English 211 Dr. Levin @ LaTech Midterm

Thomas Gray

"Elergy Written in a Country Churchyard"

William Blake

"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

Dr. Samuel Johnson

"The Preface To Shakespeare"

Charlotte Smith

"Elegiac Sonnets"

William Wordsworth

"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"

"Preface To Lyrical Ballards"

"Spontaneous overflow of Powerful Feelings"

+

"Thought"/Contemplation

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"Biographia Literaria"

"Kubla Khan"

"Spots of Time"-Tranquil Restorations that bring back a time, smell, people, or object

-Addicted to Laudanum

-Went to Cambridge

-Good friends with Wordsworth

Percy Shelley

"Ode to the West Wind"

"Mont Blanc"

-Aristocratic Family

-Oxford University(Expelled in 6 Months)

-Late Bloomer/Bullied

-Sympathetic Heart

-Did not like an authoritarian Figure

-Paradoxical Writing

Lord Byron

"Canto III From Child Harolds Pilgrimage"

-club foot

-good swimmer

-macho man

-boxer

-went to Cambridge

-lots of scandals/Gossips

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

"Revenge"

-Born 1802/died 1838

-Gaze like men do at women

-Role reversal

-Sadism

John Keats

"Ode to a Nightingale"

"Letters to George and Tom Keats, December 1817"

-Died at 25

-Lost mother and brother to TB

-Negative Capability -loose ended ending like Shakespeare

Film

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"

-days of thoughtless youth

-payoff is knowledge/even if its painful

-similar to Keats and the nightingale how they want to run away

-Relationship goes from innocence to experience

French Revolution (1789)

American Revolution(1776)

Industrial Revolution

Reign Of Terror (1792)

Sublime

Combination of Awe and Terror

Paradox

A Contradiction or Dilemma

Infinite

Possibility, Open, Limitless, (To Think Critically)

Finite

Absolute, Closed, Limits

Poetic Faith

-Coleridge

-suspension in disbelief

-one must have faith when dealing w/ poetry

-on an empirical level, may not make sense

-The unity of balance of opposites to make a discord

Kubla Khan

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

(Very Fragmented)

Reading, Takes Laudanum, Falls Asleep, Dreams, Then writes about the vivid Images.

Poem about him not being able to create a poem

Plato

(Republic)

-Plato Said no poets in my nations

-Wanted uniformity and no disagreements

-If you are acting with emotion or passion you are a threat to his republic

Dionysus

-God of wine, revelry ,intoxication, sex, unconsciousness, poetry, fertility

Apollo

God of Sun, Light, Knowledge, Reason, Poetry,

*Hard Work, time, scholarship.

Moral Purpose

-there's no conclusion or proven ending

-pleases intead of instructs

-Shakespeare writes without this

-very not Englightenment

-leaves it up to the audience for interpretation

Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings

Wordsworth's definition of poetry/deep contemplation

Empiricism

the view that knowledge originates in experience and that science should, therefore, rely on observation and experimentation

The Gaze

Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote about observing a woman, she talked about the reversal

Dissonance

balancing of discordant of opposite qualities coming together

Negative Capability

John Keats created this, ability to exist in uncertainty without any doubts or reason and that there are things that are going to happen in life that don't have logical reasoning behind them

Spots of Time

Wordsworth

They occur when you least expect it!

Shelly's Def. Of Poetry

"Poetry is a mirror that makes beautiful that which is distracted"

Voyeruism

Spying on people in compromising situations for sexual pleasure.

innocence

the state of being free from sin or moral wrong, childlike, no worries

animalistic

Empiricism aka (Experience)

the belief that accurate knowledge can be acquired through observation

Ignorance is bliss

not knowing something is often more comfortable than knowing. In other words, what you don't know can't hurt you.

Elergy Written in a Country Churchyard

The speaker walks the countryside and looks upon life as a metaphor basically saying that everyone is going to die even himself.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Stating that even the most different people can usually work together.

The Preface to Shakespeare

Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

Johnson makes his Shakespearian criticism the foundation for general statements about man, nature, and literature. He is a true neo-classicist in his concern with the universal rather than with the particular; the highest praise he can bestow upon Shakespeare is to say that his plays are "just representations of general nature." The dramatist has relied upon his knowledge of human nature, rather than on bizarre effects, for his success. "The pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth," Johnson concludes. It is for this reason that Shakespeare has outlived his century and reached the point at which his works can be judged solely on their own merits, without the interference of personal interests and prejudices that make criticism of one's contemporaries difficult. Keywords: universal, natural.

One of Johnson's most stringent objections to Shakespeare's work arises from his strong conviction that literature is essentially didactic. He is disturbed by Shakespeare's disregard of "poetic justice." Johnson was convinced that the writer should show the virtuous rewarded and the evil punished, and he finds that Shakespeare, by ignoring this premis, "sacrifices virtue to convenience." The fact that in life evil often triumphs over good is no excuse in Johnson's eyes: "It is always a writer's duty to make the world better."' Shakespeare's careless plotting and his "disregard for distinctions of time and place" are also noted as flaws. Although Johnson dislikes Shakespeare's bawdry, he is willing to concede that that fault, at least, might have rested with the indelicacy of the ladies and gentlemen at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I, rather than with the playwright. These minor "errors" are far less irritating to Johnson than Shakespeare's use of puns: "A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it."

Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

The Mind of Man and Nature and how you can have spots of time that make you think back of a certain place.

Preface to Lyrical Ballads