- •Lecture 1. Period I. The Anglo-Saxons. To a.D. 1066
- •Period II. The Norman-French Period. A.D. 1066 To About 1350
- •Lecture 2. Period III. The end of the middle ages (about 1350 to about 1500). The medieval drama.
- •The medieval drama
- •The reformation.
- •Sir thomas more and his 'utopia.'
- •The elizabethan period.
- •Prose fiction.
- •Edmund spenser, 1552-1599.
- •In general style and spirit, it should be added, Spenser has been one of the most powerful influences on all succeeding English romantic poetry.
- •Christopher marlowe, 1564-1593.
- •Shakespeare, 1564-1616.
- •Ben jonson.
- •Lecture 4. The Seventeenth Century (1603-1660). Prose and Poetry. The Restoration (1660-1700).
- •Lecture 5. The Eighteenth Century, Pseudo-Classicism And The Beginnings Of Modern Romanticism
- •Samuel taylor coleridge.
- •William wordsworth (1770-1850).
- •Robert southey.
- •Walter scott.
- •The last group of romantic poets.
- •Percy bysshe shelley (1792-1832).
- •John keats (1795-1821).
- •Lord macaulay.
- •Thomas carlyle.
- •It will probably be evident that the mainspring of the undeniable and volcanic power of 'Sartor Resartus' is a tremendous moral conviction and fervor.
- •John ruskin.
- •Matthew arnold.
- •Alfred tennyson.
- •Elizabeth barrett browning and robert browning.
- •The novel. The earlier secondary novelists.
- •Charles dickens.
- •William m. Thackeray.
- •George eliot.
- •George meredith (1828-1910).
- •Thomas hardy.
- •Stevenson.
- •Rudyard kipling.
- •Lecture 8. The 20th century english literature
- •William Strachey (1609-1618).
- •George Sandys (1578-1644).
- •John Winthrop (1588-1649).
- •Early Descriptive Writers.
- •Roger Williams, 1606-83.
- •Increase Mather, 1639-1723.
- •Cotton Mather, 1663-1728.
- •The Bay Psalm Book
- •Michael Wigglesworth, 1631-1705.
- •Sarah Kemble Knight, 1666-1727.
- •William Byrd, 1674-1744.
- •Other historical books.
- •Jonathan Edwards, 1703-58.
- •Benjamin franklin: 1706-1790.
- •Second half of the eighteenth century. The revolutionary period: speeches, argumentative essays, state papers.
- •The Declaration and the Constitution.
- •Timothy Dwight, 1752-1817.
- •Revolutionary Songs and Ballads.
- •Francis Hopkinson, 1737-91.
- •Charles Brockden Brown, 1771-1810.
- •James fenimore cooper: 1789-1851.
- •The literary development of new england in the 19th century.
- •Ralph waldo emerson: 1803-82.
- •Henry d. Thoreau: 1817-1862.
- •Nathaniel hawthorne: 1804-1864.
- •In 1849, following his enforced retirement from surveyorship at the custom-house in Salem office, -- the result of political schemes, -- Hawthorne wrote “The Scarlet Letter”.
- •Edgar allan poe: 1809-1849.
- •Lecture 11. Poetry and prose of the 19th century.
- •John greenleaf whittier (1807-1892).
- •James russell lowell (1819-1891).
- •Oliver wendell holmes: 1809-1894.
- •Walt Whitman (1819-1892).
- •Novelists and humorists. Southern Romancers and realistic fiction.
- •W.G. Simms, 1806-1870.
- •Realistic Fiction.
- •Lecture 12. Literature of the new spirit. Fiction at the turn of the 20th century.
- •Fiction since 1870.
- •W. D. Howells (1837-1920).
- •Henry James (1843-1916).
- •Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945)
- •Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
- •Ezra Pound
- •Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
- •F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream
- •Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
- •Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
- •William Faulkner (1897-1962)
- •John Hoyer Updike
William wordsworth (1770-1850).
Wordsworth is the chief representative of some (especially one) of the most important principles in the Romantic Movement; but he is far more than a member of any movement; through his supreme poetic expression of some of the greatest spiritual ideals he belongs among the five or six greatest English poets. First, he is the profoundest interpreter of Nature in all poetry. His feeling for Nature has two aspects. He is keenly sensitive, and in a more delicately discriminating way than any of his predecessors, to all the external beauty and glory of Nature, especially inanimate Nature--of mountains, woods and fields, streams and flowers, in all their infinitely varied aspects. A wonderfully joyous and intimate sympathy with them is one of his controlling impulses. But his feeling goes beyond the mere physical and emotional delight of Chaucer and the Elizabethans; for him Nature is a direct manifestation of the Divine Power, which seems to him to be everywhere immanent in her; and communion with her, the communion into which he enters as he walks and meditates among the mountains and moors, is to him communion with God. He is literally in earnest even in his repeated assertion that from observation of Nature man may learn more of moral truth than from all the books and sages. To Wordsworth Nature is man's one great and sufficient teacher. It is for this reason that, unlike such poets as Keats and Tennyson, he so often views Nature in the large, giving us broad landscapes and sublime aspects. Of this mystical semi-pantheistic Nature-religion his 'Lines composed above Tintern Abbey' are the noblest expression in literature. All this explains why Wordsworth considered his function as a poet a sacred thing and how his intensely moral temperament found complete satisfaction in his art. It explains also, in part, the limitation of his poetic genius. Nature indeed did not continue to be to him, as he himself says that it was in his boyhood, absolutely 'all in all'; but he always remained largely absorbed in the contemplation and interpretation of it and never manifested, except in a few comparatively short and exceptional poems, real narrative or dramatic power (in works dealing with human characters or human life).
In the second place, Wordsworth is the most consistent of all the great English poets of democracy, though here as elsewhere his interest is mainly not in the external but in the spiritual aspect of things. From his insistence that the meaning of the world for man lies not in the external events but in the development of character results his central doctrine of the simple life. Real character, he holds, the chief proper object of man's effort, is formed by quietly living, as did he and the dalesmen around him, in contact with Nature and communion with God rather than by participation in the feverish and sensational struggles of the great world. Simple country people, therefore, are nearer to the ideal than are most persons who fill a larger place in the activities of the world. This doctrine expresses itself in a striking though one-sided fashion in his famous theory of poetry--its proper subjects, characters, and diction. He stated his theory definitely and at length in a preface to the second edition of 'Lyrical Ballads,' published in 1800, a discussion which includes incidentally some of the finest general critical interpretation ever made of the nature and meaning of poetry. Wordsworth declared: 1. Since the purpose of poetry is to present the essential emotions of men, persons in humble and rustic life are generally the fittest subjects for treatment in it, because their natures and manners are simple and more genuine than those of other men, and are kept so by constant contact with the beauty and serenity of Nature. 2. Not only should artificial poetic diction (like that of the eighteenth century) be rejected, but the language of poetry should be a selection from that of ordinary people in real life, only purified of its vulgarities and heightened so as to appeal to the imagination. There neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and that of poetry.
This theory, founded on Wordsworth's disgust at eighteenth century poetic artificiality, contains a very important but greatly exaggerated element of truth. That the experiences of simple and common people, including children, may adequately illustrate the main spiritual aspects of life Wordsworth unquestionably demonstrated in such poems as 'The Reverie of Poor Susan,' 'Lucy Gray,' and 'Michael.' But to restrict poetry largely to such characters and subjects would be to eliminate not only most of the external interest of life, which certainly is often necessary in giving legitimate body to the spiritual meanings, but also a great range of significant experiences which by the nature of things can never come to lowly and simple persons. That the characters of simple country people are on the average inevitably finer and more genuine than those of others is a romantic theory rather than a fact, as Wordsworth would have discovered if his meditative nature had, allowed him to get into really direct and personal contact with the peasants about him. As to the proper language of poetry, no one to-day (thanks partly to Wordsworth) defends artificiality, but most of Wordsworth's own best work, as well as that of all other poets, proves clearly that there is an essential difference between the language of prose and that of poetry, that much of the meaning of poetry results from the use of unusual, suggestive, words and picturesque expressions, which create the essential poetic atmosphere and stir the imagination in ways distinctly different from those of prose.
The variety of Wordsworth's poetry deserves special mention; in addition to his short lyric and narrative poems of Nature and the spiritual life several kinds stand out distinctly. A very few poems, the noble 'Ode to Duty,' 'Laodamia,' and 'Dion,' are classical in inspiration and show the finely severe repression and finish of classic style. Among his many hundreds of sonnets is a very notable group inspired by the struggle of England against Napoleon. Wordsworth was the first English poet after Milton who used the sonnet powerfully and he proves himself a worthy successor of Milton. The great bulk of his work, finally, is made up of his long poems in blank-verse. 'The Prelude,' written during the years 1799-1805, though not published until after his death, is the record of the development of his poet's mind, not an outwardly stirring poem, but a unique and invaluable piece of spiritual autobiography. Wordsworth intended to make this only an introduction to another work of enormous length which was to have presented his views of Man, Nature, and Society. Of this plan he completed two detached parts, namely the fragmentary 'Recluse' and 'The Excursion,' which latter contains some fine passages, but for the most part is uninspired.
Wordsworth, more than any other great English poet, is a poet for mature and thoughtful appreciation; except for a very small part of his work many readers must gradually acquire the taste for him.