Neither Out Far nor In Deep (1936) The people along the sand All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day. As long as it takes to pass A… Read More ›
Search results for ‘Plato’
Analysis of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice
The Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann (1875–1955) stands out as one of the most important figures of early 20th-century literature. Influenced by German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Mann’s fiction serves as a model of subtle philosophical examination of… Read More ›
Analysis of Browning’s Aurora Leigh
Aurora Leigh is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most ambitious work. Both its very high poetic quality, when the poem is at its best, and its sometimes turgid moralizing, when it is at its worst, were noted by contemporary reviewers like George… Read More ›
Analysis of John Donne’s The Good Morrow
The Good Morrow was first published in John Donne’s posthumous collection Songs and Sonnets (1633) and ranks among his best known love poems. Critics have developed various theories regarding the poem’s symbolism, many relating to the Platonic theory of love…. Read More ›
The Philosophy of Socrates
Socrates (470/469–399 bce), mentor of Plato and founder of moral philosophy, was the son of Sophroniscus (a statuary) and Phaenarete (a midwife). According to a late doxographical tradition, he followed for a time in his father’s footsteps – a claim… Read More ›
Indian Literary Theory and Criticism
The Western tradition of literary theory and criticism essentially derives from the Greeks, and there is a sense in which Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus mark out positions and debates that are still being played out today. At a moment when… Read More ›
Analysis of Jack Spicer’s Poems
Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) wrote a poetry of imagistic and conceptual juxtaposition reminiscent, at times, of Dadaist randomness. He considered true poetry to be “dictated,” and thus removed from the conscious control of the poet…. Read More ›
Analysis of Shelley’s The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is often read in conjunction with “Mont Blanc,” written at about the same time in summer 1816, when Percy Shelley was in Switzerland. The two poems have many things in common, but “The Hymn to… Read More ›
Analysis of Richard Wright’s Stories
“Fire and Cloud” in Uncle Tom’s Children is perhaps the best representative of Richard Wright’s early short fiction. It won first prize in the 1938 Story magazine contest which had more than four hundred entries, marking Wright’s first triumph with… Read More ›
Value Theory
The study of value, called axiology, has three main branches: ethics, concerning the morally good; political theory, concerning the social good; and aesthetics, concerning the beautiful, or taste. One might perhaps add another branch, pragmatics, which concerns the utilitarian good… Read More ›
Analysis of Rubén Darío’s To Roosevelt
Poem Text It is with the voice of the Bible, or verse of Walt Whitman, that we should reach you, Hunter! Primitive and modern, simple and complicated, with a bit of Washington and a bit of Nimrod. You are the… Read More ›
Homosexuality in Literature
With the increasing impact of the gay rights movement and acceptance of gays in mainstream society, gay studies and gay literature are emerging as respected fields. Defining gay literature is sometimes difficult, given the frequent vague and subtle references to… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 bce) was born in Stagira. His father, Nicomachus, was a doctor at the court of Macedonia. The profession of medicine may well have influenced Aristotle’s interests, and his association with Macedon was lifelong: in 343 he became tutor… Read More ›
Drama Theory
Aristotle‘s Poetics, the first major text of Western drama theory, defined the terms of much subsequent discussion. Unlike such classical Eastern theoretical works on drama as the Sanskrit Natyasastra or Zeami Motokiyo’s writings on Noh, it makes only minor passing… Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
Along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Kubla Khan is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s two most famous and most-quoted-from poems. Originally written in either 1797 or 1798, it was not published until 1816 (along with Christabel). The long… Read More ›
The Sublime
The sublime is a central category of aesthetics in romanticism. It was a major topic of aesthetic theory in the 18th century, especially in England and Germany, but its inauguration as a topic was due to the translation by Nicolas… Read More ›
Analysis of William H. Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
William H. Gass is an eminent theorist and practitioner of postmodern metafiction, self-reflexive, performative fictions that emphasize the writing process itself by directing the reader’s attention to the author’s shaping presence in the showy deployment of literary strategies and conventions…. Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s In Memoriam
In Memoriam A.H.H. is one of the great elegies in English; rivaled perhaps only by John Milton’s Lycidas, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, possibly Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and some short poems by Milton and William Wordsworth…. Read More ›
Victorian Literary Criticism
Victorian literary theory, sometimes dismissed as a hinterland, is a remarkably diverse and productive field. Of the four lines of theorizing identified by the philosopher of art Francis Sparshott in Theory of the Arts (1982)— the classical, expressive, oracular, and… Read More ›
Analysis of Wordsworth’s The Intimations Ode
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (The Intimations Ode as it is almost always called) is the single central work of British romantic poetry and widely regarded as one of the greatest English poems of any age…. Read More ›
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