My thoughts!

          Introduction An elegy is normally defined as a short poem of lamentation or regret. It is called forth a by the death of a beloved or a revered person. A general sense of pathos of mortality can also inspire a poet to compose an elegy. In relation to poetry a pastoral is a piece evoking the blissful joys of a heavily romanticized rural life, a bucolic idyll populated by nymphs, shepherds, and cavorting wood sprites. A pastoral elegy, then combines elements of both kinds of poem to create a work that movingly laments someone recently deceased, presented in the guise of a shepherd. In the first category of elegies are Milton's "Lycidas"(on the death of Edward King), Shelly's " Adonais"(on the death of A. H. Clough). The second category deals with general sorrow, loss or pain. Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in the Country Churchyard" and Arnold's "Scholar Gipsy" come in the category.  The elegies of Arnold can be di...

          Introduction The pastoralism of the poem leads immediately to several themes. Most generally it represents, as it does for many poets, and escape from the intolerable world of court or affairs. Arnold certainly romanticizes the Oxford countryside, attributing to it his happiest days. Against this romantic background, then, Arnold places the quest for and of the scholar- gipsy, which gives added significance to the background. As a broad generalization the scholar (and Arnold) seek the meaning of the life. Since for Arnold Christianity was dead, and there seemed nothing to take its place giving meaning to life, the result is a constant search and intense loneliness and emptiness in life. Another general way of phrasing all this is that it presents the wisdom of the heart against the wisdom of the head. The head sees the true condition of the modern world, but the heart is drawn to the simpler, more unified life represented by the scholar and Oxfor...

Culture and Anarchy, major work of criticism by Matthew Arnold , published in 1869. In it Arnold contrasts culture , which he defines as " the study of perfection ", with anarchy , the prevalent moods of England's then new democracy , which lacks standards and a sense of direction. According to him, culture is the expansion of all the powers of human nature. He holds the culture above machinery. Culture is the best has been thought, known and said. For Androld sweetness and light are the two noblest things. For further definition of culture, Arnold borrows a phrase from Swift " Sweetness and light ", the first word indicating the sense of beauty and second the active intelligence. Against these ideals arrayed all the undisciplined forces of the age, faith in machinery whether governmental, economic or religious that leads to anarchy. Arnold classified English society into Barbarians (with their lofty spirit, serenity and distinguished manners and their inacces...

           Introduction  All the Romantics loved nature. There was an unfailing bond between nature and them. Among these Romantic poets, Wordsworth occupies a unique and supreme place. He is unquestionably the best among them. According to Stopberd, Wordsworth view of nature was entirely different. Wordsworth was the first to love nature with the true devotion of his heart. According to him nature is a living being and as such is capable of being loved as a man loves a friend. To the poet, the entire nature is pervaded by the divine spirit and it has the capacity to chasten all those who surrenders to her formative and educative influences. This point clarified in the light of the 'Tintern Abbey'.    A.  An autobiographical poem "Tintern Abbey" is a good specimen of his poem based on nature. Actually this poem reflects his attitude towards nature with gradual development. The poem is a product of personal experience of the...

Pantheism is the view that the world is either identical to God, or an expression of God's nature. It comes from 'pan' meaning  all , and 'theism', which means belief in God . So according to pantheism, " God is everything and everything is God ". The term 'pantheism' was coined by the Irish freethinker John  Toland in 1705. Pantheism is variedly described concept. One of the modern critic Schopenhauer said, " Pantheism has no ethics ", but the pantheists believes that pantheism is the more ethical view point. They hold an ideology that any harm done to another is doing harm to oneself, because what harms one harms all . There are different types of pantheism such as classical pantheism, biblical pantheism, naturalistic pantheism, Cosmotheism and Pandeism. According to traditional Western conception of God, God is transcendent but pantheists reject the idea and according to them God does not transcend the world. Pantheists  also reject ...

Romanticism is varidly defined by the different critics and scholars. Romantic poets are the poets of nature, poet of par excellence where nature became the epicenter of the movement.  The Romantic movement of 19 century art and literature was influenced by Revolutionary events such as the French and American Revolution. Walter Pater called Romanticism as a Renaissance of Wonder . Romantics were greatly inspired by the French Revolution. Imagination, emotion and freedom are certainly the focal points of Romanticism. The degree of the French Revolution i.e. freedom became the bottom line of the Romantic movement. ' Returning to nature was a creedo of Romanticist '. The 18th century Romantic poets were influenced by many outside influences but chief among them was the revolution occuring in France. Romanticism in Literature began with the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ' Lyrical Ballads '. Authors like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft...

The most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the day. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero - defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt - for which, to many, he seemed the model. Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon 19th century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism. Lord Byron was renowned as the " gloomy egoist " of his autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in the 19th Century, he is now more generally esteemed for the satiric realism of Don Juan . At the beginning of March, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published by John Murray and Byron "work to find himself famous". The poem describes the travels and reflections of a young man who, disillusioned with the life of pleasure and revelry, looks for distraction in foreign land...

John Keats by all counts had a life riddled with sadness. Keats struggled with money for most of life. Despite being in good health, Keats was overwhelmed by the feeling that he too was destined for an early death. He ended up being right and died at age 25. There was a period of time where Keats was crushed by critics and he was described by Percy Shelley as " a pale flower " in Adonis. Keats is renowned for being an escapist poet, meaning he uses his poetry to escape from his bitter reality into an imaginative world, but he is forever cognizant of the fact that the reality that plagues him is unavoidable and not fully worth avoiding. Keats is tormented by the disconnection between the ideal and actual, never truly being able to achieve happiness. Keats' " Ode to Nightingale " is a perfect example of his escapism. In the third stanza the speaker is describing to the nightingale the bitter world that it does not know of. Keats' view of life is one full of ...

In the 1920s and 1930s the far-reaching questions in literary studies raised by T.S.Eliot, I. A. Richards, William Empson and F.R. Leavis set the direction taken by criticism until the 1960s. The work of Eliot, Wimsatt and Empson resulted in a movement known as the New Criticism. This group of Criticism came to problems at the beginning of the early 20th century, most of them are American critics. The term New Criticism was made current by the publication of John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism in 1941. The focus of the movement was on the working out of a general theory of criticism. The American critics were deeply interested in the form or structure of literarier and especially poetry. They believe that the best way to analyse literarier is to consider them as existenly in a vacuum. They did not get importance to intentions of response of the reader or the historical and political context of a work of literature. They concentrated on the text which they considered to be a...

The Victorian Criticism is characterized by a battle of tastes between the neo-classical school of the early 18th century and the Romantic school of the early 19th century. A subtle critique of the literary criticism in the romantic age is found in the Victorian Criticism. It reflects the changes that occurs due to the rise of the democracy or shift to middle class, decline of religion, and effects of industrialism. The question as to " What is the Function of Criticism achieve significance in this age ". The Victorian Criticism is primarily social criticism in its theme and style. It is basically journalistic in nature and his address to a wild reading public. The growth of periodicals and a great influence of Victorian Criticism most of this journals were politically control and voice the opinions of particular parties or groups. Thus the Edinburg Review stood for the Whig party and the Tory control the Quarterly Review and the Blackwood Magazine .

The Age of Enlightenment is also known as the age of reason because an intellectual and philosophical movement runs approximately from 1600 to 1798. The power of mind has two reason that is to think, understand and form judgements logically. Law is given importance in this movement. It is called as the age of reason because of its emphasis on a rational and secular world view. The idea during the age of Enlightenment undermind the authority of the monarchy and the church. Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbs, John Locke, David Hume and Benjamin Franklin wrote on various subjects from political philosophy to the nature of mankind. In the field of literature this was the time of neo-classicism. The writers began follow the classical moderns from the ancient masters during this era.  The age of Neo-Classicism also marks the rise of the novel with writers such as Richardson, Fielding, and Defoe. The Revolutionary incidents such as the American Revolution and the French Revolu...

It is a literary theory which gained prominence in late 1960s. It focuses on the text reader reaction to a particular text more than the text itself. This theory can be linked with post-structuralism emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructed text and finding meanings. Thus, this theory does not consider the reader as a passive consumer of the text. This theory works differently from the text based approaches such as new criticism which believed that some objective meaning is already present in the text and has to be examine and found out. The reader response theory argues that it takes has a meaning only after the reader experiences it by reading. It is the job of the reader response critic to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyses the ways in which different readers make meaning out of both personal response and culturally conditions ways of readings. Some prominent names of this theory are Stanley Fish, David Blesh and Woolf Iser. 

Introduction As a critic T. S. Eliot was very practical. He called himself   “a classicist in literature” . According to Eliot, a critic must obey the objective standards to analyze any work. He thought criticism as a science. Eliot’s criticism became revolutionary at that time. 2oth century got ‘metaphysical revival’ because of Eliot. He first recognized or accepted the uniqueness of ‘metaphysical poets’ of 17 th   century. Eliot came with new ideas in criticism’s world in19th century. Eliot believed that when the old and new will become readjusted, it will be the end of criticism.  He says: “From time to time it is desirable, that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature and set the poets and the poems in a new order.” Eliot demands, from any critic, ability for judgment and powerful liberty of mind to identify and to interpret. Eliot planned numerous critical concepts that gained wide currency and had a broad influence on criticism. ‘Obje...

          Introduction Language is a vital tool that allows us to connect and command, to warn and welcome, and to anchor abstract thought in concrete words in our pursuit of higher knowledge. It is also an artistic medium through which we express our humanity. Linguistics have long sought to classify its myriad uses in a way that would create order from chaos and allow for more manageable study. If we recognise consciousness -as-noticing, consciousness-as-understanding, and conscious-as-control as critical stages in language development, we must engage in a cycle of noticing, internalizing and applying the full scope of the communicative functions of language.       Jacobson's schema of language In the field of language, much attention is given to the what (vocabulary as building blocks) and the how (grammar as a blueprint for construction) but we seldom explicitly address why language matters in terms of the greater purpose it serv...

The term Hellenism used in literary discussions refers stories, novels, dramas for poetry that has been inspired by classic Greek literature or makes use of classic Greek style or forms. For example - Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series embodies Hellenism and draws inspiration from Greek mythology and philosophy. Harry Levin, in the first major study of English Romantic Hellenism, maintained that the "cult of Greece" became "mere enthusiasm" among a long series of romantic obsessions". Lord Byron, just prior to his departure for Greece in 1809, disparged the Elign marbles as "freaks" and "multilated blocks of arts". Byron, Shelley and Keats are acknowledged by modern critics to be the best representatives of English Romantic Hellenism, as Levin notes, the three poets "are very near the centre of romantic hellenism in  England". The works of Shelley and Keats, on the other hand, continue to be examined as more purely Hellenic...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the leader of French Revolution. He was born in Geneva, Switzerland, where all adult male citizens could vote for a representative government. This adult franchise was a major influence on his works. In one of his earliest writings, he wrote that man was naturally good and was corrupted by the society . His ideas quickly made him a celebrity in the French salons where artists, scientists, and writers gathered to discuss the latest ideas. In 1792,he published his most important work on political theory, 'The Social Contract'. His opening line is still striking today: " Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains ." It is a paradoxical proclamation. Rousseau asserted that only the people, who was soverign, have that all powerful right . The Social Contract helped inspire political reforms or revolutions in Europe, especially in France. He wrote that the people would exercise their " general will " to make laws for the "pub...

Preface to Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth begins with a discussion of the collection of poems, written mostly by Wordsworth with contribution by S. T. coleridge. Originally published in 1798, in 1800, Wordsworth added an earlier version of the Preface, which extended two years later. Some scholars say that Coleridge wanted to write the preface but never got around to it so the work felt of Wordsworth instead. In the Preface, Wordsworth writes that the purpose of the collection was to write poems that dealt with things that happen in everyday life. Most importantly, Wordsworth considered each poem in the collection to be an experiment in language usage or diction. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth outlines his definition of the nature and function of poetry - as well as identifying the qualities that make someone a true poet. Wordsworth breaks down the poet's process into four stages - observation, tranquility, filtering and imagination.  In Preface to Lyrical...

The French Revolution is widely recognised as one of the most influential events of late 18th and early 19th century Europe, with far reaching consequences in political, cultural, social and literary arenas. The Revolution affected first and second generation Romantic poets in different ways. First generation poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge initially sympathize with the philosophical and political principles of the revolution. Wordsworth famously chronicled his response to the war in his Prelude . His poem ' French Revolution ' as it appeared to enthusiast at his commentment. The phrasing of the title indicates Wordsworth turned towards more conservative politics particularly after the turn of bloody politics. While Wordsworth found consolation in nature, Coleridge sort to berk his discontent with abstract philosophy and intellectual idealism. Second generation Romantic poets such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley held to the Revolution principles in a more i...

A contemporary of the great poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Robert Southey is one of the best known of the unread poets; that is, his name is better known than the work he produced. While his work leans towards the interspection, skepticism, and symbolism that characterize the period; Southey never fully came to frustation as a Romantic poet. He served as Poet Laureate of England for thirty years. He was one of the Lake poets. Southey was a prolific writer of histories, biographies and essays, many of which are considered superior to his often pedestrian verse. Southey was equally concerned about the state of contemporary culture and his own very public poetic and linguistic experiments of the mid and late 1790s had helped to pave the way for Lyrical Ballads . Southey's reputation during his lifetime was largely established by his epics.   Thalaba,the Destroyer, Madoc, and The Curse of Kehama , all set in exotic location. Southey's epic ambitions bega...

William Blake was a famous poet, painter and engraver of the late 18th century and early 19th century. Black was a radical anti authority figure. William Blake was artistic. He also had 'visions' of things like angels. He wanted to paint, so he became a student at the Royal Academy of Arts.  Blake also wrote poems. A book of poem called 'Poetical Sketches' was published in 1783. In 1789 he publish a book of poems called 'The Song of Innocence'. He published 'The Marriage of Heaven And Hell'. He also published 'America, a Prophecy'.Blake published a book of poems called 'Songs of Experience'. It included the famous poem 'The Tiger'. He later published 'The Book of Urizen and Europe, a Prophecy'.  In 1800 William Blake moved to the village of Lelpham in Sussex. He got into a fight with the soldier named John Schofield. William Blake was tried for sedition (a serious charge) but he was acquitted.  After returning to Londo...

" Over the past 100 years its globalisation -accelerated by new technology - that has had the greatest impact on the English language. English is a world language now, the dominant language of science, computing and academic in general."                                         -Dr. Maria Leedham English language is a language before Globalisation; English is a language after Globalisation . Globalisation and English language are said to work as pull factors for one another. English language plays a major role in the progress of globalisation. Globalisation of trade and commerce, increasing diversities of work force with different set of values have increased the importance of English language usage.  Globalisation has brought English language into limelight. The language has become a silver bowl to earn one's bread and butter. It is not only a means of international commerce, it ...

English is the lingua-franca. It is also known as "linking language". It has an important significance in a multilingual setting. It encourages wider mobility, national integration, and a sense of tolerance. English plays a role of 'bridging' among the two people, their ideas, views, cultures, traditions. It also chain, the two countries and nations. Language enables us to communicate with each other, it allow us to exchange our ideas and opinions. In the world today - so closely linked as a result of globalisation - the presence of the English language has spilled over into virtually all aspects of everyday life. Consequently, it is essential to highlight why English is such a valuable asset to all who use their unique language.  It is the most commonly spoken second language in the world with an estimated two billion users. It is also the official language of 94 States - both sovereign and non-sovereign. Wherever you go in the world, no matter what you want to do...

" English is a major window on the world of our time ."                                             -Pandit Nehru Pandit Nehru's statement at that era, is relevant in today also. This statement is very true. Initially, English was the language of England but now it is an international language widely spoken in many countries. It is the common language that enhances communication to people across the world. The chief agent of globalisation during the past two centuries was English language. Macaulay's Minute brought about the waves of industrial revolution, Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment of the West to the Indian soil. English prevails the global education system. In most countries children are taught the English language especially for the University level studies. Great Indian Scholars spread the values of Indian culture and tradition in the West through their ...

Some students learn a new language more quickly and easily than others. This simple fact is known by all who have themselves learned a second language or taught those who are using their second language in school. Clearly, some language learners are successful by virtue of their sheer determination and hard work and persistence. However there are other crucial factors influencing success that are largely beyond the control of the learner. Some of the important factors are- 1. Age- Second language acquisition is influenced by the age of the learner. Older learner have solid literary skill so they are in the best position to acquire new language efficiently. 2. Personality- Introverted learners makes slow progress while the extrovert learners take risk and spend more time for practice. 3. Motivation- Extrinsic motivation is also significant factor. For ex. In big Universities like American Universities students who communicate with new English boy or girl are likely to make greater ...

Drilling is an audio-lingual technique which laid emphasis on repeating structural patterns through oral practice. It means listening to a model provided by the teachers repeating what is heard. It is a technique that is still used by many teachers when introducing new language items to the students. Harmer states that " drilling is a mechanical ways if getting students to demonstrate and practice their ability to use specific language items in a controlled manner ". According to the Haycraft there are different kinds of drill such as the Repetition drill, the Substitution drill, the Question and Answer drill, the Transformation drill, the Chain drill, the Expansion drill, and Communicative drill. For the learners, drill can:  i. Provide for a focus on accuracy. ii.  Provide learners with intensive practice in hearing and saying particular words or phrases. iii. Provide a safe environment for learner. iv.  Provide an opportunity for learners to get immediate feedback...

Error analysis is a fundamental branch of applied linguistics emerge in the sixties to address student's performance. More specifically, this approach is based on the hypothesis that the learners' errors do not only occur because of their mother tongue interference, a framework hypothesis of errors in second language acquisition adopted and address by Contrastive Analysis, but they also happen due to some "universal strategies". Error Analysis was established to create a change in attitudes towards the errors. Error Analysis was established in 1960 by linguistic Corder and his colleagues. Corder's seminal paper " The Significance of Learner's Errors " had shifted researchers' attention from the teaching perspective to the learning perspective. This development went hand in hand with the turn towards a communicative approach in language teaching. The primary aims of error analysis were- i. to identify the types and patterns of errors and  ii.  ...