Romanticism was a movement emphasizing emotion, individualism, imagination, and a deep connection with nature, emerging in Europe in the late 18th century.
It is not easy to define romanticism. Like many other literary terms, this word has been used in different ages in widely different senses. Goethe placed it against Classicism: "Romanticism is disease; Classicism is health."
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth in Cumbria. His boyhood was happy; he could roam among the fields of his beloved countryside, in company with Nature and the books he loved (see The Prelude). Both Wordsworth's parents died before he was 15, and he and his four siblings were left in the care of different relatives. Sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, 1787. As a young man, Wordsworth developed a love of nature, a theme reflected in many of his poems.
A modifier is a word or phrase or clause which modifies other words in a sentence. It is either an adjective or an adverb. The adjectives modify the nouns, and the adverbs modify the verbs or the adjectives or the other adverbs.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was one of the most influential figures in American literature, widely recognized for his mastery of Gothic fiction, horror, and detective stories. He was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old. He was taken in by the Allan family (John and Frances Allan) as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia, and adopted the name as his middle name. However, his relationship with his foster father was often strained. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and, later, to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave university when Allan refused to pay Poe’s gambling debts.
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894):
Christina Georgina Rossetti was one of the most important Victorian poets of England. She was born on December 5, 1830, in London into a highly literary family. Her father was the poet Gabriele, and her brothers, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti, were founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This artistic movement emphasized emotional sincerity, medieval symbolism, and intense imagery.
An elegy is a poem of sorrow or mourning for the dead; also, a reflective poem in a solemn or sorrowful mood. The adjective ‘elegiac’ is used to describe poetry that exhibits the characteristics of an elegy.
Well-known elegies lamenting the death of a particular
person include John Milton's Lycidas (Edward King), P.B.
Shelley's Adonais (John Keats), Alfred Lord Tennyson's In
Memoriam (Arthur H. Hallam), and Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Abraham Lincoln). Perhaps the most famous
elegy, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, is a
solemn, meditative poem mourning not the death of a person, but the passing of
a way of life. Closely related terms of elegy are monody, threnody, and dirge.
The main characteristics of the
An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase, used to represent the full form. It is a broad term that encompasses acronyms (e.g., NASA, SCUBA) and initialisms (e.g., FBI, CIA), although common usage often uses "abbreviation" to encompass all forms of shortening.
Shakespeare wrote a long sonnet-sequence consisting of 154 pieces. These sonnets were written over a number of years and, though there are several strands to impart to them a unity of sorts, they do not have the kind of continuity which one might expect from a collection which has been called a sequence. These sonnets were written during thé years 1592 and 1597 or 1598; but they were not published until 1609, only seven years before Shakespeare's death. They were not published by Shakespeare himself. The publisher was a man called Thomas Thorpe, a literary-minded man who had previously published a number of famous plays, particularly those written by Ben Jonson and Chapman, and who had also published Marlowe's translation of Lucan. Now, this Thomas Thorpe had obtained the manuscripts of the sonnets from one Mr. W.H. but nobody really knows who this Mr. W.H. was.
The literary form of 'sonnet' is a foreign importation in English literature. The sonnet, as a literary form, in fact, appeared in England as one of the distinct and immediate effects of the Renaissance. A sonnet is a fixed poetic form that originated in Italy in the 13th century. The word sonnet comes from the Italian sonetto, meaning “a little song.” Traditionally, a sonnet consists of 14 lines written in iambic pentameter and follows a strict rhyme scheme. Despite its brevity, the sonnet is capable of expressing deep emotions, complex ideas, and philosophical reflections.
