William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in Soho in London; he had a grounded and happy upbringing. Although always a well-read and intelligent man, Blake left school at the early age of ten to attend the Henry Pars Drawing Academy for five years. The artists he admired as a child such as Raphael, Michelangelo, Giulio, Romano
and Dürer.
Men like Drayton, Hooker, Jonson, already wear their learning with a certain accustomed and substantial grace characteristic of the new time. But the most conspicuous example in literature of this expanding learning is Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans.
Author Feature: Sir Philip Sidney The finest incarnation of humanistic virtues in his times was Sir Philip Sidney. He was born in 1554. On both sides he was an aristocrat. His mother came of the exalted house of Lisle and Dudley. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was her brother. Philip’s…
Kamala Das – Her Literary Life and Her Works Her Life Born on March 31, 1934, in Malabar, Kerala, Kamala Das’ love of poetry was ignited by watching her great uncle Nalapat Narayana Menon, a prominent writer of his time. She would watch him work all day and felt that…
William Caxton (c1422-1491) Before Henry VIII became king there had already been devised on the continent the most powerful instrument of all for common enlightenment–the printing press. It was to make cheap and accessible the means of nurture by which the world was to grow. The art of printing was…
Author Feature: Ben Jonson Of the new doctrine of drama after Elizabeth I’s death, the great apostle was Ben Jonson. Burly, big-featured, out of sturdy common stock of the Scotch border, once a bricklayer, through solid literary achievement and force of personality he rose, still in his thirties, to be…
Caedmon is the earliest English poet known to us by name. What little we know of Caedmon, the Anglo-Saxon Milton, as he is properly called, is taken from Bede's account [Ecclesiastical History, IV, xxiv.] of the Abbess Hilda and of her monastery at Whitby. Here is a free and condensed translation of Bede's story:
Sophocles (Greek: Sophokles) was an Athenian dramatist and politician who lived from 496 BC to 406 BC. He is considered the second of the three great Greek tragedians, preceded by Aeschylus and followed by Euripides. Sophocles is himself at a young age: at the Athenian victory celebration at Salamis (480…
