English Poetry and the Cult of Death (original) (raw)
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The Sense of an Ending: Poetry and Death
It is possible the origins of religious ways of thinking are to be found in the effortsd of humankind to avoid, or at least to cope with, death. This essay simply aligns a few major poems of the English literary tradition according to their attitude toward death.
2019
This study sheds light on the attitudes of two American Romantic Poets during the nineteenth century: Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, towards the notion of death. Although they share the same interest of discussing death, but each one of them has his/her own style in expressing his/her views and thoughts concerning this concept. As far as the problematic of this study is concerned, Dickinson gives a great number of her poems only to discuss about the topic of death. She writes about death notion to the extent that someone would consider her as a Dark Romantic poet just like Poe. However, she represents this phenomenon with optimistic view in contrast of Poe. To make the study more concise, one poem for each poet is selected to be analyzed. The choice is based on the relevance of the poems for the topic: Poe‘s Annabel Lee and Dickinson‘s Because I Could Not Stop for Death. Furthermore, the intended methods to follow in this study are descriptive and interpretive. Sourc...
Piety, Poetry, and the Funeral Sermon: Reading Graveyard Poetry in the Eighteenth Century
English Studies, 2011
Eighteenth-century “graveyard poetry”, as a literary category, has been a problematic one at best. Modern studies of graveyard poetry are restricted to the footnotes of larger traditions, afflicted by a combination of formal and aesthetic codes that fail to fully validate its generic and taxonomic differentiation. This essay presents graveyard poetry as a historically embedded poetic mode, and demonstrates how it can be viewed as a specific experimental response to the intersection of evolving reading, religious and poetic practices of the early to mid-eighteenth century. This revision reads graveyard poetry alongside changing religious practices that appear to mark discernable shifts from collective to individual modes of religious experience, and from public to private forms of devotion. Moreover, it suggests that graveyard poetry was an ideal alternate didactic medium to the declining printed funeral sermon, able to aesthetically facilitate private meditation upon death via affective and subjective response.
Death continues to remain as one of the biggest threats and a great challenge to humanity. It is a single global event which affects all the human beings in unrecognized modes. Due to the distinguished capability of human beings in terms of social construction and meaning-making, it has developed as a very dynamic and complex system, which involves societal, psychological, biological, spiritual and cultural factors. Whatever may be the definition we link to death, death is always around us and continues to be a part of our culture, and we all have openly embraced it. This report throws light widely on the theory of death in American poetry with particular reference to the contribution of three poets namely William Bryant, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. The study considers the psychological concepts particularly, the existential psychology in defining the theory of death. INTRODUCTION The concept of evolving, meaning in life by death is one of the base notions of existential psychology. Various empirical psychologists such as Rollo May have reflected that individuals need to accept the certainty of their death and the deaths of their beloved ones. Else, they cannot completely indulge or determine the actual value of life. This theory traces thorough research which concludes that, more the meaning and purpose that people experience in their lives, the less they fear death. On the contrary, the refusal of accepting death to existential anxiety could result in an emotional trouble in day-today life.
The Voices of Life and Death in Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2018
Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, and the Poetry Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:
2015
Wordsworth is known as the poet of joy and hope, and to associate his name with death may seem at first strange. Yet, according to his own estimation, he was the poet not simply of joy but of “the very heart of man," of "human kind, and what we are”, of "men as they are men within themselves." Any vision of human nature which does not take into account the facts of mortality and bereavement is blinkered and inevitably inadequate and Wordsworth was committed to clarity of perception and the fullest insights of the Imagination. He did not shy away from the implications of “our mortal Nature”; throughout his career, he sought to portray in poetry the place of death in human life. Two basic ways of understanding mortality are considered in this thesis: the first is death as disjunction, extinction, the end; the second is death as part of a larger continuity, a threshold, a stage. The conflict between these two visions was fundamental to Wordsworth's thought, and ...
Looking into Death: An Evolution through Time in England from the Middle Ages to 1800
Proceedings of The National Conference On Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2017 , 2017
Death has long been a topic in concern for all humans. Regardless of gender, nationality or time period, we all reach the same destination: death. However, the interpretation of death itself does not always stay the same, but radically evolves throughout history, as reflected in multiple literary works. This paper, therefore, will examine the evolution of death notions with special regards to England from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century-from the time of persistent threat of the Black Death to the modern colonial period. Exploring the death of the three rioters in "The Pardoner's Tale" of Geoffrey Chaucer's masterpiece Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) and the protagonist's death in "Oroonoko" of Aphra Behn (1688), the paper will dissect each death to illustrate its relationship with the contemporary common belief. Following the indepth multi-dimensional analyses of other critical book and journals besides the primary texts, this research will also indicate the shift from the medieval romantic and religious mindset to the dominance of realism and humanistic world before the 1800s in England. Over time, we cease to perceive death as a necessary means to pay for sins, but witness the replacement of a totally different frame of mind, in which the colonists become "the Almighty" and death for justice disappears from scene.