Thursday, June 8, 2023
The Lucy Mystery
The five Lucy poems composed by Wordsworth four were printed in Lyrical Ballads of 1800. These four poems, all in the lyrical vein, are sober meditations on the death or apprehension of death of a girl who was the object of a deep and tender love. The love is not impassioned but meditated in...
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Friday, June 2, 2023
The Concept and Nature of Hell in Milton’s Peradise Lost
Modem critics have held many different views of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Among these the major objection has been that the Book, a twelve volume epic, is militantly Christian and does not adhere to diverse viewpoints of the modern age. Milton’s religious views are actually a mirror of the age in...
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Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Gods of Paradisiac Languour
The long-drawn ten years’ war in Troy has ended. The ship of Odysseus (that is, Ulysses) sets sail for homeward journey. The mariners sight land. A few of them go to explore the region. The air, languid, all quiet reigned. The streams seemed slumberous in movement. It was a land where nothing...
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Saturday, May 27, 2023
Varied Symbols in Anton Chekov’s Cherry Orchard
A classical dramatic literature, Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard serves as a fluid and complex symbol that has different meanings with different classes of people and also with the changing times. At one time when the cherry orchard was in bloom and laden with fruits, it was a source of great...
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Thursday, May 25, 2023
Suicidal Romance or Romantic Suicide
A while back, I finished reading Gustave Flaubert’s famous controversial novel, Madame Bovary. It struck me as an ingenuous work of art with a seminal depiction of the reality of the mid-nineteenth century French cultural mores and ethics. Published in 1857, after the novel was acquitted by the...
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Sunday, April 2, 2023
Dryden, the Satirist par-excellence
Dryden's Mac Flecknoe was written in 1678 and published in 1682. The title of the poem was the result of a literary and personal quarrel between Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, a minor playwright. The play is full of allusions to literary figures, plays, poems and publishers. Mac Flecknoe is a...
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Sunday, March 26, 2023
Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight (1798) opens with an atmosphere outside of Coleridge’s home with the frost performing its ministry, making everything so desolate and bitterly cold that the owlets cry out loud; the eerie surrounding is otherwise ‘too calm’ as to vex the concealed musings...
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Tuesday, March 7, 2023
How to make our latent potential patent
The inherent resident quarter of all beings is universal: a body is otherwise a corpse without the spirit as its body-current or the life-giving force. At the outside, the body is one extremity; in between are progresssively, the layers of our diffentiated existence -- the mind (emotions, feelings),...
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Saturday, March 4, 2023
Comedy lies in the artifice of Wit-Combat
Much Ado About Nothing is the nearest approach to the Comedy of Errors as practised by William Congreve, where sentiment or passion is conveyed either by indifference or downright contradiction. The hero and the heroine of Much Ado, Benedick and Beatrice, by their very bickerings, assume a social...
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Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Tracing the historical development of Poetry
“A WAKE, Æolian lyre, awake, And give to rapture all thy trembling strings, From Helicon's harmonious springs... “ This is the poet Thomas Gray’s (1716 – 1771) Invocation to the Æolian lyre, that is, the lyre of the ancient Greek poet Pindar who lived between the 6 th and 5 th century B.C. Gray here...
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