3. ESSAY ON CRITICISM
• Composed in heroic couplets
• "To err is human, to forgive divine,"
• "A little learning is a dang'rous thing”
• "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
• Thesis, antithesis, synthesis
4. Bad Critics
• bad criticism - greater harm
• Failed poets > critics
• “Know thyself”
• Critic has no taste
• “Nature” and “Wit”
• “Copy the nature is to copy the classists”
• Virgil, Homer, Aristotle, Horace and Longinus.
5. How to avoid it?
• Read the whole -
• Conceit
• Caring for language n/o subject
• Rhyme is boring (sleep)
• Author based
• Class based
• Often Change of mind -
• Religious and political
6. • Aristotle, quintellien , Horace, longinuous.
• “Some praise at morning what they blame at night,
But always think the last opinion right.”
• “A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”
8. Peri Bathous,
Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry
• parody of Longinus’
• Peri Hupsous
• Depth
9. Preface to Lyrical Ballads
• ‘incidents and situations from common life….’
• Diction
• ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ and the ‘vague, glossy and
unfeeling language’
• Poetry vs Prose
• Metre
• “additional source of pleasure”
• Who is a poet?
10. • Poetry?
• “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge…”
• Function of poetry?
• four stages through which poetic composition
• a) observation,
• b) recollection,
• c) contemplation,
• d) imaginative excitement of the emotions
11. Biographia Literaria
• Chapter 13 – Imaginatio vs Fanci
• Primary Imagination –
• “the living power and prime agent of all human perception”
• Involuntarily
• Secondary Imagination
• . “echo” of former
• voluntary
• “Dissolves, diffuses, dissipates inorder tyo recreate” - Synthetic
12. Fancy
• only combines different things
• “bringing together images dissimilar in the main, by source”
• “mechanical”
• Technical Part
• NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
• EGOISTICAL SUBLIME
13. Poem and Poetry (14)
• Poem = prose
• Prose + metre = Poem
• Poetry??
14. poetry and poetic diction
• Micheal, ruth, mad mother, brothger –
• Aristotle – commom character –
• rustrict purified language
• Rustric life is narrow - real vs ordinary
15. Criticism of WW’s ideas by Coleridge
• selected and purified ???
• Real man???
• Meter? Why not diction?
• Scientific
16. A Defence of Poetry
• Thomas Love Peacock
• "The Four Ages of Poetry“
• “poetry has become valueless and redundant”
• To Peacock Shelley wrote:
• Your anathemas against poetry itself excited me to a sacred rage.
. . . I had the greatest possible desire to break a lance with you ...
in honour of my mistress Urania.
17. Why are Poets indestructible???
• "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".
• dual role of legislator and prophet
• Reason (body) and Imagination (spirit)
• The Language of a Poet??
• Poets and Philosophers
• “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is
distorted”
18. • Function of poetry??
• Wisom and Delight
• degradation of poetry during the period of Charles ll
• “A great Poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters
of wisdom and delight”
19. Matthew Arnold
• Essays in Criticism
• The Function of criticism at the Present Time
• The study of Poetry
• Culture and Anarchy
20. Culture and Anarchy
• "Culture [...] is a study of perfection".
• "[Culture] seeks to do away with classes; make all men live in
an atmosphere of sweetness and light .”
•Hellenism
•Hebraism
22. Essays in Criticism – Study of poetry
• Charlatanism
• “Criticism of Life”
• The Study of Poetry: on Chaucer
• The Study of Poetry: on the age of Dryden
• Gary
• The Study of Poetry: on Burns
• Arnold on Shakespeare – “England there needs a miracle of genius
like Shakespeare's”
24. T.S.ELIOT
• “The Function of Criticism”
• Romantic critic Middleton Murrey
• English as a nation of romantics
• French are naturally classical.
• impressionistic criticism
• Arnold’s creative vs critical
25. Tradition and the Individual
• concept of tradition
• theory of the impersonality of poetry
• “Past should be altered by present as much as the present is directed by
past.”
• Praising for Individual talent?
• Influence?
• historical sense vs Slavish imitation
• poet to a catalyst -
• Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion