Summary and Critical Appreciation of Astrophel and Stella

         Astrophel and Stella is a series of sonnets written by Sir Phillip Sidney. It was published around the 1580s. The sonnets are a series of love poems between the man Astrophel and his star, Stella. Astrophel has fallen in love with Stella. Many of the sonnets are speeches delivered to Stella. We learn a lot about the internal world of Astrophel but little about Stella, aside from a few clues in her actions and reactions to the speeches.

For the first thirty sonnets or so, Stella does not return Astrophel’s love, but does not snub his affections either. She tries to be kind, or at least he believes that she is. Eventually, she marries another man. This does not deter Astrophel, but rather makes Stella more attractive because her marriage is an unhappy one, and he admires her sacrifice.

She does eventually return his affection, but she is never overcome by it. Astrophel, on the other hand, is increasingly more in love and tries to convince her to make love to him despite her vows. He even steals a kiss from her while she is sleeping. She realises that even though she loves him, she cannot continue the affair. Because Astrophel will need to consummate his passion, she ends the affair before any improper behaviour can happen.

We know that approximately the first thirty sonnets were written while Sidney’s real love, Penelope, was still unmarried and he was still at court. She never gave Sidney any overt encouragement, but just like Stella, never snubbed his affections. These thirty sonnets most likely comprise a year altogether as Sidney left the court, visited his sister’s estate, saw “Stella” at the mutual family’s house, and then returned to court.

Sidney discovers her marriage to Lord Rich somewhere between sonnets thirty-one and thirty-three. They were engaged to be married in their childhood, but this was broken off. Penelope’s marriage does not make her happy, a thing Sidney notes, but this does not diminish his passion for her. Rather, her selfless dedication to a marriage that brings her no satisfaction is something that Sidney admires and finds attractive.

He is often jealous of Lord Rich’s access to her, though he knows that she is not happy. He does not feel that her husband can appreciate her, and so he vows to win her heart. Around the sixtieth sonnet, she begins to return his love, but only platonically. She is unwilling to risk her reputation and her husband, and so tells Astrophel that the only way she will return his love is if they never consummate it.

He is content with this for a while, but as his passion grows deeper, we see his behaviour change. He cannot help but want to be with her physically, and this desire overrides his rational behaviour. He steals a kiss while she is sleeping, and this begins the downfall of their affair. She is incredibly angry that he broke her trust; the sonnet describes it as a sort of rape.

She pulls away, and her absence torments him. It takes a toll on him, and he loves her more deeply than ever. Around sonnet ninety-three, he admits to having wronged her, and his guilt and sorrow are overwhelming in the next few sonnets.

We do not have much detail, other than the kiss, for why he feels this way, but he makes it clear that the relationship is doomed forever. She falls ill, and he serenades her under her window to make her feel better. It has the opposite effect. She is so angry that he would continue to pursue her even after she has asked him not to, that she ends the relationship entirely. At the end of the series, he is alone and isolated. He retains some measure of happiness, despite how things turned out, knowing that his love for Stella is genuine and that she once loved him in return.

Sidney mimics a rhyme scheme from a famous poem by Petrarch to tell the story of his love. Just as Stella torments Astrophel, so was Petrarch tormented by his own love, a love that also causes him much joy. He touches on themes of love versus reason, as well as the conflicting desires of purity and desire.

It is clear that although Astrophel’s love for Stella was fruitless and ended, it brought him an enormous amount of joy as well. He remains happy that Stella once loved him. His inability to keep his love chaste ends their relationship, a point he makes in the sonnet after he steals a kiss. Love, for Astrophel, is something that cannot be contained, though he tries for a long time to keep Stella in his life.

Sidney introduced a new style of poetry into England during the Renaissance, changing the way literature was produced. In the end, he understands that although reason is well and good, he is happier having loved Stella with abandon and knowing that she once loved him as well.

Emily Dickinson as a poetess

         Almost unknown as a poet in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson is now recognised as one of America's greatest poets and, in the view of some, as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. The past fifty years or so have seen an outpouring of books and essays attempting to explain her poetry and her life. Some critics have used her life to try to explain her poetry, and others have tried to explain her life by referring to her poems, which they assume are autobiographical. The large number of poems she wrote (over 1700) makes it easy for critics to find support for their theories. And the fact that her life, her poems, and her letters are often difficult, if not impossible to understand, invites speculation.

Emily Dickinson's poetry speaks powerfully to us. It captures her insights and recreates meaningful events in living; it helps us to understand and even to re-live our own experiences through her intensity and with her emotional and intellectual clarity. Like John Keats, Emily Dickinson is a passionate poet. Though she lived in seclusion, she lived a passionate life. Within the confines of the family home, the garden, and her circle of family and friends, she felt with her whole heart, thought with intensity, and imagined with ardour, and she shared herself in her poetry and in her letters. She wrote of her life, "I find ecstasy in living, the mere sense of living is joy enough"

Writing poetry may have served Dickinson as a way of releasing or escaping from pain--from the deaths of loved ones, from her inability to resolve her doubts about God, from the terrors, however faint, which she saw within herself, in others, and in the world outside yet nearby. To say that she may have sublimated her pain into poetry does not invalidate her view of the power of poetry; both may be true and exist at the same time. 

In her poems, Dickinson adopts a variety of personas, including a little girl, a queen, a bride, a bridegroom, a wife, a dying woman, a nun, a boy, and a bee. Though nearly 150 of her poems begin with "I," the speaker is probably fictional, and the poem should not automatically be read as autobiography. Dickinson insisted on the distinction between her poetry and her life: "When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse, it does not mean me--but a supposed person."

His poems are not easy: there is no logical thought that binds them, some construct or system; crowded with images that are often private conventions of the artist — such as the Circumference -, or seem to be thrown into the void, about elements of his everyday life, almost impossible to clarify. In her, everything is a metaphor, never usual; it is not possible to resort to a tradition to interpret and understand them. Emily was referring only to herself, and her attention is directed more and more towards herself as the years go by.

To penetrate the meaning of her poetry, it is necessary to purify oneself from the layers of linguistic, social, personal and cultural prejudices and customs, to renounce the usual ways of thinking, to open up to the possible and immerse oneself with the being in what she says. Suddenly, an image takes shape and illustrates the meaning. It is often destabilising, it is necessary to go back to the origins of thought, proceed by associations, and rely on intuition to understand it; at the same time, one is overwhelmed by strong feelings, by recognitions and similarities that seem to echo in the infinity of the collective and archetypal subconscious.

Emily indirectly expresses the mystery that she sees and hears, but that human language is unable to express. She has no other way; she faces it by getting as close as possible to the truth, and, like Icarus, she burns the wings of inspiration, yielding to the mystical vision. Proceeding over the years, her compositions become more and more elliptical, sparse, and little remains to be said about the ineffable. Punctuation is also at the service of this language of the unspeakable, like the hyphen that replaces a meaning that cannot be said, or pauses, asks for silence, to put words and images in order, place them and better understand their meaning.

Themes in the poems of Emily Dickinson

 

In the modern poetic world of America Emily Dickinson plays a significant role which makes her different from contemporary modern poets. Her poems question the nature of death and immortality. She is remembered for her unique poetry. She writes from life experience and her deepest thoughts and for herself as a way of letting out her feelings. She as a poet deals with various themes such as nature, love, pain and sufferings, death and immortality, God and religion, artistic philosophy, universality and so on. Thus the range of themes in her poetry is very wide. Actually she goes through the depth of humane psyche to the profundity of nature.

Emily feels the necessity and profundity of nature. It plays an important role to make her poetic theme glorious and age-worthy. To her nature is extremely harmonious. It is an image of human. She considers nature as the gentlest mother as she finds mother like love amidst nature. Nature is the source of joy and beauty, the beauty of that nature holds up is in the beholders' perspective.

Emily Dickinson’s treatment of love shows her as a representative figure in the field of love and emotion. Her love poems are psychological as well as autobiographical. Love is a mystic life force it should be free from voluptuousness. Her poems run the range from renunciation to professions of love to sexual passion; they are generally intense.

"If you were coming in the fall"

"I cannot live with you"

"I early took my dog"

"Wild nights! Wild nights!"

Death is one of the foremost themes in Dickinson’s poetry. No two poems have exactly the same understanding of death, however. Death is sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing, sometimes simply inevitable. In “Because I could not stop for Death –,“ she personifies death, and presents the process of dying as simply the realization that there is eternal life. Death is personified in many guises in her poems, ranging from a suitor to a tyrant. Her attitude is ambivalent; death is a terror to be feared and avoided, a trick played on humanity by God, a welcome relief, and a blessed way to heaven. Immortality is often related to death.

Immortality have covered an important place in her poetic world. Emily Dickinson says death functions as a connecting link between life and immortality. The conventional idea of immortality, with its insistence upon splendour and a majestic transformation, is in her poem uniquely reworked to present her belief in the reality of the soul after death.  

The theme of pain and sufferings is also an organic part of her poetic theme. Actually, Emily Dickinson is a poet of universal grief whose poetic feelings goes on with the stream of eternal sufferings. Pain plays a necessary role in human life. The amount of pain we experience generally exceeds the joy or other positive value contrasted with pain. Pain earns us purer moments of ecstasy and makes joy more vital. The pain of loss or of lacking/not having enhances our appreciation of victory, success, etc.; the pain of separation indicates the degree of our desire for union, whether with another human being or God.

 Man's relationship to God and nature is concerned throughout Dickinson's life. Her attitude toward God in her poems ranges from friendliness to anger and bitterness, and He is at times indifferent, at other times cruel. Emily Dickinson transcends her poetic range to make her immortal and universal. Her universe is the universe of all people. Her poetry shows her personal confession through better experience. We can call her greatest as a modern poet. Emily Dickinson is totally a perfect poet who expresses her deepest thoughts under the guise of various themes.

The Battle of the Books

         The Battle of the Books is a satirical essay by Jonathan Swift, the renowned author of Gulliver's Travels. Published in 1704, it presents a fictional debate between books and authors and provides a witty critique of the ongoing literary controversies of Swift's time. Through clever allegory and sharp humour, Swift explores the value and merits of ancient and modern literature, ultimately questioning the importance of intellectual debates in society.

The theme of the work deals with the wide-ranging dispute between the Ancients and Moderns, which divided scholars in seventeenth-century France. The quarrel becomes significant when Sir William Temple wrote an essay on the comparative merits of ‘Ancient and Modern learning’. Temple was in support of the Ancients, and Swift composed the Battle of the Books to promote him. The controversy between the Ancients and Moderns is put forward in the form of a fictional battle between the two sets of books existing in the library at St. James’s Palace. The battle starts from a request by the Moderns that the Ancients shall withdraw the higher of the two peaks of Parnassus, which they have occupied. The books that are supporters of the moderns take up the matter, but before the battle was to be started, there occurs a dispute between a spider living in the corner of the library and a bee blundering into the spider’s web. According to Aesop, the quarrel between the spider and the bee is symbolic of the contention between the Moderns and the Ancients. For him, the spider represents the Moderns who spin their scholastic lore out of their own bowels, and the bee represents the Ancients who go to nature for their honey.

This essay deals with five incidents. The first of the five incidents forms the main body of the satire. This incident deals with the dispute between the ancients and the moderns for the right to live on the highest peak of Parnassus. This has been treated in an allegorical manner. The second part of this incident takes a serious turn. In a corner of the St. James Library, the battle among the books takes place. This incident has been treated in a mock-heroic manner.

     The second incident concerns the episode of the spider and the bee. The spider is the symbol of the moderns, and the bee represents the ancients. With the help of this fable, Swift wants to say that like spiders, the moderns put forth dirt. Like bees, the ancients spread honey and sweetness. Thus, here Swift has proved the superiority of the ancients. Later on, the satirist presents the picture of the battlefield. Both groups stand against each other. The battle starts. These groups use all sorts of weapons. On the one side, there are Pollas, Homer, Pindar, Euclid, Aristotle and Plato. Bacon, Dryden and some others are on the other side. At last, the ancients won the battle.

    Thus, ‘The Battle of the Books’ is full of criticism and satire. But it is rarely bitter. It is fluent and witty. Swift has regarded the moderns as spiders and the ancients as bees.

 

Character Sketch of Blanche

     Blanche’s character in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is defined by her complex relationship with truth. Torn between reality and illusion, Blanche’s struggle to confront her truths reveals her vulnerability and humanity. Her tragic downfall is rooted in her inability to reconcile her idealised self-image with the harsh realities of her past and present.

Blanche’s truth is complex, encompassing her personal history, desires, and fears. Her arrival at the Kowalski household marks the beginning of her unravelling, as her carefully constructed facade begins to crumble. The loss of Belle Reve, the death of her young husband, and her subsequent promiscuity form the backdrop of Blanche’s descent into self-delusion. Her interactions with Stanley and Mitch expose the fragility of her illusions, as she struggles to maintain her dignity in the face of scrutiny. Blanche’s confession about her husband’s suicide, “He was in the quicksands and clutching at me,” offers a rare glimpse into her vulnerability and guilt.

The play’s exploration of Blanche’s truth extends to her relationship with desire. Blanche’s infamous line, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” encapsulates her reliance on others to validate her existence. Her dependency on male attention, however, reflects a deeper truth about her insecurities and need for acceptance. Blanche’s pursuit of Mitch, for instance, is driven by her desire for stability and redemption, even as her past threatens to derail her efforts.

The portrayal of Blanche’s truth is both sympathetic and critical. Her illusions are depicted as both a defence mechanism and a source of self-destruction. The climactic revelation of her past by Stanley marks the ultimate confrontation between truth and illusion, leading to Blanche’s mental collapse. Her institutionalisation at the play’s end underscores the devastating consequences of her inability to reconcile her truths with her illusions.

In conclusion, Blanche’s character represents the tragic consequences of living in denial of one’s truth. Her fragile illusions provide a temporary escape but ultimately fail to shield her from reality’s harshness. Through Blanche’s journey, Tennessee Williams poignantly examines the complexities of human vulnerability and the fine line between self-preservation and self-destruction. Blanche’s downfall serves as a powerful reminder of the dangers of avoiding one’s truth and the inevitability of reality’s triumph over illusion.

The Streetcar Named Desire: Critical Appreciation

     This powerful play explores themes like desire, loss, and the struggle between reality and illusion. Set in New Orleans after World War II, it tells the story of Blanche, a fragile woman who comes to live with her sister Stella and Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski. Blanche’s arrival creates tension in the household as her refined manners clash with Stanley’s rough and aggressive nature.

The play highlights the contrast between Blanche’s dreamlike world and Stanley’s harsh reality, showing how these opposing forces impact the characters’ lives. Williams uses the setting, characters, and dialogue to show the time's changing social and cultural dynamics. With its rich characters and emotional depth, A Streetcar Named Desire remains a classic that captures the complexities of human relationships and the struggles people face in a changing world.

One of the central themes of A Streetcar Named Desire is the struggle between reality and illusion, embodied primarily by Blanche. She is a character who constructs a fragile world of illusions to escape the harsh realities of her life. Her descent into mental instability reflects her inability to reconcile her past and present. Blanche’s lies about her age, her social status, and her relationships demonstrate her desperate attempts to cling to a romanticised vision of herself.

Scholars argue that Blanche’s illusions represent a broader commentary on the human tendency to avoid unpleasant truths. In contrast, Stanley Kowalski’s blunt and unapologetic approach to life represents a harsh reality. The inevitable clash between these two perspectives leads to Blanche’s psychological breakdown.

The title of the play itself suggests the centrality of desire as a driving force in the characters’ lives. Desire is depicted as a primal and often destructive force. Blanche’s previous life was marked by scandalous relationships that tarnished her reputation. Her arrival in New Orleans signifies her attempt to escape her past, but her actions with Mitch and her behaviour reveal that she is still driven by an uncontrollable yearning for validation and intimacy.

Stanley and Stella’s relationship is also rooted in physical desire, which serves as both a connection and a source of conflict. Stella’s attraction to Stanley’s raw masculinity often blinds her to his abusive tendencies. As critic Arthur Ganz states, “Williams portrays desire not as a romantic ideal but as an elemental force that binds and destroys.”

The play explores gender roles and power dynamics, particularly in the post-war American South. Stanley’s domineering and aggressive behaviour reflects traditional patriarchal values, while Blanche’s genteel demeanour represents outdated Southern ideals of femininity. The power struggle between these characters highlights the shifting societal roles of men and women.

Stanley’s assertion of dominance—physically, emotionally, and sexually—underscores his control over Stella and ultimately over Blanche. Meanwhile, Blanche’s attempts to assert her influence through manipulation and charm ultimately fail in the face of Stanley’s brute force. Feminist critics have noted that Blanche’s downfall symbolises the diminished power of women in a male-dominated society.

Class conflict is another prominent theme in the play, reflecting the economic and cultural shifts of mid-20th-century America. Blanche’s aristocratic background clashes with Stanley’s working-class ethos. The tension between them symbolises the decline of the old Southern aristocracy and the rise of a more egalitarian, industrial society.

Blanche’s disdain for Stanley’s coarse manners and her nostalgia for Belle Reve represent her longing for a bygone era. In contrast, Stanley’s disdain for Blanche’s pretensions reflects his rejection of class-based hierarchies. According to scholar Nancy Tischler, “The play’s class conflict is a microcosm of America’s broader social and economic transformation.”

Identity is a recurring theme, with characters struggling to define and maintain their sense of self. Blanche’s identity is particularly fragile, as she constantly reinvents herself to fit her desired image. Her attempts to mask her age, her financial struggles, and her tarnished reputation reveal her insecurity and dependence on others’ perceptions.

A Streetcar Named Desire is often classified as a modern tragedy, with Blanche as its tragic heroine. Her flaws—including her inability to adapt to changing social norms and her reliance on illusions—ultimately lead to her downfall. Williams’ use of tragic elements evokes both pity and fear, making Blanche a deeply sympathetic character despite her flaws.

Loneliness pervades the lives of the characters, particularly Blanche. Her alienation from society and her estrangement from her family leave her yearning for connection. Even Stanley, despite his domineering presence, reveals moments of vulnerability that suggest an underlying loneliness.

The play also critiques the American Dream, particularly through the character of Stanley. While Stanley embodies the promise of upward mobility and self-made success, his crude behaviour and lack of moral restraint undermine the ideal. Blanche’s downfall reflects the disillusionment of those who fail to achieve the dream. As critic Philip C. Kolin suggests, “Williams exposes the darker side of the American Dream, where ambition and desire often lead to exploitation and despair.”

Addison as an Essayist

 

Saintsburry refers to the age of Addison as the peace of the Augustans. It was in reality an era of tensions, tensions between the puritans and the courtly upper classes, and fierce political and civil strife. Unity and sanity were the urgent need of the hour and it was the mission of the Addison as a social reformer to bring about this sanity, the much needed order out of disorder, peace and harmony out of social strife. Court hope rightly calls Addison a great conciliator and David Daiches justly calls him a mediator between town and country, between landed gentry and prosperous citizens. It was the weapon of light ridicule against all aberrations from good breeding and

Common sense that Addison used: 1. To restore sanity  2. To reconcile parties  3. To found a sound public opinion and standard of judgment

It has been well establish that Addison and Steele aimed at social and moral reformation of the society in which they lived and moved. Addison avowed purpose and writing for the spectator was moral and ethical. But he also wanted to divert or amuse his readers. Addison so planned his essays as to make their instruction. Agreeable and their diversion useful to enliven morality with wit and to temper wit with morality. He tried to proof that there was much good both in the puritan and the gentleman. He showed the courtiers, in a form of light literature which pleased their imagination, and with a grace and charm of manner that they were well qualified to appreciate, that true religion was not opposed to good breeding.

The refined upper classes were immoral, while the virtuous middle classes under puritan influence were fanatical. The puritans apposed all amusement as immoral and every gentle person for them was a veritable devil the very embodiment of immorality. Although Addison, in writing for the famous periodical which had been started by Steele called himself early a spectator, yet his real object was to play the role of a critic of the life and manners of his times. He set out to be a mild censor of the morals of the age and most of his compositions deal with topical subjects- fashions, head-dresses, practical jokes, indecency in conversation, gambling, drinking, swearing, cruelty, dwelling etc. he attacked the trivialities of life, and the follies and foibles of dress, of manners, or of thought. His aim in his own words was to point out those vices which are too trivial for the chastiment of the law, and too fantastical for the cognizance of the pulpit. He was, therefore, an avowed social reformer but he had no desire to denounce or castigate the fools and the vicious people.

The very plan of the spectator club is intended to present to the readers a cross- section of English society. Every member of the club is a representative of a profession or trade or class of society. Thus sir Roger, a typical country squire of the old feudal order, represents country life, the Templers represents the legal, art and learning, captain sentry, the military. The spectator himself is an impartial observer of men and manners and he sees and records practically every aspect of life of the times.

The essay in the spectator covers a wide diversity of subjects. They are a faithful reflection of the life of the time viewed with an aloof and dispassionate observation. Addison stated his essentially moral intension when he declared his purpose of bringing philosophy out of closest and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables in coffee-houses.

It is chiefly through the character of Sir Roger that country life and country manners have been portrayed. In the old ideas of feudalism still persist. Through such papers as Sir Roger at home, Sir Roger at church, moll white every aspect of country life has been vividly represented. Many old ways of thinking still survive.

There are none to home; this paper will be more useful than to the female world, wrote Addison to the interest of the fair sex. Became one of the invariable convention of the periodical essay and there can be little doubt that the essays did much to improve the status and education of women. Here Steele is a better moralist than his collaborator.

Similarly he harmonized the code of wit and pleasure with that of virtue and religion, in the realm of art and literature. His penetrating wit, founded on truth and reason, was appreciated by the fashionable world. In all these aspects Addison is the voice of humanized Puritanism, the voice of a new and civilized urban life. He emphasized virtue but never went to the extreme of condemning all pleasure.

A similarly humanizing or civilizing role did Addison play in the realm of politics as well. He thus made a useful plea for moderation and tolerance for more civilized and human standards of conduct. Addison did not fail to exert a humanizing influence on the fierceness of party violence in his day.

The spectator is important also in so far as it established the essays as an honoured of literature. At least in the first half of the 18th century it became the dominant form. The spectator is important, next, as marking a definite stage in the evolution of the English novel. The essay series dealing with sir roger brings us with in measurable distance of the genuine 18th century novel. Finally, the spectator did a great service to English prose. It represents in this matter the indispensable 18th century. It was Addison who more than anyone else, invented, middle style something between the grave stately diction of formal writing and the free and easy speech of everyday, a style suited therefore, for addressing a wide circle of readers on a wide varieties of subject, un pretentious admirably clear dignified but never stilled Mr. Spectator and sir. Roger exchange visits and in this way the good and the admirable, as well as the eccentric and the frivolous, both in the town and the country are revealed. Thus the important of the work cannot be exaggerated. He laid down rational standards of conduct and formed sound public opinion.