Term
[FIRST MAN]: We got his symptoms, didn't we?
[SECOND MAN}: Half of what he said meant something else, and the other half didn't mean anything at all.
[FIRST MAN}: Thwarted ambition--a sense of grievance, that's my diagnosis.
[SECOND MAN]: Six rhetorical and two repetition, leaving nineteen, of which we answered fifteen. And what did we get in return? He's depressed!...Denmark's a prison and he'd rather live in a nutshell; some shadow-play about the nature of ambition, never got down to cases, and finally one direct question which might have led somewhere, and led in fact to his illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw. |
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Definition
| Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard, 1966) |
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Term
Yet that which most my troubled sense doth move
Is to leave all, and take the thread of love
--Lady Mary Wroth
The "thread" refers to a gift given by |
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Definition
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Term
| Thomas Carlyle's d.o.b./d. |
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Definition
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Term
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined--
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance--Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken |
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Definition
| William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All" (1923) |
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Term
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill. |
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Definition
| Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar" (1919) |
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Term
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods--
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and rink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday. |
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Definition
| Robert Frost, "Spring Pools" (1928) |
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Term
From the moment that the striking clock, one of many symbolic timepieces, interrupts Olga's opening reminiscences of events "exactly a year ago," we know that the characters are caught up in varying permutations of time: longing for the past, of which Moscow is the most potent symbol, they snatch at moments of happiness in the tedious present of provincial life.
The play discussed is... |
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Definition
| Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" (1901) |
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Term
His heroine longs for "sighs in the moonlight, long embraces, hands at parting bathed in tears." Her enslavement to Rodolphe was enslavement to the plot of the nineteenth century feuilleton, and if she was destroyed, it was because she would rather die than live a life that was not in every respect a hackneyed romance. It was the author's achievement to make his readers simultaneously aware that Emma's infatuation was a cliche, yet no less tragic for all that.
The author whose work is discussed is... |
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Definition
| Flaubert (1821-1880), "Madame Bovary" (1857) |
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Term
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
The "king of kings" is |
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Definition
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Term
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
This is from a poem by... |
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Definition
| Yeats, "Among School Children" (1928) |
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Term
The novel he wrote about the lives of the Okies has come to symbolize the heartbreaking plight of the dispossessed. It has been called "a vivid parallel" to the situation of the American homeless today, "a story of people at the bottom of the world."
The novel discussed is... |
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Definition
| Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) |
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Term
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Definition
| a character in a poem by Ezra Pound, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920) |
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Term
My Case is bad. Lord, be my Advocate.
My sin is red: I'me under Gods arrest
Thou has the Hint of Pleading; plead my State.
Although it's bad thy Plea will make it best.
If Thou wilt plead my Case before the King:
I'le Waggon Loads of Love, and Glory bring. |
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Definition
| from "Meditation" by Edward Taylor, late 1600s |
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Term
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Definition
| mother who lost her children and wept until she turned to stone |
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Term
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Definition
| Henry James's "Daisy Miller" (1878) |
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Term
If he do bleed,
I'll gild the faces of the grooms withal,
For it must seem their guilt.
Which word is used in a double sense in these lines from Macbeth? |
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Definition
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Term
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Definition
a group of words acting as a noun
e.g.: "playing the banjo is extremely annoying" |
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Definition
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Definition
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Term
[FIRST SPEAKER]: Methinks
The manner of your death should much afflict you.
This cord should terrify you.
[SECOND SPEAKER]: Not a whit:
What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds? or to be smothered
With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exist. Tell my brothers
That I perceive death, now I am well awake,
Best gift is they can give or I can take. |
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Definition
| John Webster, "The Duchess of Malfi" (1612-13) |
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Term
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Definition
Daniel de Bosola. A former servant of the Cardinal, now returned from imprisonment in the galleys. Sent by Ferdinand to spy on the Duchess. Later, on Ferdinand's command, he orders her execution, and still later, he seeks to avenge her. Being the malcontent of the play, he tends to view things cynically, and makes numerous critical comments on the nature of Renaissance society. He is frequently characterized by his melancholy. (He is based on the historical Daniele de Bozolo, about whom less is known.)
John Webster, "The Duchess of Malfi" (1612-13) |
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Term
| Ilion is a variant name of... |
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Definition
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Term
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!
How is she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations,
And princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!
She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks. |
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Definition
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Term
Once did she hold the gorgeous east in fee;
And was the safeguard of the west:
..................................
She was a maiden City, bright and free;
No guile seduced, no force could violate;
And, when she took unto herself a Mate,
She must espouse the everlasting Sea. |
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Definition
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Term
Earth has not anything to show more fair;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty;
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. |
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Definition
| description of London, from "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," William Wordsworth |
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Term
| It has been formerly urged by you, and confessed by me, that since no man spoke any kind of verse extempore, that which was nearest nature was to be preferred. I answer you, therefore, by distinguishing betwixt what is nearest to the nature of comedy, which is the imitation of common persons and ordinary speaking, and what is nearest the nature of a serious play: this last is indeed the representation of nature, but 'tis nature wrought up to a higher pitch. The plot, the characters, the wit, the passions, the descriptions, are all exalted above the level of common converse, as high as the imagination of the poet can carry them, with proportion to verisimility. Tragedy, we know, is wont to imagine to us the minds and fortunes of noble persons, and to portray these exactly; heroic rhyme is nearest nature, as being the noblest kind of modern verse. "Indignatur enim privatis et prope socco/Dignis carminibus narrari coena Thyestae," says Horace: and in another place, "Effutire leves indigna tragaedia versus." Blank verse is acknowledged to be too low for a poem, nay more, for a paper of verses; but if too low for an ordinary sonnet, how much more for tragedy, which is by Aristotle, in the dispute betwixt the epic poesy and the dramatic, for many reasons he there alleges, ranked above it? |
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Definition
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Term
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Definition
| Aphra Behn, "Oroonoko" (1640-1689) |
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Term
| Sure Fortune will never have done with me till she hath driven me to distraction. But why do I blame Fortune? I am myself the cause of all my misery. All the dreadful mischiefs which have befallen me are the consequences of my own folly and vice. What thou has told me, Partridge, hath almost deprived me of my senses! And was Mrs. Waters, then--but why do I ask? for thou must certainly know her--If thou hast any affection for me, nay, if thou hast any pity, let me beseech thee to fetch this miserable woman back again to me. Oh, good Heavens! incest--with a mother! To what am I reserved! |
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Definition
| Henry Fielding, "Tom Jones" (1749) |
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Term
By nature trees do rot when they are grown.
And plums and apples thoroughly ripe do fall,
And corn and grass are in their season mown,
And time brings down what is both strong and tall.
But plants new set to be eradicate,
And buds new blown, to have so short a date,
Is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate. |
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Definition
| Anne Bradstreet (c.1612-1672), "In Memory of My Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet" |
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Term
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Definition
an understatement created through double negative (or, more precisely, negating the negative)
"Did you enjoy the party?"
"I found it not unpleasant." |
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Term
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Definition
| a word derived from Lyly's "Euphues" (1580) to characterize writing that is self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech. Popular and influential mode of speech and writing in the late 16th century. |
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Term
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach. |
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Definition
| Philip Larkin (1922-1985) |
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Term
You could cut the brackish winds with a knife
Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time
When the Lord God formed man from the sea's slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life,
And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will. |
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Definition
| Robert Lowell (1917-1977) |
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Term
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. |
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Definition
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Term
| We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year, certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence will be written with a high ambition, and so to build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature....We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. |
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Definition
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Term
| In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances of the contrary. I dressed plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting; a book, indeed, sometimes debauch'd me from my work; but that was seldom, snug, and gave no scandal: and to show that I was not above my business, I sometimes brought home the paper I purchas'd at the stores, thro' the streets on a wheelbarrow. Thus being esteem'd an industrious thriving young man, and paying duly for what I bought, the merchants who imported stationery solicited my custom, others propos'd supplying me with books, and I went on swimmingly. |
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Definition
| Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) |
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Term
| Tom Bertram, Lady Bertram |
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Definition
| Jane Austen, "Mansfield Park" (1814) |
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Term
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Definition
| Jane Austen, "Mansfield Park" (1814) |
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Term
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Definition
| Jane Austen, "Mansfield Park" (1814) |
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Term
| The main plot dates back to the Greeks: fair Hero is slandered, then allows her lover Claudio to think she has died. While Hero and Claudio play out their collision of chivalry and jealousy, Hero's cousin Beatrice and Claudio's friend Benedick exchange waspish badinage and talk themselves out of and then into love. |
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Definition
| Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing" |
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Term
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day
And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,
The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:
“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters. |
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Definition
| Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), "Channel Firing" |
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Term
A Drunkard cannot meet a Cork
Without a Revery--
And so encountering a Fly
This January Day
Jamaicas of Remembrance stir
That send me reeling in |
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Definition
| Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) |
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Term
| In "Writing Degree Zero" he argued that all inherited modes of writing, including the modern modes of stream-of-consciousness and expressionism, were inadequate because the writing was not "pure": they were contaminated by associations with and derivation from the dominant (bourgeois and capitalistic) culture and its ideology. Art and literature should go into hibernation, become anonymous and unidentifiable, denying the individualism and definition that, he believed, were characteristic of the ideology of bourgeois democratic society. |
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Definition
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Term
| As ____, she had learned never to trust a femme fatale like Estella Havisham but rather to lower her expectations and make her own way in the world |
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Definition
| Pip, from Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" (1861) |
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Term
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Definition
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Term
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. |
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Definition
| W.H. Auden, "Musee des Beaux Arts," (1938) |
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Term
Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th' oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out the Sandals gray,
He touch'd the tender stops of various Quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the Sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the Western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blew:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. |
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Definition
| "Lycidas" (1637), a pastoral elegy by John Milton |
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Term
| [The business of criticism] is...simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. |
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Definition
| Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), a devout classicist and very much a believer in "sweetness and light," which refers to the quality and beneficial values of classical literature |
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Term
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Definition
Matthew Arnold
Central thesis: culture (the arts) ideally nourishes, promotes, and calls forth the best in mankind |
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Term
| Let us give up the failed enterprise of seeking to "understand" any single poem as an entity in itself. Let us pursue instead the quest of learning to read any poem as its poet's deliberate misinterpretation, as a poet, of a precursor poem or of poetry in general. Know each poem by its clinamen and you will "know" that poem in a way that will not purchase knowledge by the loss of the poem's power. |
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Definition
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Term
| If criticism exists, it must be an examination of literature in terms of a conceptual framework derivable from an inductive survey of the literary field. |
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Definition
| Northrop Frye (1912-1991) |
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Term
| When I was acting, with my children and friends, in Mr. Wilkie Collins's drama of "the Frozen Deep," I first conceived the main idea of this story. A strong desire was upon me then to embody it in my own person...It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle's wonderful book. |
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Definition
| Dickens explains how he came to write "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) |
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Term
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
I chant a new chant of dilation or pride,
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough,
I show that size is only development. |
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Definition
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Term
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Definition
| Coleridge's (1772-1834) comments on Iago |
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Term
Never sell your wives to sailors when the booze is in the blood:
You may rise to civic honours, but your name will still be mud;
Rivals take your trade and profit, promised spouses let you down,
"Daughters" find their rightful fathers, ruin drives you from the town. |
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Definition
| subject is Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge" (1886) |
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Term
Dr. Aziz and Miss Quested,
While the picnic party rested,
Wandered through the bat-infested
Caves of Marabar and jested. |
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Definition
| subject is Forster's "A Passage to India" (1924) |
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Term
But I, that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform'd, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable,
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasure of these days. |
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Definition
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Term
| In the latter end of the same kings raigne sprong up a new company of courtly makers, who having travailed into Italie, there tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile of the Italian Poets Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch. They greatly pollished our rude and homely maner of vulgar Poesie from that it had bene before. |
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Definition
| Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Lord Henry Howard, Early of Surrey (1517-1547) were the first poets to use the sonnet form in English. |
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Term
| Written with surprising accuracy and realism, especially given that the author had never participated in war, _______ undercut the presumptions of glory and heroism that historians of the time brought to their accounts of seemingly every battle in the great national struggle. |
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Definition
| Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" (1895) |
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Term
| Many of his plays build toward specific and irrevocable acts of aggression that lead to the pivotal characters' being either appropriated, like Stanley in "The Birthday Party," or expelled, like Davies in "The Caretaker" |
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Definition
| discusses Harold Pinter (1930-2008) |
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Term
| The first sentence looks complete, but the lowercase opening is an indication that it is not. The beginning is to be found on the last page of the book, which hence does not end with a full stop: "A way a lone a last a loved a long the" |
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Definition
| describes Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1939) |
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Term
Alas! what ails poor Geraldine?
Why stares she with unsettled eye?
Can she the bodiless dead espy?
And why with hollow voice cries she,
"Off, woman, off! this hour is mine--
Though thou her guardian spirit be,
Off, woman off! 'tis given to me." |
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Definition
| Coleridge's "Christabel" (1816) |
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Term
| This is Nature's nest of Boxes: the Heavens contain the earth, the earth, cities, cities, men. And all these are concentric: the common center to them all is decay, ruin; only that is eccentric which was never made; only that place or garment rather, which we can imagine, but not demonstrate--that light which is the very emanation of the light of God, in which the saints shall dwell, with which the saints shall be apparelled--only that bends not to this center, this ruin; that which was not made of Nothing is not threatened with this annihilation. All other things are, even angels, even our souls: they move upon the same poles, they bend to the same center, and if they were not made immortal by preservation, their nature could not keep them from sinking to this center, annihilation. |
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Definition
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Term
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Definition
| turns Odysseus's men into pigs, tries to dupe him into taking his manhood |
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Term
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Definition
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Term
| Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees--he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. |
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Definition
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Term
Now farewell, my own father so fine,
And greet well my mother in eard.
But I pray you, father, to hide mine eyn
That I may not see the stroke of your sharp sword. |
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Definition
"The Brome play of Abraham and Isaac," 15th century, unknown
medieval mystery play |
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Term
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Definition
| Beckett's "Endgame" (1957) |
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Term
But tell the Dauphin I will keep my state,
Be like a king, and show my sail of greatness
When I do rouse me in my throne of France:
For that I have laid by my majesty
And plodded like a man for working-days,
But I will rise there with so full a glory
That I will dazzle all the eyes of France,
Yea, strike the Dauphin blind to look on us.
The "I" is... |
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Definition
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Term
| A dominant feature of the late-nineteenth-century drawing room is the portrait of a general in dress uniform. He is as out of place in this house as is his daughter, who has just moved in, married to a naive, bumbling scholar. |
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Definition
| describes Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" (1890) |
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Term
| The first scene takes place in the heroine's bedroom, where she has a portrait of her betrothed now away at war. A member of the enemy army who finds refuge in the bedroom recognizes the portrait as that of the foolhardy officer who had led a cavalry charge. |
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Definition
| Shaw's "Arms and the Man" (1894) |
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Term
| A dominant feature of this cramped apartment in St. Louis is a portrait of the narrator's father, an employee of the telephone company who "fell in love with long distances" and deserted his family. |
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Definition
| Williams' "The Glass Menagerie" (1944) |
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Term
Half way, for one commandment broken,
The woman made her endless halt,
And she to-day, a glistering token,
Stands in the wilderness of salt.
Behind, the vats of judgment brewing
Thundered, and thick the brimstone snowed;
He to the hill of his undoing
Pursued his road.
The "commandment broken" is |
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Definition
| not to look back on a scene of God's wrath |
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Term
Half way, for one commandment broken,
The woman made her endless halt,
And she to-day, a glistering token,
Stands in the wilderness of salt.
Behind, the vats of judgment brewing
Thundered, and thick the brimstone snowed;
He to the hill of his undoing
Pursued his road.
The "woman" is |
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Definition
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Term
| Brangwens, Marsh Farm, Erewash (river), Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Ilkeston (places) |
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Definition
| D.H. Lawrence, "The Rainbow" (1915) |
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Term
| He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as a ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular. |
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Definition
| Joseph Conrad, "Lord Jim" (1900) |
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Term
| Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not--some people of course never do--the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. |
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Definition
| Henry James, "The Portrait of a Lady" (1881) |
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Term
|
Definition
| Henry James, "The Portrait of a Lady" (1881) |
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Term
|
Definition
| Laurence Sterne, "Tristram Shandy" (1759-1767) |
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Term
If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic
line as a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental
terms, and plant them everywhere
................................
Though the Philistine may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band,
If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand.
The movement alluded to is most closely associated with.... |
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Definition
| Wilde (1854-1900), Pater (1839-1894), Whistler (1834-1903) |
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Term
| Amelia Sedley, Becky Sharp |
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Definition
| Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" (1847-48) |
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Term
| Standing on the bare ground--my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space--all mean egotism vanishes. I am become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. |
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Definition
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Term
| Blindfolded, I could no longer control my motions. I had no dignity. I stumbled about like a baby or a drunken man. The smoke had become thicker and with each new blow it seemed to sear and further restrict my lungs. My saliva became like hot bitter glue. A glove connected with my head, filling my mouth with warm blood. It was everywhere. I could not tell if the moisture I felt upon my body was sweat or blood. A blow landed hard against the nape of my neck. I felt myself going over, my head hitting the floor. |
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Definition
| Ellison's "Invisible Man" (1953) |
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Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung. |
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| The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guinicelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. |
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| It was all so nearly alike it must be different and it is different, it is natural that if everything is used and there is a continuous present and a beginning again and again if it is all so alike it must be simply different and everything simply different was the natural way of creating it then. |
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| Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) |
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| It was a trait common to all these tales told by the Somali women that the heroine, chaste or not, would get the better of the male characters and come out of the tale triumphant...Within this enclosed women's world, so to say, behind the walls and fortifications of it, I felt the presence of a great ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millennium when women were to reign supreme in the world. |
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I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June and July flowers;
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes. |
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| There rests now that we give the description we promised of the scene, which was the House of Fame. The structure and ornament of which (as professed before) was entirely Mr. Jones his invention and design. First for the lower columns he chose the statues of the most excellent poets, as Homer, Virgil, Lucan, etc., as being the substantial supporters of Fame. For the upper, Achilles, Aeneas, Caesar, and those great heroes which those poets had celebrated. All which stood as in massy gold. Between the pillars underneath were figured land battles, sea fights, triumphs, loves, sacrifices, and all magnificent subjects of honor. |
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Definition
| describes the setting of a masque by Ben Jonson (1572-1637) |
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| She finds, when it is too late, that she cannot live without the society she grew up in, without her son and family--all the things she had abandoned in order to be with her lover. Her creator said of his many drafts of the plot of the novel that whatever he planned or altered he could do nothing to stop her suicide. |
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| Anna Karenina, "Anna Karenina," Leo Tolstoy (1878) |
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| English, or Shakespearean, sonnet |
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Definition
| 14 lines, abab cdcd efef gg |
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He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely; he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th'unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light. |
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Definition
| Shelley (1792-1822) mourns Keats (1795-1821) |
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| He believed that "What the intellect restores to us under the name of the past is not the past" and, by way of example, described four instances of involuntary memory: the garden of Auteuil unfolding in his cup of tea, "like the Japanese paper flowers which only come to life when we drop them in water"; Venice preserved by his stumbling, "last year, as I was crossing a courtyard," on an uneven paving-stone; the trees near a railway-line, barred with sunlight and shadow, resurrected by the tinkling of a spoon on a saucer; and the never-solved enigma of the group of trees, which would reappear to the narrator during his drive near Balbec. |
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Definition
| discussion of Proust (1871-1922) |
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| According to Elizabeth Gaskell, "The sisters retained the old habit....Each read to the others what she had written, and heard what they had to say about i....The readings were of great and stirring interest to all, taking them out of the gnawing pressure of daily-recurring cases, and setting them in a free place. It was on one of these occasions that Charlotte determined to make her heroine plain, small, and unattractive, in defiance of the accepted canon." |
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Definition
| heroine described is Jane Eyre, from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" (1847) |
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| Clyde Griffiths, Samuel Griffiths, Lycurgus (town) |
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Definition
| Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" (1925) |
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Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth.
Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is laid low.
Earthly glory ageth and seareth.
No man ata ll going the earth's gait,
But age fares against him, his face paleth,
Grey-haired he groaneth, knows gone companions. |
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| from Pound's (1885-1972) translation of the Old English "Seafarer" |
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| Septimus Harding, Dr. Proudie, Obadiah Slope |
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| Trollope (1815-1882), Barsetshire novels |
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Term
| Pierrot, Columbine, Harlequin |
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Definition
| commedia dell'arte, an early form of improvisational theater |
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| You seldom find him making love in any of his scenes or endeavoring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such an height. Humour was his proper sphere: and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed freely from them. But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by law. |
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Definition
| Dryden (1631-1700) on Jonson (1572-1637) |
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Definition
an inversion of the relationship between the elements of phrases
e.g.: "I formed them free, and free they must remain"
- Paradise Lost |
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