Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις," poiesis, a "making" or "creating") is an art form in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, notional and semantic content. Poetry has a long history, and early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the various uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Poetry often uses condensed forms and conventions to reinforce or expand the meaning of the underlying words or to invoke emotional or sensual experiences in the reader, as well as using devices such as assonance, alliteration and rhythm to achieve musical or incantatory effects.
Augustan drama can refer to the dramas of Ancient Rome during the reign of Caesar Augustus, but it most commonly refers to the plays of Great Britain in the early 18th century, a subset of 18th-century Augustan literature. King George I referred to himself as "Augustus," and the poets of the era took this reference as apropos, as the literature of Rome during Augustus moved from historical and didactic poetry to the poetry of highly finished and sophisticated epics and satire.
In poetry, the early 18th century was an age of satire and public verse, and in prose, it was an age of the developing novel. In drama, by contrast, it was an age in transition between the highly witty and sexually playful Restoration comedy, the pathetic she-tragedy of the turn of the century, and any later plots of middle-class anxiety. The Augustan stage retreated from the Restoration's focus on cuckoldry, marriage for fortune, and a life of leisure. Instead, Augustan drama reflected questions the mercantile class had about itself and what it meant to be gentry: what it meant to be a good merchant, how to achieve wealth with morality, and the proper role of those who serve.
Illustration from Jami's Rose Garden of the Pious, 1553. The image blends Persian poetry and Persian miniature into one, as is the norm for many works of Persian literature.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce ( Irish Seamus Seoighe; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Along with Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, he is a key figure in the development of the modernist novel. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922). His other major works are the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Although most of his adult life was spent outside the country, Joyce's Irish experiences are essential to his writings and provide all of the settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. In particular, his rocky early relationship with the Irish Catholic Church is reflected by a similar conflict in his character Stephen Dedalus, who appears in several of his works. His fictional universe is firmly rooted in Dublin and reflects his family life and the events and friends (and enemies) from his school and college days; Ulysses is set with precision in the real streets and alleyways of the city. As the result of the combination of this attention to one place and his lengthy travels throughout Europe, he became both one of the most cosmopolitan and one of the most local of all the great English language modernists.
| by Walter Savage Landor |
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Stand close around, ye Stygian set,
With Dirce in one boat conveyed!
Or Charon, seeing, may forget
That he is old and she a shade.
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A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. |
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—Robert Frost
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The word thou (pronounced IPA [ðaʊ]) is mostly archaic, functioning as the second person singular pronoun in English and having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee (functioning as both accusative and dative), and the possessive is thy or thine. Almost all verbs following "thou" have the endings -st or -est; e.g., "thou goest". In Middle English, thou was sometimes abbreviated by writing a Wynn-shaped letter Thorn with a small u above it.
Originally, "thou" was simply the singular counterpart to the plural pronoun "ye," descended from an ancient Indo-European root. In imitation of the French practice, "thou" was later used to express intimacy, familiarity, or even disrespect while another pronoun, "you" was used for formal circumstances. See French "vous" and Dutch "U". After "thou" fell out of fashion, it was primarily retained in fixed rituals, so that it eventually came to connote formality and solemnity. "Thou" persists, sometimes in altered form, in regional dialects of England and Scotland.
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