Edmund Burke's Speech on The East India Bill

Q: Give a brief sketch of the sociopolitical style of the subcontinent during the time of Edmund Burke.

East India Bill is proposed in the British parliament, in the section of “House of Common”, to the British Queen about the misjudgments of the East India Company and the cruelty of them towards the people of Indian-subcontinent in 1783. The bill is considered as the ‘second magna-carta” of England. This bill is the milestone in the whole corpus of English written about the Indian, where a British has written in the favor of Indian subcontinent.

The British East India Company started their business in India from 1540 onwards. About a hundred years they were in India. At first it was a small company. From 1600 the company explored their business. In1757, the East India Company defeated the Nawab Siraj Ud Dula in the Battle of Plassey, which created the foundation of colonialism of East India Company over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Within hundred years they gradually expanded their reign all over India. In 1774 they had murdered Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal emperor and started to control the whole Indian subcontinent in the reign of their rule.

The ruling pattern over India of the British was unforgettable. During the rule time of the British the miseries of the common subcontinental people was increasing day by day. The brutality and cruelty of the East India Company made the life of Indians a complete hell. Warren Hastings introduced a lot new ways of exploiting the Indian people. East India Company was getting richer by exploiting the people. Some of the brutalities of the British upon the Indian are as follows-

The British established the law of sunset for feudal tax. The feudal class of the subcontinent had to give tax for their own land. And if someone missed the timeline to give tax, then his land would be confiscated by the East India Company. And also, if anyone from the feudal class had died and left any orphan of him who is not enough mature, then all his land would be confiscated. To save their own land, the feudal class wanted a high tax from the farmers.

Our farmers could not grow their own food, but they were bound to harvest blue. The Indian people forgot the minimum liberty of life. After the death of the last Mughal emperor the Indians lost the complete political freedom of their own life. During the range of East India Company, the law and order were totally collapsed. All the Indian wealth was taken to England. We had to buy our own food by paying an abnormal price. 

The educational condition of the India was not so high. The British took no step to educate the Indian people. 

The condition of women was also no so safe. The British took the widows in any restricted area where they made sexual relationship with that girl. Thus, the girls became mistress of the British. 

Edmund Burke never visited India. Nevertheless, he felt a strong emotion for the Indian. The British rule in the subcontinent created a deep negative impact on the thought of Edmund Burke. Being a British parliamentarian, he raised his political voice in favor of the Indian people. All these issues; political, social, economical and law and order were raised in the East India Bill. He could very well understand that the brutal India Company destroyed the glamour and fame of the queen Victoria. The people of the subcontinent used to hate the British from the core of their heart. He wanted to introduce an executive British power rather than a despotic mercantile empowerment. He totally rejected the activities of Warren Hastings. His intention was also to make the queen understand about the importance of the India as the biggest colony. Because, 75% of the national income of the British comes from India. So, Edmund Burke requested the Queen to change Warren Hasting and to employee a new vice-roy by her serve. So, the new vice-roy would rule over India according to the rule of the British royal family.

Burke’s speech served two purposes for the well-being of the Indian people-

 

i)     To get a good government for them

 

ii)   To make the Indian people understand that British imperialism is not affiliated with the despotism done to the Indian people. 

This bill is spoken for the liberty, fraternity and equality. We believe that somehow this bill influenced hundred years later on the mind of the patriotic Indians like Mahatma Gandhi, Shuvas Boshu etc. It created the spirit of liberation to the Indian people.

 

 

 

Speech On The East India Bill By Edmund Burke Summary

 

Edmund Burke’s Speech on East India Bill: Summary

 

Burke believed that Eighteenth-century India had declined sadly from the height of Mughal power. But still, in the Speech on East India Bill, he compared the rulers of the successor states of the empire to the kings, electors, princes, dukes, and other ruling nobility of contemporary Germany. Burke compares India with contemporary Europe to present the territorial vastness of India and at the same time, its importance as a nation. He at the end of the comparison shows what an abject land the company rule has turned India into: “Thorough all that vast extent of the country there is not a man who eats a mouthful of rice but by permission of the East India Company.”

Burke has presented India as a nation that was declining from its past glory and dignity. India was “eminently, peopled and eminently productive.” But they declined from their “ancient prosperity.” India at that time, according to Burke, was inhabited by almost thirty million people. Burke points out in his speech that the populace of India during his time was no abject and detestable creatures. India is a nation that once was culturally, economically, commercially, ethnically rich, and affluent. Burke nourished a very high notion about India, it’s past, culture, and its diversified population. But under the despotic and tyrannical rule of East India Company, this nation rich in all aspects was turning into a “grand waste.” Corruption, avarice, lawlessness, fraud, evasion, and arbitrariness characterized the British rule in India and the British rule turned this “once opulent and flourishing country” into “waste with fire and sword.” The agents of the East India Company were rendering the whole territory into barren land.

In the Speech on East India Bill, Burke left no stone unturned to show that India once famous for its riches and wealth was heavily declining under the despotic and atrocious British rule. Burke’s skillful narrative convinced his audience that India, in reality, was bleeding under the East India Company’s sway. This led Burke to advocate for the East India Bill. He believed that this bill would save “thirty million of my fellow-creatures and fellow subjects” from utter ruin. The primary objective of Burke was to achieve political success. But in depicting India in the speech, Burke did not exaggerate. He assimilated emotion and rhetoric with reality and factual details. As an orator, Burke was highly skillful in presenting India and its people with all their sufferings and grievances.

 

Life of Cowley: Summary

Johnson’s description of [metaphysical wit] begins with introducing Metaphysical poets; he accuses them of being a bunch of showing off versifiers instead of true poets whose verses are a mere celebration of their extreme knowledge of the planet and scientific studies. In fact, Johnson and his contemporaries didn’t use the term “metaphysical” adequate to “spiritual” or con to “physical”; it rather connotes the philosophical and scientific aspect of the poetry rich with strange conceits like compasses, ether, etc. only at hand for a scholar, not a poet. Johnson condemns these poets of being an excessive amount of concerned with rhyme. Poetry, he believes, is what engages men’s hearts and exposes their eyes to the “softness of love” as within the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton.

Johnson then attacks the poetry from two different angles: mimetic and pragmatic. The Metaphysicals’ first failure, consistent with Johnson, might be acknowledged through Aristotle’s criteria for true poetry – as imitative art: Metaphysical poetry is way from the truth by copying neither “nature” nor “life”. He then approaches the poetry from another angle which is its failure to affect the reader the way true poetry does. In other words, Johnson attempts to prove that Metaphysical poetry, though admirable, isn’t ready to please the reader as a harmonious, unified, and delightful piece of poetry, soothing the minds of the readers. so as to prove so, he questions the central anchor of Metaphysical poetry, namely “wit”:

He first confirms that the truth value of their poetry only lies within the merit and extent of their wit. Even Dryden admitted that he and his contemporaries “fall below Donne in wit, but surpass in poetry”. But so as to attack this anchor, he wittily provides two different definitions of ‘wit’. consistent with Pope, wit is what “has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed”. supported this definition, Metaphysical poets have did not such wit, since they “just tried to urge singular thought, and were careless of diction”, and language. Here Johnson wittily and boldly questions even Pope’s definition, and provides a replacement concept of ‘wit’, as being “at once natural and new”. Thus Metaphysical thoughts “are often new, but seldom natural”. actually the unnaturalness of their poetry is what makes them unpleasing to the mind of the reader.

Having put the 2 previous definitions of ‘wit’ aside as not working within the case of metaphysical poets, Johnson then takes a step further to define their wit as an example of Discordia concurs; “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”. He decries their roughness and violation of decorum, the deliberate mixture of various styles, this type of wit they need “more than enough”.

Johnson could seem to condemn the pragmatic failure of metaphysical poetry as “not successful in representing or moving the affections”, but is really leaving the bottom for the values of their poetry but providing subjective definitions for pragmatic and mimetic values of true poetry:

If by a more noble and more adequate conception, that be considered as wit which is directly natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it’s that which he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of this type the metaphysical poets have seldom risen.

Johnson here knowingly emphasizes the importance of the reader in producing the ultimate poem, and if by any chance Metaphysical conceits fail to prove “natural”, “just” or “obvious”, they’ll address be so in once more and place, because it really happened within the 20th century and therefore the strange conceits and fragmentation of images seemed so natural to the shattered subjects (readers) of the post-war time. As Goethe remarks, “the unnatural, that too is natural,” and therefore the metaphysical poets still be studied and revered for his or her intricacy and originality due to the very naturalness of images found in their once supposed far-fetched conceits. Such evaluations totally depend upon the context, the understanding of the reader, and therefore the time it’s being read.

Johnson’s other criteria for wit was being “new” to the reader, but how could a conceit prove new if over-used? actually , if a conceit or thought becomes a frozen metaphor, it’ll lose all its magic and wit; and this factor is additionally contingent the time and era during which it’s read.

His ending, however, is that of good judgment and sometimes admiration instead of condemnation: “if they often threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far fetched, they were often well worth the carriage”. aside from finding a sort of ‘truth’ in their poetry, he also confirms a variety of valuable features in their poetry like “acuteness”, “powers of reflection and comparison”, “genuine wit”, “useful knowledge”, and eventually “more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment”.

Johnson’s view of Metaphysical poets, though not totally confirming, proved to be fair and influenced by his own era’s literary canon – which valued imitativeness and unity over fragmentation and metaphysical expressions. we should always confine mind that metaphysical poetry was a reaction against the deliberately smooth and sweet tones of much 16th-century verse, a courageous act even against the literary canon of their own time. which is why the metaphysical poets adopted a method that seems so energetic, uneven, and rigorous and far appealing to the uninterested 20th-century reader.

 

 

Sir Richard Steele (bap. 12 March 1672 – 1 September 1729) was an Anglo-Irish writer, playwright, and politician, remembered as co-founder, with his friend Joseph Addison, of the magazine The Spectator.

The character of the Clergyman depicted by Steele

Question: How does Steele portray the character of the Clergyman?

Introduction

Richard Steele (1672- 1729) is the is the literary collaborator of the daily magazine” The Spectator” that lasted in 1711-1712 in England. The Clergyman was one of the important spokesmen of contemporary England and the final member of Spectator’s Club. If we evaluate the character of the Clergyman, we can get some features of the Clergyman.

The features of the Clergyman

The feature is the outer appearance by which a person or an object is evaluated.

An anonymous person

The Clergyman was the final member of Steele’s ”Spectator’s Club”. He was an anonymous person. Steele did not want to express the name of the Clergyman.

Religious person

Steele’s character, the Clergyman, was a religious person and a learned person. Although the Clergyman was a religious person, he hardly discussed the religious topic. He had a large number of devoted followers for his character.  He was not a regular member of the Spectator’s Club.

Philosophic person

The Clergyman was a philosophic person. Sometimes he discussed some philosophic matter. The subject of his discussion was more philosophic than the other member of the club.

Interested in worldly affairs

The Clergyman is usually a religious person. But the Clergyman is a little bit different in his character. Sometimes he has shown his interest in worldly matters. so, we can say that the clergyman wanted to connect with the earthly world.

A devoted aspirant to the next world

If we minutely observe the character of the clergyman, we can notice that he had a great attraction to overcome the world hereafter. Steele has upheld the clergyman by representing the contemporary young clergyman.

Conclusion

From the light of the above discussion, we may conclude that Richard Steele has beautifully portrayed the character of the clergyman as a spokesman of the contemporary young clergyman.

 

Edmund Burke

Prose style of Edmund Burke

 Question: Discuss Edmund Burke’s prose style. The prose style of Edmund Burke

Introduction

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) was an Irish statesman and philosopher, historian, and political writer. He served as a member of parliament between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party after moving to London in 1750. His prose style is characterized by proportion, dignity, and harmony.

Characteristics of Edmund Burke’s prose style

After scanning his prose, we get sundry features which are given below:

Oratory style

Burk’s prose style is oratory. Oratory style means words are written as drafts of an oratory. If we read his writing, we will get his words as a powerful oratory. His writing is life-like at that time, now, and will be attractive and acceptable in the future. That means his writing is like an encounter between writer and reader though he has died in 1797. This will be clear from the given line:

“My second assertion is, that the Company has never made a treaty,

which they have not broken.’’

The writer of romantic prose

He is an identified writer of romantic prose. In his writing, we get sundry features that refer to romantic prose. Major romantic features are given below:

High imagination: High imagination is a leading feature of a romantic composer. In the writing of ‘‘Speech on the East India Bill’’, we get its touch. He speaks about Indian people and the geography of India but he never came to India.

Subjectivity: Subjectivity is another leading feature of being a romantic one. In the ‘‘Speech on the East India Bill’’, we get its touch as well. He speaks for the Indian people in parliament from the first-person point of view. This will be clear from the given line:

“The strong admission I have made of the Company’s rights (I am conscious of it) binds me to do a great deal.”

Common people: Passion and compassion for common people is also a romantic feature. In ‘‘Speech on the East India Bill’’, we come to know that he speaks for the Indian common people. So, from this point of view, he is a romantic prose writer.

Choice of language: Edmund Burke uses colloquial language for his writing, ‘‘Speech on the East India Bill’’. His choice of language is like William Wordsworth and Scott as well. From the language-using perspective, he is a romantic prose writer.

Use of figures of speech

Burke is called the poet of prose but in his ‘‘Speech on the East India Bill’’, he uses some figures of speech like poetry. After scanning his writing, we get sarcasm, oxymoron, simile, irony, and so on. Thus, Burke becomes a high orator.

Use of rhetorical question

The rhetorical question means asking questions instead of providing answers in a literary work. This is also a feature of Burke’s prose style. While speaking of Hastings’ treatment of Cheit Sing, he puts a number of rhetorical questions. For example:

“Did he cite this culprit before his tribunal? Did he make a charge? Did he produce a witness?”

Use of classical and historical allusion

Edmund Burke was a learned person which is why he has been able to rife his literary works with classical and rhetorical allusions. ‘‘Speech on the East India Bill’’ uses classical or historical allusion. He studies a lot of books as a result we get the standard quality writing with reference to historical personality or incident.

Lack of humor as a demerit

After scanning Burke’s writing, we get his defect that he has a lack of humor. In his prose writing, there are no entertaining elements like other prose writers. Though it is a fault, it is unique because his essays have not lost their attraction and acceptance.

Conclusion

From the light of the above discussion, we can say that Burke is a great prose writer and orator as well. He is the greatest master in English rhetorical and political wisdom. He opens the new door for a newcomer prose writer.

  

Samuel Johnson | Life of Cowley

 

Abraham Cowley
(1618-1667)

Samuel Johnson as a biographer and critic with reference to Life of Cowley

Question: Discuss Samuel Johnson as a biographer and critic with reference to “Life of Cowley”.

Introduction

Samuel Johnson (1709 -1784) is an English writer who has made lasting contributions to English literature as a literary critic and biographer. He had once told a Scottish biographer James Boswell, “The biographical part of literature is what I love most.” Here Samuel Johnson is presented as a biographer and critic with reference to his essay “Life of Cowley.”

Samuel Johnson as a biographer

A biography is a story of a person’s life written by someone else. It has long been one of the most popular forms of prose writing. Writing a good biography is one of the most challenging tasks. It follows some basic rules.

Maintenance of objectivity and balance

Dr. Samuel Johnson has always attempted to be objective and balanced while writing a biography. His tactful narrative skill satisfies the reader’s curiosity and creates a thirst for reading to gain further understanding. “Life of Cowley” follows a three-part plan such as Johnson’s accounts, Cowley’s suggestive and evocative biography, and a summary of the main features of his writings. Thus, Johnson maintains objectivity and balance as a landmark biographer.

Representation of facts

A good biographer presents facts about a person’s life. This information includes how the writer influenced his literary period that is why Johnson mentions that Cowley was influenced by John Donne and influenced his period with the metaphysical concepts though the biographer does not hesitate to find faults. As Abraham Cowley is a real character of English literature, Johnson’s presentation of facts about the life and writings of Cowley out and out bears the sign of the best biographer.

Interpretative nature

Most biographies are interpretative, and Dr. Johnson’s life of Cowley is no exception. Johnson not only presents facts but also explains what those facts mean. In his essay on Cowley, Johnson has defended Cowley’s neutrality as a captive. But in defending Cowley, Johnson never loses his objectivity and balance although there was a scarcity of research material.

Narrative force

The narrative force along with psychological reality provides a lively flavor. Johnson’s “Life of Cowley” has the magical narrative force of a good novel. Critics have categorized Johnson as a classical biographer. At the very outset of the essay, Johnson defines genius and describes the process of how Cowley became “irrecoverably a poet”. Such aphoristic expressions provide a classical status to this piece of biography.

Reference of other writers

Johnson’s essay “Life of Cowley” is a part of the great volume “The lives of the Poets” which comprises forty-two lives. “The Lives of the Poets” exhibits Johnson’s critical power and prejudices. In his essay, Johnson mentions Milton, Dryden, and Pope who are the most substantial poets of English literature. He closely considers the poems of Donne too. So, as a biographer, Johnson is not only perfect but also influential.

Johnson as a critic

Literary criticism is the discussion of literature including description, analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literary works. To put it differently, Literary criticism means the art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and character of literary works. In the essay “Life of Cowley”, Johnson talks about the metaphysical poets followed by an examination of Cowley’s major works.

Cowley as a metaphysical poet

Johnson first tries to categorize Cowley as a metaphysical poet because Cowley in his poems has used simile, metaphor, conceit, and other styles which are like the metaphysical poets.

“Wit like other things, subject by their nature to the choice of man,

has its changes and fashions, and, at different times, takes different forms.”

Finding faults

Finding faults for evaluation and judgment is an important aspect of literary criticism. Johnson as a critic has not given a discount to William Shakespeare let alone Cowley. He defines metaphysical poetry with fault.

“The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”.

Besides, Johnson asserts that the metaphysical poets have failed to attain the sublimity of art. According to Johnson, the metaphysical poets never tried to understand the greatness of thought. The conceit used by them is packed up with drawbacks. In the modern age, Johnson is vehemently opposed by T. S. Eliot.

Positive sides

Literary criticism does not discover only the negative sides of the literary works. Positive sides are equally asserted. Johnson praises Cowley as a love poet and compares him with Petrarch, an Italian poet, and sonneteer. A love poet Cowley is able to play the role of psychologist.

Conclusion

Now we can conclude that Johnson as a biographer and critic has enhanced the potential of English literature. As a critic, Johnson is such a genius that nobody can reject his opinions completely. Even T. S. Eliot has shown respect for Johnson’s evaluation of the metaphysical poets.

 

The Metaphysical Poets by T S Eliot

The Metaphysical Poets by T S Eliot

About T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the ‘canon’ of modernist poetry.

Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Even in his most famous poems we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more ‘conservative’ poet than a radical.

Nevertheless, his poetry changed the landscape of Anglophone poetry for good. Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888, Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford before abandoning his postgraduate studies at Oxford because he preferred the exciting literary society of London. He met a fellow American expatriate, Ezra Pound, who had already published several volumes of poetry, and Pound helped to get Eliot’s work into print. Although his first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), sold modestly (its print run of 500 copies would take five years to sell out), the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, with its picture of a post-war Europe in spiritual crisis, established him as one of the most important literary figures of his day.

He never returned to America (except to visit as a lecturer), but became an official British citizen in 1927, the same year he was confirmed into the Church of England. His last major achievement as a poet was Four Quartets (1935-42), which reflect his turn to Anglicanism. In his later years he attempted to reform English verse drama with plays like Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He died in London in 1965.

Summary

Eliot’s article on The Metaphysical Poets is actually a review of a new anthology, Herbert J. C. Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. Eliot uses his review of Grierson’s anthology, however, as an opportunity to consider the value and significance of the metaphysical poets in the development of English poetry.

Although the metaphysical poets were a distinctly English ‘movement’ or ‘school’ (Eliot uses both words, while acknowledging that they are modern descriptions grouping together a quite disparate number of poets), Eliot also draws some interesting parallels between the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets and nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets like Jules Laforgue, whose work Eliot much admired.

Eliot begins by reminding us that it’s difficult to define metaphysical poetry, since there is a considerable difference in style and technique between those poets who are often labelled ‘metaphysical’. We have explored the issue of defining metaphysical poetry in a separate post, but the key frame of reference, for us as for Eliot, was Samuel Johnson’s influential denunciation of the metaphysical poets in the eighteenth century.

Eliot quotes Johnson’s line about metaphysical poetry that ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. Eliot’s response to Johnson’s censure, however, is to point out that all kinds of poets – not just the metaphysicals – unite heterogeneous or different materials together in their poetry. Indeed, Eliot quotes from Johnson’s own poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes:

His fate was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress and a dubious hand;
He left a name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.

Eliot argues that, whilst such lines as these are different in degree from what the metaphysical poets did in their own work, the principle is in fact the same. Johnson is ‘guilty’ of that which he chastised Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and other metaphysical poets for doing in their work.

Eliot then goes on to consider the style of numerous metaphysical poets. He points out that, whilst someone like George Herbert wrote in simple and elegant language, his syntax, or sentence structure, was often more complex and demanding. Key to Herbert’s method is ‘a fidelity to thought and feeling’, and it is the union of thought and feeling in metaphysical poetry which will form the predominant theme of the remainder of Eliot’s essay.

Eliot next considers what led to the development of metaphysical poetry: reminding us that John Donne, the first metaphysical poet, was an Elizabethan (Donne wrote many of his greatest love poems in the 1590s, when he was in his early twenties), Eliot compares Donne’s ‘analytic’ mode with many of his contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare and George Chapman, who wrote verse drama for the Elizabethan stage.

These playwrights were all influenced by the French writer Montaigne, who had effectively invented the modern essay form in his prose writings. (We can arguably see the influence of Montaigne, with his essays arguing and considering the various aspects of a topic, on the development of the Shakespearean soliloquy, where we often find a character arguing with themselves about a course of action: Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ is perhaps the most famous example.) The key thing, for Eliot, is that in such dramatic speeches – the one he cites is from George Chapman’s drama – there is a ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought’, i.e. reason and feeling are intrinsically linked, and thought is a sensory, rather than a merely rational, experience. This is where we come to his thesis concerning the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which occurred in the seventeenth century.

‘Dissociation of sensibility’

The idea of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s most famous critical theories. The key statement made by Eliot in relation to the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ is arguably the following: ‘A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Or, as he had just said, prior to this, of the nineteenth-century poets Tennyson and Browning: ‘they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.’

In other words, whereas poets like Donne, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, felt their thoughts with the immediacy we usually associate with smelling a sweet flower, later poets were unable to feel their thought in the same way. The change – the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, i.e. the moment at which thought and feeling became separated – occurred, for Eliot, in the mid-seventeenth century, after the heyday of metaphysical poetry when Donne, Herbert, and (to an extent) Marvell were writing.

This watershed moment, this shift in poetry, is represented, for Eliot, by two major poets of the later seventeenth century: John Milton and John Dryden. Both poets did something consummately, but what they did was different. Dryden’s style was far more rational and neoclassical; Milton’s was more focused on sensation and feeling. (It is worth noting, although Eliot doesn’t make this point, that the Romantics – whose work rejected the cold, orderly rationalism of neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope and, before him, John Dryden – embraced Milton, and especially his Paradise Lost. Wordsworth references Milton in several of his sonnets, while Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is steeped in Milton.)

Eliot concludes ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ by drawing some comparisons between the metaphysical mode and nineteenth-century French Symbolists, to demonstrate further that the ‘metaphysical’ was not some entirely distinct variety of poetry but that it shares some core affinities with other schools of poetry. He then returns to Johnson’s criticism of the metaphysical poets’ techniques and metre, and argues that, whilst we should take Johnson’s critique seriously, we should nevertheless value the metaphysical poets and look beyond poets like Cowley and Cleveland (who are Johnson’s chief focus).

In conclusion, Eliot’s essay was important in raising the profile of the metaphysical poets among his own readers: people who looked to Eliot for discerning critical judgement and viewed him as a touchstone of literary taste were inclined to go and reread the metaphysicals. This led to a tendency among critics of Eliot’s work to identify him as a latter-day metaphysical poet, a view which, as the poet-critic William Empson pointed out, isn’t borne out by reading Eliot’s work. Prufrock, the speakers of The Waste Land, and the Hollow Men don’t really speak to us in the same way as Donne or Marvell do: there aren’t really any elaborate and extended poetic conceits (central to the metaphysical method) in Eliot’s work.

So, this connection between Eliot’s own work and the work of Donne, Herbert, and others has been overplayed. (Empson was well-placed to point this out: his own poetry clearly bears the influence of Donne in particular, and Empson is rightly called a modern metaphysical poet for this reason.) However, Eliot himself encourages such a parallel at one point in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, when he writes that poets writing in modern European civilization must be difficult because the civilization is itself complex and various, and so the poet, to do justice to this complexity and variety, must become ‘more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning’. Certainly, this statement is equally applicable to Andrew Marvell and T. S. Eliot.

 

  

Terry Eagleton’s Prose Style in Rise of English

 

Question: Discuss Eagleton’s Prose Style.

Introduction

The style is not mere decoration. It is rather a way of searching and explaining the truth. Its purpose is not to impress, but to express. Since Terry Eagleton is the most renowned critic of modern English literature, his critical writing has a number of prominent features.

Dialectical Style

One of the key features of Eagleton’s critical prose is the brilliant inverse logical style. He intelligently considers social and cultural conflicts and raises the opposing arguments so strongly in the conflict that they burst and suddenly some unexpected insight or vision is revealed. In this way, the readers feel seemingly ridiculous and far-fetched assumptions. But immediately they discover how precise and reasonable the arguments are.

“In eighteenth-century England, the concept of literature was not confined as it sometimes is today to ‘creative’ or ‘imaginative’ writing.”

The above sentence may be seemed positive but expresses the limited concept of literature since it was not creative and imaginative in the 18th century. Thus, the dialectical style is the soul of his prose style.

Lightening Opacity

Absolute ambiguity is one of the most permanent and attractive qualities in Terry Eagleton’s writings. It has helped him to be one of the most colorful and controversial figures in cultural politics today. When we examine his critical writings, we can see that no one explains critical theory with greater clarity than he does. The appeal of his work stems from the bold inquiry. He has introduced the origins and aims of English studies. This is meant that the function of criticism relates to the closely related and equally relentless questions. So, Eagleton’s style is unclear due to the riddle of the question. But whenever questions are solved, his idea shines. His “The Rise of English” is the paradigm of sheer audacity.

Historical References

Eagleton is an outspoken critic of his generation. His best-selling publication “Literary Theory: An Introduction” published in 1983 reflects the breadth of his theory of knowledge. In this book the second chapter entitled “The Rise of English” contains many historical references of literature. His knowledge includes criticism not only of British critics but of Europe, Russia, and America. It is important that Eagleton himself is not a historian but his concept of literature excels the historians. Therefore, he studies how English studies went through changes from adorable drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the venerable middle class and how it replaces religion to perform the ideological platform to enforce social bonding. This approach is certainly unique and has been dispatched in the dialectical style of Eagleton.

Humor

Most of the reversal comments in “The Rise of English” are humorous. In this work, Eagleton offers scathing assessments of various currents of criticism. While discussing the concept of value-judgment, he notes:

“Nobody would bother to say that a bus ticket was an example of inferior literature, but someone might well say that the poetry of Ernest Dowson was”.

This is a grossly overdone statement, but one should, by no means, ignore the educational or pedagogical problems of Eagleton’s style.

The Satirical Reversal In Arguments

Another technique often employed by Eagleton is the Swift-like satirical reversal in arguments. He describes in detail a seemingly plausible case only to knock it down unexpectedly with a penetrating observation and expose it with faults. This technique is used to create a great effect in “The Rise of English”. When the critic satirizes the English short-lived poet and politician Ernest Dowson, it creates the Swift-like satirical reversal in arguments.

Tiresome Extent

Pointless is not the staple of Eagleton’s prose. In fact, his style is clearer than most of the formal methods. But long stretches of text can be tiring. In spite of the tedious limitations, there is something different in his prose that can regenerate the text and the readers separately and independently.

Conclusion

Thus, writing in a style is accessible. Eagleton has specifically argued in the field of literary theory. His rhetorical skills are perhaps unequaled by contemporary critics. These are something that many critical theorists could benefit from studying.