This document provides context and analysis of Roger White's final collection of poetry titled "The Language of There". It discusses the significance of 1992 as both the 100th anniversary of Baha'u'llah's ascension and a time of spiritual renewal referred to in messages from the Universal House of Justice. White published two final works that year before passing away in 1993. The document examines themes in White's last poems, including reflections on the afterlife, and analyzes how his poetry evolved over his career to convey optimism, humility and joy even in addressing death. It highlights the appeal and impact of White's final works in continuing to stimulate readers and convey spiritual truths through his distinctive style until the very end.
The document discusses John Keats' odes and how they express both happiness and sadness. It analyzes several of Keats' major odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to Autumn", and "Ode on Melancholy". A key point made is that while Keats' poetry celebrates beauty, it also conveys an underlying sense of melancholy and an awareness of mortality. The document argues this reflects Keats' own tragic life, which was cut short by tuberculosis despite his love of beauty, nature, and the senses.
This document provides an analysis and summary of Roger White's poetry collection "One Bird One Cage One Flight". It discusses how White's poetry engages with the work of Emily Dickinson and explores themes of spirituality, death, and transcendence. The summary highlights that White's poetry in this collection focuses on Dickinson's life and spirit through repetition, and aims to commune with her across time through simpler language than her often complex work. It also notes that White's poetry addresses both personal and universal experiences, creating intimacy while maintaining anonymity about the poet's own life.
B. A. Sem - IV - 'She Walks in Beauty' by Lord ByronAnil Raut
Lord Byron wrote the poem "She Walks in Beauty" in 1814 after being inspired by his cousin at a party. The poem describes a woman of exceptional beauty, both physically and spiritually. Over three stanzas, Byron uses imagery of light and dark to portray how her external good looks are matched by an equally beautiful soul and virtuous character. He emphasizes that true beauty comes from harmony between inner thoughts and outward appearance.
B. A. Sem - IV - "Hunger " by Jayanta MahapatraAnil Raut
The poem depicts the degraded conditions that people living in poverty endure. A fisherman, in a state of hunger, offers his 15-year old daughter to a stranger in exchange for money or food. In his lean-to hut, the fisherman persuades the man to have sex with his daughter, as he must leave and the daughter is alone. The man hesitates, feeling guilty, but also understands the physical hunger the two endure that drives such an act. The daughter is malnourished but obediently opens herself, showing the dehumanizing effects of prolonged poverty. The poem illustrates how hunger can compromise one's morality and humanity.
http://youtu.be/PiCfrt8Sr3I ,JOHN KEATS,AS A THINKER IN RELATION TO CRITICAL...Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri
Keats's poetry is characterized by sensuous delight in the beauty of nature. He looks at the natural world with child-like wonder, thrilled by what he sees, hears, and experiences with all his senses. In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats seeks escape into the world of the nightingale's song to forget the pains of life, but realizes that fancy cannot provide lasting escape from reality. The poem reflects the human experience that life is full of sorrow and disappointment, and that youth, beauty, and joy are all fleeting.
- Keats did not like to foster abstract thought in his poetry and cared little for intellectual truths that could not be verified through experience.
- Keats believed the poet should have "negative capability" - the ability to exist with uncertainties and doubts without reaching for facts or reasons.
- For Keats, poetry's purpose was to give pleasure by revealing universal psychological truths about human nature, not personal thoughts or views. The poet must replace the personal with the general to create a sense of "remembrance" in readers.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a Victorian poet and novelist. This document provides context about Hardy's life and work. It summarizes that he wrote during the Victorian period of industrialization, when many lost faith in religion. It led many poets like Hardy to idealize nature and express human emotion through their representation of the natural world. The document then examines some of Hardy's poetic techniques, including his use of regular form and structure, language featuring semantic fields, and imagery including personification and pathetic fallacy. It provides examples from his poem "I Look into My Glass" to illustrate his style.
The poem tells the story of a trampwoman and her lover who travel with another man and the woman's mother. While staying at an inn, the woman teases her lover by flirting with the other man, causing her lover to kill the other man in a fit of jealousy. He is later hanged for the crime, leaving the woman alone to give birth under a tree near the jail where he was hanged.
The document discusses John Keats' odes and how they express both happiness and sadness. It analyzes several of Keats' major odes, including "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to Autumn", and "Ode on Melancholy". A key point made is that while Keats' poetry celebrates beauty, it also conveys an underlying sense of melancholy and an awareness of mortality. The document argues this reflects Keats' own tragic life, which was cut short by tuberculosis despite his love of beauty, nature, and the senses.
This document provides an analysis and summary of Roger White's poetry collection "One Bird One Cage One Flight". It discusses how White's poetry engages with the work of Emily Dickinson and explores themes of spirituality, death, and transcendence. The summary highlights that White's poetry in this collection focuses on Dickinson's life and spirit through repetition, and aims to commune with her across time through simpler language than her often complex work. It also notes that White's poetry addresses both personal and universal experiences, creating intimacy while maintaining anonymity about the poet's own life.
B. A. Sem - IV - 'She Walks in Beauty' by Lord ByronAnil Raut
Lord Byron wrote the poem "She Walks in Beauty" in 1814 after being inspired by his cousin at a party. The poem describes a woman of exceptional beauty, both physically and spiritually. Over three stanzas, Byron uses imagery of light and dark to portray how her external good looks are matched by an equally beautiful soul and virtuous character. He emphasizes that true beauty comes from harmony between inner thoughts and outward appearance.
B. A. Sem - IV - "Hunger " by Jayanta MahapatraAnil Raut
The poem depicts the degraded conditions that people living in poverty endure. A fisherman, in a state of hunger, offers his 15-year old daughter to a stranger in exchange for money or food. In his lean-to hut, the fisherman persuades the man to have sex with his daughter, as he must leave and the daughter is alone. The man hesitates, feeling guilty, but also understands the physical hunger the two endure that drives such an act. The daughter is malnourished but obediently opens herself, showing the dehumanizing effects of prolonged poverty. The poem illustrates how hunger can compromise one's morality and humanity.
http://youtu.be/PiCfrt8Sr3I ,JOHN KEATS,AS A THINKER IN RELATION TO CRITICAL...Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri
Keats's poetry is characterized by sensuous delight in the beauty of nature. He looks at the natural world with child-like wonder, thrilled by what he sees, hears, and experiences with all his senses. In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats seeks escape into the world of the nightingale's song to forget the pains of life, but realizes that fancy cannot provide lasting escape from reality. The poem reflects the human experience that life is full of sorrow and disappointment, and that youth, beauty, and joy are all fleeting.
- Keats did not like to foster abstract thought in his poetry and cared little for intellectual truths that could not be verified through experience.
- Keats believed the poet should have "negative capability" - the ability to exist with uncertainties and doubts without reaching for facts or reasons.
- For Keats, poetry's purpose was to give pleasure by revealing universal psychological truths about human nature, not personal thoughts or views. The poet must replace the personal with the general to create a sense of "remembrance" in readers.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a Victorian poet and novelist. This document provides context about Hardy's life and work. It summarizes that he wrote during the Victorian period of industrialization, when many lost faith in religion. It led many poets like Hardy to idealize nature and express human emotion through their representation of the natural world. The document then examines some of Hardy's poetic techniques, including his use of regular form and structure, language featuring semantic fields, and imagery including personification and pathetic fallacy. It provides examples from his poem "I Look into My Glass" to illustrate his style.
The poem tells the story of a trampwoman and her lover who travel with another man and the woman's mother. While staying at an inn, the woman teases her lover by flirting with the other man, causing her lover to kill the other man in a fit of jealousy. He is later hanged for the crime, leaving the woman alone to give birth under a tree near the jail where he was hanged.
Landscape of the mind presentation finalIrbaz Khan
Salman Tarik Kureshi is a Pakistani English poet. His collection "Landscapes of the Mind" portrays the experience of postcolonial displacement and personal betrayal through intimate connections between inner and outer landscapes. Kureshi seeks to establish these connections through jagged yet melodic poetry that both moves and disturbs readers. The collection contains 37 poems with many having geographical titles that reflect Kureshi's affinity for nature. Symbols like rivers and rain are used to represent unpredictability and the need for prosperity. Kureshi shows influence from Western poets like Browning, Hughes, and Eliot but establishes his own voice in depicting the landscapes of his mind.
The document provides an overview of a lesson on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. It begins by asking students to recall what they learned previously about Chaucer and life in the Middle Ages. It then discusses The Knight's Tale, one of the stories within The Canterbury Tales, focusing on how it presents the medieval concept of courtly love through the tale of two cousins who fall in love with the same woman. The lesson objectives are to analyze the depiction of love and society in 14th century England through The Knight's Tale and to understand the theme of courtly love within the story.
Part 1:
Laura (Riding) Jackson(1901-1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer whom I came to know about in the first years of my retirement after a 50 year student-and-paid-employment life: 1949 to 1999. In 1938 W.H. Auden called her "the only living philosophical poet, and in 1939 another American poet, Robert Fitzgerald, expressed the hope that with the 1938 publication of her Collected Poems, "the authority and the dignity of truth-telling, lost by poetry to science, may gradually be regained."1
For the last two days I have spent many hours reading about this most philosophical of poets who has come onto the radar of many writers and poets since the early 1990s, partly due to the extensive publication of her work which has continued since her death in 1991. I began reading and writing poetry seriously, myself, in the early 1990s. I first heard of Laura Riding back in the 1990s, but time and circumstance, responsibilities and health issues, prevented me from taking a serious look at her life and work.
Part 1.1:
Jack Blackmore, in a paper given at The Laura (Riding) Jackson Conference in 2010 expressed the view that: "There are affinities between Riding, Coleridge, and William Blake. There is a common optimism and conviction: that one’s self, one self, through the most intense scrutiny of and engagement with language and life, can take the measure of the universe."2 Blackmore included the following quotation from Coleridge to support that poet's affinity with Riding: "The Poet is not only the man who is made to solve the riddle of the Universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved and this continually awakens his feelings …"-Coleridge, Lecture on Poetry, 12 December 1811.
Blackmore went on to say that "more than any poet in recent times Laura Riding conceived of her poems as a whole work, a universe."2 And so, too, do I in relation to what has become a vast corpus, a very large personal oeuvre. There are many aspects of Riding's philosophy of poetry, her view of writing, literature and life that provide parallels with my own way of going about my literary enterprise. It is for this reason that I write this prose-poetic piece.
Keats was deeply influenced by beauty in all its forms, which he saw as the highest aesthetic ideal. For Keats, beauty was truth, and he believed the greatest poetry expressed beauty for its own sake rather than having any didactic purpose. He found beauty everywhere in nature, in art, and in people. Keats viewed the world of beauty as an escape from the pains of reality, and through his poetry he aimed to capture beauty and make it eternal. His concept of beauty encompassed both joy and sorrow, and he believed imagination could reveal deeper aspects of beauty than what is perceptible by the senses alone.
B. Sc. Sem - II - Money Madness by D.H. Lawrence Anil Raut
The poem "Money Madness" by D.H. Lawrence criticizes society's obsession with wealth and material possessions. It describes how the pursuit of money has made people collectively mad, isolating them from human qualities like sympathy. The poet suggests that society views a person's worth solely based on their financial status. If someone lacks money, they are treated with contempt and forced to endure humiliation. Lawrence argues that basic needs like food, shelter, and warmth should be universal rights, not privileges reserved for those who can pay. He calls for people to regain sanity regarding money before conflict and violence erupt over it.
This document provides background information on the Romantic poet John Keats. It discusses his life, works, and critical reception. Key details include that Keats died young at age 26 of tuberculosis, as did his mother and brother; he fell in love with his neighbor Fanny Brawne but could not marry due to lack of money; and he wrote many of his famous poems in 1819, his "annus mirabilis." The document also analyzes themes in his poetry like love, nature, and beauty, and defines concepts like negative capability that were important to Keats' poetic philosophy.
Coleridge provides a summary and critique of Wordsworth's views on poetic diction as expressed in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. He objects that not all of Wordsworth's characters are truly from low and rustic life, and their language cannot be attributed solely to their environment. Additionally, the language of rustics is too limited to form the basis of poetic language, as it lacks ideas, thoughts, and vocabulary derived from reflection. While Wordsworth aimed to use natural language, Coleridge argues the best parts of language come from thinking on noble concepts, not the direct expressions of rustics. Their views thus differ on the proper sources and qualities of language suitable for poetic works.
The document analyzes the poetry of Sarojini Naidu and discusses the diversity of criticism around her work. It explores her efforts at self-exploration and adjustment to the outer world through an analysis of some of her poems. While some critics praised her work for enriching language and connecting with the spirit of the East, others found a lack of depth and felt her flights of song were not quite real in life. The document conducts a critical reappraisal of Naidu's poetry to understand her self-image as reflected in her work and her confrontation of experience through themes of nature, love, pleasure and pain, and the juxtaposition of life and death.
IMPOLITE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE TO A CRITICAL EVALUATION ON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY'...Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri
Perhaps,http://youtu.be/R6mefXs5h9o.
The beautiful atmospheric phenomenon with romantic and dignified language, the ferocity and power of west wind respectively presents the genesis of the poem, making the legend to represent the soaring idealism of the Romantics and a radical belief in a Utopia.-Percy Bysshe Shelley in his alliterative poem 'Ode to the West Wind', An Eternal Beauty of Truth and Philosophy.
The document analyzes two poems by Thomas Hardy, "If It's Ever Spring Again" and "It Never Looks Like Summer" to understand how Hardy uses descriptions of spring and summer. Both poems depict nostalgia for past relationships through descriptions of nature. Though spring and summer normally represent optimism, here they symbolize lost love and regret. The poems lack descriptive details but use contrasts to express feelings of sadness and doubt about the past. For Hardy, nature represents both beauty and "strangeness" as he explores themes of love, loss, and pessimism through the seasons.
it includes
objections and defence
Review of each paragraph
essence and existence
prose and poetry
meter
effects of meter
principles of writing
coleridge as a critic
This document is the preface and first chapter of a book titled "The Visionary Shakespeare" by Alexander C. H. Tung. The preface discusses how Shakespeare can be considered one of the greatest visionaries, in the sense that his works often represent eternal truths about life. The book contains 7 papers that analyze different visions found in Shakespeare's works, including ironic, deconstructionist, semiotic, psychoanalytic, racial, humanist, and visions of nature and power. The preface argues these visions can be found across multiple plays, though each paper focuses on manifesting a particular vision in one or a few plays. The first chapter analyzes Romeo and Juliet, arguing it can be seen as a "
biography of s.t coleridge
introduction to biographia literaria
synopsis of chap 14
critical analysis
literary devices
objections and defence
fancy and imagination
primary and secondary imagination
Roger White's Book: The Witness of PebblesRon Price
In 1981, two years after the publication of Roger White's first book of poetry, the second of what would eventually be three books of Roger White's poetry from the George Ronald publishers of Oxford was published. This second volume contained nearly three times as many poems as the first. Geoffrey Nash, who had finished his doctorate on Thomas Carlyle and had just completed writing his first book: Iran's Secret Pogrom, wrote the introduction.
The following year, in 1982, Nash was to go on and write the first significant essay on the work of Roger White: The Heroic Soul and the Ordinary Self. The publication of this volume of poetry was timely. Robert Hayden, a Baha'i, and an American poet laureate in the 1970s, had died the previous year. He had been a Baha'i and a poet for over forty years. In some important ways the Baha'i consciousness in world literature that this book is discussing found its first significant poetic expression in the poetry of Robert Hayden. John Hatcher points out that Hayden came of age as a poet in the early forties, during the first teaching Plan, 1937-1944. A Baha'i consciousness slowly grew in his poetic expression beginning in 1943 when he joined the Baha'i Faith, although it did not become obvious, did not express significant Baha'i themes, until at least 1962 in Hayden's collection A Ballad of Remembrance.
Love through the_ages_intro[1] great pictures outlineenglishcgs
This document provides an overview of the requirements for the final examination on the theme of love through the ages for an English literature course. The exam will require students to closely analyze and compare unseen extracts from poetry, prose, and drama written at different times on the theme of love. Students will be expected to draw on their wider reading across genres, time periods, and styles to interpret how writers have approached love and how readers may interpret texts differently. The exam will consist of two compulsory questions requiring analysis and comparison of the unseen extracts and references to other works on love.
John Keats was a prominent English Romantic poet influenced by Greek art, culture, and mythology. As a "Young Romantic," he believed in "art for art's sake" and wrote poetry focused on beauty, sensuousness, and nature rather than propaganda. Keats' poetry is characterized by vivid imagery experienced through all five senses and calm, concrete descriptions of nature without ideological overtones. His works also reflected Hellenism through their emphasis on Greek themes of beauty, tragedy, and fatalism.
Elit 48 c class 12 post qhq singulars vs pluralsjordanlachance
Here are a few key points about how feminist theory could be applied to analyzing Mina Loy's poem "Parturition":
- Loy critiques the patriarchal social norms and gender roles of her time that positioned women as inferior to men. She subverts expectations by portraying childbirth, a uniquely female experience, as a heroic act of strength and empowerment.
- The poem draws parallels between the physical struggles of childbirth and the everyday mental/emotional struggles women face living in a male-dominated society. Both are depicted as oppressive "mountains of agony."
- By focusing so intently on the female experience of pregnancy/birth without much mention of the male role, Loy emphasizes women's agency
The poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats follows a regular ode form but gives the impression of free expression of thoughts and emotions. It describes Keats' experience of listening to a nightingale sing and the thoughts it provokes. These include his negative view of life as painful and unhappy, and his wish to escape through imagination or death. However, the poem acknowledges the limitations of imagination and the inability to fully escape reality. It explores themes of mortality, the fleeting nature of happiness, and the power and limitations of poetry and imagination.
Wordsworth outlines three principles in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads: 1) the poetry concerns nature and country life, 2) it emphasizes poetry as an art form to enlighten readers on human emotion, and 3) clean, simple lines best capture the imagination rather than overly complicated styles. He chose rustic subjects and language to find a "plainer and more emphatic" way to communicate passions. Poetry combines feeling and thought as a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions and ideas. The poet's duty is to produce pleasure and enlarge human capability. Wordsworth defends his choice of common subjects and language to better understand essential human passions.
The document discusses Shelley's importance as a Romantic poet. Some key points made are:
- Shelley's poems focus on extreme human emotion and the wonders of nature, both hallmarks of Romanticism.
- Romantics valued emotion over reason and a return to nature. Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark" praises the bird's "unpremeditated art" and asks readers to listen, not analyze.
- Compared to earlier Romantics, Shelley portrayed nature as indifferent to human suffering and a backdrop for themes of man's insignificance.
This piece of writing was an introduction to a book of poetry by a friend. The book was entitled: Occasions of Grace. The book was published in 1992 by George Ronald Oxford The book of my essays about the poetry of Roger White is available in cyberspace at Baha'i Library Online and at Juxta Publishing in Hong Kong.
This is a 100,000 word, 200 page, longitudinal, retrospective and prospective account of my experience with bipolar disorder and some other mental health problems over 70 years: from October 1943 to October 2013. This account is a personal, clinical, and idiosyncratic study of what some life-study students call a chaos narrative. This study focuses on an aspect of my life involving several mental health issues, but mainly bipolar 1 disorder. This account is now in its 13th edition. In my retirement, the years from 2001 to 2013, I have revised the account each year up-dating the content (i) as new information about the mental health issues I deal with are added to the science, and (ii) as I continue to deal with these mental health issues as I head to the age of 70 in 2014.
Landscape of the mind presentation finalIrbaz Khan
Salman Tarik Kureshi is a Pakistani English poet. His collection "Landscapes of the Mind" portrays the experience of postcolonial displacement and personal betrayal through intimate connections between inner and outer landscapes. Kureshi seeks to establish these connections through jagged yet melodic poetry that both moves and disturbs readers. The collection contains 37 poems with many having geographical titles that reflect Kureshi's affinity for nature. Symbols like rivers and rain are used to represent unpredictability and the need for prosperity. Kureshi shows influence from Western poets like Browning, Hughes, and Eliot but establishes his own voice in depicting the landscapes of his mind.
The document provides an overview of a lesson on Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. It begins by asking students to recall what they learned previously about Chaucer and life in the Middle Ages. It then discusses The Knight's Tale, one of the stories within The Canterbury Tales, focusing on how it presents the medieval concept of courtly love through the tale of two cousins who fall in love with the same woman. The lesson objectives are to analyze the depiction of love and society in 14th century England through The Knight's Tale and to understand the theme of courtly love within the story.
Part 1:
Laura (Riding) Jackson(1901-1991) was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer whom I came to know about in the first years of my retirement after a 50 year student-and-paid-employment life: 1949 to 1999. In 1938 W.H. Auden called her "the only living philosophical poet, and in 1939 another American poet, Robert Fitzgerald, expressed the hope that with the 1938 publication of her Collected Poems, "the authority and the dignity of truth-telling, lost by poetry to science, may gradually be regained."1
For the last two days I have spent many hours reading about this most philosophical of poets who has come onto the radar of many writers and poets since the early 1990s, partly due to the extensive publication of her work which has continued since her death in 1991. I began reading and writing poetry seriously, myself, in the early 1990s. I first heard of Laura Riding back in the 1990s, but time and circumstance, responsibilities and health issues, prevented me from taking a serious look at her life and work.
Part 1.1:
Jack Blackmore, in a paper given at The Laura (Riding) Jackson Conference in 2010 expressed the view that: "There are affinities between Riding, Coleridge, and William Blake. There is a common optimism and conviction: that one’s self, one self, through the most intense scrutiny of and engagement with language and life, can take the measure of the universe."2 Blackmore included the following quotation from Coleridge to support that poet's affinity with Riding: "The Poet is not only the man who is made to solve the riddle of the Universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved and this continually awakens his feelings …"-Coleridge, Lecture on Poetry, 12 December 1811.
Blackmore went on to say that "more than any poet in recent times Laura Riding conceived of her poems as a whole work, a universe."2 And so, too, do I in relation to what has become a vast corpus, a very large personal oeuvre. There are many aspects of Riding's philosophy of poetry, her view of writing, literature and life that provide parallels with my own way of going about my literary enterprise. It is for this reason that I write this prose-poetic piece.
Keats was deeply influenced by beauty in all its forms, which he saw as the highest aesthetic ideal. For Keats, beauty was truth, and he believed the greatest poetry expressed beauty for its own sake rather than having any didactic purpose. He found beauty everywhere in nature, in art, and in people. Keats viewed the world of beauty as an escape from the pains of reality, and through his poetry he aimed to capture beauty and make it eternal. His concept of beauty encompassed both joy and sorrow, and he believed imagination could reveal deeper aspects of beauty than what is perceptible by the senses alone.
B. Sc. Sem - II - Money Madness by D.H. Lawrence Anil Raut
The poem "Money Madness" by D.H. Lawrence criticizes society's obsession with wealth and material possessions. It describes how the pursuit of money has made people collectively mad, isolating them from human qualities like sympathy. The poet suggests that society views a person's worth solely based on their financial status. If someone lacks money, they are treated with contempt and forced to endure humiliation. Lawrence argues that basic needs like food, shelter, and warmth should be universal rights, not privileges reserved for those who can pay. He calls for people to regain sanity regarding money before conflict and violence erupt over it.
This document provides background information on the Romantic poet John Keats. It discusses his life, works, and critical reception. Key details include that Keats died young at age 26 of tuberculosis, as did his mother and brother; he fell in love with his neighbor Fanny Brawne but could not marry due to lack of money; and he wrote many of his famous poems in 1819, his "annus mirabilis." The document also analyzes themes in his poetry like love, nature, and beauty, and defines concepts like negative capability that were important to Keats' poetic philosophy.
Coleridge provides a summary and critique of Wordsworth's views on poetic diction as expressed in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. He objects that not all of Wordsworth's characters are truly from low and rustic life, and their language cannot be attributed solely to their environment. Additionally, the language of rustics is too limited to form the basis of poetic language, as it lacks ideas, thoughts, and vocabulary derived from reflection. While Wordsworth aimed to use natural language, Coleridge argues the best parts of language come from thinking on noble concepts, not the direct expressions of rustics. Their views thus differ on the proper sources and qualities of language suitable for poetic works.
The document analyzes the poetry of Sarojini Naidu and discusses the diversity of criticism around her work. It explores her efforts at self-exploration and adjustment to the outer world through an analysis of some of her poems. While some critics praised her work for enriching language and connecting with the spirit of the East, others found a lack of depth and felt her flights of song were not quite real in life. The document conducts a critical reappraisal of Naidu's poetry to understand her self-image as reflected in her work and her confrontation of experience through themes of nature, love, pleasure and pain, and the juxtaposition of life and death.
IMPOLITE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE TO A CRITICAL EVALUATION ON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY'...Rituparna Ray Chaudhuri
Perhaps,http://youtu.be/R6mefXs5h9o.
The beautiful atmospheric phenomenon with romantic and dignified language, the ferocity and power of west wind respectively presents the genesis of the poem, making the legend to represent the soaring idealism of the Romantics and a radical belief in a Utopia.-Percy Bysshe Shelley in his alliterative poem 'Ode to the West Wind', An Eternal Beauty of Truth and Philosophy.
The document analyzes two poems by Thomas Hardy, "If It's Ever Spring Again" and "It Never Looks Like Summer" to understand how Hardy uses descriptions of spring and summer. Both poems depict nostalgia for past relationships through descriptions of nature. Though spring and summer normally represent optimism, here they symbolize lost love and regret. The poems lack descriptive details but use contrasts to express feelings of sadness and doubt about the past. For Hardy, nature represents both beauty and "strangeness" as he explores themes of love, loss, and pessimism through the seasons.
it includes
objections and defence
Review of each paragraph
essence and existence
prose and poetry
meter
effects of meter
principles of writing
coleridge as a critic
This document is the preface and first chapter of a book titled "The Visionary Shakespeare" by Alexander C. H. Tung. The preface discusses how Shakespeare can be considered one of the greatest visionaries, in the sense that his works often represent eternal truths about life. The book contains 7 papers that analyze different visions found in Shakespeare's works, including ironic, deconstructionist, semiotic, psychoanalytic, racial, humanist, and visions of nature and power. The preface argues these visions can be found across multiple plays, though each paper focuses on manifesting a particular vision in one or a few plays. The first chapter analyzes Romeo and Juliet, arguing it can be seen as a "
biography of s.t coleridge
introduction to biographia literaria
synopsis of chap 14
critical analysis
literary devices
objections and defence
fancy and imagination
primary and secondary imagination
Roger White's Book: The Witness of PebblesRon Price
In 1981, two years after the publication of Roger White's first book of poetry, the second of what would eventually be three books of Roger White's poetry from the George Ronald publishers of Oxford was published. This second volume contained nearly three times as many poems as the first. Geoffrey Nash, who had finished his doctorate on Thomas Carlyle and had just completed writing his first book: Iran's Secret Pogrom, wrote the introduction.
The following year, in 1982, Nash was to go on and write the first significant essay on the work of Roger White: The Heroic Soul and the Ordinary Self. The publication of this volume of poetry was timely. Robert Hayden, a Baha'i, and an American poet laureate in the 1970s, had died the previous year. He had been a Baha'i and a poet for over forty years. In some important ways the Baha'i consciousness in world literature that this book is discussing found its first significant poetic expression in the poetry of Robert Hayden. John Hatcher points out that Hayden came of age as a poet in the early forties, during the first teaching Plan, 1937-1944. A Baha'i consciousness slowly grew in his poetic expression beginning in 1943 when he joined the Baha'i Faith, although it did not become obvious, did not express significant Baha'i themes, until at least 1962 in Hayden's collection A Ballad of Remembrance.
Love through the_ages_intro[1] great pictures outlineenglishcgs
This document provides an overview of the requirements for the final examination on the theme of love through the ages for an English literature course. The exam will require students to closely analyze and compare unseen extracts from poetry, prose, and drama written at different times on the theme of love. Students will be expected to draw on their wider reading across genres, time periods, and styles to interpret how writers have approached love and how readers may interpret texts differently. The exam will consist of two compulsory questions requiring analysis and comparison of the unseen extracts and references to other works on love.
John Keats was a prominent English Romantic poet influenced by Greek art, culture, and mythology. As a "Young Romantic," he believed in "art for art's sake" and wrote poetry focused on beauty, sensuousness, and nature rather than propaganda. Keats' poetry is characterized by vivid imagery experienced through all five senses and calm, concrete descriptions of nature without ideological overtones. His works also reflected Hellenism through their emphasis on Greek themes of beauty, tragedy, and fatalism.
Elit 48 c class 12 post qhq singulars vs pluralsjordanlachance
Here are a few key points about how feminist theory could be applied to analyzing Mina Loy's poem "Parturition":
- Loy critiques the patriarchal social norms and gender roles of her time that positioned women as inferior to men. She subverts expectations by portraying childbirth, a uniquely female experience, as a heroic act of strength and empowerment.
- The poem draws parallels between the physical struggles of childbirth and the everyday mental/emotional struggles women face living in a male-dominated society. Both are depicted as oppressive "mountains of agony."
- By focusing so intently on the female experience of pregnancy/birth without much mention of the male role, Loy emphasizes women's agency
The poem "Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats follows a regular ode form but gives the impression of free expression of thoughts and emotions. It describes Keats' experience of listening to a nightingale sing and the thoughts it provokes. These include his negative view of life as painful and unhappy, and his wish to escape through imagination or death. However, the poem acknowledges the limitations of imagination and the inability to fully escape reality. It explores themes of mortality, the fleeting nature of happiness, and the power and limitations of poetry and imagination.
Wordsworth outlines three principles in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads: 1) the poetry concerns nature and country life, 2) it emphasizes poetry as an art form to enlighten readers on human emotion, and 3) clean, simple lines best capture the imagination rather than overly complicated styles. He chose rustic subjects and language to find a "plainer and more emphatic" way to communicate passions. Poetry combines feeling and thought as a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions and ideas. The poet's duty is to produce pleasure and enlarge human capability. Wordsworth defends his choice of common subjects and language to better understand essential human passions.
The document discusses Shelley's importance as a Romantic poet. Some key points made are:
- Shelley's poems focus on extreme human emotion and the wonders of nature, both hallmarks of Romanticism.
- Romantics valued emotion over reason and a return to nature. Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark" praises the bird's "unpremeditated art" and asks readers to listen, not analyze.
- Compared to earlier Romantics, Shelley portrayed nature as indifferent to human suffering and a backdrop for themes of man's insignificance.
This piece of writing was an introduction to a book of poetry by a friend. The book was entitled: Occasions of Grace. The book was published in 1992 by George Ronald Oxford The book of my essays about the poetry of Roger White is available in cyberspace at Baha'i Library Online and at Juxta Publishing in Hong Kong.
This is a 100,000 word, 200 page, longitudinal, retrospective and prospective account of my experience with bipolar disorder and some other mental health problems over 70 years: from October 1943 to October 2013. This account is a personal, clinical, and idiosyncratic study of what some life-study students call a chaos narrative. This study focuses on an aspect of my life involving several mental health issues, but mainly bipolar 1 disorder. This account is now in its 13th edition. In my retirement, the years from 2001 to 2013, I have revised the account each year up-dating the content (i) as new information about the mental health issues I deal with are added to the science, and (ii) as I continue to deal with these mental health issues as I head to the age of 70 in 2014.
Purchasing Products in Golden Maple International Trading Incericlovemaomao
Golden Maple International Trading Inc. sells product pictures. The company provides photos of various goods for clients to use on websites and in catalogs. Potential customers can browse Golden Maple's portfolio of images online to find pictures suitable for their marketing needs.
When one writes about politics, the people and the events, the ideas and the issues, one does not have to engage in the partisan variety which divides the nation and individuals from each other and engages millions in hair-splitting discussions on topics about which they usually or, at least, often know very little. Often the opinions are endless, opinions which get dropped-about now in cyberspace's social media and elsewhere, and in real space.
I have studied politics and taught it from grade 10 when I was 15 to these years of my retirement more than half a century later. I am now 70. My parents had political meetings in our home back in the early to mid-1950s. It was in those early, those embryonic, years when I was inoculated against partisan-party politics. That in-house political discussion was characterized by endless hair-splitting and personality clashes in what were my pre-puberal years, and the scene has changed little in those several decades.
Elia Kazan: From the Periphery to the CentreRon Price
Mr. Kazan's first novel in 1962, America America, retraced the odyssey of an uncle, a Greek youth, who fled the poverty and persecution of Turkey and reached America despite numbing setbacks. The book was a best seller, and Bosley Crowther of The Times called Mr. Kazan's movie version one of the 10 best films of 1963. Kazan, by 1963, was a famous film and theatre director, but most people then and now do not know the names of film directors.
In 2003 Elia Kazan died at the age of 94. He was an influential director in film and theatre1 even if not that well known in the world of popular culture. Back in 1962 my own odyssey had just begun both in the Canadian Baha'i community, and in the community of higher education. I have remained in both these communities, in a wide variety of ways, for the rest of my life although, for the most part, in Australia after a brief decade in Canada.
WHEN A PSYCHOSIS IS FUNNY ...and when mental illness is stigmatizedRon Price
Part 1:
Analyze This is a 1999 gangster comedy film directed by Harold Ramis. He co-wrote the screenplay with playwright Kenneth Lonergan and Peter Tolan. The film starred Robert De Niro as a mafioso and Billy Crystal as his psychiatrist. A sequel, Analyze That, was released in 2002.
I had the pleasure of watching these two comedy films about a mafia mobster who has a psychotic-break while in prison and several panic attacks outside prison. It was more than a dozen years, though, after these films were released before I watched them. That is the pattern now in the evening of my life. I have not been to the cinema in all the years of my retirement from paid-employment since back in 1999 when I lived in Western Australia. I wait, and eventually I can watch the movie on television.
Initially there was no plan to create a sequel to Analyze This, but the positive reaction generated by the first film encouraged the producers to consider a sequel and discuss it with the studio and actors. They believed, as Crystal put it, that: "There was an unfinished relationship between Ben Sobel and Paul Vitti, the psychiatrist and the mobster, from the first film" and "there was a good story to tell", so the sequel was commissioned. I leave it to readers with the interest to Google the story, the plot and the characters, the production and background details, the box office and reception/ratings the films received, the money which the films grossed, and all the who's whos.
Part 2:
"Freud has never been more relevant," said David Cronenberg(1943- ) recently. Cronenberg is a Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter, and actor. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. "Because of Freud's understanding of what human beings are, and his insistence on the reality of the human body. We do not escape from that. Jung went into a kind of Aryan mysticism, whereas Freud was insisting on humans as we really are, not as we might want to be."2
Cronenberg points out in relation to some of his more extreme depictions of violence and sex, mental health issues and criminality that: "Different countries have different reactions to my depictions of somewhat extreme situations and topics..2 Some films are successful in some places; some not. What will play in Glasgow for three years non-stop will be taken off the air in a dozen or more Middle Eastern countries.......I'm interested in people who don't accept the official version of reality, but try to find out what's really going on under the hood."-Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia, 7/2/'15; & 2Steve Rose, "David Cronenberg: Analyse this," The Guardian, 6 February 2012.
JESSE OWENS and THE RACE
....little did we know
Part 1:
My mother was 32 and my father 46 when American track and field athlete, Jesse Owens, won four Olympic gold medals. This stunning triumph of the most famous athlete at the 1936 Olympic Games captivated the world even as it infuriated the Nazis. My parents had not yet met in 1936, although they both worked in the lunch-pail city of Hamilton Ontario. They would meet at some time before WW2 broke out, or in the first years of that terrible conflict. I don't know exactly when they did meet; they have long since passed away and so I will never know.
But much is known about the late 30s and early 40s. Modern history is replete with information: Donald Bradman, the cricket legend was scoring 100s of runs in his winning ways; the first players were elected to baseball's hall of fame; the first Volkswagen was built; Alan Turing submitted On Computable Numbers for publication, and in this work he set out the theoretical basis for modern computers; two days later, on 30 May 1936, Shoghi Effendi asked the North American Baha'i community to design the first systematic teaching plan.1 I have been associated with extensions of that plan for more than 60 years.
Part 1.1:
Despite the racial slurs he endured, Jesse Owens' grace and athleticism rallied crowds across the globe. But when the four-time Olympic gold-medalist returned home, he could not even ride in the front of a bus. Jesse Owens(1913-1980) is the story of the 22-year-old son of a sharecropper who triumphed over adversity to become a hero and world champion. His story is also about the elusive, fleeting quality of fame and the way Americans idolize athletes when they suit their purpose, and forget them once they don't.2
Last night I watched a documentary on Jesse Owens.2 I am looking forward to the 2015 biopic Race starring Stephan James who will play Olympic legend Jesse Owens. This is the work of director Stephen Hopkins' which began shooting on 24 July 2014 in Montreal, and on location at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. The film will be released in April 2015.
Part 2:
The atmosphere around the 1936 Berlin Olympics was highly politically charged. Originally opposed to the idea of the games, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler was convinced by his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels that they were the perfect opportunity to showcase the superiority of Aryan athletes. Hitler presided over the opening day ceremonies, whipping the crowds into a frenzy of excitement. On 3 August 1936, when Jesse Owens stepped into the massive new Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the crowd went silent with anticipation, sitting on the edge of their seats to see the much-talked-about track star from America compete against the Germans.
This document provides Ron Price's resume and relevant appendices. It details his educational background and qualifications, publications including articles, books, manuals and websites. It lists his roles as writer, poet, author, journalist, teacher and positions held. Appendices provide further details on subjects taught, a biography, and perspective on his career transition to retirement. The resume is intended to provide a broad overview of Price's experiences and accomplishments for various purposes on the internet.
Química orgânica trata dos compostos do carbono. O carbono forma cadeias e ligações quádruplas, podendo ser classificado como primário, secundário, terciário ou quaternário de acordo com o número de outros átomos de carbono aos quais está ligado. As cadeias carbônicas podem ser abertas/acíclicas/alifáticas ou fechadas/cíclicas, sendo estas últimas subdivididas em alicíclicas ou aromáticas dependendo da presença ou não de benzeno.
O documento discute a importância da Inteligência Empresarial para o sucesso das empresas no ambiente competitivo atual. Propõe a criação de uma Rede de Valor para Inteligência Empresarial (REVIE) com foco no mercado, produtos, clientes e parcerias estratégicas para que as empresas possam responder rápido às mudanças, exceder as expectativas dos clientes e inovar. A REVIE vai além das ferramentas de Business Intelligence ao promover a colaboração entre a empresa e seus parceiros.
El documento habla sobre el almacenamiento en la nube. Explica que es un modelo de almacenamiento basado en redes donde los datos se almacenan en centros de datos operados por terceros y los usuarios compran o alquilan la capacidad de almacenamiento que necesitan. Las ventajas incluyen almacenar grandes volúmenes de información de forma más barata y acceder a los datos desde cualquier lugar a través de interfaces estándar. Las desventajas de almacenar los datos localmente son que es caro y no ofrece alta dispon
No século XIII, surgiram bancos e universidades na Europa, mas os séculos XIV e XV foram marcados por crises como a Peste Negra. Os estados europeus se centralizaram para apoiar a burguesia em busca de novos mercados para escapar da crise. Portugal liderou a expansão marítima a partir do século XV, conquistando Ceuta em 1415 e chegando à Índia por mar em 1498, abrindo novas rotas comerciais e encontrando o Brasil em 1500.
El documento resume las características principales del Sistema Universitario UNIMINUTO. Se destaca que en 2012 será reconocido por su énfasis en las vivencias espirituales, su aporte al desarrollo a través de la educación, y la alta calidad de sus programas. También se resalta su impacto en la cobertura debido al número de sedes y facilidad de acceso, así como sus amplias relaciones nacionales e internacionales.
El resumen describe las consecuencias del reciclaje de computadoras, incluyendo la reducción de la producción de carbono, la disminución de la contaminación por desechos electrónicos, y la reutilización de estos desechos. También describe los posibles efectos negativos en la salud que pueden causar metales pesados como el cromo, mercurio, cadmio y plomo que se encuentran en los desechos electrónicos, como daño al sistema nervioso, problemas respiratorios y cáncer. Finalmente, propone soluciones como
O documento discute a importância de evangelizar o mundo, citando vários versículos bíblicos. Afirma que evangelizar é uma ordem de Jesus, um privilégio e trará grande recompensa. A igreja só crescerá quando sua prioridade for ganhar almas para Cristo.
El documento describe cómo funciona y se instala un polo a tierra, el cual protege los aparatos eléctricos de descargas mediante una varilla enterrada conectada a la red eléctrica. Explica que el polo a tierra desvía la corriente eléctrica hacia la tierra en caso de una descarga y cómo se construye usando una varilla de cobre o un tubo enterrado con sal para mejorar la conductividad en suelos rocosos. También señala la importancia de realizar mantenimiento periódico para garantizar la efectividad del
O documento contém 8 questões de múltipla escolha sobre determinantes de matrizes, volumes geométricos, matrizes e autonomia de combustível de um carro em uma pista circular.
Diapositivas del sena sobre la contaminacion electronicamarceyuli
El documento describe los riesgos para la salud y el medio ambiente de los equipos electrónicos mal reciclados. Contienen sustancias tóxicas como berilio, cromo y mercurio que contaminan el medio ambiente cuando son desechados. El proceso de reciclaje debe separar cuidadosamente estos elementos para procesar de manera segura los materiales recuperables y evitar daños.
Two hundred years before the death of Roger White in 1993, Shaykh Ahmad-i-Ahsai "arose to dedicate the remaining days of his life to the task" of preparing the way, as one of the two critical precursors of the Baha'i Revelation, "for the advent of a new Manifestation." In the next several years of that fin de siecle he began to write a great deal about the metaphorical nature of the prophecies relating to the birth of a new and independent Revelation of God.
There was a strong poetic strain in the Shakyh's writings: symbolism and metaphor abounded. Shaykh Ahmad was very unorthodox and many "professed themselves incapable of comprehending the meaning of his mysterious allusions." This poetic, symbolic, strand has continued through the writings of the two precursors of the Babi Revelation, the Revelation of the two Manifestations of God and the writings of 'Abdu'l-Baha, all part of what you might call the poetic tradition in the Baha'i Era.
There has been, too, a series of poets beginning with Tahireh in the 1840s, to Na'im late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth centuries, to George Townshend up to mid-twentieth century and later Robert Hayden, Roger White, Bahiyyih Nahkjavani, John Hatcher and Michael Fitzgerald, among others, who have made important contributions to the literature and commentary on the Cause in a poetic idiom. In some ways it could be said that the passing of Roger White in 1993 marks and end of two centuries of intense and significant poetic writing in a tradition centred on the appearance of two Manifestations of God in the nineteenth century. It is not the purpose of this book or this chapter to describe this long history, this tradition, of poetic influence, of poetic writing. The experience of poetry begins anew with each generation.
Since the first teaching Plan, 1937-1944, poetry written by Baha'is has slowly become a part of world literature, first through Robert Hayden and second through Roger White, the subject of this study. The poetry of White is seen as continuation and development, as part of "the decisive, the most significant, contemporary life of tradition," as poetry critic F.R. Leavis once described the poetry of the present. White should be seen, too, as part of that rich treasure of human life which is now stored within the pale of a new and emerging world religion. White had much of the culture of this embryonic Force, this Movement, fermenting, crystallizing, in his head and it took him on a voyage over the deep of poetry with its delicacy and tenderness, with its inexhaustible resources, infinitely new and striking.
This document provides an overview of Walter Pater and his influential 1873 work Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Some key points:
- Pater was an Oxford scholar who studied Greek philosophy and published Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873, seen as manifesto of aestheticism.
- The book explored how 15th/16th century Italian culture embodied qualities Victorians wanted to appropriate, like classical scholarship and valuing individualism.
- It promoted embracing sensory experiences and momentary pleasures over fixed moral or religious principles, generating controversy.
- Pater's work influenced Oscar Wilde and notions of "art for art's sake," though some critiqued it for espousing a theory
The document provides a biography of Emily Dickinson and analyzes her poem "I Cannot Live With You" using imagery theory. It summarizes the poem, which explores the impossibility of the speaker living with her lover in life, death, resurrection, or judgment. Through metaphors of being locked away and separated by oceans, the poem expresses how the only option is to live apart with just a partially open door between them, sustained only by despair. The document analyzes Dickinson's use of imagery in the poem to convey these meanings and emotions.
For the last decade I have been writing on the subject of pioneering and travelling, as well as the psychological and the spiritual journey of life. I am not unaware of the significance of such writing as an expression of one's philosophy and religion, of one's sociology and ideology, indeed of the very apparatus of one's life. I have written literally hundreds of prose-poems and essays on the themes of travel interwoven with their variegated personal and societal significances.
My prose and poetry is, if nothing else, a definition of my identity, of the way I see my life, see life in general and the complex society in which I live. What follows in this essay is a collection of several pieces, several prose-poems, that I tie together somewhat tenuously for the sake of this exercise, this special posting on the subject of travel. I hope readers find some of the connections I make, often tangentially, on this subject of travel stimulating and provocative.
The document provides an analysis of T.S. Eliot's modernist poem "The Waste Land" in 3 parts:
1. It summarizes the poem's structure consisting of 5 sections that use collages of images and allusions to myths.
2. It analyzes major themes of spiritual/cultural malaise in the modern world and the universality of the themes of life/death.
3. It discusses how characters like Tiresias and the use of mythical techniques give unity and provide cultural context for the poem's fragmented images.
A Poet S Epitaph Of William WordsworthDustin Pytko
Wordsworth's poem "A Poet's Epitaph" dramatizes the confrontation between the expectations of imagined readers and the values embodied in the genre of epitaphs. The poem addresses various fictional readers who are dismissed as unable to appreciate the deceased poet, including a statesman, lawyer, physician, soldier, and philosopher. However, the rustic poet is welcomed, described as one who sees truths in nature and imparts them simply. The document then discusses Wordsworth's views on what constitutes a poet in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, contrasting the poet's relationship to nature with that of scientists and philosophers. The poet gains insight into nature through sympathy and intuition rather than analysis. Wordsworth presents the
T.S. Eliot was an American-born poet, playwright, and literary critic. He was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended Harvard University where he received both undergraduate and graduate degrees. After college, he spent time touring Europe before moving to London in 1915. Some of his most famous works include The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Eliot was heavily influenced by myths and used fragmentation in his works to reflect the modern experience. The Waste Land addresses themes of cultural fragmentation in the post-WWI period through its use of allusion and symbols.
This document summarizes T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". It discusses Eliot's views on the importance of tradition for artists. Eliot believes the best parts of an artist's work are those most influenced by past writers and works. He also discusses his theory of impersonality in art, where the artist acts as a catalyst for experiences and impressions. The document provides an overview of Eliot's views on tradition, the individual, and depersonalization in creative works.
This is the Romantic Literature Presentation,
here I talk about the John Keats as a Romantic Poet.
1) Poetry of Escape
2 ) Motif
3) Five sense and Art
4) Conclusion
This presentation is submitted to Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English.
Mikhail Bakhtin analyzed the novel form and identified several key concepts, including carnival, heteroglossia, polyphony, dialogic vs monologic, and chronotope. Carnival refers to a medieval tradition where social hierarchies were temporarily inverted through role reversals, mockery of authority, and laughter. Bakhtin argued carnival elements in literature are subversive as they disrupt authority and introduce new perspectives.
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet born in 1770 in the Lake District of England, where he spent most of his life. In the preface to his famous collection of poems Lyrical Ballads published in 1798, Wordsworth outlined his theory that poetry should focus on ordinary people and everyday situations described through simple language. He believed that being closer to nature allowed humans to express emotions in a more direct way. Wordsworth saw poetry as originating from emotions recollected in tranquility, where past feelings are recalled to inspire new creative works. His poetry focused on themes of childhood, nature, and finding the divine in natural beauty.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a central figure of the Romantic period in English literature. He experimented with poetry and helped drive a literary revolution that incorporated democratic principles. In works like Lyrical Ballads, he featured scenes of common life and the language of ordinary people. He believed that nature, imagination, and emotion influenced human life and spiritual well-being. Two of his most famous poems, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and "Tintern Abbey," showcase how nature can transform one's mood and be recalled through vivid memories.
Zia ur Rehman analyzes T.S. Eliot's modernist poem "The Waste Land" in 3 sentences or less:
The poem is composed of 5 sections that use collages of seemingly disjointed images and allusions to myths to capture the near collapse of Western civilization in the 1920s. The experiences of characters like Tiresias are fused together to represent the universal modern psyche. The structure spirals deeper into probing the modern malaise, returning to the same themes at different levels through an arrangement of ideas like a musical composition.
Zia ur Rehman analyzes T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" in 3 sentences or less:
The poem is composed of 5 sections that use collages of seemingly unrelated images and allusions to myths to capture the spiritual malaise of post-WW1 Europe. The character of Tiresias acts as a thread that gives unity to the disjointed images and represents the modern man's quest for meaning. Scholars note the poem uses mythical techniques to show how the present crisis is a recurring theme throughout history and impart universality to its themes of a society exhausted of spiritual and cultural values.
Zia ur Rehman analyzes T.S. Eliot's modernist poem "The Waste Land" in 3 sentences or less:
The poem is composed of 5 sections that use collages of disjointed images and allusions to myths to capture the spiritual malaise of post-WW1 Europe. A key figure, Tiresias, acts as a thread that gives unity to the seemingly random images and represents the modern man's quest for meaning. Scholars note the poem uses repetitive structures and mythical techniques to compress history and impart universality to its depiction of a civilization in decline.
The document discusses Romanticism in art and literature. It arose in reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and industrialization. Romantic works featured nature, emotion, imagination, and the individual artist. Wordsworth believed poetry should depict common experiences through ordinary language. Keats' poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" explores the permanence of art and the contrasting states of being depicted and experienced.
The Hope of Salvation - Jude 1:24-25 - MessageCole Hartman
Jude gives us hope at the end of a dark letter. In a dark world like today, we need the light of Christ to shine brighter and brighter. Jude shows us where to fix our focus so we can be filled with God's goodness and glory. Join us to explore this incredible passage.
A375 Example Taste the taste of the Lord, the taste of the Lord The taste of...franktsao4
It seems that current missionary work requires spending a lot of money, preparing a lot of materials, and traveling to far away places, so that it feels like missionary work. But what was the result they brought back? It's just a lot of photos of activities, fun eating, drinking and some playing games. And then we have to do the same thing next year, never ending. The church once mentioned that a certain missionary would go to the field where she used to work before the end of his life. It seemed that if she had not gone, no one would be willing to go. The reason why these missionary work is so difficult is that no one obeys God’s words, and the Bible is not the main content during missionary work, because in the eyes of those who do not obey God’s words, the Bible is just words and cannot be connected with life, so Reading out God's words is boring because it doesn't have any life experience, so it cannot be connected with human life. I will give a few examples in the hope that this situation can be changed. A375
The forces involved in this witchcraft spell will re-establish the loving bond between you and help to build a strong, loving relationship from which to start anew. Despite any previous hardships or problems, the spell work will re-establish the strong bonds of friendship and love upon which the marriage and relationship originated. Have faith, these stop divorce and stop separation spells are extremely powerful and will reconnect you and your partner in a strong and harmonious relationship.
My ritual will not only stop separation and divorce, but rebuild a strong bond between you and your partner that is based on truth, honesty, and unconditional love. For an even stronger effect, you may want to consider using the Eternal Love Bond spell to ensure your relationship and love will last through all tests of time. If you have not yet determined if your partner is considering separation or divorce, but are aware of rifts in the relationship, try the Love Spells to remove problems in a relationship or marriage. Keep in mind that all my love spells are 100% customized and that you'll only need 1 spell to address all problems/wishes.
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Why is this So? ~ Do Seek to KNOW (English & Chinese).pptxOH TEIK BIN
A PowerPoint Presentation based on the Dhamma teaching of Kamma-Vipaka (Intentional Actions-Ripening Effects).
A Presentation for developing morality, concentration and wisdom and to spur us to practice the Dhamma diligently.
The texts are in English and Chinese.
A Free eBook ~ Valuable LIFE Lessons to Learn ( 5 Sets of Presentations)...OH TEIK BIN
A free eBook comprising 5 sets of PowerPoint presentations of meaningful stories /Inspirational pieces that teach important Dhamma/Life lessons. For reflection and practice to develop the mind to grow in love, compassion and wisdom. The texts are in English and Chinese.
My other free eBooks can be obtained from the following Links:
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https://www.slideshare.net/ohteikbin/documents
The Enchantment and Shadows_ Unveiling the Mysteries of Magic and Black Magic...Phoenix O
This manual will guide you through basic skills and tasks to help you get started with various aspects of Magic. Each section is designed to be easy to follow, with step-by-step instructions.
1. (vi)
THE LANGUAGE OF THERE
1992 was indeed "an auspicious juncture in the history of His Cause."1
That year White
published not only his final major book of poetry, Occasions of Grace, but also two small
volumes: The Language of There and Notes Postmarked the Mountain of God. 1992 also
marked the hundredth anniversary of the ascension of Baha'u'llah in 1892. In the Ridvan
Message that year, in April 1992, the Universal House of Justice referred to "an onrushing
wind...clearing the ground for new conceptions," "some mysterious, rampant force" and a
"quickening wind." It was this wind which was ventilating our "modes of thought...renewing,
clarifying and amplifying our perspectives." Perhaps White's final blasts of poetry were part
of this "befitting demarcation," this Holy Year.
By the end of that Holy Year in May 1993 White had left this earthly life. This "special time
for a rendezvous of the soul with the Source of its light and life....a time of retreat to one's
innermost being," to which the Universal House of Justice called all Baha'is in April 1992 did
arrive quite literally for Roger White. Perchance the soul of Roger White was being filled,
as that year came to an end, in that undiscovered country "with the revivifying breath" of
Baha'u'llah's celestial power "from His retreat of deathless splendour."
In October 1992 I received a copy of The Language of There in the mail. Six months later
Roger left this mortal coil and all "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," "the
heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is air to" that Hamlet spoke so eloquently
of in the beautifully modulated rhythms of that soliloquy in Act III Scene I of Shakespeare's
play by that name. The last published poem and piece of prose on the last two pages of this
1 All of the references in this paragraph are to the Universal House of Justice Ridvan Message 1992.
1
2. small volume of poetry speak volumes and so I will quote them here. White's last words,
quite literally, seem perfectly appropriate in this final essay on his final works. These last
words embody the thinking of a lifetime, as so many of White's poems do, and the delight he
found for his spirit in giving expression to the truths he found in life.
THE LANGUAGE OF THERE
I mean to learn, in the language of where I am going, barely enough to ask for food and love.-
James Merrill
Yes. There, light will be our language,
a tongue without words for
perhaps, or arid, or futile,
though shadow will be retained
that we may contrast the radiance.
Almost will no longer be a measure.
We will learn a hundred synonyms for certitude,
and love will have a thousand conjugations.
Ours will be the italicised vocabulary
of delectable astonishments.
The possessive case will play no part
in the grammar of joy and burgeoning,
infants will speak at birth, and only the ancients
will remember the obscenity exile.
2
3. There, laughter will be spelt in capitals,
sadness grow obsolete,
and negation be declared archaic.
Hell will be pronounced remoteness,
and vast tomes will be devoted
to the derivations of yes.
Where all is elation and surprise
exclamation points will fall into disuse.
There, food and affection will be ours for a smile,
and immortality for a fluent, knowing wink.
In time, our desire to speak will abandon us.
All that need be said the light will say. Yes.
It would seem that White found, at least gave expression to in his poetry, what literary critic
Leone Vivante describes in the opening paragraph of his book as "a principle of inward light,
an original self-active principle, which characterizes life and spontaneity as contrasted with
mechanism."1223
This concept of self-activity revealed and developed itself in White's poetry
in a supremely genuine and direct way. There is a quality of truth in some poetry, what
Vivante says can claim to be "an ultimate truth which is essential to their poetical value."
While I'm not sure I'd go all the way here with Vivante, I can appreciate the direction of his
philosophical thought. There is for me a certain 'truth claim' which gives White's poetry
2
3
3
4. much of its impact, its force, its unity. There is a certain 'spiritual essence' in his work which
gives me a deeper sense of the spirit, deeper than I would normally have had without his art.
White's literary value is partly, for me, a reflection, a discovery, of the intrinsic nature of my
inner being and the truths of the religion I joined more than half a century ago. For the
"grand power of poetry," as Matthew Arnold wrote back in the 1860s, "is its interpretive
power…the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and
intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them."2
As I read White's poetry, I frequently sense he is putting me in touch with the essential nature
of things, taking some of life's bewilderment out of things, giving me some of the secret of
things and some of their calm and harmonious inner life. This, too, is poetry's highest powers.
White's short essay entitled "Advice From a Poet" is worth quoting in full because of its
comment on the 'spiritual essence' of his work and how he envisages it:
BRING CHOCOLAT
Advice from a poet
Address to World Centre Baha'i Youth Group, 31 October 1990.
"Poetry, like all art, has a message for us. It says: care, grow, develop, adapt, overcome,
nurture, protect, foster, cherish. It says: your reality is spiritual. It says achieve your full
humanness. It invites us to laugh, reflect, cry, strive, persevere. It says rejoice! Above all, it
says to us: be! We cannot turn our backs on art. Art heals.
I am of the conviction that in the future, increasingly, one important measure of the spiritual
maturity and health of the Baha'i world community will be its capacity to attract and win the
2 Matthew Arnold, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor,
1973(1962), pp.12-13.
4
5. allegiance of artists of all kinds, and its sensitivity and imaginativeness in making creative
use of them.
Artists--not tricksters and conjurers, but committed artists--will be a vital force in preventing
inflexibility in our community. They will be a source of rejuvenation. They will serve as a
bulwark against fundamentalism, stagnation and administrative sterility. Artists call us away
from formulas, caution us against the fake, and accustom us to unpredictability--that trait
which so characterizes life. They validate our senses. they link us to our own history. They
clothe and give expression to our dreams and aspirations. They teach us impatience with
stasis. They aid us to befriend our private experiences and heed our inner voices. They reveal
how we may subvert our unexamined mechanistic responses to the world. They sabotage our
smugness. They alert us to divine intimations. Art conveys information about ourselves and
our universe which can be found nowhere else. Our artists are our benefactors.
To the degree the Baha'i community views its artists as a gift rather than a problem will it
witness the spread of the Faith 'like wildfire' as promised by Shoghi Effendi, through their
talents being harnessed to the dissemination of the spirit of the Cause. In general society's
artists are often at war with their world and live on its fringes. Their lack of discretion in
expressing their criticism--which may be hostile, vituperative, negative, and offer no
solutions--may lead to their rejection and dismissal by the very society they long to influence.
Artists are frequently seen as trouble-makers, menacers, destroyers of order, or as frivolous
clowns. Sometimes the kindest thing said of them is that they are neurotic or mad. In the
Baha'i community it must be different. Baha'u'llah said so. Consider that the Baha'i Writings
state that All art is a gift of the Holy Spirit and exhort us to respect those engaged in science,
art and crafts.
5
6. The artist has among other responsibilities those of questioning our values, of leading us to
new insights that release our potential for growth, of illuminating our humanity, or renewing
our authenticity by putting us in touch with our inner selves, and of creating works of art that
challenge us--as Rilke says--to change our lives. The artist aids in our transformation.
In the Baha'i Order the artists will find their home at the centre of their community, free to
interact constructively with the people who are served by their art; free to give and to receive
strength and inspiration. It is my hope that all of us who are gathered here will be in the
vanguard of this reconciliation between artists and their world. As Baha'u'llah foretells, the
artists are coming home to claim their place. I urge you: Be there! Welcome them! Bring
chocolate!"
White's views here had arisen out of more than forty years of writing poetry and, now, he was
going. Indeed, inside the cover of the copy of The Language of There that he sent me in
September 1992, six months before he died, he wrote "with these lines I probably exit--
smiling, waving, heading for "There"......There is a consciousness of this theme of the
afterlife in the one hundred and two poems that make up this volume. It is the first major
published collection of poetry that White did not divide into thematic-sections.
Emily Dickinson is still there: White writes seven new poems, right at the beginning of the
volume, in which her life and her poetry are mentioned. To read Emily Dickinson had been
for White, what Robert Smith said it should be, "a profound engagement, an imaginative
reconstruction, a crystallizing of attitudes, on her flickering presence."45
Her "arduous and
4 R.M. Smith, The Seduction of Emily Dickinson, Alabama Press, 1996, pp.14-15.
5
6
7. lifelong pursuit of a speech fitting to God...(to)...divine Unnameability" was, as Elisa New
once wrote, a thorny and difficult problem that she got around only by a genuine "humility."6
White got around the problem, for the most part, by his commitment to a religion which
provided ample amounts of that "speech fitting to God." He also got around many of life’s
thorny and difficult problems in his poetry by means of humour. Emily Dickinson’s poetry is,
for most readers, obscure and complex. White’s seven poems written in part in memory of
some of Dickenson’s poems have a tongue-in-cheek humour. They also possess their own
complexity. Readers will get to the end of some of these seven poems and find themselves
perplexed, just as perplexed as they were while reading Dickinson’s poetry.
These seven poems which cast a backward glance at Emily Dickinson are found right at the
start of this booklet of poetry. There is only one poem before this group of seven. That poem,
in 19 parts, also possesses a complexity and enigmatic quality which will leave the average
reader quiet perplexed. By the time he or she gets to the end of the package of 7 Dickinson
poems, he will probably put the small book down saying: “here is another book of poetry full
of stuff I do not understand.” It will help readers, of course, if they havc some familiarity
with that famous American poet. As is so often the case with poetry, the reader needs to read
a piece two or three times to get the gist. I find that when I do get the gist, which is not
always the case with White’s poems, I feel as if I’ve had a pay-off for my reading labour. “No
pain, no effort, no gain,” I say to myself to justify the work I’ve put in to understand the
poem.
White dealt with many of the human problems we all face in several ways which we can see
by examining his poetry throughout his several volumes, but particularly--and not
6 Elisa New, The Regenerate Lyric, Cambridge UP, 1993, p.153.
7
8. coincidentally--in the last half a dozen poems in this volume, his last published poems. I'd
like to deal with these last "death" poems, or perhaps I should call them "life" poems, here.
The Language of There may well go down as one of White's most famous and quoted poems.
There is an optimism, a texture and context that appeals even to the most hardened atheist or
agnostic, to say nothing of the avowed believer in virtually any religion. That in itself is no
mean achievement. "The thing that should eventually make him truly important," wrote the
American poet James Dickey speaking about the special poet in our time, is "the quietly
joyful sense of celebration and praise out of which he writes."7
White had put this idea a little
differently in one of his first poems in which he was writing about "the banality of pain/and
the ordinariness of suffering." "It is joy that is remembered,"8
he added. White certainly
gives us a golden seam of joy amidst his other contributions to our intellectual and sensory
emporiums, amidst the inevitable fortuitousness of his poetic impulse which the poet and four
time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Robert Frost, says ideally begins in "tantalizing vagueness"
and then finds or "makes its thought."9
The humility and joy that White apotheosizes in his penultimate poem Learning New Ways
may not be everyone's long range vision of an afterlife but, in its basic simplicity or, perhaps I
should say, profound simplicity, there is something deftly appealing and-who knows-accurate
about the picture it paints, however succinctly:
............................released from
wanting and having, I shall only be.
7 James Dickey in The World's Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets, Peter Stitt, University of
Georgia Press, 1985, p.11.
8 Roger White, Another Song, p.112.
9 Robert Frost in Louis Untermeyer, The Lives of the Poets: The Story of One thousand Years of English
and American Poetry, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1959, p.633.
8
9. ..........................
Occupied with boundlessness
I shall yet divine your unspoken question:
Were you drawn away by the music,
the laughter,
the promised ecstasy of reunion?10
These are only some of White's many images and thoughts about the afterlife found in his
corpus of poetry.
Many poets after making immense imaginative efforts, such as Wordsworth and Browning,
seem to experience a certain psychic exhaustion. While such a sense of exhaustion, of
sadness, is not entirely absent from the last poetic efforts of White written after the age of
sixty and on death's door, there is also awe, humour, joy, calm, peace, wisdom….These last
poems are a study in themselves and tell much of White's ultimate view of life and death.
There is a delicacy and penetration in White, a richness and power. His final production, far
superior to what his nature first seemed to promise in the late nineteen forties and early
fifties, was abundant and varied. He supplied to the Baha'i community what the poet
Coleridge provided to England in the early nineteenth century: "a stimulus to all minds in the
generation which grew up around him, capable of profiting by it."11
The memory of Coleridge, writes Arnold, inspires a certain repugnance as well as gratitude.
The behaviour and activity of White, at least as far as we know thusfar, has a cleaner, more
consistent record to underpin and invest his memory as one of the founding fathers of poetry
10 Roger White, The Language of There, p.77.
11 Matthew Arnold, op. cit., p.161.
9
10. in the Baha'i community in its first two centuries. "Every poet," wrote the French poet
Maurice de Guerin, "has his own art of poetry written on the ground of his soul; there is no
other."12
White has left us with the ground of his soul both in his last volumes of poetry
written in 1992 and in the whole of his previous oeuvre.
Before commenting on some specific poems in White's The Language of There I'd like to
make a general point about his appeal to our human need or impulse for novelty which stirs
within us and often, if not always, provides the necessary momentum and incentive for us to
seek insight and a sense of achievement in life. Our desire for novelty is part of the pleasure
we take in life itself and is, as Samuel Johnson once wrote, the only and real end of writing.13
This appeal to his readers' need for novelty was there right to the end. The rich prism, the
intensified record that was his poetry, fluid and diverse as it was even to the end--and
especially in the end--in his last two books of poetry published in 1992, seemed to be part of
White's abundance. In the last few months of 1992 and the first four of 1993, after the
publication of his final two volumes of poetry, there was somewhat of a husk of a man, a
somewhat drained specimen. Weariness began to prevail by 'silent encroachments'14
but,
again, I have little detail to go on and I leave the sketch of White's final notes to his first and
future biographer.
White writes poems about several departures: from the Baha'i world centre, from the
intensive care unit, from this earthly life, from sadnesses, from joy and laughter--all in the
last nine poems. Ten poems from the end he writes of "returning" to his home town which he
had just done in 1991. The themes of the poems that occupy White throughout the booklet
illustrate his preoccupations in the last year of his life. To comment on them all in a befitting
12 Maurice de Guerin in Matthew Arnold, op.cit., p.20.
13 Samuel Johnson in The Achievement of Samuel Johnson, Walter Bate, Oxford UP, NY, 1970(1955), p.228.
14 ibid.,p.36.
10
11. way is beyond the scope of this brief essay and would lead to prolixity. The poems have that
concision, that slight obscurity and illusiveness that is part of poetry's nutritive function and a
sensibility that Marianne Moore says "imposes a silence transmuted by the imagination into
eloquence."15
Read with patience and receptivity they provide an exercise in pleasure.
One of the reasons I have come to poetry as I’ve headed into the last years of middle age and
the first years of late adulthood, is that I find, in the case of a good poem, a whole book can
be found. This is what makes a poet a good poet---for me. I spent my teens to my 50s with
the social sciences and I found reading a novel required too much of my time. White so often
gives me meaning and delight on one page. His poem Aphrodisiac on page 13 tells of the
experience of millions of men and women in marriage. I won’t give away all the plot in the
tight little 19 line narrative about sex and the marriage bed over the many years of a marriage,
but I’ll just say they go to the heart of the relationship without you having to wade through a
400 page novel. The following poem entitled Wish tells what retirement is like if one uses it
wisely. In eight lines White describes my life experience in these years of my retirement from
the world of jobs and leaves me feeling light, easy and more in touch with myself than I was
before reading the poem. Both of the two poems I’ve just described are a reward for me for
having got through the first fist of poems in this small book that I found difficult to grasp.
I shall now select two poems on which to close this brief commentary on The Language of
There. I will leave it to readers to discover White’s succinct dealing with Dylan Thomas’s
raging into the night, more of his wise words about love, about writing poetry, about
circumcision, his nods to Ogden Nash and T.S. Eliot, and much more.
15 This idea is complex and Moore discusses it in the context of what she calls 'society in solitude.' See
Marianne Moore, "A Review of The Auroras of Autumn," Poetry New York, No.4, 1951.
11
12. Since the first poetic writings in the 1940s of the two major poets associated with the
emergence of a Baha'i consciousness in world literature, Robert Hayden and Roger White, the
number of local spiritual assemblies had grown from several hundred to many thousands. It is
not my intention to expatiate on the brilliant conception underlying the Baha'i administrative
Order, itself the nucleus and pattern of a future world Order, but I would like to include below
one of White's poems that conveys the experience that many hundreds of thousands of
Baha'is have had serving on local administrative units or LSAs. The Baha'i system of
decision-making is far removed from the western parliamentary process and its debate
oriented lance-and-parry thrust. The Baha'i administrative system is based on consultation in
small groups and, although apparently simple in design, it is a very demanding process for
those called upon to serve. Here is the poem:
NINE ASCENDING
Nine of us, equipollent,
precariously balanced
in ragged semicircle
our eyes glazed by the impasse
we have reached
far from the decision
distantly drawing us forward.
Tension leaves us dry-mouthed,
chokes off the fatal sundering words
any one of us might speak
that will plunge us into the chasm.
12
13. This is a good terror.
With delicate calm
the Book is passed
hand to hand,
its words reweave
the disciplining cord
that binds us to our purpose.
Again the humbling summit is assaulted;
we make our verticle ascent
past fault and fissure.
Sing in gratitude
for the fragile resolution
that leads us in ginger circumspection
from the miasmal ooze
from which we so painfully inch
our consequential necessary way.16
I have always been most moved, in the ten years since I first read this poem, by White's use
of the term 'good terror.' The reason I was moved by these words is that I found they were so
apt. They describe how I often felt in the nearly forty years since I began serving on LSAs.
This same 'terror' is often part of the experience men and women have in secular
organizations as well. We are all in it together now as the world forges the instruments for its
salvation in the centuries to come.
16 Roger White, The Language of There, p.34.
13
14. Like so much of White's poetry there is a direct appeal in this poem to the experience and
knowledge, the convictions and commitments, of Baha'is the world over. So many of the
Baha'is, in the half century since both White and Hayden began writing poetry, have been
knee-deep in that "miasmal ooze" during the consultative process while they inched their
"consequential necessary way." It is not my intention for this elucidation of White's poem to
turn my comments into evaluation. I leave that to readers, as I say so often in these essays.
But there is a power in this poem, as in so many of White's poems which makes itself felt
immediately. If I had to define this power in a word it would be honesty. There is also a
gentle undercurrent of humour, as there is in so many of White's poems, which gives just
enough leaven or lightness to balance the outer seriousness of the poem. The style is so
White: colloquial, elevated even quirky, uniting opposites in his own unique way.
Many of the poems in this selection of nearly nine dozen pieces are salutes, nods, waves,
hellos and good-byes to famous and not-so-famous poets, writers and artists who had
influenced his writing and thinking: Ogden Nash, T.S. Eliot, Keats, some Canadian poets,
Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Ovid, Walt Whitman, Scott Joplin, William Sears, Anais Nin and the
inevitable Emily--and others. White's faculty for absorbing incidents from real life, his keen
eye for a good scene, his memory for detail, quotation and anecdote; in addition, his
knowledge of a remarkable circle, an extraordinary collection of intimate and not-so-intimate
friends and people from history, gave to White and to this final collection of poetry the
qualities his readers enjoy.
Many readers of poetry and literature may dislike my attempts to confine White's free and
varied insights within the limits of a system of thought that is, perhaps, too ordered, too neat
14
15. and tidy, too abstract for their liking. They will want to read his poetry, but not analyse it. For
me, the generalizing faculty asserts itself and must find a hearing. The poetry surveyed
persistently raises metaphysical questions making some theological discussion inevitable,
even if not desired by some readers. Theological discussion serves to deepen not restrict our
insight and usually raises questions of moral and humanistic interest which are of increasing
interest to even secular minds. But, however theological or philosophical a poem, there is
over any collection of White's verse some of that feeling, expressed once by Carl Sandburg,
that "poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."17
Appreciation of a poem does not
require literary criticism, but it is often enriched by such criticism, if it is well written.
My final selection from among this rich repertoire of poems that gave me pleasure in one way
or another is called Sometimes The Poem...I will quote the entire poem and make some brief
comment as I go along.
Sometimes the poem is heard as a nighttime footstep
echoing from another room
or a creaking floorboard on the dim stairs.
Often it leaves a chair rocking silently
in an emptiness filled with dustmotes
and a sense of precipitate departure.
Later it may be heard in the kitchen
warming milk and rummaging for biscuits
or may mock with the banging of a door
and the crunching sound of retreating feet on gravel.
17 Carl Sandburg in Louis Untermeyer, op.cit.p.636.
15
16. While I am writing this I am listening to a tape of the voice of Australian writer Alan
Marshall18
who is talking about the importance of small details, of writing down things that
you might not remember, because so many of the stories in life come from little things. Of
course, he is talking about writing stories and fiction, but the same applies to writing poetry,
as White indicates above. What Marshall tries to do, White tries to do also--connect the
microworld and the macroworld and in the process of observation and analysis he gave it new
life, significance, meaning. Poetry serves the function, for White, of interpretress of life's
many worlds. Poetry helps White on his long journey down life's enchanted and not-so-
enchanted stream as it alternately rushes, meanders and winds its way to the sea.
White continues in the second stanza of that poem Sometimes the Poem:
Sometimes it huddles in shadow
outside the window or claws at the shutter
sobbing tormentedly in the wind and tearing its breast.
I have glimpsed its eyes, transparent and haunted,
beyond the rainstreaked glass
and heard it babbling dementedly in the poplars
under an intermittent moon that glinted like steel.
In the darkness it has whizzed past my ear
with a knife's chilling whoosh.
In this second stanza those "little things" seem to have moved inward in a subtle way. White
its writing here about what Robert Creeley says about a poem: that it "can be an instance of
all the complexity of a way of thinking....all the emotional conflicts involved in the act of
18 Alan Marshall on "Books and Writing," ABC Radio National, 5 May 2002.
16
17. thinking."19
Perhaps Peter Stitt puts it better: "Wherever real liveliness of emotion and
intellect is happening. I feel poetry is near."20
White concludes:
With the glue of cobwebs
it has brushed against my sleeping face
awakened me with its distant cries of anguish
or taunting laughter only to elude me
in the hushed corridor or the deserted garden.
It has called me urgently from dreams
to rise and shiver at the desk
staring for hours at a blank page.
I've known it to watch from the corner
then creep up behind me
its breath smelling of wet leaves and apples
cold and moist on my nape.
I hear the call of life here in this third stanza. " A writer is not trying for a product, but
accepting sequential signals toward an always arriving present," as Stitt says again.21
There
are so many ways of saying what White is saying here, as poets and critics at least since
Shakespeare and as far back as Pindar or the writers of the Wisdom Literature in the Old
Testament, have tried to express the poetic impulse. Perhaps "the always arriving present,"
19 Robert Creeley in Re-making It New Contemporary American Poetry and the Modernist Tradition,
Cambridge UP, 1987, p.154.
20 James Dickey in The World's Hieroglyphic Beauty: Five American Poets, Peter Stitt, University of
Georgia Press, 1985, p.11.
21 ibid., p. 57.
17
18. soon to be White's experience and calling him urgently, is that boundlessness, music, laughter
and "the promised ecstasy of reunion" that he wrote of in his poem Learning New Ways.22
A final five lines from this same poem:
Sometimes it stares faint and helpless
from the mirror where
in a wavering aqueous light
my image drowns signalling
Befriend me! I am the poem you would write.
Perhaps White is referring here, partly, alluding as he does to an 'unwritten poem', to what
that French poet Guerin describes when he writes: "There is more power and beauty in the
well-kept secret of one's self and one's thoughts, than in the display of a whole heaven that
one may have inside one."23
The poet Shelley once defined the poetic Sublime as an experience that persuaded readers to
give up easier pleasures for more difficult ones. The reading of the best poems, the best
literature, constitutes more difficult pleasures than most of what is given to us visually by
television, films and video games. Shelley's definition reveals an important aspect of what I
am saying about White and his poetry. For White is both entertainer in the finest sense and
intellectual provocateur due to the supreme difficulty that often arises for his readers due to
the power of his intellect and his capacity to use words. He can hold you in a spell, but it is
not the vacuous spell of mental inactivity offered by electronic media, it is the spell that
22 Roger White, The Language of There, p.77.
23 Maurince de Guerin in Matthew Arnold, op.cit., p.34.
18
19. derives from the indubitable powers of poetry. The refreshment White offers comes from the
pleasures of change in meaning each time you read his poetry. There is often, too, a shock, a
kind of violence, that we do not find in fiction and certainly not on television. It startles us
out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life.24
It does not find its origins in
visual and auditory stimulation but, rather, in the powers of the mind and imagination and
their "new and wonderful configurations." They are configurations, which 'Abdu'l-Baha once
wrote derived from "a fresh grace…an ever-varying splendour….from wisdom and the power
of thought."25
24 For some of the ideas here I want to thank Harold Bloom and his section 'Poems' in How To Read and Why,
Fourth Estate, London, 2000, pp.69-142.
25 'Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Wilmette, 1970, p.1.
19