AD's English Literature

"Three poets, in three distant ages born, Greece, Italy and England did adorn. The first in loftiness of thought surpass'd; The next in majesty; in both the last: The force of Nature could no further go; To make a third she join'd the former two." John Dryden  (1631 - 1700) English poet, playwright, and literary critic, 1688. Referring to John Milton in relation to Homer and Virgil.   Epic simile is, in simple words, an elaborate comparison that travels beyond the point of comparison and gives a complete poetic picture of some scene or incident suggested to the mind of the poet. They are used for illustration and ornamentation. They add dignity to the style. Such long-tailed similes stand by itself illuminating and beautifying much more than the ordinary narrative.

In his tragedies William Shakespeare excels in the characterization of tragic heroes , in the comedies his artistic excellence is well marked in the portrayal of woman characters. ‘’They are the sunlight of the plays obscured at times by clouds and storms of melancholy and misdoing, but never subdued or defeated.” the world of Shakespearean comedy is world made safe for women. In Rosalind, the heroin of As You Like It , there is true womanliness with heroic courage and feminine charm, with strength, brilliance, unselfishness and high spirit. She is ideal of what we will wish the woman of our heart to be. She has been romantically drawn with great artistic skill. 

    XVI. Mischiefs Of Party Spirit Essays From Addison edited by J H Fowler Spectator No. 50, April 27, 1711   Addison ’s e ssays , his chief title to fame, are charming and delightful in themselves, and are of great importance for the influence which they had not merely upon literature but upon life and manners.His writings are of all good tastes of life. Here is sweet pool of imagination combined with acute objective writing. Sometimes like a social critic and a satirist he attacked all human vices, frailties, vanities, affectations etc., but his attacks were not fierce; ferocious, or bitter. “He attacked the little vanities, and all the big vices of his time, not in Swift’s terrible way which makes us fell hopeless of humanity, but with a kindly ridicule and gentle humour which take speedy improvement for granted” (Saintsbury). In his present e ssay Mischiets of Party Spirit Addison focuses on the evils that are escalating in the society through a jealous adhere...

The Hungry Stone is a romantic tale of wonder and mystery.  Salient features of romanticism in The Hungry Stone . The Hungry Stone is a romantic tale impressing us by bold invention and appealing to that taste for the supernatural. Spectral and mysterious as the atmosphere of the story is, it is made to look credible. Tagore affects this with the help of lovely strokes of the brush. Realistic descriptions of nature, little human touches here and there, and interposition of day and night – all these produce an effect of probability on the mind and make us feel the hard earth beneath our feet. Tagore has succeeded in effecting an organic blend between the natural and the supernatural and rousing us up to the sublimity and intangibility of an ethereal terror that enchants rather than repels.

O f all the narrative passages in Paradise Lost, Book-I , John Milton ’ s description of Hell stands out unique by virtue of its graphics pictorial quality and its evocation of a sense of gloomy terror.   Milton's "Paradise Lost" does not make any specific mention of the Baroque style of art, which is distinguished by its ornate and dramatic forms. However, the epic poem itself, which is regarded as one of the greatest pieces of English literature, exhibits the grandiose and dramatic characteristics of Baroque art too. Though Milton was aware of the Renaissance concept that heaven and hell are no specifics topographical locals, but states of the mind itself, he clings to the medieval concept of Hell of having topographical entity. Milton presents Hell as a place designed for the eternal punishment of the fallen angels. Hell is a place for removed from the celestial seat of bliss. It is situated in the nethermost depth of abyss, and it takes nine days and nights to fa...

In the sense of brevity and descriptive art The Darkling Thrush is the masterpiece of Thomas Hardy which at the same time expresses his mixed reaction - pessimism and optimism for the coming generation. At the fag end of the nineteenth century, i. e.  on 31 st December 1900, the last day of 19 th century , the day the poem is composed , the poet is somewhat listless. The vast desolate winter atmosphere and lifelessness create a fit occasion to give rise in the poet’s mind to the central thought embodied in the poem- a pensive  reflection to life and society.   Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), which includes The Darkling Thrush , contains many poems expressing Hardy's dismay with British imperialism. There he also mourns the passing of agricultural society and sees little cause to celebrate England’s rapid industrialization, which destroy the customs and traditions of rural life. Here in The Darkling Thrush ,in the transition of two centuries, he find...

Of Studies is the first essay of the first collection of ten essays of Francis Bacon which was published in 1597. But it was revised for the edition of 1612. More than dozen new sentences were added and some words were also altered. Of Studies is typically Baconian essay with an astonishing terseness, freshness of illustrations, logical analysis, highly Latinized vocabulary, worldly wisdom and Renaissance enlightenment . Bacon through a syllogistic tripartite statement begins his argument to validate the usefulness and advantage of study in our life. Bacon has the power of compressing into a few words a great body of thought. Thus he puts forward the three basic purposes of studies: “Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability”. He later expands his sentence to bring lucidity and clearness. Studies fill us delight and aesthetic pleasure when we remain private and solitary. While we discourse , our studies add decoration to our speech. Further, the men of stud...

The language formation is a continued process of growth and decay. The phenomenon of borrowing words and word-formation is the way of enriching one language. In the history of 1500 years English language has various foreign borrowing that is instrumental in the development of the English vocabulary. Contact with other cultures through conquest, and collaborations the sociopolitical circumstances, the need to explain new ideas have been the main reasons for borrowing words from various resources. Alike Celtic, Greek, French and Scandinavian borrowing, Latin loans are very important in the enrichment of English language. English is profusely influenced over a considerable period of time. This Latin influence on English language is heralded by England ’s contact with the Latin civilization . In the old English we find much of the Latin words associated with agriculture and war. Words like camp (battle), segn (banner), pil (pointed stick), mil (mile) etc are early borrowing. Besides, wor...

Words are vehicles for the conveyance or expression of thoughts and ideas, and they only mean what we choose to make them mean. Thus we have babu English , slum English , slang English etc.  Now let's locate what slangs are. Slang is an essential and dynamic element of any language, including English. It reflects the constantly evolving nature of language, adapting to new cultural trends, social attitudes, and technological advancements. Slang enriches communication by allowing speakers to express themselves in more informal, playful, or creative ways. Its widespread use highlights its importance in everyday life.The slang words as it is defined by The Oxford English Dictionary as language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of educated standard speech and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense. Slang is mainly the creation of those who despite or disregard convention and hanker after novelty of expression in ...

  The Anglo Saxons and the Jutes , of Germany bring among them their language, paganism and their district warrior traditions as they invades the Roman colony of Britain in the fifth and sixth century. The Anglo Saxons are fierce and adventurous people with the fondness  of war and love for the blue sea. Their manliness, heroism and hard toil are exhibited in Anglo Saxon heroic poetry . Here we come across a generally elevated elevating, and male centered literature, one which lays stress on the virtues of a tribal community, on the ties of loyalty between lord and liegeman, on the significance of individual heroism, and on the powerful sway of ‘wyrd’ or fate.

The name of Oedipus has been borrowed from the classical story of king Oedipus who unknowingly married his own mother and had children by her. The psychologists, Sigmund Freud and others use the term Oedipus complex for ‘a manifestation of infantile sensuality in the relations of the child to its parents. It is a state in which a person shows excessive affection for the parent opposite in sex to him or herself, and corresponding distance from others’. A great part of his life is actually controlled by this subconscious desires and passions, over which he has no control.

The porter scene or the discovery scene (Act II Scene III) in Macbeth has attracted many critical commentary and conjecture . It comprises of two climaxes – the comical porter’s apparently irrelevant and tipsy comments and the discovery of the treacherous murder of Macbeth’s guest, King Duncan. Now, let us examine from close quarter the importance of this scene.    The Satirical porter scene written in earthly prose is intended a comic relief in the grim tragic atmosphere. The sordid, tense and serious atmosphere of conspiracy and murder is slightly eased by the humourous speeches and incidents of the porter. It is woven into the drama in such a way that they have widened and enriched, rather than weakened, the tragic significance . Alike the gravediggers in Hamlet , the speeches of the Fool in King Lear , the Porter’s nonsense verbatim aims to relieve the tension and heightens the tragic element by contrast. The porter who has the duty to guard the gate and welco...

Terseness of expression and epigrammatic brevity are the most obvious characteristics of Bacon’s style  In matter of style Francis Bacon is professedly a Senecan. Though Cicero was the acknowledged master of Renaissance prose , Bacon realized that intricate effects of the ornate copious style that characterized Cicero could not be fully realized in the English language. So far, the great defect in English prose had been its prolixity and diffuseness. Bacon put an end to this. He preferred a probative authenticity of an aphoristic prose style. His prose is characterized by brief, pithy sentence units. His language has the terseness of expression and epigrammatic shortness. Indeed, Bacon comes very close to the Lypsian brevity. The concept of brevity which affected Lypsius certainly influenced Bacon and accordingly brevity is the soul of Bacon’s essay s. It is because of a cryptic compression in Bacon’s style that he is described by Joseph Hall as the English Seneca . His essays ...

With the progress of civilization we have learnt many things-- explored newer worlds, yet the mystery of death remains vogue. We have the infinite query – what’s after death? The rhythm of life and its saga, its pleasures and sorrows are trapped into the eerie patter of the mystery of death. Rabindranath Tagore ’s supernatural stories depict this aspect. His Hungry Stones , Nisithe , Sampatti Samarpan etc are few of the exquisite examples.             The artistic beauty of The Hungry Stones as a supernatural story is that it creates an atmosphere at once metaphysical yet factual, at once imaginative yet probable. It satiates the readers about their momentary disbelief of the supernatural atmosphere by dragging readers into the opacity of the poet’s abysmal conscience. Supernaturalism can only be felt by the sixth sense. The Hungry Stones pervades a mysterious romantic atmosphere that becomes a subject of extra sensual feeling –...

The witches in Macbeth are more symbolic than supernatural The employment of the supernatural device to arouse the sense of mystery and horror on the stage was very common in the Elizabethan age. The existence of the ghosts, spirits, and fairies was fairly believed at that time both by the ignorant and the learned alike. Whether Shakespeare held that notion or not is a matter of dispute but his are the plays replete with such beliefs. Owing to several dramatic purposes and needs, the supernaturalism in Shakespearean plays is both subjective and symbolic. In Macbeth , the darkest of the Shakespearean plays , is considerably distinguished by its subjective and symbolic interpretations. Its employments serve to intensify the already accumulated dark atmosphere of the play in concern. The supernatural elements in this play comprises of the witches, the ghost of Banquo and other ominous portents noticed just before the murder of Duncan, the king of Scotland . 

P. B. Shelley , the supreme lyricist in the romantic period always longs for something ethereal, something that is far beyond the ‘sphere of sorrow’. His ‘To a Skylark’ is, as Wordsworth puts in “the expression of the highest to which the poet’s genius has attained”. It is one of the “most marvelous of English lyrics” ever written. It is the expression of a genius who sings “In profuse strains of unpremeditated art”.

Introduction: Having viewed the modern materialistic civilization from the view-point of spiritualism and Christian Existentialism, T.S. Eliot has represented his reaction in the form of this poem entitled "The Waste Land". It is a symbolical poem composed in the style of poetic esotericism, “Formally the poem has been described as a much of ideas and as a poetic cryptogram”. As such his is the poem of myth and symbols, of a series of trains of thoughts whose parts look unconnected with one another. The Epigraph: "‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεîν θέλω.’      For Ezra Pound        il miglior fabbro. " The poem bears an epigraph written partly in Latin and partly in Greek. The speaker in the epigraph says that he has noticed the Sibyl at Cymae hanging in a cage and wishing to die; but she could not die because she was almost immortal by v...