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The theme of social class in literature
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Elizabeth Hands was an Eighteenth Century low-class poet. While her life is not well know, she is the discovered author of ‘Death of Amnon’, a famous poem of the time. Many criticized Hands for her social class, and many believed that she could not write anything worth reading. In response to their negativity, Hands wrote ‘A Poem, On the Supposition of an Advertisement appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant-Main’ (Supposition I) and ‘A Poem, On the Supposition of the Book having been Published and Read’ (Supposition II). The two poems are about the varying responses pertaining Hands’ ‘Death of Amnon’ poem. The poems reflect Hands’ belief that social class has no place in dictating writing.
In her
The readers are apt to feel confused in the contrasting ways the woman in this poem has been depicted. The lady described in the poem leads to contrasting lives during the day and night. She is a normal girl in her Cadillac in the day while in her pink Mustang she is a prostitute driving on highways in the night. In the poem the imagery of body recurs frequently as “moving in the dust” and “every time she is touched”. The reference to woman’s body could possibly be the metaphor for the derogatory ways women’s labor, especially the physical labor is represented. The contrast between day and night possibly highlights the two contrasting ways the women are represented in society.
For it is a commonplace of our understanding of the period that the Victorian writer wanted above all to “stay in touch.” Comparing his situation with that of his immediate predecessors, he recognized that indulgence in a self-centered idealism was no longer viable in a society which ever more insistently urged total involvement in its occupations. The world was waiting to be improved upon, and solved, and everyone, poets, included had to busy themsel...
Many sonnets revolve around the idea of gender roles and love. Mary Wroth can be identified as one of these poets. Regardless of feminist and gender-specific ideologies in Wroth’s sonnets, Mary’s perspective as a sonneteer has been wrongly identified as being commonly
The poetry of Phillis Wheatley is crafted in such a manner that she is able to create a specific aim for each poem, and achieve that aim by manipulating her position as the speaker. As a slave, she was cautious to cross any lines with her proclamations, but was able to get her point across by humbling her own position. In religious or elegiac matters, however, she seemed to consider herself to be an authority. Two of her poems, the panegyric “To MAECENAS” and the elegy “On the Death of a young Lady of Five Years of Age,” display Wheatley’s general consistency in form, but also her intelligence, versatility, and ability to adapt her position in order to achieve her goals.
When Andrew Marvell was just a pre-teen, his work started to become favored by his city. As his poetry became even more known, a tragic incident suddenly happened. Marvell's father drowned in 1640 (“Oxford Book of English Verse”). Disturbed by the loss, Andrew ceased his writing hobby for a while. The distraught situation caused Andrew to go out into the fields and work for a living. Marvell nev...
Published in 1869, A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad stands as one of the most socially acclaimed collections of English poetry from the Victorian age. This period in British history, however, proves, by judiciary focus (the Criminal Law Amendment of 1885), to be conflictive with Housman’s own internal conflicts concerning the homoerotic tendencies which he discovered in his admiration of fellow Oxford student Moses Jackson. Housman, much unlike other English literary figures such as Oscar Wilde and Thomas hardy, was not an artist who found it necessary to directly confront Britain with any political dissention imposed by is works. Instead, "for Housman the discovery of self was so disturbing and disconcerting that poetry came as a way of disclosing it" (Bayley 44). The county of Shropshire is central to much of his poetry, but it is employed merely as "a personification of the writer’s memories, dreams and affections;" meanwhile, Housman’s central character is one "who could at once be himself and not himself" (Scott-Kilvert 26). In what Housman himself regarded to be one of his best poems, "XXVII: Is my team ploughing," the focus is placed upon a conversation between a dead man and one of his friends from his previous life (Housman 18). "XXII: The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread;" meanwhile, expresses an emotional wonder discovered in the eyes of a passing soldier (Housman 15). Both the ambiguous quality of the dead man’s last question (18 ll. 25-26) in poem XXVII and the nature of the chance encounter in XXII stand to exemplify the subtle undercurrent of Housman’s own enigmatic sexuality.
To begin, Alfred Tennyson was the fourth son in a large family with twelve children. Alfred’s brothers each had particular struggles they had to overcome, one had an opium addiction while another regularly fought with their father, the Reverend Dr. George Tennyson. Alfred Tennyson’s father was the son of a wealthy landowner, but was disinherited when he instead wished to join the clergy. Alfred’s childhood home was very chaotic by many accounts and full of eccentricities. George Tennyson tutored his sons in classical and modern languages to prepare them for university. Before Alfred left for Cambridge, he had already published a book with his brother Charles titled,” Poems By Two Brothers”. Many gifted undergraduates drifted towards him and encouraged him to write poetry seriously. Unfortunately, Alfred had to leave college in 1831 due to financial issues. He published a few works while he w...
Poetry is central to the English language as both a communication tool and as a cultural heritage that dates back to antiquity. Poetry is a diverse and complex art that takes a life time to decipher the poet’s intent and motivation in a poetic literature. This paper explores the content and stylist imbued meaning in Robinson Edwin Arlington 1897 poem; Richard Cory. “Richard Cory” is a sixteen stanza poem that narrates the rich, elitist and nobility, but socially unfulfilling life of a man bearing the name that forms the title of the poem. The name Richard Cory is metaphorically derived from King Richard I; Richard Coeur de Lion (1157-1199) of England, and is used by the poet as a satire to mock the illusionary blissful contentment of the poem’s protagonist from the society’s perspective (Gateway 18). This essay explores the illusionary imputed richness, elitist, and nobility identity of Richard Cory by his fellow countrymen, and how that illusions worked his committing suicide. The poem faults the society’s idealism for richness, wealth, elitism and nobility as source of happiness.
113- The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. of the book. Vol.
Song To the Men of England is a revolutionary poem which directly appeals to the repressed common folk of England to confront those with power in the inequitable social class system of late 18th Century England. England, during this time also had a rigid hierarchical system where over 50% of the population were categorised as the Common Folk, a class where the majority lived for subsistence. In reaction to this, many Romantic poets including Shelley wrote to challenge this unjust system. The poem has a simple four-line stanza with AABB rhyming structure enabling the poem to be understood by the uneducated population promoting the Romantic principle of equality as opposed to Wollstonecraft’s more sophisticated use of language. Shelley argues for freedom from constraints through his rhetorical opening statement “Men of England, wherefore plough / For the lords who lay ye low?” Shelley further criticises the Common Folk’s acceptance of their powerlessness when he questions “Have ye leisure, comfort, calm, / Shelter, food, love’s gentle balm?” which through cumulative listing and his cynical tone evinces the upper class’ puissance provoking change towards greater equality and individualism. Shelley escalates his argument to examine the potential consequences of allowing the existing social stratification to remain through morbid imagery in “With plough and spade and hoe and loom / Trace your grave and build your tomb” and by doing so, Shelley examines the ironic nature of the lower class’ existence. Hence, Song to the Men of England explores the need to challenge power in order to gain freedom in line with the Romantic principle of
A. “Written in a tempestuous night, on the coast of Sussex.” Elegiac Sonnets. Ed. Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford, 1993.
"Given or lent?” asks T. S. Eliot in his poem “Marina,” as he examines the construction of one’s own life from the point of view of a speaker who, reaching the later years of life, feels an urge to “resign” tattered, old life for “the hope, the new ships.” J. M. Coetzee grapples with some similar issues with his character Elizabeth Curren in the novel Age of Iron. Curren throughout the course of the novel goes through a process of realizing and accepting the fact that her comfortable life as a retired white professor in apartheid South Africa has truly been built on the foundation of a deplorable social system, as well as that she is not completely innocent in her complacency with that system. As Eliot understands that he has “Made this [life] unknowing, half-conscious, unknowing, my own,” Curren awakens as she disintegrates towards death to the reality of the conditions in South Africa and her own failures in life. However, whereas Eliot sees some salvation or rebirth, even if perhaps unreachable, in the youth of “the new ships,” Curren sees only a worrisome coldness and lack of innocence in the youth around her and feels nostalgia for earlier times. During the last days of her life, she dwells on the need for a softening in people that has been overcome by an iron-like attitude in the current climate, but she herself is swept into the very state that she denounces in many ways. She internalizes the softer side of herself, becoming more and more introspective and self-absorbed as the days move on, while displaying a harder shell to the outside world. Her inability to cast off her ways of thinking and acting within South African society despite her growing awareness of their pro...
This piece of literature points out very good points of the differences between those in higher classes compared to those in lower classes. When this was written, most poets were transitioning into the Age of Science and Reason, therefore they were becoming up with more thoughts and ideas about logic and reason; the way things work. Gray shows this through the messages that he portrays in his “Elegy Written in a Churchyard” which are: death affects everyone despite their lifestyle, that those whom are in the lower class have less opportunities than others, and the virtue and purity of those who work and live as
My initial response to "A Work of Artifice" by Marge Piercy, was one of profound sadness. In defining myself as the actual reader of this poem, my background becomes significant in my emotional response. "It is this reader who comes to the text shaped by cultural and personal norms and prejudices." (Bressler, p. 72) I come from a family of poets and published writers and have been reading and composing poetry since the age of 4. My first poem was published in the local newspaper, in which I won first prize, at age 5. I have experienced all kinds of texts, as well as many different forms of art.
Knowledge of contemporary British poetry is of great importance when it comes to understanding the reigning trends of England. The 1970s saw a fair amount of polemic concerning the discontinuities of the national "traditions," most of it concerned with poetry, all of it vulnerable to a blunt totalizing which demonstrated the triumphant ability of "nation" to organize literary study and judgment--as it does still, perhaps more than ever.