Stylistics 2013/2014

William Butler Yeats   (1865-1939) Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 190...

W.H.Auden  (1907-1973) Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of  Thomas Hardy  and  Robert Frost , as well as  William Blake ,  Emily Dickinson ,  Gerard Manley Hopkins , and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers,  Stephen Spender  and Christopher Isherwood. In 1928, his collection  Poems  was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled  Poems  (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation. Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of po...

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Ernest Hemingway, famous author and journalist, was born in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. His father was a doctor; his mother, a  musician . He was named after his maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall. As a young man, he was interested in writing; he wrote for and edited his high school’s newspaper, as well as the high school yearbook. Upon graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1917, he worked for the Kansas City Star newspaper briefly, but in that short time, he learned the writing style that would shape nearly all of his future work. As an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, Ernest Hemingway was wounded and spent several months in the hospital. While there, he met and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. They planned to marry; however, she became engaged to an Italian officer instead. This experience devastated Hemingway, and Agnes became ...

HERE'S SOME USEFUL INFORMATION ABOUT READING POETRY. DON'T SKIP IT!  TAKE THE TROUBLE TO STUDY IT BEFORE YOU READ "THE RAVEN" How to Read a Poem There’s really only one reason that poetry has gotten a reputation for being so darned “difficult”: it demands your full attention and won’t settle for less. Unlike a novel, where you can drift in and out and still follow the plot, poems are generally shorter and more intense, with less of a conventional story to follow. If you don’t make room for the   experience , you probably won’t have one.   But the rewards can be high. To make an analogy with rock and roll, it’s the difference between a two and a half minute pop song with a hook that you get sick of after the third listen, and a slow-building tour de force that sounds fresh and different every time you hear it. Once you’ve gotten a taste of the really rich stuff, you just want to listen to it over and over again and figure out: how’d they do that?   As...