all that changed the moment I met you.
Heaven on Earth I was not aware
until I met a girl that was crafted with such care.
You would be the answer to a prayer
if someone asked for something rare with beauty to spare.
If I had a choice I would choose this girl over air
for air can't compare to a girl not found elsewhere.
When a person hears the word Romanticism, his first thought may be of romance story books or novels or illustrated books depicting romantic art. A few individuals, however, may connect the root of the word to a certain city on the Tiber. Despite the apparent connection between the words, romanticism has little to do with romance, nor did the Romantic Movement originate in any country that speaks of romance related legends.
The Romantic Movement started in Germany and England in the late 18th Century, and it ended with the death of Goethe and Sir Walter Scott in 1832. The Romantic Movement followed the neoclassicism school of art and was in many ways a rebellion against the tenets of neoclassicism. The artists and writers who worked when the neoclassicism school held sway saw the universe as an orderly place that the human kid could control. Nature existed so that mankind could tame it and harness its power rather than the other way around. The prevailing philosophy of neoclassicism was that with the use of order and reason, the universe could ultimately be understood and that the individual was merely part of the greater whole. Although the official date marking the end of the Romantic period is given to be 1832, authors in the USA and some painters in Europe went on to continue the tradition beyond the day.
Instead of embracing the ideas of their predecessors, the artists of the Romantic period saw an individual as a heroic entity capable of achieving great things through sheer force of will. The individual was still a part of the universe, but the creativity an individual possessed could propel him / her to great heights. What made the individual unique was his / her ability to use imagination as a creative force. One poet who wrote during the age of Romanticism expressed pity for people with no spark of imagination in them.
It may seems strange that the greatest example of individual power during this period is not one of the many artists and authors working during the Romantic period, but Napoleon Bonaparte. The name of Bonaparte may not be popular today, but he started out as a lowly soldier and rose to become an Emperor through his own abilities. This feat makes him the perfect example of the self-made man that the Romanticism movement idealized. Certainly, the victories Napoleon managed to achieve required a special type of strategic creativity.
The authors and artists also broke with the Neoclassicism school by changing the way nature was viewed in works of art. Only one single unifying philosophy connected how every author and artist of the Romantic period viewed at nature. Rather than being considered as something to be harnessed and controlled, nature was viewed a good thing that served as a source of inspiration.
Modern schools of Literature and Art have demoted the individual from the supreme place he enjoyed in the Romanticism school, suggesting instead that an artist cannot help but be influenced by his surrounding environment. This web of influence includes other artists, painters and writers with whom a person producing any work of art is familiar. It holds true for the Romantic writers as well. Since Romanticism was a rebellion against the artistic school that preceded it; it could not help but be influenced by the rejection of the ideals of neoclassicism. Romantic period authors interpreted their ideals in such a way that strange dichotomy developed in the writings of the period. Many authors chose real settings and real characters, but others chose fantastic backgrounds or unbelievable events that their protagonists needed to overcome. A few writers skillfully interwove elements of the fantastic and the believable.
Poe’s tale, The Tell-tale Heart might be the best example of this, while at the same time the fantastic elements of the tale simply might be the work of a guilty conscious. The reader is never informed whether or not anyone else in the room other than the murderer heard the beating heart of the victim. Other works, such as Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner clearly spell out events that cannot happen, but instead play on another theme during the period.
Neoclassicism, which started during the Age of Enlightenment, was marked with a ‘turn away’ from superstition. Applying the principles of rational thought was the beginning to solving all of mankind’s problems. Emotion was not eliminated by Neoclassical artists, but emotion was often viewed as a hindrance. Further, turning away from the previous school, the artists of the Romantic period felt that emotion was a necessary and vital part of life and that emotion and imagination often came up with solutions that reasoning alone could not achieve. In the worlds that the Romantic authors created, a single person could change the world, but he did so through utilizing his creative power, imagination and understanding his emotions rather than regarding them as a hindrance.
Although Romanticism ended nearly two centuries ago, many of its ideals still live on. The individual may see less importance in the artwork of today where the voice of an author is believed to be controlled by his surroundings, but the idea of a person being able to change the world through his abilities and ideas lives on.
The Age of Enlightenment had weakened the hold of religion on the people of Europe, and now many authors feel no problem / hesitation with including God, Satan and other figures in their play simply as characters, rather than showing the respect previous authors had given them. The key figures of Christianity could now be portrayed in the same way that previous artists had portrayed the Gods of Greece and Ancient Rome in. Romanticism may no longer be the school of prevailing literature and artistic thought, but its effects are alive and prevalent. Perhaps, this is because it started as a grass roots movement and the authors and artists did not view themselves as innately superior to the common man, and many of the movements’ ideals survive in both modern art and society.
Read More..Literature is the true depiction of human life in all eras and throughout the centuries. It provides an insight to human life, the behaviors and conducts of humans, as well an access to their inner realms. This quality of literature has forced critics to analyze literature on psychological grounds in order to get the gist in depths than merely the face value.
Analysis means breaking down a subject to understand it in details and discover its essential features. Psychological critical analysis of literature means to break down literature in order to understand it on psychological grounds. This has helped out the critics to present various interpretations of a single phrase apparently looking simple and uncomplicated.
Literary criticism dates back to Aristotle with his publication of Poetics, in which he describes the meters of criticism. Plato also marked the criticism by calling poetry an imitative form of art. Most of the classical and medieval criticism; the birth period of literary criticism, is marked with criticism of religious texts.
With the passage of time, literature saw many developments and criticism as well. Going through medieval to renaissance, and then 19th century, literature was not spared from criticism. In the 20th century, however, criticism took a new shape and form from merely referring to the classical literary works or detailed descriptive analysis of the literary diction.
The early 20th century is marked with ‘Anatomy of Criticism’ by Northrop Frye, in which he criticized the style of critics who adhered to their own ideologies to analyze a literary piece. In this period, the criticism became a more subject based criticism than looking into an author’s personality. In psychoanalytic criticism of literature, literature is taken on psychological grounds. It is read as if it is not latent, a manifest, and a dream work.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism started with the development of psychoanalysis itself, and induced into literature by Sigmund Freud. This form of criticism essentially requires displacement and deep concentration operations. It is a keen study of symbolism and diction. Freud’s works include several extensive literary essays that explain the psychic exploration of the characters, texts and authors themselves.
Freud’s theory was acclaimed and followed by many like Jacques Lacan and Carl Jung. Though, Freud’s concepts of psycho analysis of literature circles around characters and authors’ psyche reading to explore the mysteries of literary narratives. It can have a wide scope by analyzing the diction and dialect, baffling symbols, actions, scene settings and content resemblance and reference. Psychological critical analysis of literature can also be divided into several branches as was done by Karen Horney’s approaches including womb envy.
William Wordsworth was a famous Romantic poet. His work became a source to spread the Romantic Movement, which emphasized the role of emotions and the beauty of Nature.
Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on 7 April 1770. His parents were John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson. He was a second child to his parents amongst five children. His father was Sir James Lowther’s attorney, the 1st Earl of Lonsdale. His mother died when he was 8, and five years later, his father died too.
He was very close to his younger sister Dorothy Wordsworth, who too became a famous poetess and diarist. His elder brother Richard Wordsworth became a lawyer, John, younger than Dorothy died in a ship wreck in 1805. The youngest one, Christopher became a scholar. William Wordsworth was very close to his sister, but he couldn’t stay in her company for long due to domestic problems after his father’s death.
His early education was at a low level school at Cockermouth and was taught by his mother. He was taught poetry by his father. He taught him works of famous poets like Milton, Shakespeare, and Spenser. He was influenced from his child hood by his surroundings, which were picturesque. His father also allowed him to take benefit from his library. He also spent a lot of his time at his mother’s paternal home in Penrith.
At Penrith, after his mother’s death he was sent to a school meant for the children of upper class. There he was taught by a lady Ann Birkett who used to teach her students the traditional and classical aspects of literature. This proved to be an important influence on his literary work.
In 1787, he published his first sonnet in “The European Magazine”, starting his journey as a poet. In 1791, he went on summer vacations, visiting places famous for their picturesque beauty. These included Switzerland, France, Europe and Italy. In France he fell in love with a French girl named Annette Vallon, who bore him a baby girl in 1792. Due to critical circumstances he didn’t marry her, but kept on supporting her and her daughter throughout his life.
French Revolution proved influential for his ideas and mental growth. He started understanding politics and its influences on common people, evoking sympathy for common people. After getting these experiences he composed his most remarkable poem “Descriptive Sketches”. Though, he calls his early work as “experimental”. His renowned poems include “An Evening Walk”, “Guilt And Sorrow”, “Lyrical Ballads” and “Tintern Abbey”. “Lyrical Ballads” was a joint venture of Wordsworth and S.T Coleridge, which was a result of their close friendship.
Most of Wordsworth’s work emphasizes on depth and sensitivity of human nature. His “Lyrical Ballads” were regarded as “the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers”. His diction in all his poems is simple, and he dealt the subject with realism. His other famous poems are: “To The Cuckoo”, “The Rainbow”; “To a Butterfly”, “Ecclesiastical Sonnets”, and “The Prelude”. His poems in “Lyrical ballads Vein” project “the still, sad music of humanity”.
In his later life, Wordsworth developed an estrangement with Coleridge. This deprived him of his powerful imaginative and mental sharpness, leaving him alone. In 1843 he got appointed as England’s poet laureate, and he died on April 23, 1850.
