Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 23, 2025
Says MITFORD, "It is matter of regret, not indeed that AEschylus was a poet; but that prose-writing was yet in his age so little common that his poetical sketch of this great transaction is the most authoritative, the clearest, and the most consistent of any that has passed to posterity."
Especially in the prose-writing of the period, there were signs of flourishing growth. Gunnar Gunnarsson wrote The Church on the Mountain, and Laxness was becoming known. Laxness has devoted less attention to the writing of plays and poetry than novels and short stories. On the whole, the subject-matter of his stories is extremely varied, equally as regards time, place and human types.
And secondly, as most of our nouns have the article a or the prefixed to them in prose-writing and in conversation, they in general become personified even by the omission of these articles; as in the bold figure of Shipwreck in Miss Seward's Elegy on Capt. Cook: But round the steepy rocks and dangerous strand Rolls the white surf, and SHIPWRECK guards the land.
Literature was shaking itself free from the limits imposed upon it while it lay wholly in the hands of churchmen, and Gerald's writings, the first books of vivacious and popular prose-writing in England, were avowedly composed for "laymen and uneducated princes," and professed to tell "the doings of the people."
And while we wait patiently for this great pleasure, which must sooner or later be enjoyed and appreciated, we may gather a foretaste of Mrs. Browning's power in prose-writing from her early essays, and from the admirable preface to the "Poems before Congress." The latter is simple in its style, and grand in teachings that find few followers among nations in these enlightened days.
But there could be no question that he did attain very interesting and artistic effects, and there happened to be at the time a reaction against what was called "slovenliness" and a demand for careful preparation and planned effect in prose-writing. Even so, however, it was not at once that Stevenson took to fiction.
But to all who study the development of English prose, Shorthouse will have a definite value, as a spontaneous and lonely outcrop of poetical prose-writing in an alien soil; an isolated worker foreshowing in his secluded and graceful talent the rise of a new school in English literature, the appearance of a plant which may be expected in the future, if not in the immediate future, to break into leaf and bloom, into colour and fragrance.
They are arranged neither according to time nor subject, but on an aesthetic plan of their author's, after the fashion of a literary nosegay. As extracts from several have already been given, we need not enlarge on them here. Their language is extremely pure, and almost entirely free from that poetical colouring which is so conspicuous in contemporary and subsequent prose-writing.
But that Godwin's taste and style were by no means impeccable is proved by his elaborate essay on the subject in the Enquirer, where he endeavours to show that the progress of English prose-writing had been one of unbroken improvement since the time of Queen Elizabeth, and pours contempt on passages of Shakespeare and others where more catholic appreciation could not fail to see the beauty.
It is significant that the most admired poem of Keats begins with a sentiment which we should agree to detest in a prose-writing: My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk I contend that as this sentiment would be intolerable in prose, so also it is not to be suffered in poetry.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking