Literary Criticism, Pr. Rakii

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- English Studies
-Parcours 1: Literary and cultural Studies
-Subject: Literary Criticism
- Semester: 6
- Module: 35
- Professor : Mohamed Rakii
Sultan Moulay Slimane University
Faculty of Arts and humanities
Department of English Studies
Subject : Literary criticism
Semester 6
Academic Year : 2020-2021
Professor: Mohamed Rakii
Course Syllabus
(3 Face-to-Face Lectures + 8 Distance Learning Courses)

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Face-to-Face Lectures
Face-to-Face Lecture 1
1. Greeks: criticism in the 5th century
A. Plato (427-347)
a. forms
b. poets
B. Aristotle (488-322 BC)
a. Poetics
b. Art as mimesis
2. Renaissance Criticism
a. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
An apology for poetry (1595)
3. New Classical Age
Alexander pope (1688-1744)

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Essay on criticism
Distance Learning Courses:
4. The Romantic Age
William Blake (1757 – 1827)
a. Tyger.
b. Visual artistry.
A. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)
a. Kubla Khan: the romantic aura.
b. Vision and imagination.
B. John Keats (1795 - 1821)
a. Ode on a Grecian Urn
b. Natural imagery
5. New Criticism
a. Wayne C. Booth.. “The language of Paradox.”
b. Empson’s. “Seven Types of Ambiguity.”
REQUIRED TEXTS
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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton University Press, 1957.
Wordsworth, William. Preface of the Lyrical Ballads. eface of the Lyrical Ballads
 READING and WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
Required reading for this week
Preface of the Lyrical Ballads
Link: https://faculty.csbsju.edu/dbeach/beautytruth/Wordsworth-PrefaceLB.pdf
Distance Learning WEEK1
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Subject: Literary Criticism
Semester: 6
Professor: M. Rakii
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ALALYSIS OF ROMANTIC POETRY
Required reading:
The introduction Harold Bloomed,ed.English Romantic poetry, from p. 1 to p. 23
Harold Bloomed,Ed.English Romantic poetry. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2004.
Guideline: your reading of the introduction of Bloom’s English Romantic poetryhas to be
focussed. Organize your quotations in the following way. This will help you understand the
critical analysis of romantic poetry.
This is an example:
“Freud, in an essay written sixty years ago on the relation of the poet to daydreaming, made
the surmise that all aesthetic pleasure is forepleasure, an “incitement premium” or narcissistic
fantasy. The deepest satisfactions of literature, in this view, come from a release of tensions in
the psyche.”English Romantic poetry, p.1
“The deepest satisfactions of reading Blake or Wordsworth come from the realization of new
ranges of tensions in the mind, but Blake and Wordsworth both believed, in different ways,
that the pleasures of poetry were only forepleasures, in the sense that poems, finally, were
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scaffoldings for a more imaginative vision, and not ends in themselves.”English Romantic
poetry, p.1
“Blake’s is apocalyptic,Freud’s is naturalistic, and Wordsworth’s is—sometimes sublimely,
sometimes uneasily—blended of elements that dominate in the other two.”English Romantic
poetry, p. 1
“Freud thought that even romance, with its elements of play, probably commenced in some
actual experience whose “strong impression on the writer had stirred up a memory of an
earlier experience, generally, belonging to childhood, which then arouses a wish that finds a
fulfillment in the work in question, and in which elements of the recent event and the old
memory should be discernible.” p. 2
“English Romantics after him. pBlake and Coleridge do not set intellect and passion against
one another, any more than they arrive at the Freudian simplicity of the endless conflict
between Eros and Thanatos.”p. 3
“What allies Blake and Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, is their strong mutual conviction that
they are reviving the true English tradition of poetry, which they thought had vanished after
the death of Milton, and had reappeared in diminished form, mostly after the death of Pope, in
admirable but doomed poets like Chatterton, Cowper, and Collins, victims of circumstance
and of the false dawn of Sensibility.” p. 3

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“The pains of psychic maturation become, for Shelley, the potentially saving though usually
destructive crisis in which the imagination confronts its choice of either sustaining its own
integrity, or yielding to the illusive beauty of nature.” pp. 3-4
Analysis of Romantic Poetry
The Tyger
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
TygerTyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

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And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!
When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
TygerTyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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Assignment:
1. Why is the poet confused by the creation of the tiger?
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2. A plethora of questions are asked throughout the poem. However, confusing question marks
suffuse the second Stanza. Drawing on the concept of paradox, how can these questions hold
within their folds possible answers?
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3. Bloom points out in his introduction that “the deepest satisfactions of reading Blake or
Wordsworth come from the realization of new ranges of tensions in the mind, but Blake and
Wordsworth both believed, in different ways, that the pleasures of poetry were only
forepleasures, in the sense that poems, finally, were scaffoldings for a more imaginative vision,
and not ends in themselves.” Does the poem articulate an imaginative vision?
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4. How does Blake use symbolism in setting into contradistinction the Tyger and the lamb?
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This course is made up of:
1. Two required readings
2. An analysis of Willima Blakes’ poem “the Tyger.”
Required reading:
Reference 1:
See extract 1 below:
S. Foster damon. A blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of Willima Blake. Hanover, New
Hampshire Dartmouth College: Press 1965.
Reference 2:
See extract 1 below:
Leo Damrosch. ETERNITY’S SUNRISE The Imaginative World of William Blake New
haven/London: Yale university press, 2015.

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He is the Wrath of the Heart, for his position is East. He is one of a quaternary (MHH 8:14; J
98:43): Lion (north), Tyger (east), Horse (south), and Elephant (west). He is the fallen Luvah,
when Love has turned to Hate; he is Orc (revolution). “Wrath is a fire,” wrote Spenser (FQ
II.iv.35), utilizing a common symbol; and fire in Blake is often associated with the Tyger. But
though at least once he is “burning bright” (SoE, “The Tyger” 1), his flames are largely a
blinding smoke, as in Dante’s Purgatorio xvi. “[Urizen’s] tygers roam in the redounding
smoke in forests of affliction” (FZ vii:9–10; also FZ vii b:111; i:418; ix:361). Orc is “a
Human fire”; yet his flames emit “heat but not light” (Am 4:8–11). When the Wrath breaks
forth, it is Revolution (Eur 15:7; Ahan 3:36; FZ iii:37; v:128; Mil 42:38), consuming with its
flames the forests of the night, and thus is part of the divine scheme. “The tygers of wrath are
wiser than the horses of instruction” (MHH 9:5; cf. FZ ii:35; vii:6, 9). But “the wild furies
from the tyger’s brain” (FZ ix:236) cannot perceive the Human because he is blinded by the
redounding smoke (FZ vii:9; vii b:111). “The Tyger fierce laughs at the Human form” (FZ
i:402). He is “dishumaniz’d” (FZ vi:116). In battle, “the monsters of the Elements, Lions or
Tygers or Wolves . . . terrific men they seem to one another, laughing terrible among the
banners. And when, the revolution of their day of battles over, relapsing in dire torment they
return to forms of woe” (FZ viii:120). But in Eternity the beasts all “Humanize in the
Forgiveness of Sins” (J 98:44). Even as Rintrah (north) and Palamabron (east) constantly
work together, so do the Lion (north) and the Tyger (east) (FZ iii:37; v:128; vi:116; vii:9; vii
b:111; viii:120, 445; ix:39, 236, 301; Mil 42:38; J 63:34; 98:43). See LION. “The Tyger”
(SoE) is probably Blake’s best-known poem. Charles Lamb called it “glorious” (To Bernard
Barton, 15 May 1824). It was written about 1793, when just across the Channel the French
Revolution was consuming those “forests of the night,” Church and State. In the Songs of
Innocence and Experience, it counterbalances “The Lamb.” The Lamb symbolizes the Loving
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God; the Tyger, the Angry God. “God out of Christ is a consuming fire” (see HERVEY). The
poem describes the forging of the Tyger, which is glimpsed, as it were, in sudden flashes
through the chaos; meanwhile Blake iterates the question “who”—or rather, “what”—is the
creator. At last, when the Tyger’s form is completed, the stars throw down their spears in
terror and water heaven with their pitying tears; then Blake reaches his climax in the question
“Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Blake knew the answer, but he wanted to force his
reader to find that answer himself. The whole poem is an extended query. Could the all-loving
Father be responsible for these horrors without Mercy or even Justice? Of course not. The
Tyger is not the contrary of the Lamb but its negation. As Kathleen Raine has demonstrated
(“Who Made the Tyger?” Encounter, June 1954), the Tyger was created by Urizen. The event
took place at the very first Fiat of Creation, and was the result of Urizen’s primal
disobedience. Urizen, “first born of Generation” (FZ vii:245), “heard the mild & holy voice
saying, ‘O light, spring up & shine’ [Gen i:3], & I sprang up from the deep. . . . [He] said, ‘Go
forth & guide my Son [Albion] who wanders on the ocean.’ I went not forth: I hid myself in
black clouds of my wrath; I call’d the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark; the
stars threw down their spears & fled naked away” (FZ v:218–24). Thus Wrath came into
being. It is Urizen’s, not the benign Creator’s. Urizen’s satanic Pride was affronted when he
was appointed to serve Man. That his Wrath was the creation of the Tyger is confirmed by the
action of Urizen’s stars, who fling down their spears in terror. It was a crucial event for the
whole universe. “The moon shot forth in that dread night when Urizen call’d the stars round
his feet; then burst the center from its orb, and found a place beneath; and Earth, conglob’d in
narrow room, roll’d round its sulphur Sun” (Am b:4). Urizen is not invariably the creator of
the Tyger. Theotormon and Sotha “create the Lion & Tyger in compassionate thunderings” to
frighten the unbodied Spectres into human lineaments (Mil 28:27). The Four Sons of Los, in
war time, “Create the lion & wolf, the bear, the tyger & ounce” (J 73:17). Blake was
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dissatisfied with line 12, “What dread hand? & what dread feet?” In one copy of the Songs of
Experience (watermarked 1802) he altered it to “What dread hand Formd thy dread feet?” In
1806, Benjamin Malkin, who obviously got his material from Blake himself, printed a still
better version: “What dread hand forged thy dread feet?” (Malkin xxxix). The TYNE is a
river in northern England, which opens into an important harbor. “Tweed & Tyne anxious
give up their Souls for Albion’s sake” (J 16:17). There is also a smaller river with the same
name in Scotland.
Reference 1
S. Foster damon. A blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of Willima Blake. Hanover, New
Hampshire Dartmouth College: Press 1965.
WILLIAM BLAKE was a creative genius, one of the most original artists and poets who ever
lived. Some of his works are widely known: the image of a majestic creator tracing the orb of
the sun with a pair of compasses; the hypnotically powerful lyric “Tyger tyger burning
bright”; the poem known as Jerusalem that was later set to music and became a popular hymn.
But many years had to pass after Blake’s death before he had any reputation at all. His poems
were virtually unknown in his lifetime, and even as a visual artist he was considered a minor
figure, known mainly for engraving designs—usually by other artists—to illustrate books.
These jobs dwindled as the years went by, and his contemporaries would have been
incredulous if they could have known that one day he would be recognized as a major figure
in not just one art but two, and that the greatest museums and libraries would treasure works
that he sold for absurdly low prices when he could sell them at all. The disappointments of
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Blake’s worldly career illustrate Schopenhauer’s saying that talent hits a target no one else
can hit, while genius hits a target no one else can see.
Blake was not only a superb painter and poet, one of the very few equally distinguished in
both arts, but a profound thinker as well. Trenchantly critical of received values, he was a
counterculture prophet whose art still challenges us to think afresh about almost every aspect
of experience—social, political, philosophical, religious, erotic, and aesthetic. As he
developed his ideas, he evolved a complex personal mythology that incorporated elements of
Christian belief and drew upon many other strands of symbolism as well. The resulting myth
can seem daunting in its complexity, and Blake specialists, focusing on its more esoteric
aspects, have naturally tended to talk mainly to one another. This book draws constantly on
their insights but is intended for everyone who is attracted to Blake and would like to know
more about his art and ideas. It is not just a book about Blake but a book with Blake, who
urges us again and again to open our imaginations to “thunder of thought, and flames of fierce
desire.” It is important to recognize that Blake was a troubled spirit, subject to deep psychic
stresses, with what we would now call paranoid and schizoid tendencies that were sometimes
overwhelming. During his life he was often accused of madness, but the artist Samuel Palmer,
who knew him well, remembered him as “one of the sanest, if not the most thoroughly sane
man I have ever known.” And a Baptist minister replied, when asked if he thought Blake was
cracked, “Yes, but his is a crack that lets in the light.” Throughout his life Blake was bitterly
aware that he was an outsider, not just with respect to society as a whole, but even in his
chosen profession of graphic art. It was from a wounding sense of alienation and dividedness
that his great myth emerged, in response to what Algernon Charles Swinburne called “the
incredible fever of spirit, under the sting and stress of which he thought and labored all his life
through.” In some sense we are all outsiders, and his imaginative words and pictures speak to
us with undiminished power. Although Blake is never pious or doctrinal, his thinking is
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religious in the sense that it addresses the fundamental dilemmas of human existence—our
place in the universe, our dread of mortality, our yearning for some ultimate source of
meaning. His goal, he said, was to “rouse the faculties to act,” and he hoped that we would
use his images and symbols to provoke a spiritual breakthrough. “If the spectator could enter
into these images in his imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot of his
contemplative thought; if he could enter into Noah’s rainbow or into his bosom, or could
make a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder which always entreats him to
leave mortal things, as he must know; then would he arise from his grave, then would he meet
the Lord in the air, and then he would be happy.” The aspiration is both ambitious and
touching: to change our lives and to make us happy. But it is a poignant fact that Blake’s most
powerful writing, as the years went by, was haunted by intractable barriers to happiness. A
little poem that Blake never published, entitled Eternity, condenses an important part of his
message into four eloquent lines: He who binds to himself a joy Does the wingèd life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in Eternity’s sunrise. Blake believed that we live in
the midst of Eternity right here and now and that if we could open our consciousness to the
fullness of being, it would be like experiencing a sunrise that never ends. That would not be a
mystical escape from reality—he was never a mystic in that sense—but a fuller and deeper
engagement with reality. Yet he also knew how hard it is to relinquish the self-centered
possessiveness that kills joy instead of kissing it, and much of his work focuses on that
struggle. This book has a strongly biographical focus, but it is not a systematic biography.
Two excellent ones already exist, by Peter Ackroyd and G. E. Bentley, each with its own
strengths, and in any case Blake’s life was relatively uneventful. Nor is it a comprehensive
guide to Blake’s work. Rather, it is an invitation to understanding and enjoyment. Its goal is to
help nonspecialists appreciate Blake’s profoundly original vision and to open “the doors of
perception” to the symbols in which he conveyed it. In the words of Plotinus, one of his
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favorite philosophers, “There are parts of what it most concerns you to know which I cannot
describe to you; you must come with me and see for yourselves. The vision is for him who
will see it.”
Blake made pictures and paintings that stand alone, with no text at all. Sometimes these
illustrated other people’s work, though he tended to insinuate implications of his own, and
sometimes they were original works that he hoped to sell. One commentator rightly says that
all of his pictures are “riddled with ideas” and need to be “read” just as much as his texts do.
In addition to these stand-alone pictures, Blake created an extraordinary series of books in
which images and texts are embedded in each other, etched on copper plates and hand-colored
after printing. Following a hint of his own, these are known as the illuminated books, on the
analogy of medieval illuminated manuscripts. It is certainly not wrong to read poems like The
Tyger in conventionally printed form, but they will always be richer and more thought-
provoking in the format Blake intended. The publisher of this book has permitted a generous
representation of Blake’s visual art, but if it were not prohibitively expensive, every plate of
his illuminated books would deserve to be seen as he intended, in graphic format and in color.
Fortunately, admirable facsimiles are readily available. The William Blake Trust, in
collaboration with Princeton University Press, has issued six splendid volumes that reproduce
copies of all of the illuminated books, together with excellent commentaries. And multiple
copies of most of the books may be seen online at the superb Blake Archive website,
blakearchive.org. This resource is maintained to the highest scholarly standard and at the
same time is accessible and welcoming to everyone who loves Blake. Thanks to this archive,
we are able to do something that Blake himself never could. Unless he borrowed back copies
of his works from friends and patrons with whom he remained in touch, there was no way he
could ponder choices he had made long before: for example, looking at a 1789 printing of
Songs of Innocence before coloring a new version in 1818. But with the archive, it is a simple
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matter to use a “compare” feature to see multiple versions of a given plate. As for the dates of
the various copies, those have been convincingly established by one of the archive editors,
Joseph Viscomi, in his indispensable Blake and the Idea of the Book. No matter how
scrupulously prepared, even the best reproductions cannot capture the full effect of the
originals, with their nuances of coloring, thickness and texture of paper, and width of margins.
In early copies of the illuminated books, Blake (sometimes assisted by his wife, Catherine)
used pale watercolor washes. These have a delicate glow, and as the printmaker and scholar
Michael Phillips observes, “A transparent pigment on white paper will assume its hue more
from the color of the light transmitted through it, reflecting off the white paper and back to the
eye, than from the light reflected off of it.” Conversely, Blake’s later works were richly
colored with dense, opaque paint, with a view to selling them as expensive art objects. These
can sometimes appear garish in reproduction, while certain effects, such as the use of gold
leaf highlights, don’t come through at all. The Blake Archive editors have given scrupulous
attention to color correction, but in website reproduction there is another problem: backlit
images on a computer monitor glow like stained glass windows. For all we know Blake might
have loved that effect, but it is very different from the original. Tristanne Connolly compares
looking at a reproduction to reading a translation— “like kissing through a handkerchief.” A
Note on Texts Blake’s spelling and punctuation were eccentric. For the purposes of this book,
nothing is gained by preserving “recieve” and “opressors” and “rabbet” (for “rabbit”), though
some spellings, such as “tyger,” have become too familiar to alter. Likewise, Blake’s
extensive use of capital letters is generally not followed here, except in instances like “Man”
and “Eternity” where the context seems to call for capitalization. Punctuation is also a
problem. David Erdman, whose edition has been standard for many years and includes
valuable commentary by Harold Bloom, sought to reproduce every idiosyncratic mark in the
originals, although the result often gets in the way of understanding the meaning.
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Commentators used to make much of the supposed significance of periods where commas
might be expected, but careful study of multiple copies shows that often the difference was
nothing more than an accidental result of the printing process, in which a comma could easily
lose its tail. Surely the editor is right who concludes that Blake “was relatively indifferent
about punctuation.” So I have not hesitated to alter punctuation in places where it clearly
confuses the sense, often adding it in Blake’s headlong prose, and I have also eliminated his 6
Introduction customary ampersands in place of “and.” It is possible that he preferred them
simply to save space in a congested line, and they do create unnecessary oddity in such
expressions as “every pot & vessel & garment & utensil.” Occasionally, in fact, he did write
out “and.” Also, he seldom used quotation marks, and arguably he sometimes wanted
different voices to merge into each other, but I have added them when it seems clear who is
speaking. In this I generally follow G. E. Bentley’s choices in his edition of William Blake’s
Writings.
[…] Blake may seem to be using a language that has only one speaker. But it is important to
recognize that his imagination was fundamentally visual and that by learning to “read” the
images that accompany his words, we can gain access to the heart of his vision. And vision it
literally was. Blake continued to see actual visions throughout his life and to draw inspiration
from them. They were not hallucinations—he understood that other people couldn’t see them
when he did—but he definitely perceived them as vividly as if they were physically present.
This phenomenon is known as eidetic vision, thought to be common in children and often
persisting in artistic adults. It generally entails the mental revival of images that were once
actually seen, and many images in Blake’s art, though he thought of them as visionary, can
indeed be traced to prints and paintings with which he was familiar. They share the aesthetic
code of romantic classicism: feelings are personified in human form, either naked or clothed
in diaphanous garments through which the body is clearly visible, and they stand out from a
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loosely sketched background that suggests timelessness. As in medieval art, which always
interested Blake, these figures may differ greatly in size, reflecting their symbolic significance
rather than any naturalistic scale. Whatever the source of his visions, Blake was convinced
that he was not re-cycling ordinary sense impressions—which is how eighteenth-century
psychology understood “imagination”—but perceiving reality with exceptional fullness and
depth. In the catalog for the failed exhibition of his paintings he declared, “A spirit and a
vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing. They are
organized and minutely articulated beyond all that mortal and perishing nature can produce.
He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light
than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.” Elsewhere he said, borrowing
a thought from Plato, “I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would
question a window concerning a sight; I look through it and not with it.” A quarrel with a
dissatisfied customer provoked from Blake a clear statement about visionary art. A very
conventional clergyman named John Trusler, author of a work entitled The Way to Be Rich
and Respectable, commissioned a drawing entitled Malevolence, which if satisfactory would
be followed by Benevolence, Pride, and Humility. Trusler seems to have furnished very
specific directions, and when Blake sent him the picture he said that he had tried his best to
show “a father taking leave of his wife and child, [who] is watched by two fiends incarnate,
with intention that when his back is turned they will murder the mother and her infant.” In the
end, however, he had felt “compelled by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led.” Trusler
replied indignantly, “Your fancy, from what I have seen of it . . . seems to be in the other
world or the world of spirits, which accords not with my intentions, which whilst living in this
world, wish to follow the nature of it.” Blake retorted, “I know that this world is a world of
imagination and vision. I see everything I paint in this world, but everybody does not see
alike. To the eyes of a miser, a guinea is more beautiful than the sun, and a bag worn with the
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use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which
moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.”2
Personification Before we explore the symbolic images in Blake’s own work, it will be
helpful to look at some illustrations he made for poems by other writers. It was his custom to
give visual embodiment to metaphors— Yeats called him “a literal realist of the
imagination”—and that was common among artists at the time, following the practice of
eighteenth-century poets to personify abstract ideas. But far more than other artists, Blake
added conceptions of his own in a kind of dialogue with the text, or even a critique of it. At
times his visual images differ so strikingly from their verbal sources that we need to go to his
own symbolic mythology in order to understand them. He considered it entirely appropriate to
import his personal symbols in this way, for he saw them as reflecting the ultimate reality that
we all inhabit. A relatively simple example of personification is a picture illustrating a
passage in Thomas Gray’s Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College , one of a set of
watercolors that Blake made for a friend in 1797–98. Pasting texts from a standard edition of
Gray’s poems onto the middle of each page, he surrounded them with images. In this poem
Gray imagines that he is looking down from Windsor Castle at the famous school from which
he had graduated, yearning for a lost paradise of “careless childhood.” The Thames flows
between Eton and Windsor, and Gray asks the river to describe the schoolboys of the present
day: Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen Full many a sprightly race Disporting on thy
margent green The paths of pleasure trace, Who foremost now delight to cleave With pliant
arm thy glassy wave? The captive linnet which enthrall? What idle progeny succeed To chase
the rolling circle’s speed, Or urge the flying ball?4 Samuel Johnson, who detested poetic
personification, commented sternly, “His supplication to Father Thames, to tell him who
drives the hoop or tosses the ball, is useless and puerile. Father Thames has no better means of
knowing than himself.” But for Blake personification was no mere rhetorical device; it
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expressed his belief that nature is fundamentally human. That is to say, we inhabit a universe
that is pervaded by spirit, altogether different from the soulless machine postulated by
empiricist science and by materialist philosophy. Since our imaginations are human, we find
human meaning and value in the world. And it is thus that nature can move us to tears—or to
intuitions that are even deeper, as Wordsworth said in a poem that Blake admired, Ode:
Intimations of Immortality: Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its
tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do
often lie too deep for tears.
[…]In Blake’s personal symbolism, nature as we ordinarily experience it is a trap or prison,
the scene of an endless cycle of mortality from birth to death. He often depicts nature in this
sense as the Mediterranean Magna Mater with a spiky or battlemented crown, and the
mountain spirit in A Sunshine Holiday does indeed wear such a crown. Far from barren, she is
fertile, but not necessarily in a positive sense. And another mountain, just above the church at
the left, has the form of a pyramid.
WITH Songs of Experience—clearly aimed at adults, not children—we enter an altogether
different imaginative world, one haunted by loneliness, frustration, and cruelty. Sometimes a
poem in the second series corresponds directly to one in the first; there is a Chimney Sweeper
in both sets, and The Tyger makes a direct allusion to The Lamb. For other poems, the
brilliant London for example, there is no corresponding poem in Innocence, whose imagery is
usually rural rather than urban. Songs of Experience has a separate title page of its own that
shows leaves and tendrils sprouting from “songs,” but the stiff block letters of “experience”
might be chiseled on a tombstone, and indeed, two mourners bend over bodies or funerary
effigies that probably belong to their parents. Experience may believe that death is final, but
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Innocence is more hopeful, and the little figures in the air suggest that the spirit does not
perish with the mortal body. That is not to say, though, that Innocence is entirely right. Blake
did believe that the human spirit lives on, but not in the orthodox sense of reanimation in an
otherworldly heaven altogether different from the life we know. In Europe, published in the
same year as Songs of Experience, he contemptuously called that heaven “an allegorical
abode where existence hath never come.”
[…]Unlike the other Romantics, he rarely uses a confessional first-person style. His lyrics
reflect what Susanne Langer calls “impersonal subjectivity,” as in hymns.
[…] The best known, and deservedly so, is The Tyger. Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the
forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what
distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the
hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy
heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? and what dread feet? What the
hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp! When the stars threw down their spears And watered heaven
with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger
Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy
fearful symmetry?
The final stanza is a verbatim reprise of the first—except that contemplating this formidable
being has led the speaker to replace “could frame” with “dare frame.” Alexander Welsh,
noting the similar metrical pattern in “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day,” says that
Blake has managed to combine “the rhythms of innocent nursery rhymes and game-songs and
the rhythms of magical incantation, epiphanic invocation, and prophetic hymn.”

23
The standard poetic meter in English is iambic, stressing every second syllable, as in Milton’s
“I may assert eternal Providence / And justify the ways of God to men.” Throwing the accent
on the first syllable instead of the second, in trochaic meter, accentuates the stresses as Blake
does here. If the phrase “in the forests of the night” appeared in a piece of prose, one would
probably hear just two stresses: “in the fórests of the níght.” But cast into pounding trochees,
there are four powerful stresses in each line: Týger Týger búrning bríght Īn the fórests óf the
níght. . . .
Blake was an exacting reviser. Multiple drafts of The Tyger can be discerned in the notebook
known as the Rossetti Manuscript. He once wrote, “Ideas cannot be given but in their
minutely appropriate words,” and the pains he took with The Tyger reflect that conviction. In
preliminary versions the tiger was conventionally scary.
[…] According to the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “The tiger is more
ferocious, cruel, and savage than the lion. Although gorged with carnage, his thirst for blood
is not appeased; he seizes and tears to pieces a new prey with equal fury and rapacity, the very
moment after devouring a former one.” But the tiger in Blake’s poem is no naturalistic beast,
and whatever the forests of the night may be, they are not an ordinary Indian jungle. Blake’s
tiger dwells in mysterious distant deeps or skies, not on earth at all. The companion poem to
The Tyger is The Lamb, as is implied in the question, “Did he who made the Lamb make
thee?” The Lamb asks a single question that yields a single answer: “Little Lamb, I’ll tell
thee.” The Tyger is all questions and no answer, with a driving, accelerating tempo. In The
Lamb creation is imagined as a loving gift of life to children and lambs by a God who is
himself a shepherd and a lamb. In The Tyger creation gives form to a majestic tiger, a labor
that requires titanic daring and strength. In Genesis, “God said, Let there be light, and there
was light.” For creators in Blake’s poems—and he has many versions of them—it is not so
24
effortless as that. Often, as here, they are blacksmiths heating resistant material to be
hammered into shape. The chain probably refers to the vertebrae, and the product is organic as
well as metallic, with twisted sinews for the beating heart. Critics who look for irony in
Blake’s poems sometimes claim that the speaker of this one is deluded, foolishly worshipping
a phantom of his own imagination. But the awesome power of the tiger’s creator simply
cannot be dismissed. The questions are challengingly open, for as David Fuller says, “The
poem wonders at; it does not explain or expound.”
Not only does The Tyger question what kind of creator makes predators as well as their prey,
it hints as well at other myths that suggest further lines of questioning. Intoxicated by the
driving verse, readers may not stop to ask what is meant by “When the stars threw down their
spears / And watered heaven with their tears.” The spears are presumably rays of starlight,
and they also recall the weapons of the fallen angels in Paradise Lost, cast down after the
Almighty crushed their rebellion; it is their bitter weeping that waters heaven. A clear hint in
The Tyger does indeed point to Satan as the creator in the poem. “On what wings dare he
aspire” recalls his flight through chaos to destroy the newly created Adam and Eve, as
narrated by Milton: “Now shaves with level wing the deep, then soars / Up to the fiery
concave towering high.” Blake knew Paradise Lost practically by heart, argued with it
throughout his life, and eventually summoned Milton back to earth to unite with him in a
poem called Milton. In Blake’s wonderfully condensed lyric, yet another rebel is invoked in
“What the hand dare seize the fire?” The striking resemblance of Prometheus to Satan was
well known to the early Church fathers. Zeus punished Prometheus with eternal torture for
disobeying the commandment that no god should give the gift of fire— in effect,
civilization—to the human race. Not surprisingly, Christian theologians held that Prometheus
was right to rebel whereas Satan was wrong.

25
Not only did the same God make tigers and lambs, but both of them inhabit the world we live
in. Predators exist that seek to kill us, just as we ourselves kill trusting sheep and lambs. But
an animal that can suggest nature as threat may also symbolize nature as our proper home.
[…] although the poem is filled with challenging questions about what a creator might be like,
it is also an eloquent celebration of creativity and life.
Reference
Leo Damrosch. ETERNITY’S SUNRISE The Imaginative World of William Blake New
haven/London: Yale university press, 2015.
Analysis of the “Tyger” by William blake
This analysis is by no means exhaustive. It is a mere guideline.
Step 1:
-The speaker is anonymous. He asks different questions related to the creation of the tiger
“What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame they fearful symmetry?”
-Who is able to “twist the sinews” of the tiger’s heart? is an ontological question which gives
the poem a philosophical touch. The speaker enacts the role of the traditional philosopher who
dares asking more questions than providing answers.
-The speaker tries to understand the reason behind the creation of the tiger which does not
apparently fit within the romantic perception of nature. If nature is the manifestation of the
divine, then this tiger is the embodiment of the violent mysterious side of nature.
26
-The speaker keeps asking vexed questions with regards to the concept of creation. He
compared the creator to a blacksmith. It seems that meaning is fleshed out of a substantial
paradox between the metaphysical world of the creator, the divine/God, and the physical
world of the blacksmith, the human.
Step 2:
Tension in the poem
“Freud, in an essay written sixty years ago on the relation of the poet to daydreaming, made
the surmise that all aesthetic pleasure is forepleasure, an “incitement premium” or narcissistic
fantasy. The deepest satisfactions of literature, in this view, come from a release of tensions in
the psyche.” English Romantic poetry, p.1
“The deepest satisfactions of reading Blake or Wordsworth come from the realization of new
ranges of tensions in the mind, but Blake and Wordsworth both believed, in different ways,
that the pleasures of poetry were only forepleasures, in the sense that poems, finally, were
scaffoldings for a more imaginative vision, and not ends in themselves.” English Romantic
poetry, p.1
The poem as a literary product is an “incitement premium” or narcissistic fantasy (Freud). We
have the impression that the speaker has managed to release a set of tensions in his psyche. If
the set of questions brings about a form of mystery and ambiguity about the creation of the
tiger, it nonetheless dissipates the same ambiguity by pushing further the limits of
27
interrogations about the creator. The element of paradox resolves the question of meaning as
this mysterious nature of the tiger is a manifestation of the creator. In this vein, the tyger
becomes a symbol of the master plan of the creator because no human or mortal hand is
liable to come up with such a creator.(M. R)
3. The concept of vision.
we inhabit a universe that is per-vaded by spirit, altogether different from the soulless
machine postulated by empiricist science and by materialist philosophy. Since our
imaginations are human, we find human meaning and value in the world. And it is thus that
nature can move us to tears—or to intuitions that are even deeper, as Wordsworth said in a
poem that Blake admired, Ode: Intimations of Immortality: Thanks to the human heart by
which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that
blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. (see ETERNITY’S SUNRISE The
Imaginative World of William Blake )
It is important to recognize that Blake was a troubled spirit, subject to deep psychic stresses,
with what we would now call paranoid and schizoid tendencies that were sometimes
overwhelming. (see ETERNITY’S SUNRISE The Imaginative World of William Blake )
- The romantic poets advocate imagination as a medium for artistic creativity.
- Romantic poets debunk the values related to the age of science: rationality,
empiricism, and reason.(see the previous lessons on romantic poets studies in class.)
- The romantic poets celebrate nature and intuition which can “move us to tears.”
- The tiger is a poem which endorses most of these patterns.
- In other words, the setting of the poem wavers between the mysterious metaphysical
world of the creator and the enlightening realm of the speaker’s imagination.
- It is this sensibility which sparks off this set of deep questions about existence.
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- Although the speaker does not provide an answer to his interrogations, the mere
pattern of questioning becomes a form of poetic resolution as the tiger is the product
of a masterful divinity (M. R)
Although Blake is never pious or doctrinal, his thinking is religious in the sense that it
addresses the fundamental dilemmas of human existence—our place in the universe, our
dread of mortality, our yearning for some ultimate source of meaning. (see ETERNITY’S
SUNRISE The Imaginative World of William Blake )
- One of the fundamental dilemmas of human existence is the tyger. It is apparent that
this beast upsets Blake’s imagination.
- The romantic conception of nature is symbiotic and homogeneous.
- How does it come that the tiger stands for a double paradoxical nature: it is at once
good and evil.
- Once again, it is out of these oppositions and seeming contradictions that creatures
acquire significance in the world/in nature and in the poem.
- The world is made up of underlying paradoxes, so is the poem which has to be in
perfect harmony with nature. (M.R.)
Blake may seem to be using a language that has only one speaker. But it is important to
recognize that his imagination was fundamentally visual and that by learning to “read” the
images that accompany his words, we can gain access to the heart of his vision. And vision it
literally was. Blake continued to see actual visions throughout his life and to draw inspiration
from them. They were not hallucinations—he understood that other people couldn’t see them
when he did—but he definitely perceived them as vividly as if they were physically present.
This phenomenon is known as eidetic vision, thought to be common in children and often
persisting in artistic adults. It generally entails the mental revival of images that were once
29
actually seen, and many images in Blake’s art, though he thought of them as visionary, can
indeed be traced to prints and paintings with which he was familiar. They share the aesthetic
code of romantic classicism: feelings are personified in human form, either naked or clothed
in diaphanous garments through which the body is clearly visible, and they stand out from a
loosely sketched background that suggests timelessness. (see ETERNITY’S SUNRISE The
Imaginative World of William Blake )
-feelings are personified in human form, either naked or clothed in diaphanous garments
through which the body is clearly visible, and they stand out from a loosely sketched
background that suggests timelessness. (see ETERNITY’S SUNRISE The Imaginative World
of William Blake )
-The tyger triggers off timeless questions about human existence in the universe.
-It also gives insinuations as to the craftsmanship of the creator. The reader is imprisoned in
an eternal paradoxical dilemma which carves out unwillingly a stable meaning.
- It is the poet’s imagination which is liable to lead us to the origins of creation and to the
master realm of the creator.
-Despite the poet’s fertile imagination, the speaker was by no means able to come to terms
with the double mysterious nature of the tiger. (M.R.)
Step 4:
-The tiger is strikingly beautiful yet also ferocious in its capacity for violence.
30
- The tiger is a symbol of beauty and violence. (see cleanth Brooks “The language of
paradox.”
-This creature is both beautiful and destructive.
-Blake’s tiger stands for evil but also for an upsetting beauty.
-Fire is a symbol of creation and destruction. The tiger incarnates both beauty and evil.
-It contrasts to the “The Lamb.” (recommended reading Blakes’ poem: The Lamb)
-Think of the element of fire which has a double function: it is a source of light and
destruction as well. (M.R.)
Fire
-The tiger is a destructive creature although it looks beautiful.
Step 5:
Poetic devices :
Alliteration
"burning bright"
"frame" and "fearful."
"distant deeps"
"began" and "beat"
"daringness" and "deadliness"

31
Read the following poem by Coleridge and provide a critical reading paying attention to
the questions below. .
Kubla Khan
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

32
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.

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Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
 Provide appropriate answers to the following questions:
1. What is the main theme of this poem?
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2. Who is the speaker?
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3. What are the main poetic devices used by Coleridge in this poem?
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4. To what extent does this poem involve conflicting meanings?
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5. How does this poem reflect some of the romantic characteristics?
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6. In what way does your reading of Preface of the Lyrical Ballads help you understand
Kubla Khan?
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Analysis of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
Reccommended reading
David Ward. Coleridge and the nature of imagination. New York: Macmillan, 2013.
“Coleridge was the most introspective of English writers.” Coleridge and the nature of
imagination, p.6
“His poetry is dependent on his philosophical insights, rather than that his thought emerges
from a poetic life in which he deliberately courted areas of experience where analytical
thought gives way to obscure and unstructured motives, drawing upon the spontaneous
recovery of what he calls ‘a gay and motley chaos of facts and forms, and thousand-fold
experience, the origin of which lies beyond memory, traceless as life itself & finally passing
into a part of our life more naked than would have been compatible with distinct
consciousness’ (Logic, 8).” Coleridge and the nature of imagination, p.6
“Hume’s remarkable insight is that: ‘We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk
of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the
passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”2 Coleridge
and the nature of imagination, p.6
“Coleridge perceived a more complex relationship between thought and feeling – arguing
that there are vast areas or phases of experience in which thought and feeling cannot be
38
separated from each other: ‘I feel strongly, and I think strongly; but I seldom feel without
thinking, or think without Feeling, Reason, Thought and Language. ... My philosophical
opinions are blended with, or deduced from, my feelings: and this, I think, peculiarizes my
style of Writing” (Letters, 1, 279) Coleridge and the nature of imagination, p.6
“A Poet’s Heart and Intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified’ (Letters,
2, 459)Coleridge and the nature of imagination, p. 6
“An endless activity of thought, in all the possible associations of Thought with Thought,
Thought with Feeling, or with words, or of Feelings with Feelings, and words with words”
(CN, 3, 3246). Coleridge and the nature of imagination, p. 6
“Coleridge was very aware of the degree to which conscious deliberation may and must be
kept in the wings in writing, implicitly in thought and in speech as well.” Coleridge and the
nature of imagination, p. 6
“Coleridge traced the origin of all language in emotions: ‘Passion was the true parent of every
word in existence in every language’” (LL, 1, 271). Coleridge and the nature of imagination,
p. 6
“in a yet bolder proposition Coleridge wrote to Godwin in 1800, experimenting with the idea
that words have power which is independent of what we normally call thought, that they grow
in an environment of pre-conscious states of feeling. Coleridge and the nature of imagination
p. 6
“In the process he questions radically the nature and the role of consciousness: I wish you to
write a book on the power of words, and the processes by which human feelings form
39
affinities with them ... whether there be reason to hold, that an action bearing all the
semblance of predesigning Consciousness may yet be simply organic. ... Are not words &c
parts and germinations of the Plant? And what is the Law of their Growth? In something of
this order I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things, elevating, as
it were, words into Things, & living Things too.” (Letters, 1, 625–6) Coleridge and the nature
of imagination p. 6
“Coleridge is pointing to something very profound in our engagement with the world. We
may be able to say things which have little or no affective content, such as: ‘In a right angled
triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two
sides’ (though even this might raise complex memories of school days). But in the majority of
verbal communications words may be like the fruit of a luxuriant tree with affective roots so
profoundly entwined in our mental and physical being that we cannot fully understand the
sources of their power or their meaning.” Coleridge and the nature of imagination, p.7
“Thus images and Impressions associated with the words become more and more dim, till last
as far as our consciousness extends they cease altogether; and Words act upon us
immediately, exciting a mild current of Passion and Feeling without the regular
intermediation of Image’ (Letters, 2, 698). Coleridge and the nature of imagination, p.8
“If we attempt to define the affective power of words which seem to be simple and
straightforward lexically, like mother or daffodil, or daybreak, or world, it begins to appear
that we draw upon all kinds of inexplicable and irrecoverable resources when we speak or
write, resources which do not depend upon the perceived reality or the images we can recover.
This perception touched on something central to Coleridge’s understanding of the relationship

40
between the unconscious, experience and words, and thus of what poetry and philosophy do.
Coleridge’s expression of the relationships between ideas, thought, feeling and the self in his
reflective writings is sometimes so knotted as to defeat any attempt at full understanding.”
Coleridge and the nature of imagination, p.8
Analysis of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1798)
1. What is the main theme of this poem?
It is the eternal conflict between the rational and the irrational, between reason and passion.
Think of Coleridge’s statements:
 I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things.
 the relationship between the unconscious, experience and words.
 I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things.
 experimenting with the idea that words have power which is independent of what we
normally call thought
2. Who is the speaker?
Who is the speaker?
The speaker is anonymous.
Kubla Khan: the name of the person is mysterious.
3. What are the main poetic devices used by Coleridge in this poem?
41
1) Simile: [sim-i-li], an explicit comparison between two different things, actions, or
feelings, using the words 'as' or 'like', as in Wordsworth's line: I wandered lonely as a cloud
A very common *FIGURE OF SPEECH in both prose and verse, simile is more tentative and
decorative than *METAPHOR. A lengthy and more elaborate kind of simile, used as a
digression in a narrative work, is the *EPIC SIMILE.such as “huge fragments vaulted like
rebounding hail.” The fragments have been compared to pieces of hailstorm to show their
impacts. Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
“huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail.”
2) Personification: a *FIGURE OF SPEECH by which animals, abstract ideas, or
inanimate things are referred to as if they were human, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line:
Invention, Nature's child, fled stepdame Study's blows
This figure or *TROPE, known in Greek as prosopopoeia, is common in most ages of poetry,
and particularly in the 18th century. It has a special function as the basis of *ALLEGORY.
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
“as if this earth in fast thick pant was breathing,”
3) Metaphor: the most important and widespread *FIGURE OF SPEECH, in which one
thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing,
idea, or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two. In metaphor, this
resemblance is assumed as an imaginary identity rather than directly stated as a comparison:
referring to a man as that pig, or saying he is a pig is metaphorical, whereas he is like a pig is
a *SIMILE. Metaphors may also appear as verbs (a talent may blossom) or as adjectives (a
42
novice may be green), or in longer *IDIOMATIC phrases, e.g. to throw the baby out with the
bath-water. The use of metaphor to create new combinations of ideas is a major feature of
*POETRY, although it is quite possible to write poems without metaphors. Much of our
everyday language is also made up of metaphorical words and phrases that pass unnoticed as
'dead' metaphors, like the branch of an organization. A mixed metaphor is one in which the
combination of qualities suggested is illogical or ridiculous (see also catachresis), usually as a
result of trying to apply two metaphors to one thing: those vipers stabbed us in the back.
Modern analysis of metaphors and similes distinguishes the primary literal term (called the
'*TENOR') from the secondary figurative term (the 'vehicle') applied to it: in the metaphor the
road of life, the tenor is life, and the vehicle is the road. Concise Oxford Dictionary of
Literary Terms
“deep romantic chasm.”
“woman wailing for her demon-lover.”
4) Synecdoche: [si-nek-doki], a common *FIGURE OF SPEECH (or *TROPE) by which
something is referred to indirectly, either by naming only some part or constituent of it (e.g.
'hands' for manual labourers) or—less often—by naming some more comprehensive entity of
which it is a part (e.g. 'the law' for a police officer). Usually regarded as a special kind of
*METONYMY, synecdoche occurs frequently in political journalism (e.g. 'Moscow' for the
Russian government) and sports commentary (e.g. 'Liverpool' for one of that city's football
teams), but also has literary uses like Dickens's habitual play with bodily parts: the character
of Mrs Merdle in little Dorrit is referred to as 'the Bosom'. Concise Oxford Dictionary of
Literary Terms
“A mighty fountain momentarily was forced”

43
5) Assonance: , the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in the stressed syllables
(and sometimes in the following unstressed syllables) of neighbouring words; it is distinct
from *RHYME in that the consonants differ although the vowels or * DIPHTHONGS match:
sweet dreams, hit or miss. As a substitute for rhyme at the ends of verse lines, assonance
(sometimes is called vowel rhyme or vocalic rhyme). Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary
Terms
“deep delight”
“A stately pleasure-dome decree”
“Through caverns measureless to man.”
6) Consonance: the repetition of identical or similar consonants in neighbouring words
whose vowel sounds are different (e.g. coming home, hotfoot). The term is most commonly
used, though, for a special case of such repetition in which the words are identical except for
the stressed vowel sound (group/grope, middle /muddle, wonder/wander); this device,
combining *ALLITERATION and terminal consonance, is sometimes known more precisely
as 'rich consonance', and is frequently used in modern poetry at the ends of verse lines as an
alternative to full rhyme (see half-rhyme). Consonance may be regarded as the counterpart to
the vowel-sound repetition known as *ASSONANCE. The adjective consonantal is
sometimes ambiguous in that it also means, more generally, 'pertaining to consonants'.
“from the fountain.”
7) Apostrophe: apostrophe , a rhetorical *FIGURE in which the speaker addresses a dead
or absent person, or an abstraction or inanimate object.

44
The apostrophe is one of the *CONVENTIONS appropriate to the *ODE and to the *ELEGY.
The poet's *INVOCATION of a *MUSE in *EPIC poetry is a special form of apostrophe.
“Beware! Beware!”
8) Alliteration: alliteration (also known as 'head rhyme' or 'initial rhyme'), the repetition of
the same sounds—usually initial consonants of words or of stressed syllables—in any
sequence of neighbouring words: 'Landscapelover, lord of language' (Tennyson).. Such
poetry, in which alliteration rather than * RHYME is the chief principle of repetition, is
known as alliterative verse; its rules also allow a vowel sound to alliterate with any other
vowel. Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
“sympathy and song.”
CHRIS BALDICK.The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS,2001.
4. To what extent does this poem involve conflicting meanings?
Analysis
Paradox 1
 Speaker/ The poet
Paradox 2
 The poem as a dream or as a vision
 Kubla khan as a real historical Mongol emperor

45
Paradox 3
 The beauty of nature is set into contradistinction with its violent/threatening
counterpart (the sinuous river, the lifeless sea…)
Paradox 4
Kubla Khan’s power is opposed to the power of the poet’s imagination.
Paradox 5
Take into account what Cleanth Brooks stated in ‘The language of paradox.”
The tension between beauty and violence: here in this poem the greenery and the violent
sinuous river.
5. How does this poem reflect some of the romantic characteristics?
Step1:
-Imagination
-Vision
-Xanadu: the place holds within its folds a sense of mystery.
Step 2:
What happened in the poem?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:

46
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Kubla decreed the building of a pleasure-dome where “ Alph, the sacred river, ran Through
caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.”
Description of the setting (the place/ Space):
Space: fertile groun
With walls and towers
and there were gardens

47
many an incense-bearing tree;
and ancient forests
sunny spots of greenery.
This stanza translates the romantic aspect of celebrating nature.
The words forests and greenery are the perfect embodiment of nature.
Step 3:
Pay attention to the element of paradox in the poem. The concept of unity is substantial in
romantic poetry. In the same vein, The language of paradox does not dislocate the poem into
discordant fragments; On the contrary, the unity of meaning stems from the concept of
paradox. (M. R)
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

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It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
The stately wonderful scenery in the first stanza is contrasted to
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething
Step 4:
Pay attention to the shift in terms of poetic diction in the second stanza. The following words:
savage place, a waning moon, wailing, demon lover turmoil are apparently set into
contradistinction to
fertile ground
With walls and towers
and there were gardens
many an incense-bearing tree;
and ancient forests
sunny spots of greenery.

49
Step 5: analyze
What is the purpose of this apparent paradox? Does the poet need this contrast to create
meaning? Is romantic poetry predicated on the language of paradox?
In fact, the poet wavers between two worlds: one is real, the other seems to be unreal. Is it a
dream?
Are these places part of a geographical space? Is Kubla khan a historical emperor?
The fantastic mysterious side is one of the key features of romantic poetry. Coleridge’s poem
abolished,
where frustration is prohibited and where freedom is tasted as the milk of paradise.
Step 6.
Find the link between the use of mysterious places and names in the poem and the concept of
imagination in romantic poetry.
Step 7
The language of paradox:
“sunny spots of greenery,” are contrasted to “caverns measureless to man”.
It seems that the beauty of greenery is substantially associated with its dark counterpart as if
beauty alone could not translate the beautiful unless it is set to its paradoxical dark side of
nature “the measurless caverns” and “the sinuous river.” (M. R.)
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The ancestral voices articulate this contrast between the present and the remoted past related
to the “ancestral voices prophesying war.” Meaning is shaped out of this set of paradoxes
which ultimately converges to consolidate the unity of the poem. (M. R)
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
The last stanza emphasizes the power of imagination which is liable to go beyond the
contours of space and time. The romantic deployment of intuition and imagination blurred
any line of demarcation between the real and the unreal. (M. Rakii)
The romantic world was a pure quest for pleasure, for freedom, and for emotion. What seems
irrational is this imagination which does not abide by the logic of the body. Coleridge
migrates through his imagination to a world which is not now and here. It is a metaphysical
world where the poet can drink the milk of paradise. Only imagination can cross the borders
of heaven. (M. Rakii)
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid

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And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
6. In what way does your reading of Preface of the Lyrical Ballads help you understand
Kubla Khan?
“The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations
from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a
selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain
colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an
unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting
by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as
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far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” Lyrical
ballads pp.2-3
“the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.
Lyrical ballads, p.3
“For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be
true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of
subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also
thought long and deeply.” Lyrical ballads, p.4
“For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are
indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of
these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so,
by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important
subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind
will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we
shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connexion with each
other, that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened,
and his affections strengthened and purified.” Lyrical ballads, p.4
“Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, let me ask, what is meant by the word
Poet? What is a Poet? to whom does he address himself? and what language is to be expected
from him?—He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively
sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature,
and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man
pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the
53
spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as
manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he
does not find them. to these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other
men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions,
which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in
those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly
resemble the passions produced by real events, than anything which, from the motions of their
own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves:— whence, and from
practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels,
and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of
his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.” Lyrical ballads, p.8
“the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is
spread over the whole earth, and over all time.” Lyrical ballads, p. 11
“The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it
is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of
sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as
immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material
revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually
receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps
of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side,
carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself.” Lyrical ballads, p. 11

54
Semester 6
Professor: M. Rakii
WEEK5
Practical Criticism
Ode on a Grecian Urn
JOHN KEATS
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

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A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

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For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

57
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
Khalil Gibran
Instructions:
Before starting your critical analysis, look up for the meaning of the words in red in a
dictionary.
Your reading has to take into account the following questions:
1. Focus on the words which will enable you grasp the concept of paradox as explained in
Brook’s “language of paradox”.
Example 1: L.6 deities /mortals
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2. According to the speaker, the concept of beauty breaks away from its traditional meaning as
“Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,Though winning near the goal yet, do not
grieve;She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be
fair!”
In what way the concepts of beauty does not abide by the rules of time?
Example1: L. 2 “slow time.”
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3. The concept of paradox is the underlying raison d’être of the fourth stanza since the “heifer
lowing at the skies,” in “peaceful citadel,” while it is “is emptied of this folk,” and its
“streets for evermore Will silent be.”
Guideline: the contrast between the lowing of the heifer and the silence of the streets.
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4. On the basis of your reading of Cleanth Brooks’ “The language of paradox”, write an
academic essay on the following:
John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn is substantially predicated on the concept of paradox
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63
Semester 6
Professor: Mohamed Rakii
WEEK6
Analysis:
Ode on a Grecian Urn
by JOHN KEATS
64
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

65
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

66
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
1. Focus on the words which will enable you grasp the concept of paradox as explained in
Brook’s “language of paradox”.
Example 1: L.6 deities /mortals
-Sylvan historian / our rhyme(the poet)
-Heard melodies / unheard melodies
- Bold Lover/ canst thou kiss
- She cannot fade/ though thou hast not thy bliss
These are a few examples that are liable to enable you study the concept of paradox in Keats’
poem.
There is an underlying paradox between the sylvan historian who tells his story while keeping
silent and the poet’s expressive artistic work. While the historian is apparently part of the urn
as an artistic artifact, his tale is meaningful as it is inscribed in atemporality. It is a story
which will be told as long as the urn exists.

67
In the same vein, the unheard melodies on the urn are sweeter than those heard melodies.
Once again, the paradox lies in the seemingly contradictory nature of both words (unheard
melodies). In fact, the conventional meaning of a melody is closely bound up with a kind of
musical performance to be heard. Unheard melodies incrusted in filigrane on the urn acquire
an eternal essence through the absence of voicing and sound.
The same paradox sets into contradistinction both desire and unfulfillment. The lover’s quest
for the kiss is to ascribe to the concept of desire an eternal regeneration and rebirth.
Diction:
Unravished is the antonym of ravished; (to ravish: to force a woman to have sex= to rape
Sylvan
relating to a forest or trees
Maiden
a young girl, or a woman who is not married = damsel
Timbrels
tambourines
Pipes
a simple musical instrument like a tube, that you play by blowing
ecstasy
a feeling of extreme happiness

68
parch
if the sun or wind parches something, it makes it very dry
heifer
a young cow that has not yet given birth to a calf.
Trodden: to tread
to put your foot on or in something while you are walking: step
altar
a holy table or surface used in religious ceremonies
ditty
a short simple poem or song – used humorously
bough
a main branch on a tree
fade
to gradually disappear
pant
to breathe quickly with short noisy breaths, for example because you have been running or
because it is very hot
cloy
if something sweet or pleasant cloys, it begins to annoy you because there is too much of it
69
pious
having strong religious beliefs, and showing this in the way
desolate
a place that is desolate is empty and looks sad because there are no people there
attic
a space or room just below the roof of a house, often used for storing things
citadel
a strong fort (=small castle) built in the past as a place where people could go for safety if
their city was attacked = fortress
overwrought
very upset, nervous, and worried
pastoral
relating to the duties of a priest or a minister
woe
great sadness
2. According to the speaker, the concept of beauty breaks away from its traditional meaning as
“Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,Though winning near the goal yet, do not
70
grieve;She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be
fair!”
In what way the concept of beauty does not abide by the rules of time?
Example1: L. 2 “slow time.”
-Paradox is the language of sophistry, hard, bright, witty;
-The reader may ask: Where, then, does the poem get its power? It gets it, it seems to me,
from the paradoxical situation out of which the poem arises. The' speaker is honestly
surprised, and he manages to get some sense of awed surprise into the poem.
-I am interested rather in our seeing that the paradoxes spring from the very nature of the
poet's language: it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the
denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of
frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not
use a notation at all--as the scientist may properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has
to make up his language as he goes.
-the poet has to work by analogies. All of the subtler states of emotion, as I. A. Richards has
pointed out, necessarily demand metaphor for their expression.
-The poet must work by analogies, but the metaphors do not lie in the same plane or fit neatly
edge to edge. There is a continual tilting of the planes; necessary overlappings, discrepancies,
contradictions. Even the most direct and simple poet is forced into paradoxes far more often
71
than we think, if we are sufficiently alive to what he is doing. Cleanth Brooks “The Language
of Paradox.”
- The concept of beauty is related to the aesthetic conception of art.
-The unravished bride will never be caught or subdued : ecstasy comes from her eternal
escaping. The paradox of pleasure stems from the absence of physical contact, from the
unfulfilled kiss.
3. The concept of paradox is the underlying raison d’être of the fourth stanza since the “heifer
lowing at the skies,” in “peaceful citadel,” while it is “is emptied of this folk,” and its
“streets for evermore Will silent be.”
Guideline: the contrast between the lowing of the heifer and the silence of the streets.

72
-The altar refers to a religious ceremony
-The poem uses metaphors:
a "bride of quietness," a "foster-child of silence and slow time," and a "Sylvan historian."
-Ancient Grecian urns were used to depict either scenes of wars or to illustrate religious
practices
- The urn articulates a fragment of history as it goes beyond the frontiers of time and space
like a sylvan historian.
-the first two metaphors relate to "quietness" and "silence"
- The story is told/ narrated in images/drawings on the urn and not in words.
-Here, the urn stands for the aesthetic and artistic essence of the urn as a representation of art
itself.
- The questions you have to ask are as follows: where does the concept of paradox lie in
"bride of quietness" and a "foster-child of silence and slow time"?
- the creation of the artist which is the urn outlasted the artist. The paradox is conspicuous:
mortality contrasts with immortality.
- the urn manufacturer is a human mortal who is substantially opposed to his or own artistic
creation which is immortal .

73
-dualities : the speaker is not sure whether the iconographic figures are "deities or mortals."
-Moreover, the vexed question remains: are the figures human or divine?
-the paradox between the human and the divine is suggestive: whereas humans incarnate the
temporary/ the ephemeral, the divine embodies eternity.
-the urn becomes a space which involves a downtrodden world inhabited by human figures
and a metaphysical world inhabited by divine creatures.
The mood in this stanza is melancholic and dismal. This stanza is itself set against the happy
and joyful mood in the first three stanzas.
The speaker delineates the heifer which has her “silken flanks with garlands drest?”.
However, the scene is growing lugubrious as it is coming to a sacrifice.

74
The joy witnessed by the speaker in relation to the urn as an artifact turns out to be a mere
scene of unfulfilled wishes as
little town, thy streets for evermor
The Poetic devices used by Keats in this poem are:
apostrophe
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
Alliteration
silence and slow time
leaf-fringed legend
ye soft pipes, pay on
though thou hast not thy
heart high-sorrowful
Of marble men and maidens.

75
Assonance
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Caesura
Chiasmus
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"
Enjambment
And, little town, thy streets forevermore
Will silent be
Personification
unravished bride
foster child

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Semester 6
Professor: M. Rakii
This course includes a book entitled How to Read and Understand Poetry by Willard
Spiegeleman.
Required Reading is specified below:
Lecture One: What to Look (and Listen) for in Poems............ 5
Lecture Two: Memory and Composition ................................. 9
Lecture Three: Poets Look at the World .................................. 13
Lecture Four: Picturing Nature............................................... 17
Lecture Five: Metaphor and Metonymy I .............................. 22

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Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Subject: Literary Criticism
Semester: 6
Professor: M. Rakii
 REQUIRED TEXT the Lyrical Ballads
 READING and WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
 Required reading for this week: Monday, March 30th, 2020:
Chapter1
William Empson. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and windus, 1949.
Writing assignment
 Provide appropriate answers to the following questions:

78
1. Empsen states that “ ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and
as a rule witty or deceitful. I propose to use the word in an extended sense, and shall think
relevant to my subject any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative
reactions to the same piece of language. Sometimes, especially in this first chapter, the word
may be stretched absurdly far, but it is descriptive because it suggests the analytical mode of
approach, and with that I am concerned.?” . Seven Types of Ambiguity, Chapter 1 p.15
Look for words in Keats’ poem which correspond to Empson’s concept of ambiguity.
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2. Empson maintains that he proposes, “ to consider a series of definite and detachable
ambiguities, in which several large and crude meanings can be separated out, and to arrange
them in order of increasing distance from simple statement and logical exposition.” Seven
Types of Ambiguity, Chapter 1 p.21.
What does he mean by detachable ambiguities?
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3. “To language itself was at first a self-explanatory symbolism, based on these expressions of
feeling, on onomatopoeia, and on that use of the tongue to point at matters of interest, or to
imitate and so define a difficult action, which may be seen in a child learning to write.
Certainly, too, one would expect language in poetry to retain its primitive uses more than
elsewhere. But this sort of thing is no use to the admirers of Pure Sound in poetry, because a
grunt is at once too crude and too subtle to be conveyed by the alphabet at all. Any word can
be either screamed or grunted, so if you have merely a word written on paper you have to
know not only its meaning but something about its context before it can tell you whether to
grunt or to scream.” Seven Types of Ambiguity, Chapter 1 p.21.
Keats’ poem is underlyingly structured on the two elements of paradox and ambiguity. Read
the poem and identify the words which are paradoxical and those which are ambiguous. How
does this critical reading help you understand better the poem?
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4. How does your reading of Empson’s Seven types of ambiguity help you analyze Keats’
Ode on a Grecian Urn?
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Distance Learning WEEK 9
Required reading
The Language of Paradox (1947)
Cleanth Brooks
Professor: M. Rakii
Few of us are prepared to accept the statement that the language of poetry is the language of
paradox. Paradox is the language of sophistry, hard, bright, witty; it is hardly the language of
the soul. We are willing to allow that paradox is a permissible weapon which a Chesterton
may on occasion exploit. We :nay permit it in epigram, a special subvariety of poetry; and in
satire, which though useful, we are hardly willing to allow to be poetry at all. Our prejudices
force us to regard paradox as intellectual rather than emotional, clever rather than profound,
rational rather than divinely irrational.

81
Yet there is a sense in which paradox is the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry. It is
the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the
truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox. I overstate the case, to
be sure; it is possible that the title of this chapter is itself to be treated as merely a paradox.
But there are reasons for thinking that the overstatement which I propose may light up some
elements in the nature of poetry which tend to be overlooked.
The case of William Wordsworth, for instance, is instructive on this point. His poetry would
not appear to promise many examples of the language of paradox. He usually prefers the
direct attack. He insists on simplicity; he distrusts whatever seems sophistical. And yet the
typical Wordsworth poem is based upon a paradoxical situation. Consider his celebrated
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration ....
The poet is filled with worship, but the girl who walks beside him is not worshiping. The
implication is that she should respond to the holy time, and become like the evening itself,
nunlike; but she seems less worshipful than inanimate nature itself. Yet
It thou appear untouched by solemn thought,

82
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
The underlying paradox (of which the enthusiastic reader may well be unconscious) is
nevertheless thoroughly necessary, even for that reader. Why does the innocent girl worship
more deeply than the self-conscious poet who walks beside her? Because she is filled with an
unconscious sympathy for all of nature, not merely the grandiose and solemn. One remembers
the lines from Wordsworth's friend, Coleridge:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small.
Her unconscious sympathy is the unconscious worship. She is in communion with nature "all
the year," and her devotion is continual whereas that of the poet is sporadic and momentary.
But we have not done with the paradox yet. It not only underlies the poem, but something of
the paradox informs the poem, though, since this is Wordsworth, rather timidly. The
comparison of the evening to the nun actually has more than one dimension. The calm of the
evening obviously means "worship," even to the dull-witted and insensitive. It corresponds to
the trappings of the nun, visible to everyone. Thus, it suggests not merely holiness, but, in the
total poem, even a hint of Pharisaical holiness, with which the girl's careless innocence, itself
a symbol of her continual secret worship, stands in contrast.
Or consider Wordsworth's sonnet, "Composed upon Westminster Bridge." I believe that most
readers will agree that it is one of Wordsworth's most successful poems; yet most students
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have the greatest difficulty in accounting for its goodness. The attempt to account for it on the
grounds of nobility of sentiment soon breaks down. On this level, the poem merely says: that
the city in the morning light presents a picture which is majestic and touching to all but the
most dull of soul; but the poem says very little more about the sight: the city is beautiful in the
morning light and "it is awfully still. The attempt to make a case for the poem in terms of the
brilliance of its images also quickly breaks down: the student searches for graphic details in
vain; there are next to no realistic touches. In fact, the poet simply huddles the details
together:
silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields ....
We get a blurred impression--points of tools and pinnacles along the skyline, all twinkling in
the morning light. More than that, the sonnet as a whole contains some very flat writing and
some well-worn comparisons.
The reader may ask: Where, then, does the poem get its power? It gets it, it seems to me, from
the paradoxical situation out of which the poem arises. The' speaker is honestly surprised, and
he manages to get some sense of awed surprise into the poem. It is odd to the poet that the city
should be able to "wear the beauty of the morning" at all. Mount Snowden, Skiddaw, Mont
Blanc--these wear it by natural right, but surely not grimy, feverish London. This is the point
of the almost shocked exclamation:
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill . . .

84
The "smokeless air" reveals a city which the poet did not know existed: man-made London is
a part of nature too, is lighted by the sun of nature, and lighted to as beautiful effect.
The river glideth at his own sweet will ...
A river is the most "natural" thing that one can imagine; it has the elasticity, the curved line of
nature itself. The poet had never been able to regard this one as a real river--now, uncluttered
by barges, the river reveals itself as a natural thing, not at all disciplined into a rigid and
mechanical pattern: it is like the daffodils, or the mountain brooks, artless, and whimsical, and
"natural" as they. The poem closes, you will remember, as follows:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
The city, in the poet's insight of the morning, has earned its right to be considered organic, not
merely mechanical. That is why the stale metaphor of the sleeping houses is strangely
renewed. The most exciting thing that the poet can say about the houses is that they are
asleep. He has been in the habit of counting them dead--as just mechanical and inanimate; to
say they are "asleep" is to say that they are alive, that they participate in the life of nature. In
the same way, the tired old metaphor which sees a great city as a pulsating heart of empire
becomes revivified.' It is only when the poet sees the city under the semblance of death that he
can see it as actually alive--quick with the only life which he can accept, the organic life of
"nature."
85
It is not my intention to exaggerate Wordsworth's own consciousness of the paradox involved.
In this poem, he prefers, as is usual with him, the frontal attack. But the situation is
paradoxical here as in so many d his poems. In his preface to the second edition d the Lyrical
Ballads Wordsworth stated that his general purpose was "to choose incidents and situations
from common life" but so to treat them that "ordinary things should be presented to the mind
in an unusual aspect." Coleridge was to state the purpose for him later, in terms which make
even more evident Wordsworth's exploitation of the paradoxical: "Mr. Wordsworth . . . was to
propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to
excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the
lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonder of the world before us..."
Wordsworth, in short, was consciously attempting to show his audience that the common was
really uncommon, the prosaic was really poetic.
Coleridge's terms, "the charm of novelty to things of every day, .... awakening the mind,"
suggest the Romantic preoccupation with wonder--the surprise, the revelation which puts the
tarnished familiar world in a new light. This may well be the raison d'etre of most Romantic
paradoxes; and yet the neo-classic poets use paradox for much the same reason. Consider
Pope's lines from "The Essay on Man":
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reining but to
Alike in ignorance, his Reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much · · ·
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a Prey to all;

86
Sole Judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd;
The Glory, Jest, and Riddle of the world!
Here, it is true, the paradoxes insist on the irony, rather than the wonder- But Pope too might
have claimed that he was treating the things of everyday, man himself, and awakening his
mind so that he would view himself in a new and blinding light. Thus, there is a certain awed
wonder in Pope just as there is a certain trace of irony implicit in the Wordsworth sonnets.
There is, of court, no reason why they should not occur together, and they do. Wonder and
irony merge in many of the lyrics of Blake; they merge in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The
variations in emphasis are numerous. Gray's "Elegy" uses a typically Wordsworthian
'situation" with the rural scene and with "peasants' contemplated in the light of their "betters."
But in the "Elegy" the balance is heavily tilted in the direction of irony, the revelation an
ironic rather than a startling one:
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust?
Or Flattery sooth the dull cold ear of Death?
But I am not here interested in enumerating the
possible variations; I am interested rather in our seeing that the paradoxes spring from the
very nature of the poet's language: it is a language in which the connotations play as great a
part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying
some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the
87
poet does not use a notation at all--as the scientist may properly be said to do so. The poet,
within limits, has to make up his language as he goes.
T. S. Eliot has commented upon "that perpetual slight alteration of language, words
perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations," which occurs in poetry. It is
perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled. The
tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms to freeze them into strict denotations; the
poet's tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually
modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings. To take a very simple
example, consider the adjectives in the first lines of Wordsworth's evening sonnet: beauteous,
calm, free, holy, quiet, breathless. The juxtapositions are hardly startling; and yet notice 'this:
the evening is like a nun breathless with adoration. The adjective "breathless" suggests
tremendous excitement; and yet the evening is not only quiet but calm. There is no final
contradiction, to be sure: it is that kind of calm and that kind of excitement, and the two states
may well occur together. But the poet has no one term. Even if he had a polysyllabic technical
term, the term would not Provide the solution for his problem. He must work by contradiction
and qualification.
We may approach the problem in this way: the poet has to work by analogies. All of the
subtler states of emotion, as I. A. Richards has pointed out, necessarily demand metaphor for
their expression. The poet must wort by analogies, but the metaphors do not lie in the same
plane or fit neatly edge to edge. There is a continual tilting of the planes; necessary
overlappings, discrepancies, contradictions. Even the most direct and simple poet is forced
into paradoxes far more often than we think, if we are sufficiently alive to what he is doing.
88
But in dilating on the difficulties of the poet's task, I do not want to leave the impression that
it is a task which necessarily defeats him, or even that with his method he may not win to a
fine precision. To use Shakespeare's figure, he can
with assays of bias
By indirections find directions out.
Shakespeare had in mind the game of lawnbowls in which the bowl is distorted, a distortion
which allows the skillful player to bowl a curve. To elaborate the figure, science makes use of
the perfect sphere and its attack can be direct. The method of art can, I believe, never be
direct--is always indirect. But that does not mean that the master of the game cannot place the
bowl where he wants it. The serious difficulties will only occur when he confuses his game
with that of science and mistakes the nature of his appropriate instrument. Mr. Stuart Chase a
few years ago, with a touching naivete, urged us to take the distortion out of the bowl--to treat
language like notation.
I have said that even the apparently simple and straightforward poet is forced into paradoxes
by the nature of his instrument. Seeing this, we should not be surprised to find poets who
consciously employ it to gain a compression and precision otherwise unobtainable. Such a
method, like any other, carries with it its own perils. But the dangers are not overpowering;
the poem is not predetermined to a shallow and glittering sophistry. The method is an
extension of the normal language of poetry, not a perversion of it.
I should like to refer the reader to a concrete case. Donne's "Canonization" ought to provide a
sufficiently extreme instance. The basic metaphor which underlies the poem (and which is
89
reflected in the title) involves a sort of paradox. For the poet daringly treats profane love as if
it were divine love. The canonization is not that of a' pair of holy anchorites who have
renounced the world and the flesh. The hermitage each is the other's body; but they do
renounce the world, and so their title to sainthood is cunningly argued. The poem then is a
parody of Christian sainthood; but it is an intensely serious parody of a sort that modern man,
habituated as he is to an easy yes or no, can hardly understand. He refuses to accept the
paradox as a serious rhetorical device; and since he is able to accept it only as a cheap trick,
he is forced into this dilemma. Either: Donne does not take love seriously; here he is merely
sharpening his wit as a sort of mechanical exercise. Or: Donne does not take sainthood
seriously; here he is merely indulging in a cynical and bawdy parody.
Neither account is true; a reading of the poem will show that Donne takes both love and
religion seriously; it will show, further, that the paradox is here his inevitable instrument. But
to see this plainly will require a closer reading than most of us give to poetry.
The poem opens dramatically on a note of exasperation. The "you" whom the speaker
addresses is not identified. We can imagine that it is a person, perhaps a friend, who is
objecting to the speaker's love affair. At any rate, the person represents the practical world
which regards love as a silly affectation. To use the metaphor on which the poem is built, the
friend represents the secular world which the lovers have renounced.
Donne begins to suggest this metaphor in the first stanza by the contemptuous alternatives
which he suggests to the friend:
· . . chide my palsie, or my gout,
My five gray haires, or ruin'd fortune flout ....

90
The implications are: (1) All right, consider my love as an infirmity, as a disease, if you will,
but confine yourself to my other infirmities, my palsy, my approaching old age, my ruined
fortune· You stand a better chance of curing those; in chiding me for this one, you are simply
wasting your time as well as mine. (2) Why don't you pay attention to your own welfare--go
on and get wealth and honor for yourself. What should you care if I do give these up in
pursuing my love?
The two main categories of secular success are neatly, and contemptuously epitomized in the
line
Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face . . .
Cultivate the court and gaze at the king's face there, or, if you prefer, get into business and
look at his face stamped on coins. But let me alone.
This conflict between the "real" world and the lover absorbed in the world of love runs
through the poem; it dominates the second stanza in which the torments of love, so vivid to
the lover, affect the real world not at all--
What merchants ships have my sighs drown'd?
It is touched on in the fourth stanza in the contrast between the word "Chronicle" which
suggests secular history with its pomp and magnificence, the history of kings and princes, and
the word "sonnets" with its suggestions of trivial and precious intricacy. The conflict appears
91
again in the last stanza, only to be resolved when the unworldly lovers, love's saints who have
given up the world, paradoxically achieve a more intense world. But here the paradox is still
contained in and supported by, the dominant metaphor: so does the holy anchorite win a better
world by giving up this one.
But before going on to discuss this development of the theme, it is important to see what else
the second stanza does. For it is in this second stanza and the third, that the poet shifts the tone
of the poem modulating from the note of irritation with which the poem opens into the quite
different tone with which it closes. Donne accomplishes the modulation of tone by what may
be called an analysis of love-metaphor. Here, as in many of his poems, he shows that he is
thoroughly self-conscious about what he is doing. This second stanza, he fills with the
conventionalized figures of the Petrarchan tradition; the wind of lovers' sights, the floods of
lovers' tears, etc.--extravagant figures with which the contemptuous secular friend might be
expected to tease the lover. The implication is that the poet himself recognizes the absurdity
of the Petrarchan love metaphors. But what of it? The very absurdity of the jargon which
lovers are expected to talk makes for his argument: their love, however absurd it may appear
to the world, does no ham to the world. The practical friend need have no fears: there will still
be wars to fight and lawsuits to argue.
The opening of the third stanza suggests that this vein of irony is to be maintained- The poet
points out to his friend the infinite fund of such absurdities which can be applied to lovers:
Call her one, mee another flye·
We'are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die ....

92
For that matter, the lovers can conjure up for themselves plenty of such fantastic comparisons:
they know what the world thinks of them. But these figures of the third stanza are no longer
the threadbare Petrarchan conventionalities; they have sharpness and bite. The last one, the
likening of the lovers to the phoenix, is · fully serious, and with it, the tone has shifted from
ironic banter into a defiant but controlled tenderness.
The effect of the poet's implied awareness of the lovers' apparent madness is to cleanse and
revivify metaphor; to indicate the sense in which the poet accepts it, and thus to prepare us for
accepting seriously the fine and seriously intended metaphors which dominate the last two
stanzas of the poem.
The opening line of the fourth stanza,
Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,
achieves an effect of tenderness and deliberate resolution. The lovers are ready to die to the
world; they are committed; they are not callow but confident. (The basic metaphor of the
saint, one notices, is being carried on; the lovers in their renunciation of the world, have
something of the confident resolution of the saint. By the bye, the word "legend"--
. . if unfit for tombes and hearse
Our legend bee--
in Donne's time meant "the life of a saint.") The lovers are willing to forego the ponderous
and stately chronicle and to accept the trifling and insubstantial "sonnet" instead; but then if
93
the urn be well wrought, it provides a finer memorial for one's ashes than does the pompous
and grotesque monument. With the finely contemptuous, yet quiet phrase, "halfe-acre
tombes," the world which the lovers reject' expands into something gross and vulgar. But the
figure works further; the pretty sonnets will not merely hold their ashes as a decent earthly
memorial. Their legend, their story, will gain them canonization; and approved as love's
saints, other lovers will invoke them.
In this last stanza, the theme receives a final complication. The lovers in rejecting life actually
win to the most intense life. This paradox has been hinted at earlier in the phoenix metaphor.
Here it receives a powerful dramatization. The lovers in becoming hermits, find that they have
not lost the world, but have gained the world in each other, now a more intense, more
meaningful world. Donne is not content to treat the lovers' discovery as something which
comes to them passively, but rather as something which they actively achieve. They are like
the saint, God's athlete:
Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes ....
The image is that of a violent squeezing as of a powerful hand. And what do the lovers
"drive" into each other's eyes? The "Countries, Townes," and "Countries," which they
renounced in the first stanza of the poem. The unworldly lovers thus become the most
"worldly" of all.
The tone with which the poem closes is one of triumphant achievement, but the tone is a
development contributed to by various earlier elements. One of the more important elements
94
which works toward our acceptance of the final paradox is the figure of the phoenix, which
will bear a little further analysis.
The comparison of the lovers to the phoenix is very skillfully related to the two earlier
comparisons, that in which the lovers are like burning tapers, and that in which they are like
the eagle and the dove. The phoenix comparison gathers up both: the phoenix is a bird, and
like the tapers, it burns. We have a selected series of items: the phoenix figure seems to come
in a natural stream of association. "Call us what you will," the lover says, and rattles off in his
desperation the first comparisons that occur to him. The comparison to the phoenix seems
thus merely another outlandish one, the most outrageous of all. But it is this most fantastic
one, stumbled over apparently in his haste, that the poet goes on to develop. It really describes
the lovers best and justifies their renunciation. For the phoenix is not two but one, "we two
being one, are it"; and it burns, not like the taper at its own cost, but to live again. Its death is
life: "Wee dye and rise the same . . ." The poet literally justifies the fantastic assertion. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to "die" means to experience the consummation of the act
of love. The lovers after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted in mere lust. This is
their title to canonization. Their love is like the phoenix.
I hope that I do not seem to juggle "the meaning of die. The meaning that I have cited can be
abundantly justified in the literature of the period; Shakespeare uses "die" in this sense; so
does Dryden. Moreover, I do not think that I give it undue emphasis. The word is in a crucial
position. On it is pivoted the transition to the next stanza,
Wee can dye by it, if not live by love,
And it unfit for tombes . . .

95
Most important of all, the sexual submeaning of "die" does not contradict the other meanings:
the poet is saying: "Our death is really a more intense life"; we can afford to trade life (the
world) for death (love), for that death is the consummation of life; "After all, one does not
expect to live by love one expects, and wants, to die by it." But in the total passage he is also
saying: "Because our love is not mundane, we can give up the world"; "Because our love is
not merely lust, we can give up the other lusts, the lust for wealth and power"; "because," and
this is said with an inflection of irony as by one who knows the world too well, "because our
love can outlast its consummation, we are a minor miracle, we are love's saints." This passage
with its ironical tenderness and its realism feeds and supports the brilliant paradox with which
the poem closes.
There is one more factor in developing and sustaining the final effect. The poem is an instance
of the doctrine which it asserts; it is both the assertion and the realization of the assertion. The
poet has actually before our eyes built within the song the "pretty room" with which he says
the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which can hold the lovers'
ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the prince's "halfe-acre tomb."
And how necessary are the paradoxes? Donne might have said directly, "Love in a cottage is
enough." "The Canonization" contains this admirable thesis, but it contains a great deal more.
He might have been as forthright as a later lyricist who wrote, "We'll build a sweet little
nest,/Somewhere out in the West,/And let the rest of the world go by." He might even have
imitated that more metaphysical lyric, which maintains, "You're the cream in my coffee."
"The Canonization" touches on all these observations, but it goes beyond them, not merely in
dignity, but in precision.

96
I submit that the only way by which the poet could say what "The Canonization" says is by
paradox. More direct methods may be tempting, but all of them enfeeble and distort what is to
be said. This statement may seem the less surprising when we reflect on how many of the
important things which the poet has to say have to be said by means of paradox: most of the
language of lovers is such--"The Canonization" is a good example; so is most of the language
of religion--
He who would save his life, must lose it"; "The last shall be first." Indeed, almost any insight
important enough to warrant a great poem apparently has to be stated in such terms. Deprived
of the character of paradox with its twin concomitants of irony and wonder, the matter of
Donne's poem unravels into "facts," biological, sociological, and economic. What happens to
Donne's lovers if we consider them "scientifically," without benefit of the supernaturalism
which the poet confers upon them? Well, what happens to Shakespeare's lovers, for
Shakespeare uses the basic metaphor of "The Canonization" in his Romeo and Juliet? In their
first conversation, the lovers play with the analogy between the lover and the pilgrim to the
Holy Land. Juliet says:
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
Considered scientifically, the lovers become Mr. Aldous Huxley's animals, "quietly sweating,
palm to palm."
For us today, Donne's imagination seems obsessed with the problem of unity; the sense in
which the lovers become one---the sense in which the soul is united with God. Frequently, as
97
we have seen, one type of union becomes a metaphor for the other. It may not be too
farfetched to see both as instances of, and metaphors for, the union which the creative
imagination itself effects. For that fusion is not logical; it apparently violates science and
common sense; it welds together the discordant and the contradictory. Coleridge has of course
given us the classic description of its nature and power. It "reveals itself in the balance or
reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of saneness, with difference; of the general,
with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with 'the representative; the sense
of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion
with more than usual order .... "It is a great and illuminating statement but is a series of
paradoxes. Apparently Coleridge could describe the effect of the imagination in no other way.
Shakespeare. in one of his poems. has given a description that oddly parallels that of
Coleridge.
Reason in it selfe confounded,
Saw Division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded.
I do not know what his "The Phoenix and the Turtle" celebrates. Perhaps it was written to
honor the marriage of Sir John Salisbury and Ursula Stanley; or perhaps the Phoenix is Lucy,
Countess of Bedford; or perhaps the poem is merely an essay on Platonic love. But the
scholars themselves are so uncertain, that I think we will do little violence to established
habits of thinking if we boldly pre-empt the poem for our own purposes. Certainly the poem is
an instance of that magic power which Coleridge sought to describe. I propose that we take it
for a moment as a poem about that power;

98
So they loved as love in twaine,
Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, Division none,
Number there in love was slaine.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seene
Twixt this Turtle and his Queene;
But in them it were a wonder ....
Propertie was thus appalled,
That the seife was not the same;
Single Natures double name,
Neither two nor one was called.
Precisely! The nature is single, one, unified. But the name is double, and today with our
multiplication of sciences, it is multiple. H the poet is to be true to his poetry, he must call it
neither two nor one: the paradox is his only solution. The difficulty has intensified since
Shakespeare's day: the timid poet, when confronted with the problem of "Single Natures
double name," has too often funked it. A history of poetry from Dryden's time to our own
might bear as its suittitle "The Half-Hearted Phoenix."
In Shakespeare's poem, Reason is "in it selte confounded" at the union of the Phoenix and the
Turtle; but it recovers to admit its own bankruptcy:

99
Love hath Reason, Reason none,
If what parts, can so remaine ....
and it is Reason which goes on to utter the beautiful threnos with which the poem concludes:
Beautie, Truth, and Raritie,
Grace in all simplicitie,
Here enclosde, in cinders lie.
Death is now the Phoenix nest,
And the Turtles loyall brest,
To eternitie doth rest ....
Truth may seeme, but cannot be,
Beautie bragge, but tis not she,
Truth and Beautie buried be.
To this urne let those repaire,
That are either true or faire,
For these dead Birds, sigh a prayer.
Having pre-empted the poem for our own purposes, it may not be too outrageous to go on to
make one further observation. The urn to which we are summoned, the urn which holds the
ashes of the phoenix, is like the well-wrought urn of Donne's "Canonization" which holds the
phoenix-lovers' ashes: it is the poem itself. One is reminded of still another urn, Keats's
100
Grecian urn, which contained for Keats, Truth and Beauty, as Shakespeare's urn encloses
"Beautie, Truth, and Raritie." But there is a sense in which all such well-wrought urns contain
the ashes of a Phoenix. The urns are not meant for memorial purposes only, though that often
seems to be their chief significance to the professors of literature. The phoenix rises from its
ashes; or ought to rise; but it will not arise for all our mere sifting and measuring the ashes, or
testing them for their chemical content. We must be prepared to accept the paradox of the
imagination itself; else "Beautie, Truth, and Raritie" remain enclosed in their cinders and we
shall end with essential cinders, for all our pains.
Assignment:
What is the language of paradox?
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Recommended reading:
References:
Baldick, Chris.The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS,2001.
Brooks, Cleanth. “The Language of Paradox.” (1947)
Damon , S. Foster. A blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of Willima Blake. Hanover,
New Hampshire Dartmouth College: Press 1965.
Damrosch, Leo.The Imaginative World of William Blake New haven/London: Yale university
press, 2015.
Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. London: Chatto and windus, 1949.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton University Press, 1957.
Spiegeleman, Willard. How to Read and Understand Poetry .
Ward, David. Coleridge and the nature of imagination. New York: Macmillan, 2013.
Wordsworth, William. “Preface of the Lyrical Ballads.” Efa

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1

-Parcours 1: Literary and cultural Studies

-Subject: Literary Criticism

- Professor : Mohamed Rakii

Sultan Moulay Slimane University

Faculty of Arts and humanities

Department of English Studies

Subject : Literary criticism

Academic Year : 2020-2021

Professor: Mohamed Rakii

(3 Face-to-Face Lectures + 8 Distance Learning Courses)

1. Greeks: criticism in the 5th century

B. Aristotle (488-322 BC)

a. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

An apology for poetry (1595)

3. New Classical Age

Alexander pope (1688-1744)

Distance Learning Courses:

4. The Romantic Age

William Blake (1757 – 1827)

A. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

a. Kubla Khan: the romantic aura.

b. Vision and imagination.

B. John Keats (1795 - 1821)

a. Ode on a Grecian Urn

a. Wayne C. Booth.. “The language of Paradox.”

b. Empson’s. “Seven Types of Ambiguity.”

 READING and WRITING ASSIGNMENTS

Required reading for this week

Preface of the Lyrical Ballads

Distance Learning WEEK1

Sultan Moulay Slimane University

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Department of English Studies

Subject: Literary Criticism

ALALYSIS OF ROMANTIC POETRY

The introduction Harold Bloomed,ed.English Romantic poetry, from p. 1 to p. 23

Harold Bloomed,Ed.English Romantic poetry. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2004.

Guideline: your reading of the introduction of Bloom’s English Romantic poetryhas to be

critical analysis of romantic poetry.

the psyche.”English Romantic poetry, p.1

“Blake’s is apocalyptic,Freud’s is naturalistic, and Wordsworth’s is—sometimes sublimely,

sometimes uneasily—blended of elements that dominate in the other two.”English Romantic

memory should be discernible.” p. 2

between Eros and Thanatos.”p. 3

and of the false dawn of Sensibility.” p. 3

integrity, or yielding to the illusive beauty of nature.” pp. 3-4

Analysis of Romantic Poetry

TygerTyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,