A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 75


A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
Anglo-Saxon Period (450 — 1066)
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1: Which Roman General conquered England in A.D. 43? When did the Romans go back from England?

Ans: Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 b.c. and returned the following year to defeat the native forces. The inhabitants, referred to collectively as Britons, maintained political freedom and paid tribute to Rome for almost a century before the Roman emperor Claudius I initiated the systematic conquest of Britain in ad 43. At the end of the 3rd century, the Roman army began to withdraw from Britain to defend other parts of the Roman Empire. The Romans went back from England in A. D. 410. Celtic culture again became predominant and Roman civilization in Britain rapidly disintegrated. Roman influence virtually disappeared during the Germanic invasions in the 5th and 6th centuries. Thereafter the culture of the Angles and Saxons spread throughout the island.

2: Where did the Saxons come to England from?

Ans: The Saxons came to England from Germany. Saxons are Germanic people who first appear in history after the beginning of the Christian era. The earliest mention of the Saxons is by the Alexandrian mathematician and geographer Ptolemy in the 2nd century ad. In the 5th and 6th centuries, some groups of Saxons invaded Britain, where they were joined by other Germanic peoples, the Angles and the Jutes. At the beginning of the 7th century, the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain was practically completed.

3: From which country did St. Augustine come to England? What are his literary contributions?

Ans: St. Augustine came to England from Rome in 597 A D. As a writer, Augustine was prolific, persuasive, and a brilliant stylist. His best-known work is his autobiographical Confessions, Christian apologia The City of God (413-26), Retractions (428), On Free Will (388-95), On Christian Doctrine (397), On Baptism: Against the Donatists (400), On the Trinity (400-16), and On Nature and Grace (415); and Homilies upon several books of the Bible.

Analyzing Sylvia Plath’s Poems: Combination of Vision, Nightmare, Confession and Subjectivity


Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother in a letter: “I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast… Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me.”

Sylvia Plath, noted for her intensely personal and brutally honest poems, was a phenomenon, a meteor that appeared suddenly on the literary horizon, dazzled and disappeared before the world could properly have a glimpse of her. Plath’s work has grown in influence and popularity since her suicide at age 30. She is widely regarded as one the first feminist poets and an icon of the women’s movement. Read More Poetry Germairie Greer claimed that Sylvia Plath was the most ‘arrogantly feminine” poetess whoever wrote. David Holbrook adds, “A phenomenological analyses suggests that while knowing well outwardly that she was a woman, Sylvia Plath could scarcely find within herself anything that was feminine at all. Read More Criticism She is, perhaps, the most masculine poetess who aver wrote, yet, since, masculinity requires the inclusion of the anima, she is not that either: Read More Poetry she is sadly pseudo-male, like many of her cultists.” She was a heroine of women’s literary movement. For all her creative effort, she could not care herself. She idolized suicide and infanticide in ‘Edge’. It was written only two weeks before she committed suicide. She also idolized the Zany idolization of suicidal tendencies in The Bell Jar, a strongly autobiographical novel. The book is a first-person account of a young woman’s mental breakdown and suicide attempt, closely mirroring Plath’s own experiences.  She believed that death could be a pathway to rebirth, so that her suicide was a schizoid suicide.

Sylvia Plath belonged to the world wherein contemporary art was and is, moving towards nihilism and abandonment to hate. For all her harrowing and courageous record of suffering, Sylvia Plath died in the end because she could not sustain confidence in her true potentialities which could her. Read More Poetry In the end she is left with only one possible identity “she- who-commits-suicide”. This is the mental state, in general, o the western Society: “humanness is ebbing on account of the institutional depersonalization.” Sylvia Plath is the symptom and consequence of the prevalent epidemic in Schizoid humanity.

A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 74


A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK

 (a)Australian Aboriginal writer  Jack Davis (1917-2002) is known for his poetry, plays, and dedication to Aboriginal causes. A to Z (Objective Questions)

(b)  A picaresque novel, full-length fictional work, often satirical in nature, in which the principal character is cynical and amoral, is about a rogue hero who leads a wandering life. The form originated in Spain, and the term picaresque derives from the Spanish word picaro (rogue). The earliest Spanish example is Lazarillo de Tormes (Lazaro of Tormes, 1554); of unknown authorship. The most noted of German picaresque novels is The Adventurous Simplicissimus. In France the type is best represented by The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane. The earliest English picaresque novel is believed to have been The Unfortunate Traveller, or, The Life of Jack Wilton (1594) by Thomas Nashe. The picaresque novel was particularly popular in England in the 18th century  quickened this tradition with the contributions as The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (1722)   by Daniel Defoe; and The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), both by Tobias Smollett.  Fielding’s Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews are the finest creations of this group.

(c) Epistle, formal and instructive letter, often intended for publication. The epistolary form was familiar among the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus made notable use of it. Twenty-one books of the New Testament are epistles written by the apostles to members of the early church. Since the Renaissance the epistle, in verse and prose, has held a prominent place in literature. Examples of the literary epistle are Lettres provinciales (1656-57), by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal; the Drapier's Letters (1724-25), by the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift; and An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), in verse, by the English poet Alexander Pope.  It also refers to a special genre of novel that is written in the form of letters. Samuel Richardson fathered this novel. It was almost an accident to him at the request of two London publishers, he wrote some letters for them but relating a true story of a virtuous servant girl who married her profligate master after his attempts to seduce and rape her. His Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe are produced in this vein. In fact, Richardson had a distinguished merit as a letter-writer from an early age. He was often employed by ladies to write love-letters on behalf of them. So, producing epistolary novel was no hard task for him. Though the epistolary method brings us in close contact with the characters of the novel, yet being too lengthy, sometimes it loses the attention of the readers.

(d) Elizabethan Drama is also called Romantic Drama.

(e) Extreme devotion to form and use of closed couplet in verse are the qualities of Neo-classical poetry. A to Z (Objective Questions)

(f)  During the closing decades of 18th century, English novel had a special turn and twist. It started to deal with the contemporary social and domestic life. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) was the producer of this novel. Her novels are valuable for the excellent picture they gave of contemporary people, customs, and court life. Her other novels are, like Evelina, sentimental but witty descriptions of innocent young women entering society; they include Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), and The Wanderer (1814). She presents the manners as it seen by a woman. For this reason, she remains the pioneer of female novelists. For feminine aspect, these novels are of immense psychological charms.

(g) Gothic Novel or the Novel of Terror type of romantic fiction that predominated in English literature in the last third of the 18th century and the first two decades of the 19th century, the setting for which was usually a ruined Gothic castle or abbey. The Gothic novel, or Gothic romance, emphasized mystery and horror and was filled with ghost-haunted rooms, underground passages, and secret stairways. The principal writers of the English Gothic romance were Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve, who wrote The Champion of Virtue (1777); Ann Radcliffe, author of The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew Gregory Lewis, author of Ambrosio, or the Monk (1796); Charles Robert Maturin, who wrote The Fatal Revenge (1807); and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein (1818).

(h) Commedia also gave British playwrights a fresh and adventurous feeling for erotic themes and contemporary satire. Comedies no longer had to be situated in distant places or times to achieve their goals. Like Molière, these dramatists found peerless material in the confused and sanctimonious lifestyles of the rising middle class. Their theatrical parodies and satires were called comedies of manners. During the 18th century sentimental comedies encouraged audiences to uphold virtue and avoid vice, chiefly by stirring their emotions.

(i) French Revolution had great much impact on English Romantic poetry. Samuel Palmer painted landscapes distinguished by an innocent simplicity of style and a visionary religious feeling derived from Blake. John Constable, turning away from the wild natural scenery associated with many romantic poets and painters, infused quiet English landscapes with profound feeling. The first major artist to work in the open air, he achieved a freshness of vision through the use of luminous colors and bold, thick brushwork. J. M. W. Turner

(j) T.S. Eliot is a critic besides being a poet and essayist.

(k) Shakespeare belongs to the Renaissance Age.

 (l) It is prose which made Johnson a first rate writer. He had both regard for and reaction against neo-classicism. His prose style is characterized by heaviness and pomposity. In place of the easy grace of Addison and vigorous idiomatic colloquialism of Swift, Johnson gives us a style which is highly Latinized in Vocabulary. In sentence structure, it is marked by elaborate balance and anti-thesis. His style, however, has an elegance that depends on balance and at its best; it has great strength, nobility and dignity. His “The Rambler” and “The Idler” best express his prose style, contributed to the periodical papers. A to Z (Objective Questions)

(m) During the Restoration period, which began in 1660, many Renaissance plays were revived but new styles of drama also gained popularity. The influence of Pierre Corneille, a major playwright in France through the 1650s, encouraged a more classically oriented poetic tragedy, called heroic tragedy. John Dryden is the first major dramatist of the Restoration. All the qualities of a heroic or epic poem are presented in dramatic form. Like an epic, this type of drama deals with the themes of love, honour, valour, beauty etc. The conflict in this type of tragedy focally revolves round that of love and honour presented in the minds of several characters. The heroic tragedy presented a stirring of story of fighting and military exploits and of love and jealousy. Dryden produced a heroic tragedy with The Conquest of Granada (1670), which extols such heroic values as ideal love and valor in battle and is in rhymed couplets.   Nathaniel Lee and Otway are two other tragedians of this group. Aureng-Zebe, the Rival Queens, and the Orphan are some notable works of this group.

(n) In Blake’s so-called Prophetic Books, a series of longer poems written from 1789 on, Blake created a complex personal mythology and invented his own symbolic characters to reflect his social concerns. A true original in thought and expression, he declared in one of these poems, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Blake was a nonconformist radical who numbered among his associates such freethinkers as political theorist Thomas Paine and writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Poems such as The French Revolution (1791), America, a Prophecy (1793), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), and Europe, a Prophecy (1794) express his condemnation of 18th-century political and social tyranny. Theological tyranny is the subject of The Book of Urizen (1794), and the dreadful cycle set up by the mutual exploitation of the sexes is vividly described in “The Mental Traveller” (1803?). Among the Prophetic Books is a prose work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), which develops Blake’s idea that “without Contraries is no progression.” A to Z (Objective Questions)

 (o) The masks or half masks were worn by players in the Italian commedia dell’arte, which was popular in the 16th century. The characters portrayed in commedia dell’arte were always much exaggerated. The masks were designed to contribute to these exaggerations.

(p) Wordsworth’s interpretation of Nature is truly pantheistic. So, he believes that all objects of Nature are fundamentally one and that a mysterious soul—a Being permeates all objects of Nature and gives to each natural object—flower, wind, tree—its own distinct life and soul. This universal soul broods over, gives life to and sustains not only the objects of Nature but also the mind of man. Thus, to Wordsworth, Nature’s beauty is the visible symbol of a divine and all-pervading personality. Shelley shares this faith with Wordsworth and gives a triumphant expression to his pantheism in “Adonais.”

(q) Odes are of two types—Pindaric or regular ode and Horatian ode. Ode was invented by Pindar who wrote Odes following the Chorus songs of Greek drama. English followers are Ben Jonson, Cowley, Wordsworth,    Shelley, and Keats.  Horatian Odes, derived from the Roman poet, Horace are shorter than Pindaric Odes and these are written in a single repeated stanza form.

(r) Matthew Arnold calls Keats as enchantingly sensuous. Like Wordsworth, Keats is also a favourite of sensation and its effects. To him, it included taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing; while for Wordsworth it included only the last two.  Added to that, Keats reveled in the luxury of all the senses, even of those associated with sex or feminine body and not merely of the respectable senses, as with Wordsworth. A to Z (Objective Questions)

(s) Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey jointly brought out Tottel’s Miscellany during the Renaissance. The name of the Earl of Surrey is Henry Howard. Forty of his poems were printed posthumously in 1557 in Songs and Sonettes, Written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Howard, Late Earle of Surrey, and Others, and in the same year his translations from Virgil appeared as Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aeneis Turned into English Meter.

(t) Remarkable quote:  Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round.”David Lodge (1935 - ) British novelist and critic. The British Museum is Falling Down

(u) The dramatic structure of Restoration comedies combines in it the features of The Neoclassical Theatre of Italy and France and The Greek Theatre. Dating from the Restoration, when the English monarchy was reestablished under King Charles II in 1660, Restoration comedy witnessed the first appearance of women on the English stage. The so-called breeches part was specially created in order to costume female actors in male attire in order to reveal the female figure. The genre placed much emphasis on wit and sexual intrigues. Examples include The Country Wife (1674?) by William Wycherley, The Way of the World (1700) by William Congreve, and The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) by George Farquhar.

(v)   “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”- wrote Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass.

(w) The etymological meaning of the word “trope” is turning.

(x) English poet Coleridge in Biographia Literaria defined poetic imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite ‘I AM’ ”?

(y) Little Nell is a character in Dickens’The Old Curiosity Shop. It covers the pathos surrounding the death of its child-heroine Little Nell. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)

(z)  Formalism:  A text-based critical method   was developed by Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and other Russian critics early in the 20th century. It involved detailed inquiry into plot structure, narrative perspective, symbolic imagery, and other literary techniques.                                                   

Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert     
        2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature
        3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS
        4. Microsoft Students’ Encarta

Critical Estimate of Walter De La Mare as The Artist for Romantic Supernaturalism



“Never the least stir made the listeners
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”-

Walter de la Mare

The Listeners

Walter De La Mare is the best— known of modern poets who have excelled in writing verses for children as well as adult. He has the direct vision, of childhood as well as the child’s love for simple things but has the notion of deep introspection. Read More Poetry  Though his imagination and intellects are almost always fully adult, he can admirably convey through his poems both the charming ignorance and the divine incomprehensibility of childhood. His success in this sphere depends chiefly on the fact that, like Blake, he is a master in the art of understatement—'he can take the world in his band and call it a grain of sand.'

Walter De La Mare
Mare’s poetry has the same inexplicable charm at the romantic supernaturalism of the best poetical works of Coleridge. In many of his poems he has succeeded, like Coleridge, in creating ‘a fairy twilight world, a world of wonder and fantasy, which is the hope of perpetual youth.’ Read More Poetry But there is a subtle difference between the two poets: in The Ancient Mariner and Christabel we really come across supernatural manifestations, but in a poem like The Listeners, though the atmosphere is created and the expectation roused, nothing supernatural really takes place. Read More Modern Period Moreover, though a mystic poet, De La Mare has maintained his link with the life of his time. His Happy Encounter is a synthesis of Poetry and Science, and in Keep Innocency the poet reveals a full consciousness of the gulf between romance and reality. His insight into child psychology, his sympathy for the toiling folk, his kindly feeling for animals and his affectionate understanding of them are all reflections of the spirit of the age he lived in.

But Walter De La Mare is pre-eminently a creator of pure literature. He is a poet of lovely things, the lovely things that pass away. With infinite delicacy he depicts and delineates for us the marvelous beauty of the created world. But his heart constantly broods over the flowing stream of beauty. He knows that nothing is permanent on earth, and this knowledge imparts peculiar pathos even to his gayest utterances. Read More Poetry He draws consolation, however, from the fact that though things pass away continuously, they pass in perpetuity of beauty. Read More Modern Period The stream does not cease to be, though it does not stand still. This restless, questioning, perturbed spirit, this yearning for immortality in a world where all beautiful things are for ever changing and dying, is’ voiced in his poetry with exquisite melody and Keatsean melancholy. The poetry of both the poets makes us feel the brevity of joy and the necessity for appreciating as much beauty as possible in the little time allotted to us.

As a craftsman, pure and simple, De La Mare ranks very high among modern poets. Read More Modern Period His subtle and varied metrical music, his clever mingling of sound and sense, his sure grasp of imagery and atmosphere—all these are apparent even to the most careless readers. In later volumes, he has frequently reached perfection of workmanship in the twentieth century verse. Read More Poetry But his exquisite workmanship does not betray him into too much pre-occupation with mere artifice; nor does the dream quality of his verse hinder his consciousness of reality. In Araby, for example, that dreamy land has fired his imagination, but he has not really allowed it to steal away his wit.

<Additional Note: Walter John De La Mare was born at Charleton, Kent in 1873. He was educated at St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School. Later, he served in a business house in the city of London for some years. But he felt an inner urge for literary activities and wanted to devote himself whole-heartedly to creative writing. Read More Poetry Some of his earlier poems appeared in the Monthly Review, between 1902 and 1904. His first volume of verse, Songs of Childhood, came out in 1902, under the pseudonym, Walter Ranal. Read More Modern Period It was followed by another volume entitled Poems in 1906. Then in 1908 he was granted a civil pension for his literary work, and he took to literature as his whole- time occupation after resigning his service.

Walter De La Mare became established as a major poet of his time with the publication of The Listeners and Other Poems in 1912. The next year, he brought out Peacock Pie. Motley was published in 1918, and a collected edition, Poems, 1901 to 1918 in 1920. Meanwhile he was awarded the first Prince Edmond de Polignac Prize for literature for his novel The Return in1910. In the same year a delightful’ story of monkeys, written for children, The Three Mulla Mulgars also came out. Besides poetry, Walter De La Mare wrote many exquisitely beautiful short stories and plays. Read More Modern Period He became Professor of Fiction for the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Academic Committee. He died in 1956, after receiving honorary degree from the University of Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Bristol, and London.

Among many other works he produced in course of his long career, one remembers: The Veil and Other Poems (192?), The Memories of a Midget (1921), The Riddle Connoisseur (1923), Ding Dong Bell (1924), Crossing (1924),  The Connoisseur (1926), The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933), The Lord Fish and Other Stories (1933), Bell and Grass  (1941), The Burning Glass and Other Poems (1945) and The Traveler (1946). Read More Poetry  >


A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 73


 Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK
1. Who, of the following, belongs to 14th century?
(i) William Wordsworth
 (ii) William Wycherley
 (iii) William Langland
 (iv) William Watson

2. Match the following Time Line with their Historical Importance in British History:

List – A  Time Line            
List – B: Historical Importance in British History
(I) 1453        
1.  After the upheaval of the English Revolution a new British Parliament requested                   Charles II    to return and proclaimed him king on May 8, 1660.

(II) 1558       
2. In the ensuing period Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on a book of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads, first published in this date. This work is generally taken to mark the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English poetry. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)
(III) 1660     
3. Elizabeth I, the first woman in British history, occupy the English throne in this year.
(IV) 1798     
4. Renaissance as a movement in arts and letters is said to have started in Europe.
Which is the correct combination according to the code:
Code :I II III IV
     (A) 2 1 3 4
     (B) 3 4 2 1
     (C) 4 3 1 2
     (D) 1 2 4 3

Life and Contribution of Edward Thomas (1878—1917)- The Georgian Poet


“ When, indeed, Edward Thomas was killed in Flanders, a mirror of England was shattered of so pure and true a crystal that a clearer and tenderer reflection of it can be found no where than in these poems.” Walter de Ia Mare

 The Poet’ Life and His Prose Works: Edward Thomas was born in London in 1878. His father, a practically minded civil servant, took great care for the education of Edward. Read More History of English Literature (Essay) He had his school education at St. Paul s School and then entered the Lincoln College, Oxford.

 The family hailed from Wales. Edward as a boy heard a good many stories from his father about their native home in Wales, Even as a boy lie had a good store of tales and legends of Wales. Then as a fully grown up Youngman he undertook a walking tour in Wales. The impression of this tour is recorded in an attractive prose work Beautiful Wales. His second interest was English countryside. Read More Men That Keep Attention The Heart of England, The Woodland Life and The South Country are even today read with pleasure by all who find interest in country life.

Edward Thomas: Image Wiki
During the First World War, Edward served in the Artists’ Rifles and was killed in action in Flanders in 1917. Read More History of English Literature (Essay) Alan Lewis, a young poet and short story writer, died in India during Second World War while training for action in Burma wrote a poem entitled To Edward Thomas after a visit to the memorial stone of that poet whose feelings he shared , “Like YOU I felt sensitive and somehow apart.”  This sensitiveness and feeling apart give the poems of Thomas their distinctiveness.

Already, at Oxford he had decided to take up a writing career, and afterwards this he did with credit. He wrote numerous articles, reviews and also longer works for various periodicals and publishers. 

Thomas as a Poet: Thomas's career as a poet was indeed very briefer, so far as time was concerned —just last four years of his 39 years of life. Even that was a start by chance. Robed Frost, the American former poet of New England, temporarily settled in England between 1912 and 1915.  Read More History of English Literature (Essay) He was Thomas’s senior by 3 years. They came to know each ether personality and through writing. After reading Thomas’s prose, one day Frost “showed him that some of that work, a minimum of alteration, could be set down as poetry. Read More Men That Keep Attention This was the key that unlocked the door on the poetry stored up in Thomas’s mind.” About the source of inspiration of Thomas as a writer R. S. Thomas writes in the Introduction to Selected Work of Edward Thomas “the melancholy and wry whimsicality the longing to make the glimpsed good place permanent, which appear in Thomas’s verse, may have had a Welsh source.”

Characterization of Thomas’s Poetry: Read More History of English Literature (Essay) Thomas was a born Victorian, an age when motor car “had hardly intruded.” The knowledge of science, specially the theory of evolution, placed man in more Intimate relation with environment— with Nature.  His formative years were Georgian period in English poetry. Georgian poets were a group of English writers whose lyric poetry celebrated the English countryside. The Georgian poets included Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and our poet in discussion Edward Thomas.   Read More Men That Keep Attention 

 Much of the poet’s subject matter was taken from the stable world of the country-side. When the First World War broke down, Thomas was already 36. R. S. Thomas says: “the easy glib rhythms, the complacent sweetness, the elegant phrasing—all these were to be rejected and held up to obloquy. It was Edward Thomas’s scrupulous, self-searching honesty that was to make him something or a bridge between the older and the newer verse.”A. S. Collins said it ellaborately, “He said everything with a clear observation, behind which he lay a quiet but intense love. so that he saw not only with his eyes but with his understanding, and his poems gave a true picture not only of the scene but of himself -- trees and flowers were always with him, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that half our English birds are there by name and nature in his poems.”  

 As a poet Edward Thomas was primarily a personal one, possessed by loves, fears and doubts of his time and permanent moodiness of Nature herself. Birds, flowers and hills; sky, mists and streams individually and sometimes landscapes in their totality again and again recurred in Thomas’s poems. Read More Men That Keep Attention And the moods in him created by all these are the result, as Alun Lewis said: made him sensitive and somehow apart. If we are to single out the thing that moved 1iomas most — then, one must give the first preference to Birds as a species. In his Collected Poems (1920) there are references to Sparrow, Lark, Cuckoo, Nightingale, Marsh bird, Swallow, Pigeon, Thrush, Sedge-warbler—all singing merry birds, then a whole poem on the Owl—a gloomy bird.

A few lines may be quoted from Thomas’s different poems to make the matter clear:

“. . .up and down the roof.
White pigeons nested...”
The Manor Farm

“All day long I heard a distant Cuckoo calling”
Melancholy

“..must I be content with discontent
As larks  and swallows are perhaps with wings ?”
The Glory

“And sedge-warblers, clinging so light
To willow twigs, sang longer than the lark,”
---sedge- Warblers

“Till then the track had never bad a name
For all its thicket and the nightingales

That should have earned it.”
Women He Liked

“What did the thrushes know? Rain, snow, sleet, hail
Had kept them quiet as primroses.”
March

The poet’s attachment for the birds in general will be very much clear by these three short lines :
“‘Twas home; one nationality
We had, I and the birds that sang,
 One memory.”
Home

And lastly let us quote a few more lines to show his sentimental attachment for Wales
“Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings.”—

Edward Thomas and the First World War: To speak of the poets who laid their lives in the First World War, H. J. C. Grierson and .J. C. Smith lamented in their A Critical History of English Poetry: “who can estimate what English poetry lost by the deaths of Charles Sorby, Wilfred Owen, Julian Grenfell, Francis Ledwidge, Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas…”  (p. 496) Read More History of English Literature (Essay) But still Thomas is not generally acknowledged as a war poet. Why not? Simply because “He attempted no description of the battlefield." ( A. S. Collins. English Literature of the Twentieth Century). It seems that attitude of critics was shaped mainly by two poets: Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke. Read More Men That Keep Attention But this is not beyond question. Thomas also wrote a lot about war and its consequences upon man and society, and he did this in his own way. That is the difference. To quote a few lines:

“We turned from men or poetry
To rumours of the war remote
Only till both stood disinclined”
The Sun used to shine.

“The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpeckers’ round hole,
The ploughman said, ‘What, will they take it away?’‘When the war is over?‘”
--As the Team’s Head-Brass

“And lastly,
I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers.
This is no case of pretty right or wrong 


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