Tennyson's In Memoriam

              Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), a Victorian poet, completed his In Memoriam in 1849 where he wrestled with the contradictions between the idea of a providential god and the bleak evolutionary and materialistic science of the day after the death of his best friend. The poem is divided into 133 cantos. He was son to …

INVICTUS by William Ernest Henley

INVICTUS Out of the night that covers me,Black as the pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud.Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tearsLooms but the Horror of …

Faustian Ethics

In Marlowe’s Faust we come to find a man that was in search after power and lust; a man who desired to be twenty for life, sleep with every woman, and have the power to do as he will. What we find in Goethe’s Faust is very different. Faust is a wise man, a polymath, …

A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body By Andrew Marvell

SOUL O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A soul enslav’d so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear; A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins; …

Mind By Richard Wilbur

Mind in its purest play is like some bat That beats about in caverns all alone, Contriving by a kind of senseless wit Not to conclude against a wall of stone. It has no need to falter or explore; Darkly it knows what obstacles are there, And so may weave and flitter, dip and soar …

Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), a Victorian poet, completed his In Memoriam in 1849 where he wrestled with the contradictions between the idea of a providential god with the evolutionary and materialistic science of the day after the death of his best friend. The poem is divided into 133 cantos. He was son to a clergy …

William Blake Unshackled

Romantic poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827). His Songs of Innocence and Experience were a contrast of the ordinary mechanistic world to the vibrant imaginative world which could see the world anew, perhaps even as it really is. He recognized man as struggling between the imaginative naivete' and the realism of what old age imposes …

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria

The Lyrical Ballads were written in 1798 as a joint project between Wordsworth and Coleridge. In 1800 Coleridge said the new preface, contains our joint opinions on Poetry however by 1802 things took a wrong turn and Coleridge proclaimed he knew Wordsworth better than he knew himself. Coleridge believed Wordsworth was brilliant, but as time …

The Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge

The Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798, were a collection of poems collected and collaborated by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). This pair of writers made one feel and wonder in different ways. Coleridge would take the mysterious and wondrous, and bring them down to ordinary life. Wordsworth had the opposite effect, …

The Rage of Achilles

What started the Trojan war? Was it a wedding of the Gods, where the uninvited, Discordia, throws a gilded, golden apple on the fabled table, saying, “To the fairest”? Sitting there at this wedding table, Zeus wisely decides to not get involved and chooses a mortal man, Paris, to give the golden apple to one …