The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (5.1.7-12). This stanza taken from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream ...
If you’re a poet and want to go down in the annals of history, it might perhaps interest you to dash off a bird sonnet or two. Students may be studying them in school centuries hence. One of the more famous bird poems is a Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) composition entitled To A Skylark. “Hail ...
In the play Othello by William Shakespeare, Iago is a malicious manipulator who commits treacherous deeds without true motives. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a famous English Poet, describes Iago’s actions as “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity” because in the play Iago spitefully creates havoc and desperately seeks motives for his malice. Iago’s scheme to depose Cassio, ...
Birds are well represented in Romantic poetry. Their gifts of flight and song have been used as metaphorical examinations of the poets’ dreams and desires. They have been imagined as creatures close to spiritual perfection as any found on earth. One can imagine that birds indeed might strike a fantastic and otherworldly presence to Romantic ...
As famous French writer Stendhal comments, “Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.” Perhaps that is why some people just hate to read romance. It seems that something in the pleasure of sexuality is lost when it hits the pages of a trashy romance novel. Ages before contemporary writers such as Nora Roberts began pouring ...
The use of opium has occurred for thousands of years throughout the world. The images and dreams induced by the opium poppy have inspired artists and been the subject of their works for centuries. In British culture writers were influenced by the effects of opium and its more socially-acceptable medicinal form, laudanum. Made infamous by ...
In a majority of poems from the Romantic era there is a profusion of the use of supernatural and mythological references in reference to the content of the individual pieces. They would come in various states and mean different things, yet they would all serve the same purpose and that would be to help the ...
