Banha University Faculty of Arts English Department A Guiding Model Answer for Third Grade Neo-Classical and Romantic Poetry Exam June 4 (Year 2012) Faculty of Arts Prepared by Mohammad Badr AlDin Al-Hussini Hassan Mansour, Ph.D. University of Nevada, Reno (USA) Banha University Second Term Faculty of Arts Year (2011-2012) English Department Time: 3 hours Third Grade Second Term Exam ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Poetry Exam Respond to the following questions: 1. Discuss the varying characteristics of 18th and 19th century British poetry through a comparative analysis of the two poems, "London" by Samuel Johnson and William Blake? (Time Limit is 40 minutes; Grade is 4) 2. What is unconventional about the rhyming pattern of Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias"? (Time Limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 3) 3. Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a meditative lamentation of human mortality centered upon two poetic traditions: elegy and landscape. Elaborate? (Time Limit is 30 minutes; Grade is 4) 4. Explore the connections between the mythological, literal allusions, and theme in Alexander Pope's poem "Of the Characters of Women: An Epistle to a Lady"? (Time Limit is 25 minutes; Grade is 3) 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's major poems turn on problems of self-esteem and identity. Exploring states of isolation and ineffectuality, they test strategies to overcome weakness without asserting its antithesis—that is a powerful self, secure in its own thoughts and utterances. This is evident in "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," "The Eolian Harp," and "Frost at Midnight." Explicate the structural pattern in the three poems and comment on? (Time limit is one hour minutes; Grade is 6) Good Luck Mohammad Al-Hussini Arab 2 Answers 1. Discuss the varying characteristics of 18th and 19th century British poetry through a comparative analysis of the two poems, "London" by Samuel Johnson and William Blake? (Time Limit is 40 minutes; Grade is 4) Answer: Neoclassical literature, which dominated the first half of the eighteenth century in England, emphasized practical reason, formality, social conformity, emotional restraint, didactism, and submission to the authority of classical literary techniques. It was generally allied to political and religious conservatism as well. Its chief aim was to show to the world (that is, to mankind) a picture of itself for its own improvement and edification. Its chief ornament was art: puns, word-play, satiric description, and so forth. After 1789, when the social order in France turned upside down, life in eighteenth century England was transformed by political, economic, social, and technological innovations, and an expectation of the millennium arose in England, especially in liberal intellectual circles. The old rules of poetry were thrown off with the outworn social strictures—they seemed increasingly obsolete to younger and more audacious writers, who had absorbed the Enlightenment philosophy of humanism and freedom. A new aesthetic bloomed in their place; its ruling faculty was imagination. The world seemed made new, and poetry released from bondage. The Romantics abandoned the poetic theory of the century before. They wrote from a radically different philosophical base. They frequently stated that poems ought to be composed on the inspiration of the moment, thereby faithfully to record the purity of the emotion. In fact, the Romantics labored hard over their creations; they exerted themselves not to smoothness of meter but to preserving the grace of spontaneity while achieving precision in observation of natural and psychological phenomena. Poets saw themselves as charting hitherto unexplored reaches of human experience, extremes of joy and dejection, guilt and redemption, pride and degradation. They wrote meditations, confessions, and conversations, in which natural things were seen to abet internal states. In short, Romantic poetry represents a sharp movement away from the concerns and values of neoclassic poetry. Whereas the neoclassic poet is concerned with the mimetic relationship of poetry to the nature or reality that it imitates and with the pragmatic relationship of poetry to its audience, the Romantic poet focuses primarily on the expressive relationship of the poet to poetry. The neoclassic poet sees poetry as an imitation of nature designed to instruct and delight; the Romantic poet sees poetry as an expression of the creative imagination. In examining poetry, the neoclassic poet turns to matters of genre, techniques, conventions, and effects of poetry; the Romantic turns back to the poet, the imagination, and the creative process. When the Romantic poet does turn to the mimetic relationship, he focuses on the organic and beneficent qualities of nature, and when he looks at the pragmatic relationship, he is especially interested in the connection between feelings and moral response. As the world's first great capitalist metropolis, London in the revolutionary period presented itself as offering some privileged access to the future, to the way that the Western world in general might develop. A city existing, so to speak, partly in the future, London acquired an epistemological nontransparency. It became less of an 3 unproblematically known reality to be judged and more of a cognitive problem to be pondered. Samuel Johnson's Juvenalian satire London (1738), written somewhat in the tradition of earlier Tory Augustan satires like Swift's "A Description of the Morning" (1709) and "A Description of a City Shower" (1710), rails against the alleged crimes, vices, and follies of his adopted city; it provides a more bitter image of London than the works by Swift—arguably, indeed, the most memorable image of London to that point in English literature since the city comedy of Ben Jonson. It has sometimes been adversely criticized for its lack of a rigorous overall structure and also for its evident insincerity: for the later Dr. Johnson, the hero of Boswell's biography, is indeed about the last person one can imagine abandoning London for a rural retreat as the poem seems to recommend. But London actually operates on various levels of seriousness. Some lines seem to be written in a typically Augustan high-spiritedness of denunciation, and are, one assumes, not meant to be taken literally—"Prepare for Death, if here at Night you roam, / And sign your Will before you sup from Home—while others appear as deeply felt, and as thoroughly grounded in the author's personal experience, as anything that Johnson ever wrote. It is true that the poem is not very tightly organized; like much Augustan satire in heroic couplets, it moves from topic to topic without any strongly governing plan, and the poem as a whole is hardly more than the sum of its parts. Whether this is a fault, or merely an indication of the particular kind of poetry it is, the point to be stressed here is that the loose organization of London bespeaks a fundamental epistemological repose. If Johnson feels no need to impose any overall structure on his vision of the city, it is surely because he assumes that his experience of London is straightforward and shared in common with his readers. London, for Johnson, is still transparent; and, indeed, it is precisely this transparency that enables the poem's easy and absolute moral judgments, as the corruption of the modern city is sharply contrasted with the supposed moral purity that obtained in England under Alfred the Great or that still obtains among the rocks of Scotland and in other rustic regions. We might say that Johnson's London, whether in deadly earnest or somewhat affectedly, finds the city to be morally shocking—a cesspool of lies, snobbishness, cowardice, weakness, treason, and violence—but not productive of what Walter Benjamin, writing about another and later great urban center, would call epistemological shock. The situation is radically different when we turn to William Blake's poem also entitled "London" (1794), which is crucially different from Johnson's. The distance that separates Blake from Johnson is highlighted by the formal parallels between the two poems. In both cases, the speakers wander through the city and issue thunderous moral condemnations from their respective sociopolitical positions of Johnson's Tory radicalism and Blake's revolutionary proto-Marxism. But for Blake London is epistemologically as well as morally shocking, at once estranged and estranging. Johnson's easy empiricist certitude—his ability to take and understand London as he finds it—is gone, and with it the adequacy of his straightforward poetry of statement. In order to make sense of what he sees throughout the city, Blake must instead construct an intricate metonymic and metaphoric figural structure. London, for Blake, no longer speaks for itself as it did for Johnson; rather the marked city must be elaborately deciphered. At first, the poet's scheme of decipherment relies mainly on metaphor: the fearful cries of the Londoners are understood to signify mental repression as powerful 4 and despotic as manacles of actual steel. But in the course of the poem metonymy comes largely to supercede metaphor, as Blake's mode of understanding London relies less on mere similarity and more on actual systemic connection. It is slightly metaphorical to say that the chimney-sweeper's cry appalls the church building in the sense of making it whiter, since it is actually the sweeper's labor that does that; but it is metaphor at the very edge of metonymy, and it is a matter of full-fledged connection and causation to say that the cry appalls the church as an institution in the sense of startling and terrifying it, thereby directly, though synecdochically, suggesting the entire relationship between working class and ruling class. Somewhat similarly, there is a bit of metaphor in the role assigned to the harlot's curse in the final stanza.