Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Love poetry, English'

This study focuses on the praeceptor amoris, or teacher of love, as that persona appears in English poetry between 1500 and 1660. Some attention is given to the background, especially Ovid and his Art of Love. A study of the medieval praeceptor indicates that ideas of love took three main courses: a bawdy strain most evident in Goliardic verse and later in the libertine poetry of Donne and the Cavaliers; a short-lived strain of mutual affection important in England principally with Spenser; and the love known as courtly love, which is traced to England through Dante and Petrarch and which is the subject of most English love poetry. In England, the praeceptor is examined according to three functions he performs: defining love, propounding a philosophy about it, and giving advice. Through examining the praeceptor, poets are seen to define love according to the division between body and soul, with the tendency to return to older definitions in force since the troubadours. The poets as a group never agree what love is. Philosophies given by the praeceptor follow the same division and are physically or spiritually oriented. The rise and fall of Platonism in English poetry is examined through the praeceptor amoris who teaches it, as is the rise of libertinism. Shakespeare and Donne are seen to have attempted a reconciliation of the physical and spiritual. Advice, the major function of the praeceptor, is widely variegated. It includes moral suasion, advice on how to court, how to start an affair, how to maintain one, how to end one, and how to cure oneself of love. Advice also includes warnings. The study concludes that English poets stayed with older ideas of love but added new dimensions to the praeceptor amoris, such as adding definition and philosophical discussion to what Ovid had done. They also added to the use of persona as speaker, particularly with Donne's dramatic monologues.

The scarcity of speech in George Meredith’s Modern Love creates a deeply psychological narrative, reflecting a distrust of speech and the effectiveness of language in general. The narrator of the poem exists in a space of ambiguity, both blaming and yearning for speech; in his confusion, he remains largely silent. His silence does not only emphasize the distance between husband and wife but also between language and meaning. Furthermore, the narrator’s distrust of language ultimately exposes a breakdown in his certainty of self and truth.

Many of these poems deal with childhood, love, art, and the search for meaning. Most of the poems have a female voice that is hopeful and acceptant. The format of the thesis goes from adulthood to childhood and works as a return to the familial.

This study addresses lesser known works of romantic poets John Clare and John Keats--Clare's Child Harold and Keats's poems to Fanny Brawne--which I refer to as their love poems because the works are informed by intense feelings the poets had for women they loved. Although these works have been the brunt of negative criticism because Clare was considered insane at the time of the composition of Child Harold and Keats was accused of using the poems to give vent to his personal sufferings, nonetheless I argue that the love poems are significant for several reasons. They are a reflection of the poets' personal experiences and also demonstrate their remarkable and surprisingly similar creative abilities in the way they use poetry as a means of devising new strategies for dealing with the painful realities of their disturbing lives. And because I feel it is important to understand Clare's and Keats's feelings for the women they love in order to understand their poetry (since the poetry is, after all, based on real life experiences), I provide chapters describing the poets's lives and loves, as well as their poetic processes, to serve as a framework for examining the poems. In the remaining chapters, I show how the poets incorporate highly sophisticated metaphor in attempting to reconcile the apparent conflicts the speakers in their poems are experiencing between their subjective responses to, and their rational assessment of human existence. In the process, the speakers experience various states of emotional upheaval ranging from what I refer to as periods of limbo, purgatory, and paradise, and they create personal thresholds and undergo differing states of self-awareness. In the final chapter I provide a summary of how these different emotional states are metaphorically effected, and then attempt to explain the value of Clare's and Keats's poetic achievements in the poems from a current perspective.

This thesis presents an edition of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, a late Middle English devotional prose text for which no critical edition is currently available. I have transcribed and collated the text from all sixteen extant manuscripts and the 1506 printed edition. An investigation of the errors and variants according to the classical method of textual criticism has yielded little in the way of conclusive results, and it has therefore not proved possible to construct a stemma of manuscripts from the corpus of evidence as it now exists. My edition therefore uses one manuscript (Maidstone MS Museum 6) as a base; I emend the text of Maidstone where necessary, and cite variants from all the other witnesses to show all differences of substance. A full critical apparatus is provided, comprising: the text with variants, textual notes and glossary. The introduction includes a full description of all the manuscripts and the two early printed editions, an outline of the methods of textual criticism applied and their results, and an explanation of the choice of base manuscript; information about the language of the Maidstone manuscript and the date of the text are also provided, as is an outline of my editorial principles. The thesis also contains two appendices. The first of these deals briefly with the twenty-two instances where individual chapters of Contemplations appear in other manuscript compilations; the second discusses the English and Latin prayers which follow the full text in some manuscripts.

ORDINARY MADNESS by MATTHEW ARDEN BYARS Under the Direction of Dr. Beth Gylys ABSTRACT The following document is a brief introduction to- and selection of the poetry I have written in the years directly preceding, during, and directly after my tenure as a student in the doctoral program in creative writing at Georgia State University. The poems contained herein represent the scope of my artistic development in the field of poetry, and are a culmination of my study in the doctoral creative writing program. What growth and/or maturity they display is subjective and is, thus, for the reader to determine. It is my earnest wish that there is pleasurable enjoyment to be found in the poems included in this dissertation. INDEX WORDS: Poetry, Creative writing, Literature, Love, Madness, Life, Death, Experience

These poems trace different manifestations of religion, particularly Christianity in the Bible Belt, and the effect upon families and relationships. Issues of war, death, illness, and sexuality also permeate these lyrical narratives.

What follows is a brief introduction and a selection of the poetry I have composed over the course of my tenure as a student in the Master of Fine Arts program. I would like to think that they represent significant artistic growth. As a result of studying poetry in greater breadth and depth then ever before, the world of poetry has opened up to me, and hopefully my work exhibits that.

Although Andrew Marvell wrote and published relatively little, his poetry collects from the full range of “schools” and idiosyncratic styles present in the seventeenth century: echoes of Herbert, Donne, Milton, Traherne, Herrick, Lovelace, and Jonson, among others, permeate throughout his work. Although much of his imagery seems novel, if not strange, it is clear that Marvell has a deep engagement with several important long-running traditions. His work is conversation with Ovid, Horace, and Theocritus as much as it responds directly to the poets whose lives overlapped with his own. In his engagement with such varied sources, Marvell demonstrates an astounding degree of poetic flexibility. He is a master of imitating voice and style.

Nights in The City Beautiful is a collection of confessional, free verse poems that explores sexual trauma, mental health, the exigencies of marriage, and the complexities of human desire. These interconnected poems are grounded with a braided narrative and tackle taboo themes. In Part 1: Monogamy, the reader journeys into the world of Vincent and Victoria, their profound love, and their anxiety disorders. In Part 2: Polyamory, Victoria gets caught in a love triangle when she meets her publishing coworker, Peter Langley. The book evokes the movement of Romanticism and first-and-second-generation Romantic poets such as William Blake and Lord Byron. Contemporary influences on this collection include Aaron Smith’s Primer, Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography, and Tracy K. Smith’s The Body's Question. Nights in The City Beautiful merges lyricism with narrative, the ethereal with the physical. It is a novella in verse that delves into the boundaries of sexuality, love, and intimacy.

La presente tesis consta de dos partes principales. En la primera se pretende definir y delimitar el concepto de marcador estructural como herramienta de análisis textual aplicada a la traducción poética. Tras una aproximación a la especificidad del texto poético, y tras repasar las principales aportaciones teóricas a la traducción poética, identificamos los marcadores estructurales con los rasgos estilísticos que marcan el armazón semántico del texto.

Posteriormente, se aplica el análisis basado en los marcadores estructurales a 21 poemas de Philip Larkin, seleccionados por temas. El producto práctico de este análisis es la traducción al castellano de cada poema, acompañada de un mapa donde figuran los rasgos que forman la estructura; y el producto teórico una caracterización estilística de la poesía de Larkin, representada en un mapa donde figuran sus principales rasgos estilístico.

También se aporta un esbozo de crítica de la traducción basado en dicha herramienta.
This dissertation consists of two parts. The first one is an attempt to define and delimit the concept of structural marker as a tool of text analysis applied to poetic translation. After dealing with the specificity of the poetic text and re-examining the main theories about poetic translation, structural markers are identified with the stylistic features that mark the semantic frame of the text.

Afterwards, we apply the analysis based on the structural markers to 21 poems by Philip Larkin, put into groups by themes. The practical outcome of this analysis the translation to Spanish of this poems, accompanied with a map where the main structural features can be seen; and the theoretical outcome is a stylistic characterisation of Larkin's poetry, which we represent in a stylistic map.

We also find an outline of translation criticism based in this tool called structural marker.

erica monteiro’s collection, (evol)ution is love spelled backwards, is book of poetry created to give readers a glimpse into the personal politics of a woman of color coming into her own. The selected pieces are written as a journey through the writer’s heart. monteiro creates a mosaic through lyrical prose that is both tangible and illusive. Some of her pieces speak to current contemporary issues as in the poem “goodnight obama”, and others deal strictly with matters of love, as in “the last hurrah”. Each poem is flavored by its own unique brand of language reminiscent of twentieth century urban lyricism. monteiro’s “text speak” and new derivations on old words allow her to style shift between poetic lines, making for a creative blend of both academic and pedestrian imagery and symbolism. (evol)ution is love spelled backwards, is a mix of monteiro’s different voices, balanced to give her readers a unique perspective of her verses.

Ng Pui Lam.
Thesis submitted in: November 2005.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-96).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1
Chapter Chapter 2 --- The Secular-Divine Seduction in Donne's Seductive Poems --- p.16
Chapter Chapter 3 --- The Sexual Elements in Donne's Religious Poems --- p.34
Chapter Chapter 4 --- "Death: “The Worst Enemy""" --- p.61
Conclusion --- p.91
Bibliography --- p.94

This study explores the way in which one circumstance of daily life in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries—the relative scarcity of private space—influenced the literature of courtly love. It presents the argument that because access to spatial privacy was difficult, although desirable, stories of illicit love affairs carried on under these precarious circumstances had a special appeal. In these narratives we can observe a tendency for emotional privacy to be invested in trusted confidants and servants, and for spies and meddling figures to pose a special danger. Both of these character types are frequently shown to have privileged access to private space as well as to private knowledge. The framework for this study is provided by a discussion of the material background to developing ideas of privacy, which argues for a greater resemblance between medieval and modern concepts in this area than has previously been acknowledged. The remainder of the study is concerned with literary examples. Medieval French adaptations of the Ars Amatoria show subtle changes in emphasis which can be attributed to the different status of privacy in the medieval world as compared to Augustan Rome. The Lais of Marie de France, in particular Guigemar, Yonec, Milun, Eliduc and Lanval, are discussed in relation to the concept of the female household, a specific category of private space within the medieval castle. Three of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes—Cligès, Lancelot and Yvain—present significant variations on the theme of love mediated by third parties and flourishing in private space. Five different versions of the Tristan and Isolt story are discussed, showing their consistent preoccupation with the roles played by helping and hindering figures. The study concludes with a consideration of three works by Chaucer. Troilus and Criseyde gives prominent place to the most fully developed example of a character who mediates between lovers, Criseyde’s notorious uncle Pandarus, while The Miller’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale both centre on lovers’ quests for privacy, but do so to mock rather than to celebrate the conventions of courtly love.

ABSTRACT In this book-length poem, The Orchard Green And Every Color, the material eye becomes lingual, forging Vision from the consequential glintings of solid light through the many-colored world. Following a notational mode that foregrounds clarity which splits apart at its limits, its language attempts to be astonished before the intelligence of images and the capacity of the mind to move in step with them, even as saying and seeing run in counterpoint to one another at varying speeds in its early sections, concluding in a series of prose poems that move on the thin ice of repeated syntax. This thesis seeks to prove that poems provide more than an example of a world-weary or language-damaged individual consciousness but function as a type of sensory organ for echolocating one’s way through the world.

Since the early years of the Victorian era, Shakespeare's pre-eminence as a dramatist has itself prompted much of the attention paid to his Sonnets, because their celebrated biographical 'hints' suggest knowledge of the 'real life' of this most universal of English creative geniuses. Indeed it was simply the fact that Shakespeare was the author of these poems that induced several influential Victorians to read them at all. Five of the major poets of Victorian England wrote lyric sequences which have suffered a like fate. Tennyson's In Memoriam, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, Christina Rossetti's Manna Innominata, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The ttouse of Life and George Meredith's Modern Love - all of these have been read as autobiography, as thinly disguised, or even transparent, confessions of actual experience.. This dissertation takes the view that poetry must stand on its own, independent of the poets' biographies. It con tends that what makes Shakespeare's sonnets and these Victorian sequences lastingly valuable is the central consciousness of each one, regarded as an artistic creation, not as an autobiographical sketch of the poet. This central consciousness, this poetic protagonist, I call the 'sequence persona'. To demonstrate the presence of a persona proper to each of these five Victorian sequences, I have adopted a quite new critical approach. Chapter I demonstrates the existence in Shakespeare's Sonnets of what I call the Shakespearean persona. This involves close textual analysis of a number of the poems and includes some differentiation of Shakespeare's methods from (vi) those of other Elizabethans such as Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Out of this comes a thesis to the effect that Shakespeare's sonnets are unconventional in their content and language because they cumulatively create an individual rather than a Petrarchan sensibility. Chapter I offers, in itself, a contribution to the study of Shakespeare's Sonnets, but its main purpose in the dissertation is to locate a crucible in which the poetic emotions of the Victorians were refined to produce a new yield of artistic gold. Chapters II-V demonstrate the existence of an equally distinct persona, akin to that of Shakespeare's Sonnets, in each of the named Victorian sequences. I accompany this analysis with, and indeed often conduct it through, a comparison of individual Victorian poems and particular Shakespearean sonnets. The Conclusion codifies, clear of poetic analysis, the usefulness of reading these major nineteenth-century sequences with the Shakespearean model in mind, and suggests that the method adopted in this dissertation might well be used for fresh study of other less unified and less important examples of Vi~torian love poetry.

This thesis concerns silence and confession; the warring impulse in the poetry of Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and D. G. Rossetti between the necessity of concealing love and the desire to confess it. Lovers have always been torn between the desire to keep silent and the desire to express love and poets have long veered between guardedness and effusion. Yet in the work of the three poets with whom this study is concerned we find a reticence mixed with an avowal of love which is peculiarly their own and peculiarly informative about how these poets regarded the relationship o~ poetry to love and the relationship of poet to text. The tension . between silence and confession is evident in both the public and personal lyric sequences of the Pre-Raphaelite poets which are 'told' by the poet-singer and their ballads and longer narratives in which the protagonists, usually women, are given their own voices. These women confess much in words but their bodily signs are sometimes even more important than their speech in conveying the sexual and sociopolitical quandaries in which they find themselves. In their covert manipulations of the traditional forms, structures and techniques of the ballad, romance and epic, the Pre-Raphaelites found a freedom to transgress the accepted boundaries of what could be said about relationships between men and women and in doing so produced radically suggestive poetry. In the first part of this thesis entitled 'Elegies' I examine first-person lyric seq':lences. Two of these are well known sonnet s_equences: Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata and D. G. Rossetti's The House of Life. The other sequences have for various reasons long remained hidden from scrutiny. William Morris's 'Seasonal Lyrics' (verses for the months) are hidden within the morass of The Earthly Paradise. Christina Rossetti's 'By Way of Remembrance' quartet is a long overlooked, starker and darker precursor to both Monna Innominata and her striking sequence of Italian poems posthumously published in Italian by William Michael Rossetti as II Rosseggiar dell' Oriente (the first complete English translation of which is included as Appendix A of this thesis) which is perhaps the most personal and obscure of all the poems treated in this thesis. These sequences along with a body of nominally public lyrics such as those which I have designated Christina Rossetti's 'It' poems, and Morris's fugitive personal lyrics, elegise the death of love whilst celebrating it as the prime human and poetic experience. All three poets experiment with poetry as 'love's last gift'. Christina Rossetti, William Morris, and D. G. Rossetti explore the interconnections between the poetlover and the love poem. The love poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites is a sometimes voluble, sometimes 'silent' discourse about the impact of love and the loss of love on the identity. The lyric sequences rehearse the story of love's loss alternating bursts of agonised protest with announcements of stoical acceptance; whilst the riddling personal lyrics probe the causes of the disintegration of self and at the same time try to reintegrate that self through the 'self' protection of silence and privacy. The second part of this thesis is entitled 'Narratives'. I examine how the male Pre-Raphaelite poet constructs the female lover as a legendary character. In Pre-Raphaelite painting the ideal beloved is a silent, beautiful woman 'subtly of herself contemplative'. In Pre-Raphaelite narrative poetry, particularly balladry, the woman is the lover as well as the beloved and she often articulates her love with passionate precision. In Chapter Four I analyse the psychological studies of women in love found in William Morris's tales of Cupid and Psyche and The Lovers of Gudrun, and I compare the characters of Guenevere as created by William Morris and Alfred Tennyson and Iseult as created by A. C. Swinburne, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold. In the last chapter of this thesis I deal with Pre-Raphaelite sexual fantasy and gender politics in ballads and longer narrative poems. The Pre-Raphaelites gave themselves great poetic latitude by setting their ballads in faery lands forlorn; using the conventions of fantasy, dream and medievalism they wrote poems concerning nuns and maidens, knights and ladies, and sirens and sorcerers which deliver a rare erotic charge. These poems combine a strangled cry of desire with a sometimes brutal modernity of overt symbol- another type of silence and confession at the heart of the articulation of love in Pre-Raphaelite love poetry.

This is an original collection of poems, with an accompanying afterword that discusses poetics, grief, history, tradition, biography, ambulation, process, note-taking, note-keeping, experience, love, and thanks.