William Blake ( 1757-1827 ) It is the last act of the Romantic Era, and a poetic Renascence opens center stage with a new and different character; that character is William Blake. In poetry and art, Blake was aggressive, violent, backed by both physical and mental courage; the forerunner of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats,…
Wystan Hugh Auden 1907-1973 Wystan Hugh Auden or “Uncle Wiz” as he was more affectionately called, was a third son of a York physician. He was a not-quite modernist; not quite socialist; a Freudian; leaning toward the northern Germanic Volksmarchen and Kunstmarchen not Southern European Romanticism; “more at home with Goethe that with Baudelaire; a…
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) Matthew Arnold’s early life follows a path of most poets of the time: traditional schooling steeped in classical studies, Greek and Latin, French and German, frequent traveling at home and abroad. There is one difference: while other poets considered poetry their profession, Arnold was, for the greater part of his life, a…
Percy Bysshe Shelley In 1812 Southey, disillusioned by the “failure” of the French Revolution, wrote to a friend: “Here is a man at Keswick, who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son of the member for Shore-ham; with 6000 pounds…
William Langland’s Piers Plowman Langland’s Life: Langland is a literary figure about whom little is known. He was probably born in Malvern, in Worcestershire, the son of a poor freeman, and spent his childhood as a shepherd in the fields. Later, he moved to London with his wife and children, where he made a meagre…
Geoffrey Chaucer Well on in the pilgrims’ famous journey to Canterbury, Harry Bailey, the host of the Tabard and master of ceremonies, called on Chaucer for his story. The poet had hitherto kept in the background, though before they had set out, he had made a point of speaking with each of his fellow travellers….
Out of the Northern revival emerges a figure more shadowy than that of Alcuin, but greater. It is the one Old English poet to any extent identified by his English works. A poem called Elene, of 1300 lines, was found in an Old English manuscript which had strangely made its way to Vercelli in Italy. Into this poem were curiously wrought old forms of letters called runes, which when deciphered in order revealed the name of the poet–Cynewulf.
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 father, Sir Henry Sidney, was…
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 his life was one of…
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 late in reaching England. William…
