Bohemian Brouhaha

v   Who are the precursors of romanticism? Examine how they heralded the Age of Romanticism in their writings? ***   A few but noted writers who belonged to the transitional period between the Age of Classicism and Age of Romanticism are credited with sowing the seeds of romanticism, paving the way for Lyrical Ballads (1798) to usher in an effervescent, effusive literary era. The worthy contributors are namely James Thomson, William Collins, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, George Crabbe, Robert Burns, William Blake and, even, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Oliver Goldsmith. Starting from Rousseau’s breakaway philosophy the air of romanticism was gathering momentum as, in the second half of the 18 th century, English literature experienced an inclined departure from the avowed rigidity of classicism, although not entirely. Be it the graveyard school of English poetry of the 1740s or   Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and other sentimental novels or the “novel of sensibi

v   Comment on the plays written immediately before Shakespeare. Or Write an essay on the contributions of the University Wits towards the making of Elizabethan drama. ü   The days of Moralities and Interludes were nearly over; and drama was taking shape out of the elements of comedy, tragedy, farce, morality, tragic-comedy – all rolled into one play. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the awakened ‘humanistic’ learning of the age produced its first learned masters who deftly mirrored the variegated dramatic ferventness of man in their plays. They were staging the theatre for one maestro, William Shakespeare; and they were adding fermentable emotions and passionate language to the classical form hitherto practised in English. They were ‘University Wits’, as George Saintsbury grouped them, and the prominent playwrights were, namely, Christopher Marlowe , Robert Greene , and Thomas Nashe from Cambridge, and John Lyly , Thomas Lodge , George Peele from Oxford. Thom

ON KILLING A TREE (Notes) Title: The poem, On Killing a Tree, latently raves about, in a concentrated approach, of the trees, and on the act of killing; both these phenomena contrasted and confiscated together with intense terms, phrases and expressions. With its mere span of 35 odd countable lines when the tree is talked of, the essence of a tree is encapsulated in language, such as “Years of sunlight, air, water”, “ leperous hide / Sprouting leaves”, “ green twigs”, “The root”, “white, wet, most sensitive, hidden”,   “strength of the tree” , “consuming the earth”, and many more. But, the “killing” overpowers; the very opening line is set to “kill a tree”. The instruments, the agents, the means follow:   “the knife”, “hack and chop”, “pain”, “bleeding bark”, “roped, tied”, “pulled out entirely”, “snapped out”, “scorching and choking”, “browning, hardening, twisting, withering”. With the strength of the tree being exposed the “anchoring earth” turns into the “earth-cave”