Name : Nidhi P. Jethava
Paper : Literature of Noe-classical
Period.
Roll No – 14
Enrollment no. -306920200009
Email id – jethavanidhi8@gmail.com
Batch – 2020-22 ( MA SEM-1)
Submitted to – S.B. Gardi Department
of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Answer
:
ROBERT BORNS :-
Life
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known
familiarly as Rabbie Burns, the National Bard, Bard of Ayrshire and
the Ploughman Poet and various other names and epithets, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely
regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is
celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his
writing is in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience
beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his
political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.
He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he
became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world.
Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and
20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as
the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television
channel STV.
As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland,
often revising or adapting them. His poem (and
song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long
time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other
poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world today include "A Red, Red Rose", "A Man's a Man for A' That", "To a Louse", "To a Mouse", "The Battle of Sherramuir", "Tam o' Shanter" and "Ae Fond Kiss".
ROBERT BURNS AS A POET OF TRANSITIONAL AGE :
Burns
developed rapidly throughout 1784 and 1785 as an “occasional” poet who more and
more turned to verse to express his emotions of love, friendship, or amusement
or his ironical contemplation of the social scene. But these were not spontaneous
effusions by an almost illiterate peasant. Burns was a conscious craftsman; his
entries in the commonplace book that he had begun in 1783 reveal that from the
beginning he was interested in the technical problems of versification.
Though
he wrote poetry for his own amusement
and that of his friends, Burns remained restless and dissatisfied. He won the
reputation of being a dangerous rebel against orthodox religion, and, when in
1786 he fell in love with Jean Armour, her father refused to allow her to marry
Burns even though a child was on the way and under Scots law mutual consent followed by consummation constituted a legal marriage. Jean was persuaded by her father to
go back on her promise. Robert, hurt and enraged, took up with another woman,
Mary Campbell, who died soon after. On September 3 Jean bore him twins out of
wedlock.
Meanwhile,
the farm was not prospering, and Burns, harassed by insoluble problems, thought
of emigrating. But he first wanted to show his country what he could do. In the
midst of his troubles he went ahead with his plans for publishing a volume of
his poems at the nearby town of Kilmarnock. It was entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and
appeared on July 31, 1786. Its success was immediate and overwhelming. Simple
country folk and sophisticated Edinburgh critics alike hailed it, and the
upshot was that Burns set out for Edinburgh on November 27, 1786, to be lionized, patronized, and showered with well-meant but dangerous advice.
The
Kilmarnock volume was a remarkable mixture. It included a handful of first-rate
Scots poems: “The Twa Dogs,” “Scotch Drink,” “The Holy Fair,” “An Address to
the Deil,” “The Death and Dying Words of Poor Maillie,” “To a Mouse,” “To
a Louse,” and some others, including a number of verse letters addressed to
various friends. There were also a few Scots poems in which he was unable to
sustain his inspiration or that are spoiled by a confused purpose. In addition,
there were six gloomy and histrionic poems in English, four songs, of which
only one, “It Was Upon a Lammas Night,” showed promise of his future greatness
as a song writer, and what to contemporary reviewers seemed the
stars of the volume, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” and “To a Mountain Daisy.”
Burns
selected his Kilmarnock poems with care: he was anxious to impress a genteel
Edinburgh audience. In his preface he played up to contemporary sentimental
views about the “natural man” and the “noble peasant,” exaggerated his lack of
education, pretended to a lack of natural resources, and in general acted a
part. The trouble was that he was only half acting. He was uncertain enough
about the genteel tradition to accept much of it at its face value, and though,
to his ultimate glory, he kept returning to what his own instincts told him was
the true path for him to follow, far too many of his poems are marred by a
naïve and sentimental moralizing.
Legacy
Of Robert Burns :
Burns was a man of great intellectual energy and force of character who, in a class-ridden
society, never found an environment in which he could fully exercise his personality. It
may be argued that Scottish culture in his day was incapable of providing an intellectual
background that could replace the Calvinism that Burns rejected,
or that Burns’s talent was squandered on an Edinburgh literati that, according to English critics, were
second-raters. Yet he lived during the cultural and intellectual tumult known
as the Scottish Enlightenment, and the problem was
ultimately more than one of personalities. The only substitute for the rejected
Calvinism seemed to be, for Burns, a sentimental Deism, a facile belief in the good heart as all, and this was arguably
not a creed rich or complex enough to nourish great poetry. That Burns in spite of
this produced so much fine poetry shows the strength of his unique genius, and
that he has become the Scottish national poet is a tribute to his hold on the
popular imagination.
Burns
perhaps exhibited his greatest poetic powers in his satires. There is also a remarkable
craftsmanship in his verse letters, which display a most adroit counterpointing of the colloquial and the formal. But it is by his songs that Burns is
best known, and it is his songs that have carried his reputation round the
world.
Burns
wrote all his songs to known tunes,
sometimes writing several sets of words
to the same air in an endeavour to find the most apt poem for a given melody.
Many songs which, it is clear from a variety of evidence, must have been substantially
written by Burns he never claimed as his. He never claimed “Auld Lang Syne,” for example, which he described simply as an old
fragment he had discovered, but the song we have is almost
certainly his, though the chorus and probably the first stanza are old. (Burns
wrote it for a simple and moving old air that is not the tune to which it is
now sung, as Thomson set it to another tune.) The full extent of Burns’s work
on Scottish song will probably never be known.
It is positively miraculous that Burns was able to enter into the spirit of older folk song and re-create, out of an old chorus, such songs as “I’m O’er Young to Marry Yet,” “Green Grow the Rashes, O,” and a host of others. It is this uncanny ability to speak with the great anonymous voice of the Scottish people that explains the special feeling that Burns arouses, feelings that manifest themselves in the “Burns cult.”
Thomas Gray :-
homas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet,
letter-writer, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published
in 1751.
Gray was an extremely self-critical writer who published
only 13 poems in his lifetime, despite being very popular. He was even offered
the position of Poet Laureate in 1757, though he
declined. His writing is conventionally considered to be pre-Romantic but recent critical
developments deny such teleological classification.
Thomas Gray as a poet :-
Born in 1716 in London, Thomas Gray was a poet
and professor who is perhaps most well-known for the poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard that
was inspired by the sudden passing of his poet friend Richard West. Gray was
from a large family of 12 but was the only one to survive, his father suffered
from mental illness, and he spent most of his youth with his mother.
Gray attended Eton, was a devout scholar who
wasn’t interested in sport but found a deep joy in studying science and botany
in particular. 1734 saw him in Cambridge, although he didn’t much care for the
studies, preferring to spend his time reading and playing music. It was there
that he made friends with Horace Walpole who would later help him get published.
After the death of his friend and poet Richard
West, Gray began to write poetry in earnest, and he would spend a good deal of
the rest of his life living the life of a scholar at Cambridge, his head buried
in a book. He was often regarded in that respect as one of the highest intellectuals
in the country. Although not particularly productive, he was offered, and
turned down, the post of poet laureate in 1757.
Because of the morose nature of some of his poetry,
Gray, along with other poets, including Cowper and Goldsmith, became known as
one of the Graveyard Poets or Boneyard Boys. He started writing Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard in 1742 but left it unfinished for a number
of years before completing it in 1750. When it was published a year later it
was instantly successful and has been one of the staples of poetry classic
collections ever since.
Although he is best
remembered for that poem alone, Gray actually considered The Progress of
Poesy and The Bard amongst his best work. Throughout his life,
he liked to travel through the British countryside exploring its ancient
history and bringing it to life in his poetry. When he toured the English lakes
he produced his descriptions in the collection The Poems of Mr
Gray in 1775. Scholars have wondered over the last
two hundred years or so why Gray never actually wrote more works, even though
he was considered the premier poet of the time amongst his contemporaries.
In 1768, Gray’s scholastic endeavors led to him being offered the post of professor of modern history at Cambridge, a position that he held for just three years. In 1771, he fell ill whilst at a dinner at the college and died a week later at the age of 30. He was buried in the graveyard at Stoke Poges where he first began to write the Elegy.
Citation :-
Albert, Edward. History of English Literatutre. Ed.
J.A. Stone. New Delhi, 1997.
Hudson, William Henry, Gray & his
poetry, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977.
Long, William J. English Literature. Delhi: AITBS PUBLISHERS,INDIA,
2019.
Roberts, S. C. (Sydney Castle), Thomas Gray
of Pembroke, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978.
Thomas Gray, his life and works, London; Boston: G. Allen & Unwin, 1980.
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