1.
1871 in art
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Events from the year 1871 in art. March – Edward Lear settles at his villa in Sanremo, spring – James McNeill Whistler publishes Sixteen etchings of scenes on the Thames and paints his first moonlights of the river. May – James Tissot flees Paris for London, june 14 – Camille Pissarro marries his mistress Julie Vellay in the London borough of Croydon and moves to Pontoise. Summer – Claude Monet visits Zaandam, december – Monet and his wife Camille move to Argenteuil. William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti become tenants of Kelmscott Manor, marie Spartali marries William James Stillman. Crocker establishes the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, the Apotheosis of War George Frederic Watts – Portrait of Frederic Leighton Alfred Waud – A Home on the Mississippi James McNeill Whistler Arrangement in Grey and Black No
2.
Lewis Carroll
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Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, There are societies in many parts of the world dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life. Dodgsons family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections, conservative, most of Dodgsons male ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy. His great-grandfather, also named Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin. His paternal grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, the older of these sons – yet another Charles Dodgson – was Carrolls father. He went to Westminster School and then to Christ Church, Oxford and he reverted to the other family tradition and took holy orders. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career, instead, he married his first cousin Frances Jane Lutwidge in 1830 and became a country parson. Dodgson was born in the parsonage at Daresbury in Cheshire near the towns of Warrington and Runcorn. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in North Yorkshire, and this remained their home for the next 25 years. He was High Church, inclining to Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of John Henry Newman and the Tractarian movement, Young Charles was to develop an ambiguous relationship with his fathers values and with the Church of England as a whole. During his early youth, Dodgson was educated at home and his reading lists preserved in the family archives testify to a precocious intellect, at the age of seven, he was reading books such as The Pilgrims Progress. He also suffered from a stammer – a condition shared by most of his siblings – that often influenced his life throughout his years. At the age of twelve, he was sent to Richmond Grammar School at nearby Richmond, in 1846, Dodgson entered Rugby School where he was evidently unhappy, as he wrote some years after leaving, I cannot say. That any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again, I can honestly say that if I could have been. Secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear, scholastically, though, he excelled with apparent ease. I have not had a promising boy at his age since I came to Rugby. He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and matriculated at Oxford in May 1850 as a member of his fathers old college, after waiting for rooms in college to become available, he went into residence in January 1851. He had been at Oxford only two days when he received a summons home and his mother had died of inflammation of the brain – perhaps meningitis or a stroke – at the age of 47
3.
Jabberwocky
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Jabberwocky is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll about the killing of a creature named the Jabberwock. It was included in his 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the book tells of Alices adventures within the back-to-front world of Looking-Glass Land. In an early scene in which she first encounters the chess piece characters White King and White Queen, realising that she is travelling through an inverted world, she recognises that the verses on the pages are written in mirror-writing. She holds a mirror to one of the poems, and reads the reflected verse of Jabberwocky and she finds the nonsense verse as puzzling as the odd land she has passed into, later revealed as a dreamscape. Jabberwocky is considered one of the greatest nonsense poems written in English and its playful, whimsical language has given English nonsense words and neologisms such as galumphing and chortle. The rest of the poem was written during Carrolls stay with relatives at Whitburn, the story may have been partly inspired by the local Sunderland area legend of the Lambton Worm. The concept of nonsense verse was not original to Carroll, who would have known of such as The World Turned Upside Down. Nonsense existed in Shakespeares work and was well-known in the Brothers Grimms fairytales, roger Lancelyn Green suggests that Jabberwocky is a parody of the old German ballad The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains in which a shepherd kills a griffin that is attacking his sheep. The ballad had been translated into English in blank verse by Carrolls cousin Menella Bute Smedley in 1846, john Tenniel reluctantly agreed to illustrate the book in 1871, and his illustrations are still the defining images of the poem. The illustration of the Jabberwock may reflect the contemporary Victorian obsession with natural history, many of the words in the poem are playful nonce words of Carrolls own invention, without intended explicit meaning. When Alice has finished reading the poem she gives her impressions, It seems very pretty, she said when she had finished it, somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I dont exactly know what they are. However, somebody killed something, thats clear, at any rate and this may reflect Carrolls intention for his readership, the poem is, after all, part of a dream. For example, following the poem, a rath is described by Humpty as a sort of green pig. Carrolls notes for the original in Mischmasch suggest a rath is a species of Badger that lived chiefly on cheese and had white hair, long hind legs. The appendices to certain Looking Glass editions, however, state that the creature is a species of turtle that lived on swallows. Later critics added their own interpretations of the lexicon, often without reference to Carrolls own contextual commentary, an extended analysis of the poem and Carrolls commentary is given in the book The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner. In 1868 Carroll asked his publishers, Macmillan, Have you any means, or can you find any and it may be that Carroll was wanting to print the whole poem in mirror writing. Macmillan responded that it would cost a great deal more to do, pronounce slithy as if it were the two words, sly, thee, make the g hard in gyre and gimble, and pronounce rath to rhyme with bath
4.
John Tenniel
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Sir John Tenniel was an English illustrator, graphic humourist, and political cartoonist prominent in the second half of the 19th century. He was knighted for his achievements in 1893. Tenniel was born in Bayswater, West London, to John Baptist Tenniel, Tenniel had five siblings, two brothers and three sisters. One sister, Mary, was later to marry Thomas Goodwin Green, Tenniel was a quiet and introverted person, both as a boy and as an adult. He was content to remain out of the limelight and seemed unaffected by competition or change. His biographer Rodney Engen wrote that Tenniels life and career was that of the supreme gentlemanly outside, in 1840 Tenniel, while practising fencing with his father, received a serious eye wound from his fathers foil, which had accidentally lost its protective tip. Over the years Tenniel gradually lost sight in his eye, he never told his father of the severity of the wound. Tenniel became a student of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1842 by probation—he was admitted because he made copies of classical sculptures to provide the necessary admission portfolio. So, it was here that Tenniel returned to his earlier independent education, Tenniel studied classical sculptures through painting, however, Tenniel was frustrated that he was never taught how to draw. It was in these studies that Tenniel learned to love detail, however, Tenniel was blessed with a photographic memory, undermining his early training and seriously restricting his artistic ambitions. Another formal means of training was Tenniels participation in an artists group, in the mid-1840s Tenniel joined the Artists Society or Clipstone Street Life Academy, and it could be said here that Tenniel first emerged as a satirical draftsman. Tenniels first book illustration was for Samuel Carter Halls The Book of British Ballads, Tenniel planned to enter the 1845 House of Lords competition amongst artists to win the opportunity to design the mural decoration of the new Palace of Westminster. Despite missing the deadline, he submitted a 16-foot cartoon, An Allegory of Justice, for this he received a £200 premium and a commission to paint a fresco in the Upper Waiting Hall in the House of Lords. At Christmas 1850 he was invited by Mark Lemon to fill the position of joint cartoonist on Punch and he had been selected on the strength of his recent illustrations to Aesops Fables. He contributed his first drawing in the initial letter appearing on p.224 and his first cartoon was Lord Jack the Giant Killer, which showed Lord John Russell assailing Cardinal Wiseman. Tenniels cartoons published in the 1860s made popular the portrait of the Irishman as a subhuman being, wanton in his appetites and most resembling an orangutan in both facial features and posture. In his career Tenniel contributed around 2,300 cartoons, innumerable minor drawings, many cartoons for Punchs Almanac and other special numbers. By 1866 he was able to command ten to fifteen guineas for the reworking of a single Punch cartoon as a pencil sketch, according to the Bank of England inflation calculator, £800 in 1866 would buy goods and services worth over £85,000 in 2015
5.
English poetry
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This article focuses on poetry written in English from the United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The article does not include poetry from other countries where the English language is spoken, the earliest surviving English poetry, written in Anglo-Saxon, the direct predecessor of modern English, may have been composed as early as the 7th century. This is generally taken as marking the beginning of Anglo-Saxon poetry and it is possible to identify certain key moments, however. The Dream of the Rood was written before circa AD700, by and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is categorised by the manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of composition. While the poetry that has survived is limited in volume, it is wide in breadth, beowulf is the only heroic epic to have survived in its entirety, but fragments of others such as Waldere and the Finnesburg Fragment show that it was not unique in its time. Other genres include much religious verse, from works to biblical paraphrase, elegies such as The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and The Ruin, and numerous proverbs, riddles. With one notable exception, Anglo-Saxon poetry depends on alliterative verse for its structure, with the Norman conquest of England, beginning in 1111 the Anglo-Saxon language rapidly diminished as a written literary language. The new aristocracy spoke predominantly Norman, and this became the language of courts, parliament. While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for high culture, English literature by no means died out, other transitional works were preserved as popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament, the reputation of Chaucers successors in the 15th century has suffered in comparison with him, though Lydgate and Skelton are widely studied. A group of Scottish writers arose who were believed to be influenced by Chaucer. The rise of Scottish poetry began with the writing of The Kingis Quair by James I of Scotland, the main poets of this Scottish group were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. The Renaissance was slow in coming to England, with the generally accepted start date being around 1509 and it is also generally accepted that the English Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660. However, a number of factors had prepared the way for the introduction of the new learning long before this start date. A number of medieval poets had, as noted, shown an interest in the ideas of Aristotle. The introduction of printing by Caxton in 1474 provided the means for the more rapid dissemination of new or recently rediscovered writers and thinkers. Caxton also printed the works of Chaucer and Gower and these books helped establish the idea of a poetic tradition that was linked to its European counterparts. In addition, the writings of English humanists like Thomas More and Thomas Elyot helped bring the ideas, the establishment of the Church of England in 1535 accelerated the process of questioning the Catholic world-view that had previously dominated intellectual and artistic life
6.
Robert Browning
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Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, Brownings early career began promisingly, but was not a success. His reputation took more than a decade to recover, during which time he moved away from the Shelleyan forms of his early period, in 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better known than himself. So started one of historys most famous literary marriages and they went to live in Italy, a country he called my university, and which features frequently in his work. By the time of her death in 1861, he had published the crucial collection Men and Women, the collection Dramatis Personae and the book-length epic poem The Ring and the Book followed, and made him a leading British poet. He continued to write prolifically, but his reputation rests largely on the poetry he wrote in this middle period. Unusually for a poet, societies for the study of his work were founded while he was still alive, such Browning Societies remained common in Britain and the United States until the early 20th century. Brownings admirers have tended to temper their praise with reservations about the length and difficulty of his most ambitious poems, particularly The Ring and the Book. Nevertheless, they have included such eminent writers as Henry James, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, among living writers, Stephen Kings The Dark Tower series and A. S. Byatts Possession refer directly to Brownings work, today Brownings critically most esteemed poems include the monologues Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, and My Last Duchess. Robert Browning was born in Walworth in the parish of Camberwell, Surrey and he was baptized on 14 June 1812, at Locks Fields Independent Chapel, York Street, Walworth, the only son of Sarah Anna and Robert Browning. His father was a clerk for the Bank of England. Brownings paternal grandfather was an owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies. Brownings father had sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation. Brownings mother was the daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee in Scotland, the evidence, however, is inconclusive either way. Roberts father, a collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books. As such, Robert was raised in a household of significant literary resources and his mother, to whom he was very close, was a devout nonconformist and a talented musician. His younger sister, Sarianna, also gifted, became her brothers companion in his later years and his father encouraged his childrens interest in literature and the arts
7.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt, Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a precursor of the Aesthetic movement. Rossettis art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism and his early poetry was influenced by John Keats. His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossettis work. Rossettis personal life was linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth. The son of émigré Italian scholar Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti and his wife Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori, Rossetti was born in London, England and his family and friends called him Gabriel, but in publications he put the name Dante first in honour of Dante Alighieri. He was the brother of poet Christina Rossetti, critic William Michael Rossetti and his father was a Roman Catholic, at least prior to his marriage, and his mother was an Anglican, ostensibly Gabriel was baptized as and was a practicing Anglican. During his childhood, Rossetti was home educated and often read the Bible, along with the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, the youthful Rossetti is described as self-possessed, articulate, passionate and charismatic but also ardent, poetic and feckless. Like all his siblings, he aspired to be a poet and attended Kings College School and he also wished to be a painter, having shown a great interest in Medieval Italian art. He studied at Henry Sass Drawing Academy from 1841 to 1845, when he enrolled in the Antique School of the Royal Academy, after leaving the Royal Academy, Rossetti studied under Ford Madox Brown, with whom he retained a close relationship throughout his life. Following the exhibition of William Holman Hunts painting The Eve of St. Agnes, the painting illustrated a poem by the little-known John Keats. Rossettis own poem, The Blessed Damozel, was an imitation of Keats, together they developed the philosophy of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood which they founded along with John Everett Millais. Their approach was to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, the eminent critic John Ruskin wrote, Every Pre-Raphaelite landscape background is painted to the last touch, in the open air, from the thing itself. Every Pre-Raphaelite figure, however studied in expression, is a portrait of some living person. Rossettis first major paintings in oil display the realist qualities of the early Pre-Raphaelite movement and his Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini portray Mary as a teenage girl. I saw at once that he was not an orthodox boy, the mixture of genius and dilettantism of both men shut me up for the moment, and whetted my curiosity. Although his work subsequently won support from John Ruskin, Rossetti only rarely exhibited thereafter, in 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters
8.
Scotland
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Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and covers the northern third of the island of Great Britain. It shares a border with England to the south, and is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, with the North Sea to the east. In addition to the mainland, the country is made up of more than 790 islands, including the Northern Isles, the Kingdom of Scotland emerged as an independent sovereign state in the Early Middle Ages and continued to exist until 1707. By inheritance in 1603, James VI, King of Scots, became King of England and King of Ireland, Scotland subsequently entered into a political union with the Kingdom of England on 1 May 1707 to create the new Kingdom of Great Britain. The union also created a new Parliament of Great Britain, which succeeded both the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England. Within Scotland, the monarchy of the United Kingdom has continued to use a variety of styles, titles, the legal system within Scotland has also remained separate from those of England and Wales and Northern Ireland, Scotland constitutes a distinct jurisdiction in both public and private law. Glasgow, Scotlands largest city, was one of the worlds leading industrial cities. Other major urban areas are Aberdeen and Dundee, Scottish waters consist of a large sector of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, containing the largest oil reserves in the European Union. This has given Aberdeen, the third-largest city in Scotland, the title of Europes oil capital, following a referendum in 1997, a Scottish Parliament was re-established, in the form of a devolved unicameral legislature comprising 129 members, having authority over many areas of domestic policy. Scotland is represented in the UK Parliament by 59 MPs and in the European Parliament by 6 MEPs, Scotland is also a member nation of the British–Irish Council, and the British–Irish Parliamentary Assembly. Scotland comes from Scoti, the Latin name for the Gaels, the Late Latin word Scotia was initially used to refer to Ireland. By the 11th century at the latest, Scotia was being used to refer to Scotland north of the River Forth, alongside Albania or Albany, the use of the words Scots and Scotland to encompass all of what is now Scotland became common in the Late Middle Ages. Repeated glaciations, which covered the land mass of modern Scotland. It is believed the first post-glacial groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in Scotland around 12,800 years ago, the groups of settlers began building the first known permanent houses on Scottish soil around 9,500 years ago, and the first villages around 6,000 years ago. The well-preserved village of Skara Brae on the mainland of Orkney dates from this period and it contains the remains of an early Bronze Age ruler laid out on white quartz pebbles and birch bark. It was also discovered for the first time that early Bronze Age people placed flowers in their graves, in the winter of 1850, a severe storm hit Scotland, causing widespread damage and over 200 deaths. In the Bay of Skaill, the storm stripped the earth from a large irregular knoll, when the storm cleared, local villagers found the outline of a village, consisting of a number of small houses without roofs. William Watt of Skaill, the laird, began an amateur excavation of the site, but after uncovering four houses
9.
Australian literature
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Australian literature is the written or literary work produced in the area or by the people of the Commonwealth of Australia and its preceding colonies. During its early Western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies, therefore, Banjo Paterson, historians Manning Clark and Geoffrey Blainey, the playwright David Williamson and leading expatriate writers Barry Humphries, Robert Hughes, Clive James and Germaine Greer. There are also Australian works produced by writers in other than English. Notable contemporary expatriate authors include the feminist Germaine Greer, art historian Robert Hughes and humorists Barry Humphries, among the important authors of classic Australian works are the poets Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, C. J. Dennis and Dorothea Mackellar. Dennis wrote in the Australian vernacular, while Mackellar wrote the patriotic poem My Country. Lawson and Paterson clashed in the famous Bulletin Debate over the nature of life in Australia with Lawson considered to have the harder edged view of the Bush and Paterson the romantic. Lawson is widely regarded as one of Australias greatest writers of short stories, significant poets of the 20th century included Dame Mary Gilmore, Kenneth Slessor, A. D. Among the best known contemporary poets are Les Murray and Bruce Dawe, novelists of classic Australian works include Marcus Clarke, Miles Franklin, Henry Handel Richardson, Joseph Furphy, Rolf Boldrewood and Ruth Park. David Unaipon is known as the first indigenous author, oodgeroo Noonuccal was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse. A significant contemporary account of the experiences of Indigenous Australia can be found in Sally Morgans My Place, Charles Bean, Geoffrey Blainey, Robert Hughes, Manning Clark and Marcia Langton are authors of important Australian histories. We Europeans, wrote Cook in his journal on 23 August 1770, for this he is known as the first Aboriginal author. Oodgeroo Noonuccal was a famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse, Sally Morgans novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice. Leading Aboriginal activists Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson are active contributors to Australian literature. The voices of Indigenous Australians are being noticed and include the playwright Jack Davis. Writers coming to prominence in the 21st century include Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, Kate Howarth Tara June Winch, in poetry Yvette Holt and in popular fiction Anita Heiss. Indigenous authors who have won Australias high prestige Miles Franklin Award include Kim Scott who was joint winner in 2000 for Benang, Alexis Wright won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. Many notable works have been written by non-indigenous Australians on Aboriginal themes, examples include the poems of Judith Wright, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith by Thomas Keneally, Ilbarana by Donald Stuart, and the short story by David Malouf, The Only Speaker of his Tongue. AustLits BlackWords project provides a listing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers
10.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
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Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He wrote several novels and collections of such as Poems and Ballads. A controversial figure at the time, Swinburne was a sado-masochist and alcoholic and was obsessed with the Middle Ages, Swinburne wrote about many taboo topics, such as lesbianism, cannibalism, sado-masochism, and anti-theism. His poems have many common motifs, such as the Ocean, Time, several historical people are featured in his poems, such as Sappho, Anactoria, Jesus and Catullus. Swinburne was born at 7 Chester Street, Grosvenor Place, London, on 5 April 1837 and he was the eldest of six children born to Captain Charles Henry Swinburne and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the 3rd Earl of Ashburnham, a wealthy Northumbrian family. He grew up at East Dene in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight, as a child, Swinburne was nervous and frail, but was also fired with nervous energy and fearlessness to the point of being reckless. He attended Eton College, where he first started writing poetry, at Eton, he won first prizes in French and Italian. He returned in May 1860, though he never received a degree, Swinburne considered Northumberland to be his native county, an emotion reflected in poems like the intensely patriotic Northumberland, Grace Darling and others. He enjoyed riding his pony across the moors through honeyed leagues of the northland border, in the period 1857–60, Swinburne became one of Lady Pauline Trevelyans intellectual circle at Wallington Hall. After his grandfathers death in 1860, he stayed with William Bell Scott in Newcastle, in 1861, Swinburne visited Menton on the French Riviera to recover from excessive use of alcohol, staying at the Villa Laurenti. From Menton, Swinburne travelled to Italy, where he journeyed extensively, in December 1862, Swinburne accompanied Scott and his guests, probably including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on a trip to Tynemouth. At Oxford, Swinburne met several Pre-Raphaelites, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Swinburne was an alcoholic and algolagniac and highly excitable. Thereafter, he lost his youthful rebelliousness and developed into a figure of social respectability and it was said of Watts that he saved the man and killed the poet. Swinburne died at the Pines on 10 April 1909 at the age of 72 and was buried at St. Boniface Church, Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight. Common gossip of the time reported that he had a crush on the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. The English language is poor in rhymes, and most English poets. Swinburnes work was quite popular among undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. T. S. Eliot read Swinburnes essays on the Shakespearean and Jonsonian dramatists in The Contemporaries of Shakespeare and The Age of Shakespeare and Swinburnes books on Shakespeare and Jonson
11.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, FRS was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victorias reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. Tennyson excelled at penning short lyrics, such as Break, Break, Break, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Tears, Idle Tears, Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, Ulysses, and Tithonus. During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success and he is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England and he was born into a middle-class line of Tennysons, but also had a noble and royal ancestry. His father, George Clayton Tennyson, was rector of Somersby, also rector of Benniworth and Bag Enderby, and vicar of Grimsby. Rev. George Clayton Tennyson raised a family and was a man of superior abilities and varied attainments, who tried his hand with fair success in architecture, painting, music. He was comfortably well off for a clergyman and his shrewd money management enabled the family to spend summers at Mablethorpe. Alfred Tennysons mother, Elizabeth Fytche, was the daughter of Stephen Fytche, vicar of St. James Church, Louth and rector of Withcall, Tennysons father carefully attended to the education and training of his children. Tennyson and two of his brothers were writing poetry in their teens and a collection of poems by all three was published locally when Alfred was only 17. One of those brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner, later married Louisa Sellwood, the sister of Alfreds future wife. Another of Tennysons brothers, Edward Tennyson, was institutionalised at a private asylum, Tennyson was a student of Louth Grammar School for four years and then attended Scaitcliffe School, Englefield Green and King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he joined a society called the Cambridge Apostles. A portrait of Tennyson by George Frederic Watts is in Trinitys collection, at Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam and William Henry Brookfield, who became his closest friends. His first publication was a collection of his rhymes and those of his elder brother Charles entitled Poems by Two Brothers. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellors Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, reportedly, it was thought to be no slight honour for a young man of twenty to win the chancellors gold medal. He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830, claribel and Mariana, which later took their place among Tennysons most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although decried by critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day. In the spring of 1831, Tennysons father died, requiring him to leave Cambridge before taking his degree and he returned to the rectory, where he was permitted to live for another six years and shared responsibility for his widowed mother and the family
12.
American poetry
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Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge, the history of American poetry is not easy to know. The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I. But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published, by the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. There are 14 such writers whom we might on that basis call American poets, early examples include a 1616 testimonial poem on the sterling warlike character of Captain John Smith and Rev. One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet, the poems she published during her lifetime address religious and political themes. She also wrote tender evocations of home, family life and of her love for her husband, edward Taylor wrote poems expounding Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of the early colonial period. This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was, understandably, the dominant note of most of the written in the colonies during the 17th. Of course, being a Puritan minister as well as a poet, a distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a slave whose book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published in 1773. She was one of the poets of her day, at least in the colonies. The 18th century saw an emphasis on America itself as fit subject matter for its poets. The work of Rebecca Hammond Lard, although old, still apply to life in todays world. She writes about nature, not only the nature of environment, on the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place, as the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative and this can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets operated from the center of English-language poetic developments in London. The first significant poet of the independent United States was William Cullen Bryant, whose contribution was to write rhapsodic poems on the grandeur of prairies. Formed the Fireside Poets were a group of 19th-century American poets from New England, the poets primary subjects were the domestic life, mythology, and politics of the United States, in which several of the poets were directly involved. Other notable poets to emerge in the early and middle 19th century include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Sidney Lanier, and James Whitcomb Riley
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Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Coppée, François Édouard Joachim". Encyclopædia Britannica. 7 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 102.
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "