Poetry Portefolio

The Poetry
Portefolio
Dr. Amal Al-Hadary
2015

Submitted by

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 Poetry Portefolio
Lecture one
Modernism:Rapid developments in science and technology were
transforming the texture of everyday life and conceptions of the universe;
psychology, anthropology, and philosophy were challenging old ways of
conceiving the human mind and religion; empire, migration, and city life
were forcing together peoples of diverse origins. This dizzying pace of
change, this break with tradition, this eruption of modernity can also be
seen in the cutting-edge art and literature of the time.
Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the art of what
Harold Rosenburg calls ‘the tradition of the new. It is experimental,
formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation as well as
creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist’s freedom from
realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural
apocalypse and disaster. Its social content is characteristically avant-
garde or bohemian; hence, specialized. Its notion of the artist is of a
futurist, not the conserver of culture but its onward creator; its notion of
the audience is that it is foolish if potentially redeemable: ‘Artists are the
antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust
their great artists’ is Ezra Pound’s definition. Beyond art’s specialized
enclave, conditions of crisis are evident: language awry, cultural cohesion
lost, perception pluralized.1
-An intensifying sequence of movements from Symbolism on(Post-
impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism,

1
Greenblatt, S. & Abrams, M, H., (2005) The Norton Anthology of English Literature (8th Edition). NY,
US,: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
2
Childs, P. & Fowler, R., (2006) The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. NY, US,: Taylor &
Francis Group.

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Surrealism) often radically at odds, and sharp differences of cultural
interpretation coming from writers apparently stylistically analogous. A
like techniquecan be very differently used (e.g. the use of STREAM OF
CONSCIOUSNESS inVirginia Woolf, James Joyce and
WilliamFaulkner) according to different notionsof underlying order in life
or art. Thepost-symbolist stress on the ‘hard’ or impersonal image (see
IMAGISM) candissolve into the fluidity of Dada or Surrealism or into
romantic personalization:while the famous ‘classical’ element in
modernism, emanating particularlyfrom Eliot, its stress on the
luminoussymbol outside time, can be qualified by a wide variety of
political attitudes andforms of historicism.Modernism means the ruffling
of therealistic surface ofliterature by underlyingforces; the disturbance
may arise,though, from logics solely aesthetic or highly social. Hence,
modernism stillremains a loose label.2
-A generalterm applied retrospectively to the wide rangeof experimental
and *AVANT-GAKDE trends in the literature (and other arts)of the early
20th century, including *SYMBOLISM,
*FUTURISM,*EXPRESSIONISM, *IMAGISM, *VORTICISM,
*DADA, and *SURREALISM,along with the innovations of unaffiliated
writers. Modernist literatureis characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-
century traditions andof their consensus between author and reader: the
conventions of*REALISM, for instance, were abandoned by Franz Kafka
and othernovelists, and by expressionist drama, while several poets
rejectedtraditional *METRES in favour of *FREEVERSE. Modernist
writers tendedto see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from
bourgeois values,and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and
difficult new formsand styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of
2

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chronologicaldevelopment was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust,
and WilliamFaulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted
new ways oftracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their *STREAM-
OFCONSCIOUSNESSstyles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
replaced thelogical exposition of thoughts with *COLLAGES of
fragmentary imagesand complex *ALLUSIONS. Modernist writing is
predominantlycosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural
dislocation,along with an awareness of new anthropological and
psychologicaltheories. Its favoured techniques ofjuxtaposition and
multiple * POINTOF VIEW challenge the reader to reestablish a
coherence of meaning fromfragmentary forms. In English, its major
landmarks are Joyce's Ulyssesand Eliot's The Waste Land (both 1922). In
Hispanic literature the term hasa special sense: modernismo denotes the
new style of poetry in Spanishfrom 1888 to c.1910, strongly influenced
by the French *SYMBOLISTS and*PARNASSIANS and introduced by
the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario andthe Mexican poet Manuel Gutierrez
Najera. For a fuller account, consultPeter Childs, Modernism (2000).3

Post Modernism:A philosophicalresponse to the fragmentation of

MODERNISM in the post-1945 period, postmodernism’sinfluence on
intellectualdebates about the production, valorizationand interpretation of
cultural productionhas been enormous. Its principal theoretical
tenets have been hotly disputed sincethe appellation was first used in
1947 todescribe a mode of architectural style, butin broad terms
postmodernism refers tothree key areas of socio-cultural interaction.
First, it describes a period after modernismthough this has always been a

3
Chris Baldick., (2001) The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Literary Terms (2nd Edition). NY, US,:
Oxford University Press Inc.

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contentious and rather arbitrary distinctionas, for some critics, the
technical andformalistic experiments of postmodernismare little more
than extensions ofmodernist engagements with form andlanguage.
Certainly the two major artisticmovements of the twentieth century differ
less than some critics would contend, butequally both would resist the
coheringframework of the term ‘movement’ aseach seeks to break from
the suffocatinguniformity of conservative aesthetics. The term
‘postmodern’ began to be usedduring the 1960s as a means of
distinguishingthe subversive fiction of writers, suchas John Barth, Donald
Barthelme, SamuelBeckett and Jorge Luis Borges from the
experimental works of high modernismcomposed during the 1920s and
1930s. The playful, irreverent liberties takenwith language, narrative
structure, typologyand the reader/text interface by thesenovelists
suggested an exhaustion withthe modes of traditional expression and
Postmodernism 185championed an artistic freedom thatallowed the
celebration of non-literarymedia derived particularly from popular
culture within the text. The modernistnotion of the artist alienated from
themundane irrelevances of daily life forgingan ethereal connection with
an otherworld of art was gradually being replacedby an artist that revelled
in the visceralcontemporaneity of the everyday, moulding
out of the maelstrom of mass culturean aesthetics of ephemerality.
The second key feature of postmodernismis its deeply ambiguous
politicalcharacter. Where modernist art scornedthe insubstantiality of the
political realm, claiming that it reflected only a temporaryand localized
example of human praxis, postmodern culture centred itself on
theinherently political qualities of art. Fromthis can be inferred the strong
linksbetween postmodernism and Marxism, alegacy deriving in no small

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measure fromthe Leftist political persuasions of manyof the academic
proponents of the field. The rise of postmodernism as a philosophical
discourse during the 1960s and1970s was matched by the emergence of
literary theory, and in particular linguisticand discourse analysis. The
work ofRoland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, MichelFoucault and Julia
Kristeva quicklybecame associated with the theoreticalprinciples
underpinning postmodernismand whilst they tacitly acknowledged the
economic enchainment of the work of art, they moved the agenda of the
Left ontofresh territory by insisting that all culturalpractices were imbued
with oppressiveundertones and therefore offered sites of
productive political struggle. That anycommunicational act was
conceived, made and interpreted within ideology andthereby excluded
competing ideologicalformations became a defining intellectualreference
point for postmodernism and, allied to significant socio-economic shiftsin
the Western world, encouraged theformation of emancipatory
movementsdedicated to the vocalization of previously
marginalized politics. Tied to this visionof an ideological equivalence is
the thirdprincipal arena of postmodernism’simpact. In 1979, Jean-
François Lyotardpublished The Postmodern Condition: AReport on
Knowledge. In it he argued thatthe postmodern condition was
characterizedby a deeply felt scepticism towardsmetanarratives
(discursive formationspromising a totalized account of knowledge).
For Lyotard the traditional pivotsof human belief (whether they be
religion, philosophy or science) could no longer besustained for each
reveals its domineeringideological insistence in its intolerance
of competing voices. The totalizingimperative of the metanarrative
obscuresand denigrates the claims of Othersand, in so doing, according to
Lyotard, itinvalidates itself. The freedom that thisanti-

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establishmentarianism extended wasgrasped by a host of liberation
movements (such as feminism, gay rights and theracially and religiously
dispossessed) as avindication of their rights. Not all critics
agreed with Lyotard’s egalitarianism: Jürgen Habermas and Fredric
Jameson inparticular attacked the lack of distinctionbetween an
ideological free-for-all and themonolithic state bureaucracies that hold
sway in the West. The dominance of latecapitalismmeans, for Jameson,
that there isno distance between postmodern art andthe society that
created it, thereby renderingthe act of critical judgement impractical –
one is ultimately always judging postmodernismfrom within
postmodernism andtherefore merely ordering a procession of
self-referential landmarks.The 1980s saw attempts to formalize
postmodernism’s stylistic characteristics186 Postmodernism
with particular attention to the recycling, often parodically, of existing
images, forms and cultural codes. By focussing onthe pre-inscribed status
of artefacts fromacross a high/low cultural divide, producers
celebrated the circularities of artisticcreation, vaunting the impossibility
oforiginality by reappropriating conventionalizedforms to pastiche and
ironize theirideological ‘sincerity’. Ultimately thisself-reflexive wit
became ubiquitouslyemployed to refer to any radicalization ofthe
aesthetic act and casual invocations ofpostmodernism were used to
identify areturn to a form of conservatism (such asin the worst excesses
of post-feministchauvinism). That such a traduction isconsistent with
postmodernism’s own culturalrelativism is itself ironic, but it
isappropriate that a philosophical movementdedicated to the politics of
consumptionshould ultimately eat itself. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra
andSimulations (1980); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse
ofModernity (1985); Linda Hutcheon, APoetics of Postmodernism:

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History, Theory, Fiction (1988); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The
Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism (1991); Jean-FrançoisLyotard, The
Postmodern Condition: AReport on Knowledge (1979).4
The term has been applied to a host of movements, many in art, music,
and literature, that reacted against tendencies in modernism, and are
typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques. A late-
20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a
departure from modernism. Postmodernism includes skeptical
interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics,
architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with
deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained
significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-
structural thought.In 1921 and 1925, postmodernism had been used to
describe new forms of art and music. In 1942 H. R. Hays described it as a
new literary form. However, as a general theory for a historical
movement it was first used in 1939 by Arnold J. Toynbee.5More recently,
Walter Truett Anderson described postmodernism as belonging to one of
four typological world views, which he identifies as either (a)
Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed, (b)
Scientific-rational, in which truth is found through methodical,
disciplined inquiry, (c) Social-traditional, in which truth is found in the
heritage of American and Western civilization, or (d) Neo-romantic, in
which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature and/or
spiritual exploration of the inner self.6

4
Childs, P. & Fowler, R., (2006) The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. NY,
US,: Taylor & Francis Group.
5
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1077292/postmodernism
6
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

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Victorian Age: The Reform Bill of 1832 gave the middle class the political
power it needed to consolidate—and to hold—the economic position it had
already achieved. Industry and commerce burgeoned. While the affluence of
the middle class increased, the lower classes, thrown off their land and into
the cities to form the great urban working class, lived ever more wretchedly.
The social changes were so swift and brutal that Godwinian utopianism
rapidly gave way to attempts either to justify the new economic and urban
conditions, or to change them. The intellectuals and artists of the age had to
deal in some way with the upheavals in society, the obvious inequities of
abundance for a few and squalor for many, and, emanating from the throne of
Queen Victoria (1837–1901), an emphasis on public rectitude and moral
propriety.7
In 1897 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee
celebrationshonoring the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's coming
to the throne. "British history is two thousand years old," Twain
observed, "and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther
ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two
thousand put together." And if the whole world had "moved" during that
long lifetime and reign of Victoria's, it was in her own country itself that
the change was most marked and dramatic, a change that brought
England to its highest point of development as a world power.
In the eighteenth century the pivotal city of Western civilization had
been Paris; by the second half of the nineteenth century this center of
influence had shifted to London, a city that expanded from about two
million inhabitants when Victoria came to the throne to six and a half
million at the time of her death. The rapid growth of London is one of the
many indications of the most important development of the age: the shift
7
English literature: The Victorian Age | Infoplease.com;
.,http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/entertainment/english-literature-the-victorian-
age.html#ixzz3MGA6emuA

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from a way of life based on theownership of land to a modern urban
economy based on trade and manufacturing.
By the end of the century—after the resources of steam power had been
more fully exploited for fast railways and iron ships, looms, printing
presses, and farmers' combines, and after the introduction of the
telegraph, intercontinental cable, photography, anesthetics, and universal
compulsory education—a late Victorian could look back with
astonishment on these developments during his or her lifetime. Walter
Besant, one of these late Victorians, observed that so completely
transformed were "the mind and habits of the ordinary Englishman" by
1897, "that he would not,
could he see him, recognize his own grandfather." Because England was
the first country to become industrialized, its transformation was an
especially painful one: it experienced a host of social andeconomic
problems consequent to rapid and unregulated industrialization. England
also experienced an enormous increase in wealth. An early start enabled
England to capture markets all over the globe. Cotton and other
manufactured products were exported in English ships, a merchant fleet
whose size was without parallel in other countries. The profits gained
from trade led also to extensive capital investments in all continents.
After England had become the world's workshop, London became, from
1870 on, the world's banker. England gained particular profit from the
development of its own colonies, which, by 1890, comprised more than a
quarter of all the territory on the surface of the earth; one infour people
was a subject of Queen Victoria. By the end of the century England was
the world's foremost imperial power.8

8
Greenblatt, S. & Abrams, M, H., (2005) The Norton Anthology of English Literature (8th Edition). NY,
US,: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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 Poetry Portefolio
Elegy: An elaborately formal *LYRIC poem lamenting the death of a
friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject. In
Greek and Latin verse, the term referred to the *METRE of a poem
(alternating dactylic *HEXAMETERS and * PENTAMETERS in
coupletsknown as elegiac *DISTICHS), not to its mood or content: love
poemswere often included. Likewise, John Donne applied the term to his
amorous and satirical poems in *HEROIC COUPLETS. But since
Milton's'Lycidas' (1637), the term in English has usually denoted a
*LAMENT (although Milton called his poem a 'monody'), while the
adjective'elegiac' has come to refer to the mournful mood of such poems.
Twoimportant English elegies that follow Milton in using *PASTORAL
conventions are Shelley's 'Adonais' (1821) on the death of Keats, and
Arnold's Thyrsis' (1867). This tradition of the pastoral elegy, derived
from Greek poems by Theocritus and other Sicilian poets in the 3rd and
2nd centuries BCE, evolved a very elaborate series of * CONVENTIONS
bywhich the dead friend is represented as a shepherd mourned by the
natural world; pastoral elegies usually include many mythological
figures such as the nymphs who are supposed to have guarded the dead
shepherd, and the * MUSES invoked by the elegist. Tennyson's In
M^moriam A. H. H. (1850) is a long series of elegiac verses (in the
modernsense) on his friend Arthur Hallam, while Whitman's 'When
Lilacs Lastin the Dooryard Bloom'd' (1865) commemorates a public
figure—Abraham Lincoln—rather than a friend; Auden's 'In Memory of
W. B. Yeats' (1939) does the same. In a broader sense, an elegy may be a
poem of melancholy reflection upon life's transience or its sorrows, as in
Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751), orinRilke'sDuino
Elegies (1912-22). The elegiac stanza is a * QUATRAIN of iambic

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pentameters rhyming abab, named after its use in Gray's Elegy. In an
extended sense, a prose work dealing with a vanished way of life or with
the passing of youth may sometimes be called an elegy. See also dirge,
graveyard poetry, monody, threnody.9
-- In prosody, the metre consisting of adactylic *hexameter
and*pentameter, as being themetre appropriate to elegies; (2) generally,
of thenature of an *elegy.Elegy from the Greek, the word has been
variouslyused with reference to different periods of English. In
Old English a group of short poems in the *Exeter Bookwhose subject is
the transience of the world, sometimesrelieved by Christian consolation,
are calledelegies (see WANDERER, THE; SEAFARER, THE; DEOR;
RUIN, THE). From the 16th cent, onwards the term wasused for a
reflective poem (*Coleridge called it the kindof poetry 'natural to the
reflective mind') by poets suchas *Donne; later it was appliedparticularly
to poems ofmourning (from Milton's *Lycidas), and the generalreflective
poem, as written by Coleridge and *Yeats, sometimes called 'reverie'. The
great English mourningelegies are Lycidas (for E. *King), Shelley's
*Adonais (for *Keats), Tennyson's *In Memoriam (for A. H. *Hallam),
M. Arnold's *Thyrsis (for *Clough), and*Hopkins's Wreck of the
Deutschland. T. Gray's *ElegyWritten in a Country Church-Yard is a
general poem ofmourning, combined with the reflective mode.10
--Elegy Some genres, such as EPIC andSONNET, are fairly unequivocal
in classicaland/or modern European literature: thefirst of these two
examples is identifiedby its scale, its subject matter, and itsmanner of

9
Chris Baldick., (2001) The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Literary Terms (2nd
Edition). NY, US,: Oxford University Press Inc.
10
Margaret Drabble., (2000) The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2nd
Edition). NY, US,: Oxford University Press Inc.

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handling that subject matter; the second must obey stringent
metricalrules. ‘Elegy’ illustrates a different typeof genre-term: ultimately
classical in origin, transplanted into modern Europeanterminology only as
a word, without theclassical formal basis, unrestricted as tostructure
(except for the minimal requirementthat it be a VERSE composition),
overlapping with a number of similarlyinexplicit terms (complaint, dirge,
lament, monody, threnody), yet conventionallytied to a limited range of
subjectmatters and styles (death and plaintivemusing), and readily
comprehensible toeducated readers. In these respects, amost typical
genre-term. Elegia in Greek and Latin was atype of metre, not a type of
poem – acouplet consisting of a dactylic hexameterfollowed by a
pentameter. Sincethis verse-form was used for all kindsof subjects, the
classical ancestry is relevantto modern elegy principally in
anetymological way. From the English Renaissance, ‘elegy’or ‘elegie’
referred to a poem mourningthe death of a particular individual.
Spenser’s ‘Daphnaida’ (1591) and ‘Astrophel’ (‘A Pastorall Elegie upon
thedeath of the most noble and valorousKnight, Sir Philip Sidney’, 1595)
areinfluential early examples; Donne usesthe word in the same sense (e.g.
‘AFunerall Elegie’ in An Anatomy of theWorld, and the titles of several
poems inthe collection Epicedes and Obsequiesupon the Deaths of
Sundry Personages); then there are the ‘Elegies upon theAuthor’ by
several hands appended to the1633 edition of Donne’s poems. But
sinceDonne also uses the word for his collectionof twenty ‘Elegies’,
casual, erotic andsatirical poems on various topics, the precise ‘funeral
elegy’ sense was obviouslynot securely established. Milton’s ‘Lycidas’
mourning the deathof Edward King (1637) revives thepastoral form, with
its apparatus of shepherds, nymphs and satyrs, and sets thepattern for the
modern English elegiactradition. The best-known poems in thismode are

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Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ on Keats (1821) and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’
onClough (1867). (Milton and Arnold referto their poems as ‘monodies’,
not ‘elegies’.) Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ onthe death of Arthur Hallam
(1833–50) isnot pastoral, but introspective and personal. The language of
funeral elegies providedopportunity for plaintive,
melancholygeneralizations on death or on thestate of the world: there are
signs of thisappropriation of the mode for generalcomplaint already in
‘Lycidas’, where theauthor ‘by occasion foretells the ruin ofour corrupted
clergy’. Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1750)
is the archetypal general meditationon the passing of life,
unconnectedwith any particular death. Coleridgedeparticularized the
definition still furtherwhen he stated that the elegy ‘is theform of poetry
natural to the reflectivemind’ – so elegy came to be a mood, orElegy a
style, as well as a poem for a specificdead person. This second, looser,
definitionof elegy is invoked by literary historiansto characterize assorted
melancholypoems of any period, for example, theso-called ‘Anglo-Saxon
elegies’ including ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’, bothtales of
personal deprivation shading intoregretful meditations on the mutability
ofthe world and seeking divine consolation. As long as we are clear that
there is astrict and a loose definition of ‘elegy’, that there is slender
classical warrant forthe term in either of its two familiar modernsenses,
and that we perforce apply itto works which were not thought of bytheir
authors as ‘elegies’ (remember thatthe paradigm elegy ‘Lycidas’ is called
a ‘monody’), we have a useful exploratorygenre-term.
See A. F. Potts, The Elegiac Mode (1967); Peter M. Sacks, English
Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (1985); Jahan

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Ramazani, Poetry ofMourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardyto Heaney
(1994).11

Darwinism and Culture

Darwin was an english naturalist and geologist, best known for his
contribution in huaman evolution theory. He tried to apply that the
current state of human evoulution existed through natural selection.

In the Victorian era, there was a huge conflict occurred especially

because of Darwin's theory between science and religion. Darwin
suggested that humans are actually originated from the apes. This struck
the Orthodox, and moved the faith of people in religion. Besides, the
industrial revolution caused rapid growth of factories, mills, industries,
and people began to yield to mammon while capitalism enveloped
spirituality. Human race became calculating and materialistic. Science
brought new inventions and these inventions, while doing good to
humans, but also, were making them more mechanized. They were more
interested in business than religion, were busy in working and making
money.
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, in Shrewsbury, England
and died at the Down House in Kent on April 19, 1882. He was born to
Robert and Susannah Darwin. Robert was a successful physician whose
father, Erasmus Darwin, had also been a physician but had made his
name as a poet of the natural world. Susannah Wedgwood came from a
family of potters; her father, Josiah Wedgwood, had made a small fortune
11
Childs, P. & Fowler, R., (2006) The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. NY,
US,: Taylor & Francis Group.

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 Poetry Portefolio
making high-quality pottery. Both sides of Darwin's family were liberal
in their politics and indifferent in their religion.

Soon after graduating, in 1831, Darwin was offered a position on board

the HMSBeagle, a ship that was mapping the coast of South America on a
two or three year voyage around the world. He eagerly accepted the
opportunity and spent the next five years on board the Beagle, taking
copious notes and sending thousands of samples and specimens back to
Henslow in England for safe- keeping.

When Darwin returned to England he found that Henslow and other

geologists, zoologists, and botanists were fascinated by the specimens he
had collected. He spent the next ten years cataloging and describing the
discoveries he had made on his journey. He wrote books on coral reefs
and volcanic islands, various papers, and a journal of his voyage. While
working on these, he also started to think about a deeper, more important
problem: the origin of species. He opened his first notebook on the topic
in 1837, more than

twenty years before he would finally be confident enough of his new

theory of "evolution by natural selection" to publish it.

In 1839, Darwin married Emma Wedgwood, his cousin, and they moved
in to a house in London where Darwin could focus on his work.
Unfortunately, his health started to fail mysteriously, so they moved to
the country. They lived in a small village where Darwin could find peace
and quiet. After completing his work on the results of the Beagle voyage,
still not ready to publish his thoughts on evolution, Darwin turned to what

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seemed at first like a small, insignificant problem: the classification of
different kinds of barnacles. Darwin soon became entangled in the
enormous project of dissecting and describing all of the barnacles of the
world for what eventually became a four- volume work. Eight years later,
in 1854, he finally finished, and was able to turn back to the problem of
evolution.

In 1857, Alfred Russell Wallace sent Darwin a paper regarding the

evolution of species. Wallace's theory was very similar to Darwin's.
Wallace's paper and a sketch of Darwin's theory were presented at the
Linnean Society. Darwin decided to produce an "abstract" of a longer
book on evolution that he was working on, so as not to let anyone else
take credit for an idea he had been developing for more than twenty
years. The abstract was published in 1859 as On the Origin of Species, or
the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was an
immediate sensation, selling out the first printing within a day. Debates
over the meaning of the theory for the nature of humanity began, though
Darwin himself remained above the fray in his self-imposed isolation at
Down House. His friends Joseph Hooker, the botanist, and especially
Thomas Henry Huxley, the zoologist, defended his theory to the world
while he continued to do research.

In the 1860s, Darwin worked on three books. One was about variation
under domestication, which he saw as being parallel to variation in the
wild. Another was about the evolution of humanity and the role of sexual
selection. The final one regarded the expression of emotions. The book
on humanity and sexual selection,The Descent of Man, was published in
1871. Darwin expected it to cause a sensation with its claims that humans

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were descended from other animals, but most of the thunder had been
stolen twelve years ago by the Origin. In 1872, The Expression of
Emotions in Animals and Man was published.

In his last decade, Darwin turned away from evolution and focused on the
garden. His research on climbing plants and the geological role of
earthworms turned his workshop into a virtual greenhouse and resulted in
several books. The illness that had plagued Darwin throughout his life
began to abate somewhat, so that although he was still not strong, he was
able to enjoy his old age. By 1877, his theories were still controversial,
but he was so well respected that the University of Cambridge gave him
an honorary doctorate. In 1882, he weakened. Darwin died on April 19,
1882, at the Down House. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Lecture two
Theory of Human Soul: In the later Middle Ages the study of the soul
was part of natural philosophy. Marsilius treated the humansoul in his
commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, in which he followed the Parisian
tradition of Buridanand Oresme concerning the particular questions
addressed. Following Buridan, he argued that there is nonatural proof of
the immortality of the human soul. For the human natural mind, unaided
by revelation, the theory of Alexander of Aphrodisias that the human soul

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is corruptible is the most probable. ThatAlexander of Aphrodisias is
mistaken and that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body is
known through revelation alone. Faith has more authority than human
reason and must be accepted in allcases where the two conflict since the
things we believe on faith come from God, who cannot err.Two distinct
notions of the soul occupied centre stage in the seventeenth century. One,
stemming fromPlato and the Pythagoreans, with theological trimmings by
Augustine, had been given immense prestigeby Descartes’ championing
of it. This view was what Geach has called the "savage superstition ... that
aman consists of two pieces, body and soul, which come apart at death."
Geach adds, "the superstition isnot mended but rather aggravated by
conceptual confusion, if the soul-piece is supposed to beimmaterial"
(Geach 1969, 38).The second main account, stemming from Aristotle,
had been taken over and made Christian by St Thomas Aquinas.[49] In
this account the soul was, though incorporeal, not simply a separate bit
attached to the body, but was the form of the individual animal in
question, whether human or not. Aquinas presented arguments to show
that human souls were subsistent in view of various capacities they had,
and proceeded from there to argue for the possibility of the continuing
existence of human souls in the absence of the body. He was, however,
clear that the human person (even when the person in question was Christ
in human form) was not merely a soul with an attached body, but was the
body informed by the soul: if your soul alone were to survive death you
would not. Bodily resurrection is essential to the survival and immortality
of humans.12

12
Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy.

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 Poetry Portefolio
How far does Tennyson's "In Memoriam" reflect the spirit of the
Victorian Age?
Tennyson’s life from 1809 to 1892 spanned much of the reign of Queen
Victoria (1837—1901). She made him Poet Laureate, to succeed
Wordsworth, in 1850; and, upon the recommendation of Gladstone,
raised him to the peerage as a Baron in 1883. The adulation in his own
time by people of all classes throughout the English-speaking world is
probably unmatched in literary history.
This conflict between science and religion is wonderfully depicted in the
poems of those poets who were extremely worried because of the
conflict, Matthew Arnold is one of those. Poets like Arnold of nineteenth
century started to hold a very pessimistic view about the Victorian crisis,
and in almost all his poems, he seems to express only a negative attitude
toward his contemporary age. But we see a quite dissimilar attitude in the
poems of his most renowned contemporary, Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Unlike Arnold, he expressed a compromising attitude to his age and its
intricate problems. Tennyson, we find, in his Ulysses, The Lotos Eaters,
The Charge of the Light Brigade, holds such a sort of view which is
supposed to find a middle ground. He is neither too melancholic like
Arnold nor too optimistic like Robert Browning, another contemporary,
in terms of the tone, mood and theme of his poetry. He tries to portray in
his poems a real and clear picture of the problems of contemporary age in
an implicit way, and then shows a positivity or a ray of hope at the end of
almost all his poems. In fact the poem 'the Charge of the Light Brigade'
which is based upon the Crimean War, describes the marvelous courage
of the British soldiers and pays homage to them.
The Victorian era is well-known for its enrichment of knowledge,
expansion of empire and growth of economy. The age had a throbbing

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spirit, spirit of activity. In his famous poem “Ulysses” Tennyson reflects
this indomitable spirit of the people of his society. In it we notice that
Ulysses has spent twenty years of his life in battles and adventure. He has
seen and learnt many things, yet he is not satisfied. His thirst for
knowledge is unquenchable. He comments,
“How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
“To rust unfurnished, not to shine in use !”
His Victorian spirit is fully reflected when he says that even in old age his
ambition is
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The Victorian age is also marked with a note of pessimism and
frustration. People of the age felt exhausted with their never ending race
against time and longed for a life of settled order, stability and peace.
Tennyson reflects this trend of the period in his poem “The Lotos-
Eaters”. Here we see that after reaching the lotos island and eating lotos
fruits, the mariners are fascinated by the calm and quiet atmosphere of the
island. Although still they have a long way to go to reach their homeland,
they wish to travel or struggle no more and plan to live in this island in a
state of permanent rest, peace and tranquility. They express their disgust
at the extremely toilsome life which they have so far lived.
“Hateful is the dark-blue sky,
Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea,
Death is the end of life; ah, why
Should life all labour be?”
The Victorian age was an age of great problems and conflicts which
could not be easily resolved. But as they wanted to live in peace, they
approached these problems obliquely and from the gentler angle of
compromise in order to avoid any grave danger to their sense of

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equanimity. And Tennyson, being the representative poet of his times,
embodies this spirit of compromise in his poetry more than any of his
contemporaries.
In his political opinions Tennyson shared the views of an average
Victorian who believed in the golden mean, a compromise between
democracy and aristocracy. He believed in slow progress and shunned
revolution.
In the field of sex, the Victorians sought a compromise between unbridled
licentiousness of previous ages and the complete negation of the
functions and purposes of nature. The Victorians permitted indulgence in
sex but restricted its sphere to conjugal felicity and happy married life.
Tennyson reflects this spirit of the age in his love poems by pointing out
that true love can be found only in married life. In Tennyson’s “The Lady
of Shallot” we are introduced to ‘two young lovers’ walking together in
the moonlight, but we are at once reassured by the statement that these
two lovers were ‘lately wed’.
During the Victorian age there was great advancement of science.
However, the impact of science did not shake the belief of the Victorians
in religion, God and soul. They tried to reconcile science and religion.
This is exactly what we find in Tennyson. Thus, in “The Higher
Pantheism” he proclaims his acceptance of the legitimate conclusion of
science, but decisively rejects its further conclusion, which came to be
that of the scientific materialists of the later part of the nineteenth
century:
“God in law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice,
For if He thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice
Law is God, say some; no God at all, say the fool:
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent in a pool.”

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 Poetry Portefolio
In “In Memoriam,” he insists that we must keep our faith despite the
latest discoveries of science: he writes,
“Strong Son of God, immortal Love
Whom we, that have not seen they face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace
Believing where we cannot prove.”
Tennyson also spoke to his Victorian contemporaries about issues of
urgent social and political concern. During the Victorian period women
were thought inferior to men. This faith of the Victorians in the
subordinate position of women is expressed by Tennyson in “Locksley
Hall”:
“Weakness to be worth with weakness! woman’s pleasure, woman’s
pain-Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a shallower brain:
Woman is the lesser man and all the passions, match’d with mine
Are as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine-“
In “Locksley Hall” Tennyson satirizes the contemporary society of
vanity, materialism or artificiality. Here the speakers’ frustration over the
social conventions is clear. He fell in love with his young cousin Amy
who also reciprocated his love. But her parents stood in the way of their
love and married her off with a rich person because of the speaker’s lack
of wealth and social status. As a result, he, now, curses this social
snobbery which suppresses the craving of human heart:
“Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth!
Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth!
Cursed be the sickly form that err from honest Nature’s rule!
Cursed be the gold that gilds the straiten’d forehead of the fool!
In “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” he speaks out in favor of a
controversial diplomatic maneuver, the disastrous charge on the Russian

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 Poetry Portefolio
army by British troops in the Crimean War. Thus, Tennyson maintained a
lively interest in the developments of his day, remaining deeply
committed to reforming the society in which he lived and to which he
gave voice.
Tennyson was thus not, like one or another of his compeers,
representative of the melody, wisdom, passion, or other partial phase of
the Victorian era, but of the time itself, with its diverse elements in
harmonious conjunction. In his verse he is as truly “the glass of fashion
and the mould of form” of the Victorian generation in the nineteenth
century as Spenser was of the Elizabethan court, Milton of
theProtectorate and Pope of the reign of Queen Anne.
In fact, the frequent use of myths in many of his poems proves that,
Tennyson believed not to stagnate in a melancholic state. Rather through
going back to classical myths, he is trying at least to find a sort of
solution to some extents.
Because of the quality to look for a middle ground, Tennyson is
considered as a compromising craftsman who does neither yield to the
crisis of his age nor possess a carefree attitude towards the problems,
rather keeps compromising and finding a solution.

In what way in Tennyson's imagery of nature in "In Memoriam"

distinctive from the Romantic Presentation of Nature as God-
Nature?
In the first four lines of the preface, there are three characters: the Son of
God, Love and human being. The poet refers to God like full of immortal
love and "we", human being, have faith, although we have not proofs of
the existence of God. But in the following lines, the poet contradicts what

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he had said before in the first stanza, "we have but faith" and he writes
that it is just for knowledge and trust that we believe in things we see "it
comes from thee", moreover in line 22 when man has no fear, "we mock
thee". Surely, the theme of the poem, Arthur Henry Hallam's death
provided him the excuse to question his faith in God and as well as in the
rest of the poem, to question his faith in nature and poetry.
In section 2 another concept is expressed, the poet immersion in nature.
The poet compares himself to the yews and so to the death, I think
because these animals live underground, and as human being they born
and die; moreover he envies "the sullen tree" and "for thy stubborn
hardihood" because the tree does not die and in my opinion he imagines
to free himself from hishuman nature, represented by the blood, and
therefore incorporating himself into nature.
Anyway, in section 22 it is described a sort of experience of the author
and Hallam that consists in a fall out of natural or seasonal time, they
coexist with the natural passing of the seasons and at the end this cyclical
time changes into a more linear time endowed by the immanence of
death, represented by "the Shadow"; it is more explicit in another verse
this concept of seasonal time "And every winter change to spring" in
section 54 line 16. In my opinion winter represents the death of nature,
but the difference is that nature regenerates, whereas human being only
dies. I agree with the opinion that Tennyson, throughout the poem, tries
to reconcile the natural time with the human time, but I think that he
cannot.
Although it is defined a poetry of fragments, there is throughout the poem
a theme linearity, due to the cycle technique used by Tennyson in order to
illustrate certain fundamental laws behind human time and natural time,
nevertheless it is a non-linearity structure that prevails in the poem,

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 Poetry Portefolio
reflecting the author’s concept of non-linearity time. As I have read,
Tennyson’s notions of time are initially dependent upon the strict division
between human time and time existing in nature, the first is linear, the
second one is cyclical. This concept is exposed in the first half of the
poem.
In the stanza of the preface it is shown the important effect that time have
on human being, that is to say, the death "They have their day and cease
to be"; every man has his system or his time, which is divided by days,
then being a linear time, there is an end. In section 13 another notion is
presented; to Tennyson, time is something that oscillates along a past-
present-past-present continuum, we can experience the immanence of the
past, then the past resurfaces in the present, patterning natural or human
cyclical phenomena, moreover the past links to the present in which
dreams and illusions intertwine with reality.
As we can see in section 13 the poet is confused by this intertwining of
dream and reality and I think that for the poet the appropriate solution is
death, in order to remove this grief. What is more, in section 95 lines 42-
43 time and death appear as cause and effect; however, this relation is
only true for human time.
In conclusion, in my view, Tennyson’s poem is an elegy which deals with
social and individual problems, in such a way that he reaches the
Victorian target of avoiding the excessive egotism of romantic poetry,
even though he approaches the theme of nature in a different way, using
the comparison between human and natural time, stressing the mainly
role that death have on human nature going as far as considering nature
like a negative element in our human life, in contrast to the romantic
vision, which reckoned nature as the muse of poetry and the source of
imagination and of the poetry creativity.

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 Poetry Portefolio
Is "In Memoriam" an elegy of doubt and despair or a lyric of love
and faith?
In Memoriam is an elegy of doubt and despair. The pastoral elegy is the
traditional literary form for the expression of grief, often grief for a dead
young poet. Tennyson’s poem uses some of the conventions of this genre,
but is more personal, autobiographical, and self-analytical than most early
elegies had been. Original Greek myths mourned the decay of spring
under the midsummer heat. Theocritus’s “Daphnis” presents the song of
the shepherd Thryrsis, mourning the death of Daphnis until he too dies
and is borne down to Hades. The poet calls on all nature to grieve in
sympathy, and thus nature, and our own more general decay is used as a
reflection of human death. The presentation of sympathetic mourners was
to become an important part of the formal elegy.
Moschus’s “Bion” uses a similar form to lament his fellow poet, and ends
with the poet’s desire to join him in the underworld, but he takes comfort
in the thought that the gods will protect Bion and grant him lasting fame.
Clearly this poem was the first of a tradition of poems in which a poet
figure mourns the death of a fellow poet, from “Lycidas” to “Adonais”
and beyond.
Tennyson’s elegy is unique in the specificity of its mourning of death,
however. The poet attempts a consolation in which something of human
presence remains--the loved person’s transcendence in heaven retains
some of the qualities of the individual human being, and is thus his is one
of the more realistic and comprehensive of elegies.
In my opinion “In Memoriam” is one of the greatest poems in the English
language, and one of the finest love poems, in this case, with what would
have been somewhat controversial homoerotic overtones. In a meditative
sequence originally titled, “The Way of the Soul,” the speaker moves

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 Poetry Portefolio
through stages of grief over the death of his young and talented friend
Arthur Hallam, who had been engaged to Tennyson’s sister and was thus
his prospective brother-in-law. This remains one of the best nineteenth-
century elegies because it deals with the process of learning to live with
death; it is not chiefly a theodicy or defense of God’s ways to man but a
history of how one person learned to accept bereavement.
The themes of romantic attachment and heterosexual love were often
difficult for writers to portray without evasion, sentimentalization, or
mistrust (as in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” and “The Princess”); and
overtly homoerotic emotions were a completely tabooed theme (though
one might argue that the era’s “hero worship” in some contexts
represented homoeroticism in sublimated form). It may be just as well,
therefore, that Tennyson avoided the conventional Victorian settings of
romance and conventional marriage in order to write his most serious
extended confrontation with the loss of a beloved dead friend.
“In Memoriam” is a religious poem, which despite its use of Christian
terms and imagery, presents a highly unorthodox recasting of religious
orthodoxy in terms directly applicable to grief for an individual loss,
identifying the lost dead one as the Christ of a new evolutionary order.
After Hallam’s death, for the rest of his life Tennyson wrote a series of
poems reflecting on a lost, benign Arthur figure transmuted into a spirit,
and for a poet who spent much of his life in perceiving a single vision, it
was perhaps natural to assume that he might be granted it once again after
death.
The Effect of Arthur Hallam's Death on Tennyson:
His friendship with and love for Arthur Hallam seems to have been the
central experience of Tennyson's life, or more accurately, his bereaved
love after Hallam's death.

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 Poetry Portefolio
Arthur Hallam's friendship had been a source of comfort against a series
of acute problems and anxieties which intensified in Tennyson's late
adolescence and early twenties, and Hallam's death in 1833 externalized
his deepest fears and helped determine the character of virtually all his
significant poetry written after that date.
The Tennyson family life was unstable. A neurasthenic, violent man of
disappointed intellectual ambitions, Tennyson's father had resented losing
the rights of primogeniture to his father's landed estate. Forced to become
a cleric, he had found this occupation uncongenial and resented the
expenses of raising his ten children. Family violence made the home
unliveable, and Tennyson tried to absent himself from Somersby
whenever possible. Neighbors found the family behavior frightening, and
by 1829, the year in which Tennyson met Hallam, his father's threatening
rages had caused his mother to flee the parsonage with her remaining
children.
The problem of the father was compounded by the emotional problems of
the children; at least two of the Tennyson children were mentally ill for
their entire lives, and several others shared signs of instability (Charles,
for example, became permanently deranged in 1832). Hereditarian
theories of "insanity" weighed heavily in the nineteenth century, and
Tennyson, early prone to depression, feared for his own mental health
while suffering the effects of his family's melancholia (Ricks, 65). In
1834 he commented on the need of his brother Septimus, then heavily
depressed, for cheerful diversion, a prescription of what he himself in fact
needed (64).
Tennyson entered Cambridge University in 1827 at the age of 18. He
disliked life at the university and although he joined the eminent
"Cambridge Apostles," was never centrally interested in their debates. He

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 Poetry Portefolio
was conscious of economic pressures to earn his living, although he
wished to be a poet instead. On the one hand he feared to fail in his
aspiration to become a poet; but since even this wouldn't support him, he
felt pressed to become a clergyman, a distasteful thought compounded by
his own uncertainty as to whether he could accept the Thirty-Nine
Articles without reservations.
In 1829, two years after beginning at Cambridge he met Arthur Hallam,
of an aristocratic and intellectual family (his father was a prominent
European historian), who by the testimony of all his contemporaries was
a gifted and winning young man (855). Hallam was also lonely, for most
of his friends had gone to Oxford. Also interested in poetry and in
intellectual debates, he was more assertive and politically inclined than
Tennyson. And although his family was much wealthier, he shared
Tennyson's sense of aggrieved pride in the face of a tyrannical father, his
religious doubts, and his depressions, so that the two friends shared a
concern for each other's mental health (37, 38). One of the last poems
Hallam wrote before his death questions whether life has a purpose.
Arthur visited Somersby at Christmas, 1829 and fell in love with Emily
Tennyson, then unhappy about the family's prospective move from their
parsonage. In reaction Hallam senior proscribed further visits, opposed
the engagement on the grounds of the Tennysons' relative lesser wealth
and social status, and refused to finance the marriage even upon his son's
majority (Hallam was destined for the bar, a long slow road to economic
independence). As an added insult, he opposed his son's joint publication
of a volume of poems with Tennyson. The defensive Tennysons were
grateful for Arthur Hallam's willingness to ally with their family.
Moreover Hallam believed that Tennyson was destined to become the
greatest poet of his generation, and even of the century (32). He acted on

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 Poetry Portefolio
his beliefs; he encouraged Tennyson to submit his poem on "Timbuctoo"
to a university-wide contest; wrote a laudatory and perceptive review of
Tennyson's 1830 Poems; pressed for the publication of the 1832 Poems
and tended to the practical details of their publication; defended
Tennyson in a praiseful review when the latter volume evoked the
severity of critics on account of their allegedly lush, Keatsian and escapist
style; and in general promoted Tennyson's work to friends and publishers.
The two men took a trip to the continent together in the summer of 1830,
where they engaged in mild political activity. Then Tennyson's father
died in 1831, prompting a period of poetic activity. Though his death
might not of itself have been a cause for unmixed grief, it left his family
in dire economic straits at the hand of Sir Charles Tennyson, who among
other intrusions urged that Alfred become a clergyman. Constant family
fighting continued, and to add to his anxieties, Tennyson experienced
increased difficulties with his eyesight and feared he might become blind
(cmp. "Tiresias").
His father's death prompted a period of poetic activity for Tennyson, and
this poetry, written before Hallam's death, is notably concerned with
themes of suicide and depression. For example, "The Two Voices"
expresses the contrary impulses of a speaker contemplating and resisting
suicide; and although the suicidal voice is not declared triumphant, the
poem's best passages are those evoking death and languor. Uncannily,
some early drafts anticipate a speaker's grief at the death of a best beloved
friend.
Tennyson was gratified that the wealthy, talented, well-connected and
empathetic Hallam had chosen to become engaged to Tennyson’s sister
against his father’s opposition; and that Hallam had wholeheartedly
supported Alfred’s controversial desire to become a poet. The tension of a

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forbidden engagement wore on Hallam, however, and he was ordered
abroad, where in Vienna he died suddenly and unexpectedly in
September, 1833 of “apoplexy" (brain hemorrhage).
Alfred was 24 at the time, and the death of the human being perhaps most
able to sympathize with his anxieties about his future career, his
uncertainties about religious faith, and his family’s many difficulties and
griefs (including his financial and family problems) left him with a sense
of isolation in the face of scathing reviews and an apparently limited
future.
The period directly after Hallam's death, late 1833 and 1834, was the
single most creative of Tennyson's life. During this period he wrote
"Tithon," "Ulysses," "Morte d'Arthur," and the initial segments of "In
Memoriam," of which, oddly, the early stanzas are among the most
resolute, affirming the overcoming of grief, as does "Ulysses." Many of
these poems are written in the voice of an old man--“Ulysses,”
“Tithonus,” “Tiresias,” perhaps reflecting his sense that the loss of
Hallam had prematurely blighted his hopes.
The genesis of “Ulysses” explains some of this poem’s unusual features,
for although it proclaims itself a poem of struggle and ambition, yet the
tone seems peculiarly sad and elegiac, one of grief, wastedness, and a
sense of isolation.
He also began a series of poems evoking an idealized male figure,
variously identified with the legendary Arthur or seen as belonging to a
spiritual realm. The first of these was “Hark, the dogs do bark,” his first
known draft for a poem after Arthur Hallam's death (555), the most
physical of the series in its expression of love; and others included “Idylls
of the King,” "Merlin and the Gleam," and "In the Valley of the
Cauteretz" (1123). In the latter poem, for example, Tennyson's visit to the

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 Poetry Portefolio
Valley evokes the voice of "one I loved" thirty two years ago; and
Tennyson's biographer Robert Martin has noted that in the original
manuscript the line read, "Arthur Hallam.
Tennyson also claimed that the experience of section XCV of "In
Memoriam," in which the spirit of Hallam returns to and is inwound with
that of Tennyson, had occurred to him several times throughout his life,
not just once, but repeatedly. But even his final poem,which he wrote in
1889 and left behind to be published at the conclusion of his works,
"Crossing the Bar," contains the now familiar pattern of boat/dying
man/sea/sunset/evening star, and the final vision of a male face hovering
above the personaand through the elements, though this time the author
mourns, not the loss of another human life, but of his own identity (1458).
At this point Tennyson began the series of private poems on grief which
were later expanded and arranged into a whole. The sequence was written
over a seventeen year period--and not surprisingly the poems written
earlier convey a more concrete sense of loss and are concerned with
details such as the circumstances of Hallam’s death, the bringing back of
the body, and his final burial in the church near his home. Among these
early poems are 9, 17-19, 28, and 30-32. Tennyson's rearrangements to
some degree disrupt the chronological order of composition; and after a
trial publication in March,1850, he added two poems on doubt, nos. 56
and 96.
Some of Tennyson's early reviewers noticed that seventeen years was a
long period for mourning in the conventional sense. The sequence had
originally been called "The Way of the Soul," reflecting the poem's
preoccupation with the uses of grief for healing (note his statement that
the poem is more hopeful than he is, 859).

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 Poetry Portefolio
In the poem's sequence, the speaker passes through the following stages:
The poem opens with the poet’s despair at the emptiness of Nature, and
his protest against Nature’s indifference to the (human) spirit. He feels
grief and the desire to (literally) reunite with his friend in death, and to
see him properly buried.
He imagines Hallam in a new life and identifies with him there.
He dreams of Hallam until he seems to regain him again in an inner
psychological world.
He revisits the scenes where they had been together, and feels increased
calm.
Finally, he invokes Hallam’s spiritual presence, and experiences a vision
of eternal union with him and with all things.
Assured of Hallam’s presence throughout time, life is sanctified to him
and he anticipates a future in which the good represented by Hallam will
be more generally present.

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 Poetry Portefolio

Lecture three
Lyric:That the lyric was originally asong set to the lyre, and later to
othermusical instruments, is worth rememberingnow only because the
post-Renaissancelyric, or lyrical passage, though not oftenintended to be
sung, nevertheless tends tobe relatively mellifluous in sound andrhythm
and to have a flowingly repetitious132 Lyricsyntax that lends itself to
expansive, oftenexclamatory, expressions of intense personaljoy, sorrow
or contemplative insight. A sixteenth-century English example is
Thomas Wyatt’s ‘Fforget not yet’, fromwhich these two verses are taken:
Fforget not yet the gret assays,The cruell wrong, the skornfull ways,
The paynfull pacyence in denays.
Forget not yet!
forget not yet, forget not thys,
How long ago hathe ben and ys
The mynd, that neuer ment amys,
Fforget not yet.

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 Poetry Portefolio
The lyric poem, usually short, was oftenconstructed on a single mood.
But thetwentieth-century lyric is frequently morecomplex, allowing for
contrastive themesand for changes, even ambivalences, ofattitude, though
remaining in an emotionalrather than intellectual mode. A
contemporary example, by the Irish poetRichard Weber, shows a
technical relationshipwith Wyatt’s song but greatercomplexity:
As my eyes moved thoughtfully
Over your face
And your eyes moved thoughtlessly
Into place
I knew that all I could not say
Had been said before
And left no trace.
British poetry has on the wholedeveloped in the direction Walter Pater
suggested (favourable to lyricism) ratherthan in that which Matthew
Arnoldsuggested (favourable to the long poem). Life seen as a sequence
of intenselyfelt moments, rather than a structure ofinterrelated and
assessed experiences, tends to encourage the use of the firstperson, vivid
images and ‘local life’ at theexpense of architectonics, anecdotal
narrative and intellectual abstraction. Theeffect on criticism or on poetry
(eventhe longest twentieth-century poems tendto be fragmentary, like
‘The Waste Land’, or built out of poem-sequences, like Ted
Hughes’s ‘Crow’) makes it desirable toredress the balance by suggesting
that thepressure of feeling and intellect which thelong
poemaccommodates has considerableforce due to the fact that, while it
can

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 Poetry Portefolio
avail itself of all the devices of lyricism, the long poem builds up, in
addition, alarger structure of controlling tensionsand so may achieve a
more inclusiveintensity than that afforded by isolated ‘peak moments’.
See H. J. C. Grierson, Lyrical Poetry ofthe Nineteenth Century (1929); C.
M. Ing, Elizabethan Lyrics (1951); J. L. Kinneavy, A Study of Three
Contemporary Theoriesof Lyric Poetry (1957); Norman Maclean,
‘From action to image: theories of the lyricin the eighteenth century’ in
R. S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism (1952); EdwinMuir, The Estate of
Poetry (1962); GilbertMurray, The Classical Tradition in Poetry
(1930); Roland Arthur Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations
ofthe Western Lyric Sequence (1991).13
-In the modern sense, any fairly short poem expressing the
personal mood, feeling, or meditation of a single speaker (who may
sometimes be an invented character, not the poet). In ancient Greece, a
lyric was a song for accompaniment on the lyre, and could be a choral
lyric sung by a group (see chorus), such as a * DIRGE or *HYMN; the
modernsense, current since the *RENAISSANCE, often suggests a song-
like qualityin the poems to which it refers. Lyric poetry is the most
extensivecategory of verse, especially after the decline—since the 19th
century inthe West—of the other principal kinds: * NARRATIVE and
dramatic verse. Lyrics may be composed in almost any * METRE and on
almost everysubject, although the most usual emotions presented are
those of loveand grief. Among the common lyric forms are the
*SONNET, *ODE, *ELEGY, *HAIKU, and the more personal kinds of
hymn. Lyricism is theemotional or song-like quality, the lyrical property,
of lyric poetry. Awriter of lyric poems may be called a lyric poet, a
13
Childs, P. & Fowler, R., (2006) The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. NY,
US,: Taylor & Francis Group.

37
 Poetry Portefolio
lyricist, or a lyrist. Inanother sense, the lyrics of a popular song or other
musical compositionare the words as opposed to the music; these may not
always be lyrical inthe poetic sense (e.g. in a narrative song like a *
BALLAD).14
Logic:A System of, Ratiocinative and Inductive, atreatise by }. S. *Mill,
published 1843, revised andenlarged in the editions of 1850 and 1872.
The importance of Mill's Logic lies in the fact that itsupplied, to use the
author's own words (Autobiography), 'a text-book of the opposite
doctrine [to the apriori view of human knowledge put forward by the
German school]—that which derives all knowledgefrom experience, and
all moral and intellectual qualitiesprincipally from the direction given to
the associations'. In this work Mill stressed the importance ofinductive
methods, while, unlike F. *Bacon, giving itsproper share to deduction. He
lays down methods forinvestigating the causal relations of phenomena,
assumingthe causal principle, in defence of which he can
only say that 'the belief we entertain in the universality, throughout
nature, of the law of cause and effect, isitself an instance of induction',
constantly verified byexperience; if there were an exception to this law,
weshould probably have discovered it. In attributing to experience and
association ourbelief in mathematical and physical laws, he came into
conflict with the intuitional philosophers, and gave hisown explanation
'ofthat peculiar character of what arecalled necessary truths, which is
adduced as proof thattheir evidence must come from a deeper source
thanexperience'. This peculiar certainty, he holds, is 'anillusion, in order
to sustain which it is necessary tosuppose that those truths relate to, and
express theproperties of purely imaginary objects' as in the laws
14
Chris Baldick., (2001) The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Literary Terms (2nd
Edition). NY, US,: Oxford University Press Inc.

38
 Poetry Portefolio
ofgeometry, which are only approximately true in thereal world.
Geometry being built on hypotheses, 'itowes to this alone the peculiar
certainty supposed todistinguish it'. This conflict with the intuitional
school
is further developed in Mill's *Examination of SirWilliam Hamilton's
Philosophy.15

Lecture four
Compare between Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' and Wordsworth's
'There was a boy'. Apply the term 'Nature' in both poems.
The personifications of nature found in William Wordsworth's "Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" and Alfred Tennyson's In
Memoriam use the identical technique of picturing the nature of the
natural world, but to extraordinarily different ends.
and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress<
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts. — William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed a Few
Miles above Tintern Abbey," 122-128.
15
Margaret Drabble., (2000) The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2nd
Edition). NY, US,: Oxford University Press Inc.

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 Poetry Portefolio
Wordsworth, writing in 1798, at the forefront of the Romantic Era, crafts
a woman who will not "betray/ The heart that loved her," who will "lead/
From joy to joy." He crafts nature not just as a woman, but as a kind-
hearted, benevolent woman who serves the good of mankind and the
world. She is his source for kindness, beauty, and "lofty thoughts;" she is
the muse and nurturer of the Romantic poet and his mind.
Similarly, Tennyson also crafts a woman to represent nature but on
different terms: She cries from cliff-top. His woman is not a nurturer who
will not betray but one who cares for nothing. In the Neoclassical balance
of "I bring to life, I bring to death," Nature is portrayed as extremely
powerful and arbitrary. And where Wordsworth's female character of
Nature feeds the mind with lofty thoughts, Tennyson's "know[s] no
more."
"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarp&egrace;d cliff and quarried stone
She cries, "A thousand types are gone;
I know no more." — Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam 56, 1-8.
These divergent understandings of the same idea, expressed through
identical technique, delineate the different theological views of nature and
the world that each work expresses. Wordsworth's nature holds such
benevolent powers because in her he finds sublime majesty and
transcendence into the realm of God and the religious world. She fills his
head with lofty thoughts while he pauses to reflect, confronted by the
natural splendor of a particular scene; this careful introspection teaches
him about himself and the world around him — in the case of "Tintern
Abbey," more about his relationship with his sister. With this nearly
divine power of nature and from his faith, partly religiously based, in its
benevolence, he paints this gentle portrait. But Tennyson is under the

40
 Poetry Portefolio
sway of no such gentle feelings. Tennyson, confused by the death of his
close friend Arthur Hallam, can find no gentleness in a world which
caused such pain and crushed and bewildered his faith. Tennyson's nature
is also so unkind because in In Memoriam she has far fewer of the
religious overtones that pervade "Tintern Abbey:" the assault of
evolutionary theory upon the religious doctrines of the time contributes to
this harsh picture.

Lecture five
Depersonalization: The theory of depersonalization or impersonality is
T.S.Eliot’s remarkable gift in criticism. He holds that the poet and the
poem are two separate things. Eliot explains his theory in two phases;
“the relation of the poet to the past,” and “the relation of the poem to its
author.’
As for the first phase, he says that the past is never dead; it lives in the
present. And if we approach a poet with an open mind, “We shall often
find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may
be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality
most vigorously.” Again if he is a great poet, he alters his work in no
small scale. So what is a sort of flowing out and in. But while in giving
he asserts his individuality, in taking he has to repress it. The progress of
an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality.” According to him it is the duty of the poet to discard the
touch of personality in his work: and as a result a new form will come out
from the fusion of the past and the present.

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 Poetry Portefolio
This brings the second aspect of his theory of depersonalization in which
Eliot shows that a poet’s greatness does’ lie in putting his personality into
his work. A poet may have personal liking, disliking or may fell
interested in anything, but he should not put it into his poetry. Rather a
poet should have varied feelings which are at liberty and therefore will
enter into new combinations.
It is not necessary that these feelings will be his own rather those of
others will also do. For his mind is just like a catalyst that combines them
into a new shape ad remains unaffected at a time. Of course, it may partly
use of the poet’s on experience. “but the more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the man who suffers. There may be
impressions and experiences that are grave concern for a man, but they
should not take any place in the poetry.
So, what comes is that “Poetry is not a turning case of emotion, but an
escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality, but an escape
from personality.” So the poem, not the poet, is the focal point of “honest
criticism and sensitive appreciation.’16
In Tradition and Individual Talent, he propounded the doctrine that
poetry should be impersonal and free itself from Romantic practices, ‘the
progress of an author is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction
of personality’. He sees that in this depersonalization, the art approaches
science. For Eliot, emotions in poetry must be depersonalized. Artistic
self-effacement is essential for great artistic work.
He opposed Coleridge who says that a worth of a poet is judged by his
personal impressions and feelings. Eliot says that impressionism is not a
safe guide. A poet in the present must be judged with reference to the
poets in the past. Comparison and analysis are the important tools for a
16
http://www.literary-articles.com/2010/02/t-s-eliots-theory-of-depersonalization.html

42
 Poetry Portefolio
critic. The critic must see whether there is a fusion of thought and feeling
in the poet, depersonalized his emotions and whether he has the sense of
tradition. So these are the objective standards. But what emotion is Eliot
talking of? He speaks against the poet’s emotions. Art, too has emotions;
but different from those of the artist and this difference is to be
maintained for a great work of art. Eliot says:

“The difference between art and the event is always absolute”

His theory of impersonality goes even further when he criticizes

Wordsworth’s view that poetry has its, Origin in emotions recollected in
tranquility”. In his view poetry is an organization of different concepts
and for such organization to take place perfect objectivity on the part of
the poet is essential. There is no question of the poet expressing his
personal emotions. To Eliot, The poet’s emotions and passions must be
depersonalized; he must be as impersonal and objective as a scientist. The
personality of the artist is not important: important thing is his sense of
tradition; A good poem is a living whole of all the poetry that has ever
been written. The poet must forget his personal joys and sorrows, and be
absorbed in acquiring a sense of tradition and expressing it in his poetry.
Thus the poet’s personality is merely a medium, having the same
significance as a catalytic agent, or a receptacle in which chemical
reaction takes place. That is why the poet Poetry is not a turning loose of
emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality. Eliot does not deny
personality or emotion to the poet. Only, he must depersonalise his
emotions. There should be an extinction of his personality. This

43
 Poetry Portefolio
impersonality can be achieved only when the poet surrenders himself
completely to the work that is to be done. Eliot asserts:

“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this
‘impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work”

Eliot compares the poet’s mind to a jar or receptacle in which are stored
numberless feelings, emotions etc., which remain there in an unorganized
and chaotic form till, “all the particles which can unite to form a new
compound are present together.” Thus poetry is organization rather than
inspiration. And the greatness of a poem does not depend upon the
greatness of, or even the intensity of, the emotions, which are the
components of the poem, but upon the intensity of the process of poetic
composition. Just as a chemical reaction takes place under pressure, so
also intensity is indeed for the fusion of emotions into a single whole.
The more intense the poetic process, the greater the poem. There is

always a difference between the artistic emotion and the personal emotion
of the poet. The poet has no personality to express, he is merely a
medium in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and
unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for
the man may find no place in his poetry, and those which become
important in the poetry may have no significance for the man. The
emotions of poetry are different from personal emotions of the poet. Eliot
endorses:

44
 Poetry Portefolio
“It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by
particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or
interesting”

In the poetic process there is only concentration of a number of

experiences and a new things results from this concentration. And this
process of concentration is neither conscious nor deliberate; it is a passive
one. In the beginning, his self, his individuality, may assert itself, but as
his powers mature there must be greater and greater extinction of
personality. He must acquire greater and greater objectivity. He
compares the mind of the poet to a catalyst and the process of poetic
creation to the process of a chemical reaction. Just as chemical reactions
take place in the presence of a catalyst alone, so also the poet’s mind is
the catalytic agent for combining different emotions into something new.
The experiences which enter the poetic process, says Eliot, may be of two
kinds. They are emotions and feelings. Poetry may be composed out of
emotions only or out of feelings only, or out of both. There is always a
difference between the artistic emotion and the personal emotions of the
poet. Eliot speaks of John Keats:

“The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have

nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale,
partly perhaps because of its attractive name, and partly because of its
reputation, served to bring together”

Thus, the difference between art and emotion is always absolute. The
poet has no personality to express, he is merely a medium in which
impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

45
 Poetry Portefolio
According to Eliot, two kinds of constituents go into the making of a
poem: the personal elements, i.e. the feelings and emotions of the poet,
and the impersonal elements, i.e. the ‘tradition’, the accumulated
knowledge and wisdom of the past, which are acquired by the poet. These
two elements interact and fuse together to form a new thing, which we
call a poem. It is the mistaken notion that the poet must express new
emotions that results in much eccentricity in poetry. That is why, Eliot
says:

“His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat”

It is not the business of the poet to find new emotions. He may express
only ordinary emotions, but he must impart to them a new significance
and a new meaning. And it is not necessary that they should be his
personal emotions. Even emotions which he has never personally
experienced can serve the purpose of poetry. For example, emotions
which result from the reading of books can serve his turn. This
impersonality can be achieved only when poet surrenders himself. And
the poet can know what is to be done, only if he acquires a sense of
tradition, the historic sense, which makes him conscious, not only of the
present, but also of the present moment of the past, not only of what is
dead, but of what is already living.17
In "Tradition and Individual Talent", Eliot opposes the Romantic
conception by advancing his theory of impersonality in art and opines
that the artistic process is a process of depersonalization and that the artist
will surrender himself totally to the creative work. Eliot particularly
objected to the great Romantics as well as Victorians who exaggerated
17
http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/discuss-eliots-concept-of.html

46
 Poetry Portefolio
the need to express human personality and subjective feeling and he says,
"The progress of am artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual
extinction of personality."Eliot holds that the poet and the poem are two
separate things and "that the feelings or the emotion, or vision, resulting
from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or
vision in the mind of the poetNo poet, no artist of any art, has his
complete meaning alone. His signification, his appreciation, is the
appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You can value
him alone. You must set him for contrast and comparison among the
deads."Eliot points out the relation of the poem to its author; and says that
the poem has no relation to the poet. There is detached or alienation
between the poet and his poem. The difference between the mind of a
nature poet and that of am immature one is that the mind of a nature poet
is "a more finely perfected medium in which special or varied feelings are
at liberty to enter into new combinations". According to Eliot, the art
emotion is different from personal emotion. A successful artist s he, who
can generalize emotion in the reader's one while he himself seemed to be
unaffected by any emotion. In the other hand he should be depersonalized
in experience he describes in the poem.Eliot brings the analogy of
chemical reaction to explain the process of depersonalization. In this
respect he has drawn a scientific analogy. He tells that a poet should serve
the sold of platinum which makes sulphurus acid. He says, "When the
two gases, previously mentioned (oxygen and Sulpher dioxide) are mixed
in the presence of a filament of Platinum. They form Sulphurous acid.
The combination takes place only he the Platinum is present;
nevertheless, the newly formed acid contains no trace of Platinum, and
the Platinum itself is apparently unaffected has remained inert, neutral,
and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of Platinum. It may

47
 Poetry Portefolio
partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but,
the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in his will be the
man who suffers and the mind which creates, the one perfectly will be the
mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."Eliot next
compares the poet's mind to a receptacle in which are stored numberless
feelings, emotion, images, phases etc. , which remain there in an
unorganized and chaotic form till, "all the particles which can unite to
form a new compound are present together." Thus poetry is organization
rather than inspiration. And the greatness of a poem does not depend
upon the greatness or the intensity of the emotions, but upon the intensity
of the process of poetic composition. The more intense the poetic process,
the greater the poem.He strongly believes that "the differences between
art and the event are always absolute. Eliot illustrate his view by a few
examples among which one is of Keats' One to a Nightingale, which
contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with
the nightingale, but which the nightingale ,partly perhaps because it's
attractive name, and partly because of it's reputation served to bring
together. He illustrates his theory by a few examples. The artistic emotion
evoked by Dante in his treatment of the episode of Paolo and Francesca is
different from the actual emotion in the situation. The artistic emotion
may approximate to the actual emotion as in Agamemnon the artistic
emotion approximates to the emotion of am actual spectator; in Othello to
the emotion of the protagonist himself. Eliot believes that the main
concern of the poet is not the expression of personality. He says, “the
poet has, not a personality to express but a particular medium which is
only a medium and a personality, in which impressions and experiences
combine in peculiar and unexpected ways, impressions and experiences
which are important for the may take no place in the poetry, and those

48
 Poetry Portefolio
which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in
the man, the personality”. Again, there is no need for poet to try to
express new human emotions in poetry. The business of the poet. Eliot
says, is not to find new emotions, but use of the ordinary ones and, in
working them up in poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual
emotions at all". Eliot's final definition of poetry is:"poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion: it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape from personality." It is not the
expression of personality but an escape from personality. He emphasizes
the same theory of impersonality in art. The emotion of art is impersonal.
It has its life in the poem and not in the history of poets. So, honest
criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon
the poetry. The poet's biography is not to be studied the structure of the
poem and its evocative powers are important. Eliot's theory of
depersonalization has been criticized by critics like Ransom and Yvor
Winters. Ransom regards Eliot's theory as “very neatly a doctrine of
poetic automation".To Fei Pai Lu, Eliot's theory of depersonalization is
completely vague. He says, "in the name of impersonality", Eliot by turns
commends and censures poets and artist.From what we have said, above
it follows that there as no connection between the poet's personality and
the poem. The feelings of the poetry need not necessarily his own.18
Dramatic Monologue: A kind of poem in which a single fictional
orhistorical character other than the poet speaks to a silent 'audience'
ofone or more persons. Such poems reveal not the poet's own thoughts
butthe mind of the impersonated character, whose personality is
revealedunwittingly; this distinguishes a dramatic monologue from a *
LYRIC, while the implied presence of an auditor distinguishes it from
18
http://rashedthecritic.blogspot.com/2009/11/eliots-depersonalization-theory.html

49
 Poetry Portefolio
aSOLILOQUY. Major examples of this form in English are
Tennyson's'Ulysses' (1842), Browning's 'Fra Lippo Lippf (1855), andT. S.
Eliot's TheLove Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1917). Some plays in which
only onecharacter speaks, in the form of a *MONOLOGUE or soliloquy,
have alsobeen called dramatic monologues; but to avoid confusion it is
preferableto refer to these simply as monologues or asMONODRAMAS.
For a fulleraccount, consult Alan Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (1977).19
A kind of poem in which the speaker is imagined to be addressing a
silent audience. In aDRAMATIC MONOLOGUE, the speaker is
evidently not the real author butan invented or historical character. Many
modern critics, though, insistfurther that the speaker in any poem should
be referred to as thepersona, to avoid the unreliable assumption that we
are listening to thetrue voice of the poet. One reason for this is that a
given poet may writedifferent poems in which the speakers are of distinct
kinds: another isthat our identification of the speaking voice with that of
the real poetwould confuse imaginative composition with autobiography.
Sometheorists of narrative fiction have preferred to distinguish between
thenarrator and the persona, making the persona equivalent to
theIMPLIED AUTHOR.in theDRAMATIC MONOLOGUE the speaker
is not alone. In non-narrative poems,distinctions can be made between the
personal voice of a private lyricand the assumed voice (the PERSONA)
of a DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE.20
Stream of Consciousness: A techniquewhich seeks to record the flow of
impressionspassing through a character’s mind. The best-known English

19
Chris Baldick., (2001) The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Literary Terms (2nd
Edition). NY, US,: Oxford University Press Inc.
20
Childs, P. & Fowler, R., (2006) The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. NY,
US,: Taylor & Francis Group.

50
 Poetry Portefolio
exponents areDorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf andJames Joyce. Later
novelists have oftenemployed the technique, though rarelywith such
thoroughness as its early proponents. For them it was a fresh weaponin
the struggle against intrusive narration. By recording the actual flow of
thoughtwith its paradoxes and irrelevancies theysought to avoid the over-
insistent authorialrhetoric of Edwardian novels. They feltthat the
traditional techniques could notmeet the social pressures of the new age;
believing that, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘human nature had changed . . .
in orabout December 1910’, they rejected thesocio-descriptive novel in
favour of anovel centring on ‘the character itself’. Inner thoughts and
feelings now occupiedthe foreground of attention. Theoretically, the aim
is inclusiveness: ‘No perception comes amiss’ (Woolf). But, in practice,
each novelist developedselective principles and personal
structuralprocedures. Joyce and Woolf use the techniquein quite different
ways. Woolf’s styleis leisurely and repetitive, returning constantlyto
dominant images (e.g. the chimesof Big Ben in MrsDalloway, 1925).
These images have no significanceoutside the novel: Woolf alone
makestheir meaning by the patterning she createsin the flow of recorded
experience. Disconnected association is heightenedand ordered by the
passionate yet rationalmind which conceives and controls it. Joyce’s
work, with its mastery of theabrupt shift from reflection to reflection,
approaches the theory more nearly: ‘Notthere. In the trousers I left off.
Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe . . .’. Buthe, too, inevitably
imposes structures onthe random. In Ulysses (1922), theultimateorder and
meaning of events isrelated to those primary images whichspan human
culture; each event is continuouswith all other such events in
humanhistory, refracted through language intoits radical meaning:
Bloom/Stephenare Ulysses/Telemachus, as they are theeternal type of

51
 Poetry Portefolio
Father/Son. Each writer seeks a different way oforganizing, and so
communicating, thearbitrary, and each finally gesturestowards the
inability of any single deviceto render fully the processes of thought. See
Leon Edel, The ModernPsychological Novel (rev. edn, 1964); Melvin J.
Friedman, Stream ofConsciousness: A Study of LiteraryMethod (1955);
Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the ModernNovel (1954);
Dorrit Cohn, TransparentMinds: Narrative Modes for
PresentingConsciousness in Fiction (1978); DavidDowling, ‘Mrs
Dalloway’: MappingStreams of Consciousness (1991).21
the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and
memories in the human mind; or a literarymethod of representing such a
blending of mental processes in fictionalcharacters, usually in an
unpunctuated or disjointed form of *INTERIORMONOLOGUE. The
term is often used as a synonym for interiormonologue, but they can also
be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the
stream of consciousness is the subject-matterwhile interior monologue is
the technique for presenting it; thus MarcelProust's novel A la recherche
du temps perdu (1913-27) is about the stream ofconsciousness, especially
the connection between sense-impressionsand memory. In thesecond
(literary) sense, stream of consciousness is a special style ofinterior
monologue: while an interior monologue always presents acharacter's
thoughts 'directly', without the apparent intervention of asummarizing and
selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle themwith impressions
and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate thenorms of grammar,
syntax, and logic; but the stream-of-consciousnesstechnique also does
one or both of these things. An important device of*MODERNIST fiction
21
Childs, P. & Fowler, R., (2006) The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms. NY,
US,: Taylor & Francis Group.

52
 Poetry Portefolio
and its later imitators, the technique was pioneeredby Dorothy
Richardson in Pilgrimage (1915-35) and by James Joyce inUlysses
(1922), and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925)
and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury (1928). For a
fulleraccount, consult Robert Humphrey.22

Lecture seven
'My Last Duchess' is considered the most famous dramatic
monologue in English literature. Comment
Robert Browning is considered to be the perfecter of the dramatic
monologue, which had its heyday in the Victorian Period. Other Victorian
poets to produce one or more dramatic monologues include Alfred Lord
Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. None,
however, produced as many, or as striking, dramatic monologues as
Robert Browning. A famous example is Browning’s “My Last Duchess.”
As a chronicler of "the incidents in the development of a soul," Robert
Browning often allowed a speaker's own words to reveal, and condemn,
his or her own behavior. The Duke's monologue in "My Last Duchess"
unveils his persona as courteous, cultured, and terrifying, as he describes
a portrait of his late wife in stark detail. Browning's "My Last Duchess,"
first published in Dramatic Lyrics in 1842, is one of the best known of his
many dramatic monologues. In the following lesson, students will come

22
Chris Baldick., (2001) The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Literary Terms (2nd
Edition). NY, US,: Oxford University Press Inc.

53
 Poetry Portefolio
to understand the use of dramatic monologue as a poetic device, and they
will learn to read beyond the speaker's words in order to understand the
implications beneath.
Browning’s dramatic monologues are often narrated by very sinister
characters, and the reader must piece together what the truth of the story
is.“My Last Duchess” and “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," though
considered largely inscrutable by Victorian readers, have become models
of the form. His monologues combine the elements of the speaker and the
audience so deftly that the reader seems to have some control over how
much the speaker will divulge in his monologue.Browning wrote poetry
with a purpose – to explore the heart and mind of his characters, by
making them talk in a particular situation about a certain incident, idea or
experience. In his dramatic monologues, he looks at life from different
perspectives. The dramatic monologist is aware of the relativity, the
arbitrariness of a single way of life or way of looking at the world – so in
his monologues Browning presents the “the inexhaustible multitudes of
various lives which have been lived or can be lived.” In the following
paragraphs, an analysis of the techniques applied by Browning in his
dramatic monologues with special reference to “My Last Duchess” shall
be dealt with.

A dramatic monologue usually includes all or a few of the following

elements: a fiction speaker and audience, a symbolic setting, Talismanic
props, dramatic gestures, an emphasis on speaker’s subjectivity, a focus
on dramatics, problematics of irony or non-irony and involved reader’s
role playing. Browning presents all these ingredients in the most
appealing and fascinating platter, “My Last Duchess” being his all time
masterpiece when it came to dramatic monologues.

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 Poetry Portefolio
A tension between sympathy and judgement, a power play between
amazement and a sense of morality are among the striking features of
dramatic monologue. M.W. MacCallum had observed in this regard, “But
in every instance…the object (of the dramatic monologue) is to give facts
from within. A certain dramatic understanding of the person speaking,
which implies a certain dramatic sympathy with him, is not only
essential, but the final cause of the whole species.” In ‘My Last Duchess’,
the duke’s egregious villainy makes especially apparent the split between
moral judgement and our actual feeling for him. The poem carries to the
limit an effect peculiarly the genius of the dramatic monologue i.e. the
effect created by the tension between sympathy and moral judgement.
Browning delighted in making a case for the apparently immoral position,
and the dramatic monologue, since it requires sympathy for the speaker as
a condition of reading the poem, is an excellent vehicle for the
‘impossible’ case. The combination of villain and aesthete in the Duke
creates an especially strong tension, and Browning exploits the
combination to the fullest. The utter outrageousness of the Duke makes
condemnation the least interesting response, certainly not the response
that can account for the poem’s success. What interests us more than the
Duke’s wickedness is his immense attractiveness. His conviction of
matchless superiority, his intelligence and bland amorality, his poise, his
taste for art, his manners – high handed aristocratic manners that break
the ordinary rules and assert the Duke’s superiority when he is being most
solicitous of the envoy, waiving their difference of rank; these qualities
overwhelm the envoy, causing him apparently to suspend judgement of
the Duke, for he raises no demur. The reader is no less overwhelmed. We
suspend moral judgement because we prefer to participate in the duke’s

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power and freedom, in his hard core of character fiercely loyal to itself.
Moral judgement, as Robert Langbaum argues, is in fact important as the
thing to be suspended, as a measure of the price we pay for the privilege
of appreciating to the fullest this extraordinary man

It is because the Duke determines the arrangement and relative

subordination of the parts that the poem means what it does. The duchess
goodness shines through the Duke’s utterance, he makes no attempt to
conceal it, so preoccupied is he with his own standard of judgement and
so oblivious of the world’s. Thus the duchess’s case is subordinated to the
Duke’s, the novelty and complexity of which engages our attention. We
are busy trying to understand the man who can combine the connoisseur’s
pride in the lady’s beauty with a pride that caused him to murder the lady
rather than tell her in what way she displeased him, for in that ‘would be
some stooping; and I choose/ Never to stoop.’ The duke’s paradoxical
nature is fully revealed when, having boasted how at his command the
Duchess’s life was extinguished, he turns back to the portrait to admire of
all things its life-likeness, ‘There she stands/ As if alive’. This occurs ten
lines from the end, and we might suppose that we have by now taken the
duke’s measure. But the next ten lines produce a series of shocks that
outstrip each time our understanding of the Duke, and keep us panting
after revelation with no opportunity to consolidate our impression of him
for moral judgement. For it is at this point that we learn to whom he has
been talking, and he goes on to talk about dowry, even allowing himself
to murmur the hypocritical assurance that the new bride herself and not
the dowry is of course his object. Here, one side of the duke’s nature is
stretched as far as it can go; the dazzling figure threatens to decline into
paltriness admitting moral judgement, when Browning retrieves it with

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two brilliant strokes. First, there is the lordly waiving of rank’s privilege
as the duke and the envoy are about to proceed downstairs, and then there
is a perfect all-revealing gesture of the last two and half lines when the
Duke stops to show off yet another object in his collection. The lines
bring all the parts of the poem into final combination with just the relative
values that constitute the poem’s meaning. The nobleman does not hurry
on his way to business, the connoisseur cannot resist showing off yet
another precious object, the possessive egoist counts up his possessions,
even as he moves towards the acquirement of a new possession, a well
dowered bride and most important, the last duchess is seen in final
perspective. She takes her place in one of a line of objects in an art
collection; her sad story becomes the cicerone’s anecdote lending
piquancy to the portrait. The duke has taken from her what he wants, her
beauty and thrown the life away and we watch in awe as he proceeds to
take what he wants from the envoy and by implication form the new
duchess. Such a will undeflected by ordinary compunctions, calls into
question and lingers as the poem’s haunting after note: the Duke’s sanity.

The Duke grows to his full stature because we allow him to have is
way with us; we sub-ordinate all other considerations to the business of
understanding him. To take the full measure of the duke’s distinction, we
must be less concerned to condemn than to appreciate the triumphant
transition by which he ignores clean out of existence any judgement of
his story that the envoy might have presumed to invent. By the exquisite
timing the duke’s delay over Neptune, he tries once more the envoy’s
already sorely tried patience, and as he teases the reader too by delaying
for a lordly whim, the poem’s conclusion. This willingness of the reader

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to understand the duke, even to sympathize with him as a necessary
condition of reading the poem, is the key to the poem’s form.

Moreover, the Italian Renaissance setting of “My last Duchess”

helps to suspend moral judgement of the duke, since we partly at least
take a historical view; we accept the combination of taste and villainy
with taste and manners as a phenomenon of the Renaissance and the old
aristocratic order in general. We cannot, however, entirely, historicize our
moral judgement in this poem, because the duke’s crime is too egregious
to support historical generalization. More important therefore, for the
suspension of moral judgement is our psychologising attitude – our
willingness to take up the duke’s view of events purely for the sake of
understanding him, the more outrageous his view the more illuminating
for us the psychological revelation.

It is thus, clear that arguments cannot make the case in a Dramatic

Monologue but only passion, power, strength of will and intellect, just
those existential virtues which are independent of logical and moral
correctness and are therefore, best made out through sympathy and when
clearly separated from, even opposed to, the other virtues. Browning’s
contemporaries accuse him of ‘perversity’ as they found it necessary to
sympathize with his reprehensible characters. But Browning’s perversity
is intellectual and moral in the sense that most of his characters have
taken up positions through a perfectly normal act of will.

Browning’s monologues plunge us into a world in which no words

are trustworthy. In Browning’s dramatic monologues the speaker is often
a liar. Even where the word liar might seem too strong, the speaker is

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often attempting to use his words to alter radically his listener’ perception
of and attitude towards certain things, most notably the speaker himself.
The speaker hopes that the world presented by his words will be taken as
real, just as the liar wants his words to be taken as “true”. The success of
the speaker in doing so is however limited. The monologues, while
allowing their speakers a certain amount of control over language and its
shaping of a world that suits the speaker’s purposes, almost always
contain some principle by which the speaker’s control can be “molested”,
his altering of facts for his own ends detected. Mastery over language and
the transformation of life into art afford Browning’s speakers a stay
against the chaos of the world that acts independently of individual
desire.

The typical speaker of a Browning monologue is aggressive, often

threatening, nearly always superior intellectually or socially to the
auditor, a typically eloquent rhetorician who has complete control over
what he speaks. Yet, such absolute control puts the listener on guard. The
Duke’s subtlety makes the listener and the reader look for hidden motives
and purposes. The Duke’s great care about what he says suggests that
there is something behind the speech that he is determined not to reveal.
And the assumption is that what is hidden is hidden for a reason. The
Duke’s care with words, calling for an equal attention to those words on
the listener’s part, places a new stress on interpretation. Language must
be examined and studied to uncover the meaning it carries. Browning’s
obsession with language’s function as the medium of interaction with
men links him to the Victorian novelists, a world independent of the
speaker is created in the process in which his words are interpreted by
others, often in ways he never intended. The confrontation between selves

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implied in such a process is never far from the surface in a dramatic
monologue. The auditor is a threat because he might break through the
words offered by the duke to an interpretation that locates the duke’s
attitudes and actions within an entirely different context. The duke’s
monologue creates a world, like the lie in which everything is ordered
completely in relation to the sensibilities and desires of the speaker. But
the listener might not accept the offered world as valid. Browning’s
speakers hence manifest a veiled hostility towards their listeners. While
the Duke tries to close in on one interpretation of the Duchess’s ‘spot of
joy’, justifying his annihilation of her, his language contains within it
entirely contrary suggestion, which the listener or reader may uncover.
The poem, therefore, has a metapoetic quality to it. The main device it
uses to address its own status as an interpretative form is irony. And irony
is the key trope of internal differentiation. Irony involves distancing
language from itself. Thus, reading the monologue often means reading
the language of the poem against itself – turning its rhetoric inside out to
glimpse what the speaker may, unconsciously or not, be trying to conceal
from view. Browning works to undermine his speaker’s control over the
interpretation of his words, and this undermining function is a crucial
element in establishing the reader’s relation with Browning’s own art.

The attempt to evade the reality of the other as an active agent is an

interesting feature that is seen throughout the monologue. The duchess’s
vitality, that ‘spot of joy’ on her cheek that offends the duke so much
when she is alive, makes her portrait a striking one. The duke can enjoy
the blush when it exists within his control. The static thing, the work of
art can be controlled in way, the living person cannot be. The logic of
dehumanization is ultimately, the logic of murder. The other who cannot

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be manipulated must be murdered or else the other will destroy the world
the speaker has constructed. The only way to keep reality within one’s
control, to prevent its creation by an intersubjective process that
transcends the self, is to be alone in the world or to surround oneself with
completely passive others. But the speaker even while viewing the other
as a threat, needs the other. The speaker’s constructed world lacks
substance if others are not witnesses to it. A total escape from social
reality is unsatisfying. Browning’s speakers want a world that is entirely
self-made but also peopled. The murdered duchess remains in the duke’s
world as a portrait, a semblance of another who shares his world with
him. But we assume that the satisfaction offered by these inanimate
objects cannot be long-lasting. We learn of the last duchess and her fate
during the duke’s search for a new duchess, a new witness to his world.
The duke needs a living witness to his world, even while fearing one, and
his monologue is aimed at protecting himself beforehand from too much
vitality in that witness. The poem’s auditor, the envoy is also a witness to
the duke’s world, one whom the duke treats most carefully. The self’s
lack of power, its inability to create reality entirely on its own, is
obliquely acknowledged in this fear of the other.

‘My Last Duchess’ thus, revolves around the attempt to control the
other and reality itself by transforming life into art. Again and again in
Browning’s poems, art and life are presented as distinct, with art seen as a
wilful human construction in contrast to a reality that transcends
individual control. Reality proves threatening because contact with it
might require altering and abandoning the constructions of imagination.

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Interestingly, the ironic structure of the monologue is built primarily
on a strict notion of over-determination, but opens out to a more mystical
acknowledgement of the indeterminacy. Browning directs us as readers
towards uncovering a finite set of causes that determine the speaker’s
words and actions. The assumption is that the speaker himself can never
be in control of or aware of all these causes, and that the listener or reader
will at times, recognize causes the speaker cannot or does not wish to
acknowledge. The irony here is close to dramatic irony: the audience
(reader) enjoys a position of superior knowledge relative to the actor
(speaker). While the speaker is not entirely in control of the meaning of
his actions and utterances, there is a true meaning to those actions, a
meaning that is accessible to another. Eg. Various reasons of love are
given by the duke for killing the duchess, but an explanation of that love
as a response to the threat of the other can only be supplied by the reader.

However, its not just dramatic irony, Browning’s Duke is also seen
as a theatrical producer, as established by M.David Shaw. The duke is
staging a show for the envoy by drawing and closing curtains and
speaking rhetorically. George Monteiro remarked, “Virtually a libretto,
the duke’s monologue sustains a central metaphor of drama and
performance.” He begins his play with a curtain and sees himself in
dramatic light. His gestures convey an involvement in a drama of social
pretension, of ceremonious posturing, play acting and verbal artifice.
Another essential element of Browning’s dramatic monologue is the
importance of the auditor. Unlike the speaker, the auditor, cannot help but
hear, as if it were, by generic definition, absolutely silent, a passive
receptor of a verbal tour de force that leaves him no opportunity for
response — indeed, that often actively discourages him from doing so.

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Far from being a silence of consensus, the auditor’s is often a silence of
intimidation. However, recent linguistic theories, viewed in terms of
communicative acts, represented or otherwise, have deemed the silent
listener as absolutely crucial, the dramatic situation in itself is obviously
created by the presence of the other and he is necessary for the
delineation of the speaker’s self-portrait. Silence is clearly not mere
absence of speech but is itself heavy with communicative value. As
Wagner-Lawlor observes, “there is communication structured through
silence just as through speech”. The pragmatic ambiguity of second-
person silence in monologues highlights the tension between consensus
and resistance. The silence of the auditor, allows the reader sufficient
freedom to make his own interpretations and in the process he not only
undermines the authoritarian voice of the speaker but also becomes
integrally involved in the dialogue.
The poem takes one of the central pre-occupations of romantic
aesthetics to their potentially most devastating ends. If Romanticism
redefined the perception of the world through the active projection of the
individual will – so that the subject creates the object through say the
faculty of the imagination – then it may well follow that the subject is in
jeopardy of hallucinating reality. Overemphasis on the self can as we see
here, lead to annihilation of the other, as is seen in case of the Duke
ending the Duchess’s life. Thus, in his dramatic monologues, Browning
explores the ultimate limits of execution of individual will and
independence of action.
In his essay on “Sympathy versus Judgement”, Langbaum argues
that the duke reveals his identity accidently. However, Rader observes
that “the Duke reveals himself with deliberate calculation, for a specific
purpose.” Where Langbaum sees the Duke’s motives exposed by chance,

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Rader considers them wholly purposeful. Why, then, has the duke’s
speech led to such entirely opposing conclusions. It is here the Tucker’s
criticism comes in. He helpfully sifts the debate from the rights and
wrongs of the duke’s empirical character on to issues of language and
representation. Although critics recognize the disparity between statement
and meaning, it is what is betrayed that keeps them in dispute. Tucker
performs a reconciliation act here; he begins by noting the internal
division within the duke’s speech. On one hand, they express modesty,
attempting to control the impression made upon the envoy. On the other,
given their recurrence, they suggest the Duke’s discomfort or even
paranoia. The Duke seems to be wrestling with a language whose power
to signify is troublingly greater than his own. Tucker is able to tease out
the Duke’s considerable discursive unease. The Duke begins to cast doubt
on the values he eposes, almost in spite of himself/ As he discloses more
about his ‘last Duchess’ (sounding chilling as though she was one of a
series), her portrait lovingly executed by Fra Pandolf, and her sudden
death, the wider gap opens between intention and meaning.“My Last
Duchess”, draws attention to a disjunction between verbal ‘skill’ and
intent or ‘will’. It concentrates on exposing competing interpretations
between the Duchess’s will and his skill to represent his intentions and its
skill in doing the same. His rhetorical discomfiture deepens considerably
when he reveals himself unable to decode the intentions of others. All the
characters in the short history he adumbrates himself, the Duchess and
Fra Pandolf – have desires and demands that he chooses to regard in a
damagingly restrictive manner.
In the end, it can be said that Browning uses the familiar techniques
and requirements of a dramatic monologue in the most peculiar and

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exploratory fashion to yield an unfamiliar and unheard of art product that
was to glorify his legacy for generations to come.

Write on irony in 'My Last Duchess'.

An initial reading of the poem leads the reader to assume that the poet
intends for the reader to infer that art is unimportant, and simply serves as
an aesthetic pleasure. When showing off his painting of his deceased
wife, the Duchess, the Duke Ferrara mentions “how such a glance came
there; so, not the first / Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ‘twas not/ Her
husband’s presence only, called that spot / Of joy into the Duchess’
cheek” (lines 12-15) to express his disdain for her once flirtatious nature
and allude to her apparent infidelity. It is ironic that while alive, the
Duchess’ vivacious smile (when bestowed on other men) could incite
jealousy and offend the Duke’s pride; however, while viewing her
portrait and discussing her as a piece of art, the same smile which is
forever immortalized on a painting is rendered benign, even pleasurable.
This implies that when converted into art, the upsetting expression loses
its influence or power and becomes merely a source of aesthetic pleasure;
as art, the significance of the smile is lost–thus art is rendered
unimportant. Furthermore, the ekphrastic nature of the poem itself
illustrates the irony which Browning so skillfully employed. The poem is
a form of art, in which the poet and the Duke describe another work of
art: the portrait of the Duchess. Since the poem initially implies that art is
insignificant,
“My Last Duchess” then becomes a poem, about a painting, implying that
art itself does not matter; or in other words, Browning employs art to
discuss art, and ironically asserts the insignificance of art.

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Browning ingeniously created this paradox to lead readers to further
examine the implications of the superficial interpretation, and to direct
them to consider the possible assumption that art actually is necessary to
convey reality. Poems are important forms by which to express the
inexpressible. The fact that Browning felt it appropriate to rely on poetry,
or art, to effectively call attention to its devaluation indirectly suggests its
true importance. By illustrating the dependence on literature effectually to
portray the devaluation of art, Browning uses irony implicitly to
demonstrate the true value and fundamental necessity of art. This double
irony illustrates that art is essential to convey meaning which cannot be
stated directly; its significance therefore is beyond the realm of simple
aesthetic enjoyment. Art then becomes fundamental to the portrayal of
meaning and reality.
However, this implication that art enables an accurate understanding of
reality is also highly ironic because that which is aesthetic is inherently
removed from complete truth; thus Browning presents the disjunction
between the aesthetic and moral functions of art. In the poem, the
Duchess’ portrait “painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive” (1-
2) is but a vague shadow of reality. Although it is a skillful representation
of her, the painting is far enough removed from reality to render it
incapable of upsetting the Duke with the hints of indiscretion hidden
behind the portrait of her smile. The smile which induced the Duke to
give “commands; / Then all smiles stopped together”(45-46) is now just
an image, and is therefore not a threat to his pride. The diverting nature of
art affects the reader of the poem as well. The reader is not appalled by
the Duke’s wicked actions because he or she is removed from the
situation and can enjoy the artistic pleasure of the poetry. The Duke’s
expertly constructed speech induces the reader to forget that the art

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conceals a horrible murder. This aestheticism of reality causes
desensitization; what is real, true, moral, and right becomes abstruse and
enigmatic. It is ironic that the reader is compelled to applaud Browning’s
artistry in the same way the guest applauds the artist’s painting, despite
the morally reprehensible act that is hidden behind the veil of
aestheticism; the horror of the Duchess’ fate is overshadowed by the
beauty of language and powerful dramaticdevelopment. The irony that
things which are terrible and violent are considered good when they are
artistic and removed from reality seems to imply that it is impossible for
art to convey truth or have any moral significance.
As Browning entices his readers to forget the violence behind the Duke’s
beautifully rendered speech, he ironically forces them to evaluate their
own moral standing, thus illuminating the complexity of the relationship
between aesthetics and morality. The form of the dramatic monologue
requires reader participation to discover meaning as they piece together
the incongruities and omitted facts with what the Duke overtly says and
what his speech implies. As they become actively involved in the
interpretation of the poem, readers are compelled to question their own
responses to the subject portrayed. They determine which aspect of the
well-crafted poem dominates their reactions–an aesthetic appreciation for
the poetic and dramatic art, or horror at the underlying violence and
immorality? The implication seems to be that there is a precarious
balance between human decency and social or aesthetic refinement: when
real-life is overly aestheticized, numbness and moral decay ensue.
By intertwining moral issues and artistic expertise, Browning
demonstrates the paradoxical nature of art–its ability to demoralize
through desensitization, as well as its necessity to portray such issues of
moral degradation. Art is ironically an aesthetic means whereby we

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evaluate moral values and the implications of an overly aesthetic society.
Browning’s dramatic monologue of “My Last Duchess,” depends on
irony both to convey the significance of art in portraying truth, and
address the moral dangers of a world dominated by appearances.
Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues seem to focus on the tragedy of
vanity gone rampant, superseding all other concerns that ought to bear
more weight. His “My Last Duchess” is by no means an exception, but
this particular dramatic monologue employs an interesting characteristic
in so far as the art of deception is concerned. The Duke, who serves as
the narrator of the poem, is quite the garrulous and debonair speaker; so
much so in fact that he does not realize his own self-induced deception.
Such is the great irony of the poem. The Duke is so blinded by his own
egocentricity that, despite feelings to the contrary, he has so little control
over his duchess and especially her painting. Subsequently, he fails to
recognize the incongruous nature of his argument. With artwork as a
central image in the poem, it should come as no surprise that the poetic
medium would have implications that would cause such incongruities: the
painting of the Dukes most previous Duchess is eternalized through the
poem and so too is the presentation of the painting unto the public.
Therefore, the painting smiles at everyone always but unbeknownst to the
Duke despite his willingness to allow it.
The means by which to understand this irony is to firstly recognize
the importance Browning puts on art and the artist in this poem.
Naturally, the whole poem focuses around the painting of the Duchess but
art plays a much more significant role than merely as a plot device. The
primary significance of art is what the painting of the Duchess actually
symbolizes:
…She had

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A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere…
…Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. (Browning 21-4; 43-7)
The painting is a confinement of the Duchess’s smile and thus an
extension of the Duke’s control. Indeed, paintings have frames and this
painting in particular is shielded by a curtain, both of which here could be
said to further exemplify the Duke’s control over the Duchess. However,
the need to implement such control is not for control’s sake in itself; in
fact, the Duke’s need for control stems from an egocentric reflection of
himself and his family as indicated by his presumptuous jealousy when
such centricity is denied:
…She thanked men – good! but thanked
Somehow – I know not how – as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? (Browning 31-5)
Subsequently, the Duke feels as if he is the only one worthy of the
Duchess’s smile; after all, he had given her such an illustrious family
name while everyone else had given her nothing that warranted them to
behold such a lovely exposé as her smile. Certainly, when one’s most
valued commodity is seemingly undermined, one will more impulsively
seek to impose its affluence and vitality to a higher degree than under
typical conditions. The Duchess thus had not been the type of person that

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the Duke expected her to be, and so following her presumed death he
turned her into what he desired her to be. In other words, when the
Duchess did not naturally conform to the Duke’s will, the latter gives into
the frenzy that inevitably ensues from denying a haughty person their
supposed privilege. From such frenzy, the Duke ultimately amends the
idea of the Duchess, even more imposing than simply modifying her
actual person, into an unchangeable, soulless portrait of all that he had
expected of, and wanted from, her while she had lived.
However, there is tremendous irony in all of this, rooted in this
overarching importance on namesake. As a matter of fact, it is
extraordinarily ironic that for someone who prides himself on his name,
the Duke never discloses it when he is all too willing to disclose the
names of the artists who had constructed the works in his gallery.
Consider the following passages:
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands…
…Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me! (Browning 1-4; 54-
6)
Notice that the speaker never even addresses who he is by name.
One is anxious then to jump to the conclusion that he lies subsequently
about the legacy of his name, but this is too simple of a deduction to
make. Indeed, the evidence seems to indicate more so that he is in fact
more ignorant than he is willing to admit, and so when the Duke claims,
“Even had you skill / In speech – (which I have not) – to make your will /

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Quite clear to such an one…” (Browning 35-7), one can actually say that
his lacking skill is failing to fully acknowledge the content of what he is
essentially saying. Therefore, the irony is that there is more power
granted to the names of the artist than there is to the Duke himself; hence
the true power lies in the artwork rather than the proprietor of the work.
This becomes clear when one realizes that his perception of control is
anything but a reality, especially when considering that, because only the
artists are directly named, the listener could assume any identity and thus
is everyone. This is especially true since the poem can be read by
anyone, thus the Duke is exposing his last Duchess’s smile to the whole
world but is unaware of this fact, indeed priding himself on his
scrupulous demeanor. This is the perfect utilization of, appropriately
enough, dramatic irony.
In conclusion, one finds that in Robert Browning’s dramatic
dialogue “My Last Duchess” humor in the psychopathy of the Duke in his
own ignorance of the ironic situation which he creates. When examining
any poem, one must incorporate the medium as necessary to, but not in
itself holistically constituting, the poetic art. Therefore, when reading
Browning’s poem, much like a physicist looks at a photon, one must
understand that the medium, that is the poetic form, does not alter the
message but how that message is conveyed. Consequently, one must
consider that, if a story is conveyed through a poetic form, this form
conveys the meaning through all facets of that medium. Thus, one
understands when reading and writing a poem the eternality of the central
message of the work (this is a major focus in many of William
Shakespeare’s sonnets), and this cannot be separated from the poetic
form. In “My Last Duchess,” this eternality idea imposes the listener to a
universal audience, thereby directly contradicting the Duke’s intent, that

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is to be controlling to whom his last Duchess smiles. Therefore, while as
readers we are disturbed by the Duke, we cannot help but laugh at his
ignorance.23

23
Browning, Robert. “My Last Duchess”.The Norton Anthology English Literature Volume 2.
Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and M.H. Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2006. 1255-6.

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Lecture eight
Sophocles and the sea (Aantegon)
Sophocles, a 5th-century BC Greek playwright who wrote tragedies on
fate and the will of the gods, also heard this sound as he stood upon the
shore of the Aegean Sea. Critics differ widely on how to interpret this
image of the Greek classical age. One sees a difference between
Sophocles interpreting the "note of sadness"
humanistically, while Arnold in the industrial nineteenth century hears in
this sound the retreat of religion and faith. A more recent critic connects
the two as artists, Sophocles the tragedian, Arnold the lyric poet, each
attempting to transform this note of sadness into
"a higher order of experience".
Sophocles long ago Heard it on the gæan, and it brought Into his mind the
turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a
thought,Hearingit by this distant northern sea.

The Fountain of Neptune: is a fountain in Florence, Italy, situated on

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the Piazza della Signoria (Signoria square), in front of the Palazzo
Vecchio. The fountain was commissioned in 1565 and is the work of the
sculptorBartolomeo Ammannati.This work by Bartolomeo Ammannati
(1563–1565) and some assistants, such as Giambologna,
wascommissioned on the occasion of the wedding of Francesco I de'
Medici with Johanna of Austria in 1565. The assignment had first been
given to Baccio Bandinelli, who designed the model but he died before he
could start working on the block of Apuan marble.
The Neptune figure, whose face resembles that of Cosimo I de' Medici,
was meant to be an allusion to the dominion of the Florentines over the
sea. The figure stands on a high pedestal in the middle of an octagonal
fountain. The pedestal in the middle is decorated with the mythical
chained figures of Scylla and Charybdis. The statue of Neptune is a copy
made in the nineteenth century, while the original is in the National
Museum. However, when the work was finished, it was not appreciated in
particular by the Florentines, who called it Il Biancone (the white giant).
Work continued on this fountain during the next ten years. Ammannati,
with the assistance of the best Florentine sculptors and casters, added
around the perimeter of the basin, in a mannerist style, suave, reclining,
bronze river gods, laughing satyrs and marble sea-horses emerging from
the water. The monumental marble and the dynamic bronzes give
nevertheless a coherent impression. The fountain served as an example
for future fountain-makers.The fountain has suffered a great deal of
damage during the centuries. It was used as a washbasin for laundry at the
end of the 16th century. It was vandalized on January 25, 1580. A satyr
was stolen during the carnival in 1830. It was damaged again by the
Bourbon bombardments of 1848. Consequently, it has been the object of
several restorations and substitutions.On August 4, 2005, the statue was

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the target of three vandals who climbed it, damaging one of the hands and
the trident of Neptune. The act was recorded by security cameras. The
statue was restored by 2007. Since then, security on the fountain has been
taken very seriously. In late 2007, the statue was the target of attempted
vandalism by four teens. The security cameras and nearby police ensured
that no damage came to the fountain again and the four were arrested.24
Because of its size, the statue of Neptune is called “il Gigante” (the
Giant), or “al Żigànt” in Bolognese dialect. It was built in 1566 according
to the inscription at the base of the fountain, “to serve the people”;
namely, to beautify the Piazza Maggiore because it was a stop on the
route between the Archiginnasio and the Palazzo del Comune. Freshly
elected Cardinal Carlo Borromeo was responsible for wanting the Piazza
Maggiore improvements; the work was meant to symbolize the happy
rule of Pope Pius IV, his maternal uncle.
A young Flemish man, Jean de Boulogne, was called in from Douai
to handle the undertaking. Known as Giambologna, he was eager to prove
himself after having just lost the competition for the Fontana del Nettuno
in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence.
An entire city block was razed to create the fountain, with both
houses and shops paying the price. The statue of the god Neptune was
placed at the exact point where the cardo and the decumanus – the proto-
typical main streets of a Roman city - intersected. The fountain was
supplied with water piped in from an ancient underground cistern and a
spring found below a convent.25

Critical appreciation 'Dover Beach'

24
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_of_Neptune,_Florence
25
http://www.italyguides.it/us/italy/emilia-romagna/bologna/piazza-maggiore/fountain-of-neptune.htm

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Arnold's "Dover Beach" presents the reader with a virtual journey
through time. Lamenting the transition from an age of certainty into an
era of erosion of traditions - Modernism - is the backbone of all four
stanzas of the poem, brought together in our imagination by the nostalgic
image of the sea. "Misery", "sadness" and "melancholy" reign most of the
poem, yet the author chooses to conclude it with an emotional appeal for
honesty: "Ah, love, let us be true/ to one another" - as it is the only true
certainty left as the world around collapses under "struggle" and "fight".
The poet's attitude towards the subject of the poem is revealed through
key words, which are also references to a number of themes in the poem.
The most obvious one of these is "the sea" with its nostalgic nature and
ability to represent time and timelessness simultaneously. "Sadness",
"misery", "melancholy", "pain" accompany this effect and reveal the
overall sense of regret and helplessness the author feels before the powers
of time and inevitable change.

The tone of the piece is determined by the constant presence of

"melancholy" and "misery" in the poem that stretch on into the distance
with a "long withdrawing roar..." The calmness of the narrative voice
with which the piece is set to work ("the sea is calm to-night./ The tide is
full, the moon lies fair.") is essential for the descriptive nature of the first
stanza. Yet, later on its role is to emphasise the negativity in the tone of
the poem: "But now I only hear /Its melancholy...", "Into his mind the
turbid ebb and flow /of human misery..." The end of the piece, however,
implies that the alteration of the things around us is something inevitable.
The tone changes in the last verse of the poem in the sense that it now not
simply resents mutability, but is also a tone pleading with the reader to

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realise nothing is as stable and reliable as one perceives it, not to take the
world for granted, and to stay "true/ to one another".

The fundamental issues of the poem are not only obvious in its
conclusion. The theme of Time is being discussed in the second verse,
where Sophocles - an essential historic figure - is referred to. The
mentioning of England and France at the beginning of the first verse can
also be considered a historic reference and therefore - part of the theme of
Time as history is a natural subject of it. Time here is represented by the
image of the sea - with its vastness evoking powerful admiration. The
theme of mutability follows closely because of the sea's unreliable nature.
It is presented as something inevitable and insecure and, in its turn, leads
onto the theme of humans staying true and honest to one another - this
involving love for each other - as the only way to remain together, "for
the world, which seems/ to lie before us like a land of dreams/ Hath really
neither joy, nor love, nor light. The structure of the poem gives the
immediate impression of being inconsistent and built upon no particular
rules. There are four verses, none of which are alike, with no particular
rhythm or rhyme pattern. Yet its tremendous effect on the reader is wittily
based upon the impression of sharing the author's thoughts as we read - it
seems easy to identify with the subject matter just as the latter
synchronise with the sea's waves. The verses lead onto one another by
theme although they appear to be quite unconventionally structured. Thus
the end of the first stanza - occupied with sadness - brings on the
"misery" of stanza two; then the image of sea and insecurity of the end of
the second verse invites the beginning of the following and ending verse.
The unity of the poem is in this way complete and its impact on the
reader stretches far beyond the lines.

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 Poetry Portefolio
Imagistic Pattern 'Dover Beach'.
In the poem "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold there is a lot of irony,
appeal to the auditory and visual sense, and illusions. The tone in this
poem isvery sad and dismal, but he shows us how to keep faith and hope
in spite ofthat and how important being honest, true, and faithful to one
another, reallyis. Throughout this poem, Arnold mentions all of these
traits and ties them alltogether.
The irony in this poem is the main plot of the poem. A man has
taken awoman to a beautiful beach in France. There they look over the
cliffs at thebeautiful ocean, the moon is full and bright, and the night-air
is calm andpeaceful. She thinks that she is going to this romantic place to
be wooed bythis man. Instead he turns to her and talks to her about
Sophocles. She, notunderstanding what exactly is going on, later realizes
that he was getting tothe point of having each other and always being
there for one another.The poet uses visual and auditory images to mainly
help the romantic, fantasy-like place. “The sea is calm, the tide is full”
and “Of pebbles whichthe waves draw back, and fling,” is an example of
images that appeal to thevisual sense. While “ Where the sea meets the
moon-blanched land” and “Withtremulous cadence slow, and bring...”
uses an auditory sense. “Come to thewindow, sweet is the night air,” can
apply to both senses. Sweet can meanangelic or precious to qualify to be
an visual image, or it can mean almost likea melodious tune.
Illusions are used in this poem as deception for the girl that the man
is trying to hold a non-romantic conversation with. A theory is portrayed
inthis poem by Plato, the world is an illusion. In many case this that falls
true. In the first stanza of the poem , the surrounds of the two people is
discussed. Words like calm, tranquil, sweet, and eternal, are used which

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seem to foreshadowa lovely romantic evening. As the poem continues on,
the evening is spenttalking about anything but love. The final topic of
discussion goes much deeperthan just love. They end up talking about
how the world is sometimes sounpredictable and dark. But they have to
both rise above that and always betrue and faithful to one another.
"Dover Beach," by Matthew Arnold, is a love poem, but is it mostly
aboutsomething deeper than love. He uses language that appeals to the
senses, visualand auditory, it is overflowing with irony, and incredible
amounts of illusion. But he still keeps that glimmer of hope in the back of
his mind. He ties all of this together to write a poem about faithfulness
and being true to each other.

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Lecture Nine
Sublime: An idea associated with religious awe, vastness, natural
magnificence, and strong emotionwhich fascinated i8th-cent. literary
critics and aestheticians. Its development marks the movement away
from the clarity of *neo-classicism towards *Romanticism, with its
emphasis on feeling and imagination; itwas connected with the concept of
original geniuswhich soared fearlessly above the rules. Sublimity in
rhetoric and poetry was first analysedin an anonymous Greek work, On
the Sublime, attributedto *Longinus, which was widely admired in
England after *Boileau's French translation of 1674. The concept was
elaborated by many writers, including* Addison, *Dennis, *Hume,
*Burke, and H. *Blairand the discussion spread from literature to other
areas. Longinus had described the immensity ofobjects in the natural
world, of the stars, of mountainsand volcanoes, and of the ocean, as a
source of thesublime, and this idea was of profound importance to
the growing feeling for the grandeur and violence ofnature. The most
widely read work, and most stimulatingto writers and painters, was
Burke's PhilosophicalEnquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the *
Sublimeand Beautiful (1757). Burke put a new emphasis on
terror: 'Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideasof pain, and
danger... or is conversant about terribleobjects, or operates in a manner
analogous to terror, is asource of the sublime; that is, it is productive of
thestrongest emotion which the mind is capable offeeling.' Burke saw the
sublime as a category distinctfrom beauty. With the former he associated
obscurity, power, darkness, solitude, and vastness and with the

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latter smoothness, delicacy, smallness, and light. Thesevaried ideas were
brought together, and discussed withgreater philosophical rigour, by *
Kant in the Critique ofJudgement (1790). Burke's theory was popular,
andstimulated a passion for terror that culminated in theGothic tales of A.
*Radcliffe and the macabre paintings, crowded with monsters and ghosts,
of Barry, Mortimer, and *Fuseli. The cult drew strength from
*Macpherson'sOssianic poems; Ossian took his place beside*Homer and
*Milton as one of the great poets of thesublime, whose works were
frequently illustrated bypainters. The sublime of terror kindled the
enthusiasmfor wild scenery and cosmic grandeur already apparent
in the writings of Addison and * Shaftesbury, and of E. *Young and
James Thomson. Many writers makingthe *Grand Tour dwelt on the
sublimity of the Alps; they contrasted them with the pictures of *Rosa,
whosestormy landscapes provided a pattern for i8th-cent. descriptions of
savage nature. By the 1760s, whenpicturesque journeys in England
became popular, travellers sought out the exhilarating perils of therushing
torrent, the remote mountain peak, and thegloomy forest. Many published
their impressions in'Tours', and sublimity became a fashion, pandered
toby the dramatic storms shown by de Loutherbourg'sEdiophusikon, a
small theatre with lantern slides, andlater by J. *Martin's vast panoramas
of cosmic disaster. The Romantic poets rejected the categories of
18thcent. Theorists and yet these writers on the sublime
were moving, albeit clumsily, towards that sense of themystery of natural
forces that is so powerful in thepoetry of * Byron, * Shelley, and *
Wordsworth, and inthe paintings of Turner. See S. H. Monk, The
Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII Century England

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(i935).26
A quality of awesome grandeur in art or nature, whichsome 18th-century
writers distinguished from the merely beautiful. Ananonymous Greek
critical treatise of the 1st century CE, Peri hypsous ('Onthe Sublime',
mistakenly attributed to the 3rd-century rhetoricianLonginus), provided
the basis for the 18th-century interest in sublimity,after Boileau's French
translation in 1672. 'Longinus' refers to thesublime as a loftiness of
thought and feeling in literature, and associatesit with terrifyingly
impressive natural phenomena such as mountains, volcanoes, storms, and
the sea. These associations were revived inEdmund Burke's influential
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideasof the Sublime and
Beautiful (1757), which argues that the sublime ischaracterized by
obscurity, vastness, and power, while the beautiful islight, smooth, and
delicate. The 18th-century enthusiasm for thesublime in landscape and
the visual arts was one of the developmentsthat undermined the
restraintsof *NEOCLASSICISM and thus preparedthe way
for*ROMANTICISM.27
Agnosticism: Agnosticism is the view that the truth values of certain
claims – especially metaphysical and religious claims such as whether or
not God, the divine or the supernatural exist – are unknown and perhaps
unknowable. In the popular sense of the term, an "agnostic", according to
the philosopher William L. Rowe, is someone who neither believes nor
disbelieves in the existence of God, while a theist believes that God does
exist and an atheist believes that God does not exist.[2] Agnosticism is a
doctrine or set of tenets rather than a religion as such.
26
Margaret Drabble., (2000) The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2nd
Edition). NY, US,: Oxford University Press Inc.

Chris Baldick., (2001) The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Literary Terms (2nd
27

Edition). NY, US,: Oxford University Press Inc.

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 Poetry Portefolio
Thomas Henry Huxley, an English biologist, coined the word "agnostic"
in 1869. Earlier thinkers, however, had written works that promoted
agnostic points of view, such as Sanjaya Belatthaputta, a 5th-century
BCE Indian philosopher who expressed agnosticism about any afterlife;
and Protagoras, a 5th-century BCE Greek philosopher who expressed
agnosticism about "the gods".[8] The Nasadiya Sukta in the Rigveda is
agnostic about the origin of the universe.
Since Huxley coined the term, many other thinkers have written
extensively about agnosticism.28
The view that absolute truth or ultimate certainty is unattainable,
especially regarding knowledge not based on experience or perceivable
phenomena.The view that the existence of God or of all deities is
unknown, unknowable, unproven, or unprovable.Doubt, uncertainty, or
scepticism regarding the existence of a god or gods. 29
gnosticism is the position that the existence and nature of a god or gods
are unknown or unknowable. Agnostics are often looked upon as wishy-
washy fence sitters by both atheists and theists; however, most agnostics
feel that it's intellectually indefensible to make a strong assertion one way
or another. There is a frequent conflation between the idea of atheism
("there is no God") and agnosticism ("we don't know if there's a God")
because the former might accurately express what one believes and how
they live, while the latter would express their intellectual opinion if
pressed.The term was coined by English biologist T.H. Huxley in 1869,
although the concept was expressed far earlier than that, going back to the
Greeks around 450 BCE and even earlier mentions in the Hindu Vedas,
written between 1700 and 1100 BCE. In modern times, the word

28
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnosticism
29
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agnosticism

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 Poetry Portefolio
agnosticism is used exclusively.In theory, agnosticism is compatible with
all but the most dogmatic of religious faiths, but in practice most
agnostics are perceived as godless. Agnostics believe that while there is
insufficient evidence to prove that there is a god, believing that there is
not a god also requires a leap of faith (similar to any religious conviction)
that lacks sufficient evidence. Simply put, agnosticism merely asserts that
we lack the knowledge to determine whether or not God exists - in a
sense, it differs from more explicit atheism by being a position based on a
lack of knowledge, rather than a lack of belief. True agnostics would
actually not fit on a hypothetical scale between theism and atheism as
they would say the argument is unanswerable and could result in
anything, almost like Schrödinger's cat but where the box can never be
opened.
Most agnostics, however, can additionally be categorised depending on
how their beliefs work out in practice, whether they're more atheistic or
theistic. Agnostics may live and act as if there is no God and that no
religion is correct, but shy away from the title "atheist" because of the
expression of certainty implied. On the other hand, someone may
consider themselves spiritual but not religious, or perhaps even nominally
follow a religion, but identify as an agnostic in order to convey an honest
doubt about the reality of it all.30

Lecture ten
30
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Agnosticism

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 Poetry Portefolio
How far does (artistic imitation/ representation of nature/ reality)
belong to the realm of truth.
[1] Plato describes "the artist copying a natural world which was itself a
copy of the higher realm of Ideas" (5). Plato's attitude toward this sort of
imitation is apparently conflicted: In the Republic he would bar poets
from the city-state because they can imitate only the sensory world--
whereas the philosopher strives toward ideal Truth. "On the other hand, in
Ion he seems to bestow upon poetic discourse a semi-divine status." Here
the poet seems more the Aristotelian conduit of impersonal truth, for
Plato's Socrates tells Ion that the poet is the passive agent of "a divine
power" (6). Recent criticism has speculated that this is meant ironically,
whereas earlier criticism took the "exuberant" tack of taking it seriously
(6-7). "The reservations which Plato expresses about poetry stem in part
from his conviction that the higher truth of the Forms is only attainable
through disinterested rational enquiry. The realm of truth Plato believed
to be autonomous, independent of human agency and quite distinct from
the frenzies of poetic inspiration which substitute temporary aesthetic
pleasure for the arduous acquisition of philosophical knowledge. Plato
thus sharply demarcated between the modes of philosophical and literary
authorship so as to banish the latter in favour of the former" (7).
[2] Aristotle, in contrast, regards mimesis as a "representation of a
significant action" (5-6). Aristotle's author is a conduit of "impersonal
truth," a point of view adapted by contemporary Marxist and Lukasian
criticism (6).31
If aesthetics is the philosophical inquiry into art and beauty (or a
contemporary surrogate for beauty, e.g. aesthetic value), the striking
feature of Plato's dialogues is that he devotes so much time to both topics
31
http://www.utm.edu/staff/jfieser/class/110/2-classical.htm

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but treats them oppositely. Art, mostly as represented by poetry, is closer
to a greatest danger than any other phenomenon Plato speaks of, while
beauty is close to a greatest good. Can there be such a thing as “Plato's
aesthetics” that contains both positions?
Perhaps Plato is better described as seeking to discover the vocabulary
and issues of aesthetics. For this reason his readers might not find a single
aesthetic theory in the dialogues. For the same reason they are uniquely
situated to watch core concepts of aesthetics being defined: beauty,
imitation, inspiration.
The subject needs careful looking into. If perennially footnoted by later
philosophers Plato has also been perennially thumbnailed. Clichés
accompany his name. It is worth going slowly through the main topics of
Plato's aesthetics—not in the search for some surprising theory unlike
anything that has been said, but so that background shading and details
may emerge, for a result that perhaps resembles the customary synopses
of his thought as a human face resembles the cartoon reduction of it.32

Lecture eleven
Compare Browning's 'My Last Duchess' to Eliot's ' The Love Song of
J.Alfred Prufrock' in terms of imagistic pattern, thematic concern,
and stanzaic structure.

32
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-aesthetics/

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 Poetry Portefolio
The Love Song Of J. Alfred. Prufrock' by T.S Eliot and `My Last
Duchess by Robert Browning. Both poems are dramatic monologues led
by powerful narrators. T.S Eliot develops the views of Prufrock,
Browning the Duke. This particular form of narrative invites us the
readers to really get into the minds of the characters and explore their
personalities. As they lead us through the poems Prufrock and the Duke
bare their fears, weaknesses and desires to us the readers. The major
techniques through which the poems are presented are remarkably
similar. `The Love Song Of J.Alfred.Prufrock' is, then, a dramatic
monologue. The reader is invited by Prufrock to enter his mysterious
world of seduction in the opening paragraph. Prufrock leads the reader
into the dodgy, seedy, dilapidated area of the inner city by night, `when
the evening is spread out against the sky'. This at once introduces a sense
of secrecy and sordidness as he emphasises that the streets are deserted,
`through half deserted streets, the muttering retreats,' also that they are far
away from the hustle and bustle of the respectable city. Prufrock invites
the reader through the deserted streets, past sordid `one night cheap
hotels' and past shabby restaurants. He then draws the reader away from
the first location of the city streets and mentions but does not reveal for
the first time his `overwhelming question' which appears to be of
`insidious intent'. Prufrock then leads the reader away from the seedy
streets to make his visit to the second location `the room'. `In the room
the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.' This is a room possibly
in a friend,s house as he is clearly there for some sort of social gathering.
Browning's "My Last Duchess" and Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" are similar in both presenting unmarried, middle-aged men
suffering from insecurity as they explain their actions to a third party.
However, they differ greatly elsewhere.

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 Poetry Portefolio
The narrator of Browning's poem is an aristocrat with "a nine hundred
year old name," arrogant and haughty. His insecurity shows in his
loquacity. At first, he seems merely prissy and insufferable. Later, as it
becomes clear that he has had his former wife executed for real or
imagined flirting of the most harmless nature ("then all smiles stopped
together"), he becomes a textbook example of what has been called "the
banality of evil," with his offhand admission followed quickly by talk of
another marriage.
The narrator of "Prufrock" lives at a middle level and has wasted much of
his life in pointless socializing, "measured out my life with coffee
spoons." Instead of evil potency, he admits "am not Prince Hamlet, nor
was meant to be.... almost, at times, the Fool." He can catch a glimpse of
ideals, "have seen them riding on the waves," but this only accentuates
his feelings of uselessness.
The shared theme would seem to be the need for both self-awareness and
action. The duke, who can act, is sunk in a lethal and banal shallowness;
Prufrock, who is capable of sustained reflection, is paralyzed when it
comes to action.
As well as the inexorable rejection from the woman there is also the fear
of his advances being misunderstood and her not wanting a relationship
after their night together. Prufrock's fears of social inadequacy, growing
old and death haunt him through the poem. His fear of rejection stems
from his worries of appearing old; his hair falling out and loss of youthful
physique. There are many references towards death in the poem, one
being, `the eternal Footman' who `holds my coat and snickers'. This
quotation comes from the moment when he is in a room with the women,
too scared to make his move, yet too scared to leave, for fear of people
noticing his failure and talking about him; his social paranoia is again

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haunting him. The beach location at the end of the poem draws together
many of the poem's themes. Prufrock is imagining that the mermaids'
beauty and singing will lure him onto the rocks to meet his fate. This is
comparable to the women carelessly flirting with him then rejecting his
advances, laughing. At the end of the beach section and at the end of the
poem Eliot describes how `we have lingered in the chambers of the sea
by sea girls wreathed with sea weed red and brown, Till human voices
wake us, and we drown.' Prufrock is relating his being surrounded by
beautiful women in the room then being woken by human voices. He has
not acted and asked the question, and therefore he has metaphorically
`drowned,' and all has been lost. `My Last Duchess' like `Prufrock' is a
dramatic monologue, led by the Duke. The Duke is the narrator in the
poem; he is the central voice addressing both his visitor and us the
readers. The `Last Duchess' the Duke is referring to is his last duchess,
now preserved in a painting on the wall.
Both of these poems also deal with male/female relationships. The duke
in Browning's poem demonstrates a dominant attitude over women. He is
dissatisfied with his duchess because she is a flirt, and because she gives
attention to many men, and doesn't reserve all her attention for him. It
"was not her husband's presence only" that caused her to blush with joy.
The duke was too controlling to allow that - she was his property and
must behave as he instructs. But she would not be "lessoned" as he felt
she should. Browning demonstrates the subservience of women in his
poem.
Eliot, however, gives women the edge. For poor Prufrock, women have
the power. They are able to entice and to scare him. They are able to
direct the course of a relationship. Prufrock wishes to push a relationship
forward, but he hesitates - he is scared to be brushed aside by a women

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who would say "that is not what I meant at all." There is an indirect
suggestion here that these women are, at the very least friendly, at the
most flirtatious. However, where as Browning's duke looks to control
that, Eliot's man is intimidated by it. Women have moved up in society
by the time of Eliot's composition.
The Duke then begins to talk to the visitor about a dowry for his next
Duchess and it becomes clear that the visitor is a match-maker who has
come to arrange the marriage between the Duke and a new Duchess.
When the identity of the visitor emerges, it becomes clear that the poem
has been a cynical warning for the match-maker to pass on to the new
Duchess about his expectations of her, how she should behave and what
fate faces her is she does not. This casts a rather sinister and ominous
mood over the close of the poem. The overall theme of the poem does not
become clear until the end of the poem when the visitor's identity is
determined as the match-maker; the idea that they are coming here
together to arrange the marriage of the Duke and another Duchess then
becomes apparent. It then becomes obvious that, when the Duke is
talking to the match maker about his problems with his last Duchess, he
is passing on a warning through the match-maker to the new Duchess that
she must not behave in the same way as the last Duchess did. The Duke
has made it clear that he expects the uymost respect and obedience from
his new Duchess. He, after all, holds great pride in his `nine-hundred year
old name' and he expects her to value this gift above all others. The Duke
has certainly made it clear he will not tolerate her looking at other men or
flirting with them. He approves of good manners and courtesy but not to
every fool that asks for it and in his opinion he deserves to be valued the
most above all others by his new Duchess. The Duke has made very clear

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her fate is she does not meet his expectations and behaves dishonourably;
she will be put to death like his last Duchess was.

Dilemma of Hamlet: Hamlet is a play and Hamlet is a character in that

play. In exploring the topic, 'The Dilemma of Hamlet,' although the
problem of the play and the problem of the man are tightly interknit, it is
important for us to keep clearly in mind when we are talking about the
one and when about the other.leading theme is the relationship of
appearance and reality—that its dilemma, or the series of dilemmas it
poses for us, so to speak, is the difficulty of distinguishing between the
actuality and the plausible appearance of wisdom or virtue or right action.
This note is struck almost at the beginning, with Hamlet's acid, 'I know
not seems' [I. ii. 76], and his hatred of hypocrisy and deception, coming
hard upon his own distrustful and evasive answers to Horatius and
Marcellus after speaking with his father's ghost, and followed
immediately by his assumption of an 'antic disposition' apparently
designed to deceive Claudius and the Court into believing him insane, but
leaving the spectator as well sometimes uncertain whether Hamlet's
madness is assumed or whether his reason is breaking down under inward
emotional strain. Madness and sanity, true wisdom and corruptly shrewd
worldliness, real kingly leadership and tricky opportunism, genuine
heroism and its showy counterfeit; these are some of the distinctions the
play challenges us to make. But they lead us to Hamlet the man, about
whom my thesis—partly paralleling that of G. R. Elliott [in his Scourge
and Minister: A Study of 'Hamlet' As Tragedy of Revengefulness and
Justice]—is that his dilemma is not only to bring about justice but to do
so in a right frame of mind and feeling, acting as the scourge and minister
of heavenly justice, not poisoned in soul by vengefulness and hatred.

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In order to test these two theses and explore the dilemmas they deal with,
we must glance at what Hamlet himself is like and what happens in the
drama that bears his name. It might seem at first that this is simply done,
merely by reading the play or seeing it performed. But history shows an
extraordinary chaos of voices offering confused and contradictory
explanations of both.

First, there is what may almost be called the orthodox version of the past
one hundred and fifty years, the romantic interpretation that sees the
young Prince Hamlet as an introvert entangled in hesitating thought to the
point where he is frustrated to follow any course of action. This is the
view of Hamlet's character most early and most eloquently voiced by
[Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe and [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge. 'A
lonely, pure, noble and most moral character, without the strength of
nerve that forms the hero,' Goethe says of Hamlet, 'sinks beneath the
burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away. Impossibilities are
required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He
winds, and turns, and torments himself; he advances and recoils; is ever
put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his
purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of mind.'

This description seems to imply that Shakespeare's hero was a fusion of

Goethe's own Werther and Wilhelm Meister [in The Sorrows of Young
Werther and Wilhelm Meister's Travels]; Coleridge paid Hamlet the
compliment of assuming that Shakespeare had been painting a sixteenth
century version of the nineteenth century Coleridge. 'He intended,' wrote
Coleridge, 'to portray a person in whose view the external world and all

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its incidents and objects, were comparatively dim and of no interest in
themselves, and which began to interest only when they were reflected in
the mirror of his mind.... [ Hamlet indulges in] endless reasoning and
hesitating—constant urgency and solicitation of the mind to act, and as
constant an escape from action; ceaseless reproaches of himself for sloth
and negligence, while the whole energy of his resolution evaporates in
these reproaches. This, too, not from cowardice, for he is drawn as one of
the bravest of his time—not from want of forethought or slowness of
apprehension, for he sees through the very souls of those who surround
him; but merely from that aversion to action which prevails among such
as have a world in themselves.'

Such a view of Hamlet is on the whole accepted by [A. C.] Bradley and
E. K. Chambers, and is essentially that of Laurence Olivier's film version
of the play [see Sources for Further Study], where, in the beginning,
while ghostly mists swirl around the battlements and cold vaulted
interiors of Elsinore, a disembodied voice intones, 'This is the tragedy of
a man who could not make up his mind.'

Opposed to this judgment is the approach of those like [George Lyman]

Kittredge, who see Hamlet as a man of action moving to avenge his
father's death with no essential hesitation and all practicable dispatch, his
self-reproaches caused only by chafing at the slowness imposed upon him
by circumstances. This Hamlet demands, in conscience, to be sure,
reasonable certitude that he has not been deceived by a lying phantom.
When he has that assurance, in the King's guilty reaction to the play-
within-the-play, he is still delayed by the difficulty of producing objective
proof, convincing to the world, that he has not simply invented an

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accusation to justify regicide and a merely ambitious desire to seize the
throne. This view argues, furthermore, that as a King, Claudius—except
on the one accidental occasion when Hamlet comes on him at his prayers
—is constantly surrounded by armed courtiers and attendants and even a
corps of Swiss mercenaries; and after Hamlet has put him on his guard by
showing that his crime is known, he not only takes steps for his own
safety by sending Hamlet off to what he hopes will be the nephew's death
in England, but would not be likely to let Hamlet approach him
thenceforth without being surrounded by protection. In the culminating
duel scene, it is only the conspiracy between Claudius and Laertes to kill
Hamlet that allows him to be in the King's presence armed—and even
then only in consequence of seizing Laertes's foil, the single one with an
unbated point.

J. Dover Wilson, in turn, takes issue with a part of this argument by

insisting that Hamlet never wanted to prove to the world that Claudius
was his father's murderer. Such a view would always leave at least a stain
of suspicion that Queen Gertrude was implicated, and, indeed, until after
the play scene, in the interview in his mother's closet, Hamlet himself is
by no means certain that she has not been privy to his father's death. But
the ghost has bade Hamlet leave her to heaven, and therefore Hamlet has
with great ingenuity, Wilson argues, devised the play to show Claudius
that his guilt is known, but at the same time to make it appear to the
scandalized court that it embodies his own threat to murder the present
King. ( Hamlet himself, you will recall, identifies the murderer in the play
as nephew to the King.)

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W. W. Greg has devised a still more radical overturn of previous themes.
For him, the reason Claudius fails to be alarmed by the dumbshow of the
murder, but breaks up the performance of the play, is that he is in fact
innocent. He has not recognized the dumbshow as directed against
himself, but does, with the court, take the subsequent action of the play as
prefiguring an attempt on his own life. The ghost's accusations, heard by
no one but Hamlet, are simply a hallucinating projection of his own
deluded suspicions and have no basis in fact. Hamlet is in truth even
madder than he has been pretending to be.

T. S. Eliot concludes that none of these explanations will really do. More,
Hamlet's self-disgust and his revulsion at his mother's adultery and what
Hamlet calls her incest, the nauseated loathing with which his
imagination dwells in revolted detail upon 'The bloat King' 'honeying and
making love' to his mother 'in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed' 'over
the nasty stye' [III. iv. 182, 92-4], seem to Eliot emotions so excessive for
the facts that he regards them as insufficiently motivated in the drama,
and drawn from some hidden source in Shakespeare himself. ' Hamlet,' he
says, '... is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light,
contemplate, or manipulate into art.' Consequently, 'So far from being
Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is certainly a failure.'
According to this, Hamlet is suffering from what he cannot possibly
recognize himself, the Oedipal desire of a son to kill his father and
supplant him in his mother's love. Only so, Jones claims, can we explain
Hamlet speaking to her like a jealous lover, torturing himself with
hideous images of her lovemaking, and hating the King with all the
hysterical loathing of a rival. But because Claudius has done only what
Hamlet himself desired to do, killed the father and mated with the mother,

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Hamlet partly identifies himself with his uncle, shares his guilt, and
cannot bring himself to execute vengeance on one who has put into action
what he himself dreamed in childhood fantasy. He consequently
oscillates, between his conscious and acquired adult devotion to his father
and his infantile hatred and aggression, and is inhibited from acting upon
either. He would never be able to act effectively on either of his divided
motives, and only accident brings the play to a catastrophic ending as
fatal to himself as to Claudius.333435
The Fool of king lear: The Fool is essential to the narrative of the drama.
One of the most important reasons is because he is the only individual
who can openly criticize King Lear. Since he is licensed, the Fool is able
to speak any truth about King Lear and not receive banishment or death
for it. This enables him to become a voice of reason and conscience,
criticizing Lear when he is wrong. The Fool is able to operate as Lear's
moral and spiritual alter- ego, questioning his actions and probing into the
nature of what might be or what should be without reproach. Since the
Fool is the only one that follows King Lear after his banishment, it is
logical that Fool operates as a one who is able to trigger Lear's
awakening. The Fool is able to speak the truth, something that got
Cordelia banished and repudiated. Since the Fool follows Lear
everywhere, this would mean that truth, in a symbolic sense, never leaves
Lear's side, deny it as he might like. This becomes the reason why the
Fool operates as a catalyst for Lear's process of self- awareness and
gaining wise insight into the world and his place in it.

33
http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/suic/CriticalEssayDetailsPage/DocumentToolsPortletWindow?
jsid=1329ed575b5e365c0bfbb18e92576747&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE
%7CEJ2115503573&userGroupName=dove10524&zid=ece414a5c0f1215b85715fd9bacf2881
34
https://www.academia.edu/1433960/Hamlets_Dilemma_Thinking_Makes_It_So
35
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/h/hamlet/summary-and-analysis/act-iii-scene-1-2

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The Fool is able to speak from the earliest of points that what Lear has
done might be wrong. He continually speaks of Lear's real condition,
apart from what he might perceive it to be: "I am better than thou art
now; I am a fool, thou art nothing." This is one way in which the Fool
operates in the role of a conscience, something that reminds Lear of his
action's implications, a reminder of "moral right and wrong." The Fool is
able to illuminate that Lear's "blessing" was not that, at all and his
decision was flawed, to say the least. The Fool continues this when he
speaks of how human beings behave, something that Lear as a vaulted
monarch should have understood: "Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must
be whipped out, when the Lady Brach may stand by the fire and stink."
While Lear does not immediately capitulate and admit error, it becomes
clear that Shakespeare has designed the Fool's character as a voice of
reason in a world that is lacking it. When the Fool speaks of how Lear
should act, it is a reminder of how there can be a means to achieve
wisdom and sanity in a world that does not immediately embrace it:

Have more than thou showest,

Speak less than thou knowest,

The Fool reflects how Lear should act in contrast to how he does act. It is
here in which the Fool is a form of conscience for Lear, something that
does not change even though contingency and context changes so many
others in the drama. Towards the end of Act II, the Fool continues his role
as Lear's conscience when he reminds him of the traps of parental
failures.
The Fool's role as conscience cuts through wealth, privilege, and power.
The elements that Lear believed as real and permanent are now fleeting,

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and the Fool's presence suggests that character and dignity are the only
currency of value in a constantly changing world. The Fool's function
parallels Cordelia as an example of transcendence and permanence in a
world of shifting values and allegiances. It is quite meaningful that the
Fool and Cordelia never appear on stage together at the same time,
confirming their mutual value to Lear.
The point in which the Fool serves as a catalyst for Lear's transformation
into self- awareness can be seen in Act III. One reason why the Fool is
able to help in his master's transformation is because of his loyalty and
allegiance, reflective of a conscience that never dissipates: "I will tarry,
the Fool will stay.” Acting as a force of permanence in a condition of
transience, the Fool solidifies his role as an agent of moral right. During
the storm, the Fool operates as a means of support as Lear struggles to
grasp the "corrupted world of man."
Lear's self- awareness finally takes hold because the Fool has spoken
elements of truth from the very start of the drama. The Fool is a voice of
reason and conscience because he never leaves Lear, similar to a
universal sense of moral right and wrong that does not change. Wisdom
is applicable to all situations, a condition that the Fool embodies. While
conditions around Lear have drastically changed, the Fool remains. As a
result, the possibility of moral restoration and redemption.

Lecture tweleve
'The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock'
'My Last Duchess', poem is written by Robert Browning in 1842.
Browning used 'Dramatic Monologue' and 'Stream of Consciousness' in
the presentation to the 'Dramatic Persona' of Duke Alfonso the Second in

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his poem. Browning's Dramatic Monologue allows his readers to read
between the lines and make their own judgement about this PERSONA.
In his dramatic monologue 'My Last Duchess', Browning gives his
readers a glimpse into the world of Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, in the
sixteenth century. Ferrara is a city in what is now northern Italy. Alfonso
was a real person, but the situation described in this poem is fictional.
The Duke is addressing an envoy from a Count and is showing him a
portrait of his former wife.
In the opening line, the Duke states plainly that the painting is of his 'last
Duchess'. His comment in the second line that she is 'looking as if she
were alive' gives the impression that this is a masterpiece, but as anyone
read on realize that there is a more sinister meaning to this phrase. The
artist referred to, Fra Pandolf, is a fictional one. The Duke explains that
he is the only one who shows off the portrait by drawing back the curtains
that normally cover it. Everyone who sees it comments on the 'depth and
passion' in the facial expression of the Duchess, and wonders what the
reason for it was. The Duke refers to her expression as a 'spot of joy', and
the readers begin to understand his attitude as he tells the envoy that he
was not the cause of it: the artist was. The Duke imagines the
compliments that Fra Pandolf might have paid to the Duchess as he was
painting: 'Paint/Must never hope to reproduce the faint/Half-flush that
dies along her throat.' It is clear that the Duke disapproved of his wife's
reactions to such remarks, as he says that she was 'too soon made glad'.
The Duke's comment that 'her looks went everywhere' (line 24) suggests
that he could not tolerate the fact that the Duchess delighted in beauty and
appreciated gifts from others. He recalls that she considered his 'favour at
her breast' no more important than the setting of the sun or a present of
cherries from the orchard. He admits that she was right to thank people

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for gifts, but resents the fact that she did not seem value his gift to her, his
'nine-hundred-years-old name' above anything else. On two occasions the
Duke mentions the idea of stooping to explain to his former wife what it
was that displeased him about her (lines 34 and 42-43). This clearly
shows that he considered himself to be far above her. His language is
very direct when he tells the envoy that he might have said to her 'Just
this/or that in you disgusts me'. Again, in lines 39-40, the Duke refers to
how the Duchess might 'let/herself be lessoned', leaving us in no doubt as
to his attitude towards her. She is seen as an inferior being that would
need to be taught how to behave, almost like an unruly child. He admits
that she smiled when she saw him, but comments that she did the same to
everyone she saw. As this went on, the Duke could no longer bear her
behavior and 'gave commands;/Then all smiles stopped together' (lines
45-46). It soon becomes obvious that the Duchess did not merely cease to
smile, but ceased to live: the Duke's orders had been to kill her. Once
more he says 'There she stands/As if alive', and we are in no doubt this
time that she is no longer alive.
The Duke's comments on his former wife are over and he asks the envoy
to come downstairs with him. Only at this point is the purpose of the
envoy's visit made clear: the Duke wishes to marry the Count's daughter,
and the dowry is being discussed. Before they leave the upstairs room,
however, the Duke draws the envoy's attention to another painting. This
one, again by a fictional artist (Claus of Innsbruck) depicts Neptune
'Taming a sea-horse'. There seems to be a clear parallel here with the
concept of the Duke 'taming' his last Duchess. Browning's use of the
dramatic monologue is of course ideal for emphasizing the Duke's
dominant role in this situation. His is the only voice we hear, and his

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view of his relationship with his former wife is the one his readers are
given.
Anyone read this poem takes impression of the Duke is one of arrogance,
intolerance, jealousy and cruelty. Does a wife who has looked at others
and been generous with her thanks deserve to die? The poet told his
readers in (line 31) that on some occasions she merely blushed on
meeting people when she went out for a ride; this would seem to suggest
shyness and modesty. She appears to have been a lady who felt it right to
express gratitude or smile in a friendly way, and we are left with the
feeling that the Duke was a proud and ruthless man who over-reacted to
his wife's charming manner. Browning has composed his poem in
rhyming couplets with iambic pentameter (ten syllables to a line, with
stressed and unstressed syllables alternating).

T.S. Eliot stream of consciousness presentation of Prufrock's

dramatic persona:
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is commonly known as Prufrock.
The poem is described as a “drama of literary anguish,” presents a stream
of consciousness in the form of a dramatic interior monologue. With its
weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual
frustration, sense of decay, and awareness of mortality, Prufrock has
become one of the most recognized voices in modern literature. This
poem is inner monologue, which means that everything in the poem is
spoken from inside of Prufrock’s mind. It presents a moment in which a
narrator/speaker discusses a topic and, in so doing, reveals his personal
feelings to a listener. Only the narrator talks and intentionally and
unintentionally reveals information about him. The speaker expresses his
thoughts about the dull, uneventful, mediocre life he leads as a result of

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his feelings of inadequacy and his fear of making decisions. Unable to
seize opportunities or take risks (especially with women), he lives in a
world that is the same today as it was yesterday and will be the same
tomorrow as it is today. He does try to make progress, but his timidity
and fear of failure inhibit him from taking action.

Lecture Thirteen
T.E. Hulme's "Romanticism and Classicism":
Thomas Ernest Hulme was born in 16 September 1883 in Endon,
Staffordshire and Died 28 September 1917 in Oostduinkerke, West
Flanders, 917, France, (aged 34). He is the son of Thomas and Mary
Hulme. He was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School, and
from 1902, St John's College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics,

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but was sent down in 1904 after rowdy behaviour on Boat Race night. He
was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature
and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism. He was thrown out
of Cambridge a second time after a scandal involving a Roedean girl. He
returned to his studies at University College, London before travelling
around Canada and spending time in Brussels acquiring languages.
British writer T.E. (Thomas Ernest) Hulme was born in 1883. As an early
proponent of Imagism, he had an enduring effect on Modernist poetry and
the writers of his time, including Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Hulme
studied science and philosophy as a university student. After university,
he traveled to Canada, where he worked as a laborer; and Brussels, where
he taught English. He read French poetry and philosophy and was
particularly influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson. When he
returned from Brussels, he organized first the Poets’ Club in 1908, where
he came to know Ezra Pound, and second a group of writers and thinkers
that met at the Café Tour d’Eiffel in London. The clubs were venues for
the discussion of philosophy and literature—including a new vision of
English poetry. Hulme joined the British army in 1914 and was killed in
1917.

Dissatisfied with the state of English poetry, Hulme puts forth a rousing
argument proposing a new direction for poetry in “Romanticism and
Classicism.” The essay is logical, detailed, and sometimes funny as he
dispenses with Romanticism and looks forward to a classical revival in
which “fancy will be superior to imagination.” Hulme compares the
Romantic and classical tendencies, writing that humankind’s nature
(classicism) is seen in one as a bucket, in the other as a well. Classical
verse presents “a holding back, a reservation,” while Romantic verse is

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marked by its metaphors of flight. He is not a fan of the critics and
readers who are accustomed to admiring “the romantic view which drags
in the infinite” and insist on poems that are “moaning or whining about
something or other.” He argues that “beauty may be a small, dry thing.”

In poetry, Hulme admires “accurate, precise and definite description” and

admits the challenge of such writing: “It is no mere matter of carefulness;
you have to use language, and language is by its nature a very communal
thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise.”
Writing must come as the result of a real “zest” for the contemplated
object. And writers, he says, comparing their task to that of architecture,
must “get the exact curve of the thing.”
From about 1907 Hulme became interested in philosophy, translating
works by Henri Bergson, Ezra Pound, F.S. Flint and Hilda Doolttle. He
also translated Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence. The most
important influences on his thought were Bergson, who asserted that
'human experience is relative, but religious and ethical values are
absolute'.
Thomas Ernest Hulme is one of the founders of the Imagist movement
and a major 20th-century literary influence. Five of his poems were
published in New Age (January 1912) and reprinted at the end of Pound’s
Ripostes. Before his death while fighting in World War I, Hulme
defended militarism against the pacifism of Bertrand Russell. Hulme
posited that post-Renaissance humanism was coming to an end and
believed that its view of man as without inherent limitations and
imperfections was sentimental and based on false premises. His hatred of
romantic optimism, his view of man as limited and absurd, his theology,
which emphasized the doctrine of original sin, and his advocacy of a

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“hard, dry” kind of art and poetry foreshadowed the disillusionment of
many writers of the 1920s. He advocated the “geometrical” art of Pablo
Picasso and Wyndham Lewis as the potential expression of a new, more
disciplined religious outlook.
Hulme published little in his lifetime, but his work and ideas sprang into
fame in 1924, when his friend Herbert Read assembled some of his notes
and fragmentary essays under the title Speculations. Additional
compilations were edited by Read (Notes on Language and Style, 1929)
and by Sam Hynes (Further Speculations, 1955). Many of his noted
contemporaries hailed him as a great thinker, though later opinion has
tended to downplay his originality.
Ezra Pound's " A Retrospect"

POUND, Ezra Weston Loomis (1885-1972), American poet born in Idaho,

of Quaker ancestry; he studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he
met Hilda *Doolittle. He taught briefly in Indiana, but was asked to resign,
and in 1908 came to Europe and published his first volume of poems, A
Lume Spento ( 1908), at his own expense in Italy; he then moved to
London, where he lectured for a time in medieval Romance literature at the
Regent Street Polytechnic and soon became prominent in literary circles. He
published several other volumes of verse, including Personae (1909),
Canzoni (1911), Ripostes (1912), and Lustra (1916). Together with F. S.
Flint, R. * Aldington, and Hilda Doolittle he founded the *Imagist school of
poets, advocating the use of free rhythms, concreteness, and concision of
language and imagery; in 1914 he edited Des Imagistes: An Anthology.
Pound also championed the *Modernist work of avant-garde writers and
artists like *Joyce, W. *Lewis, *Gaudier-Brzeska, and T. S. *Eliot, whom
he was always ready to assist critically and materially; Eliot, who described
him as 'more responsible for the XXth Century revolution in poetry than any
other individual', greatly valued his advice, as may be seen from the history
of the composition of *The Waste Land. Further volumes of poetry include
Quia Pauper Amavi (1919, which contains 'Homage to Sextus Propertius')
and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Pound was now increasingly turning
away from the constrictions of Imagism, and finding freedom partly through
translations; his early volumes had contained adaptations from Provençal
and early Italian, a version of the Old English *The Seafarer, and in 1915

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Cathay, translations from the Chinese of Li Po, via a transliteration. Pound
was thus moving towards the rich, grandly allusive, multicultural world of
the Cantos, his most ambitious achievement; the first three Cantos appeared
in 1917 in *Poetry. In 1920 Pound left London for Paris with his English
wife Dorothy Shakespear, where he lived until 1924, finding a new literary
scene figuring Gertrude * Stein, *Hemingway, etc.; in 1925 he settled
permanently in Rapallo, where he continued to work on the Cantos, which
appeared intermittently over the next decades until the appearance of the
final Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX to CXVII (1970). In Italy Pound
became increasingly preoccupied with economics, embraced Social Credit
theories, and was persuaded that 'Usura', or credit capitalism, lay at the root
of all social and spiritual evils. (See Canto XLV for his violent attack on
usury.) His own interpretations of these theories led him into anti-Semitism
and at least partial support for Mussolini's social programme. During the
Second World War he broadcast over Italian radio: in 1945 he was arrested
at Genoa, then sent to a US Army Disciplinary Training Centre near Pisa, a
period which produced the much-admired Pisan Cantos (1948). He was then
moved to Washington, found unfit to plead, and confined to a mental

T.S. Eliot's " Tradition and the Individual Talent":

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 26 September 1888 in St. Louis,
Missouri in the United States and Died 4 January 1965 Kensington,
London, in England. He is the son of Henry Ware Eliot, president of the
Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and Charlotte Champe Stearns, a former
teacher, an energetic social work volunteer at the Humanity Club of St.
Louis, and an amateur poet with a taste for Emerson. His paternal
grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had been a protégé of William
Ellery Channing, the dean of American Unitarianism. Eliot was an
essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, Poet, and editor.
He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis until he was sixteen. During his
last year at Smith he visited the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and was so
taken with the fair's native villages that he wrote short stories about
primitive life for the Smith Academy Record.

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In 1905 he departed for a year at Milton Academy outside of Boston,
preparatory to following his older brother Henry to Harvard. In December
1908 a book Eliot found in the Harvard Union library changed his life:
Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1895)
introduced him to the poetry of Jules Laforgue, and Laforgue's
combination of ironic elegance and psychological nuance gave his
juvenile literary efforts a voice.
By 1909-1910 his poetic vocation had been confirmed: he joined the
board and was briefly secretary of Harvard's literary magazine, the
Advocate, and he could recommend to his classmate William Tinckom-
Fernandez the last word in French sophistication--the Vers Libre of Paul
Fort and Francis Jammes. In May 1910 a suspected case of scarlet fever
almost prevented Eliot's graduation. By fall, though, he was well enough
to undertake a postgraduate year in Paris. He lived at 151 bis rue St.
Jacques, close to the Sorbonne, and struck up a warm friendship with a
fellow lodger, Jean Verdenal, a medical student who later died in the
battle of the Dardenelles and to whom Eliot dedicated "The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock."
In 1910 and 1911 Eliot copied into a leather notebook the poems that
would establish his reputation: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"
"Portrait of a Lady," "La Figlia Che Piange," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody
on a Windy Night." Combining some of the robustness of Robert
Browning's monologues with the incantatory elegance of symbolist verse,
and compacting Laforgue's poetry of alienation with the moral
earnestness of what Eliot once called "Boston doubt," these poems
explore the subtleties of the unconscious with a caustic wit. Their effect

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was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered his
contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript.
Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock in (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 in (1922). He is also
known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral in (1935).
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his
outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."

Lecture fourteen
Defamiliarization: (literally "making it strange")The distinctive effect
achieved by literary works indisrupting our habitual perception of the
world, enabling us to 'see'things afresh, according to the theories of some
English Romantic poetsand of *RussiAN FORMALISM. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in BiographiaLiter aria (1817) wrote of the 'film of familiarity'
that blinds us to thewonders of the world, and that Wordworth's poetry

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 Poetry Portefolio
aimed to remove. P. B. Shelley in his essay The Defence of Poetry'
(written 1821) alsoclaims that poetry 'makes familiar objects be as if they
were not familiar'by stripping 'the veil of familiarity from the world'. In
modern usage, theterm corresponds to Viktor Shklovsky's use of the
Russian wordostranenie ('making strange') in his influential essay 'Poetry
as Technique' (1917). Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to recover
for us thesensation of life which is diminished in the 'automatized' routine
ofeveryday experience. He and the other Formalists set out to define
thedevices by which literary works achieve this effect, usually in terms
ofthe '*FOREGROUNDING' of the linguistic medium. Brecht's theory of
the*ALIENATION EFFECT in drama starts from similar grounds. See
alsoliterariness. Art, Literature. a theory and technique, originating in the
early 20th century, in which an artistic or literary work presents familiar
objects or situations in an unfamiliar way, prolonging the perceptive
process and allowing for a fresh perspective.is the artistic technique of
forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange
way (literally "making it strange"), in order to enhance perception of the
familiar.
The term was first coined in 1917 by Victor Shklovsky (or Shklovskij),
one of the leading figures of the movement in literary criticism known as
Russian Formalism. Formalism focused on the artistic strategies of the
author and made the literary text itself, and not the historical, social or
political aspects of the work of art, the focus of its study. The result was
an appreciation for the creative act itself. Shklovsky was a member of
OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka—Society
for the Study of Poetic Language), one of the two groups, with the

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Moscow Linguistic Circle, which developed the critical theories and
techniques of Russian Formalism.3637

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