Showing posts sorted by relevance for query shelley. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query shelley. Sort by date Show all posts

00218--Comment on the imagery of the poem "Ode to the West Wind" by P.B.Shelley. [English Literature free notes]




   Imagery is the employment of images of word pictures by poets and writers.  A poet uses them to signify all the objects and qualities of sense perception referred to in his poem.  Shelley is a great master in the use of images.  His imagination is such that it takes us away from the common world into an unsubstantial fairyland of colours and light and sound.  Images pour in rich profusion from his mind.  In his essay called "The Defence of Poetry" Shelley describes poetry as a glowing coal with the winds of imagination blowing over it.  His images, at any rate, glow and alter like palpitating coal.  A peculiar kind of imaginary that we find in Shelley is the use of figurative language (simile, metaphor, etc) Myth also forms part of his imagery.  "Ode to the West Wind" is an excellent example of Shelley's skill in creating myths.
            Right at the opening the poet compares the West Wind to the breath of autumn's being.  The leaves are imagined as a crowd of 'pestilence-stricken multitudes' which are scattered by the West Wind like ghosts driven away by an enchanter.  The leaf-image is maintained throughout the poem.  Assigning the West Wind the roles of Destroyer and Preserve is a striking example of his imagery.  The Wind is like a chariot which carries all the winged seeds to their wintry bed.  Here, through a metaphor, the seeds are compared to dead bodies.  

         The arrival of the spring is described as the sounding of a clarion, when the seeds sprout out into the air just as a flock of sheep move forward, driven by s shepherd.  Then comes the description of the rain clouds gathered in the evening sky.  This is a brilliant piece of imagery wrought by the ethereal imagination of Shelley.  Images merge into one another and one may find it a little difficult to logically disentangle the meaning.  The rain clouds tumbling about in the sky are first described as leaves shaken down from branches of Heaven and Ocean.  Then suddenly they are described as the uplifted hair of a frenzied Maenad.  The sharp howling of West Wind is described as the funeral song for the dying year (as autumn signifies the death of the year) and the dark, overcast sky is called the vaulted tomb in which the dying year is going to be buried.  One thing to note about Shelley's imagery is its scientific correctness.  In the next stanza Shelley describes the effect of the West Wind on the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.  Here again powerful and evocative images are employed.
            The whole poem is a series of myths worked into an all enclosing myth by which the West Wind becomes the Spirit of Freedom encouraging human society to change, as nature does from autumn to spring, from an old order to a new one.



00079--On what basis does Shelley call the poets 'The unacknowledged legislators of the world'? OR How does Shelly defend poetry against the charges brought against it by Love Peacock in his Four Ages of Poetry.

                                      
            Shelley's 'A Defence of Poetry' is a rejoinder to Love Peacock's charges levelled against poetry and poets in his four Ages of Poetry.  Peacock called poets 'semi-barbarians in a civilized community' and condemned Shelley's own poetry as "querulous egotistical rhapsodies."
            Defending poetry, Shelley says that poetry is on embodiment of "beautiful idealism of moral excellence."  The poet "excites a generous impulse, an ardent thirst for excellence."  He calls the poet a nightingale , who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude, with sweet sound."  He says that poetry is the creative impulse in man.  Poets are "not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture, and statutory, and painting, they are the institutors of laws, and founders of a civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life."  They are men of the most spotless virtue, the most consummate prudence, the most fortunate of men."  They are "philosophers of the very loftiest power."  Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds."
            Poetry is 'the centre and circumference of knowledge and it comprehends all science.'  Consequently, Shelley calls the poets "unacknowledged legislators of the world."  The poet reveals 'those forms which are common to universal nature and existence.'  Hence a poem is "the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth."
            Thus "a poet, as he is the author of the highest wisdom, pleasure virtue and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best the wisest and the most illustrious of men."  So the poet is the legislator of the moral, spiritual and intellectual life in the world.

00239--Comment on 'Ozymandias' as a critique of power [Shelley]. [English Literature free notes]




            Shelley's Ozymandias is an Italian sonnet that describes the contrast between the past glory and the present decayed condition of a mighty king of ancient Egypt.  The sonnet is a poem of 14 lines divided into a octave of the first eight lines and sestet (the next six lines) usually a sonnet is subjective in tone, but in Ozymandias Shelley treats the theme in an objective manner.  It is in the form of a report of a traveler from an ancient land.  The poet met his and he tells about a gigantic statue of Ozymandias.  Trunkless it had only two huge legs which stood in the desert.  Nearby lay a broken head with a frown on its face.  The lips were wrinkled showing contempt.  The sculptor had captured the violent passions of the king on his face most vividly.  The king in his lifetime had challenged everyone, even gods.  He was so proud.  But now nothing remains.  All his glory and power are reduced to dust only the vast desolate desert remains.Audio Books
            Shelley's sonnet Ozymandias is a bitter commentary on the human vanity and the transitory nature of wealth, power and pomp.  Te puny nature of man is contrasted with the immensity of Nature.  The King Ozymandias was so proud of his power that he challenged even gods.  His statue was huge.  The sculptor who made it had captured the frown on his face so vividly.  The lips were twisted expressing contempt to all others.  The king had asked the sculptor to write on the pedestal of the statue these words.
            My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings.  Look on my works Ye Mighty, and despair!  It was evident that Ozymandias believed that no one could equal his power and glory.  The poet now suddenly brings in a terrible contrast 'Nothing beside remains'.  Even such a mighty king couldn't survive the ravages of time.  He is forgotten.  Even the huge statue is ruined only the vast desert lies stretching to the great distance mocking human vanity, glory and pomp. Audio Books



00232--Evolution of thought in the poem 'Ode to the West Wind' [P.B.Shelley] [English Literature free notes]




          Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' is a perfect lyric which combines in itself lofty thoughts and strong passion.  In this poem, 'Shelley's ardent desire for the regeneration of mankind and the establishment of a new world order is vehemently expressed.  The West Wind which is a destroyer and preserver sweeps away the old and useless ideas and fosters fresh and modern ones.  The West Wind for the poet is not merely a natural phenomenon.   It is for him a tempestuous spirit destroying what has to die and preserving the seeds of a new life.  The West Wind symbolizes the free spirit of man – "tameless, and swift, and proud".  It also symbolizes poetic inspiration and becomes 'the trumpet of a prophecy' ushering in a grand and glorious regeneration of mankind.  The West Wind is the very symbol of the Law of Life itself, containing within it the power to destroy and the power to preserve.  The poem harmonises and fuses these images to a remarkable degree.  Shelley has also been successful in charging his ode with speed, force and energy like the tempestuous wind itself.
            The first three stanzas are in the form of a prayer and describe the activities of the West Wind on land, in the sky and in the ocean.  The West Wind, which is 'the breath of autumn's being, scatters the dead and sickly leaves ('pestilence-stricken multitudes') like a magician driving away ghosts.  The West Wind is not only Destroyer but is also a Preserver.  The Wind also carries and scatters the seeds and buries them under the soil, where they lie dormant all through winter.  When the warm spring breeze blows, the seeds will sprout, filling the whole earth with a new life.
 The powerful West Wind shakes and pushes the thin clouds, which are like leaves of 'the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean'.  The fast moving dark clouds herald the approach of a rain-storm.  The sky looks fierce like a mad and intoxicated Maenad and the clouds appear to be her streaming hair.  The West Wind gathers black clouds and are transformed into the dark solid dome of a tomb from which fire and hail will burst.  The lines carry the suggestion of birth and growth along with death.  The leaf image is maintained throughout.
            The West Wind wakes up the beautiful, blue and clam Mediterranean who is pictured as sleeping, lying by the side a pumice isle in Baiae's bay and dreaming of moss-grown palaces, ruined towers and gardens.  The smooth waves of the Atlantic cleave themselves into deep furrows.  The plants sense the approach of the West Wind and become pale and shed their leaves.

            A strong personal note is struck in the fourth stanza of the poem.  He is in dire need of the West Wind as he no more retains his carefree innocence and tamelessness of his boyhood.  He has fallen 'on the thorns of life' and he bleeds.  He is fettered by the claims and responsibilities and is full of the cares of life.  "A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed.  One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud" he laments.  The poet is in a mood of impotent dejection and appeals to the wind to lift him 'as a wave, a leaf, a cloud to escape from this burden of life.  Fortunately, the poem does not end here.  The poet in the next stanza recovers his balance and goes beyond his personal sorrows.  He wants to identify himself with the fierce spirit of the Wind.  He calls upon the Wind to 'drive my dead thoughts over the universe, like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!'  He appeals to the Wind to scatter his poems, which are like sparks from a smouldering fire, to kindle a new fire in the hearts and minds of men.  He also appeals to the West Wind to inspire him so that his poems, which have been born out of sorrow and hope, will prove to be the bringer of joy of humanity – the new spring time for mankind.  The poem closes on a note of ardent hope.  He wants the West Wind to blow through his lips the prophecy that a brave new world – a world of love, beauty and goodness – will soon emerge in place of the existing world of misery and suffering.  "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" the poem ends with this optimistic question.



00220--Satanic School of Poetry [English Literature free notes]


Robert Southey, the poet laureate, applied this term in the preface to his Vision of Judgement brought out in 1822. This name, Satanic School of Poetry refers to poets like Lord Byron, P.B.Shelley, and their imitators.  Southey writes, "Immoral writers who have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society."  In 1822, Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt joined in the production of "Liberal Magazine".  The first issue of the magazine contained Lord Byron's The Vision of Judgement came as the outcome of his feud with Southey.  Byron's poetry was much criticised on moral grounds, but was greatly popular at home, and abroad.  Southey's next target was P.B.Shelley on the ground of rebellion spirit.

00317--To a Skylark By Percy Bysshe Shelley

To a Skylark 

                                   By Percy Bysshe Shelley

     
  Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
                Bird thou never wert,
         That from Heaven, or near it,
                Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

         Higher still and higher
                From the earth thou springest
         Like a cloud of fire;
                The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

     
   In the golden lightning
                Of the sunken sun,
         O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
                Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

         The pale purple even
                Melts around thy flight;
         Like a star of Heaven,
                In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

         Keen as are the arrows
                Of that silver sphere,
         Whose intense lamp narrows
                In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

         All the earth and air
                With thy voice is loud,
         As, when night is bare,
                From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflow'd.

         What thou art we know not;
                What is most like thee?
         From rainbow clouds there flow not
                Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

         Like a Poet hidden
                In the light of thought,
         Singing hymns unbidden,
                Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

         Like a high-born maiden
                In a palace-tower,
         Soothing her love-laden
                Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

         Like a glow-worm golden
                In a dell of dew,
         Scattering unbeholden
                Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

         Like a rose embower'd
                In its own green leaves,
         By warm winds deflower'd,
                Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:

         Sound of vernal showers
                On the twinkling grass,
         Rain-awaken'd flowers,
                All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

         Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
                What sweet thoughts are thine:
         I have never heard
                Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

         Chorus Hymeneal,
                Or triumphal chant,
         Match'd with thine would be all
                But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

         What objects are the fountains
                Of thy happy strain?
         What fields, or waves, or mountains?
                What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

         With thy clear keen joyance
                Languor cannot be:
         Shadow of annoyance
                Never came near thee:
Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

         Waking or asleep,
                Thou of death must deem
         Things more true and deep
                Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

         We look before and after,
                And pine for what is not:
         Our sincerest laughter
                With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

         Yet if we could scorn
                Hate, and pride, and fear;
         If we were things born
                Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

         Better than all measures
                Of delightful sound,
         Better than all treasures
                That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

         Teach me half the gladness
                That thy brain must know,
         Such harmonious madness
                From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now. 

00024--An Article on Plato.


PLATO
   Ca-427-ca. 347 B.C.E.


A monumental figure in the history of Western philosophy; Plato looms nearly as large in the history of European literary theory. Indeed, for many literary scholars he marks the beginning of the tradition of literary theory, although his choice of the dialogue  format, in which historical personages convey particular arguments, suggests that the issue he raises had already been debated before he took them up-as do the extant fragments of the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers. The several dozen dialogues attributed to Plato engage almost every issue that interests philosophers: the nature of being; the question of how we come to know things; the proper ordering of human society) and the nature of justice, truth; the good, beauty, and love. Although Plato did not set out to write systematic literary theory-unlike his student ARISTOTLE, who produced a treatise on poetics-,-his consideration of philosophical issues in several of the dialogues leads him to reflect on poetry, and those reflections have often set the terms of literary debate in the West.


What binds together Plato's various discussions of poetry is a distrust of mimesis (representation or imitation). According to Plato, all art...,-including poetry-is a mimesis of nature, a copy of objects in the physical world. But those objects in the material world, according to the idealist philosophy that Plato propounds, are themselves only mutable copies of timeless universals, called Forms or Ideas. Poetry is merely a copy of a copy, leading away from the truth rather than toward it. Philosophers and literary critics ever since, from PLOTINUS in the third century C.E. to JACQUES DERRIDA in the late twentieth century, have wrestled with the terms of Plato's critique of poetry, revising it or attempting to point out inconsistencies in his argument.


Plato was born about four years after the beginning of the twenty-five-year-long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and just after the death of the great Athenian statesman Pericles, who had overseen the city's artistic golden age. His parents both came from distinguished Athenian.families, and his stepfather, an associate of Pericles, was an active participant in the political and cultural life of fifth century Athens. Plato had two older brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, who appear as characters in his longest dialogue; Republic (ca. 375 B.C.E.). As a young man, growing up in a city at war and ,in constant political turmoil, he seems to have been destined for a ,political career. But after·the Peloponnesian War ended in 405, with the defeat and humiliation of Athens, the excesses of Athenian political life under the oligarchical rule (404-403) of the so-called Thirty Tyrants and under the restored democracy left Plato disillusioned with political life. The execution in 399 of Socrates, on charges of impiety and corrupting the young, was a turning point in his life. The older philosopher was a close friend of Plato's family, and Plato's writings attest to Socrates' great influence on him. Indeed, the position of Socrates in European philosophy is unique. Though he apparently never wrote a word, his influence on subsequent thought through his' followers, Plato hi particular, is incalculable. After Socrates' death Plato retired from Athenian political life and traveled for a number of years. In 388 he journeyed to Italy and Sicily, where he became the friend of Dionysius I, the ruler of Syracuse, and his brother-in-law Dion. The following year he returned to Athens, where he founded the Academy, an institution devoted to research and instruction in philosophy and the sciences; he taught there for the rest of his life. Plato envisioned the Academy as a school for statesmen where he could train a new kind of philosopher-ruler (or "guardian") according to the principles set forth in his Republic. Unlike the older sophist GORGIAS or Plato's contemporary rival Isocrates, who both taught the arts of rhetoric and persuasion, Plato focused primarily in the Academy on mathematics, logic, and philosophy. However, when Dionysius died in 367, Dion invited Plato to return to Syracuse to undertake the philosophical education of the new ruler, Dlonysius II. Plato went, perhaps with the hope of putting the theory of Republic into practice; but philosophy proved no match for local politics and Dionysius's suspicions. Indeed, a return visit resulted In Plato's brief Imprisonment; by 360 he was back at the Academy for good.


Plato is recognized as a master of the dialogue form and as one of the great prose stylists of the Greek language; His published writings; apparently all of which are preserved, consist of some twenty-six dramatic dialogues on philosophical and related themes. The central problematic posed by this form is that it becomes virtually impossible to attribute any statement directly to Plato: he never speaks in his own person. The only exceptions are a series of thirteen letters (whose authenticity is still a matter of scholarly debate) written in the last decades of Plato's life, most addressing the political situation in Syracuse. Only the seventh-and longest-letter takes up philosophical issues. For the most part, Plato places his arguments in the, mouths of characters who mayor may not be based on historical persons. The speakers can never be assumed' to be voicing Plato's own views or the views of those whose names they bear. In almost all the dialogues, Socrates is the focal character and Plato's mouthpiece, but Plato's Socrates is not the historical Socrates. These complications, which thwart efforts to fix Plato's thought within a series of propositional statements, have attracted much attention, especially from late-twentieth-century post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida.


The chronology of Plato's dialogues is highly controversial, but most scholars divide the works roughly into three periods. The earliest works, begun after 399, include the Apology of Socrates and Crito, in which Plato defends Socrates against the charges that led to his death; Gorgias, in which Socrates' opponent is the sophist Gorgias; and Ion (one of our selections), which examines poetry as a kind of divine madness. Characteristic of these early Platonic dialogues is Socrates' disarming claim of ignorance and a formal technique of cross-examination called elenchus, a method of questioning designed to lead a learner through stages of reasoning and to expose the contradictions in an opponent's original statement.  This method of "emptying out" the question by Socrates to reveal his opponents' ignorance is especially evident in his discussion of poetry with Ion, a rhapsode (professional reciter of epic poetry). The middle period, from 380 to 367, includes the Symposium, Cratylus, and Republic, all begun after the founding of the Academy; they develop the theory of Forms or Ideas anticipated in the early dialogues. The Forms constitute a realm of unchanging being to which the world of individual mutable objects is subordinate. Because the Forms are immutable, they are more real-and more true than the changeable material world. The Form of the Good enjoys a unique status, for it is responsible for the being and intelligibility of the world as a whole. Plato's famous "Allegory of the Cave" in book 7 of Republic (one of our selections), a passage that has generated much interest among post-structuralist theorists, provides a memorable introduction to the Platonic theory of Forms, which is reiterated in book 10's equally well known critique of artistic imitation. Cratylus is of interest to theorists of language because the dispute in this dialogue concerns the "correctness" of names: do they point unproblematic ally to the "Nature of things"-that is, to the Forms-as Hermogenes contends, or are they merely a matter of convention, as Cratylus argues? Socrates concludes that the matter is unresolvable, but that "no one with any understanding will commit himself or the education of his soul to names, or trust them or their givers to the point of firmly stating that he knows something." To the late period (366-360) belong Timaeus, which throughout the Middle Ages was Plato's most widely known work; Critias; Sophist; and Phaedrus, the latter closing with a notorious attack on writing.


In Ion, our opening selection, Plato's Socrates engages Ion in a debate about the nature of the rhapsode's knowledge of poetry, about the nature of poetry, and about the status of knowledge itself. Poetry, Socrates maintains, is not an art; it is a form of divine madness: "the poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind." This debate between the claims of inspiration and those of art would subsequently have a long history in European literary criticism. Is poetry primarily a craft with a set of rules that can be taught and learned, as HORACE, GEOFFREY OF VINSAUF, and ALEXANDER POPE argue, or is it primarily the result of inspiration or genius, as LONGINUS, PLOTINUS, FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, RALPH WALDO EMERSON, and others, following Plato, have maintained?


Plato's Socrates goes a step further. Not only is poetry a form of divinely inspired madness, but so is criticism. "You are powerless to speak of Homer," he tells Ion, "on the basis of knowledge or mastery." Socrates uses the image of a magnet as a metaphor for divine inspiration: as a magnet attracts iron and passes that attraction along, so the gods inspire the artist, who inspires the interpreter, who, in turn, inspires the audience. For Plato's Socrates, the work of poet and critic is not divided between inspiration and rational analysis, as it is for most modern critics (see, for instance, MATTHEW ARNOLD and the New Critic CLEANTH BROOKS); rather, it lies on a continuum, and the work of the critic is no more rational than that of the poet, the,critic's knowledge no more truthful.


However, it is helpful when reading Plato to remember that his dialogues don't always present a straightforward argument or arrive at a single unambiguous conclusion. The process of elenchus and Socrates' persistent irony often make it difficult to pin him down to anyone position. In Ion, is Socrates making fun of the pomposity of the rhapsode, or does he seriously believe that whatever truth emerges from poetry and the interpretation of poetry results only from divine madness? On the surface, it might seem that Ion treats poetry very differently than does the later Republic, our second selection, where Plato's Socrates argues that far from being divinely inspired, poets lie and ought to be banished from the ideal republic-or, at the very least, heavily censored and kept in check. But Ion presents a view of knowledge that is consistent with the weightier arguments in Republic. However divinely inspired, Socrates argues, poets' and critics' knowledge is of a different order than, and one decidedly inferior to, the knowledge of charioteers, fishermen, or philosophers. To the modern student of literature, this denigration of the poet's learning appears downright odd. Surely the standards by which the knowledge of a charioteer or a fisherman or a mathematician would be judged are irrelevant in judging the value of poetry. Why demand that the poet "know" about horses in the same way that a horseman "knows" about horses?


To understand Socrates' remarks about knowledge, the modern reader needs to understand the centrality of poetry to Greek education. In a culture in which literacy was a relatively new and suspect technology, knowledge was frequently encoded and passed :on through the mnemonic devices of music and poetry.·The instruction provided by.the sophists and by Plato's main rival, lsocrates, was almost exclusively rhetorical and literary. Even in Republic, a book concerned with the ideal education of the guardians and citizens, Socrates divides schooling:into physical training for the body and music and poetry for the soul. Socrates' criticism of poetry and its representations appears to be directed against a culture that,believed literally "that poets know all crafts, all human affairs." In such a culture Socrates' insistence makes more sense: a poet needs to know, a horse the way a horseman knows a horse .. In his Academy, however, Plato promoted all earning whose foundation was dialectics, dialogue, and philosophical reasoning.


Both the Allegory of the Cave and Republic 10's infamous critique of mimesis explore the nature of knowledge and its proper objects. The world we perceive through the senses, Socrates argues, is illusory and deceptive. It depends on a prior realm of separately existing Forms, organized beneath the Form of Good. The realm of Forms is accessible not through the senses, as is the world of appearances, but only through rigorous philosophic discussion and thought, based on mathematical reasoning. For Plato's Socrates, measuring, counting, and weighing all bring us closer to the realm of Forms than do poetry's pale representations of nature. All' art and poetry, because they represent what is already an inferior representation of the true original (the Forms), can only lead further away from the truth, and further into a world of illusion and deception. Virtually every subsequent defense of poetry (memorable examples include those by Aristotle, SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, APHRA BEHN, and PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY) has had to come to terms with Plato's devastating attack on poetry as inferior and deceptive mimesis.


Plato's Phaedrus (from which our final selection has been taken) has been of interest
to contemporary literary theory for its discussion of the evils of writing. There Plato has Socrates relate the story of the· invention, of writing by the, Egyptian god Theuth (Thoth), who offers it to King Thamus. Thamus declines the offer, deciding that humans are better of without writing because, it substitutes an alien inscription- lifeless signs-for the ,authentic living presence of spoken. language. Far from aiding memory, writing will cause it,to atrophy. For Plato, the only good memory is anamnesis, the recollection of spiritual truths through 'genuine; living wisdom! that is, through philosophy. Plato reiterates this point in his Seventh Letter, where he says: "anyone who is seriously studying high matters will be the last to write about them and thus expose his thought to the envy and criticism of men. i.e. whenever we see a book, whether the Jaws of a legislator or a composition on any other subject, we can be sure that if the author is really serious; the book does 'not contain his best thoughts; they are stored away with the fairest of his possessions. And if, he has committed these serious thoughts to writing, it is because men, not the gods, 'have taken his wits away.' Yet Plato's use of a myth in Phaedrus to frame his philosophical objections to writing raises questions of its own, since presumably myths suffer from the same defects as the texts of the sophists, rhetoricians, poets, and other purveyors of false wisdom whom Plato criticizes elsewhere. Derrida offers a celebrated unraveling of the logic of Plato's argument against writing in his Dissemination (see below), which may be the most significant encounter between a twentieth-century philosopher and Plato.


Plato is the progenitor of Western didactic criticism and theory: the idea that literature
should serve moral and social functions.' Republic, where, he, describes an ideal well-regulated community in which the educational curriculum promotes respect for law, reason, authority, self.,discipline; and piety, has been specially influential. Although Plato's Socrates loves and regularly cites Homer's Iliad and Odyssey\ he calls for the censorship of many passages in these )works ;that ,represent sacrilegious; sentimental; unlawful, and irrational behaviour'. Above all else, he' requires that literature teach goodness and grace. Plato's relentless application of this standard to all literature marks one of the, most noteworthy beginnings of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.

00189--UGC-NET, English Literature Objective Type Question Answers 51 to 60



51) Marlowe's tragedies are:
A. tragedies of noble men
B. love tragedies
C. one-man tragedies
D. revenge plays
Answer: …………………………….
52)  Who coined the phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line"?
A.  Ben Jonson
B.  Samuel Johnson
C.  R.L. Stevenson
D.  Richard Steele
Answer: ………………………………..
53)      Out of the four chief dialects that flourished in the pre-Chaucerian period, the one that became the standard English in Chaucer's time is:
A. the Northern
B. the East-Midland
C. the West-Midland
D. the Southern
Answer: ……………………..
54)      Which of the following statements is incor­rect regarding medieval literature?
A. Allegory was frequent and usual
B. The dream-vision convention was preva­lent
C. Chaucer exploited the dream-vision con­vention in The Canterbury Tales.
D. There was often an undercurrent of moral and dialectic strain.
Answer: …………………………………..
55) In Prologue and Canterbury Tales Chaucer employed the
A. Ottawa Rhyme
B. Rhyme Royal
C. Heroic Couplet
D. Both A and C
Answer: …………………………………………..
56) Chaucer has been criticized for presenting an incomplete picture of his times, because
A. he overemphasizes the rights of the lower class
B. he exaggerates the courtly benevolence
C. he writes for the court and cultivated clas­ses and neglects the suffering of the poor
D. he supports the Lolland and the Peas­ant Revolution too fervently
Answer: …………………………………………..
57) Which of the following are correctly matched?
a. Captain Singleton                1. a sailor
b. Moll Flanders                      2. a prostitute
c. Colonel Jack                           3. a valiant solider
d. Cavalier                              4. a prince
A. Only a-1 and b-2
B. Only b-2
C. Only c-3 and d-4
D. Only d-4
Answer: ………………….

58) " Lunatics, lovers, and poets all are ruled by their overactive imaginations. " These words of Shakespeare are taken from:
A. Love's Labor Lost
B.  Hamlet
C. Henry IV
D. Midsummer Night's Dream
Answer:……………………………………
59)       An author sums up the human condition thus, "human life is everywhere a state, in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed." Who said this and where?
A. Alexander Pope - Essay on Man
B.  Oliver Goldsmith - The Vicar of Wakefield
C.  Albert Camus - The Stranger
D.  Dr. Johnson – Rasselas
Answer: …………………………..
60)       “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ''tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lo.st in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. Ii cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.”


A.      T.S.Eliot
B.      Alexander Pope
C.      P.B.Shelley
D.     Matthew Arnold



Answer: …………………………………………

51- C
52- A
53- B
54- C
55- C
56- C
57-A
58-D
59-D
60-A

00269--HAROLD BLOOM and his works

HAROLD BLOOM (1930– )











1. Shelley’s Mythmaking 
2. The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry.
3. Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument 
4. Yeats 
5. The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition
6. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry 
7. A Map of Misreading
8. Kabbalah and Criticism 
9. Poetry and Repression: Revisionism from Blake to Stevens
10. Figures of Capable Imagination 
11. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of our Climate 
12. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism
13.The Breaking of the Vessels
14.The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
15. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
16. Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

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.




00700--What is Terza Rima?





What is Terza Rima?


Terzarima is a three-line stanza form originating in Italy. Its rhyme scheme is aba bcbcdcded,and so on. Terzarima was popular with many English poets, including Milton, Byron, and Shelley.

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

Labels

Addison (4) ADJECTIVES (1) ADVERBS (1) Agatha Christie (1) American Literature (6) APJ KALAM (1) Aristotle (9) Bacon (1) Bakhtin Mikhail (3) Barthes (8) Ben Jonson (7) Bernard Shaw (1) BERTRAND RUSSEL (1) Blake (1) Blogger's Corner (2) BOOK REVIEW (2) Books (2) Brahman (1) Charles Lamb (2) Chaucer (1) Coleridge (12) COMMUNICATION SKILLS (5) Confucius (1) Critical Thinking (3) Cultural Materialism (1) Daffodils (1) Deconstruction (3) Derrida (2) Doctor Faustus (5) Dr.Johnson (5) Drama (4) Dryden (14) Ecofeminism (1) Edmund Burke (1) EDWARD SAID (1) elegy (1) English Lit. Drama (7) English Lit. Essays (3) English Lit.Poetry (210) Ethics (5) F.R Lewis (4) Fanny Burney (1) Feminist criticism (9) Frantz Fanon (2) FREDRIC JAMESON (1) Freud (3) GADAMER (1) GAYATRI SPIVAK (1) General (4) GENETTE (1) GEORG LUKÁCS (1) GILLES DELEUZE (1) Gosson (1) GRAMMAR (8) gramsci (1) GREENBLATT (1) HAROLD BLOOM (1) Hemmingway (2) Henry James (1) Hillis Miller (2) HOMI K. BHABHA (1) Horace (3) I.A.Richards (6) Indian Philosophy (8) Indian Writing in English (2) John Rawls (1) Judaism (25) Kant (1) Keats (1) Knut Hamsun (1) Kristeva (2) Lacan (3) LINDA HUTCHEON (1) linguistics (4) LIONEL TRILLING (1) Literary criticism (191) literary terms (200) LOGIC (7) Longinus (4) LUCE IRIGARAY (1) lyric (1) Marlowe (4) Martin Luther King Jr. (1) Marxist criticism (3) Matthew Arnold (12) METAPHORS (1) MH Abram (2) Michael Drayton (1) MICHEL FOUCAULT (1) Milton (3) Modernism (1) Monroe C.Beardsley (2) Mulla Nasrudin Stories (190) MY POEMS (17) Narratology (1) New Criticism (2) NORTHROP FRYE (1) Norwegian Literature (1) Novel (1) Objective Types (8) OSHO TALES (3) PAUL DE MAN (1) PAUL RICOEUR (1) Petrarch (1) PHILOSOPHY (4) PHOTOS (9) PIERRE FÉLIX GUATTARI (1) Plato (5) Poetry (13) Pope (5) Post-Colonial Reading (2) Postcolonialism (3) Postmodernism (5) poststructuralism (8) Prepositions (4) Psychoanalytic criticism (4) PYTHAGORAS (1) QUEER THEORY (1) Quotes-Quotes (8) Robert Frost (7) ROMAN OSIPOVISCH JAKOBSON (1) Romantic criticism (20) Ruskin (1) SAKI (1) Samuel Daniel (1) Samuel Pepys (1) SANDRA GILBERT (1) Saussure (12) SCAM (1) Shakespeare (157) Shelley (2) SHORT STORY (1) Showalter (8) Sidney (5) SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1) SLAVOJ ZIZEK (1) SONNETS (159) spenser (3) STANLEY FISH (1) structuralism (14) Sunitha Krishnan (1) Surrealism (2) SUSAN GUBAR (1) Sydney (3) T.S.Eliot (10) TED TALK (1) Tennesse Williams (1) Tennyson (1) TERRY EAGLETON (1) The Big Bang Theory (3) Thomas Gray (1) tragedy (1) UGC-NET (10) Upanisads (1) Vedas (1) Vocabulary test (7) W.K.Wimsatt (2) WALTER BENJAMIN (1) Walter Pater (2) Willam Caxton (1) William Empson (2) WOLFGANG ISER (1) Wordsworth (14) എന്‍റെ കഥകള്‍ (2) തത്വചിന്ത (14) ബ്ലോഗ്ഗര്‍ എഴുതുന്നു (6) ഭഗവത്‌ഗീതാ ധ്യാനം (1)