Essays on Literary theory

Introduction For my essay I am going to adopt a formalist approach to Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’. In particular I will be looking into the views of the Russian formalists such as Victor Shlovsky and Alexander Potebnya, and relating their thoughts to the poem. I will then be seeing how the ‘The Thorn’ relates to elements…

The sick roseose The sick rose is a poem by William Blake which has specific characteristics in terms of its form and content. Firstly, we can deduce that it is composed of 3 sentences, from which 2 occupy more than 1 line, and that is called enjambment. In total, the poem has 9 lines organized…

During the Elizabethan age, love sonnets were usually written by men communicating their love for unattainable women and displaying courtly love. However, Spenser’s Petrarchan sonnets from the Amoretti sequence break conventional love poetry in many ways and challenge the usual pessimist look at love to give it a buoyant look. Spenser then sets his own…

In 1846, Edgar A. Poe wrote an essay: The Philosophy of Composition; his intention was to write an account of the deliberate method used when writing his successful poem The Raven. Poe discussed within the first three paragraphs of the essay what he understood as the ‘radical error’ in the usual method of creating a…