The books of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens are world famous. So are the stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes written by Arthur Conan Doyle.
English poetry dates from the 700s, when the English language was very different from modern English. Famous poets in English include Geoffrey Chaucer, John Keats, and William Wordsworth. Scotland's best known poet is Robert Burns.
THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
English literature flourished under the reign of Elizabeth 1. While Sir Philip Sidney wrote sonnet sequences and Edmund Spenser composed such epics as Me Faerie Queen, John Donne, the Dean of London's St. Paul's Cathedral, wrote introspective devotional poetry and penned erotic verse on the side. The era's greatest contributions to English literature came in drama, with the appearance of the first professional playwrights. As Shakespeare in Love moviegoers know, Christopher Marlowe lost his life to a dagger in a pub brawl, fortunately not before he guided Tonbivlaine (c. 1587) and Dr. Faustus (c. 1588) into the world of English letters Meanwhile, Ben Jonson, when he wasn't languishing in jail (for acts as varied , insulting Scotland and killing an actor in a sword fight), redefined satiric comedy in Volpone (1606) and Bartholemew Fair (1614). The giant of the day, and SO the figure against whom all things literary are measured, was of course William Shakespeare, who mixed high and low to create some of the finest comedies, histories, and tragedies ever to grace the world. Those who equate the Bard with a
schoolroom avalanche of "whithers" and "wherefores" should know that he held one of the filthiest feathers ever to scrawl the English language, and that Shakespeare invented (or used for the first time) a staggering number of words now in everyday use, among them "arouse," "laughable," and "scuffle," as well as such common phrases as "tower of strength," "sleep not one wink," "dead as a doornail," and "foregone conclusion." An entire town bustles year round in tribute to the man (see Stratford upon Avon, p. 262), but his plays, from Hamlet and King Lear to The Tempest, remain the truest monuments to his genius.
GODS AND MEN
The British Puritans of the late
16th and early 17th centuries produced a huge volume of obsessive and beautiful literature. In Paradise Lost (1667), the epic poem to end all epic poems, the blind John Milton gave Satan, Adam, and Eve a complexity the Bible did not grant them. Another Puritan vision came from John Bunyan, a self taught Nonconformist pastor whose Pilgrim's Progress (1678) charts the Christian's quest for redemption in a world awaiting the apocalypse. After the monarchy regained full power, writers such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope led a Neoclassical revival, which yielded a keen satire of English social and political life. The major literary figure and critic of the late 18th century was Samuel Johnson, author of The Lives of the Poets (1779 81). Dr. Johnson's greatest achievement was spending nine years in Gough Square in London writing the first definitive (and lovably idiosyncratic) English dictionary.
THE NOVEL COMES INTO ITS OWN
In 1719, Daniel Defoe inaugurated the era of the English novel with his popular island bound Robinson Crusoe. Explorations of the new form continued with Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Henry Fielding's picaresque Tom Jones (1749), a novel which shows that traveling could be far more dangerous in those pre Let's Go times. Jane Austen brought the novel to new heights, slyly criticizing self importance in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815). The harsh industrialization of the Victorian period spawned numerous classic novels: Charles Dickens's often biting, sometimes sentimental works, such as A Christmas Carol (1843), draw on the bleakness of his childhood and the severe destitution of much of the British population. From their Haworth home , the Bronte sisters composed works of great intensity: in Wuthering
Heights (1847), Emily Bronte contrasts the noble but limp Edgar Linton with the exquisitely ferocious Heath cliff. Not to be outdone, her sister Charlotte created madwoman Bertha in Jane Eyre. Thomas Hardy brought the Victorian age to an end on a dark note in the fate ridden Wessex landscapes of Jude the Obscure (1895) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). It is easy to recognize similarities to real locales in southwest England "Casterbridge" is Dorchester , for instance. Like Hardy, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) lost her religious faith; her skepticism drew her to the security of traditional village life. Her Middlemarch (1871) depicts the entangled lives of an entire town; the novel is majestic in scope and in its realization of human tragedy.
ROMANTICISM AND THE 19TH CENTURY
Partly in reaction to the rationalism of the preceding century, the early 19th century saw the rise of the Romantic movement, which found its greatest expression in poetry. Painter poet William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) was a precursor to the movement in its antimaterialist spirit, but the watershed event launching Romanticism in Britain was the joint publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which included such classics as "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (see and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The Romantic poets celebrated the transcendent beauty of nature and the power of the imagination to a degree never before seen in English letters; many of their revolutionary ideassuch as childhood experiences having a profound influence on the development of the human being are accepted as common knowledge today. Wordsworth's immense blank verse poem The Prelude (1805 and 1850), in which he remembers childhood "spots in time," cemented his reputation as Romantic icon, His sonnet sequence The River Duddon (1820) is an overlooked gem. Wordsworth's younger colleagues were plagued by early deaths: the great John Keats died of tuberculosis at 26 but not before penning the maxim "beauty is truth, truth beauty" and odes full of the richest language since Shakespeare while Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the Tuscan coast at 29. Lord Byron's Don Juan (1819 24) established him as the heartthrob of the age before he was killed in the Greek War of Independence.
The poetry of the Victorian age struggled with the impact of societal changes. Alfred, Lord Tennyson spun gorgeous verse about faith and doubt for over a halfcentury, while Matthew Arnold rebelled against the industrialization of literature and the anarchy of mass rule. Combining skepticism and the grotesque, Robert Browning eschewed Tennyson's lyricism. Gerard Manley Hopkins revolutionized English poetry with his "sprung rhythm" verses, making him the chief forerunner of poetic modernism.
THE MODERN AGE
Willing or not, English audiences experienced the poignant outrage of war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. After World War I, London was the home of artistic movements such as the Bloomsbury Group, pulling the world's intellects into its midst. Virginia Woolf, a key group member, explored the private yearnings of the individual mind in To the Lighthouse (1927). T.S. Eliot grew up a Missouri boy but became the "Pope of Russell Square"; The Waste Land (1922), one of this century's most important poems, is a picture of a fragmented, motionless, precious world waiting for the end. D.H. Lawrence explored tensions in the British working class family in Sons and Lovers (1913) before traveling the other way across the Atlantic. Although he spoke only a few words of English when he arrived in the country aged 21, Joseph Conrad proceeded to masterfully employ the language to examine evil in Heart of Darkness (1902). Disillusionment also pervades E.M. Forster's half critical, half abashedly romantic novels such as A Passage to India (1924), which connect repression and class hypocrisy. Writing in the 1930s matched the tumult and depression of the decade: Evelyn Waugh turned a satirical eye on society in Vile Bodies (1930),
while Graham Greene studied moral ambiguity in Brighton Rock.
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