From the onset of the Romantic Period to that of the Modernist Era, the author’s desire to connect with his audience has gradually increased with each passing century. Additionally, changes caused by the progression of time: technological advances, scientific discoveries, changes in social conventions, etc., altered the subject matter dramatically. Their writings became far more relatable in each era because of this and eventually resulted in relationships where the authors and their audiences could easily sympathize with each other. The turn of the 19th century began with the rise of the middle class caused by an industrial revolution and brought with it a new school of thought that promoted self-reflection and meditation which in turn caused …show more content…
They valued nature, emotion, and intuition in a way that the writers of the Enlightenment Era saw as selfish and uncultured or unrefined. Due to these values, the writers of the Romantic era were only able to make limited connections with their audiences. William Wordsworth’s writings, for example, focus mainly on “the self”, personal thought, and self-reflection. Wordsworth’s use of common language was not intentionally applied to broaden his audience, but instead, was employed to solidify his relationship with his ideals. Though he “proposed to [himself] to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men […]” (Wordsworth 297), Wordsworth did not make a notable attempt to relate to readers of lower stature which were now more inclined to read his work due to the use of “common” language. Similarly, Wordsworth’s poems are usually centered on the private sector of life; they are about his perspective on situations or his innermost thoughts and feelings. In the poems We Are Seven and Resolution and …show more content…
The change in perception of time and space had gigantic affects on the writings of the time. It shifted the focus of the writers from every day banalities to extraordinary events and how they directly affect the average person; the most notable event being World War I. This shift resulted in a dynamic between the author and the reader in which both were equals. Isaac Rosenberg’s work exemplifies this best in Break of Day in the Trenches. Rosenberg’s accurate portrayal of a soldier indulging in the frivolity of life in “the same old druid Time as ever” (Rosenberg 2031) before chaos ensues resonated well with readers who, like him, participated in the Great War. He uses his work as a way to sympathize with a specific group in society. Virginia Woolf, another Modernist writer, is able to write a novel, Mrs. Dalloway, that inspires sympathy with a broad range of readers. The story centers around a soldier named Septimus Smith who suffers from “shell shock” or “soldier’s heart” and a middle aged woman named Clarissa Dalloway. By pairing them together, Woolf heightens the contrast between a soldier’s life and “regular” life while also showing that despite all their obvious differences, the characters both suffer from tragedies that make them more similar than one realizes at first glance. In this way,
In the novel, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, a royal wife, shares almost similar views of the world with Septimus Warren Smith, a former soldier who fought in the World War I and now suffering from hallucination. These two characters share many things in common albeit the fact that they are not known to each other and they have not shared anything in their lifetimes. The novel is an in-depth “day-in-the-life” view of Mrs. Dalloway featuring what she thinks about her life, other people’s lives, her real feelings and the feelings of other people. She is told the story of a former World War I soldier and she takes her time to reflect in the man’s life and experiences. His life appears more like hers not in how they both live but their feelings, which is why I hold the view tha...
In the beginning of the twentieth century, literature changed and focused on breaking away from the typical and predicate patterns of normal literature. Poets at this time took full advantage and stretched the idea of the mind’s conscience on how the world, mind, and language interact and contradict. Many authors, such as Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Twain, used the pain and anguish in first hand experiences to create and depict a new type of literature, modernism. In this time era, literature and art became a larger part of society and impacted more American lives than ever before. During the American modernism period of literature, authors, artists, and poets strived to create pieces of literature and art that challenged American traditions and tried to reinvent it, used new ways of communication, such as the telephone and cinema, to demonstrate the new modern social norms, and express the pain and suffering of the First World War.
William Wordsworth poem 'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey'; was included as the last item in his Lyrical Ballads. The general meaning of the poem relates to his having lost the inspiration nature provided him in childhood. Nature seems to have made Wordsworth human.The significance of the abbey is Wordsworth's love of nature. Tintern Abbey representes a safe haven for Wordsworth that perhaps symbolizes a everlasting connection that man will share with it's surroundings. Wordsworth would also remember it for bringing out the part of him that makes him a 'A worshipper of Nature'; (Line 153).
Mrs. Dalloway’s Free Indirect Discourse. Modernist writers' emergence in the twentieth century brought many changes to literature. They rejected the Romantic focus on nature and being and instead were inspired by the impersonal and capitalistic feelings brought on from machinery and World War I. Soldiers who were sent to war saw death and pain in completely new ways. These experiences, which only worsened with World War II in the 1940s, prevented many soldiers from mentally coming home. Enlisted writers and those back home who saw the shell-shock effects of war used that horror within their writing.
The novel, Mrs. Dalloway, written by Virginia Woolf takes place in London, England during 1923 and it recounts the experiences and lives of the novel’s central characters over an entire day in mid-June. Although it has been five years since World War I, all of the characters are still impacted by it, in one way or another. One character, Septimus Smith, who fought in the war and lost his friend Officer Evans, is by far the most affected as he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized as an anxiety problem that people experience after witnessing or being involved with a traumatic event, such as a war. The first accounts were in war situations and this disease was once referred to as shell
The narrative of Mrs. Dalloway may be viewed by some as random congealing of various character experience. Although it appears to be a fragmented assortment of images and thought, there is a psychological coherence to the deeply layered novel. Part of this coherence can be found in Mrs. Dalloway's psychological tone which is tragic in nature. In her forward to Mrs. Dalloway, Maureen Howard informs us that Woolf was reading both Sophocles and Euripides for her essays in The Common Reader while writing Mrs. Dalloway (viii). According to Pamela Transue, "Woolf appears to have envisioned Mrs. Dalloway as a kind of modern tragedy based on the classic Greek model" (92). Mrs. Dalloway can be conceived of as a modern transformation of Aristotelian tragedy when one examines the following: 1) structural unity; 2) catharsis; 3) recognition, reversal, and catastrophe; 4) handling of time and overall sense of desperation.
War is an important theme in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a post World War I text. While on the one hand there is the focus on Mrs. Dalloway’s domestic life and her ‘party consciousness’, on the other there are ideas of masculinity and “patriotic zeal that stupefy marching boys into a stiff yet staring corpse and pernicious public-spirited doctors”, and the sense of war reverberates throughout the entire text. Woolf’s treatment of the Great War is different from the normative way in which the War is talked about in the post-World War I texts. She includes in her text no first-hand glimpse of the battlefield, instead gives a detached description. This makes it more incisive because she delineates the after effects of ordinary life.
Wordsworth's Poetry A lot of literature has been written about motherhood. Wordsworth is a well known English poet who mentions motherhood and female strength in several of his poems, including the Mad Mother, The Thorn, and The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman. This leads some critics to assume that these poems reflect Wordsworth's view of females. Wordsworth portrays women as dependent on motherhood for happiness, yet he also emphasizes female strength.
In the late eighteenth century, a movement spread throughout the world that was known as the Romantic Era. The works of authors, artists, and musicians were influenced by emotions and imagination. Characters in literature during that time period heavily relied on impulses to guide them in their decisions. Whether it is the logical choice or not, they followed their hearts instead. The image that Romanticism created was one of a perfect, unrealistic lifestyle because of the worship to the beauty of nature and human emotions. Although some romantic plays ended in a tragedy, it was due to the emotions that we are capable of feeling. Romanticism promoted the idea that people should follow their hearts. This, however, gradually came to an end in the mid-19th-century.
Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway, features a severely mentally ill man named Septimus Smith. Throughout the novel the reader glimpses moments of Septimus’s dementia and how his poor frazzled wife, Rezia, deals with him. Septimus, who has returned from the war and met Rezia in Italy on his discharge, has a seriously skewed version of reality. He has been through traumatic events during the war, including the death of his commanding officer and friend, Evans. Upon his return to England he suffers from hallucinations, he hears voices (especially Evans’), and he believes that the trees have a special message to convey to him. Rezia attempts to get Septimus help by taking him to several doctors. Ultimately Septimus commits suicide rather than let the doctors get to him.
In the eyes of Wordsworth, the worst stage of life is adulthood. Since there were more obligations and things to worry about, adulthood was viewed as a miserable time as seen in his poem “Ode: The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”. Throughout his school days, Wordsworth would be outside, running around and being free. This was the basis for many of his poems since he describes early childhood as a time to be deliberately free and one with God in nature.
Clarissa Dalloway, the central character in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, is a complex figure whose relations with other women reveal as much about her personality as do her own musings. By focusing at length on several characters, all of whom are in some way connected to Clarissa, Woolf expertly portrays the ways females interact: sometimes drawing upon one another for things which they cannot get from men; other times, turning on each other out of jealousy and insecurity.
Although the entire novel tells of only one day, Virginia Woolf covers a lifetime in her enlightening novel of the mystery of the human personality. The delicate Clarissa Dalloway, a disciplined English lady, provides the perfect contrast to Septimus Warren Smith, an insane ex-soldier living in chaos. Even though the two never meet, these two correspond in that they strive to maintain possession of themselves, of their souls. On this Wednesday in June of 1923, as Clarissa prepares for her party that night, events during the day trigger memories and recollections of her past, and Woolf offers these bits to the reader, who must then form the psychological and emotional make-up of Mrs. Dalloway in his/her own mind. The reader also learns of Clarissa Dalloway through the thoughts of other characters, such as her old passion Peter Walsh, her husband Richard, and her daughter Elizabeth. Septimus Warren Smith, driven insane by witnessing the death of his friend in the war, acts as Clarissa's societal antithesis; however, the reader learns that they often are more similar than different. Thus, Virginia Woolf examines the human personality in two distinct methods: she observes that different aspects of one's personality emerge in front of different people; also, she analyzes how the appearance of a person and the reality of that person diverge. By offering the personality in all its varying forms, Woolf demonstrates the compound nature of humans.
In William Wordsworth’s poem, Resolution and Independence, Wordsworth describes the moods of the poem through the description of nature. The first appearance of the speaker, himself, is shown in (line 15); where he classifies himself as a traveler who has been seduced, as he states, “The pleasant season did my heart employ” (line 19). We see the traveler as a bright and joyful person as Wordsworth’s characteristics of nature as a means of description continues throughout the poem. As the poem progresses, the speaker’s attitude changes in (line 26), where he tells us that his mood is lowered. It is here that the speaker presents himself as “a happy child of earth” in (line 31); as once again Wordsworth...
One of the most famous poets in literary history is that of William Wordsworth. He lived between the years of 1770-1850. He was a very strong poet and many of his works have some degree of a pessimistic view to them. They could be understood after the hard life he led. He saw the French Revolution at its height and wrote several poems about it. He had an illegitimate daughter with a woman in France. When he returned back to England he married Mary Hutchinson, who gave him two sons and another daughter.