T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church. [1]

• Poets.org

• The Poetry Foundation

• Nobelprize.org

• His works

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family's summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle in London; at the same time he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. The Countess Cathleen (1892),The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King's Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are among the best known. [1]

• The Poetry Foundation

• Poets.org

• Nobelprize.org

• Encyclopaedia Britannica

• His works

• The Irish question

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Thomas Hardy, the son of a stonemason, was born in Dorset, England, on June 2, 1840. He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years. Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) andJude the Obscure (1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication and Hardy was criticized for being too pessimistic and preoccupied with sex. He left fiction writing for poetry, and published eight collections, including Wessex Poems (1898) and Satires of Circumstance (1912).[1]

• The Poetry Foundation

• Poets.org

• The Victorian Web

• Hardy's works

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright born in Camberwell, London in 1812.  He was an intelligent child who was fluent in five languages by the age of fourteen. He was also passionate about poetry and was a talented musician, composing arrangements of several songs as well as writing poetry.

In 1845 he met the far more established poet Elizabeth Barrett, they married secretly a year later and moved to Italy, during which time they both wrote extensively. However, his poems made little impact until 1861, when, after Elizabeth’s death he returned to England.  His subsequent publication The Ring and the Book, published in four volumes was a huge success, cementing his reputation as one of the foremost Victorian poets, alongside his wife.  He died at his and Elizabeth’s son’s home in Venice, Italy in 1889.[1]

• The Victorian Web

• Poets.org

• The Poetry Foundation

• His works

Introduction to the Victorian Period

In this post you can find some additional information to what we discussed in class.

For more information on the Victorian Period, access The Victorian Web.

• The Poor Law

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/history/shp/britishsociety/thepoorrev1.shtml

• Thomas Falkner

About him

To read his diary, click here.

• Leopoldo Brizuela

An interview

Synopsis: Inglaterra, una fábula

• Macauly Act

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html

• "Lie back and think of England"

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/close-your-eyes-and-think-of-england.html

• Realism

http://www.online-literature.com/periods/realism.php

• Symbolism

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-symbolism.htm

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was Queen Victoria's poet laureate. His lasting works include "Ulysses," "The Lady of Shalott," and Idylls of the King. [1]

• Poets.org

• The Poetry Foundation

• The Victorian Web

• His works

Discussion on the novel (genre), Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights

• The novel

http://literatureiilv.blogspot.com.ar/2014/06/the-novel.html

• Framing

FRAME NARRATIVE: The result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones. Often this term is used interchangeably with both the literary technique and the larger story itself that contains the smaller ones, which are called pericopes, "framed narratives" or "embedded narratives." The most famous example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which the overarching frame narrative is the story of a band of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. The band passes the time in a storytelling contest. The framed narratives are the individual stories told by the pilgrims who participate. Another example is Boccaccio's Decameron, in which the frame narrative consists of a group of Italian noblemen and women fleeing the plague, and the framed narratives consist of the tales they tell each other to pass the time while they await the disease's passing. The 1001 Arabian Nights is probably the most famous Middle Eastern frame narrative. Here, in Bagdad, Scheherazade must delay her execution by beguiling her Caliph with a series of cliffhangers. FRAME STORY: See frame narrative. FRAMING METHOD: Using the same features, wording, setting, situation, or topic at both the beginning and end of a literary work so as to "frame" it or "enclose it." This technique often provides a sense of cyclical completeness or closure.

Source: https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_F.html

• Distancing effect (Brecht)

Alienation effect, also called a-effect or distancing effect, German Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt, idea central to the dramatic theory of the German dramatist-director Bertolt Brecht. It involves the use of techniques designed to distance the audience from emotional involvement in the play through jolting reminders of the artificiality of the theatrical performance.

Source: http://www.britannica.com/art/alienation-effect

• Galvanism

In medicine, galvanism refers to any form of medical treatment involving the application of pulses of electric current to body tissues provoking the contraction muscles that are stimulated by the electric current. This effect was named by Alessandro Volta after his contemporary, the scientist Luigi Galvani, who investigated the effect of electricity on dissected animals in the 1780's and 1790's. Galvani himself referred to the phenomenon as animal electricity, believing that he had discovered a distinct form of electricity.

Source: http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Definitions/galvanism.htm

• Cyborgs

The Cyborg Foundation

• Paradise Lost by John Milton

Paradise Lost: Study Guide

• Primitivism // Civilization/Barbarity

"The White Man's Burden" by Rudyard Kipling

Sobre Jeremy Button

El último confín de la tierra, Esteban Lucas Bridges

Emily Brontë (1818-1848)

Emily Brontë was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell. She published under the pen name Ellis Bell. [1]

• Biography

• Encyclopaedia Britannica

• Poem Hunter

• Her poetry

• The Reader's Guide to Emily Brontë's Whuthering Heights

The Creation of the Monster

1. Edison's Frankenstein

2. James Whale's Frankenstein

3. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

 
4. Igor

Other interesting things to watch

Bride of Frankenstein

Young Frankenstein

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Frankenweenie

Penny Dreadful

Frankenstein, M. D.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later known as Mary Shelley, was born in Somers Town, London, England, on the 30th of August 1797. She was the daughter of William Godwin, a journalist, philosopher and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, educator and feminist philosopher.
Mary Shelley's most famous novel, Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, was released anonymously when she was only 21 years old. Only from its second edition, five years later, was her name to appear as the author. The central idea came to Shelly in a dream where she saw a student putting together parts of a man's body and working through a big engine to animate it. She first wrote a short story but Percy encouraged her to expand it into a novel. The novel had at the center of its plot a failed attempt at artificial life, by the scientist Frankenstein, which produced a monster. The work is considered to be a mixture of science fiction, gothic novel, and having elements from the Romantic movement.
During the last 20 years of her life, Mary Shelley was very busy editing and writing. She contributed frequently to ladies' magazines and after her father's death she planned to write his memoirs but ended up giving up on it. From 1939 Shelley's health started to decline, preventing her from work and she died most likely of a brain tumor on the 1st of February 1851. [1]

• Biography

• Poetry Foundation

• Mary Shelley's works

• Percy Shelley's review on Frankenstein

John Keats (1795-1821)

John Keats' Facebook

An Ode to Keats Tumblr

Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

Ozymandias

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/238972#poem

To hear the poem, click here.

To read Prometheus Unbound, click here.

More on "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

"Kubla Khan" by Samuel T. Coleridge

• To read the lyrics of Rush's song based on "Kubla Khan", click here.

• To read the ballad "The Demon Lover", click here.

• To read the story "The Demon Lover" by Elizabeth Bowen, click here.

• To read the novel Doña Flor y sus dos maridos by Jorge Amado, click here.

• To read about the Pombero, click here.

• To read about the Peixe Boto, click here.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel T. Coleridge

On Wordsworth, Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

• The Lyrical Ballads

Click here to download the book.

Click here to read the preface to the second edition.

• Biographia Literaria

Click here to download the book.

• Automatic poetry

Click here, here and here to read more about automatic poetry,

Click here to access an automatic poetry generator.

• "Kubla Khan"

Click here to read the preface to the poem.

Click here to read the ballad "The Demon Lover".

Click here to read Elizabeth Bowen's story "The Demon Lover".

Click here to download The Travels of Marco Polo.

Click here to read Purchas Pilgrimage.

• "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Click here to see the illustration on the poem by Gustave Doré.

Click here for more on Gustave Doré.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (born October 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England—died July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London), English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.1

• Poets.org

• The Poetry Foundation

• Encyclopaedia Britannica

• Coleridge's works

"Why Dorothy Wordsworth is not as Famous as her Brother" by Lynn Peters

WHY DOROTHY WORDSWORTH IS NOT AS FAMOUS AS HER BROTHER

"I wandered lonely as a...

They're in the top drawer, William,

Under your socks -

I wandered lonely as a -

No not that drawer, the top one.

I wandered by myself -

Well wear the ones you can find.

No, don't get overwrought my dear, I'm coming.

  

"I wandered lonely as a -

Lonely as a cloud when -

Soft-boiled egg, yes my dear,

As usual, three minutes -

As a cloud which floats -

Look, I said I'll cook it,

Just hold on will you -

All right, I'm coming.

"One day I was out for a walk

When I saw this flock -

It can't be too hard, it had three minutes.

Well put some butter in it. -

This host of golden daffodils

As I was out for a stroll one -

"Oh you fancy a stroll, do you?

Yes all right, William, I'm coming.

It's on the peg. Under your hat.

I'll bring my pad, shall I, in case

You want to jot something down?"

• Lynn Peter's Official Website

• Lynn Peter's Poems

Blake

"Newton" by William Blake

"Newton" (after William Blake) by Eduardo Paolozzi

British Library in London

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear 

"London" by William Blake

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Born in England in 1770, poet William Wordsworth worked with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads (1798). The collection, which contained Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," introduced Romanticism to English poetry. Wordsworth also showed his affinity for nature with the famous poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." He became England's poet laureate in 1843, a role he held until his death in 1850. 1

• Poets.org

• The Poetry Foundation

• BBC

• Wordsworth Trust

• William Wordsworth's works

• Project Gutenberg

• Dorothy Wordsworth's journals

William Blake (1757-1827)

William Blake was born at Broad Street, Soho, in 1757, the third son (and second surviving) of James Blake, haberdasher and hosier, and his wife Catherine.

As a boy he attended Henry Pars’ drawing school near the Strand, and was later apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, for whom, among other projects, Blake made drawings and engravings of the monuments of Westminster Abbey.

He continued to work as an engraver throughout his life alongside his prophetic books and paintings. 

Blake married Catherine Boucher in 1782. Blake lived almost all his life in London, apart from three years’ slumber by the sea at Felpham in Sussex in the years 1800-1803. He died in 1827, and is buried at Bunhill Fields.1

• The Poetry Foundation

• The William Blake Archive

• The William Blake Society

• William Blake's works

• Project Gutenberg

Neo-classicism & Romanticism

• "The Rape of the Lock" by Alexander Pope (Neo-classicism)

Canto I
Canto II
Canto III
Canto IV
Canto V

For more on Alexander Pope, click here.

• "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Grey (Transitional: Gothic elements)

To read the poem, click here.

For more on Thomas Grey, click here.

• "Ode to a Grecian Urn" by John Keats (Romantic with Neo-classicist elements)

To read the poem, click here.

For more on John Keats, click here.

• "A Red, Red Rose" by Robert Burns (Romanticism)

To read the poem, click here.

For more on Robert Burns, click here.