English Literature

By
Prof. Aishwarya Puri
DRama
• Old English poetry is classified into two categories, National and Christian. National
poems are those that deal with the subjects drawn from the customs and conditions of
English life, while the Christian poems deal with the subjects of ecclesiastical and Biblical
matter.
• The Wanderer is also a long poem, comprising 115 lines in the elegiac strain. It deals
with the sufferings of a man who has lost his lord. Lonely and companionless, he
wanders about and goes to the sea seeking protection and safety. In Deor's Laments the
writer laments his misfortunes which he suffered at the hands of different people.
• English poetry has a long and distinguished history. Poets began writing in Old English as
early as the seventh century, but the most famous Old English poem, Beowulf, has been
dated to the eighth century.One of the earliest in the tradition of religious poetry is
Caedmon aboutwhom Baeda (or Bede) writes lovingly in his History.
• Cynewulf lived and worked as one of the greatest Anglo-Saxon poets and enriched
English poetry with his wonderful poems. At least four of these poems bear his signature
in ruins. These four poems are Fates of the Apostles, the Christ, Juliana and the Elene.
His signatures are put either in the middle or at the end of the poems.
• In the old English poem, The Dream of the Holy Rood, the poet sees a miraculous tree
alternately glittering with jewels and dripping blood. The tree speaks to the poet and
narrates its story of how it was struck down as it was standing on the verge of the forest
and how the young brave Hero was elevated on to it.
• Geoffrey Chaucer draws his pilgrims from various classes and professions of society-
Estate Satire.
• Gower is, however, better known for his lone English work, a long poem Confessio
Amantis written in 14000 Octosyllabic lines. Confessio Amantis, or The Lover's
Confessions was completed in 1390s, and the poet revised it twice, in the second
version the dedicating prefaceto King Richard was replaced by the praise the Henry
Laucreta.
• The great allegorical vision-poem Piers the Plowman, or The Vision of William
Concerning Piers the Plowman has been written by William Langland.
• There were many poets writing in English during the Middle Ages. Poetry from this time
was often allegory, religious or romantic in nature. For example, Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, Piers Plowman by William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of poetic
stories, The Canterbury Tales.
• Chaucer's literary career is divided into three main phases, namely, Italian, French and
English. The House of Fame is written in the dream-vision technique in which he imitates
Dante's Divine Comedy particularly in Books Iland III.
• Ballads or Narrative Songs were one of the most popular forms of literature in the
Medieval Age. Medieval Ballads sang the narratives of common folks and of characters
and events from legends and folklores, thus being popular amongst all classes.
• In 1557, a London publisher, Tottel, collected a number of poems, previously unprinted, in
a volume entitled Tottel's Miscellany of Songs and Sonnettes, written by the right
honourable Lorde Henry Howard, Late Earle of Surrey. "This book contained 271 poems,
of which forty were attributed to Howard, ninety-six to Sir Thomas Wyatt, forty to
Nicholas Grimald and ninety-five to other unspecified authors".
• The word 'Sonnet' derives from the Italian Sonetto (meaning 'a little sound'). Sir
Thomas Wyatt (1503-1543) was a great classical scholar who claimed Juvenal to be
his master and translated Plutarch and Petrarch, had introduced Dante's Terza rima.
• The poetry of the Renaissance has all the freshness and vigour of a youthful race.
English poetry is interesting more for its promise than for the performance.
• The poetry of the age opens with the publication of the volume known as Tottel's
Miscellany (1557).
• Edmund Spenser was born about 1552 and died in 1599 on January 16 in Kings
Street, Westminster. His publications include The Shepherd's Calendar,
Prothalamion, Epithalamion, The Fairie Queene, etc.
• Sir Philip Sidney was also one of the famous sonneteer of the age. The Astrophel
and Stella sonnets appeared in 1593 numbering one hundred and eight and eleven
songs which deals with the theme of Petrarchan Love where the poet-lover loves
the lady from distance and is not able to declare his love for her; but it does not
deter him from writing poetry in his love.
• Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets which were published by Thomas
Thorpe in 1609. It has been speculated that out of these, first
seventeen advise a young man to marry in order to gain immortality
through his children and continue with the promise of immortality
through his poetry.
• Sonnets 127-154 express his sentiments for a dark lady who is married
to a man called William.
• Donne including other poets of the 17 Century, who wrote according to the new
standards set by him, are generally known as 'metaphysical Poets' a term invented by
Dryden and adopted by Johnson. The fashion inaugurated by Donne appeared also in
the literature of Spain and Italy and its imaginative experienced by John Donne
affected other poets after him. These were mainly metaphysical poets such as Henry
Vaughan, George Herbert and Richard Crashaw.
• Writing about Donne, John Dryden remarked that Donne "affects the Metaphysics ...
in his amorous verses where nature only shall reign; and perplexes the mind of the
fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their heats".
• Further Samuel Johnson called them metaphysical group but in derogatory way and
concerning their poetry far from significance.
• Cavalier poets was a group of English poets associated with Charles I and his exiled
son. They used to write on the courtly themes of beauty, love, and loyalty revealing
their indebtedness to both Ben Jonson and John Donne. The leading Cavalier poets
were Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling, and Thomas Carew.
• The 18 century is sometimes called the Augustan age. The art of satire is observed to
have emerged during the eighteenth century. The major poets of satirical verses are
Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Alexander Popeand Samuel Johnson, and the Irish poet
Jonathan Swift.
• Towards the end of the 18 century, poetry began to move away from the strict Augustan
ideals and a new emphasis on sentiment and the feelings of the poet. The leading
exponents of this new trend include Thomas Gray, William Cowper, George Crabbe,
Christopher Smart and Robert Burns as well as the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith. These
poets can be seen as paving the way for the Romantic movement.
• William Cowper wrote verses that gave voice to humanitarian concern such as The Task in
which he laments India's sufferings under Warren Hastings. Cowper uses heroic couplets
as well as blank verse with equal felicity and virtuosity.
• The romantic movement was aided by the publication of Bishop Percy's The Reliques of
Ancient English Poetry (1765) which was a collection of the ancient ballads. One of those
who showed direct influence to the Reliques was Thomas Chatterton. Another poet,
James Macpherson wrote a small poetic volume entitled Ossian steeped in melancholy
and sentimentalism.
• The main poets of the Romantic movement (1798-1832) were Wiliam Blake, William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John
Keats. The birth of English Romanticism is often dated to the publication in 1798 of
Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.
• The outstanding example of the English pastoral elegy is John Milton's "Lycidas"
(1638), written on the death of Edward King, a College friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley's
"Adonais" (1821), on the death of the poet John Keats, and Matthew Arnold's
"Thyrsis"(1867), on the death of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
• Wordsworth presents his gift of the "egotistical sublime" in his remarkable poetic art
The Prelude. The first version of the poem was completed in 1805 but Wordsworth
kept on rewriting certain parts of it throughout his life and the final version came out
in 1850 immediately after his death.
• Coleridge's contact with Wordsworth brought about a degree of discipline that
helped him attain intellectual growth. He also gave up his youthful social idealism
and gave himself away to "life, passion, and freedom hitherto lacking in vie work".
• During this period of reawakening he wrote Tree Bower, Frost at Midnight, Fears in
Solitude (9797-8). This was followed by what is generally acknowledged as his best
work The Rime of Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla Khan showing his
"outstanding characteristic as a poet of mystery” and intellectual simplicity.
• Shelley showed radical bent of mind quite early when at college he voiced his
difference from the official position on religious matters which culminated in his
writing the pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheism leading to his expulsion from the
University of Oxford. In 1817 he had published the poem The Revolt of Islam.
• Shelley also wrote a poetic play Cenci (1819) modelled rather on Shakespeare with
touches of realistic treatment that lends great dramatic force to the character that
was rarely seen in English over the past century.
• The Victorian age spans from 1832 to 1901. The Victorian era was a period of great
political, social and economic change. The Empire recovered from the loss of the
American colonies and entered a period of rapid expansion. The major High Victorian
poets were Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
• Robert Browning is a Victorian poet who is famous for his dramatic monologues.
Dramatic Monologue as a genre finds its best exploration in Browning's creativity and
the poems we have in syllabus are greatest examples of it, whether it is "Fra Lippo
Lippi" or "Porphyria's Lover" or "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church.
• The Wreck of the Deutsch land (1875) is Hopkins' longest poem commemorating the
drowning of the five nuns as the ship 'Deutschland' went down at the mouth of the
Thames. It is a tragic poem.
• Modern Poetry is meant for end of the century' which is closely linked the movement inaugurated by
the Decadent poets of France and the movement called Aestheticism in England. The three
movement, symbolism, decadence and aestheticism were prominent during the age.
• Aestheticism, the art movement emphasized on aesthetic values, i.e."art for art's sake" which gained
support from Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. The poems of the first half of the twentieth century break
away from the romantic tendencies of the earlier period and present life in its darkest essence the
modernist anxieties and worries. The poets such as T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats mark the greatest
heights that the modernist poetry could achieve which brings to the fore the anxieties of the age and
tries to provide a just representation of the modern man.
• The poets such as WH. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lew poets such MacNeice, are popularly
known as the Oxford Poets. These poets were graduates from Oxford and they had been great friends
and supported each other's writing and artistic Skills. W. H. Auden is the leader of the Oxford Poets
and therefore he showed much awareness about the disintegrating war torn civilization of the early
twentieth century.
• Stephen Harold Spender was an English poet, translator literary critic and also an editor. In his finest
poems, Stephen Spender showed much of political concern as well as a deep empathy for basic
human condition.
• As a poet, TS Eliot drew from many different sources to gather his material. He was
deeply influenced by some famous personalities of the past and of the modern scene.
Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Ben Jonson, Arnold, etc. in general, and Donne and the
metaphysical poets particularly added up in shaping Eliot'smind.
• The 1930s also saw the emergence of a home-grown English surrealist poetry whose
main exponents were David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, George Barker, and Philip
O'Connor. These poets turned to French models rather than either the New Country
poets or English-language modernism, and their work was to prove of importance to
later English experimental poets as it broadened the scope of the English avant-garde
tradition.
• The Georgian Poets are poets such as Rupert Brooke, John Drinkwater, W.W. Gibson,
Harold Monroe and Edward Marsh. These poets were against the decadent transitional
poetry of the earlier generations and paved path for the modernist poetry, though it is
not that they are the ones who lead the movement of modernism, but they are the
ones who were distinct from the earlier poets and also that of the modernist poets.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James
Russell Lowell, and William Cullen Bryant are the American poets who constituted the
fireside group of poets. The fireside poets were the first group of American poets to
rival British poets in popularity in either country.
• In the 1940s and 50s, a new generation of poets rebelled against the conventions of
mainstream American life and writing. They came to be known as the Beat Poets. Beat
poets sought to write in an authentic, unfettered style. "First thought, best thought"
was how central Beat poet Allen Ginsberg described. Other important poets were Jack
Kerouc, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder.