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INTRODUCTION
English literature is often described as beginning with Chaucer. This would give
England six centuries of literature. Actually there were more than six centuries of
literature before Chaucer was born. The modern reader can make out the general
meaning of a page of Chaucer without difficulty, but if he looks at the earliest
English literature he finds that it doesn’t read like English. The two most
important events in the history of England took place before the Norman Conquest.
One of them was the period when Angles, Saxons and Jutes came to England.
Literature in the Anglo-Saxon period was recorded in manuscripts, among which is
“The Song of Beowulf”.
Each art has its own medium: the painter his pigments, the musician his sound, and
the writer, words. The difficulty of the writer is that words are used for all
everyday purposes, so that they become worn, “like coins rubbed by long use”.
Modern poetry begins with Geoffrey Chaucer, diplomat, soldier and scholar.
Chaucer as a poet is so good that he makes the fifteenth century appear dull. “His
imitators are brought on to the stage of literature only to receive cat-calls”.
The poets of the century after Chaucer were involved further in the changing
nature of the language. The new way in English poetry came mainly through the
imitation of Italian models and it brought difficulties of its own. Some poets
struggled to render into English the fourteen-line Italian form of the sonnet, which
was one of the most popular forms of poetry in the period of Renaissance.
Shakespeare also used this form but he was different. Some of his sonnets are
addressed not to a woman but to a young man; others are written not with
adoration but with an air of disillusioned passion to a ‘dark lady’. But his name in
English literature is mainly associated with his plays.
It is false to consider the drama merely as a part of literature. For Literature is an
art dependent upon words, but the drama is a multiple art, using words, scenic
effects, the gestures of the actors, and the organizing talents of a producer.
Shakespeare knew that the play must come first, and the words, however brilliant,
must be subservient to it. While nothing can explain the genius of Marlowe, or
Shakespeare, the changes in the form of the drama can be in part explained by the
revival of interest in classical drama. The classical drama gave examples both for
comedy and tragedy and the Renaissance imposed a learned tradition upon a
English national drama.
The 17
th
century is in many ways the century of transition into the modern world. It
was linked with a generous sentiment towards humanity, and towards movements
which drew attention to the great gulf between the wealthy and elegant society of
the century and the conditions of those who lived in poverty.
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The first thirty years of the 19
th
century are marked by a cluster of poets whose
work differed from that of their predecessors. They all had a deep interest in
nature not as a centre of beautiful scenes but as an informing and spiritual
influence on life. In the poetry of all romantic poets, there is a sense of wonder, of
life seen with new sensibility and fresh vision. This strangeness of the individual
experience leads each of the romantics to a spiritual loneliness. They are keenly
aware of their social obligations, but the burden of an exceptional vision of live
drives them into being almost fugitives from their fellow-men.
Behind English prose, from the Anglo-Saxon period to even the 17
th
century, is the
pattern of Latin. The 16
th
century had nothing in its prose to match the excellence
of the drama, yet scholars had been preparing the way for the acceptance of
English as the standard medium of expression. The first half of the 17
th
century
was a period of religious controversy and of the triumph of Puritanism. In the 18
th
century the subject of study to which man applied himself became more numerous
and more systematic, and it was a good fortune of England that prose in that age
had become a pliant and serviceable medium. The 19
th
century prose was to
produce many historians among whom W. Scott had his recognized place. To
write briefly of 20
th
century prose is difficult. In style the most interesting
developments were in drama and fiction. In between lies a prose of a prolific half
century, with style playing a varying part; sometimes the imagination find alliance
with scholarship and criticism, but often the frontiers of literature are left behind as
one enters a solely utilitarian world.
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