Literary Latitude

Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman, b.1941–) is an American singer, songwriter, and visual artist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. In his songs and compositions, he seems to represent himself a pacifist and gives vivid descriptions of the horrors and brutalities of…

Through this beautiful dramatic monologue, Robert Browning has tried to see deep into the psychological state of the Protagonist Duke of Ferrara and the inner motivations and designs that led him to get his own wife, the last Duchess, murdered. The epigraph of the poem “FERRARA” is suggestive of it being the story of an…

Popularly known for its representation of the Victorian Compromise, the poem voices the poet’s sense of loss of his friend Henry Hallam and the lost moments of emotional recovery that the thing lost is never regained as Tennyson concludes that “that is dead/Will never come back to me”. The poem is a kind of break…

Written in blank verse, the dramatic monologue depicts Tennyson’s belief in the sense of compromise that the Victorian Age came to make: between aristocracy and democracy; religion and science; faith and doubt; monarchy and the parliament; and the old order and the new changes. Being a representative poem of the Victorian period, it voices the…

Being a typical example of Wordsworth’s nature poem, it reveals how the poetic inspiration consummates into a spontaneous overflow of the poet’s powerful feelings when he/she is in a pensive mood and tranquility “when on my couch I lie/ In vacant or in pensive mood”. The process involves writing a poem, the role of the…

Written in trochaic tetrameter quatrain form Philip Larkin’s Movement poem The Trees explores the poet’s own ambivalence where he oscillates between the sense of happiness or renewal of leaves to a tree and the sense of loss or pain grief and death that occurs before the leave grow to a tree. Through the change in…

“Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing” is an extract from our example Alexander Pope’s Essays in Criticism which is a prime example of the Neoclassicist tradition of the 18th century and where he tried to talk about the principles of how poetry can be written, and how perfection can be achieved through constant practice. This…

Charles Lamb was a Romantic essayist who began his literary career as an unsuccessful poet and dramatist but he established himself as the Prince of Essayists (said by Hugh Walker). He wrote his essays in a subjective manner in which he talks more about his eccentricities, idiosyncrasies, dreams, visions and follies. He creates humour even…

‘Of Studies’ by Francis Bacon is an essay in which he tries to talk about the importance, values and limitations of studies during the Renaissance period. This essay which is totally pragmatic in its treatment and empirical in its presentation of the subject matter tries to explore and explain the benefits of studies for all…

 Plagiarism is a serious ethical concern in literary research. It is defined as the act of using someone else’s work or ideas without giving them proper credit. Plagiarism can take many forms, including copying text verbatim from a source, paraphrasing without proper citation, and even using ideas or concepts without attribution. In literary research, plagiarism…

Elaine Showalter’s essay “The Female Tradition” is a pivotal work in feminist literary criticism that explores the development and contributions of women writers throughout history. Showalter seeks to establish a distinct female literary tradition that is separate from the male-dominated canon. She divides this female tradition into three main phases: the Feminine, the Feminist, and…

Terry Eagleton, a prominent Marxist literary critic, often emphasises the interconnectedness of literature and history in his works. He argues that literature should not be viewed in isolation, but rather as a reflection of the social, political, and historical contexts in which it was produced. Eagleton believes that literature can be used as a tool to…