Literary Theory & Criticism

         A Glossary of Literary Terms

  

New Criticism:

            The majority remarkable movement in 20^th century criticism .Which effected a total alteration , as it were of the control of English studies goes by the name of New Criticism .The new emphasis that was given to criticism earned the title ‘new’ for it .T.S.Eliot wielded a grand deal of influence among his generation .When his The Sacred Wood came out, it  progress a trend in criticism, generally descriptive then, which came to be called New Criticism. It different a prevailing interest of scholars ,critics and teachers of that era in the biographies of authors , in the social context of literature, and in literary history by insisting that the right concern of literary criticism is not with the external circumstance or effects or historical position of a work, but with a detailed consideration of the work itself as an independent entity. New Criticism had become an established in American college and even in high schools . New Criticism had to fight solid against a hostile atmosphere that prevailed in academic institutions and exposed the weakness in applying biology, psychology , economics or sociology to literary studies .

                  New Criticism balmy the readers against critical practices which distract attention from the poem itself .In analyzing and evaluating a particular work, they eschew reference to the biography and temperament and personal experience of the author, to the social condition at the time of its creation, or to its psychological and moral effects on the readers, they also tend minimize recourse to the place of the work in literary forms and subject matter. Because of its focus on the literary work in isolated from its attendant circumstances and effects  , the New Criticism is often classified as a type of critical formalism.

            The New Critics continue that their interpretations are based entirely on the context and the language of the text . Hence , their critical practice goes by the name ‘intrinsic criticism’ .This means that their criticism exists inside the confines of the text .every other methods are called ‘extrinsic’ , because they go outside the text for the tools they want to interpret the text. New Criticism also focusing  on the text. They have contributed extremely to the widening of the audience for reading poetry. Mostly New Criticism is founded on the premise that the text is an auto telic art fact   .It is complete and wholesome in itself , and it exists for its own sake .Its connection with the world beyond itself is not of much interest to the New Critic .

             The hostility to New criticism is most effectively and memorably expressed by Geoffrey Hartman in his essay,’ Beyond Formalism’ in these words ,

“There is good reason why many in this country as wellas Europe, have voiced a suspicion of Anglo-Saxon formalism.”

             Every one said and ended, the New Criticism have much to advance literary criticism, and the understanding of literary form. Walter Sutton succinctly sums up the contribution of New Criticism in the following words:

  “Their sophistication, intelligence and information sensibilities are apparent in many excellent and stimulating essay. When achievements are sets against limitation , one is impressed by the thought of what the New Criticism might have accomplished with a less hermetic theory.”

Modernism and Post modernism:

                The term modernism is usually used to identity new and distinctive features in the subjects , forms , concept, and styles of literature .The specific features signified by ‘mordenism’ differ with the user , but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the tradition bases not only of western art , but of western culture in general. central intellectual precursors of modernism , in this sense , are thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization , religion and morality and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self thinkers such as Freud and James G.Frazer, whose twelve volume ‘The Golden Bough’stressed’ the connection between central Christian tenets and pegan , often barbaric , myth and rituals .

              In 1922 alone was signalized by the appearance of such monuments of modernist improvement as James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ .Virginia Woolf’s ‘Jacob’s Room’, T.S.Eliot’s ‘The West Land’ .Major works of modernist fiction , follow Joyce’s ‘Ulysses and his even more radical Finnegan Wake subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and lucidity of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and other inventive modes of narration. Among other European and American writers who are central reprentatives of modernism are the novelist Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka , Dorothy Richardson and W B Yeats , Marianne Moore  and Bertolt Brecht .

          Modernism ‘s well-known feature is the phenomenon called the avant-garde ,that is a small , self conscious group of artists and authors who intentionally carry out, in Erza Pound’s phrase, “make it new”. Avant- garde artist signify themselves as ‘alienated’ from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy , a prominent aim is to shock the sensibilities of the conservative reader and to challenge the norms and pieties of the dominant bourgeois culture .Renyo Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-garde so its distinctive culture formation , the avant- garde .

          Post modernism applied to the literature and art in the 1950s and 1960s, when the effect on Western morale of the first world war were greatly exacerbated by the  experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination .Postmodernism involves not only a continuance , sometimes carried to an extreme, of the counter traditional experiments of modernism, but also varied attempts to break away from modernist forms which had , certainly , become in their turn conventional , as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist ‘high art’ by recourse for models to the ‘mass culture’ in film, television , newspaper cartoons and popular music. The work of postmodern literature by Samuel Beckett, roland barthes,   other blend literary genres culture and stylists levels, the serious and the playful, that they oppose classification according to traditional literary rubric.

           Postmodernists consider that the world is no longer governed by traditional authorities that is, by governments , organizations of science and education , religious institutions etc. Instead , they argue that multinational capitalism , cyber technology, media, consumerism, and globalization are the working forces of the world today .Postmodernists in literature and the arts has parallels with the movement known as post structuralism in linguistic and literary theory, post structuralists undertake to undermine the foundations of language in order to demonstrate that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates, for a rigorous inquirer, into a play of conflicting indeterminacies or else undertake to show that all forms of culture discussion are manifestations of the reigning ideology , or of the relations and construction of power, in contemporary society .Some postmodernist developments in literature, Beat writers, new novel, performance poetry.

Postcolonial:

            Postcolonialism is the political and cultural study of societies free from colonial rule. The effort has obvious relevance to the tradition work of history, but because of the strangeness of the colonial situation , postcolonialism also bears upon common issues of race, class, education, the west and capitalism. Colonialism was not just a simple suppression and exploitation of native peoples. Though motivated by economic motives, colonialism also entailed impressive the colonists’ language and culture upon the local populace.  Postcolonial studies sometimes also encompass aspects of British literature in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, viewed through a perspective that reveals the ways in which the social and economic life represents in that literature was tacitly underwritten by colonial development.

              The negative response of the “master narrative” of Western imperialism in which the colonial others is not only subordinated and marginalized, but in effect deleted as a culture agency and its replacement by a counter narrative in which the colonial culture fight their way back into a word history written by Europeans. A main part in the postcolonial outline is to disestablish Eurocentric norms of literary and artistic values, and to expand the literary canon to include colonial and postcolonial writers .Postcolonial scholarship also studies forms of imperialism other than European , with the domination of some southern-hemisphere groups or nations by other southern-hemisphere group or nations .this rethinking of empire has brought the United State into focus as an object postcolonial nation. In current scholars in postcolonial studies have turned their notice to identities in a globalized world where large group of people have, for various reason , left their homelands , producing diasporas, population flow and émigré groups .Here Modernity at Large : Cultural Dimension of globalization . Ania Loomba provides an indication of the field in Postcolonialism .

            Finally in this way  , postcolonialism focuses on the text, but has a great ambition to convey the experience through the eyes of the colonized individual , not the eyes of the colonizer . To postcolonial critics ,this is a last act of liberation from the colonizer .

      

Diaspora:

  The term Diaspora means home sickness. Most early on thought of Diaspora were confidently fixed in a conceptual ‘home land’. They were worried with a paradigmatic case or a small number of care cases. The paradigmatic case was, of course, the Jewish Diaspora and some dictionary definitions of Diaspora until newly did not simply illustrate but defined the word with respect to that case.

         The first development of the use of the phrase extended it to other similar cases, such as the American and Greek Diasporas. More recently, it has been useful to emigrant groups that go on their connection in their homeland from overseas, such as the category of long-distance nationalists identified by Benedict Anderson. Brubaker notes that Albanians, Hindu, Indian, Irish, Kashmiri, Kurds, Tamils, Palestinians have been conceptualized as Diasporas in this sense. Furthermore and social migrants who maintain affectional and socialites with a homeland” have also been described as Diasporas.

Feminist Criticism:

          Feminist criticism was not inaugurated, but after long struggle for the credit of Women’s cultural roles and achievement , and for Women’s social and political rights, clear by such books as John Stuart Mill’s ‘The Subjection of Women, and the American Margaret fuller’s ‘ Woman in the 19^th century .Greatly of feminist literary criticism continues in our time to be organized with the movement by political Feminist for social , legal and cultural freedom and equality . When reading as a woman and responding to the way woman is presented in literature . In a world for all time give response of male and condition of woman is not good .As writer and as critic  woman present her ideas in her own way, but the problems of female language .feminist criticism may be concerned with the history , themes, genres and structures of literature by woman .

               In American, modern feminist criticism was inaugurated by Mary Ellmann’s skillful and witty discussion , in ‘Thinking about Women ‘ and also the offensive stereotypes of women in literature written by men, and also about alternative and subversive sign that happen in some writing by women .Modern feminist criticism in America, England, France and other countries is not a unitary theory or procedure .The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively Patriarchal that is , it is male centered and controlled , and is organized and conducted in such a way as to inferior women to men in all cultural domains familial, religious, political , economic , social, legal and artistic .The more claim is that this patriarchal ideology pervades those writing which have been traditionally measured great literature, and which until recently have been written mainly by men for men. Typically, the most highly regarded literary works focus on male protagonist like , Hamlet , Tom Jones, Ulysses, Frankenstein etc. These males, the female characters , when they play a role , are marginal and subordinate, and either as opposite and subservient to ,or in conflict to desires and enterprises .

            Though many feminist critic have decried the literature written by men for its description of women as marginal and subservient to men’s interests and emotional needs and fears  some of them have also indentified male writers who in their view, have managed to rise above the sexual prejudices of their time satisfactorily to  understand and represent the cultural pressures that have shaped the characters of women and forced upon them their negative or subsidiary social roles .

    Psychoanalytical criticism:

             Psychological literary criticism has come to be Psychoanalytic Criticism, whose basis and measures were established by Freud. Freud had developed the dynamic form of psychology that called ‘Psychoanalysis’ as a method for the analysis and therapy of neuroses, but soon extended it to account for many developments and practices in the history of civilization, including conflict, mythology and  religion as well as literature and the other arts .Psychological criticism deals with a work of literature primarily as an expression, in an indirect and fictional form , of the condition of mind and the structure of personality of the individual author .Here also present unconscious , according to Freud, “are residual trace of prior stage of psychosexual development , from earliest infancy onward, which have been outgrown , but remain as ‘fixations’ in the unconscious of the adult” .In 1920 Freud ‘s theory was elaborated and developed but not very altered, by later developments in his theory of mental structures and processes .There development of three function the Id , the Superego and the ego. Freudian critics, in a form suggested by Freud’s later writing , on the role of ‘ego psychology’ in elaborating the manifest content and artistic from of a work , intentionally manage to mediate between the conflicting demands of the id , the superego, and the limits imposed by realism.

New historicism:

         New historicisms attend primarily to the historical and culture conditions of its production, its meanings, its effects and also of its later critical interpretations and evaluations. This is earlier kind of literary scholarship , for the views and practices of the new historicists differ markedly from those of earlier scholars who had adverted to social and intellectual history as a ‘background’ against which to set a work of literature as an independent entity, or had viewed literature as a ‘reflection’ of the worldview characteristics of a period. New historicists conceive of a literary text as ‘situated ‘ within the totality of the institutions, social practices and discourse that constitute the culture of a particular time and place and with which the literary text interacts as both a product and a producer of cultural codes.

             Louis Montrose described the new historicism as “a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.” That is, history is conceived to be not a set of fixed, objective facts but, like the literature with which it interacts a text that itself needs to be interpreted .A number of historicists claim also that these cultural and ideological representations in texts serve mainly to reproduce and propagate the complex power structures of domination and subordination which characterize a given society.

              New historicists maintain the distinction between literary and nonliterary works, as well as between major and lesser works of literary artistry. As Stephen Greenblatt has said,” Major works of art remain centrally important , but they are jostled now by an array of other texts and images” .

Ecocriticism:

            Ecocriticism shortened form of ‘ecology’ the science that investigates of all forms of plant and animal life with all other with physical habitats. Here critical writing find out the relation between literature and the biological and physical environment. This literary form was basically initiated in England by Gilbert transparent ’s extremely popular ‘Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne’ his close and affectionate observations of wildlife and the natural setting in a particular area of rural England .The middle 19^th century Thoreau and other writers in America and England were pay thought to the threats to the environment by urbanization and industrialization.

            In the 20^th century the  warning by scientist and conservationists improved , two particularly important books were Aldo leopold’s ‘A sand County Almanac’ its attention to the ominous poverty of the environment  and Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring ‘ , concerning the devastation inflicted by newly developed chemical pesticides on wildlife , both on land and in water .Finally than wild spread concern that the earth was in an environmental crisis ,brought on by the industrial and chemical pollution of the ‘biosphere’ and explosion of the human population that exposed to exceed the capacity of the earth to maintain it.

           In this environment of critics that Ecocriticism was inaugurated. It had become quickly growing field of literary study with his  own group, its own journal. Many Ecocriticism writings maintain to be oriented toward heightening their readers’ consciousness and even toward provocative them to social and political action, but other movement directed toward achieving social and political justice. Some environmental critics continue that the ecological crisis by the rejection , in the West, of the Judeo –Christian religion and culture with its anthropocentric view that human beings, because they possess souls. There are many anthologies of nature writing, representative recent ones are ‘The Norton Book of Nature Writing’, John Elder , ‘literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook .The Romantic period of the early 19^th century was the turning point in the long Western tradition of human transcendence and control over nature.

Queer Theory:

              Queer theory is frequently combined area of gay and lesbian studies , with the theoretical writing about all modes of difference as cross dressing and transsexuality from society’s normative model of sexual identity and activities .The term “queer” was firstly derogatory , used to stigmatize male and female same sex love as deviant and unnatural, it has been adopted by gays and lesbians themselves as a noninvidious term to recognize a way of life and area for scholarly inquiry. Teresa de Jagose, ‘Queer Theory :Lesbian and gay Sexualities.

               A numeral example of queer theorists, adopted the deconstructive mode of dismantling the key binary oppositions of Western culture, such as male or female, natural or unnatural and heterosexual or homosexual. Later theorists such as Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler undertook to invert the standard hierarchical opposition by which homosexuality is marginalized and made unnatural , which the supposed normatively of heterosexuality is based on the suppression and same sex want and relationships . Queer reading has become the term for interpretive activities that undertake to subvert. For queer theory now devoted a lot of magazine in the field also has been established curriculum of the humanities and social science. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, eds., Lesbian Text and Contexts: Radical Revisions.

Structuralism:

         Structuralism is certain developments in linguistics and anthropology. This style of criticism is part of French Structuralism, inaugurated in the 1950s by the cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who analyzed on the form of Saussure’s linguistics model, he examined the customs and conventions of some culture with a view of arriving at the grammar culture .Structuralism cuts across the traditional corrective areas within and between the humanities by responsibility to provide an objective account of all social and cultural practices. The primary attention of the structuralism like that of Saussure is not in the culture parole but in language. That is not any particular culture as it provides the structure  and rules of the universal system .

            Literary studies , Structuralism criticism conceives to be second order signifying system that uses the first order structural system of language as it medium. Structuralist  critics apply a selection of linguistic concept  to the analysis of literary text, there difference between phonemic and morphemic. Structuralism is in opposition to mimetic criticism and to expressive criticism, so the view that literature is a mode of communication between author and readers.

           In the view of structuralism , literary work becomes a text , that is  a mode of writing constituted by a play of domestic elements according to specifically literature conventions and codes. The structuralism enterprise , in the exact form and complete pretensions and other modes of post structural theories, which subverted the scientific claims of structuralism . The theory of structuralist that was based on the linguistics of Saussure a theory that Barthes applied not only to literature but also to decoding, by reference to an original signifying system , many aspects of popular culture. Structuralist premises and procedures, continue to be deployed in a number of current enterprise and particularly in the semiotic analysis of cultural phenomena, in stylistic and in the formal structures that in their combination and constitute the plots in novels .In poetry  narrative prose, is Jonathan Culler, structuralist poetics : also Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction.

Alankara School:

          Sanskrit is a extremely scientific language. It is brilliant with musical and rhythmic elements, in its sound pattern .It is also overcome of diversities arising from the mono-syllabic meaning  , meaning of the stem and suffix, multi meaning of words etc .All these modes and varieties of ornamental of sound and sense have been careful define and analyzed .

          The term ‘alankar , in Sanskrit stands for the principle of poetic beauty itself, in which sense of this general meaning , the entire science of criticism is so named Alankarashastra .Alankar in a limited sense also mean any trope or figure of speech that adorns a literary composition. There is feature treatment of such figure of speech from Bharata, the author of Natyashastra to Mammata concerning their definition , classification and number, different between the outstanding that are with poetic beauty and figure of speech, as also the situation of figure in the theories of rasa .

          The earliest works to deal with the figure in the encyclopedic   Natyasasta. In this treatise the beautiful speech patterns the Vachikbhinaya, one of the four abhinayas , which understand the entire field of ancient Sanskrit drama .In the Natyasastra only four figures Upama (simile), Rupak (metaphor), Dipaka(illuminator), Yamaka (rhyme) .A arrangement of figure that has been accepted by all alankarikas of those based on sound and sense. In essential we understand alankar present with point for all semantic examination. A correct appreciation of the position of early theorists in regard to alankar is necessary to understand their idea of shabda and artha which forms the starting point for all semantic analysis.

     Riti School:

            Riti is a theory of language of literature. It first time appear in Bharata’s Natyasastra , developed it into a theory , as the theory of visista padaracana riti .In the riti also attached other words like marga and vrtti .later on Anandavardhana famous style on the basis of the use of particular kinds of compounds .Mammata designates the different modes as vrttis .Here also present unusual theorist and categories like, in theorist Dandin , Vamana and Kuntaka at the side of in categories vaidarbhi, gaudiya, pancali etc.

               Riti is connect with, themes, achieve on the hearers and sentiment .Viswanatha considers proper group of language as riti words and pharases have to be correctly selected and organized in poetry and this is necessary for rasa and bhavas .Style of riti is outstanding .But riti is much more than just diction .Essentially it is a theory that handles the psychophonetic suitability of language for speaker .

Vakroti School:

       Vakroti claims that the characteristic property of literary language is its markedness . It deviates in particular ways from ordinary language in its form and in its creation of meaning Kuntaka made vakrokti a occupied fledge theory of literariness .His meaning of vakrokti is both meaning and meaning marked by artistic revolve of speech.

        Vakroti classified in six way, syallables or their arrangement , in inflected forms of substantives , in the base substantives in topic or sections, in sentences, in figure of speech. The three margas , style , sukumara, vicitra and madhyama, as plans of expression are to be treated as example vakrokti. Here also defined class of vakroti, splendor, sweetness, perspicuity, grace, classically. The principle of vakroti has a affinities with modern formalist theories of literature which measured the language of literature .

Dhvani School:

             The term dhvani is suggested by the grammarian’s principle of ‘sphota’ . which means it bears .The words and their sense that are capable of manifesting the suggested sense are able  called dhvani. Thus, indicative words and senses are called dhvani. The further activity of the speaker involved in imparting to the sounds produced by him in a manner or shape such as fast, slow etc is called dhvani.

             From the first verse of the Dhvanyaloka it is quite clear that the theory of dhvani had a long course of growth in as much as it was given a due consideration by his predecessors and it existed even at the time of Anadavardhana himself in various forms, handed down , as he asserts in endless tradition although it may not have been explained as Abhinavagupta, adds in his gloss, in particular books .This implies without doubt that the school excited from a very early time, but it goes the credit if Anandavardhana to ore sent it in a systematic and scientific form .

         The theory of dhavni marks a major turn in the onward journey of literary movement , which proclaims dhvani as the essence of poetry and vyanjana as the middle of literary creation and communication .The emergence of the theory of suggestion therefore , constitutes a major event in the Sanskrit literary criticism. It modify the course of the literary current from outward to the inner . It is in this sense that Anandavardhana declares his school as different from the famous system , which has not effort to demonstrate traditional authorize behind the idea of suggestion. The significance of Anandavardhana ‘s typology of verbal suggestion needs to be set out clearly. If we are able to explain how indirect meanings arise thoroughly, we are able to maintain that all probable meaning are natural in the text all that the reader does is to develop this system of verbal symbolism to create a particular meaning.

            There are two main divisions of dhvani the one where the expressed sense being stultified suggests some ideas and is called ‘avivakshitavachta’ and the other where the expressed sense, thought intentionally  to convey some ideas as leading to something else, suggests some other ideas. It is termed as ‘vivakashitanya paravachya’. The ‘avivakshitavachta’ type of dhvani may be illustrated by the following

         “   Only three type of men can pluck the golden flowers

     Of this earth, viz , the brave , the learned and the parasites “.

The victorian Literature

                 Study of Victorian Age

                The Victorian era was age full of changes; the most important was the supremacy of Queen Victoria, who ascended the throne in 1837 and ruled the British Empire, restoring strength to the crown. Her control is considered one of the most wealthy in her time, which finally became this symbol of a period that took its name, "the Victorian Era".

     Napoleonic Wars completed in 1815, and meanwhile France and the

Revolution changed Europe; Great Britain became the main power of the World. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Britain would stay as the leading world power, far above any other. Britain controlled so many areasaround the world that the sun always shown in one of them.

       Victoria reigned this great and open kingdom during sixty-three years. She was only eighteen years old when she was crowned. Victoria sheltered the cosmopolitan interests that predominate the era and cultivatedinternational relationships between various dynastic families of Europe.

The British pound became the currency par brilliance in world markets; the British fleet was the maximum authority in overseas; factories and the numerous railroad tracks were the example to follow for all the other powers that imitated the British Industrial Revolution.

      The transform in the way of production (before with peasants and craftsmen and now with workmen) shortly revolutionized the society and the economy of the world. for the moment the development of the railway and other industries promoted the new way of production; Queen Victoria governed her monarchy bravely influencing the entire world.

Her period of influence, became a symbol of the consolidation of the British Empire, was see of the rise of the middle-class and characterized by a morality deeply conservative. With Queen’s Victoria reign, England agreed out a process of electoral and social reforms.

            Major Victorian literature in any suitable and complete manner has proven difficult for critics ever while the nineteenth century came to a close. The movement generally comprises the years from 1830 to 1900, still there is full deviation about even this simple point. The name given to the period is borrowed from the royal matriarch of England, Queen Victoria, who sat on throne from 1837 to 1901. One has difficulty determining with any truth where the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century leaves off and the Victorian Period begins because these traditions have so many aspects in general. The same, identifying the point where Victorianism gives way completely to Modernism is no simple task. Literary periods are never the separate, self-contained realms which the anthologies so suggest. Rather, a literary period more closely resembles a rope that is frayed at both ends. Many threads make up the rope and work mutually to form the whole artistic and cultural setting. The Victorian writers exhibited some well-established behavior from previous eras, while at the same time almost arts and letters in new and interesting direction. Certainly, some of the later Victorian novelists and poets are nearly indistinguishable from the Modernists who followed shortly after that. In spite of the hesitation of terminology, there are some actual statements that one can make as regards the nature of Victorian literature and the intellectual world which nurtured to literature.

             In this age also material development  .It was an age living with new activities .There was a revolution in commercial enterprise ,owing to the grand increase of available markets , and as a result of this  huge advance in the use of mechanical device .On the other side of this picture of commercial extension we see the dreadful social condition of the new industrial cities, the squalid slums, and the development few to cheap labor , the painful fight by the progressive few to introduce social legislation and the slow expansion of the authorization .

             Here also comes intellectual development .There can be little hesitation that in many cases material wealth produced a hardness of irritation and an impatience of projects and ideas that brought no return in hard cash , Yet it is to the credit of this age that intellectual activities were so different .In addition, popular education became a practical object  .This is its turn produced a new hunger for intellectual food and resulted in a great amplify in the production of the press and of other more strong species of literature .

In the Victorian age present many features ,yet in numerous we can specify.

           Its Morality- practically all observers of the Victorian age are struck by this severe deference to the conventions .To a later age these seem ridiculous .To a great extent the new morality was a natural revolt against the grossness of the later Regency and the influence of the Victorian court was all in its favour .In literature it is sufficiently reflected .Tennyson is the most conspicuous example in poetry , crating the priggishly complacent Sir Galahad and King Arthur ,Dickenson ,possibly the most representative of the Victorian novelists took for his model the old picaresque novel ,but it is almost laughable to observe his anxiety to be moral .

      The Revolt –Many writers protested against the deadening effects of the conventions .carlyle and Matthew Arnold in their different accents ,were loud in their denunciations Thackeray never tried of satirizing the snobbishness of the age and Borrowing’s and the smooth self- satisfaction of the Tennysonian school .As the age proceeded the response strengthened .In the poetry pre-Raphaelites ,led by Swinburne and William Morris ,proclaimed no maarlity but that of the artist’s consider for his art .By the vigour of his methods Swinburne horrified the timorous and made himself rather ridiculous in the eyes of sensible people .

       Intellectual Developments – The literary invention was certainly affected by the new idea in science ,religion and politics .we can identify the influence of such a work in Tennyson’s In Memoriam ,in Matthew arnold’s meditative poetry and in the works of Carlyle .In religious and ethical thought the ‘Oxford Movement’ as it was called was the most noteworthy advance .This movement had its resource among the young and eager thinkers of the old university and was headed by the great Newman  ,who finally joined the church of Rome .As religious indication it marked the extensive discontent with the existing bailiffs of the Church of England . 

         The New Education – The instruction Acts, making a sure measure of instruction compulsory, quickly produced an huge rading public. The cheapening of printing and paper improved the demand for books , so that the production was multiplied .The most popular form of literature was the novel ,and the novelists responded with a will .Much of their work was of a high standard , so much so that it has been asserted by competent critics that the middle years of the 19^th century were the richest in the full history of the novel .        

            International Influences – Through the 19^th century the whole interaction among American and European writers was remarkably fresh and strong .subject nations in particular the Italians, were a sympathetic theme for prose and verse .

         The Achievement of the age – With all its immense production ,the age produced no supreme writer .It exposed no Shakespeare ,no Shelly ,nor a Byron or Scott .The common literary level was nevertheless, very high and it was an age moreover , of large intellectual horizons  ,noble endeavour and brilliant aspirations .

The poets of The Victorian Age:

Alfred Lord Tennyson:

    Tennyson was English poet often regarded as the leader representative of the Victorian age in poetry. When Tennyson was seventeen years old he collaborated with his elder brother Charles in poems by ‘Two Brothers ‘.The volume is  a minor one , but in the light of his later work we can already recognize a little of the Tennysonian  metrical ability and expressive power .In this contains such notable poems as’ The Lady of Shalott’ ,The Lotus _Easter and The Place of Art in which we see the Tennyson system approaching perfection .In 1842 he produced two volumes of poetry that position him once and for all among the grater poets of his day .

His career are marked primarily by much longer poems .The Princess is a serio comic effort to handle the theme that was then famous as the ‘new woman’ .for the sake of his story Tennyson imagines a ladies academy with a defiantly intellectual princess at the head of it .For a space a tragedy seems imminent, but in the end all is well, for the princess in married to the innocent hero . The poem is in blank verse  , but interspersed are several singularly beautiful lyrics . The humour is serious, but many of the imagery are as rich and wonderful as any Tennyson ever attempted.

In poem ‘In Memoriam ‘caused a great strit when it first appeared .It is a very long series of meditations upon the death of Arthur Henry Hallam  .Tennyson brooded over the subject for years and upon this elegiac theme  he imposed many meditation on life and death  ,showing how these subject were affected by the new theories of the day .For the first and possibly the only  ,time Tennyson feelings were moved and troubled .The result was the  most deeply emotional ,and probably the greatest  ,poetry he ever produced .The poem is adorned with many beautiful sketches of English scenery and the metre now called the in this poem –and which is quite rare is deftly managed .

              With faith that comes of self-control,

              The truths that never can be proved

              Until we close with all we loved,

              And all we flow from soul in soul.

Tennyson issued a severe of Idylls of the King . Many doting admirers saw in the Idylls an allegory of the soul of man. These Idylls are sacred in tears and are dedicated to the memory of one who loved them as if he had seen his own picture in them. He was a man who seemed in all his qualities and fine behavior to be none other than Arthur's ideal knight. Now he is gone, and England prays that his sons will be as noble as he was and will be worthy of their father, Albert the Good. The queen should reign alone, in brilliance and in solitude, for he is gone, but she is royal and will suffer. In his closing lines to the queen, the poet writes:
                      His love, unseen but felt, o'ershadow thee,                       The love of all thy sons encompass thee,                       The love of all thy daughters cherish thee,                       The love of all thy people comfort thee,                       Till God's love set thee at his side again!

The other poem of any length is Enoch Arden  , which became the most popular of all and create its way in translation into foreign language .The plot is cheap enough , dealing with a seaman  ,who returns and finding his wife happily married another man sorrowfully retires without making  himself known .

With the shorter poems like ,’Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ and’ The Death of Enone’ .But in poem ‘Break ,Break ,Break ‘lyrical quality is rather uneven .Here he provide a background for the true lyrical strength of emotion .

Robert Browning :

                Robert Browning was English playwright and master of dramatic dialogue poetry .the future poet was educated semi-privately and from an early age he was free to follow his inclination toward studing unusual subjects. But in his work chief difficulty to reading him, because the obscurity of his style , which the critics of half a century ago held up to ridicule . He is led from one thing to another by his own mental associations, and forgets that the reader’s association may be of an entirely different kind. Browning is careless in his English and frequently clips his speech, giving us a serious of ejaculations .as we do not quite understand his processes of thought , we must stop between the ejaculations to trace out the connections . His allusions are often farfetched refer , ring to some odd scrap of information which he has picked up in his wide reading ,and the ordinary reader find it difficult to trace and understand them .His first famous work is ‘Pauline’ , an introspective . poem Pauline is a fragmentary poem about the unnamed narrator's inability to commit himself to poetry. His conception of poetry is vastly ambitious, its blueprint an apotheosized Shelley. Perhaps the very ambition makes failure inevitable, or perhaps he is right to analyze traits of vacillating weakness, vanity, over-egocentrism, over-self-analysis, insincere religiosity, insufficient love for others, and the rest.      
I have no confidence,                   So I will sing on—fast as fancies come                   Rudely—the verse being as the mood it paints.Pippa passes  of  Bowing’s simple but beautiful lyrics. The language is
Uncomplicated, simple descriptive statements unadorned by comparison andunveiled in allusion, yet dense with imagery and wonderfully evocation .

The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in his Heaven - All's right with the world! His method is to take a character at a moment of crisis and , by allowing him to talk , to reveal not only his present thoughts and feelings but his past history .dramatic Lyrics and dramatic Romance and Lyrics show this faculty being directed into the channel in which it was to achieve perfection that of the dramatic monologue .He produced his some of best work in ‘Men and Women’. .In 1864 saw the publication of his last really great volume, Dramatis personae.The remaining years of Browning ‘s long life saw the production of numerous further volumes of verse like ,’The Inn Album’ , ‘Fifine at the fair’, ‘The Two Poets of Croisic’, ‘Jocoseria’ .

Elizabeth Barrett Browning :

     

Elizabeth was  English poet  and her famous Sonnets ‘ The Portuguese ‘ .In 1844 Miss Barrett published her poems , which idea extraordinary public favor .Such poems as ‘The Cry of the Children’ ,which voice the objection of humanity against  child labor ,appealed tremendously to the readers of the age ,and this young woman’s fame as a poet temporarily overshadowed that of Tennyson and Browning .Her works are ‘The Seraphim and other Poems’ , sonnets from the ‘Portuguese’ ,. She also wrote many of her shorter pieces for magazines  ,the most important contributions being ‘The cry of the Cornhill’ .As a narrative poet Browning is a comparative failure for the in way , but she has power of a  sweet ,lucid and frequently passionate style .

Matthew Arnold :

        In the literature Arnold has occupied for many years an authoritative situation as critic and teacher, related to that held by Ruskin in the world of art .In his poetry he reflects the doubt of an age which witnessed the conflict between science and exposed faith  , but this men so different in sprit and methods , confronted the similar problems ,sought the equal ends ,and were dominated by the same moral honesty . Arnold’s literary work divides itself into three periods, which we may call the poetical , the critical and the practical .He had written poetry since  his school days, and his first volume ,’ The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems’. His chief works in critical period are the ‘Lectures On Translating Homer’ and the two volumes of ‘Essays in Criticism’ , which made Arnold one of the best known literary men in England .His well famous narrative poems ‘balder dead’ and ‘Sohrab and Rustum’.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

          Rossetti was painter and poet .He was also leader in the pre Raphaelite movement .He published his first work ‘ Hand and Soul’. In 1881 he published his Ballads and Sonnets , a remarkable volume containing with other poems ,’The Confession’, ‘The King Tragedy’ a masterwork of dramatic narrative and ‘The House of life’ ‘ a collection of one hundred  and one sonnets reflecting the poet’s love and loss.

William Morris:

         He created a great amount of poetry , and was one of the most conspicuous figures in mid- Victorian literature. Upon art, education , political, and social problems his great energy and powerful mind led him to take very decided views, amazing of an original nature .The bulk of Morries’s  poetry was during the first 45 years of his life .’The Defence of Guenevere’ and other poems shoes his love of beauty of colour, sound and scenery and his passion for the medieval .In structure the poems of this volume are often imperfect and in way they have an sudden roughness which is not seen in his later work .’The Life and Death of Jason’ a heroic poem on the familiar theme , is told in smooth, easy couplets and has the melancholy tone so ordinary  in Morris .The literary production of the second part of Morris’s life consisted mainly of prose romance, lecture, and articles. The best of his lectures are ‘Hopes and fears for art and ‘Signs of Change’.

Algernon Charles Swinburne:

               Swinburne is chronologically , the last of Victorian poets , an artistic technique having ideal command of all old English verse forms and a remarkable facility for inventing new he seems at the present time to rank  among the best in our literature .Here his poetical work  can be mentioned here ‘Songs beforeSunrise’, acollection of poems chiefly in praise of Italian liberty , a more and less successful attempt at Greek tragedy and ‘Tristram and Other Poems , anarrative of much passion and force, collected in the heroic couplet.

The Novelist  of the Victorian Age:

Charles Dickens:

               

Here Dickens ‘s life and work in contrast with that of the two great poets Tennyson and Browning were being educated for the life of literature and defended most kindly from the hardships of the world. In 1836 her ‘Pickwick’ was published , and life was changed as if a magician had waved his wand over him .Dickens was intense enough to understand his danger and his next novel ‘Oliver Twist’ had serious purpose of justifying the evils under which the poor were suffering. His next novel ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ and indeed in most of his remaining works. He presents different types of characteristics like blameless little child like Oliver’ than the horrible or grotesque foil like Squeers and the grandiloquent or broadly humours fellow like Sam weller.

William Makepeace Thackeray:

             In life of Thackeray number of years was investigative for a means of expression and wavered between verse and periodicals .The most significant of these are ‘The Yellowplush Corrspondence’ , contributed to ’Fraser’s Magazine’ and dealing with philosophy and experiences ‘The Book of Snobs’ which firstly appeared in punch as ‘The Snobs of England’.’The Memoirs of Barry’ Lyndon is a distinct advance  .’In Vanity Fair’ the genius of Thackeray reaches high water mark .

George Eliot:

           

She is more observably, more intentionally a preacher and moralizer than any of her great generation .All her novels try  ,  to show in individual the play of universal moral force .’Adam Bede’ was a full length novel. ’The Mill on the Floss’, the partly autobiographical story of ‘Maggie and Tom Tulliver’ is a affecting tragedy set in an authentic rural background .’Silas Marner: the Weaver of Raveloe’ is a shorter novel, which once more gives excellent pictures of village life .’Middle March ‘ , a study of provincial life , in which Eliot built up from the life of a great number of deeply studied characters suffer through their own blindness and folly and the theme is treated with a powerful and inevitable realism .Her last novel ‘Daniel Deronda’ is still more strongly colored by her preoccupation by moral problems.

Conclusion:

         

              Historically the age is extraordinary for the increase of democracy following the reform of 1832, for the spread of education among all classes, for the express development of the arts and science, for important mechanical creation, and for the enormous extension of the bounds of human knowledge by the discoveries of science .

So, on the one side it emphasizes truth as the only object of human effort and on the other side  , its first effect seems to be to discourage works of the imagination.

The Romatic Literature

John Keats as poet

                John Keats was born on October 31, 1795.Keats was attentive artist, concerned to load his poetry as fully as possible with its own particular kind of superiority. Keats as a pictorial poet was essentially presenting in a given poem a series of scenes, and still in the narrative the action does not flow from inside the characters, but is governed pictorially from the outside. He is therefore a painting poet and would have earned Lessing’s censure. But like every great artist he knew that his problem was to work within his inadequacy, and to find a way of conveying what happens in time, for it is only by conversion into dramatic realism that the parts of the verbal painting realize relation and signification.

We see the outcome of it in the faithful critical care he gives to his own poetical development. As we examine his work, we become awake of a constant effort on his part to correct faults in technique and affecting tone .He continuously rejects harmful models and chooses better ones. Above all, he is always thinking out the necessary of his own kind of poetry to the leaving out of everything else.

            Keats was not only aintensely thoughtful poet, he was also the most reflective and motivated artist among the romantics. He took a long time to work free of both his own variable taste and bad influences, and still his mature poems were not always flawless. Keats is one of the most inevitably associated with the love of beauty in the world as the ordinary sense of the carrier of beautiful images and of the various imaginative association of an object or word with whatever might give it a sensitive emotions appeal .Poetry, according to Keats, should be the incarnation of beauty, not a medium for the expression of religious or social philosophy.

                In Keats the emotionof Nature was simpler, more direct, and more objective than in either or these others poets. It was his sense to love and interpret Nature more for her own sake, and take away for the sake of the sympathy which the human mind can read into her with its own working and aspirations. He was gifted with a pleasedimpending into all the beauties of woods and fields .Keats is the poet of the sense  ,and he loves Nature because of his sensuousappeal, his appeal to the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, the sense of smell, the sense of touch. He loves flowers because of their beauty of color,fragrant smell, and softness .He loves streams because of their music .He loves the snow , the moon and rainbow for their visual loveliness .

               Shelley expressed the opinion that , “Keats was a Greek “. Indeed  in which was definitely a representative or Greek idea , in a sense in which Wordsworth and Coleridge and even Shelly were not , the Greek courage came to Keats through literature  ,through sculpture , and through an innate tendency  ,and it is below Hellenic authority as a regulation that he gives of his best .

               The inborn, temperamental “Greekness” of Keats’s mind is to be seen in his love of beauty  .To him ,as to the Greeks , the expression of beauty is the ideal of all art .And for him, as for them beauty is not exclusively material nor spiritual , nor intellectual , but is the fullest development of all that goes to make up human perfection.

            Towards the creating of Greek mythology Keats was attracted by an overmastering pleasure in their beauty , and a natural sympathy with the period of imagination that crated them .He infatuated the Greek instinct for personifying the powers of Nature in visibly defined imaginary shapes endowed with human beauty and half human faculties  .In particular he shows himself possessed and fancy bound by the mythology , as well as by the physical attraction , of the moon. Never was bard in youth so literally moon- struck. Not only had the charm of the myth of the love of the moon- goddess for Endymion interwoven itself in his being with his natural sensibility to the physical and spiritual bring of moonlight, but deeper and more abstract meaning than its own had gathered about the story in his mind .

              Greek myth , and to a smaller extent Greek art and literature , give either his main themes or frequent allusions .Keats’s boyish interest had been nourished by his Elizabethan reading , by Leigh Hunt , by the Elgin Marbles ,and by Wordsworth  .one reason for Keats’s high consider for The Excursion would be the account in the fourth book of the Greek religion of Nature and its imaginative expression in myth. Classical myth had been a very rich element in Renaissance poetry from Spenser to Milton , but had been destroyed by the Augustan rationalism . It revived with the romantic religion of Nature and the imagination.

              Keats had no first – hand knowledge of Greek literature .He resulting his knowledge of the Greek classical from translation and books of reference like “Chapman’s translation of Homer”, and “Lempriere’s classical Dictionary”.

                   According to a critic ,

       “Hyperion is in poetry what the Elgin Marbles are in sculpture  .The calm  grandeur of Greek art  ,its majesty and symmetry and simplicity, its economy of ornament and subordination of parts to the whole , came Keats through his knowledge of these marbles.”

               A pure poet perceives beauty and truth in a new light. His observation is unique to him  .The uniqueness deceit in his poetical character .It suggests that there are no non-poetical elements in his composition. He is concerned with the sensitivity of beauty and truth and the expression of the twain in the simplest but most powerful way .The expositions of a pure poet come from his heart and enter the very hearts of his readers .

                   A .C .Bradeley commenting on the true nature of Keats as a poet wrote that , “while his mind had much general power , he was ,more than wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelly ,a poet pure and simple.”

                Keats ‘s idea of Beauty is a very widespread one. It is not confined to what seems good  ,or beautiful or pleasing , it goes outside these boundaries even to the most painful and unpleasant aspect of life .A true poet must see life as a whole: no aspect of life can be ignored .An significant aspect of his concept of Beauty is to put joy and sorrow together. Joy and sorrow or happiness and melancholy cannot be seen or treasured in isolation. Keats dose not find unalloyed happiness in the world .Happiness is happiness because there is unhappiness .A pure poet loves the two with the same attachment.

               Keats’s is apprehensive with romantic themes. He does not go for any worldly or material consideration .The passion for Beauty with him was the master passion. More or take away, all of us are concerned with Beauty .Poets add an elements of strangeness to it and this makes them romantic .Keats has a synthesis of the classical but the romantic element dominates in him .wish of beauty and curiosity are at the very centre of the art and irritation of Keats .

            Downer pointed out that ,”With Keats no consideration of theology ,humanity or metaphysics mingle with his love of Nature .” He loves every mood and color and movement of Nature without decision any spirit or moral preaching there .He see and appreciates Nature through the five sense .He listens to the music of Nature ,smells the sweet fragrance even in darkness ,would like to touch and taste soft and delicate things of Nature .The poetry of earth is never dead  ,beautifulsights and sounds are there even in autumn. In one of his letters Keats wrote,”The setting sun would always set me to right or if a sparrow were before my window, I take part in his existence and pick about the gravel.”

             The odes of Keats are rich in philosophic content .We cannot say that he writes later for the sake of writing .He writes because there is an insist on in his soul, he writes because he has felt and thought and his feelings and thoughts must come out .Lionel Trilling wrote ,”Keats was nothing if not man of ideas” .His odes richly prove it  . There we get his ideas on life  ,art and love .there Keats seems to be moving “towards immortal longings.”Keats is very particular about his words ,compound words , phrases and sentences .No word is unnecessary  ,no phrase is superfluous. There is decoration and ornamentation .It is necessary as poetry it is not prose .Word must have a brightness and afford delight to the readers . Joy is the end of art his poems give joy to the readers  .Keats uses all his possessions to provide joy to his readers  .There is a sense of comfortable sweetness about his language .He loves words and phrases and uses them for meaningfulness as well as harmonious charm .Keats uses a variety of verse form and adds a lot of music to each form .He uses heroic couplet ,four –line stanza ,blank verse as well as Spenserian stanza. He adds a different beauty to every form .There is nothing severe or harsh about his presentation .Then he writes Odes , Sonnets ,and Poems in ballad forms also .He uses Blank verse very effectively in long narrative poems .

                The Eve of St. Agnes was included in the 1820 volume of Keats’s poems .First it was not much liked by the poet himself .Afterward on he wrote positively of it .It is a love –story with a happy ending written in Spenserian stanza form .Keats wrote this poem at a time when he was much troubled due to a number of factors. He himself was not observance good health and was much troubled on account of his painful throat .He had fallen in love with Fanny Brawne but the love was at a very doubtfulstage. As Drinkwater says,” the Eve of St. Agnes must be reckoned, on the whole, the most splendid of Keats’s poems” .The poem is a work of art ,of beauty and a unique feat of poetical craftsmanship .

                            In this poem the weather was very cold .An old Beadsman sat in the chapel telling his beads of the rosary with his benumbed fingers  .His prayers over  ,he walked to his cell with slow steps .In the chapel there were statues of lords and knights and ladies and they seemed . Revolving northwards, he heard music coming from the hall. He could not enjoy it as he had to pray for the recovery of his own soul and for those of the sinners , but the style of Keats ‘s own and the poemis full of beauties of description  ,imagery ,and color . Typical of its beautiful beauty is the following stanza,

                           Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,

                          And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast ,

                          As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon ;

                          Rose –bloom fell on her hands  ,togetherprest,

                              In La Belle Sans Merci was composed on April 21 ,1918 and is directly related with Keats’s feelings for Miss Brawne .The title is derived from a French song written long back in 1424 by Alain Chartier with the title – La Belle Sans Merci .It fascinated Keats .Here the Knight- at – arms met a beautiful lady ,a Faery’s child who certain the knight that she loved him truly. He set her on his pacing steed and rode with her the full day .She got delicious roots and honey of wild flowers for him and then devotedly lulled him to sleep .The fatal enchantress deserted him, left him lonely and miserable on the cold hill’s side where encountered  and asked him why he loitered there with a cold sweat on his  brow he poencountered and asked him why he loitered there with a cold sweat on hisbrow.

             Of the longer poems in the volume, “Lamia” is the most indicative  .It is the story of a beautiful enchantress  ,who turns from a serpent into a glorious woman and fills every human sense with delight  ,until ,as a result of the foolish philosophy of old Apollonius , she vanishes forever from her lover’s sight .The poem is occupied of typically Keatsian pictorial richness , which ,on time,becomes rather excessive .The following explanation of the snake- enchantress is one of the more attractive parts of the story .

 “ She was a Gordian shape of dazzling hue ,

                            Vermillion –spotted ,golden , green ,and blue:

                            Striped like a zebra , freckled like a pard,

                            Eyed like a peacoke  ,and all crimson barr’d;

                           And full of silver moons  ,that, as she breathed, “

                       Together with the longer poems are many shorter pieces of highest beauty .The huge odes like ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ ,’ Ode To A Psyche ‘, ‘ Ode On Autumn’ ,’ Ode To A Grecian Urn’.These are like an invitation to a feast; one who reads them will hardly be fulfilled until he knows more of such amusingpoetry.

 The’Ode To A Nightingale’ is one of the greatest odes of Keats .The poem starts with a happy note .The poet is happy in the happiness of the nightingale as the bird is singing of summer at her full –throated ease .It gives an impression to the poet that the world of the nightingale must be free from the taints of unhappiness and pains.

                          My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

                                 My sense , as thought of hemlock I had drunk,

              He wants a draught of vintage, some old wine so that he may forget all that the nightingale does not know .A draught of wine cooled for long in deep delved earth from the southern parts of France will have great strength .It will transport the poet into the valley flowers, the land of happy life where the peasants and easy folks sing  and dance and enjoy themselves in the bright and pleasant sunlight .

                             Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through  verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

              Here is a contrast between the actual and imaginary .The imagery world of the nightingale is free from all the actual is full of.

        ‘ Ode On A Grecian Urn’ composed in the spring .Here the imagination brain of Keats gave a shape and unity to the different pieces and the Urn that comes to us in the poem is an natural whole.We read the poem and see pictures from the Greek life .This ode contains a powerful message. Here in this poem Keats says ‘Art confers immortality ‘ .The Urn is a better historian in the poets ,it tell a tale and makes its character and their feelings worldly with the message ,

                     ‘Beauty is truth ,truth beauty ‘-that is all

                     Ye know on earth , and all ye need to know.

                 This ode is a ideal image of Keats’s dictum that “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever” .Keats made his urn a thing of beauty and it is a joy forever  .Here Keats blended several threads from his reading and experiences his love of Greek art , the nearness of pain and pleasure , the stormy nature of passion and the severity of the ideal along with the equation of beauty and truth.

               The’ode To Autumn‘has a great thematic issue.First , it illustrates Keats’s thoughts about Beauty .Keats is popularly known as a poet of beauty. It is to be noted that his idea of beauty is not limited to fair faces  ,ravishing sounds and thrilling sights .It is an all comprehensive concept . It includes every aspect of human life .Joy and sorrow  ,pain and pleasure  ,laughter and tears have their individual place and importance in it .Spring is beautiful, so is winter and so is autumn .The treatment of the subject is completely objective or impersonal .The poet keeps himself completely out of the picture . He just describes certain sights and sounds without expressing his personal effect to these sight and sounds .The poem is a perfect nature-lyric .No human sentiment finds expressive, only the beauty and bounty of Nature through autumn are describe .

                            Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

                                Close bosom friends of maturing sun,

Conspring with him ho wto load and bless

                                 With fruit the vines that round the thatch –eves run;

End of the  poem various sounds of Autumn the choir of gnats ,  the bleating of lambs the singing of cricket  , the whistling of red- breasts and the twittering of swallows .Keats’s interest in small and homely creatures is fully evidenced in Nature and his keen and minute observation of natural sights and sounds .

                            Hedge-cricket sing; and now with treble soft

                           The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft,

                                  And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

               ‘Ode To Psyche’ in the Psyche Greek word for the soul .Keats seems to regard psyche not only as the personification of the human soul but also as the personification of beauty .the poem is significant for its concrete and sensuous imagery  ,which constitutes one of the most striking characteristics of Keats’s poetry  .There is , first of all , the lovely pictureof cupid and psyche lying in an embrace in deep grass ,beneath a roof of leaves and blossoms by the side of Brooklet .Keats imagines the two fair creatures.

 Couched side by side

              In deepest grass, beneath the whispering roof

               Of leaves and trembled blossoms ,where there ran

       A brooklet  ,scarce espied:

                  The poem is characterized by passion and enthusiasm .There is intense feeling and passionate enthusiasm in the lines in which Keats pledges himself to the worship of Psyche.The elaborate and fantastic metaphor of the ending stanza is full of the varied beauty of Nature and myth.

                                And there shall be for thee all soft delight

                                       That shadowy thought can win

                                 A bright torch, ans a casement ope at night,

                                       To let the warm Love in  !

Conclusion:

                             Keats was a very careful artist.He took the greatest pains in revising and polishing his poems .The effect is that we find him using the choicest and most suitable diction .The beauty of his phrase , the subtleties of rhyme in the arrangement of words and their suggestive power.

                                              W.H.Hudson:

“Historically ,Keatsis important for three reasons ,

First ,on the side of form and style he is the most romantic of the romantic poets .

Secondly , more than any other great poet of his time ,he represents the exhaustion of the impulses generated by the social upheaval and the humanitarian enthusiasms of the Revolution .

Finally ,his influence was none the less very strong upon the poets of the succeeding generation.”