In plain English ...
Saturday 5 October 2024
THE ROMANTIC AGE - 5^C LINGUISTICO
Thursday 3 October 2024
Wednesday 2 October 2024
SONNET 18
It is the best known and most well-loved
of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most direct in language and intent.
The poet starts the praise of his dear friend
without ostentation, but he slowly builds the image of his friend into that of
a perfect being. He is first compared to summer in the octave, but, at the beginning
of the third quatrain (line 9), the speaker states with a renewed assurance that “thy eternal summer shall not fade” and that his friend
will preserve his beauty and even cheat Death and Time by becoming eternal. He achieves this through his sonnet. The
final couplet reaffirms the poet's hope that as long as there is breath in
mankind, his lines too will live on, and ensure the immortality of the “fair
youth”.
Here and here you can read a short commentary on this sonnet.
Tuesday 1 October 2024
SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS
In
the late 16th century it was
fashionable for English gentleman authors to write sonnets, lyric poems composed of 14 lines. The sonnet is composed
with a formal rhyme scheme, denoting different thoughts, moods, or emotions,
sometimes summed up in the last lines of the poem.
The
two main forms of the sonnet are the Petrarchan
(Italian) and the Shakespearean
(English).
Sonnets had been glorified by Petrarch
in Italy more than 200 years before English poets even knew about them. Sir
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were among the first to
introduce the sonnet into England. William Shakespeare's first and second years
in London were spent writing in the Petrarchan style. The Petrarchan sonnet has
an eight-line stanza, or octave, and six-line stanza, or sestet. The octave has
two quatrains, rhyming abba, abba, but avoiding a couplet; the first
quatrain gives the theme, and the second develops it. The sestet is built on
two or three different rhymes; the first three lines reflect on the theme, and
the last three lines bring the whole poem to an end.
The English sonnet is divided into three quatrains, each rhymed
differently, with an independently rhymed couplet at the end. Its rhyme scheme is
abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Each quatrain takes a different appearance of the
idea or develops a different image to express the theme. In his lifetime William
Shakespeare composed 154 sonnets which were
in this form and can be divided into three groups:
1. twenty-six sonnets written
mostly to a young man, seventeen
of them urging marriage;
2. one hundred and one sonnets,
also written to a young man (probably the same young nobleman as in the first
twenty-six). These have a variety of themes, such as the beauty of the loved
one; destruction of beauty; competition with a Rival Poet; despair about the
absence of a loved one; and reaction
toward the young man's coldness;
3. the remaining twenty-seven sonnets are written mainly to a woman,
popularly known as "the Dark Lady." Seemingly Shakespeare had a love affair with this woman.
Most Elizabethan sonnets were written
about joys and sorrows of love. Some of Shakespeare's sonnet arrangements are
thought to be autobiographical. This is why scholars have tried to learn about
William Shakespeare's life from his sonnets. But
some of the critics view the sonnets as "purely literary exercises."
Thursday 20 June 2024
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by John Keats when he was just 20 years old. Essentially, it is a poem about poetry itself, describing a reading experience so profound that an entire world seems to come to life.
Tuesday 21 May 2024
VIRGINIA WOOLF - 5^C LINGUISTICO
Virginia Woolf was a well-known English writer in the 20th century. She was best-known for her novels, but she was also a writer of essays, biographies, letters, and diaries. Her writing fell into the Modernist Movement, which was a literary movement that took place between World War I and World War II.
https://www.iispandinipiazza.edu.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/virginia-woolf.pdf
Monday 22 April 2024
WILFRED OWEN - DULCE ET DECORUM EST
The Latin title is from Horace (1st century
BC) and it means “it is sweet and proper”. This is followed by the
phrase pro patria mori, or “to die for one’s country” in English.
The poem is known for its horrific imagery and condemnation of war. It combines two sonnets and is formed by 28 lines. Read here.
https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2017/05/revising-wilfred-owen.html
Thursday 11 April 2024
Wednesday 10 April 2024
Tuesday 2 April 2024
THE BEAT GENERATION - 5^C LINGUISTICO
The Beat movement was an American social and literary movement, originating in the 1950s, and centred in the bohemian artist communities of
San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New
York City’s Greenwich
Village. Its adherents, self-styled as “beat” (originally meaning
“weary” (= tired), but later also connoting a musical sense, a “beatific”
spirituality, and other meanings) and derisively called “beatniks,” expressed
their alienation from conventional, or “square,” society by adopting a style of
dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians. They
advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the
heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen
Buddhism. The Beats and their advocates found the joylessness and
purposelessness of modern society sufficient justification for both withdrawal
and protest. Read here.
Friday 29 March 2024
Thursday 28 March 2024
THE BALLAD THROUGH TIME - 3^C LINGUISTICO
Once
medieval ballads (=oral compositions passed on
from generation to generation) became popular, they began to borrow
freely from the carols (=religious
folk songs or popular hymns, especially associated with Christmas),
riddle songs, popular stories and romances of the time. Ballads were popular
throughout (=in every part of) Europe and the English-language ballad also
borrowed from other countries and cultures. Read here.
There
are examples of the ballad form from the Middle Ages right up to the
present day. The 16th century saw the gradual disappearance of the
old-style romances, along with the minstrels who used to recite and sing
them.
The
ballad form remained popular through the 17th and the 18th centuries,
which saw a revival especially of magic and supernatural themes.
In the 19th century
the poetry of the Romantics drew widely for inspiration on the materials of
folk narrative ballads and lyrical folk songs: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner owes its
intense supernaturalism and its archaisms to traditional ballads;
Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a ballad about an encounter that involves both pleasure
and pain.
In
the 20th century an oral ballad
tradition still survived in England and the United States and the
term "ballad" was applied to a short song with a slow rhythm and
romantic or sentimental content.
In
the 1960s popular music in general became a space for cultural and
political conflict and dialogue. Bob Dylan started to use the form of the
ballad to protest against the Vietnam War when, in 1962, he used the
mixture of dialogue and narration of Lord Randal in his
song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. Among his most famous
anti-war songs are Blowin’ in the Wind and Masters of
War.
The
ballad is still used in modern pop and folk music. Read here.
from Performer Heritage 1, Zanichelli, p. 63