Figures of Speech

Antithesis
is a figure of contrast, arrangement of two opposite ideas in the same sentence:
Man proposes, God disposes.

Zealous yet untrue.

Though grave yet trifling.
As civilization advances, poetry declines.
In penance planning sins anew.
Where law ends, tyranny begins.
Speech is silver but silence is golden.

A friend exaggerates a man’s virtues, an enemy his vices.

Apostrophe
is direct address to the absent, the dead, the personified, an inanimate object:
Exult o shores and ring o bell.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean.
With thee, sweet hope, resides the heavenly light.
O liberty, what crimes have been committed in thy name.
O mischief, thou art swift to enter in the thoughts of
desperate men.
O death where is thy sting?
O grave where is thy victory?

Bathos is anti-climax, descent from the sublime to the ridiculous:

- Here lies a king whose word no man relies on , who never said a foolish thing and never
did a wise one.
- For months still I lingered in hope and in doubt,
While her form it grew wasted and thin;
But the last dying spark of existence went out
 As the oysters were just coming in.

Bombast
is elevation of diction without elevation of the subject.

Climax
is arrangement of a series of ideas in a gradual rise, a figure in which sense advances by successive
steps from the less important to the more important:
I came , I saw, I conquered.
He was a robber, a murderer, a patricide.
To gossip is a fault, to libel a crime, to slander a sin.

Conceit
is a comparison in great detail, a decorative figure, an extended metaphor or simile, a popular
mannerism of Renaissance.

Donne compares parted lovers to the legs of a pair of compasses, deifies his mistress by saying

that she is only defined by negatives or that she can read the thoughts of his heart, a thing beyond

an angel’s art.
He refers to subtleties of nothingnesses and quintessences, mixture of souls, significance of
numbers, aerial bodies of angels, the phoenix and the mandrake’s root, the king’s real and
stamped face.

Epigram
is a figure of wit and contrast, a short pithy saying depending on antithesis:
Familiarity breeds contempt.
When all speak, none hear.
He was conspicuous by his absence.
A little more than kin and less than kind.

Euphemism
is glossings over a shocking or ugly thing, using a favourable or gentle term, describing an
unpleasant truth in pleasant way, indirect or softened statement for a blunt or offensive one, use
of delicacy to tone down something forbidden and harsh, mellowing down of an impolite term:
Pass away .
Mental hospital.
Death is a happy release.
She is plain in appearance.
He was gathered to his forefathers.
Discord fell on the music of his soul (he became mad).
He appropriated what did not belong to him. (stole)
He occasionally deviates from strict truthfulness.
His later life was clouded by domestic disagreements.
In the golden age, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and
The leopard shall lie down with the kid.

Hyperbole
is overshooting the mark, over statement, exaggerating a truth for emphasis/ humour, describing
things in higher/ lower terms:

This book weighs a ton.

There were millions of people at the party.
I could have knocked him over with a feather.
She is more beautiful than venus.
They lifted the roof with their shouting.
He will be knocked unconscious by a snowflake.
The whole world was shocked at the news.
The soldiers charged with the rapidity of lightning.
The sees will be multiplied as the stars of the heaven and as
the sand which is upon the sea-shore.

The sky shrank upwards with unusual dread

And trembling Tiber dived beneath his bed.

So frowned the mighty combatants that hell

Grew darker at their frown.

Says Shakespeare—
I would a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make
thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part and each
particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.

Innuendo
is a suggestion that is hinted at.
Irony
is a contradictory outcome
- a condition of being mocked by facts or fate
- difference between intended and expressed meaning
- a situation or utterance having unforeseen significance
- a figure of disguise/ dissimulation
- a contrast between appearance and reality
- a manner of speaking that implies a discrepancy
- what is said by way of compliment is the opposite of what is meant in a derogatory
way.
- based on gap between what is thought to be true and what actually is true.
- gap between words and truth , words and meaning, intention and outcome
- a kind of alliance between reader and writer
- seeing and not seeing. The reader is percipient/ able to see while the exposed is
impercipient/ unable to see.
In dramatic irony, the reader has information which is denied to characters.

In situational irony, there is difference from expectation:

Suicide committed by an admired person or murder may be plotted by an apparently
harmless person. Situational irony is an incongruous situation.

In verbal irony, we say one thing but mean another: the meaning is far from the usual meaning,
calling a humble baker a rich man. It implies a contrast or discrepancy between what is said and
meant.
 Do not weep maiden for war is kind.
Bitter verbal irony is sarcasm:
Brutus is an honourable man (Mark Antony)
Jane Austen’s Emma confuses appearance with reality; she knows that blunders arise from partial
knowledge but herself has high pretensions to judgement. The novalist stresses the necessity of
knowing oneself and others.

Double irony occours when one irony undercuts another. Hardy describes Tess as virginal
daughter of nature. Later Angel Clare rejects her, speaking better than he knows Here irony
rebounds on the reader.

“Finnegans Wake” is the chief ironic epic of the modern times; irony has three parts- hidden real,
apparent real and human perception; it has psychological function of affecting relationship
between poet and reader as well as metaphysical function of affecting view of reality; distorts view-
point through false equation or suggests metaphysical inconclusiveness through use of both-and;
affords insight into reality. Open a window on universe, produces sense of complex and ultimately
unresolvable paradoxes of the human situation and replaces incantation by cerebration; irony
implies discrepancy/ incongruity between what is said and what is meant—verbal irony;
He is a true friend to forsake you in trouble.
I fear I wrong the honourable men whose daggers have
stabbed Caesar.
He was the cleverest general who ever lost a battle.
That accomplished lawyer knew a little of everything, even
of law.

Irony implies discrepancy between appearance and reality, a thing and a limited perception of it
; irony of situation is discrepancy between expectation and fulfillment—a man with second wife
accidentally seated next to the first in a cinema; in O’ Henry’s The Gift of the Magie, a poor man
pawns his gold watch to buy hair comb for wife who sells hair to buy a fob for his watch—
Coleridge’s mariner finds not a drop to drink in mid-ocean; irony is discrepancy between what
the speaker says and what the author means; this is dramatic irony , the reader is made aware of
the outcome of a situation before the characters realise it ; this dramatic irony is more complex
than verbal irony.
Brooks spreads out irony into a theory of language, structure, image and theme. But in
Critics and Criticism 1952, R S Crane condemns this view as critical monism. Irony is derived from
its traditional use in drama; it tends to expand into an abstraction or mystical monism; the
essential element of irony is the presence of qualification or even reversal; irony controls the
complexity of poetry; it prevents identification of the poem with an uncomplicated sentiment, a
moral pronouncement or a myth; it looks toward uniqueness which is the quality of every poem.
Irony is a sophisticated mode rooted in realism and dispassionate observation but
moving toward myth; the naïve ironist calls attention to the fact that he is being ironic whereas
sophisticated irony merely states and lets the reader add the ironic tone himself.
THE BOOK OF JOB is a tragic irony in which the dialectic of divine and human
works itself out. Tragic irony is the study of tragic isolation; the hero is free from hamartia or
pathetic obsession; the central principle of tragic irony is that the exceptional event is causally out
of line with hero’s character; irony isolates from a tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness or of
victim’s unluck. Tess is a typical victim/ scape goat, neither innocent nor guilty ; Adam is
archetype of the inevitably ironic, human nature under sentence of death , as Frye puts it. At the
other pole is the incongruous irony of human life, in which all attempts to transfer guilt to a victim
invest him with innocence. Christ has been called an archetype of the incongruously ironic; the
tragic hero is halfway between, human yet of heroic size.

In His IRONY AS A PRINCIPLE OF STRUCTURE, Cleanth Brooks states that irony is produced
by skillful disposition of the context, that it is the special strategy of great deal of modern poetry
on account of
1) breakdown of common symbolism
2) scepticism to universals
3) depletion or aorruption of language by mass media, pulp fiction, public sophisticated by
commercial art.
He states that the modern poet uses ironic techniques to rehabilitate a tired/ drained language
and to achieve clarity and passion.
Sarcasm is reversal of meaning effected by the context and the tone of voice:
This is a fine state of affairs!
Irony can be playful, gentle, tragic. The meaning of a poem is modified by the context---
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? (Gray)
Shakespeare produces playful irony by mixing pagan myth with theology:
Holy, fair and wise is she;
The heaven such grace did lend her…
Love doth to her eyes repair
To help him of his blindness.
 In Arnold’s DOVER BEACH, the world that stretches like a land of dreams has neither joy nor
love nor light; the speaker standing beside the beloved and looking out of the window on the
calm sea is aware of the delusion of moonlight blanching the scene; the pressure of the context
produces irony.
Wordsworth develops irony by exploiting the contrast between violet and star---
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
The violet-like Lucy was half-hidden when alive but not completely hidden after death; from
the world’s point of view she was shy but from her lover’s she is dominating. In his SLUMBER
DID MY SPIRIT SEAL, Wordsworth creates ironic contrast between
1) the speaker’s former slumber (insensitiveness to the claims of mortality) and
the beloved’s present slumber (death)
2) beloved’s insulation against time because she seemed divine and her
insulation because she is inert, helplessly fallen into the clutter of things,
meaningless, mechanical, repetitive motion.
Randall Jarrell’s poem ‘Eighth Air Force’ has the tension of opposing themes, presents airmen as
murderers and wolves, carries us beyond abstract creed into the matrix from which creeds are
abstracted.
Cosmic irony is ironic twists of fate, developments revealing a terrible distance between what
people deserve and what they get, between what is and what ought to be. Hostile fate keeps playing
tricks to thwart the central characters, as in Hardy. Cosmic irony is the frustration of human
efforts by a malicious fate.
Irony may make us laugh, sympathise, wonder; it occours in a statement, a situation,
an unexpected event, a point of view.

Litotes
is an understatement, a form of ironic expression, saying negative of the opposite, negation of the
contrary for making out a positive sense---
He is a teacher of no mean caliber.
He was not unmindful i.e. he gave careful attention.

Metaphor
is an implied comparison, a comparison with close identification of two things, an implied simile,
a comparison between two unlike things by saying that a thing is another thing, transforming one
thing into another; an implicit identity; the application of a name or descriptive term to an object
to which it is not literally applicable.
Metaphor is an omnipresent principle of language ,a literary mode conveying the
speaker’s mood and poetic intelligence; metaphor is something personal and visionary, requiring
no allegiance to facts; it is more compressed and economical than a simile:

A dead silence
A flash of wit
A hard heart
A ray of hope
Ambition is a bubble.
My house is a prison/ a dark road.
I smell a rat.
A desert is a sea of sand.
You are the salt of the earth.
Portia is a pillar of law.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight.
The ship of the state weathered the storm.
Handle this thorny subject carefully.
He poured forth a stream of eloquence.
The French Revolution was a volcanic eruption.
Sleep is the balm of hurt minds, chief nourisher in life’s Feast, nature’s second course.
The Assyrian wolf came down on the fold.
Athens was the mother of arts and eloquence.
Stars are the daisies that adorn the blue fields of the sky.
The day is done and darkness falls from the wings of night.
There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood Leads on to fortune.
A great deal of the furniture of ancient tyranny is worn to rags (furniture and cloth)
A torrent of superstition consumed the land . (water and fire)
Hope, the balm of life, darts a ray of light through the thickest
gloom .(medicine and light)
His sharp wit cut through our conversation

Green Buddhas (uncut water-melons)

On the fruit stand
We eat the smile (tasty wedges)
And spit the teeth. (seeds)
Comparison of the intensity of hunger and thirst to a dying person—
I am starving
I am dying for a drink
Says Marvell—
My vegetable love should grow.
Says Marianne Moore—
The sea is a collector quick to return that rapacious look.
In ‘Poppies in October’, Sylvia Plath refers to red petals of poppies as skirts—
Even the sun clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Tenor is object presented; vehicle is that in terms of which it is presented. Larkin uses church as
tenor & shell as vehicle.

Metonymy
is figure of contiguity/ substituation
a name calling forth a complex structure of ideas
and things
substituation of a word associated with a thing for the things itself , cause for effect,
effect for cause, container for the contained, a place for the inhabitants, a person’s name for his
work, a sign for the signified, an adjunct for the subject.
chamak : horse trading in politics
church : whole complex of organized religion
crown : monarchy
Texas : windy plans and oil wells
Vermont : gentle green hills, maple trees, vivid foliage.
Washington : American government
The kettle boils.
I haven’t read Virgil.
The crown calls forth the image of government.
Scepter and crown must tumble down.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
The scepter shall not depart from Judah.
Pakistan has won the match.

Oxymoron
is a figure of contrast , a condensed paradox, adjective contradicting noun, paradoxical use of two
opposite words, combination of two seemingly contradictory elements:
sightless view
profitless usurer
o my gentle village fierce
o my powerful people weak.
Juques had humourous sadness.
It is an open secret.
He committed a pious fraud.
He lived a life of active idleness.
James1 was the wisest fool in Chiristendom.
He is a busy idler and an honourable villain.
She accepted the kind cruelty of the surgeon’s knife.

Paradox
is An apparent contradiction , a statement that apparently contradicts itself,
A statement that seems to be contradictory or ridiculous
but is true,
a statement outwardly illogical,
a reconciliation of seeming opposites,
an exercise of metaphysical wit,
a figure of contrast having shock value:
defend me from my friends.
The more you know about people , the less you understand them.
Many sightless people are highly observant.
Cowards die many times before their death.
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
Says Emily Dickinson—
My life closed twice before its close.
Says Wordsworth—
The child is father of the man.
Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”—
The fool doth think he is wise but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Says Lovelace—
When I lie tangled in her hair
And fettered to her eye,
The birds that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.

Says Henry Thoreau in ‘Walden’—

In proportion as the human being simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less
complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty , nor weakness weakness.

Periphrasis
is circumlocution, roundabout expression.
In all human probability (most likely)
He was recipient of the highest award. (received)

Personification
is a kind of metaphor, attribution of human feelings and qualities to an abstract idea, an animal,
an inanimate object. This figure helps communication of feelings and images, makes ideas
concrete, makes unfamiliar experiences commonplace and commonplace experiences
unfamailiar.
Prattling brooks
Smiling morn.
The ground thirsts for rain.
The island danced with corn.
Daffodils danced in glee.
Flowers danced about
Procrastination is the thief of time.
Peace hath her victories no less renowned than war.
The sun smiled down on them.

And every wave with dimpled face

That leaped upon the air,
Had caught a star in its embrace,
And held it trembling there.

Says Shakespeare—
The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night.

Says Frost—
The secret sits in the middle and knows.
Ahmad Alhamisi feels threatened by white culture, states that
whites’ poems are dangerous daggers, guns and cops while Blacks’
poems are exotic, rare, rich , Egyptian princesses—
pierching hearts in weird designs
Keats personifies autumn and melancholy—
She dwells with beauty – beauty that must die ,
And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight,
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine.
Elizabeth Darynsh states that Anger lies beside her all night. She views anger as something outside
her, a persistent presence over
which she has no control—
His breath was hot upon my brow,
He told me of my burning, wrong,
All night he talked and would not go.
Ruth Fainlight personifies future as a timid woman—
The future is timid and wayward
And wants to be courted, will not
Respond to threats or coaxing,
And hears excuses only
When she feels secure.

Pun
is play on words sounding alike,play on two meanings of the same word, echolalia or verbal
hiccups, alteration of one or more letters, anti-decorum; against right things in right place, use of
homographs or words identical in pronunciation and spelling but different in meaning and origin,
subversion of order/rationality, assertion of personal independence, culturally important for
sharing a sense of community, pivotal movement in which second meaning rotates round the first
one or branches off from it,
re-routing of trains of thought, based on awareness of identity in difference or of
difference in identity, bringing two different concepts under one word so that difference is in
concepts and identity is in reality; witticism in bringing two different objects under one concept,
with identity in concept and difference in reality, centripetal/cohesive and centrifugal/disjunctive
operation to double our attention and stretch our mind:
Race- rush, nation
Urdu ‘hul’- solution and plough
Spot- place, stain
Is life worth living?
That depends on the liver (person, organ)
I told the sexton who tolled the bell.

A woman powders the face while a soldier faces the powder.

I am a proud Pakistani and not a Europepeon (European)
Women are daily crucified (nailed to bed)

Jhoot ke paaon nahi hotey

To phhir joota kaisay pehnta hai?

Tum ooper se yeh le aaye ho

Ooper se to naheen laya.

Tumhaarey liye hostel bhaari hoga

Kiya isey otthana hoga?

Woh hath maar ker rupeyya le giya

Oos ne haath to nahin mara.

Alice:You should say what you mean

March Hare: I do.
Alice: I mean what I say- that’s the same thing, you know
Gallaan- chit-chat, cheeks
Tear-rip, weeping

The pun is a double-think, using a word with two different meanings, using two different words
having different meanings but somewhat similar pronunciation/ spelling, using two words of
similar meaning or pronunciation but different spellings. The pun passes off similarity as identity,
treats as the same word those words which are etymologically distinct but identical in form. The
sounds punned upon conceal a sliding panel or a trap door. Punning is the lowest form of wit. Bad
puns are artifice, not art; are distracting, lack semantic shock, are based on verbal similarity
without highlighting congruity/contrast of meaning.

Simile
is comparison of two different things on the basis of shared quality; introduced by as , like,
seemed, resembled , similar to ; expression of likeness between two unlike things.
As white as a sheet.
As cool as a cucumber.
I wandered lonely as a cloud.
Pleasures are like poppies spread.
My love is like a red red rose.
Debt is like a millstone about a person’s neck.
The fog sat like a lid on the mountains.
His dress was as plain as an umbrella cover.
The Assyrians came down like the wolf on a fold.

Sweet are the uses of adversity

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears still a precious jewel in its head.

My doctrine shall drop as the rain and my speech shall distil as the dew.

Says Browning—
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed.
Says Hopkins—
It strikes like lightnings to hear him sing (About thrush)
Says Emily Dickinson—
There’s a certain slant of light,
Winter afternoons—
That oppresses like the heft of cathedral tunes.

Synechdoche
is figure of contiguity/substitution, a part suggesting the whole, a large concept suggesting
something specific, a species suggesting a genus.

Lazybones – a sluggish person

Gray hairs are here and there upon him (old age)
My whole world is lost.
All hands on deck . (workers)
We need new wheels (car)

Tautology is pleonism/ redundance, repetition of same ideas

Both students went together.

I rejoiced at the happy sight.
He continued to remain my friend.
There was a universal cry of joy from everybody.
He and she can both travel together.

Transferred epithet is a figure of construction

She passed a sleepless night.

The farmer plodded his weary way homeward.
He tossed from side to side on his sleepless bed.

Understatement is use of limitation and modesty, avoidance of emphasis in description, saying

something subtle, not extreme, saying less than one means, verbal irony.
This looks like a good bite (a loaded dinner plate)
We were not displeased (we were delighted)
A little misunderstanding (disagreement)
Literary Terms

Absolutism
is thesis , relativism is antithesis while perspectivism is synthesis. An object is known from
different points of view.

ABSTRACT POEM
is that which depends on sound for meaning and sacrifices sense to aural effects. Example: Edith
Sitwell’s ‘Facade’;Hopkinsuses melopoeic and onomatopoeic devices;
Roy Campbell:
‘O of seven hues in white elision,
the radii of your silver gyre
are the seven swords of vision
that spoked the prophets’ flaming tyre;
their sistered stridencies ignite
the spectrum of the poet’s lyre
whose unison becomes a white
revolving disc of stainless fire,
and sights the eye of that sole star
that, in the heavy clods we are,
the kindred seeds of fire can spy,
or, in the cold shell of the rock,
the red yolk of the phoenix-cock
whose feathers in the meteors fly.

Absurdist play
deals with moral and philosophical points through an absurd plot. A giant corpse keeps growning.

Absurdity has been defined as futility of existence,preposterousness of man in an immense

universe.Absurdist playwrights believe that man is inhabiting a universe which is out of key, that
man is obscurely stationed in this world, that he is bewildered and confused due to his uncertain
position. This idea sprang from
1. horrors of WW11which
- exposed many flaws of human nature
- uprooted man
- highlighted man’s bloodthirsty nature
- shook the validity of institutions
- made human existence dubious
- highlighted arbitrariness and meaninglessness of
everything man strives for.
2. Threat and fear of nuclear annihilation which stressed vulnerability of human
status.
3. disappearance of religion .
4. Biblical concepts regarding fragility of life.
The theatre of the absurd makes us realise the ultimate reality, awakens us from slumber,
shows our limitations to confront mystical experiences, urges us to get out of our comfortable
position, to look beyond the daily cycle of bread and butter and look beyond hideous conventions
and customs, and look beyond our blurred/myopic vision.
It produces distrust of language, deplores that language had become a tool of stereotyped
exhanges, words had failed to convey complexities of life/ experience.
It condemns conventional language as barrier between us and reality.it subverts logic,
shatters unrealistic ideas. It is a lyrical statement, like music, communicating atmosphere and
archetypal situations. It presents poetical images, light and movement, visual experience, abstract
scenic effects. It draws upon mime, ballet, acrobatics, conjuring, early talkies.

Accent
is stress on syllable within a word while emphasis is stress on word in a sentence.

ACMEISM
favours well-defined imagery; rejects symbolism.
AESTHETICS and aestheticism.
Aesthetics is study of principles of value-judgements.
Croce believes that far from being a product of reflection, logic or skill, art is spontaneous
imaginative form, that the effect of art is intuition.
Aestheticism is reverence for beauty , a theory of aesthetic autonomy, the idea that
art is terminal value and that aesthetic considerations are independent of morality, that moral
ugliness can be transformed into art, as Falstaff is compounded of intemperance, Macbeth of
infidelity, Shylock of illiberality and Othello of injustice.
This doctrine revolts against Philistine practical environment and didacticism; it
favours sensory and emotive pleasure, harmony and inner sense, disinterestedness,
aesthetic remoteness. Protesting against rationalist stress on balance, proportion, adherence to
rules of composition, it stresses that art plays a significant role in life and contributes to
understanding of the world , that unlike reason which uses abstract concepts, art produces
concrete insight into reality and makes it available to direct apprehension .It is against prudery
and hypocrisy of bourgeois morality, utilitarianism and slavery of sentimentality and subject-
matter. It claims that artists are unique; and it complains that artists suffer psychically and
economically.
The matrix of this doctrine is located in Kant’s triadic division of human capacities
and functions-cognitive faculty of understanding, moral faculty of conscience, and aesthetic
faculty of taste and sensibility.
It originated in France in late 19th century as a protest against complexity,
fragmentation, specialization, divisiveness and divergence, disintegration of cohesive organismic
holistic structures of life in the wake of scientific and industrial revolutions. According to Iredell
Jenkins, it is both a battle cry and a creed. According to James Whistler, it is based on the view:
“Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the
notes of all music”.

EXTRA-AESTHETIC CRITERIA.
T.S.Eliot states that the literariness of literature is judged by aesthetic criteria but
greatness is judged by extra-aesthetic criteria.
AESTHETIC DISTANCE.
Separation between reader and work of art; awareness of formal unreality of art.
ALLEGORY.
Use of second or ulterior meaning , extended metaphor, series of related symbols,
making the abstract concrete to expound a concept , using actions , characters, places as vehicles
of abstract or moral significance.
Allegory is a contrapuntal technique , a structure of images and not disguised ideas.
Blake defines poetry as allegory addressed to intellectual powers. Allegory is a symbolic mode
encoding oblique multiple meaning; it uses personification and iconographic devices , draws
upon inner consciousness , practical wisdom and system of values , correlates literal meaning with
an external frame of reference, creates a realm of mystic knowledge beyond the semantic barrier.
Allegory takes us beyond the literalness of words towards unity , embracing political dreams
of universal brotherhood and intellectual dreams of organised knowledge; it converts physical
universe into a symbol, expresses interplay of microcosm and macrocosm, images permanence in
flux. Great art is allegorical for it has a larger meaning than surface meaning.
Allegory clothes conceptual skeletals, personifies concepts, turns propositions into events,
turns states of mind into places, and turns moral problems into a quest. Allegorical characters,
events and parts correspond to a system of ideas.
Allegory is a narrative in which characters stand for abstract ideas; it describes inner
conflicts, the clash between the rash and restrained parts of personality.
In allegory , literal events contain sustained reference to a simultaneous structure of other
events/ideas. Allegory is not mere substitution of one action/subject for another but a
correspondence between literal and metaphorical levels.
Religions have a large allegorical content. Allegory is a development from exegesis (explication
of Biblical passages to develop spiritual and theological significance in the literal events of Biblical
history).
Allegory elucidates, make divine or universal mysteries accessible to human
understanding. In literary allegory , the relation of literal to other levels is complex and shifting;
the writer explores difficult concepts, and searches for proper mode of expression. The definitive
feature of an allegory is its consistent reference to a secondary scheme, the two levels following
the same structure of progression.
The basic technique of moral allegory is personification of abstract ideas. Blake’s
allegory is based on an individual mythological system requiring personal information. Mention
may be made of Dante’s Divine Comedy of 13th c., Piers Plowman, 14th c. ,Moby Dick, T.F.Powys-
Mr. Weston’s Good Wine, Dryden-Absalom and Achitophel, Orwell-Animal Farm, Swift-
Gulliver’s Travels,
A Tale of a Tub,
The Devil and Tom Walker (Temptation of a greedy man) Bunyan- The Pilgrim’s Progress, Plato’s
allegory of –the world as a dark cave of shadows
-ideal forms as the world of daylight
Shelley- Prometheus Unbound.
In The Castle and in The Trial, Kafka presents man as caught up in a closed world. E. M.
Forster’s The Celestial Omnibus is an allegorical tale in which literary writers drive a bus to
the mountain of materialism and snobbishness. St. Augustine’s allegory of the city of God and the
city of man. Medieval allegory assimilates mythical and pagan attributes to moral and mystical
framework. The biblical Song of Songs allegorises hierogamy between divine and human
partners.
Alliteration, assonance, consonance are sound devices.

Alliteration
is memorable and pleasing repetition of sound in two or more words, usually of initial consonants.
Old English verse is alliterative. With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew.
(Owen’s Exposure)
Life’s fitful fever.
Austrian army awfully arrayed.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
Artful aid.
Fluttering floating flakes
Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces. (Flakes are sinister for bringing
deathly cold to exposed soldiers)
Haughty head.
Bred by bishop’s bread. The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew
Seasick spindrift drifts or skips.
Alliteration creates mood , imparts musical quality , reinforces meaning , stresses words,
unifies lines.
Repetition of initial sounds is initial / head rhyme while that of internal sounds is hidden
alliteration called
1) Assonance- repetition of a vowel sound in stressed syllables with
dissimilar consonant sounds-The western wave was all aflame.
Repetition of i-sound in:
The light was white and shining.
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time.
Donne-
When thou sighest, thou sighest not wind,
But sighest my soul away
When thou weepest unkindly kind,
My life’s blood doth decay.
Repetition of o-sound in—
 A host of golden daffodils.
11) consonance- repetition of similar final consonantal sounds in stressed syllables with
dissimilar vowel sounds, -reverse of assonance
A frightful fiend doth close behind

Allusion
is reference of literary , biblical , historical, mythological kind
The lash (tyranny)
A Vulcan guarding the flames (father tending winter fire)

AMBIQUITY or plurisignation or device of multiple choice.

It is richness of meaning , delicacy and compression of thought, intricacy sustained

by multiple meanings, multivalence, complex structure , veiled utterance , an ontological category
between the natural and the supernatural.
Pejoratively, it is violation of correspondence between reasoning process and reality, failure at
truth , failure in communication, ineptitude, excessive brevity, deliberate obscurity.
Since knowledge has no limit , ambiguity is an integral part of human experience.
Artists favour multivalenced resonance, cross-references, paradoxes for joining together different
worlds. In the Einsteinian world, matter has dissolved into energy, time is a geometric projection
and the motion of charged particles is unpredictable. This has given rise to ambiguity as aesthetic
principle , use of conjuctive principles of correspondence and contrariety, conjoining of different
categories of analysis , language, mind and reality; reappraisal of the meaning of history and
human culture, cultural relativity and epistemological quandary, bewildering diversity of
categories of thought , multiplicity of meaning. The complexity of experience demands saying
more than one thing at a time, exploration of perception and attention-span, realignment.
Pindar records theophanies at religious games. The political success of Augustan
Rome did not prevent the poet from longing for the other world; the withdrawal of Virgil as
Dante’s guide means that reason is not the governing principle. Hamlet’s madness is
multivalent:he is under house arrest, he wishes to spy and prowl, rejects revenge as negative and
wild justice, wishes to purge revenge of passion and anger , seeks proof of Claudius’s guilt ;his
double role of victim and scourge requires premeditation ; he confronts the problems of God’s
will, limits of reason , purpose of knowledge. Along with the stage drama, we have drama in
Hamlet’s mind; internalizing soliloquies suspend action and produce infinite regress.
Frost’s line “And miles to go before I sleep” means
1) I have a long way to ride.
2) I have many more things to do before the end of my life.
Analogy
is point by point comparison between two dissimilar things to clarify the less familiar one. A
detailed similarity between things otherwise different: human life and journey by sea.
In Life on the Mississipi , we have Mark Twain’s analogy between a book and the
river. Those unschooled in the lore of the river are exposed to great challenges and complexities.

Anaphora
is rhetorical repetition of words or sentences in successive lines to intensify an effect or heighten
the impact. The following extract uses anaphora to convey disillusionment with government
promises-
“Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead
people. They do not pay for my country, now overrun by whites. Good words will not give me back
my children. Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying.
Good words will not get my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of
themselves.”

Antithesis
is arrangement of opposing elements to heighten contrast.

Aphorism
is a brief statement that expresses a truth about life. It is often humorous and pointed.
Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.

Says Emerson: trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string.

APPRECIATION AAND SCHOLARSHIP.

Appreciation is understanding through personal intuition and subjective approach while
scholarship is collection of facts, generalization of laws and the use of scientific and historical
method.
Archetype
is an associative cluster , a communicable unit ,a complex variable and not a sign, a symbol
connecting one poem with another.
Archetypes are symbols seen in terms of dreams, myths and rituals; archetype is an
original pattern from which copies are made; the Platonic idea of a horizontal surface propped by
vertical supports is the archetype of all tables; we have archetypes of revenge play and of Oedipal
situation; the formula for plot structure—
1) conflict/ complication
2) crisis / peripety
3) resolution/ denouement
coincides with the archetypal pattern-
1) birth
2) initiation / quest / exile/ descent/ death
3) return / ascent / rebirth.
Unlike personal unconscious comprising personal side of psychic life, collective unconscious
consists of universal images or archetypes. Archetypes are psychic contents not submitting to
conscious elaboration except in esoteric teaching. To primitives who mythologise seasons and
phases of the moon as allegories of experience or expressions of psychic drama, the course of the
sun represents the fate of a hero or god dwelling in human soul. Klaus assimilated archetypal
image of Christ in bearskin to formulate the idea of trinity. Virgin Birth, decorating Christmas tree
and hiding Easter eggs are archetypal images. Like all numinous contents, archetypes cannot be
rationally integrated.
According to Frye, the human cycle of waking-dreaming corresponds to the natural
cycle of light-darkness. While the ritual combines the human with the natural, art combines desire
and circumstance. While popular literature appeals to inertia of the untrained mind , literary
works reflect values. Criticism treats the divine as a character or human artifact and explains
epiphanies as mental dreamlike phenomena, interprets and systematizes the vision of the artist.
Literature has converging patterns of significance .The search for archetypes is
literary anthropology. Archetypes are unifying categories of criticism. Mythical characters
envision a community beyond indifferent nature. In comedy, the hero represents the reader’s
wish-fulfilment while the tragic hero is an isolated man with archetypes of a heath, a wilderness
or a sinister forest. Shakespeare recreates archetypal form in the grave-digger’s scene in
HAMLET: an intricate verbal texture ranging from puns of first clown to Yorick soliloquy, images
of corruption and decay, nature myths.
Wheelwright laments the impairment of response to poetry in the modern era and
the reduction of myth to an archaism. He states that transcendental forces peer through the cracks
of the universe and the mythical consciousness cuts across the empirical dimension. He asserts
that myth is a part of the cognitive activity of every culture for expressing primordial way of
knowing, that mytho-religious perspective involves a rediscovery of unchangeable conditions of
human insight and blessedness, that Descartes denuded nature of human significance and tried
to build history out of an unhistorical present. The primitive community mind comprises living
persons as well as ancestral ghosts and souls of things. According to chthonic concept, violation
of moral code , murder, incest offend ancestral ghosts. The rhythmic succession of guilt and
expiation expresses Greek sense of a pulsating nature. Aeschylean drama inspires religious awe
to make the audience aware of transcendental forces. Shakespeare stresses the harmony between
love and universal passion throbbing through nature, uses plague, tempest and portents as
symbols of murder of Duncan/ Caesar. The loss of sense of transcendental significance in human
affairs has resulted in the death of tragedy.

Aside
is thoughts going on in the speaker’s mind; statement not audible to other characters but directed
at audience.

Associations.
Words are loaded with shades of meaning/ feelings. Associations make words attractive , induce
cannotations, and prompt reactions.
Blood- red sun suggests something dangerous / sinister . Richard Eberhart uses the word ‘daisies’
which is associated with children to describe a dead lamb and so creates an effect of
unpleasantness:
I saw on the slant hill a putrid lamb
Propped with daisies.

ATMOSPHERE:
Emotional quality engendered by the setting.

AUGUSTAN AGE
is the age of Queen Anne.

Ballad
is a poem telling a story in simple language. The ballad metre is quatrains of alternating 4-stress
and 3-stress lines, usually iambic, first and third lines are longer than second and fourth..Written
ballad deals with topical events while oral ballad was transmitted from minstrel to minstrel over
centuries, and remade in the process during performance, dealing unusually with subject –matter,
using action and dialogue.
Ballads deal with adventure love, travel, war
-are direct and fast moving
-contain brief and telling details.
In Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, terrible bleakness is conveyed by the refrain-
And no birds sing.

BAROQUE ART.
Baroque is a term derived from Portuguese barroco for the irregular odd-shaped pearl brought
from Goa in 16th century, French term baroco for bizarre, scholastic syllogism-
Every fool is stubborn. Some people are not stubborn. Hence some people are not fools. French
professors were ridiculed as sophists in baroco.
Baroque art is marked by ornamental extravagance, artistic perversion, whimsicality
and lack of harmony, Gothic sentimentalism, florid architecture of Counter –Reformation
inItaly, Germany and Spain.
Ancient Roman baroque had more mood than visual imagination.
Baroque is associated with bombast, involved style, ingenious conceits, morbid
sensual mysticism, strong emotions and gestures. Nietzsche regards baroque as a recurrent
phenomenon in history occurring when art declines into rhetoric and theatricality. After First
World War, Germans admired even grotesque and tortured forms of baroque.
Baroque philosophers include Spinoza, Leibnitz, Berkeley. Baroque is now used for
all manifestations of 17th c. civilization. This term was transferred to literature in 19th c. The
difference between Renaissance and baroque is illustrated by the difference between Ariosto and
Tasso. Shakespeare shows baroque tendencies in VENUS AND ADONIS and RAPE OF
LUCRECE: atectonic asymmetrical style, abundance of minor characters, unsymmetrical
grouping, varying emphasis on different acts. His MACBETH has been called baroque with an
ellipse formed by
1) grace
2) realm of darkness
and weird sisters at focal points. Tasso and Marino are baroque. An anthology of German baroque
poetry appeared in 1921. Spanish literature from Guevara (early 16thc) to Calderon (late 17thc) is
baroque. French classicism is a variant of baroque: pathos, morbidity, tension between religion
and sensuality. Rabelais is early baroque. Pope’s RAPE OF THE LOCK is rococo ; English pulpit
oratory from Latimer to Jeremy Taylor and the works of Ben Jonson and Phineas Fletcher are
baroque. So is 17th c. English poetry with its tension between spiritualism and sensualism.
Dryden’s heroic tragedies are baroque like his translation of Chaucer in FABLES. Milton has been
called the most hispanized baroque poet of 17th c. Sylvester’s translation of DU BARTAS and
Thomas Burnetts THEORY OF THE EARTH are baroque. Donne represents literary baroque.
Austin Warren’s book on Crashaw is sub-titled: a study in baroque sensibility. Bunyan is also
baroque.
 Tucker Brooke labels the prose of Donne, Thomas Browne, James Howell ‘baroque glory’.
Tillyard describes Milton’s epistolary prose as baroque. Jacobean literature is baroque.
Baroque is an aesthetic term for post Renaissance and pre-classical works
expressing convulsed soul struggling with language, lyricism struggling with antithesis and
catachreses, the distance between word and thing, content and form, the difficulty of translation
from intention to experience , precious cultist style, the insufficiency of linguistic expression.
References: Allen Benham’s THE MYTH OF DONNE THE RAKE 1941; Martin Briggs’s
BAROQUE ARCHITECTURE 1913; J.Isaacs’s BAROQUE AND ROCOCO, A HISTORY OF TWO
CONCEPTS 1937; Hans Kettler’s BAROQUE TRADITION IN THE LITERATURE OF GERMAN
ENLIGHNTENMENT 1943; James Mark’s THE USES OF THE TERM BAROQUE 1938; Louis
Martz’s THE POETRY OF MEDITATION; M.M.Mahood’s MILTON THE BAROQUE ARTIST
1950; Joseph Mazzeo’s A CRITIQUE OF SOME MODERN THEORIES OF METAPHYSICAL
POETRY 1953; Lowry Nelson’s BAROQUE LYRIC POETRY 1961; Marcel Raymond’s BAROQUE
AND RENAISSANCE POETIQUE 1955; Corrado Ricci’s BAROQUE ARCHITECTURE AND
SCULPTURE IN ITALY 1912; Geoffrey Scott’s THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM;
Scheverell’s SPANISH BAROQUE ART 1931 and GERMAN BAROQUE SCULPTURE 1938;

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME.

Beautiful means easy beauty achieved out of tractable material, as comedy masters the ugly ;
sublime means difficult beauty having intricacy, tension and width, transporting instead of
convincing, as tragedy gives expressive form to the painful.

BLANK VERSE.
Unrhymed five-foot iambic line having flexibility; close to speech rhythm but stylized enough in
regularity;

It was the favourite metre of Elizabethans and Shakespeare. But the witches (Macbeth) and fairies
(A Mid summer Night’s Dream) speak in trochees rather than iambs. It was introduced by Earl
of Surrey, used by Sackville and Norton in Gorboduc, by Spenser in Faerie Queene, by Milton in
Paradise Lost, by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey and in the Prelude , by Tennyson in The Princess,
by Browning in The Ring and the Book, by Frost in Birches and in The death of the Hired Man,
and by Edwin Robinson in Amarnath.

BURLESQUE
now survives as revue. Examples: Villiers ‘ THE REHEARSAL, Henry Carey’s attack on operas in
THE DRAGON OF WANTLEY and attack on contemporary dramatic technique in
CHRONONHOTONTHOLOGOS, W.S. Gilbert’s ROBERT THE DEVIL, Fielding’s THE
HISTORICAL REGISTER FOR THE YEAR 1736.
BYRONIC HERO
is exemplified by hero of first two cantos of Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, hero of ‘Turkish
Tales’, hero of last two cantos , rebel of ‘Cain’. Derived from Biblical Cain, Gothic Villain, Milton’s
Satan, Marlowe’s Faustus, mythological Prometheus, noble outlaw, child of nature,
Mrs.Radcliffe’s Schedoni.

CARPE DIEM
means:seize the day i.e. enjoy yourself before youth passes away; but there is an undertone of
melancholy also.

Says Horace:
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero:
Seize the day for there is little trust to be put in the future-

Says Herrick:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying.

Says Shakespeare:
Present mirth hath present laughter ;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

Catachresis
is misapplication of a word .
Says Milton: blind mouths.

Catalectic
is a line omitting last syllable. Brachycatalectic is a line with two syllables missing while
hypercatalectic is a line with one or two syllables in excess.
Catharsis is release of emotion by the fate of tragic hero.

Cavalier poets
- group of 17th c. lyric poets
- carew, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Waller

Celtic revival and twilight .

Celtic revival is interest in Celtic culture and literature after 18 th c. antiquarianism.
Thomas Gray- The Bard 1757
Evans- Some Specimens of the Poetry of Ancient Welsh Bards 1764
Charlotte Guest- The Mabinogion 1838
Eugene O’Curry’s lecture on Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History
James Macpherson’s Ossian poems
Thomas Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin 1829
Hopkin’s St. Winifred’s Well 1885
Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

CELTIC TWILIGHT.
Shadowy vision of Celtic myth and legend to supply Ireland with romantic past; suggestion of
remote heroic times through dream, shadow and legendary figure; *19thcentury writers’ creation
of an unreal world more beautiful than the real; Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin 1889.

CLASSICISM AND NEO-CLASSICISM .

According to Cazamian, English national mind rhythmically oscillates between
setiment and intellect, romanticism and classicism; whereas
romanticism is Hebraism/Dionysianism/celebration of instinct/primitive nature, classicism is
Hellenism /Apollonianism/celebration of reason /culture. We have Greek classicism , French
classicism which derived inspiration from Rome and was exemplified by Corneile, La Fontaine,
Moliere, Pascal, Racine, Rochefoucauld and reached climax in 17th c when Boileu codified it in
Art Poetique 1674;French classicism is set against the unclassical background of baroque
culture and reflects aristocratic society ; German classicism derived inspiration from Rome and
was exemplified by Herder , Goethe, Lessing, Kant, Schiller and Voss; it was ushered in by
Winklemann; it lays stress on organic unity /universal culture; contains strain of romanticism
because of awareness of contrast between its ideals and its age. English classicism, exemplified
by Addison, Dryden, Johnson, Steele, Shaftsbury, Swift and Pope, was nourished by Locke’s
rationalism and was an expression of middle class mentality; stressed reason/ correctness
rather than grandeur / dignified restraint.

The word CLASSICUS(excellent) was used in 2nd c. by Gellius of Rome; in

England CLASSICISM was used for the first time in 1831 by Carlyle in ESSAY ON
SCHILLER; classical means Greek and Roman, academic and conventional; model of
excellence, perfection and authority; pejoratively , it means observing rules and imitating
ancients. Homer, Dante and Shakespeare are classical although they do not strictly follow rules;
so the concept of classicism has been broadened.
French classicism is represented by the 17th c. age of Corneille, Racine, Moliere and
Pascal. English classicism is represented by the age of Queen.Anne; it is derived from Ben
Jonson and Italian formulation of Aristotelian and Horatian theory in late 15th and early 16 th c.
Classicism is rooted in the idea that tradition and organization are valuable, man is
intrinsically limited; classicism favours purity, permanence, just proportion , preponderance of
reason, restraint and universality; focus on form and worldliness; severe and serene control of
emotions, tendency toward point of stillness; it has been called counterpart of political tyranny.
Classicism is seeking standards in great works of the past. It is marked by
-clarity and urbanity,
- economy of means
-elegance and simplicity.
In music it is embodied in the works of Haydn and Mozart. Architectural classcism is modelled
on Parthenon, the harmony of proportions and unbroken horizontal.
Neoclassicism is a perversion of classical spirit for its stress on blind imitation of
classical rules and techniques, staleness, mannerism and unreality; 20th c. neoclassicism is
escapist and academic reaction against pop art ; it is exemplified by electronic music, concrete
poetry.
Neoclassicism belongs to last half of 17th c and first half of 18th c. , the period of
quiescence and consolidation after a spate of innovation and disorder; Blaise Pascal calls man a
thinking reed, T.S.Eliot exalts Dryden in HOMAGE TO DRYDEN 1924 and exalts Pope in
WHAT IS A CLASSIC 1945. Neo-classicism is marked by decorum, narrow virtuosity , absence of
spontaneity.

Cliche is an expression that has lost forse through overuse- Mad as a March hare.

Climax is turning point in drama or narration, moment of peak intensity/interest

 1. This our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the
running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
2. Add to your faith , virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge,
temperance ; and to temperance, patience; and to patience, godliness; and to
godliness , brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, charity.
3. Actions approved by the conscience are commended to practice;when
practised they become easy and then pleasurable, and are in consequence
frequently repeated. But frequent repetition engenders habit; and thus what
at first was difficult becomes in time almost a second nature.
Climax is high point of a series of happenings, the point of reader’s highest emotional
reaction .Anti-climax occours when the effect decreases at the conclusion; it is introduction of
items of inferior importance to spoil the effect of grandeur; descent from sublime to ridiculous.

Spring is the season of hope , of re-awakening, of returning sunshine , of song birds and of
cleaning.
I die, I faint, I fail.
He hates death , sickness, pain, poverty.
Terrible as hell, fierce as a lion and dark as night.
He preaches like a saint, speaks like a man but acts like the devil.
He reached the summit and peeled a banana.

Cognition and conation . Cognition is from cognitum (know); process of knowing; mental
operation by which we become aware of objects of perception and thought.
Conation is from conatio; one of three divisions of mind , the other two being feeling and
cognition; includes desire and volition; every state of mental rest; striving with/ without a
conscious goal.
Coherence . Artistic coherence is emotion; philosophical coherence is thinking.
Heresy of Communication and fallacy of communication. Heresy of communication is
Cleanth Brooks’s idea that poetry should be instead of communicating, that we should
apprehend not merely ideas but total aesthetic experience of the poem. Fallacy of
Communication is the term used by Allen Tate for non-poetic ideas, propaganda poetry.

Concept, conception, perception. Concept is mental image; an idea as distinguished from a

percept. Conception is from concipere (conceive); intellectual interpretation;
abstract/intellectual/universal part of knowing ; function of understanding.
Perception is function of perceiving by the senses; immediate apprehension; apprehension of
concrete particulars; includes seeing truth of an axiom.
Concrete Universal. Term used by Wimsatt; a work of art is concrete is so far as it is the sum
of its details and universal in so far as its details coalesce into a totality or central abstraction ; a
work of art unifies the particular and the universal, though romantics stress particularity,
concreteness and texture. Dr.Johnson states that the poet should not count the streaks of the
tulip; Aristotle states that poetry is more philosophical / universal than history.

Conflict is struggle between opposing forces; character vs. nature (survival in a snow storm),
one person vs. another person (son-father clash), character vs society (attempt to escape
punishment ), character vs a supernatural force (mythology) are examples of external conflict.
Internal conflict is opposing tendencies in an individual’s make-up (loyalty to family vs
reverence for music).

Connotation is emotional response evoked by a word. Home has connotative meaning while
house has denotative meaning.

Convention and Revolt. Convention is artistic practice as a substitude for natural or realistic
expression. Transition from one period to another is governed by law of rhythmic change. Each
stage is marked by craving for novelty and contrast as well as preservation of accumulated capital
of previous experiences. In Anglo-Saxon, root vowels and terminations were inflected to show
change of tense, number and person; unlike modern English, Anglo-Saxon was synthetic and
possessed great freedom in the arrangement of words; words were arranged in accordance with
emphasis/ alliteration. Anglo-Saxon poetry was full of staccato phrases, disconnected words in
apposition, superimposed interjections, interrupted sequence and abruptness; the normal line
was made up of undertermined number of syllables; there was lack of lucidity/ terseness. Norman
poets revolted against this prosody and introduced accentual rhythm, aligned themselves with
French poets to produce swing/lyricism. From mid-eleventh to mid-14th century, English poetry
wavered between alliterative rhythm and rhymed line; this revolt was precipitated by translation
of French works; new words gained currency, only essential accentuated syllables survived and
inflections were dropped, there was increase in monosyllables.English became analytical and its
grammatical complications were simplified. But since the versification derived
from France lacked assured prosody, there was return to Anglo-Saxon epic verse, alliterative
epithets/synonyms and Teutonic words.There was revolt against court poetry in favour of the soil.
And naturalism was a revolt against the looseness/sentimentality of romanticism.

CRITICISM. Formalist criticism was advocated by Cleanth Brooks but even he has budged away
from it because critical methods other than the formalistic also contribute to literary
understanding, and a literary work is a combination of many elements. Formalists stress that
form is meaning (aims at some effect), that literature is ultimately symbolic and metaphorical,
that the general and universal is apprehended through the concrete and the particular, that
literature is not a surrogate for religion, that literature deals with moral values without pointing
out a moral , that critical principles define the area relevant to literary criticism but do not
constitute a critical method.
Formalists are against treating characters as characters or as a reflection of the author’s
attitude toward life or as examples of prevailing cultural conditions. A character is a function of
his appointed role. Literary criticism is concerned not only with description or evaluation but also
with the problem of unity, internal consistency , the relation of parts to one another to form a
whole. Kenneth Burke stresses that there is a critical qualitative difference between a material
object and its name, the nameable and the named, the symbolised and the symbol, the thing tree
and the word tree.
Formal criticism begins with an examination of the imagery of a poem-recurring or
repeated images forming tonality while isolated, episodic, modulating images relate themselves
to this tonality in a hierarchic structure. According to Archibald MacLeish, a poem should not
mean but be, should be dumb as old medallions to the thumb, should make its impact on
imagination rather than intellect.
Historical Criticism. It is based on the idea that literature is a re-creation of the past, that a
literary work should be elucidated in the light of the past, that we should re-create the conditions
under which an author worked, that we should make the past present. Taine states that literature
springs from three interfusing factors: moment , race, milieu. Hegel states that national literatures
are expressions of their societies. Dr.Johnson attributes Shakespearean characteristics to the
barbarity of his age. Eliot states that by penetrating the life of another age, we penetrate the life
of our own, that each poet’s relation to tradition changes the tradition itself. Trilling states that
history involves abstraction and that historical sense is the critical sense. Vico states that Homer
composed ILIAD whenGreece was young and so delineated pride, anger , vengeance. Since
ODYSSEY was composed in old age, Achilles was replaced by Odysseus, Force by Wisdom.
Historical criticism is concerned with sources, biography, intellectual milieu; it interprets
literature in its social, economic and political aspects and tends to neglect the work.

Literary Criticism is the study of concerete works of art , including literary theory; its aim is
intellectual cognition; it is a systematic knowledge about literature . Rejecting extrinsic
methods, Rene Wellek stresses the importance of a system of principles and theory of values
(Theory of Literature 1949).
Literary theory is a branch of literary study ; it is study of literary principles, criteria and
categories; it is inconceivable without literary criticism and literary history ; it is better than
terms like poetics, science of literature, literary scholarship because those terms exclude
criticism, evaluation and speculation while the term poetics smacks of prescription and excludes
the essay and the novel.
In his ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Frye defines criticism as a structure of thought and
knowledge, rejects literary chit-chat and criticism reflecting the prejudices of the reading public,
condemns evaluative judgement as arbitrary, irrational and meaningless history of taste and
literary stock exchange.

Dadaism was founded by Tristan Tzara in 1914 in Zurich. This movement was marked by
 - stress on nihilism
- protest against logic and social convention
- sound poems
- nonsensical poems
Marcel Duchamps sent toilet bowl for exhibition.

Diction is words used by poets. Archaisms are words resurrected while neologisms are words
invented by poets. One of the first things to note about a poem is the effect of diction, including
unusual words. Diction
- determines the mood
- gives a poem its character
- is colloquial, down-to-earth, light-hearted
- elevated, lofty, serious
Says Milton-
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold.

Didactic Heresy. Term used by Poe; belief that poetry is an instrument of edification;
Horace’s Renaissance doctrine that poetry is sweet and useful_dulce et utile.

Dissociation of sensibility. Used by T S Eliot ; absence of integerated sensibility; absence of

thought and emotion; Tennyson and Browning suffer from dissociation unlike metaphysicals.
Dramatic monomogue is a poem written as a speech made at some decisive / revealing
moment, addressed by the speaker to some other character who remains silent.
End-Stopped and run-on lines. In end-stopped line, the grammatical unit is co-terminous
with the line; the line and the sense end together .
In run-on/enjambed line, the grammar and sense are unfinished at the end of line. The reader
looks further and has a delightful feeling of expectation.
Epigraph is motto or quotation at the beginning of a book, chapter, play, poem; it reveals
theme and source for title.
The epigraph of Eliot’s The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock is a quotation from Dante’s Inferno.
Epitaph is inscription on a tombstone/ monument
Epithet is an apt/memorable phrase identifying a person or thing: the innocent.
Existentialism. Philosophy of anguish, liberty and action, individual’s concrete experience,
human condition; World War II weakened the hold of rationalism and engendered intellectual
climate conductive to awareness of abscure forces. Gabriel Marcel believes that engagement
leads to God while Andre Malraux and Albert Camus are on the outer edge of existentialism.
Other existentialists are Sartre, Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir; Sartre’s early
characters are convinced of agonizing nothingness and live in a lamentable condition of groping
after a self somewhere in the future but later characters are rescued by action-Orestes (THE
FLIES) and Mathieu (IRON IN THE SOUL).

Exposition
- is detailed explanation or groundwork for narration
- may be interspread through flashback
- provides background information.

EXPRESSIONISM AND IMPRESSIONISM.The first movement arose in Germanybefore

World War I and ended in 1942; early expressionists found intellectual stagnation in material
prosperity of the first decade of 20thc. and felt that naturalists, neo-romanticists and
impressionists falsified reality.
Expressionism is based on Bergson’s élan vital and Freud’s theory of subconscious forces;
it goes beyond reason and appearance to explore the deeper meaning of reality ; it is based on
the view that art is rooted in artist’s feelings and experiences and that artistic creation is an
expressive act revealing the artist’s intuition, emotions and attitudes; expressionist style is not
descriptive but in the form of a telegram or inarticulate stammer, using parallel or antithetic
phrases, presenting man as a machine and mixing reality and super-reality and producing
grotesqueness; Kafka is expressionist novelist while Strindberg is expressionist dramatist
presenting tableaux and symbolic scenes. Expressionism rejects reality established by
appearance and reason and explores meaning through erratic imagination.
Impressionism originated in Germany in revolt against representational conventions; it
favours spontaneity and inner vision; it now applies to visionary styles for reflecting the shock of
war and industrialization; it is based on the view that art captures ephemeral surface aspects of
things, deals with meaning for the mind and not physical structure and reveals the felt quality or
total effect of an object , scene or event.
Impressionism was perfected by Rilke, Maeterlinck and Thomas Mann; in their
impressionist compositions, Chopin, Debussy, Delius and Schumann deal with the expression of
a mood or the suggestion of a scene while Degas, Manet, Monet and Renoir paint things as they
appear at any given moment;impressionism favours correspondence between words and
characteristics of an object, surrender of personality, total assimilation of an object, exploration
of the subtleties of human relationships; it invests naturalistic technique with a new feeling for
reality.
Fable is a brief tale illustrating a moral, part of oral literature, has animal characters with
human attributes, moral qualities and philosophical positions. Fables of Aesop who was a Greek
slave 600 B.C.
Orwell’s allegorical fable Animal Farm
Rachel Carson A Fable for Tomorrow

Fallacy of Expressive Form. The idea that intense feeling/inspiration produces adequate
expression, rejection of external criteria.This fallacy has been criticised by Yvor Winters and R P
Blackmur.

Affective Fallacy. Confusing what the poem is with what it does; laying stress on
psychological effects and neglecting the text; this fallacy leads to relativism/impressionism.

Intentional Fallacy. It is the failure to distinguish between fiction and fact, hypothesis and
assertion, imaginative and discursive writing; the notion that the critic should capture the poet’s
intention by bringing target and missile into alignment.
Intentional fallacy was propounded by Pope in Essay on Criticism; laying stress on intention of
the poet rather than on the poem; judging a work by the writer’s success/failure to achieve his
intention; concern with artist’s psyche than with art; this fallacy springs from romantic
subjectivism.

Pathetic Fallacy. Termed by Ruskin in Modern Painters; animating the incarnate; investing
lifeless objects with human characteristics or feelings without using personification- cruel
crawling foam.
The effect is close to personification. This fallacy springs from weak thought and strong feeling.

Kis qadr ehsaas hai qudret ko meray dard ka

Jaagtay rehtay hain taarey raat bbher meray liye.
Or,
The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.
Or ,
O say, what angry power Elpenor led
To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?
 How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
Outfly the nimble sail and leave the lagging wind?

Fancy and Imagination. Fancy is use of memory and association; correlation of images into
metaphor; capricious, remote, blind and arbitrary play of associations. Coleridge calls it
associative/aggregative power; interest in collecting than in things collected; Cowley is fanciful.
Imagination is creative /unifying faculty; Milton is imaginative; mental synthesis of new ideas
from elements experienced separately; the faculty whereby the soul beholds likenesses of absent
things; psychologists call it reproductive power; the faculty of mental creation;
productive/constructive power; Glanville states that imagination is apprehension of absent
corporeal object while sense apprehends present objects; Shakespeare states_
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Whereas fancy deals with superficial resemblances, imagination deals with deeper truths;
Wordsworth states that when imagination frames a comparison, resemblance depends less upon
outline of form/feature than upon expression/effect , less upon casual/outstanding than upon
inherent/internal qualities; analyzing creative activity, Coleridge issues anti-associationist
manifesto; he regards imagination as an active/unifying power independent of fixed associations
of memory/experience; imagination dissolves, diffuses, dissipates for re-creating, idealizing and
unifying; modifies materials, adapts them to each other and to total poetic effect and harmonises
different dramatic characters; imagination not only creates aesthetic harmony but also performs
revelatory function; secondary imagination co-exists with conscious will but differs from primary
imagination which is merely agent of perception; Coleridge anticipates the hypothesis of collective
unconscious by stating that the poet has direct access to a deep store of phyletic experience and
the universal which is potentially in each particular not as an abstraction of observation from a
variety of men but as a substance capable of endless modifications; the poet superinduces upon
forms moral reflections to which they approximate, makes the external internal, the internal
external, makes nature thought and thought nature; imagination enables the poet to imitate that
which is within a thing, that which is active through form and figure. But it is not always easy to
identify imaginative and fanciful structure; Coleridge’s theory of imagination is based on his
demand for complexity; Dylan Thomas’s kissproof world is based on incongruous
associations with lipstick advertisement; the pun in Lady Macbeth’s desire to gild the grooms’
faces so that it may seem their gilt fancy; Coleridge’s belief in a qualitative difference fails to
discriminate that imagination can fail and fancy succeed on some occasions; fancy and
imagination cannot be synonymized but they do merge.

Farce is comedy based on concealment devices, mistaken identity, rapid entries and exits.
Feeling, emotion, passion. Feeling is being conscious of a subjective state i.e. state of mind;
being conscious instinctively/intuitively/intellectually rather than through actual
sensation/experience; sensitive response; emotional rather than intellectual conviction;
sensation or complex of sensations; in psychology, feeling is consciousness in general and hence
includes sensation, emotion and thought. Emotion is from emovere (e-out, movere-move); strong
feeling, agitation of feelings/sensibilities ; any of the states designated as fear, anger, disgust,
grief, joy, surprise, yearning; emotive expression is one charged with excitement.
Passion is from passus-suffer; powerful/controlling emotion; depth and vehemence of feeling;
intense, high-wrought, violent emotion. According to Aristotle and Spinoza, passion is a state of
desire/feeling/emotion representing the influence of what is eternal; opposed to thought and
reason, passion is true activity of the human mind.

Flashback
-advances plot dramatically
- is a conversation, incident, scene at an earlier point or before the
story
-a character’s recollection.

Foot is a unit of metre, a stressed syllable and one or two unstressed syllables
preceding/following it
The four basic feet are –
- iamb (unstressed & stressed)
- trochee (stressed & unstressed )
- anapaest (two unstressed & stressed)
- dactyl (stressed & two unstressed)

Form and Content. Form means linguistic elements; language as aesthetically active factor;
that which makes a work literary; shape of thought/feeling/action; selection of elements of
content; words/aesthetic structure; making.
Content means experiences, materials, thought, world, meaning derived from experience
and observation; aesthetically inactive factor; saying

Form cannot be separated from content. Aesthetic form consists of complex meanings and a
particular unity, is greater than external scheme, is total structural integration, is shaped from
within and not imposed from without. The artist assimilates materials into structure, content into
form, the world into language, ideas and experiences into polyphonic relations through dynamics
of aesthetic purpose. Form ranges from a 2-line poem to a novel in many volumes.
Rene Wellek states that the old distinction between form and content is untenable, that
form and content are inseparable because the form or prosodic structure of a poem is nothing
without content while content without form is an unreal abstraction, that a work of art must be
perceived as a whole. Gestalt suggests synthesis of life and art, biography and criticism. Polish
phenomenologist Ingarden states that a work of art is a totality composed of
heterogeneous strata. The reduction of a poem to its prose content is called heresy of paraphrase.
In spite of a mechanistic concept of form as sum of techniques, procedures, relations between
elements, Russian formalists stress that unity of form and content, define form as that which
makes a linguistic utterance a work of art, regard content as an aspect of form.
Renaissance and neoclassical theorists define form as elements of verbal composition:
diction, imagery, rhythm, metre, structure, doctrine. Marxist criticism separates form and
content. Ransom also stresses the dualism of form and content, decoration and message,
distinguishes between texture/detail/concrete local life and structure/logical statement about
reality. Kenneth Burke combines Marxism/psychoanalysis/anthropology with semantics and has
a psychologistic concept of form. Herbert Read distinguishes between organic form (embodiment
of words in a form) and abstract form (image, metaphor, word, music, structure, conception).
Leavis stresses the unity of verbal values and ethos/emotion. Eliot equates form with content.
Offering an austere ideal of pure poetry, Valery states that although the value of a poem lies in
indissolubility of sound and sense, form is a pattern/formalization. He defines a work of art as a
closed system in which nothing can be modified, subordinates content to form, defines content as
impure form, declares that the material follows, and not precedes, form.
Rejecting both formalism and the idea of an abstractable content, Croce defines form as
expression-intuition; being a monistic idealist, he states that form is filled, content is formed, that
what is external is not a work of art; he is concerned neither with verbal structure nor with raw
material outside art; he equates form with substance or Hegel’s gehalt, stresses the unity of a work
of art, distinguishes between poetic rather than empirical personality.

THEORY OF ORGANIC FORM

The concept of organic form, unity in variety, reconciliation of opposites derives from
German romantics and Coleridge who-while refuting neoclassical critics’ view of the absence of
form in Shakespeare-asserted that a work grows from inspiration (as a plant grows from a seed)
and is not fitted into a preconceived mould. Organistic concept of form has biological analogies,
turning literary scholarship into a branch of biology and comparing the time scheme of a
novel to the skeleton of an animal.
Free verse is a free from conventional restraints of metre regular stress pattern, line-length.
It is printed in broken lines, not continuously like prose but like verse. It is rhythmical with
patches of metrical regularity but on the whole it does not consist of regular lines of repeated feet
of traditional versification.
Free verse is non-metrical verse, poetry written in irregular lines without regular metre; it
reflects untidiness of life; confronting a disorganized world, modern poets disturst regular
pattern; it is verse based not on recurrence of stress accent in a measurable pattern but on
irregular rhythmic cadence; being an art form, verse cannot be free in the sense of having no
limitations or guiding principles.
Free verse has been defended as more natural than regular metre, innately democratic and
revolutionary; conventional metres are based on analogies to Greek and Latin quantitative forms
and so deform natural speech pattern; free verse springs from refusal to conform to standard
prosody; in it measure is loosened to give more play to vocabulary, syntax, excursion of mind.
Free verse expands the bracket of fixed foot into variable foot, bringing freedom and
discipline together; it is based on the idea that measure varies with the idiom by which it is
employed and the tonality of the individual poem; it favours criteria of effectiveness and
expressiveness rather than mechanical syllable counts. ;in 20 th c. it has become characteristic
form and has been used among others by T.S.Eliot , Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos
Williams, Walt Whitman; it can be traced back to –
I .Greek and Latin art prose.
II. Medieval tropes and sequences.
I II. King James’s translation of PSALMS and SONG OF SONGS.
IV. Milton’s tendency to make verse paragraph rather than the line his
basic unit.
V. Baroque Pindaric ode.
VI. Rhythmical prose of Macpherson’s OSSIAN POEMS.
VII. French symbolism.
VIII. Imagism of pond and T.E.Hulme.
Graveyard School. Mid 18th century; its pioneers were Thomas Gray and Edward Young;
concern with death; gloomy scenery.School of Night. In poetry , pure sound is either a fiction or
an elementary series of relationships; inherent and rational elements of sound; inherent elements
are musicality/euphony/peculiar individuality of sounds independent of quantity; rational
elements are basis of rhythm and metre and permit quantitative distinctions like
pitch(higher/lower), duration (shorter/longer), stress(stronger/weaker)and frequency
(greater/smaller).
Heroic Couplet is the rhyming two iambic pentameters. It is assertive and self-affirming; it is
appropriate for argument and narration.
Says Pope-
Words are like leaves; and where they most abound
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
Imagery and imagism Imagery means- concrete and figurative details to stimulate senses
- use of language to convey sense impressions,
 - creating an experience imaginatively
Images make ideas concrete
- create atmosphere
- establish a pattern in a poem.
Imagism is presentation of small sharp pictures denoting mass, line and colour; this movement
flourished 1909-17; first imagist anthology was edited by Ezra Pound; imagism is revolt against
loose sentimental poetry of 19th century; its tenets are common speech , new rhythms, freedom of
subject-matter, precise/concrete images; important practitioners are Hilda Doolittle, Richard
Aldington, Amy Lowell, F S Flint, John Gould Fletcher.
Charles Feidelson states that in literature the image and the meaning merge, that the
interaction of the two terms produces meaning; theme as metaphoric statement recognizes the
centrality of image in the poem.
Image is not a material copy but a thought focusing attention on sensory qualities , a picture
made up of words, the sensuous element in poetry; imagery is non-literal language creating
pictures and presenting situations; imagery is not a decorative ornament and is not confined to
visual pictures; it is a vehicle of ideas, a logic enabling a poet to avoid bald statements; it is saying
something in terms of other things to produce complexity-
There midnight’s all a glimmer and noon a purple glow.
Or,
With how sad steps, O moon , thou climb’st the skies!
In MACBETH, images of blood and sleeplessness have thematic importance and are in
keeping with a tragedy of murder and remorse-
MAKING THE GREEN ONE RED
Here , the colours are of different thematic intensities, red is closer to the key of the play and is
more like the repetition of a tonic chord in music; in this play , the structure of imagery is a pattern
derived from the text, a rhythm of repetition.
Says Macduff-
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope
The Lord’s anointed temple and stole thence
The life of the building.
Duncan’s death is confusion which like a craftsman has made his masterpiece. Murder is a thief
breaking into a religious building.
Vision and sound are blended in the description of a redbreast whistling from a garden
croft and gathering swallows twittering in the skies. Various senses and sensations are stimulated
in the description that they pinched her feet, singed her hair and screwed it up with pins. We have
a visual image in the lines-
You stood in the door and the sun was a shadow
Of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair.
An image is a sense-experience expressed in words, a concrete representation of a sense
impression, feeling or idea triggering imaginative re-enactment od sensory experience.

What wondrous life is this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Images are visual pictures of sensory experience, metaphorical expression of abstract ideas,
vehicles of aesthetic experience and imaginative thought.
In THE HAUNTED PALACE , Poe uses visual and non-visual images: a winged odour went
along pallid ramparts.
In RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER, Coleridge uses auditory image to describe flute’s
sound/angel’s song ; in a sonnet Shakespeare visualizes abstract ideas of time and death when
he says that our lives hasten to their end as waves dash toward the shore; Keats refers to autumn
as sitting carelessly on a granary floor with their soft-lifted by winnowing wind; Dante presents
Paradise as image of salvation; Emily Dickinson compares fading light to the fading of life in a
dying face; a departing ray of light is like the distance on the look of death.
Images are vestigial representations of sensations, transforming
observations/events/abstract ideas into concrete experience, revealing poet’s psyche:
Across the moon at Gantchester.
Imagery is tactual/tactile (something felt). Tactile imagery deals with touch.
Ted Hughes describes what the touch of thistles would be against the cows’ rubber –like
tongues-
Against the rubber-tongues of cows & the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air.
Imagery is thermal, auditory/aural/something heard. In aural imagery, we are invited to hear
/image sound.
Arnold
- describes waves flinging themselves up the beach
- creates the sound of pebbles:
Listen. You hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling,
At their return , up the high strand.
Imagery is static and synaesthetic. Synaesthetic imagery describes felings in terms of colour and
describes sadness as feeling blue.
Imagery is gustatory/ something tasted—
1) And is there honey still for tea?
2) O for a draught of vintage that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green.
Imagery is visual /something seen. Wordsworth makes us see a rock towering over him
and pursuing him-
The huge cliff
Rose up between me, the stars, and still,
With measured motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me.
In psychology, image is mental reproduction of a past experience; according to Pound, it
presents intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time and so is not merely
pictorial representation ; Dr.Richards regards the image as a mental event.
Exuberant image (Marlowe , Burns) Juxtaposes 2 surfaces in face to face contact to
cover loose comparisons/relationships based on evaluative categories ; intensive image
(Dante, Spenser) is diagrammatic; sunken image occurring in contemplative writing and
classical poetry has literariness, internality and interpenetration of terms; lacking
overtones it suggests the sensuous concrete without projecting it; in lines-
Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all
RIPENESS is a sunken image with suggestion of analogy between inevitability of cycles of
life and vegetation; in radical image, the terms meet at root or invisible logical ground, the
 minor term being homely, unpoetic, technical; we have pseudo-medical radical image in
the following lines-
But as some serpent’s poison hurteth not
Except it be from the live serpent shot,
So doth her virtue need her here to fit
That unto us , she working more than it.
In expansive image (Bacon, Browne, Burke, Shakespeare ), each term opens a wide
vista to modify the other; in “Macbeth”, we have –
Light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood: good things of day begin to
droop and drowse.
Here, Shakespeare presents a metaphorical setting for crime with sensuous concreteness,
parallels night and demonic evil, light and goodness, making the subject and predicate
work both backward and forward.
Yeats’s BYZANTIUM is a structure of closely interrespondent non-natural images;
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM contrasts biological life/mackerel crowded seas with the rigid
world of gold enamelling/moasaic.
Imagery is not only descriptive but also associative, one-dimensional, kinaesthetic-
Ah God! To see the branches stir.
Imagery can be olfactory / something smelled –
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten,
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River smell…
Spenser describes the vile stink of the vomit of a mythical beast to turn our stomach in
disgust—
Therewith she spew’d out of her filthy maw
A flood of poison horrible and black.
Here are images of colour and shape—
1) Is dawn a secret shy and cold anadyomene, silver-gold?
2) Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand, still guardians of that holy land?
Sometimes the poets mix up the senses, speak about sights in terms of sound, or touch in
terms of taste. Elizabeth Barret Browning uses colour to describe the voice she heard—
Guess now who hold thee ?—‘Death’, I said. But then
The silver answer rang__ Not death, but love.
 Images are often used in compact groups to produce wealth of thought and excitement of
discovery; sometimes almost merge, illuminating one another and producing an accumulating
weight of feeling and thought.
Milton calls shallow clergymen blind mouths that scarce know how to hold a sheep-hook;
they are MOUTHS because they are preachers, are shallow like mouths of rivers and are
rapaciously hungry; they are BLIND because they ignore the true function of their calling; they
claim to be shepherds but cannot even manage the staff. This is an example of closely compounded
images expressing abstract thought and emotion in terms of concrete experience.
Imagism, coined by Pound in 1914, means use of clear images in short poems, conveying
concentrated juxtaposed impressions as untainted response; this movement was reaction
against the excesses of romantic fantasy; it is based on a sense of a fragmented world; no attempt
is made to organise experience; it has been defined as self-conscious innovation and search for a
technique to describe the world; imagist poems consist of precise description of scene and
metaphorical comparison. Here is Pouns’s 2- line poem entitled IN A STATION OF THE
METRO_
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough.
Inspiration and Art. Inspiration is creative impulse; Walpole calls Oliver Goldsmith an
inspired idiot.
Art is from ars; expression of beauty in form, colour, sound, speech or movement; artistic
temperament is disposition marked by easily excited emotions.
Intellect and Intelligence. Intellect is from intellectum-understanding; faculty of knowing
unlike feeling/imagining/volition/conation; judging, comprehending relationships, reasoning,
analyzing, creating ideas; Aristotle defines it as form-giving power of the mind; passive intellect
is form-receiving faculty of penetrating appearances and getting at the substance through
elimination of the unimportant; in modern psychology, intellect stands for the whole cognitive
function of the mind. Intelligence is from intelligens which is present participle of intelligere-
perceive; mental acuteness, ability to apprehend interrelationships; psychologists still debate the
question whether intelligence is a unitary characteristic of the individual or a sum of his abilities;
intelligence tests like Alpha test, Beta test, Binet test consist of standardized questions to
determine mental age i.e. relative mental capacity.
Internal and External World. External world is the physical /social world.
Internal world is moral/imaginative world; human values, intuitions, fantasie.
Intuition understanding and reason. Instuition is from intueri-look on ; seeing with
mind’s eye ; knowing without recourse to inference/deduction; innate/instinctive knowledge;
direct/immediate knowing whether mystical, perceptual, moral or intellectual; contrasted with
speculative/mediate knowing.
Understanding is faculty of relationships/comparisons/concepts/clear comprehension/
judgement in practical affairs. German philosophers call it verstand , schoolmen call it ratio and
Plato calls it dianoia.
 Reason is from ratio-think/reckon; Schoolmen call it intellectus, German philosophers call
it vernunft; power of inferring; cognitive faculty co-ordinate with perception and understanding ;
sum of intellectual powers; human as distinguished from brute intelligence; universal rationality
of nature or collective minds; rational soul of universe; faculty of framing general conceptions or
apprehending universals; rationalized understanding which comprehends while sense perceives
and understanding conceives; faculty of subsuming the particular under the general or
apprehending general relations of particulars; reasoning from the individual to the universal,
from particulars or parts to general or whole is induction/ampliative inference while reasoning
from general to particular is syllogism/ratiocination; argumentation is presentation of arguments
logically. It is the power to render experience intelligible by bringing perceived particulars under
appropriate concepts; pasing from data/premises to a conclusion; discovering rational
relationships of ideas; practical reason is based on empirical element, pure reason is free from
empirical elements, theoretical reason leads to cognition and is the capacity to grasp the universal
in the particular, speculative reason is concerned with the supersensible, intuitive reason is
apprehension of a priori principles, discursive/logical reason is the faculty of drawing inferences.
Jargon- words used by specialists.
Gothic literature is fiction with gloomy/strange setting, mysterious, supernatural and violent
events. It creates suspense and terror, stresses not character but plot and setting. Poe’s The Pit
and the Pendulum is about a dungeon teeming with rats, a razor-edged pendulum.

LITERARY HISTORY stresses that ignorance of history distorts literary study, that
unhistorical approach puts literature under the microscope and leads to pedantry and aberration.
Rosemond Tuve rejects Empson’s reading of Herbert’s SACRIFICE
as arbitrary and states that Christ’s ascending the cross is not a symbol of incest; she rejects
Empson’s view that background study,sources and conventions,liturgy, medieval poems and
devotional treatises cannot solve the problem of poetic value. Cleanth Brooks admits that criticism
needs history but insists that literature should be read as literature and that historical evidence
cannot finally determine meaning . isaiah Berlin also states that if everything is subjective and
relative, nothing can be judged, that literary study deals with monuments rather than documents,
that literary study should not be reduced to the study of chronicles.
New Criticism rejects the view that a literary work is illuminated by biography, social
conditions, historical background/knowledge. But literary history is important. Marvell’s
HORATIAN ODE requires knowledge of the historical situation. Words have a history of their
own, genres have a tradition and works should not be divorced from contemporary realities,
literary review raises socio-historical issues. Although criticism is not a form of history, historical
perspectivism is useful.
The advocates of literary history favour the adoption of past criteria, the application of
period values and the exploration of liturgical and iconographic traditions. But historicism is
negated by logic, ethics and aesthetics. HAMLET should not be interpreted in terms of the views
of Shakespeare and hit audience because later insights have aggregated. Universal art is not
relativist. But we should not dismiss historicism which opposes abstract and unhistorical
categories and stresses that general human quality common to literature of different periods can
be grasped as a dialectical force in history. Historicism does not necessarily lead to arbitrary
eclecticism; it is opposed mainly because of disgust with 19 th century philology and antiquarian
pedantry, overvaluation of biographical detail and indifference to literary values.

LITERATURE AND MORALITY. Literature should not preach directly and dogmatically; it
should be free from injunctions, doctrines, systematic logic and system of metaphysics; literature
elevates us above reality, not only represents life but also idealises it, presents the permanent and
the universal, springs from deeper sources and spiritual aspirations, externalises the inner world,
imitates hidden reality; has intrinsic value and is a means to culture. Morality in literature is
different from didacticism. Pope’s ESSAY ON MAN is moralistic, Arnoldfavours high seriousness
and reorientation but Shakespeare’s HAMLET provides moral insight into reality, mystery of life,
divine providence. Literature should not be moralistic but great literature is moral.
LITERATURE AND PERSONALITY.Literature reflects personality; influences on the writer’s
mind unify hid works; Buffon remarks that style is the man, artist works from within outwards;
Wordsworth declares that emotion is recollected in tranqullity; there should be balance between
thought and expression; T.S.Eliot favours organic blend of personality and impersonality,
individual talent and tradition, extinction of personality or depersonalization; we cannot deny the
force of time spirit, audience, age, environment, group mind; Taine’s view of race and heredity.
Victorian literature sprang from Victorianism.
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY.According to Rene Wellek, we should distinguish
between history of ideas and history of philosophy; the former combines semantic and
philosophic history while the latter deals with thinkers and systems. Literary history parallels and
reflects intellectual history; writers are aware of certain philosophical assumptions; Dante’s
theology has been variously interpreted.
Literature deals with fate, freedom, necessity, nature and spirit, sin and salvation, myth and
magic, love and death, problems of family, society, state.
In Dostoevsky’s novels, ideas are acted out in terms of character and event. Marlowe reflects
Italianate atheism/skepticism. Dryden is aware of deism and fideism. George Eliot discusses
moral, philosophical and social problems. James Joyce reflects Aquinas, Bruno, Freud, Jung and
Vico.
We should not confuse art with philosophy. Literature is not knowledge translated into
imagery and verse; the second part of FAUST suffers from over-intellectualisation; similarly the
second part of Thomas Mann’s MAGIC MOUNTAIN is devoted to philosophical discussion.
Although a literary work should not be reduced to doctrinal statement, ideological content
conduces to complexity and coherence, theoretical insight increases artistic depth; in pre-Socratic
age, Empedocles blended philosophy with literature through integration and intensity; we are
influenced by sensibility and aesthetic considerations as well as by thought and cosmological
speculations.
In “FICTION_A LENS ON LIFE”, Wallace Stegner states that an artist is not primarily
interested in theories and abstractions, that art springs from experiential rather than conceptual
knowledge, that ideas may haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark;
ideas are in the foreground in problem plays and novels of ideas; in Ibsen, Huxley and Arthur
Koestler. Wordsworth’s pantheism, Dante’s Thomism, Lucretius’s Epicureanism are centripetal
verbal structures. Similarly, Pope’s ESSAY ON MAN does not expound a system of metaphysical
optimism founded on concept of chain of being; it rather uses such a system to construct
hypothetical but richly suggestive statements.
LITERATURE AND PSYCHOLOGY. Psychological approach involves study of author’s
conflicts, frustrations, traumatic experiences and neuroses; study of creative process; and study
of effect of literature on readers; stream of consciousness technique traces the thoughts and
feelings of characters, the drama going on in their mind and soul, their attitudes, inhibitions and
complexes; literature has been influenced by Freud; conscious can be explained with respect to
the subconscious, although Shakespeare has profound insight into human nature; behaviourist
view that man is a plaything of circumstances; determinism. D.H.Lawrence favours primitive
instinctive happiness.
Literature and Science. Bacon propounded the method of inductive reasoning and bridged
the gulf between science and humanism, rejected the authority of Aristotle and scholastics;
Dryden’s style harmonized with new requirements; in SACRED THEORY OF THE EARTH,
1690, Thomas Burnet uses scientific method to justify theology and gives quasi-scientific
explanations of the processes by which nature is in chaos.
In ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING 1690,John Locke applies scientific
method to the study of mind; in SPECTATOR, Addison disseminated the ideas of Newton and
Locke to inquisitive public; John Ray and William Derham stilled doubt engendered by science.
In his play THE VIRTUOSO 1676, Shadwell ridicules the self-regarding seriousness of scientists
in conducting experiments on flies, maggots and eels; in THE ELEPHANT IN THE MOON,
Samuel Butler adopts the same attitude; so does William King in THE TRANSACTIONER 1700
and USEFUL TRANSACTIONS IN PHILOSOPHY 1709.
In GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, Swift ridicules the Academy of Lagado/project of the virtuosi;
in DUNCIAD, Pope condemns the growing pedantry of the age and crowns the lesser breed of
scientists with fantastic weeds and shells and exposes the pretensions of scientific optimism and
rebukes man’s new sense of self-importance; In THE SEASONS, James Thomson freely draws
upon scientific findings; in RASSELAS 1759, Dr.Johnson attacks scientific optimism but draws
upon science for his similes; the romantic revival was not a rejection of scientific knowledge but
a recovery of sense of mystery and spirituality.(C.J.Horne)

LITERATURE AND SOCIETY. History is useful but literature is universal; literature is an

instrument of culture (sweetness and light); Spenser is the child of Renaissance/Reformation,
“Faerie Queene” reflects Protestantism, Error and Pride stand for Roman Catholicism and
scholasticism; T.S.Eliot is the child of post war disillusionment, THE WASTE LAND reflects
spiritual atrophy; George Orwell’s “1984” is about the modern trend toward totalitarianism;
science fiction reflects advances in science and technology ; the popularity of short story and one
act play reflects modern fast life.
Malapropism & Spoonerism .Malapropism is confusing words having similar sound, using
similar sounding words as synonyms laughable misuse of words. A word mistakenly used for
another that resembles it, producing unintended comic effect.
This term is derived from Mrs.Malaprop in Richard Sheridan’s play The Rivals:
Derangement for arrangement
Epitaph for epithet
Prodigy for progeny.
The audience cheered loudly to express their depreciation (Appreciation)
The dog-trainer got a new leash on life (leash)
Every detail of the incident was made implicit by the eye-witness (explicit)
Earning people who collect the dole are parasols (parasites)
I found his behaviour quite objective (objectionable)
I felt an instant detraction towards her (attraction)
The growth on his neck was a malingering one (malignant)
Hope springs maternal in the human heart (eternal)
Looking around you could see that the audience was deeply moved and everyone was infected by
sadness.(affected)

All members must attend the propitiation ceremony

Surgeons had to deform the operation quickly (perform)
The prisoner’s privileges were provoked by the judge (revoked)
The sky was overcast and the rain was eminent (imminent)
The statement was quite ambivalent (ambiguous)
We welcomed important guests and extinguished visitors (distinguished)
The writing was almost ineligible (illegible)
He accused me of evading his questions.

Spoonerism . This term is derived from absent-minded Rev. Spooner of New College,Oxford. It
is accidental reversal of sounds, slips of tongue transposition of initial letters of words.
Control of line (line of control)
It’s time to deed the fog (feed, dog)
It’s a well-boiled icicle (oiled bicycle)
You have hissed all mystery lectures (missed, history)
The horse began to pleat the ant (eat, plant)
There were signs of fain on his pace (pain,face)
He began to cling pieces of foal at the passers-by (fling, coal)
He arranged a mad batch for the girl (bad, match
Peeling satisfied at the file of work done, he relaxed (feeling, pile)
I poured with rain (roared, pain)
Anyone who banks half his pay each week is a sick quaver.(saves, quick, saver)

Meaning. Meaning is interpretation of experience while experience is interpretation of event;

story about a life is interpretation of life. Midnight sky can be interpreted as spooky; this is poor
interpretation for the mind gravitates to the commonplace. Or it can be interpreted as lot of stars;
this interpretation expresses awe at cosmic immensity. Or it can be interpreted as seeing eternity
the other night; this interpretation expresses profound religious experience.
Emotive meaning induces feelings of fear/anger etc.; evokes emotional response; is based
on associations, sound patterns, word-suggestions,
experience/feeling/attitude/presentation/connotation. Cognitive/referential meaning includes
extension and ‘intension’; denotation,dictionary meaning minus associations. Extension of chair
is particular chair and all chairs; ‘intension’ is lifelessness, four legs, one back, one seat.
Dante identifies the following four levels of meaning literal or historical; moral; allegorical or
symbolical; mystical or anagogical. Richards identifies the following levels_sense i.e. what has
been said; feeling i.e. emotional attitudes.

Melodrama deals with sensational crime and highly emotional theme.

Metre and scansion . Metre is repetition of a regular rhythmic unit in a line of poetry, regular
occurrence of stress in a poem, number and placement of measured stresses. Scansion is
designation of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Mind and Soul. Mind is that from which thought originates ; that which
feels/perceives/wills/thinks; perceptive/thinking part of consciousness excluding emotion; total
of the conscious states of an individual; conscious element in the universe as contrasted with
matter; the agent in knowing/feeling/performing an action.
Soul is deeper than spirit_
Writes Browning:
When my lips just touched your cheek
Touch which let my soul come through.
Writes Shakespeare:
There is some soul of goodness in things evil. Soul is man’s moral and emotional nature
as distinguished from his intellect. According to spiritual view, soul is sum of the functions of
the brain; animating principle; psychical and spiritual principle; immaterial nature devoid of
quantity and spatial extension; consisting of lower part which is appetitive/sensuous and higher
part which is volitional/cognitive. According to materialistic view, soul is rational thinking; not
the mind but that which thinks and wills; this is the view of Descartes. According to idealistic
view, soul is totality of conscious experience.
Monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. Monosyllabic words have one syllable. In Hymn to
God the Father, Donne says-
Wilt thou forgive my sin where I began
Which was my sin though it were done before.
These monosyllabic words enact a dark and serious force.
Polysyllabic words produce a flowing, lyrical and majestic effect. In The
Windhover, Hopkins writes_
I caught this morning morning’s minion kingdom
Of daylight’s dauphin dapple-dawn drawn falcon.
Mood is
- atmosphere or feeling
- created by connotative words, figurative language, sensory images, rhythm and sound of
language
Mood is of 8 kinds_
1) clear
2) discursive
3) dynamic. Rapid shift from comic banter to tragic suffering, as in
O’Casey
4)Reflective
5) relaxed
6) romantic
7) tense
i. uncertain
The following extract illustrates a mood of luxurious and relaxed contentment—
 “October is the richest of the seasons. The fields are cut , the granaries are full, the
bins are loaded to the brim. The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape. The sun goes down
in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields”.
Motif and motivation. Motif is a theme running through different works; a recurring
element within a single work; theme/character/verbal pattern. Motivation is combination of
circumstance and temperanment.

Myth. Myth is opposite of logos; story enacted by ritual; anonymously composed story about
origins/destinies; the myths of modern man are progress/equality/universal education. Myth is
translation of ritual/festival mime into narrative shorthand; an instrument for making experience
intelligible to ourselves; a large controlling image that gives philosophical meaning to the facts of
ordinary life; without such images, experience is chaotic/fragmentary/phenomenal; all
convictions involve a mythology; myths unify experience; the term myth does not mean a
falsehood; acceptance of myth is not a form of anti-intellectualism/obscurantism; modern myths
are political; we live in a period of multiple/conflicting myths.
Literature ceases to be perceptual and tends to degenerate into mere description without
adequate myth; T S Eliot makes excursions into anthropology and various religions; Joyce
explores psychology of human organisms and Yeats probes the aesthetic realm; the hunt for
essential image goes on everywhere today.
In an article The Meaning of Myth in Modern Criticism 1953, Wallace Douglas states that
myth is the most inclusive word in current critical literature; the dictionary meaning of legend is
a starting point for a series of extensions—from illusion through belief to truth; critics who
approach literature from the point of view of myth treat a work as a storehouse of racial
memories/unconsciously held values; they treat character and action as representative of
types/classes/ideals. A myth represents values sanctioned by general belief; it is a
sanctified/dogmatized expression of basic social/class conventions/values; a myth embodies
insights as opposed to facts/ordered knowledge; it involves semi-poetic devices like structural
paradoxes/ironies/tensions/non-rational and linguistically indescribable elements of experience.
In Quest for Myth, Richard Chase states that the mythopoeic mind is superior to
rational/speculative reason; man lives in the world of practical reason as well as the magico-
religious world; myth is a defensive projection of man’s unconscious; it suffuses the natural with
the preternatural; it fortifies the ego with the impression that there is a magically potent
brilliance/dramatic force in the world.The study of myth has become one of the most pervasive
occupations of literary critics; major works from Shakespeare to Defoe through Melville to
Faulkner use myth to deepen our perceptions.
Negative Capability. Term used by Keats; negation of logical rationalizing part of mind,
rejection of fact; involvement in doubts, mysteries, uncertainties. Negative capability is essential
for poetry in which the sense of beauty is more important than logic and reason. Coleridge lacks
negative capability on account of his tendency to integrate intuitions into a system of thought.
Noble Savage. Concept propounded by Rousseau and Chateaubrand; primitive man is
inherently good and civilization has a corrupting influence.
Objective correlative is the term used by T S Eliot when he says that ‘Hamlet’ is an artistic
failure because the hero’s emotions exceed the events experienced by him; this means an object
or situation or events expressing emotion.
Obscurity is an integral part of poetry; before reflecting with a clear mind man formed imaginary
ideas, singing preceded articulation, imagination preceded knowledge to fill an unexplained
vacuum; poetry originated in the necessity of creating a metaphysic; poetic logic gives rise to
metaphor- a shorthand fable; the poet violates words expressive of things to seek symbolic form;
he does not merely arrange/select on the intellectual plane but also projects himself into an
emotional complex defying intelligence, beyond the region of normal thought-processes to a point
where the mind encounters pressing need for creation.
Unlike false complexity which conceals a vaccum and is a smoke-screen, true complexity
springs from wealth of ideas; obscure poetry seems to be a vision without meaning but when the
veil is penetrated it breaks on our awareness with the suddenness of revelation. The resistance
of modern poetry springs from abstract thought; modern poets believe that those poems which
incite us to become are more important than those which make us understand; that
intelligibility is inferior to a certain inflection of the poetic voice , that instead of resolving into
clear ideas, words should articulate the most critical moments of life.
Empson rejects this defence of obscurity as magical apology; but poetry dates back to a time
anterior to writing and criticism; the poet makes up a language of his own in accordance with
tones, intensities, subtle shades of thought and profound objectives. The poetic worth of
Coleridge’s poems is in inverse ratio to their logical sense. Obscurity lies in the reader and not the
poet; seeking precision of language and thought the poet exceeds the limits of customary
expression, introducing new words, new uses of words and new devices for re-animating words.
Obscurity affirms the sovereignty of thought-process, sound-value, magic of words; it
springs from honest objectivity of the poet working outwards from an emotional unity clothed in
an inner language form; it springs from the fact that there is no necessary correspondence
between the inner language and rational language. It is a mistake to ask a poet to explain his
poems; the emotional unity which is the raison d’etre of every poem cannot be measured by
rational instruments otherwise it could be cast in prose. Obscurity springs from the poet’s effort
to create in words an objective equivalence of his emotional experience.
Onomatopoeia is name-making, the process of imitating sounds, the use of echoic words to
create atmosphere, the use of words whose sound echoes their meaning_ hiss of a snake, the
bang of a gun, the murmuring of bees, buzz, crash.
In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats produces an atmosphere of languid ease_
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eaves
There is alliteration on m and s; combination of murmurous with long vowels.

Ontological Status. A poem has ontological status because it is neither real like a statue nor
mental like the experience of pain nor ideal like a triangle.
Oxford Movement. Led by Newman;Oxford University reaction to religious laxity.
Palindrome. A word/sentence reading the same backwards/forwards_
Madam, I’m Adam.
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
Parody is imitation of a serious work for criticism, humorous effect, tribute, mimicry of subject
or style.

Parody results from a poet’s rewriting the verses of a precursor, it is a humorous and mocking
imitation of a work through distortion and exaggeration of certain aspects like tone, stylistic
mannerisms or purpose. A good parody catches the flavour and manner of the original. A
parodist may extend the original beyond its limits.
Kenneth Koch parodies the following poem by William Carlos Williams__
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

as hereunder__
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
And then sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing .
3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Parody is mocking the manner/ style of an original by relating to grotesquely inappropriate

subjects. Lewis Carroll’s How Doth the Little Crocodile is a parody of Isaac Watt’s How Doth the
Little Busy Bee.
A.C. Hilton’s Octopus is a parody of Swinburne’s Dolores.
Henry Reed’s Chard Whitlow parodies Eliot’s style.
Hopkins parodies Wordsworth’s ‘My Heart Leaps Up’ by interpreting a line literally___

'The child is father to the man'.

How can he be ? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can;
'The child is father to the man'.
No; what the poet did write ran,
The man is father to the child.
'The child is father to the man'.
How can he be? The words are wild.
Pound parodies Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade in his The Charge of the Bread
Brigade_
Half a loaf, half a loaf,
Half a loaf? Um-hum?
Down through the vale of gloom
Slouched the ten million,
Onward th' 'ungry blokes,
Crackin' their smutty jokes.
We'll send 'em mouchin' 'ome,
Damn the ten million.

There goes the night brigade,

They got no steady trade,
Several old so'jers know
Monty has blunder'd.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to buy the pie,

Slouching and mouching,

Lousy ten million.

Plenty to right of 'em,

Plenty to left of 'em,
Yes, wot is left of 'em,
Damn the ten million
Stormed at by press and all,
How shall we dress 'em all?
Glooming and mouching.

See 'em go slouching there,

With cowed and crouching air
Dundering dullards.
How the whole nation shook
While Milord Beaverbrook
Fed 'em with hogwash.
According to Edmund Reiss, Chaucer's Miller's tale is a parody
of courtly love; parody is not the same as satire or burlesque or irony; the satiric process
involves going from a particular inadequacy to the general one. In parody, the given or original
exists as someting inadequate but we go from it and call up
an ideal that exists behind it.
Chaucer's parodic portrait of Huberd is more than a satire on friars; in stressing his inadequacies
he calls up the original concept and work of St.Dominic and St.Francis. The portrait of Alisoun,
Wife of Bath, is a parody of Virgin Mary whose seamless weaving symbolised the immaculate birth
of Christ; Alisoun is childless on account of her concern with cloth-making and wordly vestments;
she is a wife unlike Virgin Mary; her self-centred earthly passion is a parody of Virgin Mary's
celestial love.
Christ's birth was parodied by a medieval nativity play Second Shepherd's Play showing a
sheep in a cradle.
To return to Chaucer: Parody is his predominant way of looking at the world; his Man of
Law is said to be a parody of Christ, the archetypal lawgiver; man of law's inadequancies highlight
ideal, uncompromised, unflawed justice.
Chaucer's Harry Bailly is a parody of the Christian concept of host. The journey from the Tabard
Inn, encompassed by Miller, Reeve and Bailly, is without spiritual progress and hence a parody of
the ideal pilgrimage. Chaucer's pilgrims fail to attain spiritual ascent during their 3-day journey
and , by and large, stay wholly on earthly roads, eating food, and thinking in material terms. They
start from Iabard Inn, apparently a notorious brothel fast by the Belle, and stay in the figurative
Babylons of the world.

Personality.
Personality in literature means_
i) autobiographical strain; Milton's sonnet on blindness, Wordsworth's Prelude.
ii)style reflects personal, national and racial characteristics.

The writer expresses as well as controls expression of personality; he has ego as well as id.
Ego is coherent organisation of mental processes; conscious flow of
thoughts/impressions/sensations; perception ; contains reason/sanity/reality-principle;
produces literary element of form. Id is impersonal aspect of personality; contains repressed
instincts/passions/pleasure-principle; produces literary energy/content; the artist deliberately
allows the ego to give in to the flow of energy from id; produces surrealism.
 Personality is flow of consciousness. Character is derived from Greek word for engraved
sign; power to keep a selected motive dominant throughout life; controls flow of consciousness;
regulates instinctual impulses; an impersonal ideal which is armour against experience.
Inspiration flowers if personality does not harden into character. The poet should
escape from personality, develop historical sense or sense of the livingness of past, acquire a
realisation of the simultaneous existence of past poets.

Plot is main line of action, force driving the novel, play or story along a character's physical and
spiritual struggle.
Portmanteau word is a word formed by combining sound/sense of two or more words:
bisexcycle, slithy (lithe, slimy)

Pre_Raphaelitism
1848 movement preceding aestheticism, fleshly school of poetry based on admiration for
early Italian painters rejection of Renaissance and post-Renaissance idealisation of man/nature,
rejection of the
crassness of contemporary industrial world, treatment of the theme of death and decay, focus on
archaic diction, beauty, medievalism, pictorial detail, sensuousness, symbolism.

Primitivism
is belief in the supermacy of primitive universal emotions.
Realism and susrealism
- developed as literary movement after French Revolution
-was aided by scientific conquest of nature as a means of
self-experession; the invention of photography in 1839; the rise of
journalism; Courbet's doctrine of the ordinary hero; Flaubert's
"Madame Bovary"
-was a reaction against allegorical fantasy, Gothic romance,
picturesque adventures
-focused on the drab, seamy aspects, the underprivileged;
-involved sociological involvement and search for objectivity.
Realism has been encouraged by the concept of imitation; it is fidelity to nature reflected
in 18th century bourgeois drama, medieval fabliaux, Hellenistic sculpture.
 As a literary creed realism means a dispassionate analysis and truthful
representation of the world. The relation of art to reality is a fundamental epistemological
problem.Whereas nominalism considers ideas to be names or abstractions, realism is belief
in the reality of ideas. Higher reality is that of essence, symbol and dream. While Dickens is
novelist of ideal or romantic school, Thackeray is a realist committed to truthful observation
and delineation of commonplace settings, events and characters. Henry James, Pushkin and
Gogol are also realists portraying the contradictions of social development, providing insight
into social structure and the future direction of social evolution.
Realism rejects myth and dream, the stylized and decorative, the fantastic, abstract,
allegorical and symbolic, the contigent, fortuitous and improbabale, the
didactic and moralistic. Subjective realism rejects objective order of things and is akin to
impressionism or exact notation of mental states. While naturalism implies scientific approach
and materialistic determinism and the use of positivistic science as an antitode for display and
phrasemaking, realism is concerned not with social criticism but with faith in man and pessimistic
determinism of science. While naturalism is concern with the average and the surface, realism is
representative and prophetic.
Realism rejects the ideality of classicism and dignified subject-matter but can degenerate
into non-art, scientific description, treatise writing, reportage, documentation , journalism,
propaganda, sociology, information and exhortation. Croce rejects realism as a pseudo concept
and a category of obsolete rhetoric. Belinsky states that the artist should create types of
universal significance. Realist fiction has impersonality and absence of author. While the
ancients were impersonal and objective, the moderns are personal and subjective. Stream of
consciousness dramatises the mind but dissolves outer reality.
Naturalism was founded by Emile Zola who demonstrates the influence of heredity on
character, observes rather than interprets, treats virtue/vice as a chemical reagent, creates an
idiom consonant with the age of the locomotive. This movement was foreshadowed by Balzac,
Stendhall and Ibsen. German and Russian naturalism flourished in Hauptmann and Gorky,
British naturalism flourished in Gissing, Galsworthy and Hardy.
Naturalists see evolution mainly in terms of conflict of social forces and sympathise with
oppressed workers, insert characters into crucial situations, turn literature into a social
document, suppress poetic elements, adopt a flat objective style, present sordid aspects of life
like slums, sweat, filth, disease, bestiality,treating human beings as biological pawns rather than
as agents of free will. Naturalism is an intensified form of realism.
Surrealism was founded by Apollinaire in 1924. its forerunners were Coleridge, Lewis
Carroll, Rimbaud and Kafka. Its leaders were Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault,
Georges Hugnet, Salvador Dali, Hugh Sykes, Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne, and Jean Cocteau.
Surrealism juxtaposes verbal images, presents automatic writing, removes the barrier
between the inner & the outer world, establishes the reality beyond the confines of reason.
Surrealism was founded on psychic automatism, the real functioning of thought, a search
for something other than the conscious; in 1925, it was launched as an amalgam of poetics and
pseudo-scientific exoeriments in altered states of consciousness; it was based on the dictum_
 “The liberation of the spirit requires as a prior condition the liberation of man himself;
the right to pursue in literature and art new means of expression”.
It has been attacked by Ehrenburg:
“I don’t know if they are really sick or if they are only faking their craziness; these young
phosphorescents play-act at being the zealots of revolutionary intransigence and proletarian
honesty”.
ROMANTICISM
Rene Wellek states that while perfection is clear, closed, seeking the image, romanticism is
open, dark, seeking the symbol. Romanticism favours the misty/hazy, disorder, continuity, soft
focus, inner bias, another world, decadentism, aestheticism, nihilistic daring, invention of myth
to overcome solitude and achieve reintegration into the whole, awareness of the elemental
anguish of the creature enclosed in temporality. Romanticism raises the preconscious to
consciousness, presents personal apprehension of human timelessness, brings eternity into time.
Romanticism is a consciousness of the fundamentally subjective nature of mind,
withdrawal from reality to the centre of self, return to nature, transition from self-consciousness
to imagination, renascence of wonder, vagueness, folklore and liberalism, medievalism,
reconciliation of subject and object, man and nature , consciousness and unconsciousness,
nostalgia for the object, language striving to become nature, vision becoming a presence or a
landscape. Earthly objects have intrinsic ontological primacy and language fails to reach the
ontological status of the object but romanticism questions the ontological primacy of sensible
objects.
Rejecting generalizations like emotionalism, spontaneity and primitivism, Albert Gerard
stresses in ON THE LOGIC OF ROMANTICISM 1957 that poetic experience is a form of
knowledge and an intuition of cosmic unity. David Ferry states in THE LIMITS OF MORTALITY
, AN ESSAY ON WORDSWORTHS’S MAJOR POEMS 1959 that Wordsworth regards nature as a
metaphor for eternity and absence of death; Paul de Man states in SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPE IN
WORDSWORTH AND YEATS 1962 that Wordsworth has a transcendental vision and that
landscapes are the gateway to a world beyond visible nature; Geoffrey Hartman states in
WORDSWORTH AND THE VIA NATURALITER NEGATIVE 1962 that nature leads
Wordsworth beyond nature; W.K.Wimsatt states in THE STRUCTURE OF ROMANTIC
NATURE IMAGERY 1949 that romanticism blurs distinction between the literal and the
figurative and affirms continuity/interchange between outer motions and inner life; and Meyer
Abrams stresses in THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP 1953 the shift from imitation theory to
expression theory, from neo-classical mechanistic analogies to biological imagery of
romanticism.

Rhyme creates harmony completes/resolves an idea, focuses meaning. It is similarity of sound

between two words, accented vowels and succeeding sounds.
When the rhyming words are monosyllabic, the rhyme is masculine_
bold and
old.
When the rhyming words are polysyllabic, the rhyme is feminine_
bending and ending.
In feminine rhyme, the last syllable is unstressed.
End rhyme is at the end of a line_
An ant on the table cloth
Ran into a dormant moth.
Internal rhyme is rhyme occurring within a poetic line with heavy thump, a lifeless lump.
Imperfect or near or off or slant rhymes are end rhymes which are approximate and not exact.
Half rhyme occours when consonants (but not vowels) of 2 rhyming words have same sounds.
We expect but do not get a rhyme. Here rhyme function is performed by consonance. In Owen’s
Futility_
Think how it wakes the seeds_
Woke, once, the clays of cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved still warm- too hard to stir.

Rhyme-scheme is pattern - of end rhymes in a poem.

-in which rhyme sounds occour.

Rhythm is cadence, regularity of stress on syllables, regular patterned recurrence of strong and
weak elements.
It creates mood, reinforces content, heightens ideas and the power of language. The human
voice is an instrument of great range and sensitivity, grows loud or soft, rises and falls,
resembles the rhythmic movements in nature like the beating of the heart, crests and hollows of
waves, gathering and subsiding of force.
Sarcasm is type of verbal irony bitter and cutting speech ridicule intended to wound feelings
contemptuous and critical remark so that the literal meaning is the opposite of actual meaning.
Well, I wouldn’t expect you to understand
 -this poem
-my point of view.
Satire is a literary technique to ridicule foolish customs and ideas, militant irony to produce
reform, a focus on the discrepancy between propriety and reality.
It developed from private abuse; is based on exaggeration and idealism; is wildly abusive,
bitterly critical or gently witty.
Horation satire is gentle ridicule of foibles. Juvenalian satire is moral condemnation of
vice.
Chaucer & Ben Jonson satirise alchemists; Nashe and Swift satirise astrologers.
“Erewhon” is a satire on Darwinian and Malthusian theories . The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn by Mark Twain is
-a satire on literary sentimentality
- a parody of sentimental excesses in poetess Grangerford’s work
“The Elephant in the Moon” is a satire on astronomers. “1984” is a satire on technological
efficiency “Brave New World” is a satire on conditioned reflexes.
Science fiction uses imagination plus scientific data and theories, presents fictional
possibilities of the past and the future. A science fiction story is usually set in the future
somewhere in the universe.
-comments on contemporary society
- creates a future possibility, a world different from ours but helps the reader to
visualize the scene, creates excitement and suspense
- has at least one high point and a satisfying conclusion
- addresses current human problems in an unfamiliar setting
- explores a possible future to understand the present better
- flows from one idea to the next
- invents new names for objects and places
- makes use of correct scientific knowledge
- incorporates dialogue to invest characters with depth
- invests story with life
- makes characters realistic through their interaction
- presents equipment and technology not available in our present-day
life
In Harrison Burgeron, we have a frightening society which penalizes talent and
carries equality to an extreme .
Sentiment and Sentimentality. Sentiment connotes a larger intellectual element than
feeling/sensation; refined feeling, sometimes romantic, ossasionally affected; mental attitude;
keen/delicate sensibility; used in good sense. Sentimentality is exaggerated/affected sentiment;
outpouring of emotion unimpeded by thought; suspension of intelligence and
intellectual/ethical judgement.

Setting is -flavour of a locality place/time of action

-social and moral environment; social customs and moral values. Setting may be a
incidental or a source of conflict.

Sincerity. Sincere expression of the emotional state out of which the poem came, the state in
which the poem was written, the linguistic construct shaping the poet’s mind as he writes.
Stanza is a group of lines in a poem forming its basic structural unit. It accords with the
meaning/mood. Some stanza forms are
-terza rima (3 lines)
-quatrain (4)
-rime royal (7, ababbcc)
-octava rima (8, ababbcbcc)
-Spenserian stanza ending with an alexandrine.
Stereotype is
a standardized mental picture
a sweeping generalization
a stock character lacking the complexity of real people
an oversimplified opinion of a group/race
something that conforms to a fixed/general pattern, without individual
distinguishing marks/qualities.
All Italians
Every Pakistani
Absent-minded professor.
Structure, materials, texture.
Structure is an important aspect of content, a means of adding layers of psychological
complexity, the way in which a literary work is put together, arrangement of words and lines to
produce a desired effect, aesthetically active elements of form and content; explicit
argument/statement in a poem. Stanza is a structural unit in poetry; para in prose; chapter in a
novel; act in a play.
Materials are aesthetically indifferent elements of form and content.
Texture is term used by John Crowe Ransom; metrical/phonetic pattern; sequence of images;
verbal connotation.
Both structure and texture invest a poem with ontological status.
Style
Choice of words; flavour/aptness/expressiveness; sound/wit/metaphor rhythm of
sentences; restraint/ebullience; product of all a man is, has thought, how he views
himself/world; habitual way of seeing.
Subjectivity. Expression of personal feeling/experience; concern with inner life; basis of
romanticism/impressionism; in criticism, subjectivity means personal response/taste.
A thought is subjective when it deals with personal reaction; it is objective when it concentrates
on the object.
Suspense is excitement/tension felt by the reader, eagerness to know the outcome of conflict.
Symbol is a person, place, object representing something beyond itself. It communicates
abstract and complex ideas. It is a word/phrase/image used with special reference, any unit of
literary structure that can be isolated for critical attention, a word used as emblem for a fuller
meaning.
Spellings are a part of a writer’s symbolism. Unlike allegory which depends on conceptual
meaning, symbolism depends on evocative meaning. In Frost’s MENDING WALL, the wall
symbolizes barriers impeding understanding; in Hemingway’s THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA,
scarred hands symbolize stigmata referring to Christian idea of cross.
In Blake’s “The Tiger”, tiger symbolizes creative energy; Shelley’s wind symbolizes
inspiration; Ted Hughes’s hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of nature. Here
are more examples_
Says Blake:
The gay fishes on the wave when the moon sucks up the dew.
Says Burns:
The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And time is setting with me, O.
Here the setting of the moon is mysteriously related to setting of Time.Unlike metaphors,
symbols are profoundly moving. Colours, forms and sounds are used by symbolists to evoke
disembodied powers and indefinable emotions. Our waking life perishes from us and it is only
after a struggle that we come to remember it again; meditation becomes a trance.
 In the making and in the understanding of a work of art, we are lured to the threshold of
sleep, the steps of horn or of ivory. Intellectual symbols evoke ideas or ideas mingled with
emotions_ a cross, a crown of thorns.
According to Ezra Pound, the symbolic function of symbols should not obtrude. According
to Arthur Symons, if we look at the moon, we move among things that have shaken off mortality
,the ivory tower, the queen of waters; we can’t give a body to something that moves beyond the
senses unless our words are as subtle and complex, and as full of mysterious life as the body of a
flower/woman; the form of poetry may sometimes be obscure or ungrammatical but its perfection
escapes analysis; its subtleties have a new meaning every day.

While reading, our attention moves in two directions_

i) outward/centrifugal/going from individual words to things they mean.
ii) inward/centripetal, developing from the words a sense of larger verbal pattern. In both cases,
we deal with symbols; verbal symbol CAT is group of black marks on a page representing a
sequence of noises representing an image or memory representing a sense experience
representing an animal uttering meow; when we read the word CAT, we get a representational
flash of the animal; in all literary verbal structures the final direction of meaning is inward.
Crown symbolises ultimate achievement
heart symbolises love
rose symbolises love
pits symbolise worst moments.
The poetic symbol directs/organises some conception of reality;
the creations of French symbolists, the speculations of Freud and Jung and the treatises of
Whitehead, Cassirer and Langer stress the notion of language as a symbolizing force;the
symbolistic outlook attempts to resolve the dichotomy between the real and the ideal.
Symbolism is based on the idea that the world is a forest of symbols and that symbol is
expression of a spiritual state, that the actual is an expression of something underlying.
Symbolism gave rise to imagist and surrealist movements.
According to Charles Feidelson, the allegorist avails himself of formal
correspondence between ideas and things but the symbolist opens an imaginative reality. A
symbol's meaning is continuous in time.
Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is an exposition of symbolic perception, exploring the meaning
of adultery and the meaning of meaning itself. The letter A worn by Hester means the discovery
and absorption of its meaning: she feels the pressure of the surrounding Puritan vision.
However, with the passage of time, she extends the lawlessness of adultery into all her habits of
thought. Hence she reshapes conventional values_
"The world's law was no law for her mind. She assumed freedom of speculation"
In this way, letter A shapes the perceiving mind as well as the objective scene.
In Melville's Moby Dick, Ishmael identifies voyage with vision, making life a quest for
knowledge, fusing the voyaging mind with the worldly flux of wave-like forms, losing identity of
self in a pantheistic sea, making water gazing a search for unity with the object of thought. The
phantom of life is ungraspable and the ocean is annihilative__
"The great flood gates of the wonder world swung open and in the wild conceits that
swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of
the whale, and midmost of them all, one grand hooded phantom like a snowhill in the air"
Ishmael is the voyaging mind, the capacity for vision, the potentiality of symbolic
perception, uncomfortably aware of the irrationality of the fluid sea; the ultimate horror of
whiteness is its in indefiniteness. The inaccessible world swallows up the visionary.
Symbolism contributes to complexity and intensity. A symbol is a word or character or
object or action that stand for something beyond itself. Yeats's swans symbolise everlasting
unchanging life which is denied to the ageing speaker.
Synaesthesia is description of sounds in terms of colour, description of colours in terms of
feeling, intermingling of sensations. Popular in 18th and 19th centuries
Red wail
Hot pink
Taste is the faculty of perceiving/enjoying the excellent in literature/art/life; a means of making
aesthetic judgements and stating subject-object relationship.
Tone may be aggressive, angry, bitter, detached, fierce, hectoring, humorous, innocent,
intimate, ironic, playful, serious,sly; it is the writer's emotional and intellectual attitude toward
i ) a person_belligerent, condescending, friendly, respectful
ii ) himself_cocksure, humble
iii ) subject/theme_earnest, sarcastic

It is manner and poise of a literary text, a substitute for writer's face/voice.; it is different from
mood which is a reader's response__eerie/tense.
Lamb has a regretful tone in the following lines__
I have had playmates, I have had companions
In my childhood days, in my joyful school days
 All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
Tone is
- casual detachment or indifference
- fererish commitment or feelings of intensity
- awe, bitterness, depression, effusiveness, frivolity, humour,
optimism, pessimism, restraint.

Value. Aesthetic value means style/composition. Perceptual value means intellectual content.

Vorticism. Originated 1914; stress on precise classic style; rejection of diffuse romanticism; T S
Eliot's Apeneck Sweeney poems, Ezra Pound's Mauberley poems.
University wits. Oxford and Cambridgescholars who came to London in 16th century and
developed Elizabethan literature; these included Marlowe, Lodge, Robert Greene, Lyly, George
Peele and Thomas Kyd who never studied at University.

Some Poetical Genres

Here are some poetical genres_

ACROSTIC
Poem in which letters of successive lines form a word or pattern; in cross acrostic, pattern
is formed by first letter of first line, second letter of second line, third letter of third line etc
Cf.George Herbert's THE ALTAR; Dylan Thomas's VISION AND PRAYER; Irshad-ul-Hasan's
ACROSTIC.

BALLAD
A narrative song pertaining to folklore with stylized description; intended to be sung;
background of myth, ghosts, fairies; stories derived from folklore, romances, chronicles; ironic
acceptance of tragedy.
BALLADE
Drawing room poetry, difficult verse form; 3 stanzas (of 8 or 10 lines, each rhyming
ababbabc) followed by an envoi (4 or 5 lines bcbc); the same line concludes each stanza and the
envoi. Cf.Chaucer's LACK OF STEADFASTNESS; Chesterton's A BALLADE OF SUICIDE;
Michael Scot's BALLADE OF THE CATS OF BYGONE TIME.
CANZONE is a long song with irregular stanza/rhyme-scheme:
 The rainbow comes and goes a
And lovely is the rose; a
The moon doth with delight b
Look round her when the heavens are bare; c
Waters on a starry night b
Are beautiful and fair; c
The sunshine is a glorious birth; d
But yet I know, whereever I go, e
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. d
CHANT ROYAL
Five 11-line stanzas with 8-line envoi;
ababccddsdEddedE
DOGGEREL
Crude humorous verse. Samuel Butler's HUDIBRAS is doggerel epic.
Dramatic Monologue.
DREAM ALLEGORY
Flourished during Middle Ages; Langland's PIERS PLOWMAN; Chauser's THE HOUSE
OF FAME; THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS; THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS.
ECLOGUE
ELEGY
Lament proceeding from expression of grief through philosophical implications to
affirmation of belief leading to consolation. Originally, it was a flute song without any lament, a
poem in distichs;the pentameter consisted of two hemiepes (-vv-vv-) joined by diacresis or word-
end; the elegiac metre was a variation on the heroic hexameter and consisted of an unrhymed
couplet, the first line being a dactylic hexameter and the second a dactylic pentameter; it was sung
to flute unlike lyrics sung to lyre.
Barly Greel elegies were flute songs dealing with wars, political feuds, manners and morals,
laws and principles, love and conviviality, festive pleasure as well as lamentation for the dead;
Callinus the first elegist and Tyrtaeus of Sparta deal with military exhortation; Solon deals with
patriotic themes; Mimnermus, Archilochus and Theognis wrote amatory elegies. The elegiac
measure has been used by Watson in HYMN TO THE SEA. In late 6th c.,elegiac metre was used
for mythological love stories while in the Alexandrian period, narrative elegy became a favourute
genre; Callimachus wrote etiological elegies; later on elegiac metre was used by Petronius for
epigrams.
 The word ELEGY is derived from ELEGEION/ELEGOS meaning lament; elegy is brief lyric
of mourning/bereavement, pervaded by melancholy tone. Euripides’s ANDROMACHE is the
earliest dirge; Theocritus introduced pastoral elegy; Moschus lamentsd Bion’s death; Spenser
laments Philip Sidney’s death in the Battle of Zutphen in 1586 in pastoral elegy ASTROPHEL.
Latin elegy reached its zenith in the love poems of Tibullus and Propertius; Gallus
contributed to the development of erotic elegy ;Ovid used elegiac metre for mock didactic poems
and fictitious epistles from mythological heroines to absent lovers. It was Horace who associated
elegiac metre with dirges.
Milton’s LYCIDAS, Shelley’s ADONAIS, Arnold’s THYRSIS, Tennyson’s IN MEMORIAM,
,Gray’s ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, Johnson’s VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES, Walt
Whitman’s WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED. There is elegiac strain in
MOTHER HUBERD’S TALE, THE FATE OF THE BUTTERFLY (mock-heroicfable),THE RUINS
OF TIME (lamentation over ruins of Verulam) , TEARS OF THE MUSES (denunciation of a
degenerate era).
Critical elegy is exemplified by William Watson’s WORDSWORTH’S GRAVE and Matthew
Arnold’s HEINE’S GRAVE, TWO OBERMANN POEMS and MEMORIAL VERSES.
Speculative elegy is exemplified by Shelley’s ADNAIS and Browning’s LA SAISIAZ. Encomiastic
elegy is exemplified by LYCIDAS, and THYRSIS, Arnold’s RUGBY CHAPEL, Ben Jonson’s TO
THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED SHAKESPEARE and Whittier’s IN REMEMBRANCE OF
JOSEPH STURGE.
Communal elegy is exemplified by BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS lamenting the fall of a city in five
poems; reflective elegy is represented by ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD in
thirty-two stanzas.
David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan is Hebrew elegy ; Robert Bridges’s ELEGY ON A
LADY WHOM GRIEF FOR THE DEATH OF HER BELOVED KILLED is in prosaic form;
Wordsworth’s LUCY is too brief while Tennyson’s elegy on Hallam is too long . William Bryant’s
THANATOPSIS is a generalized elegy.

EPIC Poem on a grand scale about heroic exploits; historical/legendary epic is exemplified by
Homer’s THE ILIAD and THE ODYSSEY in 24 books each; 12thc.anonymous French epic
CHANSON DE ROLAND; Tasso’s epic of crusades GIERUSALEMME LIBERATA; Spanish epic
EL CID about resistance against Moors; Camoen’s national epic of Portugal entitled THE
LUSIADS; anonymous Anglo-Saxon epic BEOWULF; Longfellow’s HIAWATHA dealing with
original inhabitants of America; Thomas Malory’s prose epic MORTE D’ ARTHUR.
Literary epic is exemplified by Virgil’s AENEID in 12 books; Ariosto’s ORLANDO
FURIOSO; Spenser’s FAERIE QUEENE about allegorized ideal of Elizabethan gentlemen.
Religious epic is exemplified by THE DIVINE COMEDY; PARADISE REGAINED.
Semi-epic: Chaucer’s TROILUS AND CRISEYDE
Mock-epic:RAPE OF THE LOCK
Beast epic: Chaucer’s NUN’S PRIEST ‘ S TALE, Spenser’s
 MOTHER HUBBERD’s TALE
Doggerel epic: HUDIBRAS.
EPIGRAM
Short witty crisply written, often satirical,poem from 2 to 6 lines; used by Martial in first
century, Jonson and Herrick Modern epigrams are short witty statements.
EPISTLE i) Verse letter; used by Pope, Dr.Johnson, Burns, Byron
ii) Prefatory dedication current during 17th and 18th cc.
FABLIAU
Medieval short verse tale, comic and ribald; THE MILLER’S TALE.
IDYLL
Pastoral lyric; Marlowe’s THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE; Wordsworth’s
THE SOLITARY REAPER; Tennyson’s IDYLLS OF THE KING.
LAMPOON
Satirical character sketch current in 17th and 18th cc.
LIMERICK
Short humorous poem of 5 lines; with second and fifth lines having three anapaestic
beats while third and fourth have two; rhyme-scheme aabba; popularized in 1846 by Edward
Lear’s BOOK OF NONSENSE.
LYRIC
Originally in Greece, a poem sung to the accompainiment of a lyre; short poem expressing
emotion without fixed form, expressing a single thought, mood or feeling, exploring individual
sensibility; developed from 15thc carol which was secular/half-folkloric as well as religious/half-
clerical.
Anglo-Saxon period is without lyrics. Secular lyrics of Middle English are in the form of
casually preserved scraps. Lyric developed from seasonal celebrations, communal work songs and
recreational folk songs; its movement from folk art to professional craftsmanship resulted in
sophistication of technique; there is shift from woman’s view in folk love poetry to man’s view in
later love lyrics.
13thc. established lyrical tradition. SONG OF LEWES is a political lyric accusing Earl
accusing Earl of Cornwall of misleading the prince; Lurence Minot’s 14thc. lyrics celebrate English
victories over Scots and Frenchmen; medieval-lyrics were influenced by Latin hymns and ranged
from the moral to the devotional/mystical; Corpus Christipoem found in a 16thc. MS is essentially
a folk song with central symbolism deriving from Grail legend but possessing overtones of
meaning.
Lyric includes elegy, hymn, ode, sonnet. It is a short personal poem dealing with feelings
and thoughts of an individual speaker, not necessarily the poet himself. Typical subject-matter of
a lyric is love of mistress. Most people’s idea of poetry is lyrical although it can be didactic,
narrative, satiric.

MADRIGAL
Song for several voices; around close of 17thc. ; used by Thomas Morley, Thomas
Weelkes, John Wilbye.

METRICAL ROMANCE
Story of adventure in verse; Chaucer’s KNIGHT’S TALE; Scott’s THE LADY OF THE
LAKE; Byron’s THE CORSAIR * AND THE GIOUR

EPIC NARRATIVE
Chaucer’s THE PRIORESS TALE and THE CLERK’s TALE; shakespeare’s VENUS
AND ADONIS and THE RAPE OF LUCRECE; Sackville’s INDUCTION TO THE MIRROR FOR
MAGISTRATES; Tennyson’s THE IDYLIS OF THE KING; Arnold’s SOHRAB AND RUSTUM;
Masefield’s THE EVERLASTING MERCY DAUBER ; Cecil Day Lewis’s NABARA.

SIMPLE NARRATIVE
Unvarnished tale; Wordsworth’s MICHAEL and THE IDIOT BOY; Coleridge’s
RIME OF ANCIENT MARINER; Cowper’s JOHN GILPIN; Houseman’s HELL GATE.

NURSERY RHYMES.
OCCASIONAL VERSE
In commemoration of an event; Milton’s ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN
PIEDMONT; Marvel’s CROMWELL’S RETURN FROM IRELAND; Hopkins’s THE WRECK OF
THE DEUTSCHLAND; Yeats’s EASTER 1916

Ode has intricate stanza form, dignified style and serious purpose.
 Originally choral lyric in Greek tragedy; fairly long and stately poem written on some
public occasion or expressing aspiration or addressed to a person, thing, personification; almost
any poem of substantial length and elevated tone from 50 to 200 lines; 4 types_
1) Pindaric /choric ode is tripartite-strophe, antistrophe, epode; too
complex for general use; strophe is sung by chorus moving
in one direction, antistrophe is sung by chorus moving
in other direction and epode is sung by chorus standing
still; Cowley’s Pindaric Ode about William Hervey; Ben Jonson’s ODE TO CAREY
AND MORRISON; Thomas Gray’s PROGRESS OF POESY

ii) Horatian/ stanzaic ode consists of regular stanzas/series of strophes;Marvell's

CROMWELL'S RETURN FROM IRELAND;Keats's ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.
iii) Cowleyan ode/romantic ode ; stanzas are irregular in line-length and rhyme-scheme;
Dryden's SONG FOR ST.CECILIA'S DAY; Coleridge's DEJECTION;Wordsworth's
INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY.
iv) Funeral ode; Tennyson's ODE ON THE DEATH OF DUKE OF WELLINGTON; LYCIDAS;
Gray’s elegy.
Mention may also be made of the following odes:
Spenser's EPITHALAMION; Marcel's HORATIAN ODE; Gray's THE BARD; On the Death of
a Favourite Cat; Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.
Coleridge's DEJECTION; Wordsworth's ODE TO DUTY; Mrs.Hunter's ODE TO AN
EXPIRING FROG in Dicken's PICKWICK PAPERS;Milton's NATIVITY ODE; Thomas Hood's
ODE ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF CLAPHAM ACADEMY; Shellet's HYMN TO
INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY; Cecil Day Lewis's ODE TO FEAR. Keats's odes have 10-line
stanzas of iambic pentameter i.e. 10 weak-strong beats.
Palinode is a poem recanting statement in a previous poem; Chaucer's The Legend of Good
Women atones for earlier story of Cressida's infidelity.
Pasquinade is lampoon posted in a public place
PARODY
Unflattering imitation/ exaggeration based on change of context; Byron's DON JUAN is
self-parody while THE VISION OF JUDGEMENT is Southey's parody; Cecil day Lewis
paradoies Marlowe in COME LIVE WITH ME; Shelley parodies Wordsworth's PETER BELL;
Buckingham parodies Dryden in THE REHEARSAL; Andrew Lang parodies Rosetti in OH,
NO, WE NEVER MENTION HER NAME; Auden parodies Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse in
AGE OF ANXIETY and T.S. Eliot in FOR THE TIME BEING; Eliot parodies modern love,
PROTHALAMION and WHEN LOVELY WOMAN STOOPS TO FOLLY in THE WASTE
LAND; his lines-
Still is the unspoken word, the word unheard,
 The word without a word, the word within
The world and for the world (ASH WEDNESDAY)
have been parodied as -
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind.
Eliot's CHARD WHITLOW is a self parody -
As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am 55,
And this time last year I was 54,
And this time next year I shall be 62:
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again- if you can call it time;
Fidgeting uneasily under the draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded tube.
Cf.Coleridge's THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT ; Swinburne's NEPHELIDIA;
Irshad-ul-Hasan's CRITICISM IN CRISIS.
PROSE POEM
QUATORZAIN
Poem of 14 lines not in sonnet form
RONDEAU
13-line poem in three sections; 2nd and 3rd sections end with unrhymed refrain/1 st half
of opening line; rhyme-scheme aabba aab R aabbaR.
ROUNDEAU REDOUBLE consists of 6 quatrains on two rhymes, each line of 1 st quatrain
recurring as final line of 4 succeeding quatrains and last quatrain followed by refrain/1 st half
of opening line.
ROUNDEL 3 stanzas of 3 lines each on 2 rhymes; 1st and 3rd stanzas are followed by
refrain/1st part of 1st line; rhyme-scheme abaR bab abaR; Swinburne describes it as follows_
A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere,
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A roundel is wrought.
Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught-
Love, laughter, or mourning-remembrance of rapture or fear-
 That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.
As a bird’s quick song runs round , and the hearts in us hear
Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught,
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
A roundel is wrought.
ROUNDELAY Short song with a refrain.
Sonnet is specialized lyric with 14 pentameters; 3 rhymed quatrains followed by a rhymed
couplet-
abab cdcd efef gg
This is Shakespearean.
Or octet followed by sestet-
abba abba cde/ecd cde/ecd
This is Petrarchan. It was used by Milton. In 16th century the favourite theme was love; in
17th century, it was politics; in 19th century, it had different subjects and themes.
The sonnet has tightness of argument and depth of emotional range; the conclusion either
arises out of the rest of the poem or is artificial like a tag.
CROWN OF SONNETS Poem of 7 interlinked sonnets; final line of each stanza forming
first line of next; first line of opening sonnet forming last line of final sonnet; Donne’s LA
CORONA.
CURTAL SONNET Invented by G.M.Hopkins; sonnet of ten lines and a half; 6-line stanza
followed by 4-line stanza and a half-line tail-piece
TRIOLET Used by English Parnassians in late 19thc. ; 8-line playful poem of 2 rhymes;
1st rhyme occurs 3 times in lines 1,4,7; 2nd rhyme occurs twice in lines 2,8; rhyme-scheme
abaaabab; Robert Bridges’s ALL WOMEN BORN
ARE SO PERVERSE.
VERSE ESSAY Thoughtful poem which is neither a story nor vehicle of personal emotion;
Pope’s THE DUNCIAD; Dryden’s ABSALOM AND ACHITOPHEL; Byron’s ENGLISH
BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS, HINTS FROM HORACE and THE AGE OF BRONZE;
Herbert’s THE CHURCH PORCH; Louis MacNeice’s AUTUMN JOURNAL; Roy Campbell’s
THE GEORGIAD
VILLANELLE Used by Andrew Lang and W.E.Henley; 5 tercets followed by a quatrain
having 2 rhymes of 1st and 3rdlines;1 rhyme occurs in middle of each tercet and 2nd line of
quatrain; opening line is repeated at the end of 2nd and 4thtercets while the 3rd line (last line
of first tercet) is repeated at the end of 3rd and 5th tercets; quatrain ends with 1st and 3rdlines;
rhyme-scheme
a 1 b a2a b a1 aba2………aba1 a2__
 A dainty thing’s the villanelle
Sly, musical, a jewel in rhyme,
It serves its purpose passing well.

A double-clappered silver bell,

That must be made to clink in chime,
A dainty thing’s the villanelle;

And if you wish to flute a spell,

Or ask a meeting ‘neath the lime,
It serves its purpose passing well.

You must not ask of it the swell

Of organs grandiose and sublime-
A dainty thing’s the villanelle;

And, filled with sweetness, as a shell

Is filled with sound, and launched in time,
It serves its purpose passing well.

Still fair to see and good to smell

As in the quaintness of its prime,
A dainty thing’s the villanelle,
It serves its purpose passing well.

Cf.Austin Dobson’s WHEN I SAW YOU LAST.

VIRELAY Short lyric with 2 rhymes in each stanza, end-rhyme of one stanza being chief
rhyme of the next; short lines of one stanza provide rhyme for long lines of the next.