English Literature

SHUAIB ASGHAR DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH GOVT. RAZVIA ISLAMIA COLLEGE HAROONABAD, PAKISTAN The period from 1798 to 1824 is termed as �The Romantic Age� of English Literature. In this period the writing was mostly poetry. A revolution was taking place in poetic language and its themes. Previously the head controlled the heart, now the heart controlled the head; for the previous poets feelings and imagination were dangerous, but for the Romantics reason and the intellect were dangerous. The romantic period is the most fruitful period in the history of English literature. The revolt against the classical school which had been started by writers like Chatterton, Collins, Gray, Burne, Cowper etc. reached its climax during this period and some of the greatest and most popular English poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats belong to this period. To have knowledge of the trends and characteristics of this age we are to discuss some of its prominent and representative figures. T...

Coleridge is one of the greatest of literary critics, and his greatness has been almost universally recognized. He occupies, without doubt, the fist place among English literary critics. After eliminating one after another the possible contenders for the title of the greatest critic, Saintsbury concludes: "So, then there abide these three � Aristotle, Longinus and Coleridge." According to Arthur Symons, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria is, "� the greatest book of criticism in English." Herbert Read concludes Coleridge as: " � head and shoulders above every other English critic." I. A. Richards considers him as the fore-runner "of the modern science of semantics", and Rene Wellek is of the view that he is a link, "between German Transcendentalism and English Romanticism." A man of stupendous learning, both in philosophy and literature, ancient as well as modern, and refined sensibility and penetration intellect...

Wordsworth and Coleridge came together early in life and mutually arose various theories which Wordsworth embodied in his "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads" and tried to put into practice in his poems. Coleridge claimed credit for these theories and said they were "half the child of his brain". But later on, his views underwent the change; he no longer agreed with Wordsworth's theories and so criticized them. In his Preface, Wordsworth made three important statements all of which have been objects of Coleridge's censure. First of all Wordsworth writes that he chose low and rustic life, where the essential passions of the heart find a better soil to attain their maturity. They are less under restraint and speak a plainer and more emphatic language. In rustic life our basic feelings coexist in greater simplicity and more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated. The manners of rural life, sprang from those elementary feelings and from the necessar...

Coleridge poses numerous questions regarding the nature and function of poetry and then answers them. He also examines the ways in which poetry differs from other kinds of artistic activity, and the role and significance of metre as an essential and significant part of a poem. He begins by emphasizing the difference between prose and poetry. "A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition." Both use words. Then, the difference between poem and a prose composition cannot lie in the medium, for each employs words. It must, therefore, "consists in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object being proposed." A poem combines words differently, because it is seeking to do something different. "All it may be seeking to do may be to facilitate memory. You may take a piece of prose and cast it into rhymed and metrical form in order to remember it better." Rhymed tags of that kind, with their frequent, "sounds and quantiti...

Coleridge,in his essay "Biographia Literaria",rejecting the empiricist assumption that the mind was tabula rasa on which external experience and sense impressions were imprinted, stored,recalled, combined both come from respectively the Latin word 'imaginato' and Greek word 'phantasia'. Coleridge defines imagination by saying that "The imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception,and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am . The secondary I consider as am echo of the former, co-existing with the concious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degrees, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate, or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to dealize and to unify....