Biographies

[fadi006]

[align=left]Illuminated books[/align]
[align=left]c.1788: All Religions Are One
There Is No Natural Religion
1789: Songs of Innocence
The Book of Thel
1790–1793: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
1793: Visions of the Daughters of Albion
America: a Prophecy
1794: Europe: a Prophecy
The First Book of Urizen
Songs of Experience
1795: The Book of Los
The Song of Los
The Book of Ahania
c.1804–c.1811: Milton: a Poem
1804–1820: Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion [/align]

[align=left]Non-Illuminated[/align]
[align=left]1791: The French Revolution [/align]

[align=left]Illustrated by Blake[/align]
[align=left]1791: Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life
1797: Edward Young, Night Thoughts
1805-1808: Robert Blair, The Grave
1808: John Milton, Paradise Lost
1819-1820: John Varley, Visionary Heads
1821: R.J. Thornton, Virgil
1823-1826: The Book of Job
1825-1827: Dante, The Divine Comedy (Blake died in 1827 with these watercolours still unfinished) [/align]

[align=left]On Blake[/align]
[align=left]Peter Ackroyd (1995). Blake. Sinclair-Stevenson. ISBN 1-85619-278-4.
Donald Ault (1974). Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton. University of Chicago. ISBN 0-226-03225-6.
---(1987). Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake's The Four Zoas. Station Hill Press. ISBN-10 1886449759.
G.E. Bentley Jr. (2001). The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08939-2.
Harold Bloom (1963). Blake’s Apocalypse. Doubleday.
Jacob Bronowski (1972). William Blake and the Age of Revolution. Routledge and K. Paul. ISBN 0-7100-7277-5 (hardcover) ISBN 0-7100-7278-3 (pbk.)
――― (1967). William Blake, 1757-1827; a man without a mask. Haskell House Publishers.
G.K. Chesterton (1920s). William Blake. House of Stratus ISBN 0-7551-0032-8.
S. Foster Damon (1979). A Blake Dictionary. Shambhala. ISBN 0-394-73688-5.
David V. Erdman (1977). Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-486-26719-9.
Irving Fiske (1951). "Bernard Shaw's Debt to William Blake." (Shaw Society)
Northrop Frye (1947). Fearful Symmetry. Princeton Univ Press. ISBN 0-691-06165-3.
Alexander Gilchrist, Life and Works of William Blake, (second edition, London, 1880)
James King (1991). William Blake: His Life. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-07572-3.
Dr. Malkin (1806). A Father's Memories of his Child.
Peter Marshall (1988). William Blake: Visionary Anarchist ISBN 0-900384-77-8
W.J.T. Mitchell (1978). Blake's Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-691-01402-7.
Victor N. Paananens (1996). William Blake. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-7053-4.
George Anthony Rosso Jr. (1993). Blake's Prophetic Workshop: A Study of The Four Zoas. Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8387-5240-3.
Sheila A. Spector (2001). "Wonders Divine": the development of Blake's Kabbalistic myth, (Bucknell UP)
Algernon Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay, (London, 1868)
E.P. Thompson (1993). Witness against the Beast. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22515-9.
W. M. Rosetti (editor), Poetical Works of William Blake, (London, 1874)
A. G. B. Russell (1912). Engravings of William Blake.
Basil de Sélincourt, William Blake, (London, 1909)
Joseph Viscomi (1993). Blake and the Idea of the Book, (Princeton UP). ISBN 0-691-06962-X.
David Weir (2003). Brahma in the West: William Blake and the Oriental Renaissance, (SUNY Press)
Jason Whittaker (1999). William Blake and the Myths of Britain, (Macmillan)
W. B. Yeats (1903). Ideas of Good and Evil. Contains essays. [/align]

[Oscar]

[align=center]THE LITTLE BLACK BOY

MY mother bore me in the southern wild
And I am black, but O, my soul is white
White as an angel is the English child
But I am black, as if bereaved of light

My mother taught me underneath a tree
And, sitting down before the heat of day
She took me on her lap and kissèd me
And, pointing to the East, began to say

'Look at the rising sun: there God does live
And gives His light, and gives His heat away
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning, joy in the noonday

'And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Are but a cloud, and like a shady grove

'For when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish, we shall hear His voice
Saying, "Come out from the grove, my love and care
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice

Thus did my mother say, and kissèd me
And thus I say to little English boy
When I from black and he from white cloud free
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy

I'll shade him from the heat till he can bear
To lean in joy upon our Father's knee
And then I'll stand and stroke his silver hair
And be like him, and he will then love me

**

CRADLE SONG

SLEEP, sleep, beauty bright
Dreaming in the joys of night
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace
Secret joys and secret smiles
Little pretty infant wiles

As thy softest limbs I feel
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest

O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep
When thy little heart doth wake
Then the dreadful night shall break
..
Thx Fadi
[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years that was revised and expanded a number of times. It was never published during his lifetime, and was only given the title after his death. Up until this time it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.[/align]

[align=left]
Early life and education[/align]
[align=left]The second of five children, Wordsworth was born in Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England called the Lake District. His sister was the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth. With the death of his mother in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School. In 1783 his father, who was a lawyer and the solicitor for the Earl of Lonsdale (a man much despised in the area), died. The estate consisted of around £4500[citation needed], most of it in claims upon the Earl, who thwarted these claims until his death in 1802. The Earl's successor, however, settled the claims with interest. After their father's death, the Wordsworth children were left under the guardianship of their uncles. Although many aspects of his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of loneliness and anxiety. It took him many years, and much writing, to recover from the death of his parents and his separation from his siblings.

Wordsworth began attending St John's College, Cambridge in 1787. His youngest brother, Christopher, rose to be Master of Trinity College of that institution.[1] Three years later, in 1790, he visited Revolutionary France and supported the Republican movement. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without distinction.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]Relationship with Annette Vallon[/align]
[align=left]In November 1791, Wordsworth returned to France and took a walking tour of Europe that included the Alps and Italy. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England the next year.[2] The circumstances of his return and his subsequent behavior raise doubts as to his declared wish to marry Annette but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. During this period, he wrote his acclaimed "It is a beautous evening, calm and free," recalling his seaside walk with his daughter, whom he had not seen for ten years. At the conception of this poem, he had never seen his daughter before. The occuring lines reveal his deep love for both child and mother. The Reign of Terror estranged him from the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are also strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid 1790s.

With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in France and arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement regarding Wordsworth's obligations.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]First publication and Lyrical Ballads[/align]
[align=left]1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved to Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume had neither the name of Wordsworth nor Coleridge as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as author, and included a preface to the poems, which was significantly augmented in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]Germany and move to the Lake District[/align]
[align=left]Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge then traveled to Germany in the autumn of 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the trip, its main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness.[2] During the harsh winter of 1798–1799, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and despite extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude. He also wrote a number of famous poems, including "the Lucy poems." He and his sister moved back to England, now to Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, and this time with fellow poet Robert Southey nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets". Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death, endurance, separation, and grief.





William Wordsworth, reproduced from Margaret Gillies' 1839 original
Portrait, 1842, by Benjamin HaydonBoth Coleridge's health and his relationship to Wordsworth began showing signs of decay in 1804. That year Wordsworth befriended Robert Southey. With Napoleon's rise as Emperor of the French, Wordsworth's last wisp of liberalism fell, and from then on he identified himself as a Tory.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]Autobiographical work and Poems in Two Volumes[/align]
[align=left]Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He had in 1798–99 started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but called the "poem to Coleridge", which would serve as an appendix to The Recluse. In 1804 he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he planned. By 1805, he had completed it, but refused to publish such a personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother, John, in 1805 affected him strongly.

In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was only lukewarm, however.

For a time (starting in 1810), Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction.

Two of his children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. The following year, he received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the £400 per year income from the post made him financially secure. His family, including Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal Water), where he spent the rest of his life.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]The Prospectus[/align]
[align=left]In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and never would complete them. However, he did write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and intent of the poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:

My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
Theme this but little heard of among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind . . .
Some modern critics recognise a decline in his works beginning around the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterise his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation, abandonment) were resolved in his writings. But, by 1820 he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.

By 1828, Wordsworth had become fully reconciled to Coleridge, and the two toured the Rhineland together that year.[2]

Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth gave Annette and Caroline the money they needed for support.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]The Poet Laureate and other honors[/align]
[align=left]Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham University, and the same honor from Oxford University the next year.[2] In 1842 the government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year.

With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate. When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill.[/align]



[align=left]Marriage[/align]
[align=left]In 1802, after returning from his trip to France with Dorothy to visit Annette and Caroline, Wordsworth received the inheritance owed by Lord Lonsdale since John Wordsworth's death in 1783. Later that year, he married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson.[2] Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, John.[/align]


[align=left]Death[/align]
[align=left]William Wordsworth died in Rydal Mount in 1850 and was buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere.

His widow published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has since come to be recognised as his masterpiece. The lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in particular their collaboration on the "Lyrical Ballads," are discussed in the 2000 film Pandaemonium.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]Major works[/align]
[align=left]Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798)
"Simon Lee"
"We Are Seven"
"Lines Written in Early Spring"
"Expostulation and Reply"
"The Tables Turned"
"The Thorn"
"Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800)
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
"Strange fits of passion I have known"[3]
"She dwelt among the untrodden ways"[3]
"Three years she grew"[3]
"A slumber did my spirit seal"[3]
"I travelled among unknown men"[3]
"Lucy Gray"
"The Two April Mornings"
"Nutting In Ambers Mouth"
"The Ruined Cottage"
"Michael"
Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
"Resolution and Independence"
"I wandered lonely as a cloud"
"My heart leaps up"
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
"Ode to Duty"
"The Solitary Reaper"
"Elegiac Stanzas"
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
"London, 1802"
"The world is too much with us"
The Excursion (1814)
"Prospectus to The Recluse"
Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822)
"Mutability"
The Prelude (1850, posthumous)
The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind [/align]

[Oscar]

[align=center]
..
When I Have Borne in Memory What Has Tamed

When I have borne in memory what has tamed
Great Nations, how ennobling thoughts depart
When men change swords for ledgers, and desert
The student's bower for gold, some fears unnamed
?I had, my Country -am I to be blamed
Now, when I think of thee, and what thou art
Verily, in the bottom of my heart
Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed
For dearly must we prize thee; we who find
In thee a bulwark for the cause of men
: And I by my affection was beguiled
What wonder if a Poet now and then
Among the many movements of his mind
!Felt for thee as a lover or a child

**

The Green Linnet

Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
Their snow-white blossoms on my head
With brightest sunshine round me spread
Of spring's unclouded weather
In this sequestered nook how sweet
!To sit upon my orchard-seat
And birds and flowers once more to greet
My last year's friends together

One have I marked, the happiest guest
:In all this covert of the blest
Hail to Thee, far above the rest
!In joy of voice and pinion
Thou, Linnet! in thy green array
Presiding Spirit here today
Dost lead the revels of the May
.And this is thy dominion

While birds, and butterflies, and flowers
Make all one band of paramours
Thou, ranging up and down the bowers
:Art sole in thy employment
A Life, a Presence like the Air
Scattering thy gladness without care
Too blest with any one to pair
.Thyself thy own enjoyment

Amid yon tuft of hazel trees
That twinkle to the gusty breeze
Behold him perched in ecstasies
Yet seeming still to hover
There! where the flutter of his wings
Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings
.That cover him all over

My dazzled sight he oft deceives
A Brother of the dancing leaves
Then flits, and from the cottage eaves
Pours forth his song in gushes
As if by that exulting strain
He mocked and treated with disdain
The voiceless Form he chose to feign
.While fluttering in the bushes
..

Again Fadi
ThAnk u so much
[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=center]Edmund Spenser Poem[/align]



[align=center]My Love Is Like To Ice[/align]



[align=center]My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal's with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem Paradise Lost, Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, Areopagitica. Long considered the supreme English poet, Milton experienced a dip in popularity after attacks by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis in the mid 20th century; but with multiple societies and scholarly journals devoted to his study, Milton’s reputation remains as strong as ever in the 21st century.

Very soon after his death – and continuing to the present day – Milton became the subject of partisan biographies, confirming T.S. Eliot’s belief that “of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions…making unlawful entry. Milton’s radical, republican politics and heretical religious views, coupled with the perceived artificiality of his complicated Latinate verse, alienated Eliot and other readers; yet by dint of the overriding influence of his poetry and personality on subsequent generations--particularly the Romantic movement--the man whom Samuel Johnson disparaged as “an acrimonious and surly republican” must be counted one of the most significant writers and thinkers of all time.[/align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]Family life and childhood[/align]
[align=justify]Joh[align=left]n Milton’s father, also named John Milton (1562? – 1647), moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father, Richard Milton, for embracing Protestantism. In London, Milton senior married Sara Jeffrey (1572 – 1637), the poet’s mother, and found lasting financial success as a scrivener (a profession that combined the functions of solicitor, realtor, public notary, and moneylender), where he lived and worked out of a house on Bread Street in Cheapside. The elder Milton was noted for his skill as a musical composer, and this talent left Milton with a lifetime appreciation for music and friendship with musicians like Henry Lawes.

After Milton was born on 9 December 1608, his father’s prosperity provided his eldest son with private tutoring, and a place at St Paul's School in London, where he began the study of Latin and Greek that would leave such an imprint on his poetry. The fledgling poet, whose first datable compositions are two psalms done at age 15, was remarkable for his work ethic: "When he was young," recalled Christopher, his younger brother, "he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o'clock at night." Milton was born on Bread Street, the same road where The Mermaid Tavern was located, where legend has it that Ben Jonson and other poets often caroused.[/[/align]align]

[fadi006]

[align=left]Cambridge years[/align]

[align=left]John Milton matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1625 and, in preparation for becoming an Anglican priest, stayed on to obtain his Master of Arts cum laude on 3 July 1632. At Cambridge Milton befriended American dissident and theologian, Roger Williams. Milton tutored Williams in Hebrew in exchange for lessons in Dutch. Though at Cambridge he developed a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, Milton experienced alienation from his peers and university life as a whole. Watching his fellow students attempting comedy upon the college stage, he later observed that 'they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools'. The feeling it seems was mutual; Milton, due to his hair, which he wore long, and his general delicacy of manner, was known as the "Lady of Christ's", an epithet probably applied with some degree of scorn. At some point Milton was probably rusticated for quarrelling with his tutor, which reflects the general disdain in which he held the university curriculum, consisting of stilted formal debates on abstruse topics conducted in Latin. Yet his corpus is not devoid of “quips, and cranks, and jollities,” notably his sixth prolusion and his jocular epitaphs on the death of Hobson, the driver of a coach between Cambridge and London . While at Cambridge he wrote a number of his well-known shorter English poems, among them Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, his Epitaph on the admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare, his first poem to appear in print, and L'Allegro and Il Penseroso.[/align]