As two key figureheads in what is now deemed the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen served as voices for a previously voiceless population. Their poetry speaks of the enduring struggles of being an African American, and the effort required to merely survive in...
Neil Gaiman’s Coraline introduces the story’s antagonist far before that very antagonist’s evil intentions are revealed. In the novel, a young girl Coraline has just moved into an old home. She feels ignored by her parents who are too busy working to pay attention to...
“Yes, if you understood me, Mama, you’d see I was trying to explain it, in blues, without words, the explanation somewhere behind the words. To explain what will always be there” (Gayl Jones, Corregidora, p 66). Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it Each...
The speaker in “Heritage” expresses profound emotions regarding an African-American perspective of the motherland. Countee Cullen writes in an irregular meter throughout the piece, consistently using seven syllables in each line. The speaker is effectually declaring the pains of the slave trade to be innocuous...
Having subdivided the text into three distinct parts, namely, the State, the Church and the Commons, Gower’s Prologue addresses all three estates from its stylistic “medial” point. Although initially dedicated to the king, this poem addresses all people – the “lewed” as well as the...
Comfort Woman, written by Nora Ojka Keller, tells the fictional story of two women, a mother and a daughter, bound by their genetics and torn apart by their varying cultures and experiences. Keller explores not only the past experiences of Akiko the mother, a Korean...
During the first weeks of August 1902, Samuel Taylor Coleridge toured the hills of England near Scafell on foot. Ironically, the lines that “involuntarily poured forth” into a “Hymn” did not end up describing Coleridge’s ascent of Scafell, but rather a hypothetical scene in the...
‘Lines’ opens with a celebration of natural life and its exuberance, ‘the red-breast sings from his tall larch’. Here the singing robin is portrayed through metonymy giving a sense that it is something accessible and familiar to the common people. The singing ‘red breast’ and...
The zeitgeist of Romanticism, while notoriously broad in its philosophy, had definite universal views upon the concepts of the individual, nature and imagination; which constitutes the basis of what today are known as the main aspects of the movement. Such aspects, addressed in Samuel Coleridge’s...
In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer argues that contemporary science, while evolving from magical and religious attempts to understand and control the natural world, eclipses these frameworks[1]. To Frazer “magic” in the 20th century “is a spurious system of natural law as well...
The poems “Marriage” by Marianne Moore and “Home Burial” by Robert Frost demonstrate a clear separation between men and women. Equality between genders is a controversial issue today, but truly began to arise during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s when Modern American poetry was...
The debate over the fragmentary nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” has continued from the time the poem was written in 1797 to the present day. Some critics believe “Kubla Khan” to be a complete work in its totality, while others argue that...
With “The Visionary Hope,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge romanticizes the overpowering state of yearning without excluding the turmoil it causes in human life. Coleridge develops for the reader an almost picturesque cluster of emotional impulses and handicaps far from abstract, and obscure only in the question...
How do we describe an emotion? Happiness, sadness, and fear, all simply words which we tie to certain “feelings,” observable by bodily functions — flushed cheeks, tears, goosebumps, the production and distribution of certain hormones. As humans our emotions manifest as art, but when the...
In both his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ and its accompanying prologue Samuel Taylor Coleridge presents two ideas: the variable nature of the imagination and the beauty of the foreign and exotic. Many scholars view the story behind the poem’s composition as not only one of the...
Of all the English poets that comprise the Romantic period, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), John Keats (1795-1821), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stand as the quintessential masters of Romantic poetry. Their contributions to the aesthetics of versification, from which emerged “a concept of the...
The philosophical concept of The Sublime, though typically hard to define due to its complex nature, is most often described as an object or a surrounding which evokes a feeling of profound awe when viewed. The key difference between the concept of The Sublime and...
It’s a common hope in the life of parents that their children will go on and live more successful lives. That their child will learn the lessons their parents taught them and the road their parents laid out for them to lead them to a...
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” considered by many scholars as the quintessential masterpiece of English Romantic poetry, the symbolic themes of mystery and the supernatural play a very crucial role in the poem’s overall effect which John Hill Spencer sees as...