1.
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
2.
Literary modernism
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Modernists experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pounds maxim to Make it new. This literary movement was driven by a desire to overturn traditional modes of representation. In the 1880s increased attention was given to the idea that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, the theories of Sigmund Freud, and Ernst Mach influenced early Modernist literature. Mach argued that the mind had a structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of parts of the mind in The Science of Mechanics. Freuds first major work was Studies on Hysteria, according to Freud, all subjective reality was based on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. As a philosopher of science, Ernst Mach was an influence on logical positivism, and through his criticism of Isaac Newton. Another major precursor of modernism was Friedrich Nietzsche, especially his idea that psychological drives, specifically the will to power, were more important than facts, or things. Henri Bergson, on the hand, emphasized the difference between scientific clock time and the direct, subjective, human experience of time. Also important in Bergsons philosophy was the idea of élan vital, the life force and his philosophy also placed a high value on intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect. These various thinkers were united by a distrust of Victorian positivism, Modernism as a literary movement can be seen also, as a reaction to industrialization, urbanization and new technologies. Initially, some modernists fostered a spirit, stimulated by innovations in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, physics. This idealism, however, ended, with the outbreak of World War I, many modernist writers also shared a mistrust of institutions of power such as government and religion, and rejected the notion of absolute truths. Modernist works such as T. S. Eliots The Waste Land were increasingly self-aware, introspective, and explored the darker aspects of human nature. The term modernism covers a number of related, and overlapping, artistic and literary movements, including Imagism, Symbolism, Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and Dada. They also attempted to take into account changing ideas about reality developed by Darwin, Mach, Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche, Bergson, from this developed innovative literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, as well as the use of multiple points-of-view. This can reflect doubts about the basis of realism, or alternatively an expansion of our understanding of what is meant by realism. For example, the use of stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue reflects the need for psychological realism. But modernism was already stirring by 1902, with such as Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, while Alfred Jarrys absurdist play, Ubu Roi appeared even earlier
3.
Romantic poetry
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Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Although many stress the notion of spontaneity in Romantic poetry, the movement was greatly concerned with the difficulty of composition. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another prominent English Romantic poet and critic, Romantic poetry contrasts with neoclassical poetry, which was the poetry of intellect and reason, while romantic poetry is more the product of emotion. Romantic poetry at the beginning of the century was a reaction against the set standards. According to William J. ” Belief in the importance of the imagination is a feature of romantic poets such as John Keats, Samuel Coleridge. Keats said, “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Hearts affections, the secret of great art, Blake claimed, is the capacity to imagine. To define imagination, in his poem Auguries of Innocence, Blake said, To see a world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower, love for nature is another important feature of romantic poetry, as a source of inspiration. This poetry involves a relationship with nature and places. However, the romantic poets differed in their views about nature, wordsworth recognized nature as a living thing, teacher, god and everything. These feelings are developed and expressed in his epic poem The Prelude. In his poem The Tables Turn he writes, One impulse from the vernal wood Can teach you more of man, Of moral evil and good, Shelley was another nature poet, who believed that nature is a living thing and there is a union between nature and man. Wordsworth approaches nature philosophically, while Shelley emphasises the intellect, John Keats is another a lover of nature, but Coleridge differs from other romantic poets of his age, in that he has a realistic perspective on nature. He believes that nature is not the source of joy and pleasure, Coleridge believed that joy does not come from external nature, but that it emanates from the human heart. Melancholy occupies a prominent place in poetry, and is an important source of inspiration for the Romantic poets. In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats wrote, Romantic poetry was attracted to nostalgia and medievalism is another important characteristic of romantic poetry, especially in the works of John Keats and Coleridge. They were attracted to exotic, remote and obscure places, the world of classical Greece was important to the Romantics. John Keats poetry is full of allusions to the art, literature and culture of Greek, most of the romantic poets used [[supernaturalism|supernatural elements\\ in their poetry. Samuel Coleridge is the romantic poet in this regard
4.
Victorian literature
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While in the preceding Romantic period poetry had been the dominant genre, it was the novel that was most important in the Victorian period. Charles Dickens dominated the first part of Victorias reign, his first novel, Pickwick Papers, was published in 1836, and his last Our Mutual Friend between 1864–5. William Thackerays most famous work Vanity Fair appeared in 1848, algernon Charles Swinburne is also considered an important literary figure of the period, especially his poems and critical writings. Yeats was also published in Victorias reign, with regard to the theatre it was not until the last decades of the nineteenth century that any significant works were produced. This began with Gilbert and Sullivans comic operas, from the 1870s, various plays of George Bernard Shaw in the 1890s, Charles Dickens is the most famous Victorian novelist. Extraordinarily popular in his day with his characters taking on a life of their own beyond the page, Dickens is still one of the most popular and read authors of the world. His first novel, The Pickwick Papers written when he was twenty-five, was an overnight success, the comedy of his first novel has a satirical edge and this pervades his writing. Dickens worked diligently and prolifically to produce the entertaining writing that the wanted, but also to offer commentary on social problems. William Thackeray was Dickens great rival in the first half of Queen Victorias reign, with a similar style but a slightly more detached, acerbic and barbed satirical view of his characters, he also tended to depict a more middle class society than Dickens did. He is best known for his novel Vanity Fair, subtitled A Novel without a Hero, which is an example of a popular in Victorian literature. Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë produced notable works of the period, wuthering Heights, Emilys only work, is an example of Gothic Romanticism from a womans point of view, which examines class, myth, and gender. Jane Eyre, by her sister Charlotte, is another major nineteenth century novel that has gothic themes, annes second novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, written in realistic rather than romantic style, is mainly considered to be the first sustained feminist novel. Later in this period George Eliot, published The Mill on the Floss in 1860, like the Brontës she published under a masculine pseudonym. In the later decades of the Victorian era Thomas Hardy was the most important novelist and his works include Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the dUrbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. Other significant novelists of this era were Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, George Meredith, the husband and wife team of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning conducted their love affair through verse and produced many tender and passionate poems. Both Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote poems which sit somewhere in between the exultation of nature of the romantic Poetry and the Georgian Poetry of the early 20th century, however Hopkinss poetry was not published until 1918. Arnolds works anticipate some of the themes of later poets. The reclaiming of the past was a part of Victorian literature with an interest in both classical literature but also the medieval literature of England
5.
Classicism
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Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. Classicism is a genre of philosophy, expressing itself in literature, architecture, art, and music, which has Ancient Greek and Roman sources. It was particularly expressed in the Neoclassicism of the Age of Enlightenment, Classicism is a recurrent tendency in the Late Antique period, and had a major revival in Carolingian and Ottonian art. Until that time the identification with antiquity had been seen as a history of Christendom from the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine I. Renaissance classicism introduced a host of elements into European culture, including the application of mathematics and empiricism into art, humanism, literary and depictive realism, importantly it also introduced Polytheism, or paganism, and the juxtaposition of ancient and modern. The classicism of the Renaissance led to, and gave way to and this period sought the revival of classical art forms, including Greek drama and music. Opera, in its modern European form, had its roots in attempts to recreate the combination of singing and dancing with theatre thought to be the Greek norm, examples of this appeal to classicism included Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare in poetry and theatre. Tudor drama, in particular, modeled itself after classical ideals, studying Ancient Greek became regarded as essential for a well-rounded education in the liberal arts. They also began reviving plastic arts such as bronze casting for sculpture, for example, the painting of Jacques-Louis David which was seen as an attempt to return to formal balance, clarity, manliness, and vigor in art. Various movements of the period saw themselves as classical revolts against a prevailing trend of emotionalism and irregularity. The 20th century saw a number of changes in the arts, thus, both pre-20th century disciplines were labelled classical and modern movements in art which saw themselves as aligned with light, space, sparseness of texture, and formal coherence. Examples of classicist playwrights are Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine and Moliere, the influence of these French rules on playwrights in other nations is debatable. In the English theatre, Restoration playwrights such as William Wycherly and those of Shakespeares plays that seem to display the unities, such as The Tempest, probably indicate a familiarity with actual models from classical antiquity. Classicism in architecture developed during the Italian Renaissance, notably in the writings and designs of Leon Battista Alberti and this style quickly spread to other Italian cities and then to France, Germany, England, Russia and elsewhere. In the 16th century, Sebastiano Serlio helped codify the classical orders, building off of these influences, the 17th-century architects Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren firmly established classicism in England. For the development of classicism from the mid-18th-century onwards, see Neoclassical architecture, for Greek art of the 5th century B. C. E. See Classical art in ancient Greece and the Severe style Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture are marked by their renewal of classical forms, motifs and subjects. In the 15th century Leon Battista Alberti was important in theorizing many of the ideas for painting that came to a fully realised product with Raphaels School of Athens during the High Renaissance
6.
Modernism
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Among the factors that shaped modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions of horror to World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief, the poet Ezra Pounds 1934 injunction to Make it new. Was the touchstone of the approach towards what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past. In this spirit, its innovations, like the novel, atonal and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and abstract art. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and makes use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, others focus on modernism as an aesthetic introspection. While J. M. W. Art critic Clement Greenberg describes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-Modernists, There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites actually foreshadowed Manet, with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, rationalism has also had opponents in the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and later Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom had significant influence on existentialism. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was The Crystal Palace, the huge cast-iron, Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals in London, such as Paddington Station and Kings Cross Station. These technological advances led to the building of structures like the Brooklyn Bridge. The latter broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be and these engineering marvels radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and the daily lives of people. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, the philosopher Schopenhauer called into question the previous optimism, and his ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Nietzsche. Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness, in particular, the notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as lower animals proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Karl Marx argued that there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system, historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Everdell also thinks modernism in painting began in 1885–86 with Seurats Divisionism, the poet Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal, and Flauberts novel Madame Bovary were both published in 1857. In the arts and letters, two important approaches developed separately in France, the first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors. Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, the school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention
7.
Modernist poetry in English
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Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism. Modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best practices of poets in earlier periods and their models included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, the troubadours, Dante and the medieval Italian philosophical poets, and the English Metaphysical poets. Much of early modernist poetry took the form of short, compact lyrics, as it developed, however, longer poems came to the foreground. These represent the modernist movement to the 20th-century English poetic canon, specifically, poetic sonic effects would also, therefore, become an influential poetic device of modernism. The origins of Imagism and cubist poetry are to be found in two poems by T. E. Hulme that were published in 1909 by the Poets Club in London. Hulme was a student of mathematics and philosophy who had established the Poets Club to discuss his theories of poetry. The poet and critic F. S. Flint, who was a champion of free verse and modern French poetry, was critical of the club. From the ensuing debate, Hulme and Flint became close friends, the American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to this group and they found that their ideas resembled his. In 1911, Pound introduced two other poets, H. D. and Richard Aldington, to the Eiffel Tower group, both of these poets were students of the early Greek lyric poetry, especially the works of Sappho. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H. D. and Aldington under the rubric Imagiste to Poetry magazine. That month Pounds book Ripostes was published with an appendix called The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, aldingtons poems were in the November issue of Poetry and H. D. s in January 1913 and Imagism as a movement was launched. The March issue contained Pounds A Few Donts by an Imagiste, the latter contained this succinct statement of the groups position, Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, as regarding rhythm, to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. Free verse was encouraged along with other new rhythms, common speech language was used, and the exact word was always to be used, as opposed to the almost exact word. In setting these criteria for poetry, the Imagists saw themselves as looking backward to the best practices of pre-Romantic writing, Imagists poets used sharp language and embrace imagery. Their work, however, was to have a impact on English-language writing for the rest of the 20th century. Chinese grammar offers different expressive possibilities from English grammar, a point that Pound subsequently made much of, with a few exceptions, this represents a roll-call of English-language modernist poets of the time
8.
Great Britain
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Great Britain, also known as Britain, is a large island in the north Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of 209,331 km2, Great Britain is the largest European island, in 2011 the island had a population of about 61 million people, making it the worlds third-most populous island after Java in Indonesia and Honshu in Japan. The island of Ireland is situated to the west of it, the island is dominated by a maritime climate with quite narrow temperature differences between seasons. Politically, the island is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island. The term Great Britain often extends to surrounding islands that form part of England, Scotland, and Wales. A single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the union of the Kingdom of England, the archipelago has been referred to by a single name for over 2000 years, the term British Isles derives from terms used by classical geographers to describe this island group. By 50 BC Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a name for the British Isles. However, with the Roman conquest of Britain the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain, the oldest mention of terms related to Great Britain was by Aristotle, or possibly by Pseudo-Aristotle, in his text On the Universe, Vol. III. To quote his works, There are two large islands in it, called the British Isles, Albion and Ierne. The name Britain descends from the Latin name for Britain, Britannia or Brittānia, Old French Bretaigne and Middle English Bretayne, Breteyne. The French form replaced the Old English Breoton, Breoten, Bryten, Breten, Britannia was used by the Romans from the 1st century BC for the British Isles taken together. It is derived from the writings of the Pytheas around 320 BC. Marcian of Heraclea, in his Periplus maris exteri, described the group as αἱ Πρεττανικαὶ νῆσοι. The peoples of these islands of Prettanike were called the Πρεττανοί, Priteni is the source of the Welsh language term Prydain, Britain, which has the same source as the Goidelic term Cruithne used to refer to the early Brythonic-speaking inhabitants of Ireland. The latter were later called Picts or Caledonians by the Romans, the Greco-Egyptian scientist Ptolemy referred to the larger island as great Britain and to Ireland as little Britain in his work Almagest. The name Albion appears to have out of use sometime after the Roman conquest of Britain. After the Anglo-Saxon period, Britain was used as a term only. It was used again in 1604, when King James VI and I styled himself King of Great Brittaine, France, Great Britain refers geographically to the island of Great Britain, politically to England, Scotland and Wales in combination
9.
Ireland
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Ireland is an island in the North Atlantic. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, Ireland is the second-largest island of the British Isles, the third-largest in Europe, and the twentieth-largest on Earth. Politically, Ireland is divided between the Republic of Ireland, which covers five-sixths of the island, and Northern Ireland, in 2011, the population of Ireland was about 6.4 million, ranking it the second-most populous island in Europe after Great Britain. Just under 4.6 million live in the Republic of Ireland, the islands geography comprises relatively low-lying mountains surrounding a central plain, with several navigable rivers extending inland. The island has lush vegetation, a product of its mild, thick woodlands covered the island until the Middle Ages. As of 2013, the amount of land that is wooded in Ireland is about 11% of the total, there are twenty-six extant mammal species native to Ireland. The Irish climate is moderate and classified as oceanic. As a result, winters are milder than expected for such a northerly area, however, summers are cooler than those in Continental Europe. Rainfall and cloud cover are abundant, the earliest evidence of human presence in Ireland is dated at 10,500 BC. Gaelic Ireland had emerged by the 1st century CE, the island was Christianised from the 5th century onward. Following the Norman invasion in the 12th century, England claimed sovereignty over Ireland, however, English rule did not extend over the whole island until the 16th–17th century Tudor conquest, which led to colonisation by settlers from Britain. In the 1690s, a system of Protestant English rule was designed to materially disadvantage the Catholic majority and Protestant dissenters, with the Acts of Union in 1801, Ireland became a part of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland saw much civil unrest from the late 1960s until the 1990s and this subsided following a political agreement in 1998. In 1973 the Republic of Ireland joined the European Economic Community while the United Kingdom, Irish culture has had a significant influence on other cultures, especially in the fields of literature. Alongside mainstream Western culture, an indigenous culture exists, as expressed through Gaelic games, Irish music. The culture of the island shares many features with that of Great Britain, including the English language, and sports such as association football, rugby, horse racing. The name Ireland derives from Old Irish Eriu and this in turn derives from Proto-Celtic *Iveriu, which is also the source of Latin Hibernia. Iveriu derives from a root meaning fat, prosperous, during the last glacial period, and up until about 9000 years ago, most of Ireland was covered with ice, most of the time
10.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
11.
Avant-garde
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The avant-garde are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox, with respect to art, culture, and society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, the avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, the avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. Several writers have attempted, with limited success, to map the parameters of avant-garde activity, the Italian essayist Renato Poggioli provides one of the best-known analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon in his 1962 book Teoria dellarte davanguardia. Other authors have attempted both to clarify and to extend Poggiolis study, bürgers essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-historians such as the German Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry critically argues for an approach to these positions. Subsequent criticism theorized the limitations of these approaches, noting their circumscribed areas of analysis, including Eurocentric, chauvinist, and genre-specific definitions. The concept of avant-garde refers primarily to artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is opposed to cultural values. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch, phony, faked or mechanical culture, for instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales became the measure. It has become common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as avant-garde, nevertheless, an incisive critique of vanguardism as against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s. Since then it has been flanked by what he called avant-garde ghosts to the one side, and this has seen culture become, in his words, a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it. Avant-garde in music can refer to any form of working within traditional structures while seeking to breach boundaries in some manner. The term is used loosely to describe the work of any musicians who radically depart from tradition altogether, although most avant-garde composers have been men, this is not exclusively the case. Women avant-gardists include Pauline Oliveros, Diamanda Galás, Meredith Monk, there are movements in theatre history that are characterized by their contributions to the avant-garde traditions in both the United States and Europe. Among these are Fluxus, Happenings, and Neo-Dada, Avant-garde – Wikipedia book Barron, Stephanie, and Maurice Tuchman. The Avant-garde in Russia, 1910–1930, New Perspectives, Los Angeles County Museum of Art Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. Los Angeles, CA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art ISBN 0-87587-095-3, Cambridge, MA, ISBN 0-671-20422-X Berg, Hubert van den, and Walter Fähnders
12.
Cubism
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Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century, the term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in Paris during the 1910s and extending through the 1920s. The movement was pioneered by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, joined by Andre Lhote, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of form in the late works of Paul Cézanne. The impact of Cubism was far-reaching and wide-ranging, Cubism spread rapidly across the globe and in doing so evolved to a greater or lesser extent. In essence, Cubism was the origin of a process that produced diversity. In France, offshoots of Cubism developed, including Orphism, Abstract art, in other countries Futurism, Suprematism, Dada, Constructivism, De Stijl and Art Deco developed in response to Cubism. Other common threads between these movements include the faceting or simplification of geometric forms, and the association of mechanization. Cubism began between 1907 and 1911, Pablo Picassos 1907 painting Les Demoiselles dAvignon has often been considered a proto-Cubist work. Georges Braques 1908 Houses at L’Estaque prompted the critic Louis Vauxcelles to refer to bizarreries cubiques, Gertrude Stein referred to landscapes made by Picasso in 1909, such as Reservoir at Horta de Ebro, as the first Cubist paintings. A second phase, Synthetic Cubism, remained vital until around 1919, english art historian Douglas Cooper proposed another scheme, describing three phases of Cubism in his book, The Cubist Epoch. Douglas Coopers restrictive use of terms to distinguish the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris. Alternative interpretations of Cubism have therefore developed, wider views of Cubism include artists who were later associated with the Salle 41 artists, e. g. John Berger identifies the essence of Cubism with the mechanical diagram. The metaphorical model of Cubism is the diagram, The diagram being a symbolic representation of invisible processes, forces, structures. A diagram need not eschew certain aspects of appearance but these too will be treated as not as imitations or recreations. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Europeans were discovering African, Polynesian, Micronesian, artists such as Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso were intrigued and inspired by the stark power and simplicity of styles of those foreign cultures. Around 1906, Picasso met Matisse through Gertrude Stein, at a time when artists had recently acquired an interest in primitivism, Iberian sculpture, African art and African tribal masks. Picassos paintings of 1907 have been characterized as Protocubism, as seen in Les Demoiselles dAvignon
13.
Ezra Pound
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Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist movement. His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and his best-known works include Ripostes, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos. This included arranging for the publication in 1915 of Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, while in custody in Italy, Pound had begun work on sections of The Cantos. These were published as The Pisan Cantos, for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, triggering enormous controversy. Largely due to a campaign by his writers, he was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958. Hemingway wrote, The best of Pounds writing—and it is in the Cantos—will last as long as there is any literature, Pound was born in a small, two-story house in Hailey, Idaho Territory, the only child of Homer Loomis Pound and Isabel Weston. His father had worked in Hailey since 1883 as registrar of the General Land Office, both parents ancestors had emigrated from England in the 17th century. On his mothers side, Pound was descended from William Wadsworth, the Wadsworths married into the Westons of New York. Harding Weston and Mary Parker were the parents of Isabel Weston, harding apparently spent most of his life without work, with his brother, Ezra Weston, and his brothers wife, Frances, looking after Mary and Isabels needs. On his fathers side, the immigrant ancestor was John Pound, a Quaker, Ezras grandfather, Thaddeus Coleman Pound, was a Republican Congressman from northwest Wisconsin who had made and lost a fortune in the lumber business. Thaddeuss son Homer, Pounds father, worked for Thaddeus in the lumber business, Homer and Isabel married the following year, and Homer built a home in Hailey. Isabel was unhappy in Hailey and took Ezra with her to New York in 1887, Homer followed them, and in 1889 he found a job as an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint. The family moved to Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, and in 1893 bought a house in Wyncote. Between 1897 and 1900 Pound attended Cheltenham Military Academy, sometimes as a boarder, the boys wore Civil War-style uniforms and besides Latin were taught English, history, arithmetic, marksmanship, military drilling and the importance of submitting to authority. After the academy he may have attended Cheltenham Township High School for one year and it was at Pennsylvania in 1901 that Pound met Hilda Doolittle, his first serious romance, according to Pound scholar Ira Nadel. In 1911 she followed Pound to London and became involved in developing the Imagism movement, Pound was seeing two other women at the same time—Viola Baxter and Mary Moore—later dedicating a book of poetry, Personae, to the latter. He asked Moore to marry him too, but she turned him down and his parents and Frances Weston took Pound on another three-month European tour in 1902, after which he transferred, in 1903, to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, possibly because of poor grades
14.
Edwardian era
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The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 marked the end of the Victorian era. The new king Edward VII was already the leader of an elite that set a style influenced by the art. The Liberals returned to power in 1906 and made significant reforms, below the upper class, the era was marked by significant shifts in politics among sections of society that had been largely excluded from wielding power in the past, such as common labourers. The Edwardian period is sometimes imagined as a golden age of long summer afternoons and garden parties. This perception was created in the 1920s and later by those who remembered the Edwardian age with nostalgia, the Edwardian age was also seen as a mediocre period of pleasure between the great achievements of the preceding Victorian age and the catastrophe of the following war. Recent assessments emphasise the differences between the wealthy and the poor during the Edwardian era and describe the age as heralding great changes in political and social life. Robert Tressells popular novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists is an example of the eras social critique. Despite this, this type of perception has been challenged more recently by modern historians, the British historian Lawrence James has argued that, during the early 20th century, the British felt increasingly threatened by rival powers such as Germany, Russia, and the United States. There was a political awareness of the working class, leading to a rise in trade unions. The aristocracy remained in control of top government offices, the Conservatives – at the time called Unionists – were dominant from the 1890s to 1906. The party had many strengths, appealing to voters supportive of imperialism, tariffs, the Church of England, a powerful Royal Navy, and traditional hierarchical society. There was a powerful leadership base in the aristocracy and landed gentry in rural England, plus strong support from the Church of England. Historians have used election returns to demonstrate that Conservatives did surprisingly well in working-class districts and they had an appeal as well to the better-off element of traditional working class Britons in the larger cities. Nevertheless, the weaknesses were accumulating, and proved so overwhelming in 1906 that they did not return to power until 1922. The Conservative Party was losing its drive and enthusiasm, especially after the retirement of the charismatic Joseph Chamberlain, there was a bitter split on tariff reform, that drove many of the free traders over to the Liberal camp. Tariff reform was an issue that the Conservative leadership inexplicably clung to. Support among the top tier of the class, and in lower middle class weakened. The 1906 election was a landslide for the opposition, which saw its total vote jump 25 percent, the Liberal Party lacked a unified ideological base in 1906
15.
Alfred Austin
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It was claimed that he was being rewarded for his support for the Conservative leader Lord Salisbury in the General Election of 1895. Austin’s poems are little-remembered today, his most popular work being prose idylls celebrating nature, Alfred Austin was born in Headingley, near Leeds, on 30 May 1835, to a Roman Catholic family. His father, Joseph Austin, was a merchant in Leeds, his mother was a sister of Joseph Locke, Austin was educated at Stonyhurst College, St Marys College, Oscott, and University of London, from which he graduated in 1853. He became a barrister in 1857 but after inheriting a fortune from his uncle gave up his career for literature. Politically conservative, between 1866 and 1896 Austin edited National Review and wrote leading articles for The Standard. An ardent imperialist and follower of Disraeli he became, in 1883, in the interval the claims of one writer and another were assessed, but eventually, in 1896, Austin was appointed to the post after Morris had declined it. Austin served as Deputy-Lieutenant for Herefordshire, Austin died of unknown causes at Swinford Old Manor, Hothfield, near Ashford, Kent, England, where he had been ill for some time. On 14 November 1865 Austin married Hester Jane Homan-Mulock, tenth child of Thomas Homan-Mulock and Frances Sophia Berry at St Marylebone Parish Church, in his Autobiography, Austin gives a curious account of their first meeting with her. Seeing the photograph of a lady in an album belonging to a friend in Florence, he had asked. And received the reply, The girl you ought to marry, at the second visit Hester became engaged to Alfred. Throughout his career as journalist and writer Austin derived constant help and she died suddenly on 23 September 1929 at her residence in Kensington. His nephews included the Polar Explorer Captain George F. A. Mulock and British diplomat Sir Howard William Kennard, the book aroused some discussion at the time, but its judgments were extremely uncritical. As poet-laureate, his topical verses did not escape negative criticism, the most effective characteristic of Austins poetry, as of the best of his prose, was a genuine and intimate love of nature. His prose idylls, The Garden that I love and In Veronicas Garden, are full of a pleasant and his lyrical poems are wanting in spontaneity and individuality, but many of them possess a simple, orderly charm, as of an English country lane. He had, indeed, a love of England, sometimes not without a suspicion of insularity. A drama by him, Flodden Field, was performed at His Majestys theatre in 1903, hope Volume 1 · Volume 2. An Artists Proof, London, Tinsley Volume 1 · Volume 2 · Volume 3, London, Chapman & Hall Volume 1 · Volume 2 · Volume 3 Poetry. Randolph, A Poem in Two Cantos, revised edition published as Leszko the Bastard, A Tale of Polish Grief, London, Chapman & Hall
16.
Stephen Phillips
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Stephen Phillips was an English poet and dramatist, who enjoyed considerable popularity in his lifetime. He was born at Somertown near Oxford, the son of the Rev. Stephen Phillips, in 1885, however, he moved to Wolverhampton to join his cousin F. R. Bensons dramatic company, and for six years he played various small parts. In 1890 a slender volume of verse was published at Oxford with the title Primavera, in 1894 he published Eremus, a long poem of loose structure in blank verse of a philosophical complexion. In 1896 appeared Christ in Hades, forming with a few short pieces one of the slim paper-covered volumes of Elkin Mathewss Shilling Garland. This poem caught the eye of the critics, and when it was followed by a collection of Poems in 1897 the writers position as a new poet of exceptional gifts was generally recognized. This volume contained a new edition of Christ in Hades, together with Marpessa, The Woman with the Dead Soul, The Wife and shorter pieces, including To Milton, Blind. Encouraged by the success of the drama in its literary form. In these plays the poets avowed aim was, instead of attempting to revive the method of Shakespeare, paolo and Francesca was the most successful. The 29 January 1902 issue of The Tatler reported that the artist Henry Jamyn Brooks was working on a 9 by 6 feet picture of the attendees and this article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh, ed. Phillips, Stephen. Sir George Alexander & The St. James Theatre, reissued 1969, New York, Benjamin Blom. Works by Stephen Phillips at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Stephen Phillips at Internet Archive
17.
William Watson (poet)
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Sir William Watson was an English poet, popular in his time for the celebratory content, and famous for the controversial political content, of his verse. Initially popularly recognised, he was neglected because of changing tastes. Watson was born in Burley, in present-day West Yorkshire and he was a prolific poet of the 1890s, and a contributor to The Yellow Book, though without decadent associations, and on the traditionalist wing of English poetry. His reputation was established in 1891, with the publication of Wordsworths Grave, on Alfred Tennysons death in 1892, he was a strong candidate to be his eulogist, the commission resulting in his Lachrymae Musarum. He suffered a breakdown later in 1892 and was passed over for the position of Poet Laureate in favour of Alfred Austin, Watson regained his standing in 1894 with the publication of Odes and other poems, which included Vita Nuova, expressing gratitude for his recovery. He courted controversy later in the decade with an attack on Turkey, perhaps in exchange for writing a panegyric of Lloyd George, or perhaps because of his support of the Great War effort, he was awarded a knighthood in 1917. After World War I Watson was largely forgotten, a number of literary men in 1935 issued a public appeal for a fund to support him in his old age, he died the same year. Watson married Adeline Maureen Pring in 1909, they had two daughters, Poems Written During Estrangement New Poems Sable and Purple The Heralds of the Dawn, A Play in Eight Scenes The Muse in Exile Pencraft. A Plea For The Older Ways The Man Who Saw, and Other Poems Arising out of the War Retrogression and Other Poems The Superhuman Antagonists, Works by William Watson at Project Gutenberg Works by or about William Watson at Internet Archive Works by William Watson at LibriVox
18.
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
19.
Victorian era
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The Victorian era was the period of Queen Victorias reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities. Some scholars date the beginning of the period in terms of sensibilities, the era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period. The later half of the Victorian age roughly coincided with the first part of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe, culturally there was a transition away from the rationalism of the Georgian period and toward romanticism and mysticism with regard to religion, social values, and arts. The end of the saw the Boer War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of political reform, industrial reform. Two especially important figures in period of British history are the prime ministers Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. Disraeli, favoured by the queen, was a gregarious Conservative and his rival Gladstone, a Liberal distrusted by the Queen, served more terms and oversaw much of the overall legislative development of the era. The population of England and Wales almost doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901, Scotlands population also rose rapidly, from 2.8 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1901. However, Irelands population decreased sharply, from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901, mostly due to the Great Famine. Between 1837 and 1901 about 15 million emigrants departed the UK permanently, in search of a life in the United States, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia. During the early part of the era, politics in the House of Commons involved battles between the two parties, the Whigs/Liberals and the Conservatives. These parties were led by such prominent statesmen as Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, Lord Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli, Victoria became queen in 1837 at age 18. Her long reign until 1901 was mainly a time of peace, Britain reached the zenith of its economic, political, diplomatic and cultural power. The era saw the expansion of the second British Empire, Historians have characterised the mid-Victorian era as Britains Golden Years. There was prosperity, as the income per person grew by half. There was peace abroad, and social peace at home, opposition to the new order melted away, says Porter. The Chartist movement peaked as a movement among the working class in 1848, its leaders moved to other pursuits, such as trade unions
20.
Poet laureate
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A poet laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government or conferring institution, who is often expected to compose poems for special events and occasions. The Italians Albertino Mussato and Francesco Petrarca were the first to be crowned poets laureate after the classical age, in Britain, the term dates from the appointment of Bernard André by Henry VII of England. In modern times, the title may also be conferred by an organization such as the Poetry Foundation, over a dozen national governments continue the poet laureate tradition. In ancient Greece, the laurel was used to form a crown or wreath of honour for poets and heroes. This custom, first revived in Padua for Albertino Mussato, was followed by Petrarchs own crowning ceremony in the hall of the medieval senatorial palazzo on the Campidoglio on 8 April 1341. As the concept of the laureate has spread, the term laureate has come in English to signify recognition for preeminence or superlative achievement. As a royal degree in rhetoric, poet laureate was awarded at European universities in the Middle Ages, the term might also refer to the holder of such a degree, which recognized skill in rhetoric, grammar and language. The Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate is appointed as an officer of the Library of Parliament, the position alternates between an English and French speaking laureate. Candidates must be able to write in both English and French, have a publication history displaying literary excellence and have written work reflecting Canada. The first laureate was George Bowering, in 2002, in 2004, the title was transferred to Pauline Michel, in 2006 to John Steffler until December 3,2008, to Pierre DesRuisseaux on April 28,2009, and to Fred Wah in December 2011. Michel Pleau was installed in January,2014, Poets Laureate of Dominican Republic include, Pedro Mir. Poets Laureate of Ethiopia include, Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, Poets Laureate of Nazi Germany include, Hanns Johst from 1935 to 1946. Sripada Krishnamurty Sastry was the first poet laureate of Andhra Pradesh, kannadasan was the poet laureate of Tamil Nadu at the time of his death. Malek o-Shoarā Bahār was the laureate of Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar. He was born in Mashhad in 1884 and was a figure among the modernists. The closest equivalent is the title Saoi held by up to seven members at a time of Aosdána, a body of those engaged in fine arts, literature. Poets awarded the title include Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Anthony Cronin, the unofficial Poet Laureate of Netherlands is Ester Naomi Perquin as Dichter des Vaderlands. The previous laureate was Anne Vegter, gerrit Komrij was the first Dichter des Vaderlands
21.
Thomas Hardy
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Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the status of rural people in Britain. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the dUrbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. During his lifetime, Hardys poetry was acclaimed by poets who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Two of his novels, Tess of the dUrbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBCs survey The Big Read. Jemima was well-read, and she educated Thomas until he went to his first school at Bockhampton at the age of eight, for several years he attended Mr. Lasts Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester, where he learned Latin and demonstrated academic potential. Because Hardys family lacked the means for a university education, his formal education ended at the age of sixteen, when he apprenticed to James Hicks. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862 and he won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association. He joined Arthur Blomfields practice as assistant architect in April 1862 and worked with Blomfield on All Saints parish church in Windsor, a reredos, possibly designed by Hardy, was discovered behind panelling at All Saints in August 2016. Hardy never felt at home in London, because he was conscious of class divisions. During this time he became interested in reform and the works of John Stuart Mill. He was also introduced by his Dorset friend Horace Moule to the works of Charles Fourier, after five years, concerned about his health, he returned to Dorset, settling in Weymouth, and decided to dedicate himself to writing. In 1870, while on a mission to restore the parish church of St Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford. In 1885 Thomas and his wife moved into Max Gate, a designed by Hardy. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior, however, he remained preoccupied with his first wifes death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry. In 1910, Hardy had been awarded the Order of Merit and was also for the first time nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and he would be nominated for the prize eleven years later. His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, and it proved a controversial occasion because Hardy had wished for his body to be interred at Stinsford in the grave as his first wife
22.
Christina Rossetti
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Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and childrens poems. She is famous for writing Goblin Market and Remember, and the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter and she had two brothers and a sister, Dante Gabriel became an influential artist and poet, and William Michael and Maria both became writers. Christina, the youngest, was a lively child and she dictated her first story to her mother before she had learned to write. Rossetti was educated at home by her mother and father, who had her religious works, classics, fairy tales. Rossetti delighted in the works of Keats, Scott, Ann Radcliffe, the influence of the work of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers filled the home and would have a deep impact on Rossettis later writing. Their home was open to visiting Italian scholars, artists and revolutionaries, in the 1840s, her family faced severe financial difficulties due to the deterioration of her fathers physical and mental health. In 1843, he was diagnosed with persistent bronchitis, possibly tuberculosis and he gave up his teaching post at Kings College and though he lived another 11 years, he suffered from depression and was never physically well again. Rossettis mother began teaching to keep the family out of poverty and Maria became a live-in governess, at this time her brother William was working for the Excise Office and Gabriel was at art school, leaving Christinas life at home to become one of increasing isolation. When she was 14, Rossetti suffered a breakdown and left school. Bouts of depression and related illness followed, during this period she, her mother, and her sister became deeply interested in the Anglo-Catholic movement that developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a role in Rossettis life. In her late teens, Rossetti became engaged to the painter James Collinson and he was, like her brothers Dante and William, one of the founding members of the avant-garde artistic group, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The engagement was broken in 1850 when he reverted to Catholicism, later she became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley, but declined to marry him, also for religious reasons. The third offer came from the painter John Brett, whom she also refused, Rossetti sat for several of Dante Gabriel Rossettis most famous paintings. The following year she modelled again for his depiction of the Annunciation, a line from her poem Who shall deliver me. Inspired the famous painting by Fernand Khnopff called I lock my door upon myself, in 1849 she became seriously ill again, suffering from depression and sometime around 1857 had a major religious crisis. Rossetti began writing down and dating her poems from 1842, mostly imitating her favoured poets, from 1847 she began experimenting with verse forms such as sonnets, hymns and ballads, drawing narratives from the Bible, folk tales and the lives of the saints. Her early pieces often feature meditations on death and loss, in the Romantic tradition and she published her first two poems, which appeared in the Athenaeum, in 1848 when she was 18
23.
Ernest Dowson
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Ernest Christopher Dowson was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, often associated with the Decadent movement. Ernest Dowson was born in Lee, London, in 1867 and his great-uncle was Alfred Domett, a poet and politician who became Premier of New Zealand and had allegedly been the subject of Robert Brownings poem Waring. Dowson attended The Queens College, Oxford, but left in March 1888 before obtaining a degree, in November 1888, he started work with his father at Dowson and Son, a dry-docking business in Limehouse, east London, which had been established by the poets grandfather. He led a social life, carousing with medical students and law pupils, going to music halls. He was also working assiduously at his writing during this time and he was a member of the Rhymers Club, which included W. B. He was a contributor to literary magazines as The Yellow Book. Dowson collaborated on two novels with Arthur Moore, worked on a novel of his own, Madame de Viole. Later in his career, Dowson was a translator of French fiction, including novels by Balzac and the Goncourt brothers. In 1889, aged 23, Dowson became infatuated with the eleven-year-old Adelaide Missie Foltinowicz, daughter of a Polish restaurant owner, to Dowsons despair, Adelaide was eventually to marry a tailor. In August 1894, Dowsons father, who was in the stages of tuberculosis. His mother, who was also consumptive, hanged herself in February 1895, soon after her death, Dowson began to decline rapidly. The publisher Leonard Smithers gave him an allowance to live in France and write translations, in 1899, Robert Sherard found Dowson almost penniless in a wine bar and took him back to the cottage in Catford, where Sherard was living. Dowson spent the last six weeks of his life at Sherards cottage where he died at age 32 and he had become a Catholic in 1892 and was interred in the Roman Catholic section of nearby Brockley and Ladywell Cemeteries. After Dowsons death, Oscar Wilde wrote, Poor wounded wonderful fellow that he was, I hope bay leaves will be laid on his tomb and rue and myrtle too for he knew what love was. This is also the source of the catchphrase I have been faithful. in my fashion, margaret Mitchell, touched by the far away, faintly sad sound I wanted of the third stanzas first line, chose that line as the title of her novel Gone with the Wind. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Dowson provides the earliest use of the word soccer in written language and his prose works include the short stories collected as Dilemmas, and the two novels A Comedy of Masks and Adrian Rome. A comedy of masks, a novel With Arthur Moore, Dilemmas, stories and studies in sentiment Verses The Pierrot of the minute, a dramatic phantasy in one act Decorations in Verse and Prose Adrian Rome With Arthur Moore. Tony is based on Dowson, while Paul is based on Moore, frederick Delius set a number of Dowsons poems, in his Songs of Sunset and Cynara
24.
George Meredith
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George Meredith, OM was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters and his mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany and he read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry. He collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine and he married Edward Peacocks widowed sister Mary Ellen Nicolls in 1849 when he was twenty-one years old and she was twenty-eight. Meredith collected his writings, first published in periodicals, in an 1851 volume. In 1856 he posed as the model for The Death of Chatterton and his wife ran off with Wallis in 1858, she died three years later. The collection of sonnets entitled Modern Love emerged from this experience as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Meredith married Marie Vulliamy in 1864 and settled in Surrey. He continued writing novels and poetry, often inspired by nature and he had a keen understanding of comedy and his Essay on Comedy remains a reference work in the history of comic theory. In The Egoist, published in 1879, he applies some of his theories of comedy in one of his most enduring novels, some of his writings, including The Egoist, also highlight the subjugation of women during the Victorian period. During most of his career, he had difficulty achieving popular success and his first successful novel was Diana of the Crossways published in 1885. Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writers income with a job as a publishers reader and his advice to Chapman and Hall made him influential in the world of letters. Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue The Decay of Lying, implies that Meredith, along with Balzac, is his favourite novelist, saying Ah and his style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. In 1868 Meredith was introduced to Thomas Hardy by Frederic Chapman of Chapman & Hall the publishers, Hardy had submitted his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. Meredith advised Hardy not to publish his book as it would be attacked by reviewers, Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich and counselled Hardy to put it aside and write another with a purely artistic purpose and more of a plot. Meredith spoke from experience, his first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was judged so shocking that Mudies circulating library had cancelled an order of 300 copies. Hardy continued in his attempts to publish the novel, however it remained unpublished, though he clearly took Merediths advice seriously. Before his death, Meredith was honoured from many quarters, he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors, in 1909, he died at his home in Box Hill, Surrey. He is buried in the cemetery at Dorking, Surrey, Meredith had two wives and three children
25.
Robert W. Service
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Robert William Service was a British-Canadian poet and writer who has often been called the Bard of the Yukon. He is best known for his poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee, from his first book, Songs of a Sourdough. His vivid descriptions of the Yukon and its made it seem that he was a veteran of the Klondike gold rush. Although his work remains popular, Services poems were received as being crudely comical works. Service was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, the third of ten children and his father, also Robert Service, was a banker from Kilwinning, Scotland, who had been transferred to England. When he was five, Service was sent to live in Kilwinning with his three aunts and his paternal grandfather, the towns postmaster. There he is said to have composed his first verse, a grace, on his birthday, At nine. He attended Glasgows Hillhead High School, after leaving school, Service joined the Commercial Bank of Scotland which would later become the Royal Bank of Scotland. He was writing at this time and reportedly already selling his verses and he was also reading poetry, Browning, Keats, Tennyson, and Thackeray. When he was 21, Service travelled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with his Buffalo Bill outfit and this sometimes required him to leech off his parents Scottish neighbours and friends who had previously emigrated to Canada. In 1899, Service was a clerk in Cowichan Bay. The Colonist also published Services Music in the Bush on September 18,1901, in her 2006 biography, Under the Spell of the Yukon, Enid Mallory revealed that Service had fallen in love during this period. He was working as a labourer and store clerk when he first met Constance MacLean at a dance in Duncan B. C. where she was visiting her uncle. MacLean lived in Vancouver, on the mainland, so he courted her by mail, though he was smitten, MacLean was looking for a man of education and means to support her so was not that interested. To please her, he took courses at McGill Universitys Victoria College, in 1903, down on his luck, Service was hired by a Canadian Bank of Commerce branch in Victoria, British Columbia, using his Commercial Bank letter of reference. The bank watched him, gave him a raise, and sent him to Kamloops in the middle of British Columbia, in Victoria he lived over the bank with a hired piano, and dressed for dinner. In Kamloops, horse country, he played polo, in the fall of 1904, the bank sent him to their Whitehorse branch in Yukon. With the expense money he himself a raccoon coat
26.
John Masefield
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John Edward Masefield, OM English poet and writer, was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930. Among his best known works are the childrens novels The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, Masefield was born in Ledbury in Herefordshire, to Caroline and George Masefield, a solicitor. His mother died giving birth to his sister when Masefield was only six and his father died soon after following a mental breakdown. He spent several years aboard this ship and found that he could spend much of his reading and writing. It was aboard the Conway that Masefields love for story-telling grew, while on the ship, he listened to the stories told about sea lore. He continued to read, and felt that he was to become a writer, in 1894, Masefield boarded the Gilcruix, destined for Chile – this first voyage bringing him the experience of sea sickness. On reaching Chile, Masefield suffered from sunstroke and was hospitalised and he eventually returned home to England as a passenger aboard a steam ship. In 1895, Masefield returned to sea on a windjammer destined for New York City, however, the urge to become a writer and the hopelessness of life as a sailor overtook him, and in New York, he deserted ship. He lived as a vagrant for several months, drifting between odd jobs, eventually finding work as an assistant to a bar keeper, before returning to New York City. Sometime around Christmas 1895, Masefield read the December edition of Truth, a New York periodical, which contained the poem The Piper of Arll by Duncan Campbell Scott. Ten years later, Masefield wrote to Scott to tell him what reading that poem had meant to him, I had never cared much for poetry, but your poem impressed me deeply. Since then poetry has been the one deep influence in my life, and to my love of poetry I owe all my friends, and the position I now hold. For the next two years, Masefield was employed by the huge Alexander Smith carpet factory in Yonkers, New York and he purchased up to 20 books a week, and devoured both modern and classical literature. His interests at this time were diverse and his reading included works by George du Maurier, Dumas, Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Dickens, Kipling, Chaucer also became very important to him during this time, as well as poetry by Keats and Shelley. He eventually returned home to England in 1897 as a passenger aboard a steam ship, when Masefield was 23, he met his future wife, Constance de la Cherois Crommelin, who was 35 and of Huguenot descent. Educated in classics and English Literature, and a mathematics teacher, in 1902 he was in charge of the fine art section of the Arts and Industrial Exhibition in Wolverhampton. By the time he was 24, Masefields poems were being published in periodicals and his first collected works, Salt-Water Ballads was published, Masefield then wrote the novels, Captain Margaret and Multitude and Solitude. As a result, he became known to the public and was praised by the critics, in 1912
27.
Nobel Prize in Literature
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Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, here work refers to an authors work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize in any given year, the academy announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. Although the Nobel Prize in Literature has become the worlds most prestigious literature prize, many authors who have won the prize have fallen into obscurity, while others rejected by the jury remain widely studied and read. The prize has become seen as a political one - a peace prize in literary disguise, whose judges are prejudiced against authors with different political tastes to them. Tim Parks has expressed skepticism that it is possible for Swedish professors, as of 2016,16 of the 113 recipients have been of Scandinavian origin. The Academy has often been alleged to be biased towards European, Nobels vague wording for the criteria for the prize has led to recurrent controversy. In the original Swedish, the word translates as either idealistic or ideal. The Nobel Committees interpretation has varied over the years, in recent years, this means a kind of idealism championing human rights on a broad scale. Though Nobel wrote several wills during his lifetime, the last was written a little over a year before he died, Nobel bequeathed 94% of his total assets,31 million Swedish kronor, to establish and endow the five Nobel Prizes. Due to the level of surrounding the will, it was not until 26 April 1897 that the Storting approved it. The executors of his will were Ragnar Sohlman and Rudolf Lilljequist, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee that were to award the Peace Prize were appointed shortly after the will was approved. The prize-awarding organisations followed, the Karolinska Institutet on 7 June, the Swedish Academy on 9 June, the Nobel Foundation then reached an agreement on guidelines for how the Nobel Prize should be awarded. In 1900, the Nobel Foundations newly created statutes were promulgated by King Oscar II, according to Nobels will, the Royal Swedish Academy was to award the Prize in Literature. Each year, the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature and it is not permitted to nominate oneself. Thousands of requests are sent out each year, and as of 2011 about 220 proposals are returned and these proposals must be received by the Academy by 1 February, after which they are examined by the Nobel Committee. By April, the Academy narrows the field to around twenty candidates, by May, a short list of five names is approved by the Committee. The subsequent four months are spent in reading and reviewing the works of the five candidates. In October, members of the Academy vote and the candidate who receives more than half of the votes is named the Nobel laureate in Literature
28.
W. B. Yeats
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William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, Yeats was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He was born in Sandymount, Ireland and educated there and in London and he spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display Yeatss debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, from 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, in 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Of Anglo-Irish descent, William Butler Yeats was born at Sandymount in County Dublin and his father, John Butler Yeats, was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, and well-known painter who died in 1712. Benjamin Yeats, Jerviss grandson and Williams great-great-grandfather, had in 1773 married Mary Butler of a family in County Kildare. Following their marriage, they kept the name Butler in the family name, Mary was a descendant of the Butler of Ormond family from the Neigham Gowran branch of the family. They were descendants of the first Earls of Ormond, by his marriage, Williams father John Yeats was studying law but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherleys Art School in London. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a merchant family in Sligo. Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleons dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty is manifestly true of W. B. Y. Yeatss childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power-shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy, the 1880s saw the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement, the 1890s saw the momentum of nationalism, while the Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments had an effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his countrys biography. In 1867, the moved to England to aid their father, John. At first the Yeats children were educated at home and their mother entertained them with stories and Irish folktales. John provided an education in geography and chemistry, and took William on natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside
29.
Abbey Theatre
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The Abbey Theatre, also known as the National Theatre of Ireland, in Dublin, Republic of Ireland, first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day. The Abbey was the first state-subsidized theatre in the English-speaking world, since July 1966, the Abbey has been located at 26 Lower Abbey Street, Dublin 1. In its early years, the theatre was associated with the writers of the Irish Literary Revival, many of whom were involved in its founding. The Abbey served as a nursery for many of the leading Irish playwrights and actors of the 20th century, including William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Seán OCasey and John Millington Synge. In addition, through its programme of touring abroad and its high visibility to foreign, particularly American, audiences. The Abbey arose from three bases, the first of which was the seminal Irish Literary Theatre. Founded by Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and W. B, Yeats in 1899—with assistance from George Moore—it presented plays in the Antient Concert Rooms and the Gaiety Theatre, which brought critical approval but limited public interest. The second base involved the work of two Dublin directors, William and Frank Fay, William worked in the 1890s with a touring company in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, while his brother Frank was involved in amateur dramatics in Dublin. In April 1902, the Fays gave three performances of Æs play Deirdre and Yeats Cathleen Ní Houlihan in a hall in St Theresas Hall on Clarendon Street, the performances played to a mainly working-class audience rather than the usual middle-class Dublin theatregoers. The run was a success, thanks in part to the beauty and force of Maud Gonne. The company continued at the Antient Concert Rooms, producing works by Seumas OCuisin, Fred Ryan, the third base was financial support and experience of Annie Horniman. Horniman was a middle-class Englishwoman with previous experience of production, having been involved in the presentation of George Bernard Shaws Arms. She came to Dublin in 1903 to act as Yeats unpaid secretary and her money helped found the Abbey Theatre and, according to the critic Adrian Frazier, would make the rich feel at home, and the poor—on a first visit—out of place. Encouraged by the St Theresas Hall success, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Æ, Martyn and they were joined by actors and playwrights from Fays company. At first, they staged performances in the Molesworth Hall, on 11 May 1904, the society formally accepted Hornimans offer of the use of the building. As Horniman did not usually reside in Ireland, the letters patent required were granted in the name of Lady Gregory. The founders appointed William Fay theatre manager, responsible for training the actors in the newly established repertory company
30.
Rudyard Kipling
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Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kiplings works of fiction include The Jungle Book, Kim, and many short stories and his poems include Mandalay, Gunga Din, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, The White Mans Burden, and If—. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, Henry James said, Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known. In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on occasions for a knighthood. Kiplings subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age, George Orwell called him a prophet of British imperialism. Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote, is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary, but as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and a recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts. Rudyard Kipling was born on 30 December 1865, in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, to Alice Kipling, Alice was a vivacious woman about whom Lord Dufferin would say, Dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room. Lockwood Kipling, a sculptor and pottery designer, was the Principal, John Lockwood and Alice had met in 1863 and courted at Rudyard Lake in Rudyard, Staffordshire, England. They married and moved to India in 1865 and they had been so moved by the beauty of the Rudyard Lake area that when their first child was born they referenced it when naming him. Alices sister Georgiana was married to painter Edward Burne-Jones, and her sister Agnes was married to painter Edward Poynter, Kiplings most famous relative was his first cousin, Stanley Baldwin, who was Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times in the 1920s and 1930s. Kiplings birth home on the campus of the J J School of Art in Bombay for many years was used as the Deans residence. Although the cottage bears a plaque stating that this is the site where Kipling was born, the original cottage may have torn down decades ago. Some historians and conservationists are also of the view that the bungalow merely marks a site close to the home of his birth, as the bungalow was built in 1882, Kipling seems to have also said so to the dean when he visited J J School in the 1930s. Kipling was to write of Bombay, According to Bernice M. Murphy, Kipling’s parents considered themselves Anglo-Indians and so too would their son, complex issues of identity and national allegiance would become prominent features in his fiction. So one spoke English, haltingly translated out of the idiom that one thought. Kiplings days of light and darkness in Bombay ended when he was five years old
31.
T. E. Hulme
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Thomas Ernest Hulme was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism. He was a philosopher and the father of imagism. Hulme was born at Gratton Hall, Endon, Staffordshire, the son of Thomas and Mary Hulme. He was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School, and from 1902, St Johns College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and he was thrown out of Cambridge a second time after a scandal involving a Roedean girl. He returned to his studies at University College, London before travelling around Canada, from about 1907 Hulme became interested in philosophy, translating works by Henri Bergson and sitting in on lectures at Cambridge. He translated Georges Sorels Reflections on Violence, Hulme was influenced by Remy de Gourmonts aristocratic concept of art and his studies of sensibility and style. From 1909 Hulme contributed critical articles to The New Age, edited by A. R. Orage, Hulme developed an interest in poetry and wrote a small number of poems. He was made secretary of the Poets Club, attended by such establishment figures as Edmund Gosse, there he encountered Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint. In late 1908 Hulme delivered his paper A Lecture on Modern Poetry to the club, hulmes poems Autumn and City Sunset, both published in 1909 in a Poets Club anthology, have the distinction of being the first Imagist poems. A further five poems were published in The New Age in 1912 as The Complete Poetical Works of T. E, despite this misleading title, Hulme in fact wrote about 25 poems totalling some 260 lines, of which the majority were possibly written between 1908–1910. Robert Frost met Hulme in 1913 and was influenced by his ideas, the publisher of the book Ripostes spoke in that book of Hulme the meta-physician, who achieves great rhythmical beauty in curious verse-forms. Similar views were expressed by T. S. Eliot. Hulmes ideas had an effect on Wyndham Lewis. He championed the art of Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg, was a friend of Gaudier-Brzeska, hulmes politics were conservative, and he moved further to the right after 1911 as a result of contact with Pierre Lasserre, who was associated with Action Française. Hulme volunteered as an artilleryman in 1914 and served with the Honourable Artillery Company and later the Royal Marine Artillery in France and he kept up his writing for The New Age. Notable publications during this period for that magazine were War Notes, written under the pen name North Staffs, and A Notebook, back at the front in 1917, he was killed by a shell at Oostduinkerke near Nieuwpoort, in West Flanders. On 28 September 1917, four days after his thirty-fourth birthday, apparently absorbed in some thought of his own he had failed to hear it coming and remained standing while those around threw themselves flat on the ground. What was left of him was buried in the Military Cemetery at Koksijde, West-Vlaanderen, Notes on Language and Style, in The Criterion, Vol.3, No
32.
London
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London /ˈlʌndən/ is the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south east of the island of Great Britain and it was founded by the Romans, who named it Londinium. Londons ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its 1. 12-square-mile medieval boundaries. London is a global city in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism. It is crowned as the worlds largest financial centre and has the fifth- or sixth-largest metropolitan area GDP in the world, London is a world cultural capital. It is the worlds most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the worlds largest city airport system measured by passenger traffic, London is the worlds leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. Londons universities form the largest concentration of education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted the modern Summer Olympic Games three times, London has a diverse range of people and cultures, and more than 300 languages are spoken in the region. Its estimated mid-2015 municipal population was 8,673,713, the largest of any city in the European Union, Londons urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census. The citys metropolitan area is the most populous in the EU with 13,879,757 inhabitants, the city-region therefore has a similar land area and population to that of the New York metropolitan area. London was the worlds most populous city from around 1831 to 1925, Other famous landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Pauls Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square, and The Shard. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world, the etymology of London is uncertain. It is an ancient name, found in sources from the 2nd century and it is recorded c.121 as Londinium, which points to Romano-British origin, and hand-written Roman tablets recovered in the city originating from AD 65/70-80 include the word Londinio. The earliest attempted explanation, now disregarded, is attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae and this had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had allegedly taken over the city and named it Kaerlud. From 1898, it was accepted that the name was of Celtic origin and meant place belonging to a man called *Londinos. The ultimate difficulty lies in reconciling the Latin form Londinium with the modern Welsh Llundain, which should demand a form *lōndinion, from earlier *loundiniom. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the Welsh name was borrowed back in from English at a later date, and thus cannot be used as a basis from which to reconstruct the original name. Until 1889, the name London officially applied only to the City of London, two recent discoveries indicate probable very early settlements near the Thames in the London area
33.
Soho
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Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and is part of the West End of London, England. Since the 1980s, the area has undergone considerable gentrification and it is now predominantly a fashionable district of upmarket restaurants and media offices, with only a small remnant of sex industry venues. Soho is a small, multicultural area of central London, a home to industry, commerce, culture and entertainment, record shops cluster in the area around Berwick Street, with shops such as Phonica, Sister Ray and Reckless Records. On many weekends, Soho is busy enough to warrant closing off some of the streets to vehicles, Westminster City Council pedestrianised parts of Soho in the mid-1990s, but later removed much of the pedestrianisation, apparently after complaints of loss of trade from local businesses. The name Soho first appears in the 17th century, Most authorities believe that the name derives from a former hunting cry. James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, used soho as a call for his men at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685. The Soho name has been imitated by other entertainment and restaurant districts such as Soho, Hong Kong, Soho, Málaga, SOHO, Beijing, SoHo, London, Ontario, Canada, and Palermo Soho, Buenos Aires. SoHo, Manhattan, gets its name from its location SOuth of HOuston Street, however, apart from Oxford Street, all of these roads are 19th-century metropolitan improvements, so they are not Sohos original boundaries. Soho has never been a unit, with formally defined boundaries. The area to the west is known as Mayfair, to the north Fitzrovia, to the east St Giles and Covent Garden, and to the south St Jamess. According to the Soho Society, Chinatown, the area between Leicester Square to the south and Shaftesbury Avenue to the north, is part of Soho, Soho is part of the West End electoral ward which elects three councillors to Westminster City Council. In 1536, the land was taken by Henry VIII as a park for the Palace of Whitehall. In the 1660s, ownership of Soho Fields passed to Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans and he was granted permission to develop property and quickly passed the lease and development to bricklayer Richard Frith. Soho was part of the ancient parish of St Martin in the Fields, as the population started to grow a new church was provided and in 1687 a new parish of St Anne was established for it. The parish stretched from Oxford Street in the north, to Leicester Square in the south and it therefore included all of contemporary eastern Soho, including the Chinatown area. The western portion of modern Soho, around Carnaby Street was part of the parish of St James, building progressed rapidly in the late 17th century, with large properties including Monmouth House, Leicester House, Fauconberg House, Carlisle House and Newport House. Soho Square was first laid out in the 1680s on the former Soho Fields, firth built the first houses around the square, and by 1691,41 had been completed. It was originally called King Square in honour of Charles II, several upper-class families moved into the area
34.
Waka (poetry)
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Waka is a type of poetry in classical Japanese literature. Waka are composed in Japanese, and are contrasted with poetry composed by Japanese poets in Classical Chinese, although waka in modern Japanese is written as 和歌, in the past it was also written as 倭歌, and a variant name is yamato-uta. As a result, the word waka became effectively synonymous with tanka, tanka consist of five lines of 5-7-5-7-7 on or syllabic units. Therefore, tanka is sometimes called Misohitomoji, meaning it contains 31 syllables in total. The term waka originally encompassed a number of differing forms, principally tanka and chōka and these last three forms, however, fell into disuse at the beginning of the Heian period, and chōka vanished soon afterwards. Thus, the term came in time to refer only to tanka. Chōka consist of 5-7 on phrases repeated at least twice,802, which is of a pattern 5-7 5-7 5-7 5-7-7. Since then, the term waka came to be almost synonymous with tanka. Famous examples of works are the diaries of Ki no Tsurayuki and Izumi Shikibu, as well as such collections of poem tales as The Tales of Ise. Lesser forms of waka featured in the Manyōshū and other ancient sources exist, besides that, there were many other forms like, Bussokusekika, This form carved on a slab of slate – the Buddha footprint or bussokuseki – at the Yakushi-ji temple in Nara. Sedōka, The Manyōshū and Kokinshū recorded this form, katauta, The Manyōshū recorded this form. Waka has a history, first recorded in the early 8th century in the Kojiki. In literary historian Donald Keenes books, he uses four large categories, Early, the most ancient waka were recorded in the historical record the Kojiki and the 20 volumes of the Manyōshū, the oldest surviving waka anthology. The editor of the Manyōshū is anonymous, but it is believed that the editor was Ōtomo no Yakamochi. He was a poet who belonged to the youngest generation represented in the anthology, indeed. The first waka of volume 1 was by Emperor Ōjin, nukata no Ōkimi, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, Yamabe no Akahito, Yamanoue no Okura, Ōtomo no Tabito and his son Yakamochi were the greatest poets in this anthology. The Manyōshū recorded not only the works of the royalty and nobility, the main topics of the Manyōshū were love, sadness, and other miscellaneous topics. But in the 9th century, Japan stopped sending official envoys to Tang dynasty China and it was presented to the emperor in 905. Rise of Japanese national culture The first three chokusenshū The first three imperially-commissioned waka anthologies were the Kokin Wakashū, the Gosen Wakashū and the Shūi Wakashū
35.
Haiku
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Haiku listen is a very short form of Japanese poetry. It is typically characterised by 3 qualities, The essence of haiku is cutting, traditional haiku consist of 17 on, in three phrases of 5,7, and 5 on respectively. A kigo, usually drawn from a saijiki, an extensive, there is a common, although relatively recent, perception that the images juxtaposed must be directly observed everyday objects or occurrences. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a vertical line while haiku in English often appear in three lines to parallel the three phrases of Japanese haiku. Previously called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century, in Japanese haiku a kireji, or cutting word, typically appears at the end of one of the verses three phrases. A kireji fills a role analogous to a caesura in classical western poetry or to a volta in sonnets. The fundamental aesthetic quality of both hokku and haiku is that it is sufficient, independent of context, and will bear consideration as a complete work. The kireji lends the verse structural support, allowing it to stand as an independent poem, the kireji in the Bashō examples old pond and the wind of Mt Fuji are both ya. Neither the remaining Bashō example nor the Issa example contain a kireji although they do both balance a fragment in the first five on against a phrase in the remaining 12 on. In comparison with English verse typically characterized by syllabic meter, Japanese verse counts sound units known as on or morae, traditional haiku consist of 17 on, in three phrases of five, seven and five on respectively. Among contemporary poems teikei haiku continue to use the 5-7-5 pattern while jiyuritsu haiku do not, one of the examples below illustrates that traditional haiku masters were not always constrained by the 5-7-5 pattern. Although the word on is sometimes translated as syllable, one on is counted for a short syllable and this is illustrated by the Issa haiku below, which contains 17 on but only 15 syllables. Conversely, some sounds, such as kyo may look like two syllables to English speakers but are in fact a single on in Japanese, the word onji is sometimes used in referring to Japanese sound units in English although this word is no longer current in Japanese. In Japanese, each on corresponds to a character and hence ji is also sometimes used as the count unit. In 1973, the Haiku Society of America noted that the norm for writers of haiku in English was to use 17 syllables, some translators of Japanese poetry have noted that about 12 syllables in English approximate the duration of 17 Japanese on. Kigo are often in the form of metonyms and can be difficult for those who lack Japanese cultural references to spot, the Bashō examples below include kawazu, frog implying spring, and shigure, a rain shower in late autumn or early winter. Kigo are not always included in non-Japanese haiku or by writers of Japanese free-form haiku. Hokku is the opening stanza of an orthodox collaborative linked poem, or renga, by the time of Matsuo Bashō, the hokku had begun to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun, and haiga
36.
Japanese poetry
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Much of the literary record of Japanese poetry begins when Japanese poets encountered Chinese poetry during the Tang dynasty. For example, in the Tale of Genji both kanshi and waka are frequently mentioned, since the middle of the 19th century, the major forms of Japanese poetry have been tanka, haiku and shi or western-style poetry. Today, the forms of Japanese poetry include both experimental poetry and poetry that seeks to revive traditional ways. Poets writing in tanka, haiku and shi may seldom write poetry other than in their specific chosen form, although some active poets are eager to collaborate with poets in other genres. Also, much of Japanese poetry features short verse forms, often collaborative, older forms of Japanese poetry include kanshi, which shows a strong influence from Chinese literature and culture. Kanshi literally means Han poetry and it is the Japanese term for Chinese poetry in general as well as the written in Chinese by Japanese poets. Kanshi from the early Heian period exists in the Kaifūsō anthology, Waka are composed in Japanese, and are contrasted with poetry composed by Japanese poets in Classical Chinese, which are known as kanshi. The Manyōshū anthology preserves from the eighth century 265 chōka,4,207 tanka, one tan-renga, one bussokusekika, four kanshi, and 22 Chinese prose passages. However, by the time of the tenth century Kokinshū anthology, waka had become the term used for short poems of the tanka form. Tanka are poems written in Japanese with five lines having a 5-7-5-7-7 metre, the tanka form has shown some modern revival in popularity. As previously stated, it used to be called waka, much traditional Japanese poetry was written as the result of a process of 2 or more poets contributing verses to a larger whole piece, such as in the case of the renga form. Typically, the honored guest would begin by composing a few beginning lines and this initial sally would be followed by a stanza composed by the host. This process could continue, sometimes with many composed by numerous other guests. Other collaborative forms of Japanese poetry also evolved, such as the renku form, haiku are a short, 3-line verse form, which have achieved significant global popularity, and the haiku form has been adapted from Japanese into other languages. Typical of the form is the metrical pattern of 3 lines with a distribution of 5,7. Other features include the juxtaposition of two images or ideas with a kireji between them, and a kigo, or seasonal reference, usually drawn from a saijiki, much of Japanese poetry has been transmitted historically through published anthologies, many of them with imperial patronage. Important collections are the Manyōshū, Kokin Wakashū, Shin Kokin Wakashū, the history of Japanese poetry is tied to the history of Japanese literature, that is in the purely historical sense of having extant written records. However, the early pre-history and mythology of Japan involve or include some references to poetry, and, the earliest preserved works in the Japanese language also preserve some previous poetry from this earlier period
37.
Chinoiserie
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Chinoiserie is the European interpretation and imitation of Chinese and East Asian artistic traditions, especially in the decorative arts, garden design, architecture, literature, theatre, and music. First appearing in the 17th century, this trend was popularized in the 18th century due to the rise in trade with China, as a style, chinoiserie is related to the Rococo style. Chinoiserie entered European art and decoration in the mid-to-late 17th century and it was also popularized by the influx of Chinese and Indian goods brought annually to Europe aboard English, Dutch, French, and Swedish East India Companies. There was a revival of popularity for chinoiserie in Europe and the United States from mid-19th Century through the 1920s, though usually understood as a European style, chinoiserie was a global phenomenon. Local versions of chinoiserie were developed in India, Japan, Persia and those products then inspired local artists and artisans such as ceramicists making Talavera pottery at Puebla de Los Angeles. There were many reasons why chinoiserie gained such popularity in Europe in the 18th century, Europeans had a fascination with the exotic East due to their increased, but still restricted, access to new cultures through expanded trade with East Asia, especially China. While Europeans frequently held inaccurate ideas about East Asian, this did not necessarily preclude their fascination, in particular, the Chinese who had exquisitely finished art. Whose court ceremonial was even more elaborate than that of Versailles were viewed as highly civilized. According to Voltaire in his Art de la Chine, The fact remains that four years ago. In other words, somewhere, on the side of the world, there existed a culture so rich that it rivaled the civilizations of Rome. Chinoiserie created a juxtaposition between something new and exotic for Europeans while at the same time reflecting the values of the 4,000 year old culture from which these objects came. Some critics saw the style as …a retreat from reason and taste and it was viewed as lacking the logic and reason upon which Antique art had been founded. Architect and author Robert Morris claimed that it …consisted of mere whims and chimera, without rules or order, it requires no fertility of genius to put into execution. Those with an archaeological view of the East, considered the chinoiserie style, with its distortions and whimsical approach, to be a mockery of the actual Chinese art. Finally, still believed that an interest in chinoiserie indicated a pervading cultural confusion in European society. Chinoiserie persisted into the 19th and 20th centuries but declined in popularity, there was a notable loss of interest in Chinese-inspired décor after the death in 1830 of King George IV, a great proponent of the style. The First Opium War of 1839-1842 between Britain and China disrupted trade and caused a decline of interest in the Oriental. China closed its doors to exports and imports and for many people became a fashion of the past
38.
Japonism
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First described by French art critic and collector, Philippe Burty in 1872, Japonism, from the French Japonisme, is the study of Japanese art and artistic talent. Japonsim affected fine arts, sculpture, architecture, performing arts, the term is used particularly to refer to Japanese influence on European art, especially in impressionism. From the 1860s, ukiyo-e, Japanese woodblock prints, became a source of inspiration for many Western artists, Ukiyo-e began as a Japanese painting school developed in the 17th century. Ukiyo-e woodblock prints were created to fit a demand for inexpensive, although the prints were inexpensive, they were innovative and technical which gave each one value. These prints were created with a single patron in mind. Although a percentage of prints were brought to the West through Dutch trade merchants, Western artists were intrigued by the original use of color and composition. Ukiyo-e prints featured dramatic foreshortening and asymmetrical compositions, during the Edo period, Japan was in a period of seclusion. Although international trade had been shut down, one remained active. Tokugawa Iemitsu, ordered that an island, Deshima, be built off the shores of Nagasaki from which Japan could receive imports. The Dutch were the country able to engage in trade with the Japanese, however. Every year the Dutch arrived in Japan with fleets of ships filled with Western goods for trade, in the cargoes arrived many Dutch treatises on painting and a number of Dutch prints. Shiba Kōkan was one of the notable Japanese artists that studied the Dutch imports, Kōkan created one of the first etchings in Japan which was a technique he had learned from one of the imported treatises. Kōkan would combine the technique of linear perspective, which he learned from a treatise, through the seclusion era, Japanese goods remained a sought after luxury by European monarchs. Japanese porcelain manufacturing began in the century after the unearthing of kaolin clay near Nagasaki. Japanese manufacturers were aware of the popularity of porcelain in Europe, therefore, porcelain and lacquerware became the main exports from Japan to Europe. Porcelain was used to decorate the homes of monarchs in the Baroque, a popular way to display porcelain in a home was to create a porcelain room. Shelves would be placed throughout the room to display the exotic decorations, during the Kaei era, after more than 200 years of seclusion, foreign merchant ships of various nationalities began to visit Japan. Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan ended a period of national isolation and became open to imports from the West, including photography
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British Museum
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The British Museum is dedicated to human history, art and culture, and is located in the Bloomsbury area of London. The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician, the museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. Although today principally a museum of art objects and antiquities. Its foundations lie in the will of the Irish-born British physician, on 7 June 1753, King George II gave his formal assent to the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum. They were joined in 1757 by the Old Royal Library, now the Royal manuscripts, together these four foundation collections included many of the most treasured books now in the British Library including the Lindisfarne Gospels and the sole surviving copy of Beowulf. The British Museum was the first of a new kind of museum – national, belonging to neither church nor king, freely open to the public, sloanes collection, while including a vast miscellany of objects, tended to reflect his scientific interests. The addition of the Cotton and Harley manuscripts introduced a literary, the body of trustees decided on a converted 17th-century mansion, Montagu House, as a location for the museum, which it bought from the Montagu family for £20,000. The Trustees rejected Buckingham House, on the now occupied by Buckingham Palace, on the grounds of cost. With the acquisition of Montagu House the first exhibition galleries and reading room for scholars opened on 15 January 1759. During the few years after its foundation the British Museum received several gifts, including the Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts. A list of donations to the Museum, dated 31 January 1784, in the early 19th century the foundations for the extensive collection of sculpture began to be laid and Greek, Roman and Egyptian artefacts dominated the antiquities displays. Gifts and purchases from Henry Salt, British consul general in Egypt, beginning with the Colossal bust of Ramesses II in 1818, many Greek sculptures followed, notably the first purpose-built exhibition space, the Charles Towneley collection, much of it Roman Sculpture, in 1805. In 1816 these masterpieces of art, were acquired by The British Museum by Act of Parliament. The collections were supplemented by the Bassae frieze from Phigaleia, Greece in 1815, the Ancient Near Eastern collection also had its beginnings in 1825 with the purchase of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquities from the widow of Claudius James Rich. The neoclassical architect, Sir Robert Smirke, was asked to draw up plans for an extension to the Museum. For the reception of the Royal Library, and a Picture Gallery over it, and put forward plans for todays quadrangular building, much of which can be seen today. The dilapidated Old Montagu House was demolished and work on the Kings Library Gallery began in 1823, the extension, the East Wing, was completed by 1831. The Museum became a site as Sir Robert Smirkes grand neo-classical building gradually arose
