POETS

John Donne

I

INTRODUCTION

John Donne (1572-1631), English poet, prose writer, and clergyman, considered the greatest of the metaphysical poets and one of the greatest writers of love poetry.

Donne was born in London; at the age of 11 he entered the University of Oxford, where he studied for three years. According to some accounts, he spent the next three years at the University of Cambridge but took no degree at either university. He began the study of law at Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1592. About two years later, presumably, he relinquished the Roman Catholic faith, in which he had been brought up, and joined the Anglican Church. His first book of poems, Satires, written during this period of residence in London, is considered one of Donne's most important literary efforts. Although not immediately published, the volume had a fairly wide readership through private circulation of the manuscript, as did his love poems, Songs and Sonnets, written at about the same time as the Satires.

II

EARLY CAREER

In 1596, Donne joined the naval expedition that Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, led against Cádiz, Spain. On his return to England, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Keeper of the Great Seal, in 1598. Donne's secret marriage in 1601 to Egerton's niece, Anne More, resulted in his dismissal from this position and in a brief imprisonment. He had to live a baggers’ life by begging from friends for the next thirteen years. A cousin of his wife offered the couple refuge in Pyrford, Surrey. While there, Donne wrote his longest poem, The Progresse of the Soule (1601), which ironically depicts the transmigration of the soul of Eve's apple.

During the next few years Donne made a meager living as a lawyer, serving chiefly as counsel for Thomas Morton, an anti-Roman Catholic pamphleteer. Donne may have collaborated with Morton in writing pamphlets that appeared under Morton's name from 1604 to 1607. Donne's principal literary accomplishments during this period were Divine Poems (1607) and the prose work Biathanatos (posthumously published 1644). In the latter he argued that suicide is not intrinsically sinful. In 1608 reconciliation was effected between Donne and his father-in-law, and his wife received a much-needed dowry. His next work, Pseudo-Martyr (1610), is a prose treatise maintaining that English Roman Catholics could, without breach of their religious loyalty, pledge an oath of allegiance to James I, king of England. This work won him the favor of the king. Donne became a priest of the Anglican Church in 1615 and was appointed royal chaplain later that year. He attained eminence as a preacher, delivering sermons that are regarded as the most brilliant and eloquent of his time.

III

LATER WORK

Donne continued to write poetry, notably his Holy Sonnets (1618), but most of it remained unpublished until 1633. In 1621 James I appointed him dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral; he held that post until his death. His friendship with the essayist and poet Izaak Walton, who later wrote a moving (although somewhat inaccurate) biography of Donne, began in 1624. While convalescing from a severe illness, Donne wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623-1624), a prose work in which he treated the themes of death and human relationships; it contains these famous lyrics.

It is almost certain that Donne would have become a bishop in 1630 but for his poor health. During his final years he delivered a number of his most notable sermons, including the so-called funeral sermon, Death's Duell (1631), delivered less than two months before his death in London.

IV

DONNE'S ACHIEVEMENT

The poetry of Donne is characterized by complex imagery and irregularity of form. He frequently employed the conceit, an elaborate metaphor making striking syntheses of apparently unrelated objects or ideas. His intellectuality, introspection, and use of colloquial diction, seemingly un poetic but always uniquely precise in meaning and connotation, make his poetry boldly divergent from the smooth, elegant verse of his day. The content of his love poetry, often both cynical and sensuous, represents a reaction against the sentimental Elizabethan sonnet, and this work influenced the attitudes of the Cavalier poets. Those 17th-century religious poets sometimes referred to as the metaphysical poets, including Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan, drew much inspiration from the imagery and spirituality of Donne's religious poetry. Donne was almost forgotten during the 18th century, but interest in his work developed during the 19th century, and his popularity reached new heights after the 1920s, when Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot acknowledged his influence. Donne also wrote the Anniversaries, an elegy in two parts (1611-1612); collections of essays; and six collections of sermons.

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John Keats

I  INTRODUCTION

John Keats (1795-1821), major English poet, despite his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. Keats’s poetry describes the beauty of the natural world and art as the vehicle for his poetic imagination. His skill with poetic imagery and sound reproduces this sensuous experience for his reader. Keats’s poetry evolves over his brief career from this love of nature and art into a deep compassion for humanity. He gave voice to the spirit of Romanticism in literature when he wrote, “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination.” Twentieth-century poet T. S. Eliot judged Keats's letters to be 'the most notable and the most important ever written by any English Poet,” for their acute reflections on poetry, poets, and the imagination.

II EARLY LIFE

Keats was born in north London, England. He was the eldest son of Thomas Keats, who worked at a livery stable, and Frances (Jennings) Keats. The couple had three other sons, one of whom died in infancy, and a daughter. Thomas Keats died in 1804, as a result of a riding accident. Frances Keats died in 1810 of tuberculosis, the disease that also took the lives of her three sons.

From 1803 to 1811 Keats attended school. Toward the end of his schooling, he began to read widely and even undertook a prose translation of the Aeneid from the Latin. After he left school at the age of 16, Keats was apprenticed to a surgeon for four years. During this time his interest in poetry grew. He wrote his first poems in 1814 and passed his medical and druggist examinations in 1816.

III LIFE AS A POET

In May 1816 Keats published his first poem, the sonnet 'O Solitude,' marking the beginning of his poetic career. In writing a sonnet, a 14-line poem with a strict rhyme scheme, Keats sought to take his place in the tradition established by great classical, European, and British epic poets. The speaker of this poem first expresses hope that, if he is to be alone, it will be in “Nature’s Observatory”; he then imagines the “highest bliss” to be writing poetry in nature rather than simply observing nature. In another sonnet published the same year, 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,' Keats compares reading translations of poetry to awe-inspiring experiences such as an astronomer discovering a new planet or explorers first seeing the Pacific Ocean. In “Sleep and Poetry,” a longer poem from 1816, Keats articulates the purpose of poetry as he sees it: “To soothe the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” Within a year of his first publications Keats had abandoned medicine, turned exclusively to writing poetry, and entered the mainstream of contemporary English poets. By the end of 1816 he had met poet and journalist Leigh Hunt, editor of the literary magazine that published his poems. He had also met the leading romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

“Endymion,” written between April and November 1817 and published the following year, is thought to be Keats's richest although most unpolished poem. In the poem, the mortal hero Endymion's quest for the goddess Cynthia serves as a metaphor for imaginative longing—the poet’s quest for a muse, or divine inspiration.

Following “Endymion,” Keats struggled with his assumptions about the power of poetry and philosophy to affect the suffering he saw in life. In June of 1818, Keats went on a physically demanding walking tour of England’s Lake District and Scotland, perhaps in search of inspiration for an epic poem. His journey was cut short by the illness of his brother Tom. Keats returned home and nursed his brother through the final stages of tuberculosis. He threw himself into writing the epic “Hyperion,” he wrote to a friend, to ease himself of Tom’s “countenance, his voice and feebleness.'

An epic is a long narrative poem about a worthy hero, written in elevated language; this was the principal form used by great poets before Keats. The subject of “Hyperion” is the fall of the primeval Greek gods, who are dethroned by the Olympians, a newer order of gods led by Apollo. Keats used this myth to represent history as the story of how grief and misery teach humanity compassion. The poem ends with the transformation of Apollo into the god of poetry, but Keats left the poem unfinished. His abandonment of the poem suggests that Keats was ready to return to a more personal theme: the growth of a poet's mind. Keats later described the poem as showing 'false beauty proceeding from art' rather than 'the true voice of feeling.' Tom’s death in December 1818 may have freed Keats from the need to finish “Hyperion.”

Two other notable developments took place in Keats’s life in the latter part of 1818. First, “Endymion,” published in April, received negative reviews by the leading literary magazines. Second, Keats fell in love with spirited, 18-year-old Fanny Brawne. Keats's passion for Fanny Brawne is perhaps evoked in 'The Eve of St. Agnes,' written in 1819 and published in 1820. In this narrative poem, a young man follows an elaborate plan to woo his love and wins her heart.

Keats’s great creative outpouring came in April and May of 1819, when he composed a group of five odes. The loose formal requirements of the ode—a regular metrical pattern and a shift in perspective from stanza to stanza—allowed Keats to follow his mind’s associations. Literary critics rank these works among the greatest short poems in the English language. Each ode begins with the speaker focusing on something—a nightingale, an urn, the goddess Psyche, the mood of melancholy, the season of autumn—and arrives at his greater insight into what he values.

In “Ode to a Nightingale,” the nightingale’s song symbolizes the beauty of nature and art. Keats was fascinated by the difference between life and art: Human beings die, but the art they make lives on. The speaker in the poem tries repeatedly to use his imagination to go with the bird’s song, but each time he fails to completely forget himself. In the sixth stanza he suddenly remembers what death means, and the thought of it frightens him back to earth and his own humanity.

In 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' the bride and bridegroom painted on the Grecian urn do not die. Their love can never fade, but both can they kiss and embrace. At the end of the poem, the speaker sees the world of art as cold rather than inviting.

The last two odes, 'Ode on Melancholy' and 'To Autumn,” show a turn in Keats’s ideas about life and art. He celebrates “breathing human passion” as more beautiful than either art or nature.

Keats never lived to write the poetry of 'the agonies, the strife of human hearts' to which he aspired. Some scholars suggest that his revision of “Hyperion,” close to the end of his life, measures what he learned about poetry. In the revision, 'The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream,' Keats boldly makes the earlier poem into the story of his own quest as poet. In a dream, the poem’s speaker must pass through death to enter a temple that receives only those who cannot forget the miseries of the world. Presiding over the shrine is Moneta, a prophetess whose face embodies many of the opposites that had long haunted Keats’s imagination—death and immortality, stasis and change, humankind’s goodness and darkness. The knowledge Moneta gives him defines Keats’s new mission and burden as a poet.

After September 1819, Keats produced little poetry. His money troubles, always pressing, became severe. Keats and Fanny Brawne became engaged, but with little prospect of marriage. In February 1820, Keats had a severe hemorrhage and coughed up blood, beginning a year that he called his “posthumous existence.” He did manage to prepare a third volume of poems for the press, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems.

In September 1820, Keats sailed to Italy, accompanied by a close friend. The last months of his life there were haunted by the prospect of death and the memory of Fanny Brawne.

Collected By:-

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O. Henry

O. Henry, pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), American writer of short stories, best known for his ironic plot twists and surprise endings. Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, O. Henry attended school only until age 15, when he dropped out to work in his uncle’s drugstore. During his 20s he moved to Texas, where he worked for more than ten years as a clerk and a bank teller. O. Henry did not write professionally until he reached his mid-30s, when he sold several pieces to the Detroit Free Press and the Houston Daily Post. In 1894 he founded a short-lived weekly humor magazine, The Rolling Stone.

In 1896 O. Henry was charged with embezzling funds from the First National Bank of Austin, Texas, where he had worked from 1891 to 1894. The amount of money was small and might have been an accounting error; however, he chose to flee to Honduras rather than stand trial. Learning that his wife was dying, he returned to Texas in 1897 and, after her death, turned himself in to authorities. He served three years of a five-year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio, where he first began to write short stories and use the pseudonym O. Henry.

Released from prison, O. Henry moved to New York City in 1901 and began writing full time. In his stories he made substantial use of his knowledge of Texas, Central America, and life in prison. He also became fascinated by New York street life, which provided a setting for many of his later stories. During the last ten years of his life, O. Henry became one of the most popular writers in America, publishing over 500 short stories in dozens of widely read periodicals.

O. Henry’s most famous stories, such as “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Furnished Room,” and “The Ransom of Red Chief,” make simple yet effective use of paradoxical coincidences to produce ironic endings. For example, in “The Gift of the Magi” a husband sells his watch to buy his wife a Christmas present of a pair of hair combs; unbeknownst to him, she cuts and sells her long hair to buy him a Christmas present of a new chain for his watch. His style of storytelling became a model not only for short fiction, but also for American motion pictures and television programs.

Writing at the rate of more than one story per week, O. Henry published ten collections of stories during a career that barely spanned a decade. They are Cabbages and Kings (1904), The Four Million (1906), Heart of the West (1907), The Trimmed Lamp (1907), The Gentle Grafter (1908), The Voice of the City (1908), Options (1909), Roads of Destiny (1909), Whirligigs (1910), and Strictly Business (1910). The collections Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912), and Waifs and Strays (1917) were published after his death. In 1919 the O. Henry Memorial Awards for the best American short stories published each year were founded by the Society of Arts and Sciences. The Complete Works of O. Henry was published in 1953.

O. Henry

O. Henry is the pseudonym used by American writer William Sydney Porter. He is known for his witty short stories, which often offer a surprise ending. One of his most famous works is The Gift of the Magi (1906).

Collected By:-

M.H.Zafras Ahamed

B.A & H.N.D. in English

SEUSL & SLIATE

E-mail:- safrassiya@gmail.com, safrassiya@yahoo.com

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Robert Burns

I		INTRODUCTION

Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scottish poet and writer of traditional Scottish folk songs, whose works are known and loved wherever the English language is read.

II		EARLY LIFE

Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, January 25, 1759. He was the eldest of seven children born to William Burness, a struggling tenant farmer, and his wife, Agnes Broun. Although poverty limited his formal education, Burns read widely in English literature and the Bible and learned to read French. He was encouraged in his self-education by his father, and his mother acquainted him with Scottish folk songs, legends, and proverbs. Arduous farm work and undernourishment in his youth permanently injured his health, leading to the rheumatic heart disease from which he eventually died. He went in 1781 to Irvine to learn flax dressing, but when the shop burned down, he returned home penniless. He had, meanwhile, composed his first poems. The poet's father died in 1784, leaving him as head of the family. He and his brother Gilbert rented Mossgiel Farm, near Mauchline, but the venture proved a failure.

III		FIRST VERNACULAR POEMS

In 1784 Burns read the works of the Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson. Under his influence and that of Scottish folk tradition and older Scottish poetry, he became aware of the literary possibilities of the Scottish regional dialects. During the next two years he produced most of his best-known poems, including “The Cotter's Saturday Night,””Hallowe'en,””To a Daisy,” and “To a Mouse.” In addition, he wrote “The Jolly Beggars,” a cantata chiefly in standard English, which is considered one of his masterpieces. Several of his early poems, notably “Holy Willie's Prayer,” satirized local ecclesiastical squabbles and attacked Calvinist theology, bringing him into conflict with the church.

IV		SOCIAL NOTORIETY

Burns further angered church authorities by having several indiscreet love affairs. In 1785 he fell in love with Jean Armour, the daughter of a Mauchline building contractor. Jean soon became pregnant, and although Burns offered to make her his wife, her father forbade their marriage. Thereupon (1786) he prepared to immigrate to the West Indies. Before departing he arranged to issue by subscription a collection of his poetry. Published on July 31 in Kilmarnock in an edition of 600 copies, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was an immediate success. In September Burns abandoned the West Indies plan; the same month Jean became the mother of twins. He moved in the fall of 1786 to Edinburgh, where he was lionized by fashionable society. Charmed by Burns, the literati mistakenly believed him to be an untutored bard, a “Heavens-taught Plowman.” He resented their condescension, and his bristling independence, blunt manner of speech, and occasional social awkwardness alienated admirers.

While Burns was in Edinburgh, he successfully published a second, 3000-copy edition of Poems (1787), which earned him a considerable sum. From the proceeds he was able to tour (1787) the English border region and the Highlands and finance another winter in Edinburgh. In the meantime he had resumed his relationship with Jean Armour. The next spring she bore him another set of twins, both of whom died, and in April Burns and Armour were married.

In June 1788, Burns leased a poorly equipped farm in Ellisland, but the land proved unproductive. Within a year he was appointed to a position in the Excise Service, and in November 1791 he relinquished the farm.

V		LATER SONGS AND BALLADS

Burns's later literary output consisted almost entirely of songs, both original compositions and adaptations of traditional Scottish ballads and folk songs. He contributed some 200 songs to Scots Musical Museum (6 volumes, 1783-1803), a project initiated by the engraver and music publisher James Johnson. Beginning in 1792 Burns wrote about 100 songs and some humorous verse for Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, compiled by George Thomson. Among his songs in this collection are such favorites as “Auld Lang Syne,””Comin' Thro' the Rye,””Scots Wha Hae,””A Red, Red Rose,””The Banks o' Doon,” and “John Anderson, My Jo.”

After the outbreak of the French Revolution, Burns became an outspoken champion of the Republican cause. His enthusiasm for liberty and social justice dismayed many of his admirers; some shunned or reviled him. After Franco-British relations began to deteriorate, he curbed his radical sympathies, and in 1794, for patriotic reasons, he joined the Dumfriesshire Volunteers. Burns died in Dumfries, July 21, 1796.

A memorial edition of Burn's poems was published for the benefit of his wife and children. Its editor, the physician James Currie, a man of narrow sympathies, represented the poet as a drunkard and a reprobate, and his biased judgment did much to perpetuate an unjustly harsh and distorted conception of the poet.

Burns touched with his own genius the traditional folk songs of Scotland, transmuting them into great poetry, and he immortalized its countryside and humble farm life. He was a keen and discerning satirist who reserved his sharpest barbs for sham, hypocrisy, and cruelty. His satirical verse, once little appreciated, has in recent decades been recognized widely as his finest work. He was also a master of the verse-narrative technique, as exemplified in “Tam o'Shanter.” Finally, his love songs, perfectly fitted to the tunes for which he wrote them, are, at their best, unsurpassed.

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Walter de La Mare (1873-1956),

Walter de La Mare (1873-1956), English poet, anthologist, and novelist. Walter John De la Mare was born in Charlton, Kent, and educated at Saint Paul's School, London. In 1908 a royal grant enabled him to devote himself entirely to writing. De la Mare's writings have an eerie, fantastic quality, which serves as a means of entry into a world of deeper reality. His perceptions endow his work with charm and candor. Among his writings are the collections of verse Songs of Childhood (1902), The Listeners and Other Poems (1912), and O Lovely England (1953); the long poem The Traveller (1946); the novels The Return (1910) and Memoirs of a Midget (1921); and Collected Tales (1949). De la Mare also compiled Come Hither (1923; reprinted 1957), an anthology of English verse primarily for children. De la Mare is remembered as a poet for adults and children whose work was idiosyncratic, technically accomplished, and possessed of a style uniquely his own.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), English poet. Rupert Chawner Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, and educated at King's College, University of Cambridge. While serving with the British Royal Naval Division during World War I, Brooke died of blood poisoning in Greece. His untimely death, his great personal attraction, and the charm of his verse made him a symbol of all the gifted youth killed in that war. His first collection Poems was published in 1911; “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” Brooke's tribute to a lovely village near Cambridge, appeared in 1912. The poet's most famous work, the sonnet sequence 1914 and Other Poems, was published in the year of his death. These poems continue the boyish idealism of his earlier poetry. In The Letters of Rupert Brooke (1968) are found poignant views on the tragedy and waste of war. His experiences in the United States and Canada are described in Letters from America (1916).

Rupert Chawner Brooke (1887 - 1915)

English poet Rupert Chawner Brooke died at the age of 28 while serving with the British Royal Naval Division during World War I. As a result of his early death and unfulfilled literary promise, Brooke became a symbol of the talented youth killed in the war. Brooke’s early writings express the initial patriotism of British citizens at the outset of the war, but his final works describe the war’s tragedy and cruelty.

 

"The Soldier"

Patriotism

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

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William Butler Yeats

I  INTRODUCTION

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist, and Nobel laureate, who was a leader of the Irish Renaissance and one of the foremost writers of the 20th century.

II  DEVELOPMENT

Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, the son of the noted Irish painter John Butler Yeats. He was schooled in London and in Dublin, where he studied painting, and vacationed in county Sligo, which inspired his enthusiasm for Irish tradition. In 1887 he moved with his family to London and became interested in Hinduism, theosophy, and occultism. He wrote lyrical, symbolic poems on pagan Irish themes, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1893), in the romantic melancholy tone he believed characteristic of the ancient Celts. He also wrote The Celtic Twilight (1893) and The Secret Rose (1897), which deal with Irish legends. On a visit to Ireland he met the beautiful Irish patriot Maud Gonne, whom he loved unrequitedly the rest of his life. She inspired much of his early work and drew him into the Irish nationalist movement for independence.

Yeats returned to Ireland in 1896. He became a close friend of the nationalist playwright Lady Gregory, whom he visited often at her estate at Coole Parke and with whom he traveled in Italy. With Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory he helped found what the famous Abbey Theatre became in 1904. As its director and dramatist, he helped develop the theater into one of the leading theatrical companies of the world, and a center of the Irish literary revival called the Irish Renaissance. Among the plays he created for it were Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), a nationalist prose drama with Maud Gonne as the lead, and Deirdre (1907), a tragedy in verse.

In his poetry of this period, such as The Wing Among the Reeds (1899), The Shadowy Waters (1900), and The Green Helmet (1910), Yeats strove to abandon his earlier self-conscious softness and facility. His work, now less mystical and symbolic, became clearer and leaner.

III LATER YEARS

As Yeats grew older, he turned to practical politics, serving in the Senate of the new Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. He also accomplished the feat, rare among poets, of deepening and perfecting his complex styles as the years advanced. His later writings are generally acknowledged to be his best. They were influenced by Georgie Hyde-Lees, his wife since 1917, who had a medium's gift for automated writing. A Vision (1925) is an elaborate attempt in prose to explain the mythology, symbolism, and philosophy that Yeats used in much of his work. It discusses the eternal opposites of objectivity and subjectivity, art and life, soul and body that are the basis of his philosophy. Other poetic works in this vein are The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1933).

Yeats also wrote short plays on the Celtic legendary hero Cuchulain, combined as Four Plays for Dancers (1921). They were strongly influenced by the nō drama of the Japanese court (see Japanese Drama), which was being translated in 1913 by the American poet Ezra Pound. Yeats's plays were designed more for small, appreciative audiences in aristocratic drawing rooms than for the middle-class public in commercial Dublin theaters. He derived much of his innovative technique, such as the use of ritual, masks, chorus, and dance, from the nō drama. In these plays Yeats brought poetry back to theater, from which it had long been absent, and fused strict realism with mythic vision to create poetic dramas as spare and pregnant with mysterious meaning as the images of a dream.

Continually revising his work, Yeats recounted episodes from his life in his Autobiographies (1927) and Dramatis Personae (1936). Two later collections are A Full Moon in March (1935) and Last Poems and Two Plays (1939). He received the Nobel Prize in 1923. Yeats died in Roquebrune, France, on January 18, 1939, and was buried in Sligo, Ireland.

Collected By:-

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B.A & H.N.D. in English

SEUSL & SLIATE

E-mail:- safrassiya@gmail.com, safrassiya@yahoo.com

Website: - http://explore-safras.blogspot.com

William Shakespeare

No author is quoted more often than William Shakespeare. His is the most famous name in all of English literature. What makes him so great?

EARLY LIFE

Shakespeare was born in 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, a prosperous town in England. His local grammar school had a demanding curriculum. At age 18, he married Anne Hathaway. They had a daughter, Susanna, and twins—Hamnet and Judith. At some point, Shakespeare left Stratford for London, to work in the theater.

PLAYWRIGHT IN LONDON

Shakespeare made his reputation with 38 glorious plays. He wrote about two plays a year, while living in London. He never published the plays, but he saw them performed at the Globe and other London theaters.

Shakespeare’s plays were well liked by audiences. But we know little about his life in London. Later, he retired in Stratford as a prominent citizen. He died in 1616. Two actors saw that his plays were printed. A collection called the First Folio came out seven years after his death.

A WRITER FOR ALL TIME

Shakespeare was a fabulous storyteller. His plays entertained audiences. Most people of his time considered his plays merely popular entertainments, much as we think of the movies today.

Shakespeare was also a profound thinker. He created a variety of true-to-life characters in his plays. These characters seem real because Shakespeare presented their viewpoints so well. The richness of his language is amazing. He even invented many words and phrases that are now common, including leapfrog, lonely, and watchdog.

Shakespeare’s plays reflect many aspects of human life. He wrote delightful comedies, such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It. He wrote plays about England’s kings that teach history in an entertaining way. The great tragedies explore flaws in human nature. These plays include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. In his spare time, he wrote poetry. His 154 sonnets are among the most famous love poems of all time.

ü  Prosperous – wealthy, rich

ü  Prominent – famous, well known

ü  Profound – deep, thoughtful

Delightful – wonderful, enjoyable                                                                           Prepared by:-

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William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet, one of the most accomplished and influential of England's romantic poets, whose theories and style created a new tradition in poetry.

Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, and educated at Saint John's College, University of Cambridge. He developed a keen love of nature as a youth, and during school vacation periods he frequently visited places noted for their scenic beauty. In the summer of 1790 he took a walking tour through France and Switzerland. After receiving his degree in 1791 he returned to France, where he became an enthusiastic convert to the ideals of the French Revolution (1789-1799). His lover Annette Vallon of Orleans bore him a daughter in December 1792, shortly before his return to England. Disheartened by the outbreak of hostilities between France and Great Britain in 1793, Wordsworth nevertheless remained sympathetic to the French cause.

Although Wordsworth had begun to write poetry while still a schoolboy, none of his poems was published until 1793, when An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches appeared. These works, although fresh and original in content, reflect the influence of the formal style of 18th-century English poetry. The poems received little notice, and few copies were sold.

Wordsworth's income from his writings amounted to little, but his financial problems were alleviated for a time when in 1795 he received a bequest of £900 from a close friend. Thereupon he and his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, went to live in Racedown, Dorsetshire. The two had always enjoyed a warmly sympathetic relationship, and Wordsworth relied greatly on Dorothy, his devoted confidante, for encouragement in his literary endeavors. Her mental breakdown in later years was to cause him great sorrow, as did the death of his brother John. William had met the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an enthusiastic admirer of his early poetic efforts, and in 1797 he and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden, Somersetshire, near Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. The move marked the beginning of a close and enduring friendship between the poets. In the ensuing period they collaborated on a book of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798.

This work is generally taken to mark the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English poetry. Wordsworth wrote almost all the poems in the volume, including the memorable “Tintern Abbey”; Coleridge contributed the famous “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Representing a revolt against the artificial classicism of contemporary English verse, Lyrical Ballads was greeted with hostility by most leading critics of the day.

In defense of his unconventional theory of poetry, Wordsworth wrote a “Preface” to the second edition of Ballads, which appeared in 1800 (actual date of publication, 1801). His premise was that the source of poetic truth is the direct experience of the senses. Poetry, he asserted, originates from “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Rejecting the contemporary emphasis on form and an intellectual approach that drained poetic writing of strong emotion, he maintained that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material of which poetry could and should be made. Far from conciliating the critics, the “Preface” served only to increase their hostility. Wordsworth, however, was not discouraged, continuing to write poetry that graphically illustrated his principles.

Before the publication of the “Preface,” Wordsworth and his sister had accompanied Coleridge to Germany in 1798 and 1799. There Wordsworth wrote several of his finest lyrical verses, the “Lucy” poems, and began The Prelude. This introspective account of his own development was completed in 1805 and, after substantial revision, published posthumously in 1850. Many critics rank it as Wordsworth's greatest work.

Returning to England, William and his sister settled in 1799 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Westmorland, the loveliest spot in the English Lake District. The poet Robert Southey as well as Coleridge lived nearby, and the three men became known as the Lake Poets. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, who is portrayed in the charming lyric “She Was a Phantom of Delight.” In 1807Poems in Two Volumes was published. The work contains much of Wordsworth's finest verse, notably the superb “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” the autobiographical narrative “Resolution and Independence,” and many of his well-known sonnets.

In 1813 Wordsworth obtained a sinecure as distributor of stamps for Westmorland at a salary of £400 a year. In the same year he and his family and sister moved to Rydal Mount, a few kilometers from Dove Cottage, and there the poet spent the remainder of his life, except for periodic travels.

Wordsworth's political and intellectual sympathies underwent a transformation after 1800. By 1810 his viewpoint was staunchly conservative. He was disillusioned by the course of events in France culminating in the rise of Napoleon; his circle of friends, including the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, also influenced him in the direction of orthodoxy.

As he advanced in age, Wordsworth's poetic vision and inspiration dulled; his later, more rhetorical, moralistic poems cannot be compared to the lyrics of his youth, although a number of them are illumined by the spark of his former greatness. Between 1814 and 1822 his publications included The Excursion (1814), a continuation of The Prelude but lacking the power and beauty of that work; The White Doe of Rylstone (1815); Peter Bell (1819); and Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822). Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems appeared in 1835, but after that Wordsworth wrote little more. Among his other poetic works are The Borderers: A Tragedy (1796; published 1842), Michael (1800), The Recluse (1800; published 1888), Laodamia (1815), and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent (1822). Wordsworth also wrote the prose works Convention of Cintra (1809) and A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England (1810; reprinted with additions, 1822).

Much of Wordsworth's easy flow of conversational blank verse has true lyrical power and grace, and his finest work is permeated by a sense of the human relationship to external nature that is religious in its scope and intensity. To Wordsworth, God was everywhere manifest in the harmony of nature, and he felt deeply the kinship between nature and the soul of humankind.

The tide of critical opinion turned in his favor after 1820, and Wordsworth lived to see his work universally praised. In 1842 he was awarded a government pension, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as poet laureate. Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount, April 23, 1850, and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard.

  

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, considered one of the foremost English romantic poets, composed flowing blank verse on the spirituality of nature and the wonders of human imagination. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807), Wordsworth considers the Platonic notion that humans forget all their knowledge at birth and spend the remainder of their lives recollecting, rather than learning. Wordsworth celebrates the child, who can enjoy an ecstatic communion with nature, and hopes that in adulthood people can eventually recover this ecstasy by heeding intuition. This excerpt is recited by an actor.

Collected By:-

M.H.Zafras Ahamed

B.A & H.N.D. in English

SEUSL & SLIATE

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