Dryden was seen as an author that moved with the chaotic times, and used his satire to evoke passions about the turmoil within England and religion. Between his own writing characteristics and the use of alternative characters, he would be able to speak more freely about these characters faults and actions without fear of court .In essence, the story of Absalom and Achitophel is about the son of a king rebelling against his father due to the unscrupulous actions of one of his father’s trusted advisors. It was with these events and their possible correlation to the biblical story that Dryden issued forth the poem not only to praise the King, but to validate his actions and to destroy his opponents and it is with these corresponding events between the two stories that will be used to analyze
Such a chance for improvement only exists in a world of imperfection; therefore, the complexity of our minds is exactly what makes humanity strive for progress. “Poems of Our Climate,” by Wallace Stevens, conveys human nature’s tendency to bring triumph and ruin through the complexity of thought. It uses imagery and contrasting elements to emphasize the human fixation for imperfection and thought complexity. These concepts of Stevens’ poem can be applied to Oedipus in Oedipus the King by Sophocles, as he falls by establishing imperfection, and rises by reaching moral self-recognition through his curiosity to pursue the truth. “Poems of Our Climate” brings to life the natural human ability of thought intricacy and the desire for imperfection that spawns from it.
Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines “tradition” by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he then argues that poetry should be essentially “impersonal,” that is separate and distinct from the personality of its writer. Eliot’s idea of tradition is complex and unusual, involving something he describes as “the historical sense” which is a perception of “the pastness of the past” but also of its “presence.” For Eliot, past works of art form an order or “tradition”; however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself. This view, in which “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” requires that a poet be familiar with almost all
The usage of literary devices aid in building Humbert Humbert’s character in Lolita as his thought process and narrative exposes itself through poetic diction. Humbert’s twisted thoughts accompanied by his abnormal nature is best revealed with foreshadowing, point of view, and figurative language
Another example, not from Poe, is the novel “Speak”; which the conflict brings the reader to know how the character is lonely, depressed, and even confused. Both authors, of “Speak” (Laurie Halse Anderson) and Poe, use conflict to develop characters in many ways. Edgar Allan Poe is a very descriptive writer, which in his texts he develops characters through conflict all the time. In one of Poe’s poems, “Annabel Lee”, the conflict of the poem is how the narrator 's lost the love of his life and he needs to find a way to get her back. Per the conflict, the author is letting the reader
He/She is prone to show his true side of his hate but the narrator is fearful that others may think of him in a wrong way. The narrator goes back and forth, indecisive of whether or not to show his true secret. Near the end, he/she is forced, by his conscience, to do something wrong to the man, leading to Guilt. In stanzas 3 and 4, it states, “ /His manner imprisons me like a ball and chain, /Shatters my sanity, and drives me insane.” This shows that the narrator developing the theme of guilt by using metaphors and First Person Point of View. The metaphor, “...imprisons me like a ball and a chain”, shows that the author wrote this for the main purpose of portraying guilt.
We are taught to change and fix and then do it all over again until we have wasted our precious lives on vain nonsense. It isn’t fair that we enter life without a chance. Time and time again, we are told to be this and be that and even when we finally come close to accomplishing our hopeless ambitions, this changes to that and we must start all over again. But let me be clear, we were not born this way. There is a moment, even if only an instant, where we remain uncorrupted, untainted by the cruel
It has the effect of creating awareness of certain issues that society seems to be ignorant of and it illustrates the emotions of the poet that enable the reader to obtain the poet’s perspective. It is also gives the poet the opportunity his perspective of how the world should be. Literature has been utilized for centuries with the
Meena Alexander believes in poetry as political activism: her poetry often deals with conflicts and unrest, cities at the edge of war, episodes of discrimination, and so on. In an interview with Ruth Maxey, the poet admits that history conspires against the writing of poetry (Alexander 2009, 190). Many American poets have tried to do away with history, and to break the chains that still linked them to tradition, and to the old canon of British poetry. Alexander mentions Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose notion of self-reliance, which she interprets as reinvention of the self, “exhilarated” her (2009, 3). Chapter first of this study is entitled Identity which offers the theoretical framework of the term identity and the elements of identity in her works and try to find out her own identity.
The focus of this essay is to critically discuss the issues and possible solutions which are highlighted in the poems The Second Coming and The Tyger. It is important to note that, according to the structure of a poem, the first stanzas are predominantly about pointing out the problem that the poet is confronted with and the last stanzas are about the resolution or what the poet suggests must be done in order to solve the problem identified. In contextualising the two poems, The Second Coming was written by WB Yeats and The Tyger was written by William Blake. Notably, both these poets were intrigued by something which led to the writing of these poems. “By the accident of the date of his birth, however, Yeats lived into the modern age, which