00238--Show how Keats succeeds in this Ode in giving concrete poetic expression to a theme that is abstract and profound. / Write an appreciation of 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. / Comment on the evolution of thought in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. [English Literature free notes]

            'Ode on a Grecian urn' is one of the most remarkable poems by the great romantic poet, John Keats.  The poem reveals Keats great interest in Hellenic life and art.  In it the poet has also given expression to his philosophy of art.Audio Books

            The poem is said to have been inspired by the Elgin Marbles, a part of the sculpture of the temple of Athena in Greece which was brought to England and later sold to the British Museum.  Keats was however not inspired by one particular urn but by many of these sculptures.  The poet combines all these into one work of supreme beauty.  In the poem the urn becomes a symbol of art and permanence.  He compares art with real life and concluded Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.

            In the first stanza Keats stresses the superiority of art.  Through a series of rhetorical questions he brings to life the engravings on the urn.  These pictures are taken up in the subsequent stanzas, adding details which make them immortal.

            The wild ecstasy of the musicians at the end of the first stanza inspires the poet to say that heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.  In his imagination Keats listens to the sweeter unheard melodies which do not end and which are ever fresh and eternal.

            Keats then addresses a young lover pictured on the urn.  The lover is about to kiss his beloved.  The artist has arrested his further movement and so the lover does not even fulfill his desire.  The poet however consoles the lover.  Fulfillment takes away the expectation and thrill.  The lover will ever love and his beloved with always be young and beautiful.

            Here we have Keats philosophy of art.  Art is superior to life because it is not subject to growth and decay.  Trees on the urn never shed leaves, they are always in full bloom for the artist had pictured them in spring.  The piper never gets tired.  For each generation the piper sings fresh songs.  His music passes from the real to the eternal.  It becomes the everlasting music of the soul which one listens with the inner ear.

            There are other figures carved on the urn, all frozen in time.  There is a crowd of worshipers on its way to a sacrifice, there is a mysterious priest leading a fat sleek garlanded heifer to the leaf-decked alter.  Looking on the scene Keats lets his imagination fly beyond the visible into the little town which has been evacuated.  The streets are deserted and silent for all the people have gone for the sacrifice.  They will never return and the streets of the town will always be desolate.Audio Books

            The last stanza of the ode contains Keats testament of Beauty.  Keats has written that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever'.  The beauty of the urn and the joy it gives to the viewer are a joy for ever.  Time does not destroy this beauty, it is there for all age to give joy, and it is everlasting.  So Keats writes Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.  It is not only the urn's message to man but also the philosophy of Keats on Beauty and Art.

00205--'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' as a ballad [John Keats]. [English Literature free notes]

A ballad is a narrative song of love and adventure usually using a dramatic form of questions and answers.  Keats's famous poem  "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", has been written in the style of a ballad.  It tells the story of a knight who was enchanted by a beautiful lady who finally destroyed him.  In his poem Keats has followed the ballad style.  He uses archaic words and the metre of the poem conforms to the ballad style.  The subject matter of the poem is also a characteristic of a ballad.  The theme of most of the early ballads is a knight's love for a fairy, the deception and the consequent sad plight of the knight.  This poem is one of the few successful ballads written in English poetry. 

            Like most traditional ballads the poem begins with a question.  The poet finds a knight equipped with his weapons loitering about alone in the woods.  He looks sad and pale.  It is the autumn season and even the weeds of the lake are dried up and no bird sings.  The poet asks the knight why he is roaming about alone in the dull season of the year when the corn has been reaped and even the squirrels are not found moving about the fields as they are stored enough grain for the winter.  He further tells the knight that his face is as white as a lily and his forehead is covered with drops of perspiration resulting from some inward pain.  His cheeks are bloodless and dry like a rose which is losing its colour and withering quickly.

            The knight tells the poet his touching story.  While roaming about in the meadows he met an extremely beautiful lady.  She looked a fairy child.  She had long hair and walked nimbly.  There was wildness in her eyes.  The knight was so much enchanted by her beauty that he plucked flowers and made a garland for her head and bracelets and sweet smelling belt.  The beautiful lady did not speak a word.  From her look and sweet melancholic manner the knight thought that she loved him dearly.  He took her on his horse and they rode the whole day.  In his extreme love for the lady, he did not notice anything around him.  While riding, the lady bent sideways and sang some fairy song.  At last they reached a strange place.  The lady offered him delicious food.  She spoke in a strange language.  The knight thought that she was expressing her love for him.  She then took him to her fairy home and there she lulled him to sleep.  In his sleep he saw a nightmare.  He felt that he was lying on the side of a cold hill and there he saw a number of princes, kings and warriors.  They looked very pale.  They told him that they had been deceived by the beautiful lady.  They were her early Victims.  When he woke up he found that he was lying alone on the cold hill.  The lady had deserted him.  In his sad plight he is roaming about the dreary hill in that dull season of the year.   

00217--Keats’ concept of Hellenism as revealed in the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. [English Literature free notes]

Keats usually drew his inspiration from two sources; Greek Art and Medieval Romance.  His acquaintance with the Elgin marbles and familiarity with Grecian urns inspired his famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.  Greek art with its belief in absolute perfection of form fascinated him.  The word “urn” is an attractive one, and full of artistic significance, but Keats wanted to bring the very presence of Greece here, and therefore uses the word “Grecian” in the title itself.  He preferred this term to “Greek” because the latter signifies Greek language and the citizens of that great civilization.  “Arcadia” (known as the Switzerland of Greece) and “Tempe” (a synonym for a valley with cold shades and romantic scenery) are referred to by the poet as scenes pictured on the urn.  The sacrifice mentioned in the poem also is a common feature of Greek religion.  The word “Attic” in the concluding stanza again takes us to Athens, the centre of Greek civilization.

00182—Negative Capability by John Keats

This term was introduced by the poet John Keats in a letter written December 1817 to define a literary quality :

at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously— I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

He goes on to criticize Coleridge for not being 'content with half knowledge'; and in later letters complains of the 'egotistical' and philosophical bias of Wordsworth's poetry. By negative capability, then, Keats seems to have meant a poetic capacity to efface one's own mental identity by immersing it sympathetically and spontaneously within the subject described, as Shakespeare was thought to have done.

00190--UGC-NET, English Literature Objective Type Question Answers 61 to 75

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61)      “…the error of evaluating a poem by its effects—especially its emotional effects—upon the reader” is:

A.      Affective Fallacy

B.      Intentional Fallacy

C.      Both A and B

D.     Pathetic Fallacy

Answer: …………………………………………

62)      Match A with B

                        A                                             B

a. Robert Penn Warren                   1. Ode to the Confederate Dead

b. Allen Tate                                     2. Understanding Poetry

c. John Crowe Ransom              3. Literary Criticism: A Short History

d. W.K. Wimsatt                                       4. The New Criticism

A.      a-4, b-3, c-1, d-2

B.      a-2, b-4, c-3, d-1

C.      a-2, b-1, c-4, d-3

D.     a-1, d-4, c-2, d-3

Answer: ……………………………………………

63)      Marlowe’s all four great tragedies share two features in common.  Which are they?

1.      Magic Realism

2.      Theme of overreaching

3.      Blank Verse

4.      Romantic presentation

A.      Only 1, 2 and 3

B.      Only 3 and 4

C.      Only 2, 3 and 4

D.     Only 2 and 3

Answer: ………………………………………..

64) Who said that the writer should be “outside the whale”, because otherwise, the state or society could swallow the writer up, as the whale had swallowed Jonah.

A.      Andrew Marvell

B.      S.T.Coleridge

C.      T.S.Eliot

D.     George Orwell

Answer: ……………………………..

65) “I have used similitude.” Who said this about his which work?

A.      Thomas Hobbes about ‘Leviathan’.

B.      Bunyan about ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’

C.      Milton about ‘Paradise Lost’

D.     Alexander Pope about ‘The Dunciad’

Answer: …………………………………

66)   Which of the following is wrong?

A.      Jonathan Swift—A Modest Proposal—Pamphlet—1728

B.      Samuel Johnson—The Vanity of Human Wishes—Imitation of Juvenal’s 10^th satire

C.      Robinson Crusoe—Friday—Colonialism

D.     Henry Feilding—Tom Jones—Story of a foundling

Answer: ……………………………………….

67) The two gentlemen in the Two Gentlemen of Verona are
(a) Douglas and Calvin
(b) Valentine and Protons
(c) Henry Bailey and Davenant
(d) Lovelace and Herrick
Answer: …………………………….
68) Who popularized the inductive method for arriving at a conclusion through his Novum Organum?
(a) Ben Jonson
(b) Francis Bacon
(c) Addison and Steele
(d) Dr. Johnson
Answer: …………………….
69)  Thomas Hardy’s life and career are obliquely depicted in:
A. The Return of the Native
B. Jude the Obscure
C. Tess of the d’ Urbervilles
D. The Mayor of Casterbridge
Answer: …………………………….
70) Which of the following statements is/are wrong based on the novel “Heart of Darkness”?
1. Kurtz pretends to be mad.
2. The novel opens on the mouth of the Thames.
3. Marlow is the hero-narrator of the tale
4. Chinu Achebe denounced this novel as “bloody racist”.

A. Only 1
B. Only 2
C. Only 3 and4
D. Only 4
Answer: ………………….

71)       “The humblest craftsman over near the Aemilian school will model fingernails and imitate waving hair in bronze; but the total work will be unhappy because he does not know how to represent it as a unified whole. I should no more wish to be like him, if I desired to compose something, than to be praised for my dark hair and eyes and yet go through life with my nose turned awry. You who write, take a subject equal to your powers, and consider at length how much your shoulders can bear. Neither proper words nor lucid order will be lacking to the writer who chooses a subject within his powers. The excellence and charm of the arrangement, I believe, consists in the ability to say only what needs to be said at the time, deferring or omitting many points for the moment. The author of the long-promised poem must accept and reject as he proceeds.”

Horace here:

A.      Gives advice

B.      Criticises

C.      Evaluates

D.     Inspires

Answer: ……………………..

72)      “The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with gods or geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.

“And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity.

“Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood; choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.

“And at length they pronounced that the gods had ordered such things.

“Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast.

                                    ……………….

Who speaks here?

A.      Addison

B.      Matthew Arnold

C.      William Blake

D.     Alexander Pope

Answer: ………………………………….

73)      “I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously-I mean negative capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”

This is taken:

A.  from Letter to Benjamin Bailey.

A.      from Letter to George and Thomas Keats .

B.      from Letter to John Taylor .

C.      from Letter to Richard Woodhouse.

Answer: ……………………..

74)      Well, we are all condamnes. as Victor Hugo says: "les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indejinis ":  we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm. or the "enthusiasm of humanity." Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

This is from:

A. Is There a Text in This Class?

B. The Contingency of Language

C. Studies in the History of the Renaissance

D. The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles

Answer: ………………………….

75)            Or, after dark, will dubious women come

               To make their children touch a particular stone;

               Pick simples for a cancer; or on some

               Advised night see walking a dead one?

               Power of some sort will go on

               In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;

               But superstition, like belief, must die,

               And what remains when disbelief has gone?

This is taken from Philip Larkin’s 

A.      The Less Deceived

B.      An Arundel Tomb

C.      Church Going

D.     Toads

Answer: …………………………….

ANSWERS:

61-A
62-C
63-D
64-D
65-B
66-A
67-B
68-B
69-B
70-A
71-A
72-C
73-B
74-C
75-C

01733--closed couplet

Closed couplet is two lines of metrical verse in which the syntax and sense come to a conclusion or a strong pause at the end of the second line, giving the couplet the quality of a self-contained epigram. The term is applied almost always to rhyming couplets, especially to the heroic couplet; but whereas the heroic couplets of Chaucer and Keats often allow the sense to run on over the end of the second line, those written by English poets in the late 17th century and in the 18th are usually end-stopped, and are thus closed couplets, as in these lines about men from Sarah Fyge Egerton's 'The Emulation' (1703):

They fear we should excel their sluggish parts, Should we attempt the sciences and arts; Pretend they were designed for them alone, So keep us fools to raise their own renown.

00180—How does Matthew Arnold evaluate Chaucer’s greatness?

Matthew Arnold is an admirer of Chaucer’s poetry.  He remarks that Chaucer’s power of fascination is enduring.  “He will be read far more generally than he is read now.”  The only problem that we come across is the difficulty of following his language.  Chaucer’s superiority lies in the fact that “we suddenly feel ourselves to be in another world”.  His superiority is both in the substance of his poetry and in the style of his poetry.  “His view of life is large, free, simple, clear and kindly.  He has shown the power to survey the world from a central, a human point of view.”  The best example is his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  Matthew Arnold quotes here the words of Dryden who remarked about it; “Here is God’s plenty”.  Arnold continues to remark that Chaucer is a perpetual fountain of good sense.  Chaucer’s poetry has truth of substance; “Chaucer is the father of our splendid English poetry.”   By the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition.  We follow this tradition in Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Keats.  “In these poets we feel the virtue.”  And the virtue is irresistible.

In spite of all these merits, Arnold says that Chaucer is not one of greatest classics.  He has not their accent.  To strengthen his argument Arnold compares Chaucer with the Italian classic Dante.  Arnold says that Chaucer lacks not only the accent of Dante but also the high seriousness.  “Homer’s criticism of life has it, Shakespeare has it, Dante has it, and Shakespeare has it.”  Thus in his critical essay “The Study of Poetry” Matthew Arnold comments not only on the  merits of Chaucer’s poetry, but also on the short comings.  He glorifies Chaucer with the remark, “With him is born our real poetry.”

00052--Write a note on Alexander Pope's concept of "Nature".

                             

            Pope's concept of "Nature" was very different from the concept of the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley or Keats.  Wordsworth gave the call to "return to nature", while Pope exhorted man to "follow nature".  Both these concepts are diametrically opposed to each other.  To Wordsworth nature was the external phenomenon of the universe; to Pope nature was uncorrupted human nature controlled by reason and approved by tradition.  Pope spoke of "nature still, but nature  methodized".  To Pope nature means reason and commonsense.  He says that the rules framed by the ancients were rules of nature and poetry must submit to them.  This became the guiding principles of Pope and he strongly asserted 'to learn the ancient rules' for 'copying nature is to copy them'.

            Wit, taste and rules are all bound up with nature.  Thus the dictum 'follow nature' meant to follow the moral law which is the central reality.  But even this concept of nature is bound up with its own laws:

"Nature, like liberty, is but restrained

By the same laws which first herself ordained."

            This nature is the fruitful source of life, the source of the inner light of intelligence.  Hence it sees things as in themselves they really are, and judges them correctly.

00201--Summary of Ode On A Grecian Urn [John Keats] [English Literature free notes]

Stanza 1.  The poet addresses the Urn. Looking at the urn the poets imagination conjures up the ancient life and worship suggested by the sculptured images and he speculates on the abstract relation of art and life.  These figures are unpolluted by the hand of man and not destroyed by time.  Time which destroys everything has preserved it like a foster child.  Scenes from rustic life are depicted on the urn.  It is also if some historian had recorded ancient Greek life.  The engraver has succeeded in giving it permanence.  A poet could not do this better.  The scene is pictured with an ornamental border of leaves.  It tells the tales of gods and men in Tempe or the valleys of Arcadia in Greece.  The poet now asks a few questions.  We are these men or gods?  Who are these women feigning coyness?  Why do the men or gods pursue them madly?  The poet wonders how they elude their pursuers.  Pipes and timbrels are playing and the whole scene is filled with exquisite rapture.

            Stanza 2.  In the second stanza the poet emphasizes the permanence of a moment captured by art.

            Songs heard in reality are sweet, but those unheard, those which dwell in the realm of the ideal are sweeter still.  From the real world the poet takes us through the world of art into the pure realm of imagination.  So the pipes he seems on the urn play on not to the physical ear but to the ears of the soul and we hear the harmonies of eternity.  The poet addresses the sculptured figure of the young man who cannot stop singing.  The trees under which he is standing will be ever green, Both the youth and the trees have passed into the realm of eternity through art.  The lover is about to kiss his beloved.  The consoles the lover.  His beloved is always young because as in real life the lover and the girl do not grow old and lose their beauty. 

            Stanza 3.  On the urn the trees are even green.  They cannot shed their leaves because it is always spring for them.  The piper standing under the tree will keep on signing fresh songs.  The lovers on the urn keep on loving.  They are always happy.  The fleeting passions of real life do not affect them.  They are never surfeited.  They do not suffer from the agonies of thwarted love.

            Stanza 4.  The poets curiosity is aroused watching the figures coming to the sacrifice.  Who are these men and women?  Who is this mysterious priest who leads the young sacrificial cow to the grassy alter.  The poet hears the pitiful crying of the cow.  Looking beyond what he seems before this eyes the poet visualizes the empty stress of the little town.   All the people have gone to the sacrifice.  They will never return and the streets of the city will ever be silent and desolate. 

            Stanza 5.  The beautiful shape of the Grecian Urn raises in the mind of the poet the ideal of Beauty which he equates with Truth.  The sculptured figures of men and women and the pastoral scene raise thoughts which baffle the poet.  They are as mysterious as eternity.  When men of this age are crippled by old age the urn would whisper words of comfort Oman of succeeding generations.  Beauty is truth, truth beauty.  Beauty and truth becomes one and the same thing.

00185--UGC-NET, English Literature Objective Type Question Answers 11 to 20

11)           That moment she was mine, mine, fair,

       Perfectly pure and good: I found

A thing to do, and all her hair

       In one long yellow string I wound

       Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her. No pain felt she;

       I am quite sure she felt no pain. 

These lines stand for the speaker’s:

A.      true love

B.      dilemma

C.       pride

D.     abnormal psychology

Answer: ………………………………………

12)   But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

               Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

               A savage place! as holy and enchanted

               As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

               By woman wailing for her demon lover!

These line are taken from:

A.      Christabel

B.      Dejection: An Ode

C.      The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

D.     Kubla Khan

Answer: ……………………………

13)       In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: 'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

This paragraph advocates:

A.      Structuralism

B.      Post-structuralism

C.      Formalism

D.     Expressionism

Answer: ………………………………………………………….

14)  Match A with B

                        A                                                          B

a. Eugenius                              1.Speaks for the French drama

b. Crites                                   2. Speaks for the English drama

c. Lisideius                               3. Speaks for the ancient drama

d. Neander                              4. Speaks for the modern drama

A.      a-4, b-2, c-1, d-3

B.      a-1, b-2, c-4, d-3

C.      a-4, b-3, c-1, d-2

D.     a-2, b-3, c-4, d-1

Answer: ………………………………..

15)  Match A with B

                        A                                                                 B

            a. Surrealism                                                 1. Lord Byron

            b. Stream of Consciousness                          2. T.S. Eliot

            c. Romanticism                                            3. Dylan Thomas

            d. Modernism                                               4. James Joyce

A. a-1, b-3, c-4, d-2

B. a-3, b-4, c-2, d-1

C. a-3, b-4, c-1, d-2

D. a-1, b-2, c-3, d-4

Answer: ………………………………

16)    

“ Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory. and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters.”

This is from:

A.      Art of Poetry

B.      An Apology for Poetry

C.      An Essay on Criticism

D.     A Defense of Poetry

Answer: ……………………………..

17)  Match the lines with the authors.

a.       The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

b.      The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom;

The land of apparitions, empty shades!

c.       Wild shrieks have issued from the hollow tombs;

Dead men have come again, and walked about;

And the great bell has tolled, unrung and untouched.

d.      "When men my scythe and darts supply

How great a King of Fears am I!"

1.      Robert Blair        2. Thomas Parnell       

 3. Thomas Grey           4.Edward Young

A.    a-3, b-1, c-2, d-4

B.     a-3, b-4, c-1. d-2

C.     a-3, b-1, c-2, d-4

D.    a-1, b-2, c-4, d-3

Answer: …………………..

18)  

            “But though it is in terms of structure that we must describe poetry, the term structure is certainly not altogether satisfactory as a term. One means by it something far more internal than the metrical pattern, say, or than the sequence of images. The structure meant is certainly notform in the conventional sense in which we think of form as a kind of envelope which "contains" the "content." The structure obviously is everywhere conditioned by the nature of the material which goes into the poem.”

The author is:

A.      John Crowe Ransome

B.      William Empson

C.      Cleanth Brooks

D.     I.A.Richards

Answer: …………………………….

19)       It will be convenient at this point to introduce two definitions. In a full critical statement which states not only that an experience is valuable in certain ways, but also that it is caused by certain features in a contemplated object, the part which describes the value of the experience we shall call the critical part. That which describes the object we shall call the technical part.

This is taken from:

A.      Seven Types of Ambiguity             B. The Heresy of Paraphrase

C.  The Principles of Literary Criticism                 D. The New Criticism

Answer: ……………………………

20)       The loveliest and the last,
The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew
Died on the promise of the fruit.

The context is:

A.      The death of Edward Young

B.      The death of Mary Shelley

C.      The death of Fanny Brawne

D.     The death of Keats

Answer: ………………………………

ANSWERS:

11-D

12-D

13-B

14-C

15-C

16-D

17-B

18-C

19-C

20-D