Andrew Marvell Biography - Nneka

Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician and had even sat in the house of commons between 1659 and 1678, During the Commonwealth period. He was born in winestead, England on the 31st of march 1621; he died at 57 on the 16 August 1678 in London. His most famous works were: "To His Coy Mistress", "The Garden", "An Horatian Ode". Andrew was said to be the single most compelling embodiment of the change that came over English society. He was a poet with an array of exquisite lyrics that blend Cavalier grace with Metaphysical wit and complexity. Marvell's first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek were published when he was still at Cambridge and lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to king charles I. Marvell served as tutor to the daughter of the Lord General Thomas Fairfax, who had recently relinquished command of the Parliamentary army to Cromwell. He lived during that time at Nun Appleton Hall, near York, where he continued to write poetry. One poem, "Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax", uses a description of the estate as a way of exploring Fairfax's and Marvell's own situation in a time of war and political change. Probably the best-known poem he wrote at this time is "To His Coy Mistress". Andrews works are said to contain religious themes and satirical material.


Examples:

• Eyes and Tears
• Bermudas
• Clorinda and Damon
• Two Songs at the Marriage of the Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell
• A Dialogue between the Soul and Body
• The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn
• Young Love

The definition of love 

My love is of a birth as rare 

As ’tis for object strange and high; 

It was begotten by Despair 

Upon Impossibility. 

Magnanimous Despair alone 

Could show me so divine a thing 

Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown, 

But vainly flapp’d its tinsel wing. 

And yet I quickly might arrive 

Where my extended soul is fixt, 

But Fate does iron wedges drive, 

And always crowds itself betwixt. 

For Fate with jealous eye does see 

Two perfect loves, nor lets them close; 

Their union would her ruin be, 

And her tyrannic pow’r depose. 

And therefore her decrees of steel 

Us as the distant poles have plac’d, 

(Though love’s whole world on us doth wheel) 

Not by themselves to be embrac’d; 

Unless the giddy heaven fall, 

And earth some new convulsion tear; 

And, us to join, the world should all 

Be cramp’d into a planisphere. 

As lines, so loves oblique may well 

Themselves in every angle greet; 

But ours so truly parallel, 

Though infinite, can never meet. 

Therefore the love which us doth bind, 

But Fate so enviously debars, 

Is the conjunction of the mind, 

And opposition of the stars.

George Herbert Biography-Nieve

George Herbert (April 3rd 1593-1st March 1633)

George Herbert was a Welsh-born poet , orator and Anglican priest and is recognized as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists. Herbert was largely raised in England and received good education that led to his admission in 1609 as a student Trinity College, Cambridge. Then he became the University's Public Orator and he attracted the attention of King James I. In 1624 and briefly in 1625 he served in the Parliament of England.  Herbert wrote poetry in English, Latin and Greek,  and all of Herbert's poetry were published in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. This collection featured such works as the "The Altar", "The Storm", and "Love".  George Herbert's "The Altar" is a perfect example of  pattern poetry or a pattern poem, which is a arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance.


Here is an extract of George Herbert's "The Altar":

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,

Made of a heart and cemented with tears;

Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;

No workman's tool hath touch'd the same.

A HEART alone

Is such a stone,

As nothing but

Thy pow'r doth cut.

Wherefore each part

Of my hard heart

Meets in this frame

To praise thy name.

That if I chance to hold my peace,

These stones to praise thee may not cease.

Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,

And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

Herbert's poems have been characterized by a deep religious devotion, linguistic precision, metrical agility, and the ingenious use of conceit. Sam Taylor Coleridge wrote of Herbert's diction  that "nothing can be more pure, manly, or unaffected,"and he is ranked with Donne as one of the greatest metaphysical poets.

Andrew Marvell Biography - Kenzee

Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) 

Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician. He sat in the House of Commons at various points from 1659 – 1678 and during the Commonwealth period, he was a good friend of John Milton. Some of his most notable works include ‘To His Coy Mistress’, ‘The Garden’ and ‘An Horatian Ode’.

Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness, near the city of Kingston upon Hull. Born to a Church of England clergy man also named Andrew Marvell, the family moved to Hull after his father was appointed Lecturer at the Holy Trinity Church, and Marvell attended Hull Grammar School. At just 13 years old, Marvell earned a BA degree from Trinity College, Cambridge. His first poems, published in Latin and Greek whilst he still attended Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to King Charles I. After the death of his father in 1641 as a result of drowning, Marvell travelled extensively on the continent, learning new languages and missing the English civil wars in the process.

Marvell spent most of the 1650s as a tutor, first for Mary Fairfax, the daughter of a retired Cromwellian general, and then for one of Oliver Cromwell’s wards. In 1657, Marvell was appointed John Milton’s Latin Secretary, a post that he held until Marvell was elected for Parliament in 1660. He held office during Cromwell’s government and represented Hull during the Restoration period. Holding a very publicised position of power during a time of tremendous political turmoil and upheaval almost led Marvell away from publication for good. Nothing escaped his satirical eye; he criticised both the court and parliament. If certain poems, such as ‘Tom May’s Death’, had been published in his lifetime, Marvell would’ve been extremely unpopular with royalists and republicans.

He died rather suddenly in 1678 due to a fever, and many of his works were published in the following three years after his death. A woman of the name Mary Palmer, Marvell’s housekeeper, had claimed to be his wife, apparently, in order to keep his small estate from the creditors of his business partners.

Marvell’s style has been described as “more than a technical accomplishment; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace”. One of his most famous poems, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, fits the conventions of metaphysical poetry with the combination of an old poetic conceit with Marvell’s typically vibrant imagery and easy command of rhyming couplets. Other works of his include topical satire and religious themes.

'To His Coy Mistress'

Had we but world enough and time, 

This coyness, lady, were no crime. 

We would sit down, and think which way 

To walk, and pass our long love’s day. 

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side 

Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide 

Of Humber would complain. I would 

Love you ten years before the flood, 

And you should, if you please, refuse 

Till the conversion of the Jews. 

My vegetable love should grow 

Vaster than empires and more slow; 

An hundred years should go to praise 

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; 

Two hundred to adore each breast, 

But thirty thousand to the rest; 

An age at least to every part, 

And the last age should show your heart. 

For, lady, you deserve this state, 

Nor would I love at lower rate. 

       But at my back I always hear 

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; 

And yonder all before us lie 

Deserts of vast eternity. 

Thy beauty shall no more be found; 

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound 

My echoing song; then worms shall try 

That long-preserved virginity, 

And your quaint honour turn to dust, 

And into ashes all my lust; 

The grave’s a fine and private place, 

But none, I think, do there embrace. 

       Now therefore, while the youthful hue 

Sits on thy skin like morning dew, 

And while thy willing soul transpires 

At every pore with instant fires, 

Now let us sport us while we may, 

And now, like amorous birds of prey, 

Rather at once our time devour 

Than languish in his slow-chapped power. 

Let us roll all our strength and all 

Our sweetness up into one ball, 

And tear our pleasures with rough strife 

Through the iron gates of life: 

Thus, though we cannot make our sun 

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Hi Ladies,

Please find a digital copy of the curriculum overview we discussed in class. Familiarise yourself with the set texts and components for each half term.

Miss R

Term	Miss Roden	Miss Willson
Autumn 1	Unseen poetry: Ø  Diachronic approach to poetic movements/contextualisation. Ø  Subject terminology: poetic forms/conventions. Ø  Homework: tasks set on Blogger. Ø  Key critical text: On Poetry by Glyn Maxwell.	Unseen prose:   Ø  Diachronic approach to Literary movements. Ø  Subject terminology: literary analysis. Ø  Homework: analysis of extracts.
Autumn 2	Text: Othello Ø  Understanding the conventions of drama. Ø  Shakespeare’s place within the canon. Ø  New Historicist literary approach to the play. Ø  Close textual analysis. Ø  Homework: essays to be individually and collaboratively planned on Blogger.	Text: The Great Gatsby   Ø  The conventions of modernist literature. Ø  Context: The Jazz Age/post war literature & culture. Ø  Close textual analysis. Ø  Strategies for synthesis. Ø  Homework: essays.
Spring 1	Texts: The Handmaid’s Tale & Feminine Gospels Ø  Targeted intervention for Othello. Ø  Introduction to dystopian literature. Ø  Cultural context: America in the 1980s. Ø  Critical approaches: feminism/postmodernism/new historicism. Ø  Comparative analysis/synthesis of the two texts. Ø  Homework: poetic analysis/ essay planning.	Text: A Streetcar Named Desire   Ø  Conventions of contemporary Drama Ø  Social and historical context Ø  Character analysis/exploration of themes. Ø  Critical approaches: gender studies/new historicism. Ø  Homework: essay practice.
Spring 2	Continuation of Spring 1	Continuation of Spring 1
Summer 1	Text: Frankenstein (selected students) Ø  Social and historical context of 18th / 19th Century. Ø  Conventions of Gothic literature and associated terminology. Ø  Literary allusion and intertextuality.	Text: Dracula Ø  Social and historical context of 19th Century. Ø  Conventions of Gothic literature and associated terminology. Ø  Literary allusion and intertextuality.
Summer 2	Academic essay writing workshops. Drafting NEA.	Meeting the assessment objectives workshops. Drafting NEA.

George Herbert Bio - Francesca

George Herbert Biography

(3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633)

Born in Wales, George Herbert is recognised as ‘one of the foremost British devotional lyricists’ as well as being an Anglican priest. He received a good education that led to his holding prominent positions at Cambridge University and Parliament. As a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert excelled in languages and music. He went to college with the intention of becoming a priest, but his scholarship attracted the attention of King James I. Herbert then served in Parliament for two years. After the death of King James and at the urging of a friend, Herbert's interest in the divine was renewed.

In his late thirties he gave up his secular ambitions and took holy orders in the Church of England for the rest of his life. His background in the church had a huge impact on the themes of his metaphysical poetry as he wrote religious poems characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery and conceits that were so key to the metaphysical school of poets. Many of his poems have intricate rhyme schemes, and variations of lines within stanzas described as 'a cascade of form floats through the temple'. He explores the architecture of faith and his complex relationship with God through his poems and shares a tone of desperation similar to Donne’s, but instead of striving for a physical unification with a lover, pursues unification with the Divine despite his imperfect physical. Herbert himself, in a letter to Nicholas Ferrar, said of his writings, "they are a picture of spiritual conflicts between God and my soul before I could subject my will to Jesus, my Master".

Herbert's poetry has also been set to music by several composers, one of them being Ralph Vaughan Williams.

 

The Altar

A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

This poem is what’s called a ‘pattern poem’ in which the words of the poem itself form a shape suggesting an altar, and this altar becomes his conceit for how one should offer himself as a sacrifice to the Lord. As mentioned earlier, it can be said that Herbert's poems are actually a record of his own devotional life. Thus the altar metaphor should provide insight to his personal relationship with God.

Some of George Herbert’s other works:

The Church Porch

The Sacrifice

The Windows

Easter Wings

Paradise

John Donne Biography by Jess

John Donne Biography

22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631

Donne was born in London in 1572 into a Catholic family at a time when Catholicism was illegal. He studied at both Oxford and Cambridge but could not graduate because of his faith. After university he became a soldier and fought on the continent and then returned to a promising civil service career. But Donne effectively stalled his own career when he secretly married his employer's teenage niece, Anne More. Her uncle was furious and had him arrested. Though he was later released from prison, he found it hard to find employment, and over the coming years he would be unable to support his increasingly large family without charitable help.

When King James I came to power, Donne converted to Church of England and moved towards religious poetry, writing prose attacking the Catholic faith. In 1615, in a final change of fortune, Donne took holy orders and rose quickly in his profession to become the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. Towards the end of his life he wrote the famous Holy Sonnet X (Death). He died in 1631, and his work was never published in his lifetime.

He is considered the fulcrum of the metaphysical poets and poetry. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms are a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.

A range of John Donne’s poetry are:

The Flea (shown below) 

Death

Good Morrow

A Vediction: Forbidding Mourning  

La Corona

Nativity

Fall Of A Wall  

The Flea 
by John Donne

 MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee, 
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

Hello Lit Lasses,
Link to the podcast can be found below. Your biography of a Metaphysical poet, including one of their poems and a brief examination of how it demonstrates the characteristics of the movement, is due next Tuesday.

Remember, the earlier you do it, the more smug you will feel. But don't get too conceited (get it? Conceit(ed). No? Maybe I won't go into stand up)😊

Miss R

http://lol.lynx.net.ru/index.php?q=uuggc%3A%2F%2Fjjj.oop.pb.hx%2Fcebtenzzrf%2Fo00podud%23cynl