Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods

may be For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

The art of written works. The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts or work of written art. Literature represents a language or a people: culture and tradition. But, literature is more important than just a historical or cultural artifact; it also introduces us to new worlds of experience.

Literature is a form of human expression. Certain forms of writing, however, are universally regarded as belonging to literature as an art. Individual attempts within these forms are said to succeed if they possess something called artistic merit and to fail if they do not. The nature of artistic merit is less easy to define than to recognize. The writer need not even pursue it to attain it. On the contrary, a scientific exposition might be of great literary value and a pedestrian poem of none at all.

Critical Theories

Conveniently be called the expressive and constructive theories of composition. Is the artist or writer a technician, like a cook or an engineer, who designs and constructs a sort of machine that will elicit an aesthetic response from his audience? Or is he a virtuoso who above all else expresses himself and, because he gives voice to the deepest realities of his own personality, generates a response from his readers because they admit some profound identification with him?

Literary Language

The language employed is quite different from that spoken or used in ordinary writing. This marks off the reading of literature as a special experience. Other writers have sought to use language for its most subtle and complex effects and have deliberately cultivated the ambiguity inherent in the multiple or shaded meanings of words.

Ambiguity

Translation

Words do have overtones; they do stir up complicated reverberations in the mind that are ignored in their dictionary definitions. Great stylists, and most especially great poets, work with at least a half-conscious, or subliminal, awareness of the infinite potentialities of language.

The coconuts have ripened, They are like nipples to the tree. (A woman has only two nipples, There are many women-lives in a coconut tree.) Soon the coconuts will grow heavy and full: I shall pick up one. . . many.. . Like a child I shall suck their milk, I shall suck out of coconuts little white songs: I shall be reminded of many women
I shall kiss a coconut because it is the nipple of a woman. (Age 17)

Craftsmanship

Literature, like music, is an art of time, or tempo: it takes time to read or listen to, and it usually presents events or the development of ideas or the succession of images or all these together in time. The craft of literature, indeed, can be said to be in part the manipulation of a structure in time, and so the simplest element of marking time, rhythm, is therefore of basic importance.

Structure

The craft of writing involves more than mere rules of prosody. The works structure must be manipulated to attract the reader. First, the literary situation has to be established. The reader must be directly related to the work, placed in it given enough information on who, what, when, or why so that his attention is caught and held or, on the other hand, he must be deliberately mystified, to the same end.

Tie your heart at night to mine, love, and both will defeat the darkness like twin drums beating in the forest against the heavy wall of wet leaves. Night crossing: black coal of dream that cuts the thread of earthly orbs with the punctuality of a headlong train that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly. Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement, to the grip on life that beats in your breast, with the wings of a submerged swan, So that our dream might reply to the sky's questioning stars with one key, one door closed to shadow.

The word as symbol

The content of literature is as limitless as the desire of human beings to communicate with one another. Its most primitive elements are those words that express direct experiences of objective reality, and its most sophisticated are concepts on a high level of abstraction.

Themes and their sources

Literature may use such symbols directly, but all great works of literary art are, as it were, original and unique myths. The worlds great classics evoke and organize the archetypes of universal human experience. Literature tends to concern itself more and more with the interior meanings of its narrative, with problems of human personality and human relationships. Some deal with abstract ideas or philosophical conceptions.

The writers personal involvement

Relation of form to content

Form determines content. Content determines form. Literary critics object to writers who they feel sacrifice ideological orthodoxy for formal perfection, message for style. Great style depends on the perfect matching of content and form, so that the literary expression perfectly reflects the writers intention. Literature may be an art, but writing is a craft, and a craft must be learned.

Style

Objective-subjective expression

All form in literature is expressive. All expression has its own form, even when the form is a deliberate quest of formlessness. Form simply refers to organization and literary writers organizes experience. Thus, organization stretches far back in the mental process. Form is the other face of content, the outward, visible sign of inner spiritual reality.