| 53146 |
Literature Shakespeare Beowulf Pope Sidney
I'm reading the following at the moment:
Beowulf
Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
Sir Phillip Sidney's Defense of Poesie
Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism
Anybody have any comments or reactions to any of these?
Even if you haven't read the first two, most of you probably know something about them.
Sidney, a renaissance poet, wrote his essay in an effort respond to a number of essays published around the same time, arguing that poetry was bad because, 1) There are much more productive things we can do with our time, 2) Being works of fiction, poetry is nothing but lies. 3) When we read poetry, it tempts us to sinful living, and 4) Plato banned all poets from his republic, so why shouldn't we ban them from ours?
Sort of reminds you of Herr Von Trapp, doesn't it? But it's an interesting essay, and kind of fun to see how Sidney deals with those stuffed renaissance jerkins. If you've an interest and can't find it in your library, it's pretty easy to find on line.
Alexander Pope is really interesting, because I really didn't know him from Adam before I started reading his work, and it turns out that he is the single most quoted writer in the English language after William Shakespeare. He lived about a hundred years after The Bard of Avon and was a master of the heroic couplet, a style of iambic pentameter which Shakespeare often used himself. This proves, actually, to be one of the reasons Pope is so wonderfully quotable. When a pithy jibe is structured as a heroic couplet, it becomes dangerously easy to remember. And one of the things I love about reading Pope (and about Shakespeare) is the number of old sayings I "discover"in their works. There's something really thrilling about coming across one of these and thinking, "So THAT's where that came from!" Such as, "fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead, / For fools rush in where angels fear to tread" (l 624-25). How many thousands of references have we seen to that one?
Anyway, let us know what you know, what you'd like to know, what you discover if you take the time to turn to any of these. I'll let you know if I discover anything new and wonderful while I'm at it.
Cheers!
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA
|
Language pair: English; All
|
|
|
