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The theme of social class in literature
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Elizabeth Hands was an Eighteenth Century low-class poet. While her life is not well know, she is the discovered author of ‘Death of Amnon’, a famous poem of the time. Many criticized Hands for her social class, and many believed that she could not write anything worth reading. In response to their negativity, Hands wrote ‘A Poem, On the Supposition of an Advertisement appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant-Main’ (Supposition I) and ‘A Poem, On the Supposition of the Book having been Published and Read’ (Supposition II). The two poems are about the varying responses pertaining Hands’ ‘Death of Amnon’ poem. The poems reflect Hands’ belief that social class has no place in dictating writing.
In her
The publication history of all of John Clare’s work is, in the end, a history about editorial control and influence. Even An Invite to Eternity, written within the confines of a mental institution seemingly distant from the literary world, is not an exception to this rule, for it and Clare’s other asylum poems do not escape the power and problem of the editor. And, further, this problem of the editor is not one confined to the past, to the actions of Clare’s original publisher John Taylor or to W.F. Knight, the asylum house steward who transcribed the poetry Clare wrote during his 20 odd years of confinement. In fact, debates continue and rankle over the role of the editor in re-presenting Clare’s work to a modern audience: should the modern editor present the unadulterated, raw Clare manuscript or a cleaned up, standardized version as Taylor did? Only exacerbating and exaggerating this problem o...
Everett, Nicholas From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamiltong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
The readers are apt to feel confused in the contrasting ways the woman in this poem has been depicted. The lady described in the poem leads to contrasting lives during the day and night. She is a normal girl in her Cadillac in the day while in her pink Mustang she is a prostitute driving on highways in the night. In the poem the imagery of body recurs frequently as “moving in the dust” and “every time she is touched”. The reference to woman’s body could possibly be the metaphor for the derogatory ways women’s labor, especially the physical labor is represented. The contrast between day and night possibly highlights the two contrasting ways the women are represented in society.
For it is a commonplace of our understanding of the period that the Victorian writer wanted above all to “stay in touch.” Comparing his situation with that of his immediate predecessors, he recognized that indulgence in a self-centered idealism was no longer viable in a society which ever more insistently urged total involvement in its occupations. The world was waiting to be improved upon, and solved, and everyone, poets, included had to busy themsel...
Raffel, Burton. and Alexandra H. Olsen Poems and Prose from the Old English, (Yale University Press)Robert Bjork and John Niles,
Many sonnets revolve around the idea of gender roles and love. Mary Wroth can be identified as one of these poets. Regardless of feminist and gender-specific ideologies in Wroth’s sonnets, Mary’s perspective as a sonneteer has been wrongly identified as being commonly
When Andrew Marvell was just a pre-teen, his work started to become favored by his city. As his poetry became even more known, a tragic incident suddenly happened. Marvell's father drowned in 1640 (“Oxford Book of English Verse”). Disturbed by the loss, Andrew ceased his writing hobby for a while. The distraught situation caused Andrew to go out into the fields and work for a living. Marvell nev...
To begin, Alfred Tennyson was the fourth son in a large family with twelve children. Alfred’s brothers each had particular struggles they had to overcome, one had an opium addiction while another regularly fought with their father, the Reverend Dr. George Tennyson. Alfred Tennyson’s father was the son of a wealthy landowner, but was disinherited when he instead wished to join the clergy. Alfred’s childhood home was very chaotic by many accounts and full of eccentricities. George Tennyson tutored his sons in classical and modern languages to prepare them for university. Before Alfred left for Cambridge, he had already published a book with his brother Charles titled,” Poems By Two Brothers”. Many gifted undergraduates drifted towards him and encouraged him to write poetry seriously. Unfortunately, Alfred had to leave college in 1831 due to financial issues. He published a few works while he w...
Poetry is central to the English language as both a communication tool and as a cultural heritage that dates back to antiquity. Poetry is a diverse and complex art that takes a life time to decipher the poet’s intent and motivation in a poetic literature. This paper explores the content and stylist imbued meaning in Robinson Edwin Arlington 1897 poem; Richard Cory. “Richard Cory” is a sixteen stanza poem that narrates the rich, elitist and nobility, but socially unfulfilling life of a man bearing the name that forms the title of the poem. The name Richard Cory is metaphorically derived from King Richard I; Richard Coeur de Lion (1157-1199) of England, and is used by the poet as a satire to mock the illusionary blissful contentment of the poem’s protagonist from the society’s perspective (Gateway 18). This essay explores the illusionary imputed richness, elitist, and nobility identity of Richard Cory by his fellow countrymen, and how that illusions worked his committing suicide. The poem faults the society’s idealism for richness, wealth, elitism and nobility as source of happiness.
113- The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. of the book. Vol.
Song To the Men of England is a revolutionary poem which directly appeals to the repressed common folk of England to confront those with power in the inequitable social class system of late 18th Century England. England, during this time also had a rigid hierarchical system where over 50% of the population were categorised as the Common Folk, a class where the majority lived for subsistence. In reaction to this, many Romantic poets including Shelley wrote to challenge this unjust system. The poem has a simple four-line stanza with AABB rhyming structure enabling the poem to be understood by the uneducated population promoting the Romantic principle of equality as opposed to Wollstonecraft’s more sophisticated use of language. Shelley argues for freedom from constraints through his rhetorical opening statement “Men of England, wherefore plough / For the lords who lay ye low?” Shelley further criticises the Common Folk’s acceptance of their powerlessness when he questions “Have ye leisure, comfort, calm, / Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?” which through cumulative listing and his cynical tone evinces the upper class’ puissance provoking change towards greater equality and individualism. Shelley escalates his argument to examine the potential consequences of allowing the existing social stratification to remain through morbid imagery in “With plough and spade and hoe and loom / Trace your grave and build your tomb” and by doing so, Shelley examines the ironic nature of the lower class’ existence. Hence, Song to the Men of England explores the need to challenge power in order to gain freedom in line with the Romantic principle of
"Given or lent?” asks T. S. Eliot in his poem “Marina,” as he examines the construction of one’s own life from the point of view of a speaker who, reaching the later years of life, feels an urge to “resign” tattered, old life for “the hope, the new ships.” J. M. Coetzee grapples with some similar issues with his character Elizabeth Curren in the novel Age of Iron. Curren throughout the course of the novel goes through a process of realizing and accepting the fact that her comfortable life as a retired white professor in apartheid South Africa has truly been built on the foundation of a deplorable social system, as well as that she is not completely innocent in her complacency with that system. As Eliot understands that he has “Made this [life] unknowing, half-conscious, unknowing, my own,” Curren awakens as she disintegrates towards death to the reality of the conditions in South Africa and her own failures in life. However, whereas Eliot sees some salvation or rebirth, even if perhaps unreachable, in the youth of “the new ships,” Curren sees only a worrisome coldness and lack of innocence in the youth around her and feels nostalgia for earlier times. During the last days of her life, she dwells on the need for a softening in people that has been overcome by an iron-like attitude in the current climate, but she herself is swept into the very state that she denounces in many ways. She internalizes the softer side of herself, becoming more and more introspective and self-absorbed as the days move on, while displaying a harder shell to the outside world. Her inability to cast off her ways of thinking and acting within South African society despite her growing awareness of their pro...
My initial response to "A Work of Artifice" by Marge Piercy, was one of profound sadness. In defining myself as the actual reader of this poem, my background becomes significant in my emotional response. "It is this reader who comes to the text shaped by cultural and personal norms and prejudices." (Bressler, p. 72) I come from a family of poets and published writers and have been reading and composing poetry since the age of 4. My first poem was published in the local newspaper, in which I won first prize, at age 5. I have experienced all kinds of texts, as well as many different forms of art.
This piece of literature points out very good points of the differences between those in higher classes compared to those in lower classes. When this was written, most poets were transitioning into the Age of Science and Reason, therefore they were becoming up with more thoughts and ideas about logic and reason; the way things work. Gray shows this through the messages that he portrays in his “Elegy Written in a Churchyard” which are: death affects everyone despite their lifestyle, that those whom are in the lower class have less opportunities than others, and the virtue and purity of those who work and live as
Knowledge of contemporary British poetry is of great importance when it comes to understanding the reigning trends of England. The 1970s saw a fair amount of polemic concerning the discontinuities of the national "traditions," most of it concerned with poetry, all of it vulnerable to a blunt totalizing which demonstrated the triumphant ability of "nation" to organize literary study and judgment--as it does still, perhaps more than ever.