01729--classicism

Classicism is an attitude to literature that is guided by admiration of the qualities of formal balance, proportion, decorum, and restraint attributed to the major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature ('the classics') in preference to the irregularities of later vernacular literatures, and especially (since about 1800) to the artistic liberties proclaimed by romanticism. A classic is a work of the highest class, and has also been taken to mean a work suitable for study in school classes. During and since the renaissance, these overlapping meanings came to be applied to the writings of major Greek and Roman authors from Homer to Juvenal, which were regarded as unsurpassed models of excellence. The adjective classical, usually applied to this body of writings, has since been extended to outstandingly creative periods of other literatures: the 17th century may be regarded as the classical age of French literature, and the 19th century the classical period of the Western novel, while the finest fiction of the United States in the mid-19th century from Cooper to Twain was referred to by D. H. Lawrence as Classic American Literature (despite the opposition between 'classical' and 'romantic' views of art, a romantic work can now still be a classic). A classical style or approach to literary composition is usually one that imitates Greek or Roman models in subject-matter (e.g. Greek legends) or in form (by the adoption of GENRES like TRAGEDY, EPic, ODE, or verse SATIRE), or both. As a literary doctrine, classicism holds that the writer must be governed by rules, models, or conventions, rather than by wayward inspiration: in its most strictly codified form in the 17th and 18th centuries (see neoclassicism), it required the observance of rules derived from Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) and Horace's Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE), principally those of decorum and the dramatic unities. The dominant tendency of French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, classicism in a weaker form also characterized the augustan age in England; the later German classicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was distinguished by its exclusive interest in Greek models, as opposed to the Roman bias of French and English classicisms. After the end of the 18th century, 'classical' came to be contrasted with 'romantic' in an opposition of increasingly generalized terms embracing moods and attitudes as well as characteristics of actual works. While partisans of Romanticism associated the classical with the rigidly artificial and the romantic with the freely creative, the classicists condemned romantic self-expression as eccentric self-indulgence, in the name of classical sanity and order. The great German writer]. W. von Goethe summarized his conversion to classical principles by defining the classical as healthy, the romantic as sickly. Since then, literary classicism has often been less a matter of imitating Greek and Roman models than of resisting the claims of Romanticism and all that it may be thought to stand for (Protestantism, liberalism, democracy, anarchy): the critical doctrines of Matthew Arnold and more especially of T. S. Eliot are classicist in this sense of reacting against the Romantic principle of unrestrained self expression. 

00230--Consider Tennyson's Ulysses as a hero of unending adventure. OR Bring out the character of Ulysses. OR Tennyson and his hero. [English Literature free notes]

     Tennyson's Ulysses is quite Homer's hero, who is wise, variant and compassionate and is perfectly content to spend the rest of his life with his devoted wife and son and for whom the first duty is to govern his country.  Tennyson to some extent is indebted to Dante for his portrait of Ulysses.  Dante, however, does not approve of his hero's neglect of social and family responsibilities and in fact, condemns him for his perpetual longing for new experiences at the expense of social realities.

            Tennyson's hero is neither Homer's Odysseus with his quite magnificence nor even Dante's Ulysses, who is condemned for his selfish escapism.  Tennyson through his character reflects the complex tendencies of his age and his own temperament.  In one way, the poet expresses his admiration for the active life and the courage and strong determination of his hero.  He is fascinated by the defiant strength and stoic assertion of life displayed by Ulysses.  The voyage may be symbolic of Tennyson's reusing himself from impotent melancholy.  To the poet, Ulysses represents the romantic figure of a man for whom the purpose and joy of life lie in variety and fullness of experience.  He has the unquenchable thirst for new knowledge and experience.  He has always been a man of action and has 'drunk the delight of battle with his peers'.  He is a part of all that he has experienced and still feels that 'all experience is an arch where through / Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever' when he moves.  He cannot be tied down to the narrow confines of his little island kingdom Ithaca.  The sea for him has an irresistible fascination and he urges his mariners to set out for the last, desperate voyage towards the 'utmost bound of human thought'.  Though time and fate have diminished their physical prowess, they still have the heroic spirit and strong will 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield'.  Thus, in one way Ulysses is expressive of a character endowed with a restless spirit – an eternal seeker of knowledge.  This is in a way reflective of the Victorian age with its scientific spirit and colonial expansion.
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            But there is the other side of the picture too.  The first five lines of the poem give us some insight into the character of Ulysses by telling us what he hates.  His scorn for his people and his contempt for his wife are revealed both in words and, more importantly, in the very tone.  He calls his country "barren crags" and his wife 'aged' and his people 'a savage race'.  The line 'That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me' consists of hard monosyllables and reveals his utter disgust with the animal-like existence of his people.  Curiously enough, he pretends to admire his son Telemachus for possessing the very qualities which he himself despises.  Though he had contempt for his country people and his wife he admires Telemachus for his 'slow prudence to make mild a rugged people'.  He boasts of striving with gods and yet talks of Telemachus paying 'meet adoration to gods.'  It appears that he does not believe in immortality (which, incidentally is the central doctrine of IN MEMORIAM) as he talks of 'the eternal silence' and that 'death closes all'.  He is not certain whether they will all be drowned in the high seas or they will be able to reach Elysium and meet Achilles.  At any rate, he appears to be proud and boastful and neglects his duty and social responsibilities.   Some critics have gone to the extent of saying that the poem is a repudiation of life and responsibilities.  For them "it is a brilliant failure in which the details are inconsistent, the reasoning specious" and it deals with life without faith, which can only lead to personal and social disintegration.  The last lines, no doubt, are exalted; but the rhetoric in "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield' should be viewed in the light of all that preceded them.  We find them devoid of purpose or significance.

         
Tennyson's Ulysses is a bundle of contradictions.  Scornful of his people, and contemptuous of his own son and wife, skeptical of gods and immortality, Ulysses talks rhetorically of the life of infinite search and yearning for new knowledge and experience.  The poet thus depicts some of the contradictions apparent both in himself and in his age through his character.

00199--UGC-NET, English Literature Objective Type Question Answers 76 to 145 [English Literature free notes]

1.   Match the right authors
 1    The chambers and the stables weren wide
And well we weren easd at the best.
30 And shortly, when the sun was to rest,
So had I spoken with them every one
That I was of their fellowship anon,
And mad forward early for to rise
To take our way there as I you devise.
2    Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty.
For I can see no fruits in all their faith,
But malice, falsehood, and excessive pride,
Which methinks fits not their profession.
Haply some hapless man hath conscience,
And for his conscience lives in beggary.

3    Right in the midst the goddess' self did stand
Upon an altar of some costly mass,
Whose substance was uneath [difficult] to understand:
For neither precious stone, nor dureful brass,
Nor shining gold, nor mouldering clay it was;
But much more rare and precious to esteem,
Pure in aspect, and like to crystal glass,
Yet glass was not, if one did rightly deem,
But being fair and brickie [brittle], likest glass did
seem.

4    And this, alas, is more than we would do.
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we'are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to this, self murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
a,  Spenser
b,  Chaucer
c,  Donne
d,  Marlowe
A  1-d, 2-c, 3-a, 4-b
B  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
C  1-b, 2-d, 3-a 4-c
D 1-a, 2-c, 3-b 4-d
Answer:…………………..

2.  “My great religion is the belief in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than intellect”.
Whose words?
a)    Thomas Hardy
b)    Charlotte Bronte
c)    Emily Bronte
d)    D.H Lawrence
Answer:…………………..

3.  “Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater Man, if such
Descend to earth or dwell in highest heaven!
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep—and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil”
The above passage is an instance of epic style invocation. Identify the work and its author.
a)    Illiad by Homer
b)    Paradise Lost Book 3, Milton
c)    Paradise Lost Book 1, Milton
d)    Recluse, by Wordsworth
Answer:…………………..

4.  “Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green:
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plains”
The above lines are from The Deserted Village, written by Oliver Goldsmith. What social movement is referred to in these lines?
a)    The Enclosure
b)    The Chartist movement
c)    Green Revolution
d)    Glorious Revolution
Answer:…………………..

5.  “Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.”
Identify the poem?
a)    Tennyson’s Lotos Eaters
b)    Browning’s My Last Dutchess
c)    Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot
d)    Browning’s Porphyria's Lover"
Answer:…………………..
6.  The following are characteristic features of a poetic genre. Identify the genre.
A single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment […].
This person addresses and interacts with one or more other people; but we know of the auditors' presence, and what they say and do, only from clues in the discourse of the single speaker.
The main principle controlling the poet's choice and formulation of what the lyric speaker says is to reveal to the reader, in a way that enhances its interest, the speaker's temperament and character.
a)    Sonnet
b)    Epic
c)    Ode
d)    Dramatic Monologue
Answer:…………………..
7.  “Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in his hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"
Identify the author and work.
a)    Tennyson, Lotos eaters
b)    Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra
c)    Browning, My Last Dutchess
d)    Browning, Andrea del Sarto
Answer:…………………..
8.  “If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die. —
That strain again; it had a dying fall:
O, it came oer my ear, like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour! Enough! No more.
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”
Which of Shakespearen character says so. Identify the play.
a)    Hamlet, in Hamlet
b)    Lady Macbeth in Macbeth
c)    Orsino in Twelfth Night
d)    Hermione in the Winter’s Tale
Answer:…………………..
9.  He scarce had ceas't when the superiour Fiend
Was moving toward the shoar; his ponderous shield
Ethereal temper, massy, large and round, [ 285 ]
Behind him cast; the broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose Orb
Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands, [ 290 ]
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
His Spear, to equal which the tallest Pine
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast
Of some great Ammiral, were but a wand,
He walkt with to support uneasie steps [ 295 ]
Over the burning Marle, not like those steps
On Heavens Azure, and the torrid Clime
Smote on him sore besides, vaulted with Fire;
The fragment is taken from a work by
A,  Edmund Spenser
B,  John Milton
C,  William Shakespeare
D,  Geoffrey Chaucer
 Answer:…………………..

10.  "It is virtue, yea virtue, gentlemen, that maketh gentlemen; that maketh the poor rich, the base-born noble, the subject a sovereign, the deformed beautiful, the sick whole, the weak strong, the most miserable most happy. There are two principal and peculiar gifts in the nature of man, knowledge and reason; the one commandeth, and the other obeyeth: these things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can change, neither the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither sickness abate, neither age abolish”.
The above passage is an example of a mannered style of English prose fashionable in the Elizabethan times. Identify the style.
a.    Bombast
b.    Parallelism
c.    Euphuism
d.    Baroque
Answer:…………………..

11.  “The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says: “Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?”
The above passage appears in……
a.    Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
b.    Culture and Society
c.    Popular Culture
d.    Culture and Anarchy
Answer:…………………..

12.  1 The existence of a variety of structures of language generated by specific configurations of power, all seeking precedence and the imposition of particular rules and hierarchies.
2 An overarching explanation of a state of affairs, like those offered  by Marxism, the enlightenment or Christianity
3 Possessing no overall design or universal plan, resistant to totalisation or universalisation.
4 A self-certifying or absolute structure or foundation which lies beyond the operation of language
a, anti-teleological
b, plurality of power/discourse formation
c, metaphysics of presence
d, metanarrative
A  1-c, 2-b, 3-d, 4-a
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-d, 2-a, 3-c 4-b
D 1-a, 2-c, 3-b 4-d
Answer:…………………..

13.   1  The way in which linguistic structures or discourses maintain a radical difference from one another
2  The collapse of signification as a set of discernible and discrete units of meaning
3  An identity, consciousness or ego which is deferred,displaced, fragmented or marginalised within a structure.
4  Self conscious incorporation of the process of production, construction or composition
a, reflexivity
b, implosion of meaning
c, incommensurable
d decentring of the subject

A  1-b, 2-c, 3-d, 4-a
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-d, 2-a, 3-c 4-b
D  1-c, 2-b, 3-d 4-a
Answer:…………………..

14.  1 It is well known that certain periods of highest development
of art stand in no direct connection with the general development
of society, nor with the material basis and the skeleton
structure of its organization. Witness the example of the
Greeks as compared with the modem nations or even
Shakespeare. As regards certain forms of art, as, e.g., the
epos, it is admitted that they can never be produced in the
world-epoch-making form as soon as art as such comes into
existence; in other words, that in the domain of art certain
important forms of it are possible only at a low stage of its
, development. If that be true of the mutual relations of different
forms of art within the domain of art itself, it is far less
surprising that the same is true of the relation of art as a
whole to the general development of society. The difficulty
lies only in the general formulation of these contradictions.
No sooner are they specified than they are explained. Let us
take for instance the relation of Greek art and of that of
Shakespeare's time to our own

2 The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is
at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the
material intercourse of men, the language of real life. The mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language
of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.-real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness
can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process

3 ..............All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance
to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar,  Mettemichand Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself. To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

4 The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and
serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and
oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried
on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a
fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution
of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere complicated arrangement of society into various orders a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

a, Manifesto of theCommunist Party.
b, Bourgeois and Proletarians1
c,  A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
d, The German Ideology

A  1-c, 2-b, 3-d, 4-a
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a 4-b
D 1-a, 2-c, 3-b 4-d
Answer:…………………..

15.  1 J C Ransome        a, irony
2 R P Blackmur        b, tension
3 R P Warren        c, gesture
4 Allen Tate            d, texture

A  1-d, 2-c, 3-a, 4-b
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a 4-b
D 1-a, 2-c, 3-b, 4-d
Answer:…………………..

16.  1, satire        a, autumn
2, romance        b, spring
3, tragedy        c, winter
4, comedy        d, summer

A  1-d, 2-c, 3-a, 4-b
B  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a 4-b
D 1-a, 2-c, 3-b 4-d
Answer:…………………..

17.  1, Maud Bodkin        a, Archetypes in Literature
2, Jessie Weston        b, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry
3, Levi Strauss        c, From Ritual to Romance
4, Northrope Frye        d, Elementary Structures of kinship

A  1-d, 2-b, 3-a, 4-c
B  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
D 1-b, 2-c, 3-d 4-d
Answer:…………………..

18.  1 Among the following, who is/are not belonging to Formalist School?
1, Yury Tynyanove
2 Osip Brick
3 R S Crane
4 Boris Eichenbaum
A, Both 2 and 4
B, Only 2
C, Only 3
D, Both 2 and 3
Answer:…………………..

19.  Of his kind of analysis, the privileges of the subject?
Clearly, in undertaking an internal and architectonic analysis
of a work (whether it be a literary text, a philosophical
system, or a scientific work) and in delimiting psychological
and biographical references, suspicions arise concerning
the absolute nature and creative role of the subject. But
the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be
reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating
subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse,
and its system of dependencies. We should suspend
the typical questions: how does a free subject penetrate
the density of things and endow them with meaning;
how does it accomplish its design by animating the rules
of discourse from within? Rather, we should ask: under
what conditions and through what forms can an entity like
the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position
does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what
rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the
subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative
role and analysed as a complex and variable function of
discourse.

The passage implies...
A,  that the author is insignificant in the analysis of a work
B,  that the author is merely a part of work
C,  that the author has a role in the analysis of a work
D,  that the author is dead
Answer:…………………..

20.  If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written.... And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of personality, not being necessarily more interesting, on having 'more to say', but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The passage is taken from a work by:

A,  Mathew Arnold

B,  William Wordsworth

C,  S T Coleridge

D,  T S Eliot

Answer:…………………..

21.  The importance of the god or hero in the myth lies in the fact that such
characters, who are conceived in human likeness and yet have more power
over nature, gradually build up the vision of an omnipotent personal community
beyond an indifferent nature. It is this community which the hero regularly enters in his apotheosis. The world of this apotheosis thus begins to pull away from the rotary cycle of the quest in which all triumph is temporary. Hence if we look at the quest-myth as a pattern of imagery, we see the hero's quest first of all in terms of its fulfilment.... the vision of innocence which sees the world in terms of total human intelligibility. It corresponds to, and is usually found
in the form of, the vision of the unfallen world or heaven in religion. We may call it the comic vision of life, in contrast to the tragic vision, which sees the quest only in the form of its ordained cycle.

The passage is an example of...

A,  formalist criticism
B,  archetypal criticism
C,  psychoanalytic criticism
D,  new criticism
Answer:…………………..

22.  1,  New Historicism            a,  Mikhail Bakhtin

2,  Dialogism                b,  Allen Sinfield               

3,  Frankfurt School            c,  Stephen Green

4,  Cultural materialism            d,  Walter Benjamin


A  1-d, 2-c, 3-a, 4-b
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
D  1-c, 2-a, 3-d, 4-b

Answer:…………………..


23.  “There is shadow under this red rock”

The line suggests...

A, the possibility of attaining salvation

B, modern man fails to see each other

C, loss of faith in the modern era

D, modern man’s life is futile

Answer:…………………..

24.  1,  Robert Graves            a,  The Shield of Achilles

2,  T S Eliot                b,  The Cool Web

3,  W H Auden            c,  October Dawn

4,  Ted Hughes            d,  Ash Wednesday

A  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
B  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
C  1-d, 2-c, 3-a, 4-b
D  1-c, 2-a, 3-d, 4-b

Answer:…………………..

25.   1. “My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes makes one sight”
In which Frostean poem do we read these lines?
a)    Mending Walls
b)    True Tramps in Mud Time
c)    A Brook in the City
d)    A Servant to Servants

Answer:…………………..

26.  “Nature is the incarnation of thought
    The world is the mind precipitated”
Which is the philosophical doctrine that holds the above belief?
a)    Transcendentalism
b)    Romanticism
c)    Naturalism
d)    Realism
Answer:…………………..

27.  “The Tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops, the same is true of laugh”.
Who says so and in which work appear these lines?
a)    Pozzo in Waiting for Godot
b)    Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus
c)    Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathusthra
d)    Kazantzakis in The Report to Greco
Answer:………………….
28.   “The peculiar nakedness of Wordsworth’s poetry, its strong sense of being alone with the visible universe, with no myth or figure to meditate between ego and phenomena, is to a surprisingly large extent not so much a result of history as it is of Wordsworth’s personal faith in the reality of the body of nature”.
The above passage is taken from a classical study of Romanticism. Identify the author and work?
a)    The Romantic Imagination by Mourice Bowra
b)    The Visionary Company by Harold Bloom
c)    Natural Supernaturalilsm by M.H Abrams
d)    The Mirror and Lamp by M.H Abrams
Answer:…………………..

29.   “... the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [...] is the determination of being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence (essence, existence, substance, subject, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth).”
 Who is the author of the above passage?
a)    Roman Jakobson
b)    Roland Barthes
c)    Jacques Derida
d)    Jacques Lacan
Answer:…………………..

30.   “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Identify the author and work?
a)    James Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
b)    James Joyce Ulysses
c)    Beckett, Murphy
d)    Beckett, Moloy
Answer:…………………..

31.  “Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.”
In which poem by Eliot appear the above lines?
a)    The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
b)    The Waste Land
c)    The Hollow Men
d)    Ash-Wednesday
Answer:…………………..
32.   It is a narrative form which deals with the artist’s growth to maturity. It means the “artis’s novel”. Wordsworth’s Prelude, Dickens’ David Copperfield, etc. are examples of this narrative form. Name this narrative form.
a)    Künstlerroman
b)    Bildungsroman
c)    Autobiography
d)    Historical novel
33.   “Incredulity towards meta-narratives” is a definition of postmodernism given by:
a)    Lyotard
b)    Baudrillard
c)    Fredric Jameson
d)    Terry Eagleton
Answer:…………………..
34.  “With this same key
Shake-speare unlocked his heart' once more!
Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shake-speare he!”
Identify the author of the above lines.
a.    Robert Browning
b.    Ben Johnson
c.    Dr. Samuel Johnson
d.    Coleridge
Answer:…………………..
35.  “An ambiguity, in ordinary speech, means something very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful.... any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language”.
Identify the author and Work.
a.    I.A Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism
b.    Derrida, Speech and Phenomena
c.    F.R Leavis, The Common Pursuit
d.    William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
Answer:…………………..


36.  “Why can a street be completely rebuilt and still be the same? Because it does not constitute a purely material entity; it is based on certain conditions that are distinct from the materials that fit the conditions, i.e. its location with respect to other street”

The passage reminds you of.....

A,  Archetypal criticism

B,  Structuralism

C,   Postmodernism

D,  Poststructuralism

Answer:…………………..

37.  1,  Barthes            a,  History

2,  Levi Strauss        b,  Anthropology

3,  Foucault            c, Philosophy

4,  Derrida            d,  Literature

A  1-d, 2-b, 3-a, 4-c
B  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
D 1-b, 2-c, 3-d  4-d
Answer:…………………..

38.  Which is/are not by Foucault...
1, Order of Things
2,  Madness and Civilisation
3,  A Study of History
4,  History of Sexuality

A,  Only 1
B,  Only 3
C,  Both 1 and 2
D,  Both 3 and 4
 Answer:…………………..
39.  Literature was conceived to be primarily an "art"; that is, a set of skills which, though it requires innate talents, must be perfected by long study and practice and consists mainly in the deliberate adaptation of known and tested means to the achievement of foreseen ends upon the audience of readers. It is the craftsman's ideal demanding finish, correction, and attention to detail. Special allowances were often made for the unerring freedom of what were called natural geniuses, and also for happy strokes, available even to some less gifted poets, which occur without premeditation.

The passage refers to...

A,  formalist criticism

B,  neo-classical criticism

C,  new criticism
Answer:…………………..

40.  Match the works with their composers

1,  Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues...



2,  From gardens where we feel secure
Look up, and with a sigh endure
The tyrannies of love:
And, gentle, do not care to know,
Where Poland draws her Eastern bow,
What violence is done . . .


3,  Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free . . .

4,  And I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life
And i have something to expiate;
A pettiness

a,  W H auden- Look Stranger
b,  D H Lawrence- Snake
c,  T S Eliot- waste Land
d,  W B Yeats- The Tower

A  1-c, 2-a, 3-d, 4-b
B  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
D 1-b, 2-c, 3-d  4-d
Answer:…………………..
41.  Match the following
1, Lacan            a, discourse
2, Derrida            b, mirror stage
3, Foucault            c, scriptible
4, Barthes            d, logocentrism

A  1-c, 2-a, 3-d, 4-b
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
D 1-b, 2-c, 3-d  4-d
Answer:…………………..
42.  1,Culture and Anarchy            a, Walter Pater

2, The Picture of Dorian Gray            b, Johnson        
3, Studies in the History of the Renaissance    c, Mathew Arnold
4, Lives of the English Poets            d, Oscar Wilde
A  1-c, 2-d, 3-a, 4-b
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-b, 4-a
D 1-b, 2-c, 3-d  4-d
Answer:…………………..
43.  After all, if anyone will ask me whether 'a tragedy cannot be made upon
any other grounds than those of exciting pity and terror in us, Bossu,4 the
best of modern critics, answers thus in general: That all excellent arts, and
particularly that of poetry, have been invented and brought to perfection by
men of a transcendent genius; and that, therefore, they who practise afterwards
the same arts are obliged to tread in their footsteps, and to search in
their writings the foundation of them; for it is not just that new rules should
destroy the authority of the old. But Rapin writes more particularly thus,
that no passions in a story are so proper to move our concernment as fear
and pity; and that it is from our concernment we receive our pleasure is
undoubted; when the soul becomes agitated with fear for one character, or
hope for another, then it, is' that we are pleased 'in ‘Tragedy, by the interest
which we take in their adventures.

This extract is taken from...

A, Pope- Essay on Criticism

B,  Dryden- Essay on Dramatic Poesy

C,  Johnson- Preface to Shakespeare

D,  Sidney- Apology for Poetry
Answer:………………….
44.  ‘Considering that it is as subject one comes to voice, then the postmodernist
focus on the critique of identity appears at first glance to threaten and
close down the possibility that this discourse and practice will allow those
who have suffered the crippling effects of colonization and domination to
gain or regain a hearing. Even if this sense of threat and the fear it evokes
are based on a misunderstanding of the postmodernist political project, they
nevertheless shape responses. It never surprises me when black folks respond
to the critique of essentialism, ,especially when it denies the validity of identity
politics by saying, 'Yeah, It s easy to give up identity, when you got one."
Should we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the "subject" when
they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time? Though an apt and oftentimes
appropriate comeback, it does not really intervene in the discourse in a way
that alters and transforms.’

The passage highlights...

A,  postcolonialism

B,  postmodernism

C,  racial isues

D,  cultural criticism
Answer:…………………..
45.  1,  Macbeth            a, pride

2,  Hamlet                b, ambition

3,  Othello                c, procrastination

4,  Lear                d, jealousy


A  1-d, 2-c, 3-d, 4-a
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-d, 3-a 4-b
D 1-a, 2-c, 3-b, 4-d
Answer:…………………..
46.  I will not suffer a sense of false modesty to prevent me from asserting, that
I point my Reader's attention to this mark of distinction, far less for the sake
of these particular Poems than from the general importance of the subject.
The subject is indeed important! For the human mind is capable of. Being
excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must
have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know
this, and who does not further know, that one, being is elevated above
another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore
appeared to me, that to endeavour, to produce or enlarge this capability is
done of the best services in which, ;at any period, a Writer can• be engaged;
but this service; excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For
a multitude of causes, unknown to former ,times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it
for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to Ii state of almost savage torpor. The
most effective of these causes rather great national events which are daily
taking place and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the
the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies; To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the
country have conformed themselves.
The passage is from
A,  The Function of Criticism by T S Eliot
B,  Biographia Literaria by Coleridge
C,  Culture and Ararchy by Arnold
D,  Preface to Lyrical ballads by Wordsworth
Answer:…………………..
47. 1, Louis McNiece        a, Lost Season
2,  Roy Fuller            b, Confessions of a Life Artist
3,  Basil Bunting            c, Homage to Cliches
4,  Thom Gunn            d, The Spoils

A  1-d, 2-c, 3-d, 4-a
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-a, 3-d, 4-b
D 1-a, 2-c, 3-b, 4-d
Answer:…………………..
48.  Among the following who is/are not from Dickens’ Hard Times?
1, Louisa       
2, Gradgrind
3, Sissy Jupe
4, Pip
A,  Only 1
B,  Only 4
C,  Both 1 and 2
D,  Both 3 and 4
Answer:…………………..
49.  Match the quotations with writers
1,  “unconscious is structured like a language”
2,  “there is nothing outside text”
3,  “life is a fatal sexually transmitted disease”
4,  “power is maintained through discursive practices”
a, Freud
b, Derrida
c, Lacan
d, Foucault
A  1-d, 2-c, 3-b, 4-a
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-a, 3-d, 4-b
D 1-c, 2-b, 3-a, 4-d
Answer:…………………..
50. 1,  Dylan Thomas        a, Country Sentiments
2,  R S Thomas            b, Lament and Triumph
3,  George Barker            c, The Stones of a Field
4,  Robert Graves            d, Fern Hill            
A  1-d, 2-c, 3-b, 4-a
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-c, 2-a, 3-d, 4-b
D 1-c, 2-b, 3-a, 4-d
Answer:…………………..
51.  which critical practice provided equal weightage to history and text?
1,  Cultural Materialism
2, Rchetypal Criticism
3,  Structuralism
4,  New Historicism
A,  Only 1
B,  Only 4
C,  Both 1 and 4
D,  Both 3 and 4
Answer:…………………..
52. One important feature of Jane Austen’s style is?
(A) boisterous humour
(B) humour and pathos
(C) subtlety of irony
(D) stream of consciousness
53. The title of the poem ‘The Second Coming’ is taken from?
(A) The Bible
(B) The Irish mythology
(C) The German mythology
(D) The Greek mythology
Answer:…………………..
54. The following lines are an example……… of image.
‘The river sweats
Oil and tar’
(A) visual
(B) kinetic
(C) erotic
(D) musical
Answer:…………………..
55. Who invented the term ‘Sprung rhythm’?
(A)Hopkins
(B)Tennyson
(C)Browning
(D)Wordsworth
Answer:…………………..
56. Which of the following plays of Shakespeare has an epilogue?
(A)  The Tempest
(B) Henry IV, Pt I
(C) Hamlet
(D) Twelfth Night
Answer:…………………..
57.  Which of the following poems of Coleridge is a ballad?
(A) Work Without Hope
(B) Frost at Midnight
(C) The Rime of the Ancient
(D) Youth and Age
Answer:…………………..
58.  The second series of Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb was published in?
(A) 1823
(B) 1826
(C) 1834
(D) 1833
Answer:…………………..
59.  Identify the poet, whom Queen Victoria, regarded as the perfect poet of ‘love and loss’—
(A) Tennyson
(B) Browning
(C) Swinburne
(D) D. G. Rossetti
Answer:…………………..
60.  A verse form using stanza of eight lines, each with eleven syllables, is known as?
(A) Spenserian Stanza
(B) Ballad
(C) OttavaRima
(D) Rhyme Royal
Answer:…………………..
61.  Identify the rhetorical figure used in the following line of Tennyson “Faith un-faithful kept him falsely true.”
(A) Oxymoron
(B) Metaphor
(C) Simile
(D) Synecdoche
Answer:…………………..
62. Match the following
1, Hybridity
2,  Ahistorical
3,  Transhistorical
4,  Phonocentric
a, irrespective of historical era
b, insignificance of historical era
c, priority of speech over writing
d, mixed individual identity
A  1-d, 2-c, 3-b, 4-a
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-d, 2-b, 3-a, 4-c
D 1-c, 2-b, 3-a, 4-d
Answer:…………………..
63,  Match the following
1,  With its sombre ideology of heroism and baleful destiny; thus also the work
of Eugene Genovese on black religion restores the vitality of these utterances
by reading them, not as the replication of imposed beliefs, but rather as a
process whereby the hegemonic Christianity of the slave-owners is appropriated, secretly emptied of its content and subverted to the transmission of quite different oppositional and coded messages. Moreover, the stress on the dialogical then allows us to reread or rewrite the hegemonic forms themselves; they also can be grasped as a process of the reappropriation and neutralization, the cooptation and class transformation, the cultural universalization, of forms which originally expressed the situation of "popular," subordinate, or dominated groups. So the slave religion of Christianity is transformed into the hegemonic ideological apparatus of the medieval system; while folk music and peasant dance find themselves transmuted into the forms of aristocratic or court festivity and into the cultural visions of the pastoral; and popular narrative from time immemorial romance, adventure story, melodrama, and the like-is ceaselessly drawn on to restore vitality to an enfeebled and asphyxiating "high culture."

2,  Chlorinated fluids, for instance, have always been experienced as a sort of
liquid fire, the action of which must be carefully estimated, otherwise the
object itself would be affected, 'burnt'. The implicit legend of this tyt;e of
product rests on the idea of a violent, abrasive modification of matter: the
connotations are of a chemical or mutilating type: the product 'kills' the dirt.
Powders, on the contrary, are separating agents: their ideal role is to litfe'rate
the object from its circumstantial imperfection: dirt is 'forced out' and no
longer killed; in the Omo imagery, dirt is a diminutive enemy, stunted and
black, which takes to its heels from the fine immaculate linen at the sole
threat of the judgment of Omo. Products based on chlorine and ammonia
are without doubt the representatives of a kind of absolute fire, a saviour but
a blind one. Powders, on the contrary, are selective, they push, they drive
dirt through the texture of the object, their function is keeping public order
not making war. This distinction has ethnographic correlatives: the chemical
fluid is an extension of the washerwoman's movements when she beats the
clothes, while powders rather replace those of the housewife pressing and
rolling the washing against a sloping board.

3, To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour
power requires ,not only a reproduction, of its skills but, also, at the same
time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order,
i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the, workers,' and
a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology curtly for
the agents of exploitation and repression; so that they, too, will provide for
the domination of the ruling class. In other words, the school (but also other State institutions like the Church, or 'other apparatuses like the Army) teaches 'know-how', but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its 'practice'. All the agents of production, exploitation and repression, not to speak of the 'professionals of ideology' (Marx), must in one way or another be 'steeped' in this ideology in order to perform their tasks 'conscientiously' the tasks of the exploited (the proletarians), of the exploiters (the capitalists), of the exploiters' auxiliaries (the managers), or of the high priests of the ruling ideology .

4, To judge from various recent publications; the spirit of the times is not
blowing in the direction of formalist and intrinsic criticism.• We may no
longer be hearing too much about relevance but we keep hearing a great
deal about reference, about the nonverbal "outside" to which language refers,
by which it is conditioned and upon which it acts. The stress falls not so
much on the fictional status of literature  property now perhaps somewhat
too easily taken for granted-but on the interplay between these fictions and
categories that are said to partake of reality, such as the self, man, society,
"the artist, his culture and the human community," as one critic puts it.
Hence the emphasis on hybrid texts considered to be partly literary and partly
referential, on popular fictions deliberately aimed towards social and psychological gratification, on literary autobiography as a key to the understanding of the self, and so on. We speak as if, with the problems of literary form resolved once and forever, and with the techniques of structural analysis refined to near-perfection, we could now move "beyond formalism"2 towards the questions that really interest us and reap, at last, the fruits of the ascetic concentration on techniques that prepared us for this decisive step. With
the internal law and order of literature well policed, we can now confidently
devote ourselves to the foreign affairs, the external politics of literature. Not
only do we feel able to do so, but we owe it to ourselves to take this step:
our moral conscience would not allow us to do otherwise.

a, Althusser-‘ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’.

b, Paul de Man- Semiology and Rhetoric’

c, Roland Barthers- Mythologies

d, Friedric Jameson- ‘Political Unconscious’

A  1-d, 2-c, 3-a, 4-b
B  1-b, 2-d, 3-a, 4-c
C  1-d, 2-b, 3-a, 4-c
D 1-c, 2-b, 3-a, 4-d
Answer:…………………..
64.  By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a
veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes a set of
automatic habits some traditions of dress, and a few broken-down institutions.
Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there
is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people,
national oppression, and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing.
After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the
extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata.
The withering away of the reality of the nation and the death pangs of the
national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependence. This is why
it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations during
the struggle for national freedom. The negation of the native's culture, the
contempt. For any manifestation of culture whether active or emotional, and
the placing outside the pale of all specialized branches of organization contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the reflexive type; they are poorly differentiated,
anarchic and ineffective.

The passage implies...

A, Marxism

B, New Historicism

C, Postcolonialism

D, Cultural Materialism

Answer:…………………..

65.  It is a peculiarity of our epoch that, at the moment when the phoneticization of writing the historical origin and structural possibility of philosophy as of
science, the condition of the episteme-begins to lay hold on world culture,
science, in its advancements, can no longer be satisfied with it. This inadequacy had always already begun to make its presence felt.  It appears as such, allows it a kind of takeover without our being able to translate this novelty into clear cut notions of mutation, explication, accumulation, revolution, or tradition.
By alluding to a science of writing reined ill by metaphor, metaphysics,
and theology, this exergue must not only announce that the science of writing-
grammatology shows signs of liberation all over the world, as a result
of decisive efforts. These efforts are necessarily discreet, dispersed, almost
imperceptible; that is a quality of their meaning and of the milieu within
which they produce their operation. I would like to suggest above all that,
however fecund and necessary the undertaking might be, and even if given
the most favourable hypothesis it did overcome all technical and epistemological obstacles as well as all the theological and metaphysical impediments that have limited it hitherto, such a science of writing runs the risk of never being established as such and with that name, of never being able to define the unity of its project or its object. Of not being able to either write its
discourse on method or to describe the limits of its field.

The extract reminds you of...

A,  Judith Butler

B,  Harold Bloom

C, Roland Barthes

D, Jacques Derrida
Answer:…………………..
66. Who called ‘The Waste Land ‘a music of ideas’?
(A) Allen Tate
(B) J. C. Ransom
(C) I. A. Richards
(D) F. R Leavis
Answer:…………………..
67. Which book of John Ruskin influenced Mahatma Gandhi?
(A) Sesame and Lilies
(B) The Seven Lamps of Architecture
(C) Unto This Last
(D) Fors Clavigera
Answer:…………………..
68. The twins in Lord   of the Flies are?
(A)Ralph and Jack
(B) Simon and Eric
(C) Ralph and Eric
(D) Simon and Jack
Answer:…………………..
69. Which of the following plays of Shakespeare, according to T. S.
Eliot, is ‘artistic failure’?
(A) The Tempest
(B) Hamlet
(C) Henry IV, Pt I
(D) Twelfth Night
Answer:…………………..
70. What does ‘I’ stand for in the following line?
‘To Carthage then I came’
(A) Buddha
(B) Tiresias
(C)  Smyrna Merchant
(D) Augustine


ANSWER KEY

1-C
2-D
3-D
4-A
5-A
6-D
7-B
8-C
9-B
10-C
11-D
12-B
13-D
14-C
15-A
16-B
17-D
18-C
19-C
20-D
21-B
22-D
23-C
24-A
25-B
26-A
27-A
28-B
29-C
30-B
31-A
32-A
33-A
34-A
35-D
36-B
37-A
38-B
39-B
40-A
41-B
42-A
43-C
44-C
45-A
46-D
47-C
48-B
49-D
50-A
51-C
52-B
53-A
54-C
55-A
56-A
57-C
58-D
59-D
60-C
61-A
62-C
63-A
64-C
65-D
66-A
67-C
68-A
69-B
70-D

00191--Tradition And Individual Talent by T.S.Eliot

Tradition and the Individual Talent

                                           T.S. Eliot

I

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at mo.st, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of so-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to. English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archaeology.

 Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are ''more critical" than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to. insist, when we praise a poet, upon tho.se aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the mo.st individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality mo.st vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ''tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lo.st in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value-a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: It appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe-the mind of his own country-a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind-is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Someone said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my program for the metier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulfur dioxide.

II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus3 of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of,"personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulfurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which "came," which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality:

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light-or darkness-of these observations:

And now methinks I could e'en chide myself

For doting on her beauty, though her death

Shall be revenged after no common action.

Does the silkworm expend her yellow labors

For thee? For thee does she undo herself?

Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships

For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?

Why does yon fellow falsify highways,

And put his life between the judge's lips,

To refine such a thing-keeps horse and men

To beat their valors for her? . . .

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or fiat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquility" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquility. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere

which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be 'Conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal”.  Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few- know when there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach his impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious; not of what is dead, but of what is already living.

                                       The End