Lecture notes drop box and creative corner of Dr Aswathy Aravindakshan
Reading Time: 3 minutes ‘A Red Red Rose’ is a famous Scottish love song attributed to Robert Burns. He is believed to have been inspired by a simple Scots song he had heard in the country. Burns first planned to publish it in A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice, a compilation of songs by…
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Reading Time: < 1 minute One of the aspects of the medieval revival was a renewed interest in the poetry of the old English masters, more especially Spenser and Milton. Under the inspiration of Milton’s Penseroso, a school or cult of melancholy grew, and the poets of this school are known as “the churchyard school of poets”. Gray’s Elegy,…
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Reading Time: < 1 minuteWilliam Collins (1721–1759) was a prominent pre-Romantic English poet known for his lyrical odes that combined Neoclassical forms with Romantic themes and emotions. Despite his brief literary career and limited output, Collins is celebrated as one of the finest lyric poets of the 18th century. Educated at Winchester College and Magdalen College, Oxford, he developed…
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Reading Time: < 1 minuteWilliam Blake (1757-1827) was the first to introduce the romantic note of mysticism in English poetry. In his poetry, we are very close to Wordsworth. Though he is a transitional poet or a precursor of the Romantic Revival, he is even more romantic in many ways than the Romantic poets. He was the most undisciplined and lonely of all poets and lived in his…
Reading Time: < 1 minute George Crabbe (1754-1832) belongs to the neoclassical tradition, as far as his diction is concerned. In his masterpiece The Village, which is mostly descriptive of the miseries of the poor villagers, Crabbe is an uncompromising realist. He asserted I paint the Cot As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not. He shows…
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Reading Time: 2 minutesWilliam Cowper (1731-1800) was a prominent poet among the pre-romantics. “He”, says Compton-Rickett, “is a blend of the old and the new, with much of the form of the old and something of the spirit of the new.” His greatest poem is The Task. It is written in blank verse and contains the famous line,…
Reading Time: < 1 minute Goldsmith (1728-74), the contemporary of Dr Johnson, was like Thomson to Pope. He has left behind him two critical poems, The Traveller (1164) and The Deserted Village (1770), and both are in heroic couplets. The first poem is didactic and is concerned with the description and criticism of the various places and people of Europe which Goldsmith…
Reading Time: < 1 minute James Thomson (1700-48) was a typical transition poet, though he belongs to the first half of the eighteenth century. He began writing when Pope was at the height of his popularity, yet he broke away from the tradition of Pope’s school to explore “fresh woods and pastures new”. His The Seasons, published in 1730,…
Reading Time: 3 minutes The period 1750-1800 marks the shift from one distinct school or convention of English poetry to another. The Neo-classical period, which began with Dryden in the late seventeenth century and continued well into the eighteenth century, had specific, very definite characteristics. The Romantic period, which began near the end of the eighteenth century with the…
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Reading Time: 4 minutes EVENING IN THE CHURCHYARD As evening approaches, the gentle tolling of church bells signals night’s arrival. Exhausted ploughmen and cattle slowly return from the fields, their movements sluggish after a long day’s work. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his…
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