Atwood is the second of three children of Margaret Dorothy, a former dietitian and nutritionist, and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. She was a lover of literature from her very early life, since she learnt reading.

Atwood began writing at age six and to write professionally when she was 16. In 1961, She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and minors in philosophy and French at Victoria University in the University of Toronto. She won the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately printed book of poems, “Double Persephone” in late 1961. After that she began graduate studies at Harvard’s Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967-68), the University of Alberta (1969-79), York University in Toronto (1971-72), and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English.In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk, whom she divorced in 1973. She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto. In 1976 their daughter, Eleanor Jess Atwood Gibson, was born. Atwood returned to Toronto in 1980. She divides her time between Toronto and Pelee Island, Ontario.

Atwood is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award seven times, winning twice. While she may be best known for her work as a novelist, she is also an award winning poet, having published 15 books of poetry to date. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths, and fairy tales, which were an interest of hers from an early age. Atwood has also published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper’s, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, Playboy, and many other magazines.

Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, marking the final stop of her international tour to promote The Year of the Flood. She stated that she had chosen to attend the event because the city has been home to one of Canada’s most ambitious environmental reclamation programs: “When people ask if there’s hope (for the environment), I say, if Sudbury can do it, so can you. Having been a symbol of desolation, it’s become a symbol of hope.”

<< Selected Poems of Atwood >>

• A Visit
• The Rest
• Night
• Bored
• Morning in The Burned House
• Variations On The Word Love
• They Eat Out
• Postcard
• This is A Photograph of Me
• In The Secular Night

Sri Chinmoy began writing poetry at an early age, his early efforts being in his native Bengali tongue. However, Sri Chinmoy learnt English metre and rhyme and most of his poems have since been written in English. His first English poem was written in 1945 and was entitled “The Golden Flute”.
In his poetry, Sri Chinmoy is attempting to express the inexpressible, to articulate what is beyond the scope of words. Sri Chinmoy is above all a poet of the inner landscape, and he never forgets that the poem is ‘a finger pointing at the moon’, an invitation to the silence beyond the words.

“The Absolute” is a good example of this. This poem encapsulates a profound spiritual experience; He does not have to argue his case, he just expresses a spiritual consciousness. This inner confidence is reminiscent of the great mystic poets such as Kabir, Mirabai and Rumi. With this kind of poetry we feel it is coming from an inner source of spontaneity and creativity.

Recently Sri Chinmoy’s poetry has focused on short mantric sutra’s or aphorisms. They display a haiku-like compactness, a tremendous density and compression of language. Many of Sri Chinmoy’s short poems are also instructional, their apparent simplicity revealing more and more profound depth on each re-reading.

During the 1970s, while in America, Sri Chinmoy attracted followers such as musicians Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, Narada Michael Walden, Roberta Flack and Boris Grebenshikov. Sri Chinmoy also had the Olympic athlete Carl Lewis as a student. Frederick Lenz (Atmananda) became a follower around 1972, but he left and became a guru on his own around 1981. In 1976, Chinmoy released a meditative album on Folkways Records entitled Music for Meditation.

In 1977, he founded the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, which holds running, swimming, and cycling events worldwide, from fun runs to ultramarathons. Its precursor was the 1976 Liberty Torch Run, a relay in which 33 runners marked America’s bicentennial by covering 8,800 miles in 7 weeks, mapped out over 50 states. This concept was expanded in 1987 to become the international Peace Run (later renamed World Harmony Run), generally held every two years.

Sri Chinmoy died from a heart attack while at his home in Jamaica, Queens, New York on October 11, 2007. His works, teachings and efforts are great asset. According to an estimate, Sri Chinmoy wrote 1,500 books, 115,000 poems and 20,000 songs, created 200,000 paintings and gave almost 800 peace concerts. His short songs were written in Bengali and English.

<<<< The Selected Poems of Sri Chinmoy >>>>

• Inner Oneness
• Eternity’s Joy
• Oneness
• Try to Smile
• Source Immortal
• God’s Child
• Voyager of Time
• If Seeing is Believing
• Fulfilment
• I am Happy
• The Song of The Soul
• Red Angered Eyes
• I Have Nothing
• Cheerfulness and Enthusiasm
• The Power of Love
• Confidence
• Beyond Speech and Mind
• The Beauty of A Rose
• The Jewel of Humility
• Faith-nectar
• Meditation
• Inner Cry
• Joy
• Aphorisms
• Be Happy
• Self Sacrifice
• My Love of Light
• My Silence
• My Human Pride and My Pride Divine
• War and Peace
• Man and God
• My Heart
• My Vital
• My Body
• My Soul
• Will
• Man Immortalized
• Immagination
• Sailing the Boat of Silver Light
• My Lord of Beauty
• I Sing I Smile
• O Bird of Light
• O Light of The Supreme
• The Mother Supreme
• A Little
• Another Day
• Between Nothingness and Eternity
• Revealing Soul and Fulfilling Goal
• Revelation
• Apocalypse
• Immortality
• The Golden Flute
• The Absolute

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many — they are few.” (P. B. Shelley)

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 in Horsham, Sussex, England. He was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded among the finest lyric poets in the English language. He is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed poems in the English language. His major works, however, are long visionary poems which included Prometheus Unbound, Alastor, Adonaïs, The Revolt of Islam, and the unfinished The Triumph of Life. The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820) were dramatic plays in five and four acts respectively. He also wrote the Gothic novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) and the short works The Assassins (1814) and The Coliseum (1817).

Percy Shelley was the eldest of the seven children of Elizabeth Pilfold and Timothy Shelley, a country squire who would become baronet in 1815 on the death of his father. Young Percy attended Sion House Academy before entering University College, Oxford, in 1804. He, due to his atheistic views, was expelled from school. After being expelled from school, he eloped with sixteen-year old Harriet Westbrook to Scotland. They married on 28 August 1811 and would have two children, daughter Ianthe born and son Charles. The marriage,later, was broken.

Shelley was impressed by William Wordsworth and famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron. It was the result of his affiliation with Wordsworth that Shelley prodiced the poem “Queen Mab” and  “printed” this first major poem in 1813, at age of 21. But the poem was pirated by printer, after he printed it’s 250 coppies. It was a revolutionary poem, therefore, was considered illegal and Shelley could not claim for copyright against the pirator. Between 1821 and the 1830s over a dozen pirated editions of Queen Mab were produced and distributed among and by the laboring classes fueling, and becoming a bible for, Chartism.

The novelist Mary Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; 1797-1851) became the second wife Percy Shaelley. She was the daughter of an atheist journalist William Godwin. Their marriage was also the result of an elopement of Mary to Switzerland in 1814. The Shelley’s were spending much time with Lord George Gordon Byron who also led a controversial life of romantic entanglements and political activity.

In 1815 the Shelley’s moved back to England and settled near London. The year was full of good and bad news for him. His grand father left a handsome money for him, his wife Harriet drowned herself and Mary’s half sister Fanny committed suicide.

During his last years, Shelley wrote numerous articles on vegetarianism. He was working on his tragedy in five acts The Cenci and many other works including “Men of England” and his elegy for John Keats “Adonais” (1821). Mary too was busy writing while they lived in various cities including Pisa and Rome. Shelley died on 8 July 1822, at the age of twenty-nine while he was on sailing trips on his schooner ‘Don Juan’ when in a storm it sank. His body washed ashore and he was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. His ashes are buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Italy.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major contributors to English Romantic poetry. He is an asset for the English literature. His unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong disapproving voice, made him an authoritative and much-denigrated figure during his life and afterward. He became an idol of the next two or three or even four generations of poets, including the important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as Lord Byron, Henry David Thoreau, William Butler Yeats, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and poets in other languages such as Jan Kasprowicz, Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy.

<= The Selected Poems of Percy Shelley =>

• Queen Mab
• Mutability
• The Cloud
• To Night
• When The Lamp is Shattered
• Stanzas Written in Dejection
• Song Of Proserpine
• Song
• Ozymandias
• Bereavement
• Ode To The West Wind
• Ode To A Skylark

About his childhood, Coleridge suggests that he “took no pleasure in boyish sports” but instead read “incessantly” and played by himself. After John Coleridge died in 1781, the then 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ’s Hospital, a charity school founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Virgil and William Lisle Bowles. From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote on the slave trade. In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the Royal Dragoons using the false name “Silas Tomkyn Comberbache”, perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. Afterwards, he was rumored to have had a bout with severe depression. His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later under the reason of “insanity” and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never receive a degree from Cambridge.

Coleridge is best known for his poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”. Among his major prose works is “Biographia Literaria”. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, is highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He added new words and terminologies to the English poetry. He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression (neuralgia) and chose to treat these episodes with opium, becoming an addict in the process.

As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. Coleridge’s philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A.O. Lovejoy and I.A. Richards.

<= The Selected Poems of Coleridge =>

• Lines
• Fears in Solitude
• To William Wordsworth
• Song
• Human Life
• Forbearance
• Duty Serving Self-Love
• Work without Hope
• To Nature
• What is Life?
• Kubla Khan

Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland. His boyhood was full of adventure among the hills, and he says of himself that he showed “a stiff, moody, and violent temper.” He lost his mother when he was 8, and his father, John Wordsworth ( a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale) in 1783 when he was 13. The latter, prematurely cut off, left little for the support of his family of four sons and a daughter, Dorothy (afterwards the worthy companion of her illustrious brother).After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and William would not meet again for another nine years. He further in 1787 went to St. John’s Coll., Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1791.

Wordsworth’s father, although could not live long, did teach him poetry, including that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to allowing his son to rely on his own father’s library. After the death of his father, Wordsworth’s uncles were desirous that he should enter the Church, but to this he was unconquerably averse; and indeed his marked indisposition to adopt any regular employment led to their taking not natural offence. The beginning of his friendship with Coleridge in 1795 tended to confirm him in his resolution to devote himself to poetry; and a legacy of £900 from a friend put it in his power to do so by making him for a time independent of other employment.

Wrdsworth, in November, 1791, married a French woman, Annette Vallon, while he was on a visit to France and had a girl from her but due to uncertain circumstances, he had to leave them and returned to England. With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in France and arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement regarding Wordsworth’s obligations.

The year 1793 saw Wordsworth’s first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, he settled with his sister at Racedown, Dorsetshire, and shortly afterwards removed to Alfoxden, in the Quantock Hills, to be near Coleridge, who was then living at Nether Stowey in the same neighbourhood. One result of the intimacy thus established was the planning of a joint work, “Lyrical Ballads”, to which Coleridge contributed “The Ancient Mariner”, and Wordsworth, among other pieces, “Tintern Abbey”. The first edition of the work appeared in 1798. With the profits of this he went, accompanied by his sister and Coleridge, to Germany, where he lived chiefly at Goslar, and where he began the “Prelude”, a poem descriptive of the development of his own mind. After over a year’s absence Wordsworth returned and settled with Dorothy at Grasmere. Two years later Wordsworth’s circumstances enabled him to marry his cousin(In 1802), Mary Hutchinson, to whom he had been long attached. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased William and Mary.

In 1807 his best publication of “Poems in Two Volumes”, which contains much of his best work, including the “Ode to Duty,” “Intimations of Immortality,” “Yarrow Unvisited,” and the “Solitary Reaper”, added the treasure of English Literature. In 1813 he migrated to Rydal Mount, his home for the rest of his life; and in the same year he received, through the influence of Lord Lonsdale, the appointment of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, with a salary of £400.

Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem “to Coleridge”. Wordsworth was England’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850 (buried in the churchyard of Grasmere). He is regarded by the great majority of the lovers of poetry as, notwithstanding certain limitations and flaws, a truly great and original poet.

<= The Selected Poems of Wordsworth =>

• She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
• The World Is Too Much With Us
• To The Cuckoo
• To A Butterfly
• The Stars Are Mansions Built By Nature’s Hand
• The Tables Turned
• The Simplon Pass
• Ode On Intimations of Immortality
• A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
• My Heart Leaps Up

Byron spent his early childhood years in poor surroundings in Aberdeen, where he was educated until he was ten. After he inherited the title and property of his great-uncle in 1798, he went on to Dulwich, Harrow, and Cambridge, where he piled up debts and aroused alarm with bisexual love affairs. Staying at Newstead in 1802, he probably first met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh with whom he was later suspected of having an incestuous relationship.

In 1807 Byron’s first collection of poetry, Hours Of Idleness appeared. It received bad reviews. However his real poetic success came in 1812 when Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. Amongst Byron’s best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we’ll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.

Byron’s notability rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured aristocratic excesses, huge debts, numerous love affairs, and self-imposed exile. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Byron served as a regional leader of Italy’s revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died on 19 April 1824, from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.

Lord Byron is attributed as one of the most important figures of the Romantic Movement (1785–1830; a period when English literature was full of virtuous heroes and themes of love and triumph). Because of his works, active life, and physical beauty he came to be considered the perfect image of the romantic poet-hero; the concept of the ‘Byronic hero’.

<= The Selected Poems of Lord Byron =>

• When We Two Parted

• We’ll Go No Mpre A-Roving

• There Be None of Beauty’s Daughters

• She Walks in Beauty

• Prometheus

• On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

• The Eve of Waterloo

• The Destruction of Sennacherib

• Darkness

• And Thou Art Dead, As Young and Fair

Michelangelo’s output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of Saint Peter’s Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo’s design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification.

In a demonstration of Michelangelo’s unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino (”the divine one”). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo’s impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Source: Wikipedia

<==The Gallery==>

William Blake (1757-1827) was a British poet, painter, visionary mystic, and engraver, who illustrated and printed his own books. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the 18th- century. Misunderstanding shadowed his career as a writer and artist and it was left to later generations to recognize his importance.

Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life. His father was a successful London hosier who encouraged Blake’s artistic talents. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by his mother. In 1767 he was sent to Henry Pars’ drawing school. Blake has recorded that from his early years, he experienced visions of angels and ghostly monks and that he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, and various historical figures.

At the age of 14 Blake was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire. Gothic art and architecture influenced him deeply. In 1783 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener. Blake taught her to draw and paint and she assisted him devoutly.

Blake’s first book of poems, Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783 and was followed by Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of ExperienceE (1794). His most famous poem “The Tyger”, was part of his Songs of Experience. In these works the world is seen from a child’s point of view, but they also function as parables of adult experience.

Blake engraved and published most of his major works himself. Famous among his “Prophetic Books” are The Book of Thel(1789) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,(1790) The Book of Urizen,(1794) America(1793), Milton(1804-8)and Jerusalem.(1804-20).In the “Prophetic Books”, Blake expressed his lifelong concern with the struggle of the soul to free its natural energies from reason and organized religion. Among Blake’s later artistic works are drawings and engravings for Dante’s Divine Comedy and the 21 illustrations to the book of Job, which was completed when he was almost 70 years old.

Blake never shook off his economic poverty, which was in a large part due to his inability to compete in the highly competitive field of engraving and his expensive invention that enabled him to design illustrations and print words at the same time. However, independent throughout his life, Blake left no debts at his death on August 12, 1827. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the public cemetery of Bunhill Fields. Though generally dismissed as an eccentric during his lifetime, posterity rediscovered Blake and today he is highly rated both as a poet and artist.

<= Selected Poems Of William Blake =>

• To Tirzah

• The Voice Of The Ancient

• The Sick Rose

• The Schoolboy

• The Little Vagabond

• The Little Girl Lost

• The Lily

• The Human Abstract

• The Garden of Love

• The Fly

• The Clod and The Pebble

• The Chimney Sweeper

• The Angel

• Nurse’s Song

• My Pretty Rose Tree

• London

• Infant Sorrow

• Earth’s Answer

• A Poison Tree

• A Little Girl Lost

• A Little Boy Lost by

• A Divine Image

• A Cradle Song

• The Little Lamb

• The Divine Image

• The Blossom

• Spring

• On Anothers Sorrow

• Night

• Laughing Song

• Holy Thursday

• A Cradle Song

• A Dream

• The Echoing Green

• Infant Joy

• The Lamb

Oscar Wilde proved to be a student of great talent. He was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin. Here he studied the classics, in particular developing an interest in the Greek philosophers and the Hellenistic view of life. From Trinity college he won a scholarship to Magdalen College Oxford University. He enjoyed his time in Oxford and was able to develop his poetic sensibilities and love of literature. He also became more conscious of his bisexual nature. For his increasing “femine” dress he often received stick from more “traditional” Oxford students. He was a brilliant scholar but also increasingly rebellious. In one academic year he got rusticated for turning up to College 3 weeks after the start of term. Thus after a while he lost interest in pursuing an academic career in Oxford and moved to London. It was in London that he was able to skilfully enter into high society, soon becoming well known as a playwright and noted wit. Oscar Wilde became famous throughout London society. He was one of the early “celebrities” in some respects he was famous for being famous. His dress was a target for satire in the cartoons, but Wilde didn’t seem to mind. In fact he learnt the art of self-publicity and seemed to revel in it, at least up until his trial in 1898.

Oscar Wilde’s trial gripped the nation, the subject matter a source of intense gossip and speculation. For his “crime” of homosexual acts Wilde was subject to 2 years hard labour in Wandsworth and then  Reading Gaol. It is no understatement to say this experience deeply shocked and affected the previously ebullient Wilde. In some respects he never really recovered, on his release he left for Paris where he lived in comparative anonymity. However he retained his wit and continued to write, heavily influenced by his chastening experiences. Of these post gaol writings, his poem “Ballad of Reading Gaol is perhaps the most well known, illustrating a new dimension to Wilde’s writing.

“I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.”

..

“ I walked with  other souls in pain.
Within another ring.
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing.
When a voice behind me whispered low,
That fellows got to swing.”

From: Ballad of Reading Gaol

Although Wilde couldn’t return to his previous level of writing  he developed new capacities, whilst retaining his sharp intellect. As Johnathon fryer commented on Oscar Wilde’s final part of life he was.

 “beaten but not bowed, still a clown behind a mask of tragedy.”

The Life of Wilde was turbulent and volatile. Never short of  incident. It reflected his own inner paradoxes and revolutionary views. In some ways he was both a saint and sinner at the same time. Rightly or wrongly Wilde is remembered as much for his life as his writings. However he himself said.

“I have put my talent into writing, my genius I have saved for living.”

His writings reflect in part his paradoxical view of life, suggesting things were not always as they appeared. As his biographer Richard Ellman said of Wilde.

“Along with Blake and Nietzche , he was proposing that good and evil are not what they seem, and that moral tabs cannot cope with the complexity of behaviour”

Whatever one may make of Wilde’s life, his capacity for writing remains undeniable. His greatest work and comedy is arguably  “The importance of being Earnest” Here the plotline is thin to say the least but Wilde brings it alive through his scintillating repertoire of wit and biting humour.

“Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.”

- Algernon, Act I

“Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

- Lady Bracknell, Act III

Wilde was not an overtly political commentator but through his plays there is an underlying critique of social norms that are illumined for their absurdities.

Wilde remains a fascinating character. One who lived life to the full, experiencing both the joy and tragedy of society’s vacillating judgements. With the distance of over a century it is easier to judge Wilde for his unique contributions to literature rather than through the eyes of Victorian moral standards. His quotes have become immortal a fitting tribute to a genius of the witticism

“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”

Source: poetseers.com

<== Click Here To Read Wild’s Quotations ==>

<= The Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde =>

• Magdalen Walks
• A Vision
• On The Massacre of Christians in Bulgaria
• Holy Week at Goa
• To Milton
• Sonnet to Liberty

His next book, POEMS (1833), received unfavorable reviews, and Tennyson ceased to publish for nearly ten years. Hallam died suddenly on the same year in Vienna. It was a heavy blow to Tennyson. He began to write ‘Im Memorian’ for his lost friend – the work took seventeen years. A revised volume of Poems, which included the ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘The Lotus-eaters’. ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and ‘Ulysses’ appeared in 1842 in the two-volume POEMS, and established his reputation as a writer. In ‘Ulysses Tennyson portrayed the Greek after his travels, longing past days: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!”

After marrying Emily Sellwood, whom he had already met in 1836, the couple settled in Farringford, a house in Freshwater on the Isle of Wright in 1853. From there the family moved in 1869 to Aldworth, Surrey. Tennyson’s life was then uneventful. In London he was a regular guest of the literary and artistic salon of Mrs Prinsep at Little Holland House. During these later years he produced some of his best poems.

Among Tennyson’s major poetic achievements is the elegy mourning the death of his friend Arthur Hallam, In Memoriam (1850). The personal sorrow led the poet to explore his thoughts on faith, immortality, and the meaning of loss:

“O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.”

Among its other passages is a symbolic voyage ending in a vision of Hallam as the poet’s muse. Some critics have seen in the work ideas, that anticipated Darwin’s theory of natural selection. “Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation’s final law – / Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek’d against his creed – “, the poet wrote. He was born in the same year as Darwin, but his view about natural history, however, was based on catastrophe theory, not evolution. The patriotic poem ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, published in MAUD (1855), is one of Tennyson’s best known works, although first Maud was found obscure or morbid by critics ranging from George Eliot to Gladstone. Later the poem about the Light Brigade inspired Michael Curtiz’s film from 1936, starring Errol Flynn. Historically the fight during the Crimean war brough to light the incompetent organization of the English army. However, the stupid mistake described in the poem honored the soldier’s courage and heroic action.

In the 1870s Tennyson wrote several plays, among them poetic dramas QUEEN MARY (1875) and HAROLD (1876). In 1884 he was created a baron. Tennyson died at Aldwort on October 6, 1892 and was buried in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Soon he became the favorite target of attacks of many English and American poets who saw him as a representative of narrow patriotism and sentimentality. Later critics have praised again Tennyson. T.S. Eliot has called him ‘the great master of metric as well as of melancholia’ and that he possessed the finest ear of any English poet since Milton.

Source: poetseers.org

<= The Selected Poems of Alfred Tennyson =>

• The Lady Of Shalott
• Tithonus
• Ulysses
• Sir Galahad
• Flower In The Crannied Wall
• Crossing The Bar
• Cradle Song
• Break, Break, Break
• After-Thought
• A Farewell
• The Charge Of The Light Brigade