Alexander Pope was an 18th century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. It was in 1819 that a controversy arose over the question. Was Pope a poet? To have asked that in 1719 would have indicated that the questioner was ignorant; to have asked it a half...
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Since the beginning of his success as a creative force within the New Journalism movement in the late 1960s, Tom Wolfe has established himself as a major figure of American Letters. Born on March 2, 1931 in Richmond, Virginia, the son of an agronomy professor and a landscape designer discovered his enthusiasm for fiction and journalism even before high school and majored in English at Washington and Lee in 1951. Instead of further pursuing his studies or applying as a...
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The village lottery culminates in a violent murder each year, a bizarre ritual that suggests how dangerous tradition can be when people follow it blindly. Before we know what kind of lottery they’re conducting, the villagers and their preparations seem harmless, even quaint: they’ve appointed a rather pathetic man to lead the lottery, and children run about gathering stones in the town square. Everyone is seems preoccupied with a funny-looking black box, and the lottery consists of little more than...
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This was an odd moment for me to finally get around to reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, which has been waiting on my bookshelf for ages. Bursting with energy and appreciation for all living things, the book reminds me that I am not a farmer, that I am not a naturalist––not in the true sense of those words, anyway. It offers a snapshot of my former ambitions that, for whatever reason, did not motivate or entice me in the way...
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The Art of Being Ambiguous In his collection of short stories, Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges uses dreams, imagination and fantasy to establish ambiguity in his stories. With the use of juxtaposition and symbols, Borges blends a realm of dreams and imagination into the individual’s everyday worldly experiences. Through these devices, Borges commonly blurs the line between aspects of reality for his characters versus the constructs of his or her mind. By combining the real with the fictitious, Borges incorporates ambiguity...
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In the play, 'The Crucible' Arthur Miller writes about a fire and its representation of hysteria and a crucible to depict that in times of hysteria, making assumptions will only create additional chaos and paranoia by leading one further from the truth. The concept of fire through symbolism and a biblical allusion demonstrates that assumptions will only lead one further from the truth. In Act One, when Goody Putnam mentions the death of all her children but one, she justifies...
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Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle goes through a series of intense struggles experienced by a Lithuanian immigrant family who have migrated to the United States in hopes for a better life. Sinclair encompasses the realities the working-class experiences in the Urban America, he creates a sense of familiarity with the migrant family, making the struggles more deeply felt, ensuring that we empathize with the victims of the capitalist society. In his writing, Sinclair does not necessarily go through the concept of...
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In the poem “We Must Die” written by Claude Mckay, the deeper meaning behind his word choice and structure of sentences is presented starting from the beginning of the poem. What stuck out in this poem was the eeriness of the words and the images that linger in your head when you try to comprehend what the author is trying to say using symbolism and metaphors. Throughout the poem Claude Mckay reveals the theme of mortality and begins to expand...
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Chinua Achebe, emeritus professor of the University of Nigeria, one of the greatpioneers of modern African literature in English, who published several outstanding novels,among which Things Fall Apart (1958), has already become something like an Africanclassic, and who is not only known for his stories, essays, and children's books but also forhis award-winning poetry, has given us another very fine novel, Anthills of the Savannah.This is an extremely well-written and balanced novel about the ugly contrast betweenidealistic aspirations and violent...
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Like Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, and a few others, Eudora Welty endures in national memory as the perpetual senior citizen, someone tenured for decades as a silver-haired elder of American letters. Her abiding maturity made her seem, perhaps long before her time, perfectly suited to the role of our favorite maiden aunt. But when I visited Welty at her Jackson, Mississippi, home on a bright, hot July day in 1994, I got a glimpse of the girl she used to...
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Homer was an ancient Greek author and epic poet. He is the reputed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epic poems that are the foundational works of ancient Greek literature. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time: for example, in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Virgil refers to him as 'Poet sovereign', king of all poets; in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope acknowledges that Homer...
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In countries all across the globe, you can see disputes between political powers, causing the health and general wellbeing of the rest of the population to be offset, or cause it to differentiate in some way. William Golding saw this when he marched into Nazi Germany. He saw an entire population allowing the mistreatment of a large group of people, which surely was being allowed by the government. This brought out the worst in people, making friendly neighborhoods weapons of...
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Nature can be a therapist, for example, walking in the woods, listening to the leaves agitating themselves in the breeze, a sense of seclusion and tranquility can be gained; nature can also be destructive, for instance, floods, hurricane and avalanche deprive thousands of lives. In 1979, at the sight of a total eclipse, Annie Dillard has learned about the unpredictability and strong power of nature, thus emphasizing the significance of communication to create something new for the world in order...
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Alexander Pope constructs The Rape of the Lock as a social satire as he utilises satirical techniques to comment upon contemporary society. This passage displays how Pope toys with structure and form to parody the popular genre of the epic by creating a mock-heroic piece, voicing how society focuses on such trivialities, as opposed to truly important matters. In addition, the passage exaggerates the cutting of Belinda’s locks to be symbolic, to expose the male control over female sexuality, forming...
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Joseph Campbell’s analysis of world mythology in his book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, reveals the concept of the Monomyth, an idea that states that all myths contain a basic, near universal structure. Dave Whomsley further dissected Joseph Campbell’s recipe for stories in his short summary titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces The book by Joseph Campbell, discussed by Dave Whomsley and refined it into three chunks with each holding four more specific steps thus resulting in twelve...
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Chaucer is referred not only as father of English poetry but also as father of English language and literature. Even today English literature is incomplete without reading him. Every student when get admission in English literature he has to read poetry from the very beginning. For this, he reads Chaucer’s poetry in detail especially his book “The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales”. Chaucer, if is known today, then its reason is his poem “The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales”. It...
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Matthew Arnold was born in 1822 in Laleham-on-Thames in Middlesex County, England. Due to some temporary childhood leg braces, and a competitiveness within the large family of nine young Matthew earned the nickname 'Crabby'. His disposition was described as active, but since his athletic pursuits were somewhat hindered by this correction of a 'bent leg', intellectual pursuits became more accessible to him. This may have led him to a literary career, but both his parents were literary (his mother wrote...
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Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, the daughter of Christian Webb Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty, Eudora Welty grew up in a close-knit and loving family. From her father she inherited a “love for all instruments that instruct and fascinate,” from her mother a passion for reading and for language. With her brothers, Edward Jefferson Welty and Walter Andrews Welty, she shared bonds of devotion, camaraderie, and humor. Nourished by such a background, Welty became perhaps the most distinguished graduate...
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Wholeness then can be understood as variety, versatility and complexity. Self-development occurs through the conscious integration of new facets, by our openness to change and by a certain control of our thoughts, emotions and inclinations. Instead of using words like uniformity or harmony, we should rather speak of integrated complexity. If parts of our selves are not integrated or if they are emphasised in a one-sided way, they prove to be an obstacle in achieving wholeness. They need to engage...
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Tim O'Brien is widely regarded as a leading figure in contemporary American literature. A veteran of the Vietnam War, he is primarily known for recounting his experience in Vietnam with careful attention to literary details. Many critics consider him the most prominent author within the field of Vietnam War writers. His memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me up and Ship Me Home (1973), is praised as a masterful chronicle of the Vietnam War experience while Going...
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Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is considered by some to be one of the best examples of confessional poetry ever published. In the poem, Plath compares the horrors of Nazism to the horrors of her own life, all of which are centered on the death of her father. Although autobiographical in nature, “Daddy” gives detailed insight into Sylvia Plath’s conflicting emotions by intertwining fact and fiction into an alternate reality through the use of metaphors and symbolism. The poem ultimately reveals the...
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When Shirley Jackson's chilling story 'The Lottery' was first published in 1948 in The New Yorker, it generated more letters than any work of fiction the magazine had ever published. Readers were furious, disgusted, occasionally curious, and almost uniformly bewildered. The public outcry over the story can be attributed, in part, to The New Yorker's practice at the time of publishing works without identifying them as fact or fiction. Readers were also presumably still reeling from the horrors of World...
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Hardy is primarily a poet, and nowhere does he have more claims for his recognition as a poet in his fiction than in the imaginative use of style. Here the poet is at his best. His poetic genius coupled with the power of employing imaginative words and phrases has made poetry of his prose. The themes which Hardy employs in his novels are again essentially poetic, as the element of sorrow has always been a spur to the imagination. As...
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Early in the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem about the legendary Trojan War, there occurs a famous digression known as the catalogue of ships, which names all the Greek leaders and contingents who came to fight at Troy. These verses reflect a central claim of epic poetry – that through the inspiration of the Muses, daughters of Memory, it can preserve the knowledge of people and the events of the past – a formidable power in the non-literate, oral cultures in...
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Geoffrey Chaucer the outstanding English poet before Shakespeare and “the first finder of our language.” His The Canterbury Tales ranks as one of the greatest poetic works in English. He also contributed importantly in the second half of the 14th century to the management of public affairs as courtier, diplomat, and civil servant. In that career he was trusted and aided by three successive kings—Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV. But it is his avocation—the writing of poetry—for which...
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I’ve said before that the Church Fathers are unanimous in their belief in regenerative baptism: that is, they believe that Baptism actually saves us (as 1 Peter 3:21 explicitly says), by causing us to be born again by water and the Spirit; that it actually washes away our sins, and creates in us a clean heart, enabling us to approach God all of which is prophesied by Ezekiel. It’s because of this belief that the Church permits infant baptism: baptism...
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As a well respected American writer of many extraordinary texts, Edward Albee was able to demonstrate many modernist and absurdist characteristics in his play “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?”. His play was able to give an insight to the readers about what had influenced the play. This play is more than just a story about the imperfect marriage between the two main characters; when analyzed more thoroughly it can be seen to have a deeper understanding of the 1950s. Edward...
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Before the Victorian era, there were very few famous female poets. However, during this era, many important female poets were born, such as Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Browning and Christina Rossetti. Christina Rossetti was one of the most important female poets in the nineteenth century. She was viewed as a typical Victorian poet, who frequently wrote about love and faith. This poet wrote many excellent poems such as “Remember” which is a sonnet that reflects her beliefs on love, death and...
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A hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair, the muckraker and socialist, brought out “The Jungle,” a sensationally grim exposé of the noisome squalors and dangers of the meatpacking industry. Dedicated to “the workingmen of America,” the book became an overnight best-seller. At the White House, Theodore Roosevelt, who had watched soldiers die from eating rotten meat during the Spanish-American War, wrote a three-page appreciation and critique of the novel, and sent it to Sinclair with an invitation to visit him. (Those...
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Robert Lynd, an Irishman, is one of the great contemporary essayists of English literature. He was born on 20 April 1879 in Belfast. He received a Protestant education in Belfast and began his literary work with the drawings of Irish life. In 1901 Robert moved to London where he actively participated in various newspapers. He started his profession as a journalist on The Northern Whig in Belfast and later started to write under the pen name Y.Y. (Ys, or wise)....
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