Approaches to literature week thirteen

Term explanation

onomatopoeia: is a word that phonetically imitates, resembles or suggests the source of the sound that it describes. Onomatopoeia (as an uncountable noun) refers to the property of such words.

alliteration: is a stylistic literary device identified by the repeated sound of the first consonant in a series of multiple words, or the repetition of the same sounds in stressed syllables of a phrase. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed, as in James Thomson's verse "Come…dragging the lazy languid Line along". Another example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers".

free verse: is an open form of poetry. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.

Free Verse Poems: No Rules

Free verse poems do not follow the rules. They are sometimes thought to be a modern form of poetry; but, the free verse types of poem have been around for hundreds of years.

Examples of free verse poems:

After the Sea-Ship by Walt Whitman

After the Sea-Ship—after the whistling winds;

After the white-gray sails, taut to their spars and ropes,

Below, a myriad, myriad waves, hastening, lifting up their necks,

Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship:

Waves of the ocean, bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,

Waves, undulating waves—liquid, uneven, emulous waves,

Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,

Where the great Vessel, sailing and tacking, displaced the surface;

Poets

W.B. YEATS

He was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and, along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. Yeats is considered to be one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933).

His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeats's debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, Yeats's poetry grew more physical and realistic.

W.H AUDEN

He was an Anglo-American poet, best known for love poems such as "Funeral Blues," poems on political and social themes such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles," poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. uden was a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays, and other forms of performance.

E.E Cummings

He was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as an eminent voice of 20th century English literature.

James Dickey

He was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award

Emily Dickinson

She was an American poet. While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time. Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends. Dickinson is now almost universally considered to be one of the most significant of all American poets.

John Donne

He was an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques.

T.S Eliot

He was an American-born British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930) and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".

John Keats

He was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death. He had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats's work was the most significant literary experience of his life. The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through the emphasis of natural imagery.

Wallace Stevens

He was an American Modernist poet. Some of his best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar," "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Sunday Morning," "The Snow Man," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

Walt Whitman

He was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.

--Kubla Khan

It is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. According to Coleridge's Preface to "Kubla Khan", the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan.

[end rhyme 押韻工整]

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Muslim

It relates to a person who follows the religion of Islam, a monotheistic and Abrahamic religion based on the Quran. Muslims consider the Quran to be the verbatim word of God as revealed to the Islamic prophet and messenger Muhammad. They also follow the sunnah teachings and practices of Muhammad as recorded in traditional accounts called hadith. "Muslim" is an Arabic word meaning "one who submits (to God)". A female Muslim is sometimes called a Muslimah.[citation needed] There are customs holding that a man and woman or teenager and adolescent above the age of fifteen of a lunar or solar calendar who possesses the faculties of rationality, logic or sanity, but misses numerous successive Jumu'ahs without a valid excuse, no longer qualifies as a Muslim.

Khan academy

is a non-profit educational organization created in 2006 by educator Salman "Sal" Khan with the aim of providing a "free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere". The organization produces short lectures in the form of YouTube videos. In addition to micro lectures, the organization's website features practice exercises and tools for educators. All resources are available for free to anyone around the world.

A narrow fellow in the grass

A NARROW fellow in the grass      

Occasionally rides;    

You may have met him,—did you not?      

His notice sudden is. 

 

The grass divides as with a comb,        

A spotted shaft is seen;    

And then it closes at your feet       

And opens further on.     

 

He likes a boggy acre,      

A floor too cool for corn.        

Yet when a child, and barefoot,    

I more than once, at morn,    

 

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash    

Unbraiding in the sun,— 

When, stooping to secure it,          

It wrinkled, and was gone.     

 

Several of nature’s people      

I know, and they know me;    

I feel for them a transport      

Of cordiality;      

          

But never met this fellow,       

Attended or alone,   

Without a tighter breathing,  

And zero at the bone.

analysis

It describes a "narrow fellow" in the grass which is the snake[evil, biblical allusion, temptation]. The speaker seems playful in his description of the creature through the use of this colloquial sounding phrase. His observations of the snake’s movements are captured in the use of the word ‘rides’ suggesting an ease of movement and a natural harmony with its surroundings.

The Raven

It is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore". The poem makes use of a number of folk, mythological, religious, and classical references.

the Edgar Allan Poe raven's tomb

To Helen

Helen, thy beauty is to me

    Like those Nicean barks of yore,

That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,

    The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

    To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

    Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

    To the glory that was Greece.

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

    How statue-like I see thee stand!

    The agate lamp within thy hand,

Ah! Psyche from the regions which

    Are Holy Land!

analysis

In one sense, Helen guards the home hearth in the traditional domestic role of caregiver while displaying a faithful attachment that recalls the idealized love of Annabel Lee in Poe's eponymous 1849 poem.

History of literary Periods

The main issues in literary history are period and genre. Underneath genre, we need to explore the great authors and their masterpiece.

-Classicism-- including epics, tragedy, and comedy

-Dark age (Medieval)-- including Curtly Love and 3M (morality play, mystery play, and miracle play) 

-Renaissance-- Main genre is drama.

-Neoclassicism

-Romanticism-- This is where the American literature really began.

-Victorian Literature-- high seriousness

-Modernism

Additional Supplement

Danae and golden shower

Danae

She was the daughter, and only child of King Acrisius of Argos and his wife Queen Eurydice. She was the mother of the hero Perseus by Zeus. She was credited with founding the city of Ardea in Latium during the Bronze Age.

Danae [Rembrandt painting]

It is Rembrandt's painting from the collection of Pierre Crozat which since the 18th century has resided in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. It is a life-sized depiction of the character Danaë from Greek mythology, the mother of Perseus. She is presumably depicted as welcoming Zeus, who impregnated her in the form of a shower of gold.

Perseus

The legendary founder of Mycenae and of the Perseid dynasty of Danaans, was, alongside Cadmus and Bellerophon, the greatest Greek hero and slayer of monsters before the days of Heracles. Perseus beheaded the Gorgon Medusa and saved Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus. Perseus was the son of the mortal Danaë and the god Zeus. He was also the great grandfather of Heracles, also a son of Zeus.

Dionysus

He is the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy in Greek mythology. Alcohol, especially wine, played an important role in Greek culture with Dionysus being an important reason for this life style. He is a major, popular figure of Greek mythology and religion, and is included in some lists of the twelve Olympians. Dionysus was the last god to be accepted into Mt. Olympus. He was the youngest and the only one to have a mortal mother. His festivals were the driving force behind the development of Greek theatre. Modern scholarship categorises him as a dying-and-rising god.

Sphinx Riddle

It is a mythical creature with, at a minimum, the head of a human and the body of a lion. In Greek tradition, it has the head of a human, the haunches of a lion, and sometimes the wings of a bird. It is mythicised as treacherous and merciless. Those who cannot answer its riddle suffer a fate typical in such mythological stories, as they are killed and eaten by this ravenous monster. This deadly version of a sphinx appears in the myth and drama of Oedipus. Unlike the Greek sphinx, which was a woman, the Egyptian sphinx is typically shown as a man (an androsphinx).

phallic symbol

It is a penis, especially when erect, an object that resembles a penis, or a mimetic image of an erect penis. Any object that symbolically — or, more precisely, iconically — resembles a penis may also be referred to as a phallus; however, such objects are more often referred to as being phallic (as in "phallic symbol"). Such symbols often represent fertility and cultural implications that are associated with the male sexual organ, as well as the male orgasm.

Movie

The other Boleyn Girl

It is a 2008 drama film directed by Justin Chadwick. The screenplay by Peter Morgan was adapted from the 2001 novel of the same name by Philippa Gregory. It is a romanticized account of the lives of 16th-century aristocrats Mary Boleyn, one-time mistress of King Henry VIII, and her sister, Anne, who became the monarch's ill-fated second wife, though much history is distorted.

Rapunzel

It is a German fairy tale in the collection assembled by the Brothers Grimm, and first published in 1812 as part of Children's and Household Tales. The Grimm Brothers' story is an adaptation of the fairy tale Rapunzel by Friedrich Schulz (German author) 3 published in 1790. The Schulz version is based on Persinette by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force originally published in 1698[3] which in turn was influenced by an even earlier tale, Petrosinella by Giambattista Basile, published in 1634.[4] Its plot has been used and parodied in various media and its best known line ("Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair") is an idiom of popular culture. 

Song

Duras

Marguerite Donnadieu, known as Marguerite Duras was a French novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, essayist and experimental filmmaker. She is best known for writing the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, which earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

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