Studying English Literature

          The poem "Ode to the West Wind" directly conforms to Shelley’s poetic creed. Poetry, Shelley writes in A Defence of Poetry , “…awakens and enlarges the mind by rendering it the receptable of a thousand unapprehended combination of thought. Poetry lifts its veil from the hidden beauty of the world.” Consistent with this theory of poetc creation, Shelley’s Romanticism is filled with vehement feelings, ecstatic, mournful, passionate, desperate or fiercely indignant. Sometimes this turns inward to talk about himself. It is in this that he is unique among the Romantics—looking for a better world of liberty, equality and fraternity in his idealistic project of life. For this, he is seen to be pessimistic about the present but highly optimistic about the future to come.           The wind is itself a powerful and recurrent Romantic metaphor. But in Shelley’s treatment it is not a “correspondent breeze”. I...

"Porphyria’s Lover", under the name Porphyria, was first published in a magazine named Monthly Repository. It appeared again in Dramatic Lyrics together with "Johannes Agricola in Meditation". It is significant that both the poems were published under the common title "Madhouse Cells". Taking the same format of octo-syllabic lines, like the other ‘madhouse’ poem, Porphyria’s Lover opens with an ironic discrepancy between the speaker’s statement and the real meaning. But the poem is much more complex than Johannes Agricola, where the issue of motivation is concerned. Like Agricola, Porphyria’s lover describes a supposedly natural course of action, which is, on introspection, illogical. Where Agricola rejects the authority of the Gospels, Porphyria’s lover breaks one of God’s Ten Commandments that,           “Thou shall not kill.”     The Old Testament, ‘Exodus’ 20: 13. The lover does so by perpetrating a murde...

Drawing upon the personal experiences of his own life and the Platonic theory of anamnesis , Wordsworth in his ode "On Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" presents such a typical theme, which can easily be generalized as a Romantic cry over the loss of innocence, and of the splendour that goes with the vision of innocence. Wordsworth’s originality lies in the poetic transformation of the theme, and the poetic treatment also gives human touch to a deep philosophical problem. While discussing the process of the birth of Particular (human) Soul from the Universal Soul, Plato said that the human soul undergoes a change, and that there occurs the forgetting (anamnesis) of the Supreme Beauty and Goodness and Truth of the Universal Idea, which it descends from. Wordsworth’s approach to the problem is, however, different. He begins in a tone of profound regret at the loss of visionary splendour, which seemed, in retrospect, to have invested so many...