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"id": 12513,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/kavishala_logo.png",
"name": "श्रीकृष्ण शर्मा",
"bio": "",
"raw_bio": null,
"slug": "srikrsna-sarma",
"DOB": "1933-09-17",
"DateOfDemise": "2010-09-15",
"location": "आगरा, उत्तर प्रदेश",
"url": "/sootradhar/srikrsna-sarma",
"tags": null,
"created": "2023-09-22T12:17:48.134411",
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{
"id": 12516,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/kavishala_logo.png",
"name": "श्रीजुगलप्रिया",
"bio": "",
"raw_bio": null,
"slug": "srijugalapriya",
"DOB": null,
"DateOfDemise": null,
"location": "nan",
"url": "/sootradhar/srijugalapriya",
"tags": null,
"created": "2023-09-22T12:17:48.151846",
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{
"id": 12522,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/kavishala_logo.png",
"name": "Sripati(श्रीपति)",
"bio": "<p><strong>जन्म:</strong> १०१९ - १०६६<br /><strong>श्रीपति के पिता का नाम नागदेव था (कहीं कहीं 'नामदेव' भी मिलता है) तथा उनके दादा का नाम केशव था। खगोलशास्त्र, ज्योतिष तथा गणित में श्रीपति लल्ल के अनुयायी थे। गणित पर किये गये उनके कार्य खगोल में उपयोग को ध्यान में रखकर किये गये थे। उदाहरण के लिये, गोलों का अध्ययन खगोलिकी में उपयोग को दृष्टिगत रखकर ही किया गया था। खगोलिकी से सम्बन्धित उनके कार्य, उनके ज्योतिष (astrology) के कार्यों को आधार प्रदान करने के लिये किये गये थे।;</strong></p>",
"raw_bio": "जन्म: १०१९ - १०६६ श्रीपति के पिता का नाम नागदेव था (कहीं कहीं 'नामदेव' भी मिलता है) तथा उनके दादा का नाम केशव था। खगोलशास्त्र, ज्योतिष तथा गणित में श्रीपति लल्ल के अनुयायी थे। गणित पर किये गये उनके कार्य खगोल में उपयोग को ध्यान में रखकर किये गये थे। उदाहरण के लिये, गोलों का अध्ययन खगोलिकी में उपयोग को दृष्टिगत रखकर ही किया गया था। खगोलिकी से सम्बन्धित उनके कार्य, उनके ज्योतिष (astrology) के कार्यों को आधार प्रदान करने के लिये किये गये थे।;",
"slug": "sripati",
"DOB": null,
"DateOfDemise": null,
"location": "nan",
"url": "/sootradhar/sripati",
"tags": "",
"created": "2023-09-22T12:17:48.178809",
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{
"id": 12530,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/kavishala_logo.png",
"name": "दूधनाथ सिंह",
"bio": "दूधनाथ सिंह (जन्म:17 अक्टूबर, 1936 एवं निधन 12 जनवरी, 2018) हिन्दी के आलोचक, सम्पादक एवं कथाकार थे। उन्होने अपनी कहानियों के माध्यम से साठोत्तरी भारत के पारिवारिक, सामाजिक, आर्थिक, नैतिक एवं मानसिक सभी क्षेत्रों में उत्पन्न विसंगतियों को चुनौती दी।\r\n\r\nजीवन परिचय\r\nदूधनाथ सिंह का जन्म उत्तर प्रदेश के बलिया जिले के 'सोबन्था' नामक एक छोटे-से गाँव में हुआ था। उन्होने इलाहाबाद विश्वविद्यालय से हिन्दी साहित्य में एम ए किया। कुछ दिनों (1960-62) तक कलकत्ता में अध्यापन किया जिसके बाद फिर इलाहाबाद विश्वविद्यालय के हिन्दी विभाग में अपनी सेवाएँ दी। सेवानिवृति के बाद वह पूरी तरह से लेखन के लिए समर्पित हो गये।",
"raw_bio": "दूधनाथ सिंह (जन्म:17 अक्टूबर, 1936 एवं निधन 12 जनवरी, 2018) हिन्दी के आलोचक, सम्पादक एवं कथाकार थे। उन्होने अपनी कहानियों के माध्यम से साठोत्तरी भारत के पारिवारिक, सामाजिक, आर्थिक, नैतिक एवं मानसिक सभी क्षेत्रों में उत्पन्न विसंगतियों को चुनौती दी।\r \r जीवन परिचय\r दूधनाथ सिंह का जन्म उत्तर प्रदेश के बलिया जिले के 'सोबन्था' नामक एक छोटे-से गाँव में हुआ था। उन्होने इलाहाबाद विश्वविद्यालय से हिन्दी साहित्य में एम ए किया। कुछ दिनों (1960-62) तक कलकत्ता में अध्यापन किया जिसके बाद फिर इलाहाबाद विश्वविद्यालय के हिन्दी विभाग में अपनी सेवाएँ दी। सेवानिवृति के बाद वह पूरी तरह से लेखन के लिए समर्पित हो गये।",
"slug": "_dudhanatha-sinha",
"DOB": "1936-10-17",
"DateOfDemise": "2018-12-01",
"location": null,
"url": "/sootradhar/_dudhanatha-sinha",
"tags": "",
"created": "2023-09-22T15:40:24.875559",
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{
"id": 14294,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/kavishala_logo.png",
"name": "Anna Bhau Sathe",
"bio": "",
"raw_bio": null,
"slug": "anna-bhau-sathe",
"DOB": null,
"DateOfDemise": null,
"location": "Bombay, Maharashtra, India",
"url": "/sootradhar/anna-bhau-sathe",
"tags": null,
"created": "2023-09-22T12:17:48.244529",
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{
"id": 28802,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/kavishala_logo.png",
"name": "आबिद अदीब",
"bio": "आबिद अदीब आबिद अदीब आबिद अदीब",
"raw_bio": "आबिद अदीब आबिद अदीब आबिद अदीब",
"slug": "abida-adiba",
"DOB": null,
"DateOfDemise": null,
"location": null,
"url": "/sootradhar/abida-adiba",
"tags": "",
"created": "2024-02-27T16:40:00.984834",
"is_has_special_post": false,
"is_special_author": false,
"language": null
},
{
"id": 34841,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/kavishala_logo.png",
"name": "Panje Mangesh Rao",
"bio": "Panje Mangesh Rao (1874–1937) was an Indian writer and poet who wrote short stories, essays, poems and children's rhymes in Kannada.He is known as 'kavishishya'. He wrote Huthariya haadu, Naagara haave, Koti chennaya, Gudugudu Gummata Devaru, Maathaado raamappa.\r\nMangesh Rao's ancestors hailed from Panje, now in Dakshina Kannada. He was born on 22 February 1874 to Ramappayya and Seethamma, Chitrapur Saraswat Konkani Brahmins, and had six siblings. After finishing primary schooling, in Bantwal, he had to go to Mangalore to study in high school. His proficiency in Kannada brought him a Kannada translator's job, on a monthly salary of twenty rupees, even before he completed graduation. He married Girijabai and had six children. They took active interest in his literary pursuits and his love of music. Later he completed his B.A. degree and got a teacher's diploma as well. He was also appointed Inspector of schools. In 1934, he was elected President of All India Kannada Conference held at Raichur, then under the Nizam of Hyderabad's rule. At the age of sixty-three, he died of pneumonia in 1937. Distinguished littérateurs such as Masti Venkatesh Iyengar, Shivaram Karanth and Kuvempu had paid rich tribute in moving terms. His Great Grandson is journalist Shiv Aroor.\r\nMangesh Rao is credited with the creation of Navodaya literature in Kannada. He wrote in both Konkani and Kannada. He had worked on drama, poetry, translations and other branches of literature. Among his most famous compositions are Nagarahave! (Snake) a popular children's rhyme taught in primary schools like Mina Mina minuguva nakshatra(Kannada version of twinke twinkle little star. Huttari Hadu (Harvest Song), another famous composition, praises the Kodava people and their land Kodagu. He also helped popularise the Tulu legend, Koti and Chennayya. Tenkanagaliyata (Ode to southern Wind) is yet another popular composition of Mangesh Rao's.",
"raw_bio": "Panje Mangesh Rao (1874–1937) was an Indian writer and poet who wrote short stories, essays, poems and children's rhymes in Kannada.He is known as 'kavishishya'. He wrote Huthariya haadu, Naagara haave, Koti chennaya, Gudugudu Gummata Devaru, Maathaado raamappa.\r Mangesh Rao's ancestors hailed from Panje, now in Dakshina Kannada. He was born on 22 February 1874 to Ramappayya and Seethamma, Chitrapur Saraswat Konkani Brahmins, and had six siblings. After finishing primary schooling, in Bantwal, he had to go to Mangalore to study in high school. His proficiency in Kannada brought him a Kannada translator's job, on a monthly salary of twenty rupees, even before he completed graduation. He married Girijabai and had six children. They took active interest in his literary pursuits and his love of music. Later he completed his B.A. degree and got a teacher's diploma as well. He was also appointed Inspector of schools. In 1934, he was elected President of All India Kannada Conference held at Raichur, then under the Nizam of Hyderabad's rule. At the age of sixty-three, he died of pneumonia in 1937. Distinguished littérateurs such as Masti Venkatesh Iyengar, Shivaram Karanth and Kuvempu had paid rich tribute in moving terms. His Great Grandson is journalist Shiv Aroor.\r Mangesh Rao is credited with the creation of Navodaya literature in Kannada. He wrote in both Konkani and Kannada. He had worked on drama, poetry, translations and other branches of literature. Among his most famous compositions are Nagarahave! (Snake) a popular children's rhyme taught in primary schools like Mina Mina minuguva nakshatra(Kannada version of twinke twinkle little star. Huttari Hadu (Harvest Song), another famous composition, praises the Kodava people and their land Kodagu. He also helped popularise the Tulu legend, Koti and Chennayya. Tenkanagaliyata (Ode to southern Wind) is yet another popular composition of Mangesh Rao's.",
"slug": "panje-mangesh-rao",
"DOB": "1874-02-22",
"DateOfDemise": null,
"location": null,
"url": "/sootradhar/panje-mangesh-rao",
"tags": "",
"created": "2024-12-11T03:27:43.957166",
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},
{
"id": 5,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/sootradhar_author/Sadhguru.jpg",
"name": "Sadhguru",
"bio": "Jaggi Vasudev, generally referred to as Sadhguru, is an Indian yogi and author. In 1992, Vasudev established Isha Foundation, which has been involved in various activities in the field of spirituality, education, and environment.",
"raw_bio": "Jaggi Vasudev, generally referred to as Sadhguru, is an Indian yogi and author. In 1992, Vasudev established Isha Foundation, which has been involved in various activities in the field of spirituality, education, and environment.",
"slug": "sadhguru",
"DOB": null,
"DateOfDemise": null,
"location": null,
"url": "/sootradhar/sadhguru",
"tags": null,
"created": "2023-09-22T12:17:48.318652",
"is_has_special_post": false,
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"language": 2
},
{
"id": 26,
"image": "https://kavishalalab.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/sootradhar_author/William_Shakespeare.jpg",
"name": "William Shakespeare",
"bio": "<p>While William Shakespeare’s reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. With the partial exception of the <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Sonnets </em>(1609), quarried since the early 19th century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditionally been pushed to the margins of the Shakespeare industry. Yet the study of his nondramatic poetry can illuminate Shakespeare’s activities as a poet emphatically of his own age, especially in the period of extraordinary literary ferment in the last ten or twelve years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.</p><p>Shakespeare’s exact birth date remains unknown. He was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564, his mother’s third child, but the first to survive infancy. This has led scholars to conjecture that he was born on April 23rd, given the era’s convention of baptizing newborns on their third day. Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, moved to Stratford in about 1552 and rapidly became a prominent figure in the town’s business and politics. He rose to be bailiff, the highest official in the town, but then in about 1575-1576 his prosperity declined markedly and he withdrew from public life. In 1596, thanks to his son’s success and persistence, he was granted a coat of arms by the College of Arms, and the family moved into New Place, the grandest house in Stratford.</p><p>Speculation that William Shakespeare traveled, worked as a schoolmaster in the country, was a soldier and a law clerk, or embraced or left the Roman Catholic Church continues to fill the gaps left in the sparse records of the so-called lost years. It is conventionally assumed (though attendance registers do not survive) that Shakespeare attended the King’s New School in Stratford, along with others of his social class. At the age of 18, in November 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a local farmer. She was pregnant with Susanna Shakespeare, who was baptized on May 26, 1583. The twins, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, were baptized on February 2, 1585. There were no further children from the union.</p><p>William Shakespeare had probably been working as an actor and writer on the professional stage in London for four or five years when the London theaters were closed by order of the Privy Council on June 23, 1592. The authorities were concerned about a severe outbreak of the plague and alarmed at the possibility of civil unrest (Privy Council minutes refer to “a great disorder and tumult” in Southwark). The initial order suspended playing until Michaelmas and was renewed several times. When the theaters reopened in June 1594, the theatrical companies had been reorganized, and Shakespeare’s career was wholly committed to the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men until 1603, when they were reconstituted as the King’s Men.</p><p>By 1592 Shakespeare already enjoyed sufficient prominence as an author of dramatic scripts to have been the subject of Robert Greene’s attack on the “upstart crow” in <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit</em>. Such renown as he enjoyed, however, was as transitory as the dramatic form. Play scripts, and their authors, were accorded a lowly status in the literary system, and when scripts were published, their link to the theatrical company (rather than to the scriptwriter) was publicized. It was only in 1597 that Shakespeare’s name first appeared on the title page of his plays—<em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Richard II</em> and a revised edition of <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Romeo and Juliet</em>.</p><p>While the London theaters were closed, some actors tried to make a living by touring outside the capital. Shakespeare turned from the business of scriptwriting to the pursuit of art and patronage; unable to pursue his career in the theatrical marketplace, he adopted a more conventional course. Shakespeare’s first publication, <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis </em>(1593), was dedicated to the 18-year-old Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The dedication reveals a frank appeal for patronage, couched in the normal terms of such requests. Shakespeare received the Earl’s patronage and went on to dedicate his next dramatic poem, <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece, </em>to the young lord as well. <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis </em>was printed by Richard Field, a professionally accomplished printer who lived in Stratford. Shakespeare’s choice of printer indicates an ambition to associate himself with unambiguously high-art productions, as does the quotation from Ovid’s <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Amores</em> on the title page: “Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret acqua” (Let worthless stuff excite the admiration of the crowd: as for me, let golden Apollo ply me with full cups from the Castalian spring, that is, the spring of the Muses). Such lofty repudiation of the vulgar was calculated to appeal to the teenage Southampton. It also appealed to a sizable slice of the reading public. In the midst of horror, disease, and death, Shakespeare was offering access to a golden world, showing the delights of applying learning for pleasure rather than pointing out the obvious morals to be drawn from classical authors when faced with awful catastrophe.</p><p>With <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis</em> Shakespeare sought direct aristocratic patronage, but he also entered the marketplace as a professional author. He seems to have enjoyed a degree of success in the first of these objectives, given the more intimate tone of the dedication of <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece</em> to Southampton in the following year. In the second objective, his triumph must have outstripped all expectation. <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis</em> went though 15 editions before 1640; if was first entered in the Stationers’ Register on April 18, 1593. It is a fine and elegantly printed book, consisting of 1,194 lines in 199 six-line stanzas rhymed <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">ababcc</em>. The verse form was a token of social and literary ambition on Shakespeare’s part. Its aristocratic cachet derived from its popularity at court, being favored by several courtier poets, such as <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sir-walter-ralegh\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Sir Walter Ralegh</a>, Sir <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/arthur-gorges\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Arthur Gorges</a>, and <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sir-edward-dyer\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Sir Edward Dyer</a>. <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis</em> is unquestionably a work of its age. In it a young writer courts respectability and patronage. At one level, of course, the poem is a traditional Ovidian fable, locating the origin of the inseparability of love and sorrow in Venus’s reaction to the death of Adonis: “lo here I prophesy, / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend /... all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.” It invokes a mythic past that explains a painful present. Like so many texts of the 1590s, it features an innocent hero, Adonis, who encounters a world in which the precepts he has acquired from his education are tested in the surprising school of experience. His knowledge of love, inevitably, is not firsthand (“I have heard it is a life in death, / That laughs and weeps, and all but with a breath”). There is a staidly academic quality to his repudiation of Venus’s “treatise,” her “idle over-handled theme.</p><p>Shakespeare’s literary and social aspirations are revealed at every turn. In his Petrarchism, for example, he adopts a mode that had become a staple of courtly discourse. Elizabethan politicians figured themselves and their personal and political conditions in Petrarchan terms. The inescapable and enduring frustrations of the courtier’s life were habitually figured via the analogy of the frustrated, confused, but devoted Petrarchan lover. Yet Shakespeare’s approach to this convention typifies the 1590s younger generation’s sense of its incongruity. Lines such as “the love-sick queen began to sweat” are understandably rare in Elizabethan courtly discourse. Power relations expressed through the gendered language of <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/queen-elizabeth-i\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Elizabeth’s</a> eroticized politics are reversed: “Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing / ... Her eyes wooed still, his eyes disdain’d the wooing.” It is Venus who deploys the conventional carpe diem arguments: “Make use of time / ... Fair flowers that are not gath’red in their prime, / Rot, and consume themselves in little time”; she even provides a <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">blason</em> of her own charms: “Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow, / Mine eyes are grey, and bright, and quick in turning.”</p><p>Like most Elizabethan treatments of love, Shakespeare’s work is characterized by paradox (“She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d”), by narrative and thematic diversity, and by attempts to render the inner workings of the mind, exploring the psychology of perception (“Oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled”). The poem addresses such artistic preoccupations of the 1590s as the relation of poetry to painting and the possibility of literary immortality, as well as social concerns such as the phenomenon of “masterless women,” and the (to men) alarming and unknowable forces unleashed by female desire, an issue that for a host of reasons fascinated Elizabeth’s subjects. Indeed, <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis</em> flirts with taboos, as do other successful works of the 1590s, offering readers living in a paranoid, plague-ridden city a fantasy of passionate and fatal physical desire, with Venus leading Adonis “prisoner in a red-rose chain.” In its day it was appreciated as an erotic fantasy glorying in the inversion of established categories and values, with a veneer of learning and the snob appeal of association with a celebrated aristocrat.</p><p>Since the Romantic period the frank sexuality of Shakespeare’s Venus has held less appeal for literary critics and scholars than it had to Elizabethan and Jacobean readers. C.S. Lewis concludes in <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama</em> (1954) that “if the poem is not meant to arouse disgust it was very foolishly written.” In more recent years a combination of feminism, cultural studies, renewed interest in rhetoric, and a return to traditional archival research has begun to reclaim <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis</em> from such prejudice.</p><p>The elevated subject of Shakespeare’s next publication, <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece</em>, suggests that <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis </em>had been well received, <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece</em> comprises 1,855 lines, in 265 stanzas. The stanza (as in <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Complaint of Rosamund</em>) is the seven-line rhyme royal (<em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">ababbcc</em>) immortalized in Chaucer’s <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Troilus and Criseyde</em> (circa 1385) and thereafter considered especially appropriate for tragedy, complaint, and philosophical reflection. In places the narrator explicitly highlights the various rhetorical set pieces (“Here she exclaims against repose and rest”). Lucrece herself comments on her performance after the apostrophes to “comfort-killing Night, image of Hell,” Opportunity, and Time. Elizabethan readers would have appreciated much about the poem, from its plentiful wordplay (“to shun the blot, she would not blot the letter”; “Ere she with blood had stain’d her stain’d excuse”) and verbal dexterity, to the inner debate raging inside Tarquin. Though an exemplary tyrant from ancient history, he also exemplifies the conventional 1590s conflict between willful youthful prodigality and sententious experience (“My part is youth, and beats these from the stage”). The arguments in his “disputation / ‘Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will” are those of the Petrarchan lover: “nothing can affection’s course control,” and “Yet strive I to embrace mine infamy.” But the context of this rhetorical performance is crucial throughout. Unlike <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Venus and Adonis</em>, <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece</em> is not set in a mythical golden age, but in a fallen, violent world. This is particularly apparent in the rhetorical and ultimately physical competition of their debate--contrasting Tarquin’s speeches with Lucrece’s eloquent appeals to his better nature.</p><p>The combination of ancient and contemporary strengthens the political elements in the poem. It demonstrates tyranny in its most intimate form, committing a private outrage that is inescapably public; hence the rape is figured in terms both domestic (as a burglary) and public (as a hunt, a war, a siege). It also reveals the essential violence of many conventional erotic metaphors. Shakespeare draws on the powerful Elizabethan myth of the island nation as a woman: although Tarquin is a Roman, an insider, his journey from the siege of Ardea to Lucrece’s chamber connects the two assaults. His attack figures a society at war with itself, and he himself is shown to be self-divided.” Tyranny, lust, and greed translate the metaphors of Petrarchism into the actuality of rape, which is figured by <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">gradatio</em>, or climax: “What could he see but mightily he noted? / What did he note but strongly he desired?”</p><p>The historically validated interpretation—for Shakespeare’s readers, descendants of Brutus in New Troy—is figured by Brutus, who “pluck’d the knife from Lucrece’s side.” He steps forward, casting off his reputation for folly and improvising a ritual (involving kissing the knife) that transforms grief and outrage at Lucrece’s death into a determination to “publish Tarquin’s foul offense” and change the political system. Brutus emerges from the shadows, reminding the reader that the poem, notwithstanding its powerful speeches and harrowing images, is also remarkable for what is unshown, untold, implicit. Until recently few commentators have taken up the interpretative challenge posed by Brutus. Traditionally <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece </em>has been dismissed as a bookish, pedantic dry run for Shakespeare’s tragedies, in <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/william-empson\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">William Empson</a>‘s phrase, “the Bard doing five-finger exercises,” containing what F.T. Prince in his 1960 edition of the poems dismisses as defective rhetoric in the treatment of an uninteresting story. Many critics have sought to define the poem’s genre, which combines political fable, female complaint, and tragedy within a milieu of self-conscious antiquity. But perhaps the most significant recent developments have been the feminist treatments of the poem, the reawakening interest in rhetoric, and a dawning awareness of the work’s political engagement. <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece</em>, like so many of Shakespeare’s historical tragedies, problematizes the categories of history and myth, of public and private, and exemplifies the bewildering nature of historical parallels. The self-conscious rhetorical display and the examination of representation is daringly politicized, explicitly, if inconclusively, connecting the aesthetic and the erotic with politics both sexual and state. At the time of its publication, <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece</em> was Shakespeare’s most profound meditation on history, particularly on the relations between public role and private morality and on the conjunction of forces—personal, political, social—that creates turning points in human history. In it he indirectly articulates the concerns of his generation and also, perhaps, of his young patron, who was already closely associated with the doomed earl of Essex.</p><p>In 1598 or 1599 the printer William Jaggard brought out an anthology of 20 miscellaneous poems, which he eventually attributed to Shakespeare, though the authorship of all 20 is still disputed. At least five are demonstrably Shakespearean. Poem 1 is a version of Sonnet 138 (“When My Love Swears that She Is Made of Truth”), poem 2 of Sonnet 144 (“Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair”), and the rest are sonnets that appear in act 4 of <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Love’s Labor’s Lost</em> (1598). Investigation of Jaggard’s volume, called <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">The Passionate Pilgrime,</em> has yielded and will continue to yield insight into such matters as the relationship of manuscript to print culture in the 1590s, the changing nature of the literary profession, and the evolving status of the author. It may also, as with <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">The Phoenix and Turtle</em> (1601), lead to increased knowledge of the chronology and circumstances of Shakespeare’s literary career, as well as affording some glimpses of his revisions of his texts.</p><p>“With this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” wrote <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7549\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">William Wordsworth</a><a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/william-wordsworth\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\"> </a>in “<a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45547\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Scorn not the Sonnet</a>“ (1827) of the <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Sonnets</em>. “If so,” replied <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/robert-browning\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Robert Browning</a> in his poem “House” (1876), “the less Shakespeare he.” None of Shakespeare’s works has been so tirelessly ransacked for biographical clues as the 154 sonnets, published with <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">A Lover’s Complaint</em> by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. Unlike the narrative poems, they enjoyed only limited commercial success during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and no further edition appeared until Benson’s in 1640. The title page, like Jaggard’s of <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">The Passionate Pilgrim</em>, relies upon the drawing power of the author’s name and promises “SHAKE-SPEARES / SONNETS / Never before Imprinted.”</p><p>The 154 sonnets are conventionally divided between the “young man” sonnets (1-126) and the “dark lady” sonnets (127-152), with the final pair often seen as an envoy or coda to the collection. There is no evidence that such a division has chronological implications, though the volume is usually read in such a way. Shakespeare employs the conventional English sonnet form: three quatrains capped with a couplet. Drama is conjured within individual poems, as the speaker wrestles with some problem or situation; it is generated by the juxtaposition of poems, with instant switches of tone, mood, and style; it is implied by cross-references and interrelationships within the sequence as a whole.</p><p>There remains a question, however, of how closely Shakespeare was involved in preparing the text of the sonnets for publication. Some commentators have advocated skepticism about all attempts to recover Shakespeare’s intention. Others have looked more closely at Thorpe, at Benson, and at the circulation of Shakespeare’s verse in the manuscript culture: these investigations have led to a reexamination of the ideas of authorship and authority in the period. Although scholarly opinion is still divided, several influential studies and editions in recent years have argued, on a variety of grounds, for the authority, integrity, and coherence of Thorpe’s text, an integrity now regarded as including <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">A Lover’s Complaint</em>.</p><p>The subsequent history of the text of the sonnets is inseparable from the history of Shakespeare’s reputation. John Benson’s <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent</em> (1640) was part of an attempt to “canonize” Shakespeare, collecting verses into a handsome quarto that could be sold as a companion to the dramatic folio texts (“to be serviceable for the continuance of glory to the deserved author in these his poems”). Benson dropped a few sonnets, added other poems, provided titles for individual pieces, changed Thorpe’s order, conflated sonnets, and modified some of the male pronouns, thereby making the sequence seem more unambiguously heterosexual in its orientation. In recent years there has been increasing study of Benson’s edition as a distinct literary production in its own right.</p><p>The Romantic compulsion to read the sonnets as autobiography inspired attempts to rearrange them to tell their story more clearly. It also led to attempts to relate them to what was known or could be surmised about Shakespeare’s life. Some commentators speculated that the publication of the sonnets was the result of a conspiracy by Shakespeare’s rivals or enemies, seeking to embarrass him by publishing love poems apparently addressed to a man rather than to the conventional sonnet-mistress. The five appendices to Hyder Edward Rollins’s Variorum edition document the first century of such endeavors. Attention was directed toward “problems” such as the identity of Master W. H., of the young man, of the rival poet, and of the dark lady (a phrase, incidentally, never used by Shakespeare in the sonnets). The disappearance of the sonnets from the canon coincided with the time when Shakespeare’s standing as the nation’s bard was being established. The critics’ current fascination is just as significant for what it reveals about contemporary culture, as the “Shakespeare myth” comes under attack from various directions.</p><p>The sonnets were apparently composed during a period of ten or a dozen years starting in about 1592-1593. In <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Palladis Tamia</em> Meres refers to the existence of “sugared sonnets” circulating among Shakespeare’s “private friends,” some which were published in <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">The Passionate Pilgrim.</em> The fact of prior circulation has important implications for the sonnets. The particular poems that were in circulation suggest that the general shape and themes of the <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Sonnets</em> were established from the earliest stages. Evidence suggesting a lengthy period of composition is inconvenient for commentators seeking to unlock the autobiographical secret of the sonnets. An early date (1592-1594) argues for Southampton as the boy and <a href=\"https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/christopher-marlowe\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Christopher Marlowe</a> as the rival poet; a date a decade later brings <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/george-herbert\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">George Herbert</a> and <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/george-chapman\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">George Chapman</a> into the frame. There are likewise early dark ladies (Lucy Negro, before she took charge of a brothel) and late (Emilia Lanier, Mary Fitton). There may, of course, have been more than one young man, rival, and dark lady, or in fact the sequence may not be autobiographical at all.</p><p>No Elizabethan sonnet sequence presents an unambiguous linear narrative, a novel in verse. Shakespeare’s is no exception. Yet neither are the <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Sonnets</em> a random anthology, a loose gathering of scattered rhymes. While groups of sonnets are obviously linked thematically, such as the opening sequence urging the young man to marry (1-17), and the dark lady sequence (127-152), the ordering within those groups is not that of continuous narrative. There are many smaller units, with poems recording that the friend has become the lover of the poet’s mistress (40-42), or expressing jealousy of the young man’s friendship with a rival poet (78-86). Sonnet 44 ends with a reference to two of the four elements “so much of earth and water wrought,” and 45 starts with “The other two, slight air and purging fire.” Similarly indivisible are the two “horse” sonnets 50 and 51, the “Will” sonnets 135 and 136, and 67 and 68. Sonnets 20 and 87 are connected as much by their telling use of feminine rhyme as by shared themes. Dispersed among the poems are pairs and groups that amplify or comment on each other, such as those dealing with absence (43-45, 47-48, 50-52, and 97-98).</p><p>“My name is Will,” declares the speaker of 136. Sonnet 145 apparently puns on Anne Hathaway’s name (“I hate, from hate away she threw”). Elizabethan sonneteers, following <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/philip-sidney\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Sir Philip Sidney</a>, conventionally teased their readers with hints of an actuality behind the poems. Sidney had given Astrophil his own coat of arms, had quibbled with the married name of the supposed original for Stella (Penelope Rich) and with the Greek etymology of his own name (Philip, “lover of horses”) in <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Astrophil and Stella </em>sonnets 41, 49, and 53. Shakespeare’s speaker descends as much from Astrophil as from Daniel’s more enigmatic persona, most obviously in the deployment of the multiple sense of <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">will</em> in 135 and 136. Yet Shakespeare’s sequence is unusual in including sexual consummation (Spenser’s <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Amoretti</em> led to the celebration of marriage in <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Epithalamion</em>, 1595) and unique in its persuasion to marry. There is evidence that some contemporary readers were disturbed by the transgressive and experimental features of 1590s erotic writing. Works by Marston and Marlowe were among those banned in 1599 along with satires and other more conventional kindling. Benson’s much-discussed modification of the text of the <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Sonnets</em> indicates at least a certain level of anxiety about the gender of the characters in the poems. Benson retained Sonnet 20 but dropped 126 (“O Thou My Lovely Boy”) and changed the direct address of 108 (“Nothing, Sweet Boy”) to the neutral “Nothing, Sweet Love.”</p><p>The speaker sums up his predicament in 144, one of the <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Passionate Pilgrim </em>poems:</p><p>Two loves I have of comfort and despair,</p><p>Which like two spirits do suggest me still:</p><p>The better angel is a man right fair,</p><p>The worser spirit a woman color’d ill.</p><p>The speaker’s attraction to the “worser spirit” is figured in harsh language throughout the sequence: in fact, the brutal juxtaposition of lyricism and lust is characteristic of the collection as a whole. The consequent disjointedness expresses a form of psychological verisimilitude by the standards of Shakespeare’s day, where discontinuity and repetition were held to reveal the inner state of a speaker.</p><p>The anachronism of applying modern attitudes toward homosexuality to early modern culture is self-evident. Where Shakespeare and his contemporaries drew their boundaries cannot be fully determined, but they were fascinated by the Platonic concept of androgyny, a concept drawn on by the queen herself almost from the moment of her accession. Sonnet 53 is addressed to an inexpressible lover, who resembles both Adonis and Helen. Androgyny is only part of the exploration of sexuality in the sonnets, however. A humanist education could open windows onto a world very different from post-Reformation England. Plato’s praise of love between men was in marked contrast to the establishment of capital punishment as the prescribed penalty for sodomy in 1533.</p><p>In the <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Sonnets</em> the relationship between the speaker and the young man both invites and resists definition, and it is clearly presented as a challenge to orthodoxy. If at times it seems to correspond to the many Elizabethan celebrations of male friendship, at others it has a raw physicality that resists such polite categorization. Even in sonnet 20, where sexual intimacy seems to be explicitly denied, the speaker’s mind runs to bawdy puns. The speaker refers to the friend as “rose,” “my love,” “lover,” and “sweet love,” and many commentators have demonstrated the repeated use of explicitly sexual language to the male friend (in 106, 109, and 110, for example). On the other hand, the acceptance of the traditional distinction between the young man and the dark lady sonnets obscures the fact that Shakespeare seems deliberately to render the gender of his subject uncertain in the vast majority of cases.</p><p>For some commentators the sequence also participates in the so-called birth of the author, a crucial feature of early modern writing: the liberation of the writer from the shackles of patronage. In Joel Fineman’s analysis, Shakespeare creates a radical internalization of Petrarchism, reordering its dynamic by directing his attention to the speaker’s subjectivity rather than to the ostensible object of the speaker’s devotion: the poetry of praise becomes poetry of self-discovery.</p><p>Sidney’s Astrophil had inhabited a world of court intrigue, chivalry, and international politics, exemplifying the overlap between political and erotic discourse in Elizabethan England. The circumstances of Shakespeare’s speaker, in contrast, are not those of a courtier but of a male of the upwardly mobile “middling sort.” Especially in the young man sonnets, there is a marked class anxiety, as the speaker seeks to define his role, whether as a friend, a tutor, a counselor, an employee, or a sexual rival. Not only are comparisons drawn from the world of the professional theater (“As an unperfect actor on the stage” in sonnet 23), but also from the world of business: compared to the prodigal “Unthrifty loveliness” of the youth (sonnet 4), “Making a famine where abundance lies” (1), the speaker inhabits a bourgeois world of debts, loans, repayment, and usury, speaking in similar language to the Dark Lady: “I myself am mortgaged to thy will” (134).</p><p>Yet Shakespeare’s linguistic performance extends beyond the “middling sort.” He was a great popularizer, translating court art and high art—John Lyly, Sidney, <a href=\"http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/edmund-spenser\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit;\">Edmund Spenser</a>—into palatable and sentimental commercial forms. His sequence is remarkable for its thematic and verbal richness, for its extraordinary range of nuances and ambiguities. He often employs words in multiple senses (as in the seemingly willfully indecipherable resonance, punning, polysemy, implication, and nuance of sonnet 94). Shakespeare’s celebrated verbal playfulness, the polysemy of his language, is a function of publication, whether by circulation or printing. His words acquire currency beyond himself and become the subject of reading and interpretation.</p><p>This linguistic richness can also be seen as an act of social aspiration: as the appropriation of the ambiguity axiomatically inherent in courtly speech. The sequence continues the process of dismantling traditional distinctions among rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry begun in the poems of 1593-1594. The poems had dealt in reversal and inversion and had combined elements of narrative and drama. The <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Sonnets</em> occupy a distinct, marginal space between social classes, between public and private, narrative and dramatic, and they proceed not through inverting categories but rather through interrogating them. Variations are played on Elizabethan conventions of erotic discourse: love without sex, sex without love, a “master-mistress” who is “prick’d ... out for women’s pleasure” as the ultimate in unattainable (“to my purpose nothing,” 20) adoration. Like Spenser’s <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Amoretti</em>, Shakespeare’s collection meditates on the relationships among love, art, time, and immortality. It remains a meditation, however, even when it seems most decided.</p><p>The consequences of love, the pain of rejection, desertion, and loss of reputation are powerful elements in the poem that follows the sequence. Despite Thorpe’s unambiguous attribution of the piece to Shakespeare, <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">A Lover’s Complaint</em> was rejected from the canon, on distinctly flimsy grounds, until quite recently. It has been much investigated to establish its authenticity and its date. It is now generally accepted as Shakespearean and dated at some point between 1600 and 1609, possibly revised from a 1600 first version for publication in Thorpe’s volume. The poem comprises 329 lines, disposed into 47 seven-line rhyme-royal stanzas. It draws heavily on Spenser and Daniel and is the complaint of a wronged woman about the duplicity of a man. It is in some sense a companion to <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Lucrece</em> and to <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">All’s Well That Ends Well</em> (circa 1602-1603) as much as to the sonnets. Its connections with the narrative poems, with the plays, and with the genre of female complaint have been thoroughly explored. The woman is a city beseiged by an eloquent wooer (“how deceits were gilded in his smiling”), whose essence is dissimulation (“his passion, but an art of craft”). There has been a growing tendency to relate the poem to its immediate context in Thorpe’s <em style=\"font-family: inherit;\">Sonnets</em> volume and to find it a reflection or gloss or critique of the preceding sequence.</p><p>Interest in Shakespeare’s nondramatic writings has increased markedly in recent years. They are no longer so easily marginalized or dismissed as conventional, and they contribute in powerful ways to a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and the Elizabethan era in which he lived and wrote.</p><p>Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, on what may have been his 52nd birthday.</p>",
"raw_bio": "While William Shakespeare’s reputation is based primarily on his plays, he became famous first as a poet. With the partial exception of the Sonnets (1609), quarried since the early 19th century for autobiographical secrets allegedly encoded in them, the nondramatic writings have traditionally been pushed to the margins of the Shakespeare industry. Yet the study of his nondramatic poetry can illuminate Shakespeare’s activities as a poet emphatically of his own age, especially in the period of extraordinary literary ferment in the last ten or twelve years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare’s exact birth date remains unknown. He was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564, his mother’s third child, but the first to survive infancy. This has led scholars to conjecture that he was born on April 23rd, given the era’s convention of baptizing newborns on their third day. Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, moved to Stratford in about 1552 and rapidly became a prominent figure in the town’s business and politics. He rose to be bailiff, the highest official in the town, but then in about 1575-1576 his prosperity declined markedly and he withdrew from public life. In 1596, thanks to his son’s success and persistence, he was granted a coat of arms by the College of Arms, and the family moved into New Place, the grandest house in Stratford. Speculation that William Shakespeare traveled, worked as a schoolmaster in the country, was a soldier and a law clerk, or embraced or left the Roman Catholic Church continues to fill the gaps left in the sparse records of the so-called lost years. It is conventionally assumed (though attendance registers do not survive) that Shakespeare attended the King’s New School in Stratford, along with others of his social class. At the age of 18, in November 1582, he married Anne Hathaway, daughter of a local farmer. She was pregnant with Susanna Shakespeare, who was baptized on May 26, 1583. The twins, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, were baptized on February 2, 1585. There were no further children from the union. William Shakespeare had probably been working as an actor and writer on the professional stage in London for four or five years when the London theaters were closed by order of the Privy Council on June 23, 1592. The authorities were concerned about a severe outbreak of the plague and alarmed at the possibility of civil unrest (Privy Council minutes refer to “a great disorder and tumult” in Southwark). The initial order suspended playing until Michaelmas and was renewed several times. When the theaters reopened in June 1594, the theatrical companies had been reorganized, and Shakespeare’s career was wholly committed to the troupe known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men until 1603, when they were reconstituted as the King’s Men. By 1592 Shakespeare already enjoyed sufficient prominence as an author of dramatic scripts to have been the subject of Robert Greene’s attack on the “upstart crow” in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit . Such renown as he enjoyed, however, was as transitory as the dramatic form. Play scripts, and their authors, were accorded a lowly status in the literary system, and when scripts were published, their link to the theatrical company (rather than to the scriptwriter) was publicized. It was only in 1597 that Shakespeare’s name first appeared on the title page of his plays— Richard II and a revised edition of Romeo and Juliet . While the London theaters were closed, some actors tried to make a living by touring outside the capital. Shakespeare turned from the business of scriptwriting to the pursuit of art and patronage; unable to pursue his career in the theatrical marketplace, he adopted a more conventional course. Shakespeare’s first publication, Venus and Adonis (1593), was dedicated to the 18-year-old Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. The dedication reveals a frank appeal for patronage, couched in the normal terms of such requests. Shakespeare received the Earl’s patronage and went on to dedicate his next dramatic poem, Lucrece, to the young lord as well. Venus and Adonis was printed by Richard Field, a professionally accomplished printer who lived in Stratford. Shakespeare’s choice of printer indicates an ambition to associate himself with unambiguously high-art productions, as does the quotation from Ovid’s Amores on the title page: “Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret acqua” (Let worthless stuff excite the admiration of the crowd: as for me, let golden Apollo ply me with full cups from the Castalian spring, that is, the spring of the Muses). Such lofty repudiation of the vulgar was calculated to appeal to the teenage Southampton. It also appealed to a sizable slice of the reading public. In the midst of horror, disease, and death, Shakespeare was offering access to a golden world, showing the delights of applying learning for pleasure rather than pointing out the obvious morals to be drawn from classical authors when faced with awful catastrophe. With Venus and Adonis Shakespeare sought direct aristocratic patronage, but he also entered the marketplace as a professional author. He seems to have enjoyed a degree of success in the first of these objectives, given the more intimate tone of the dedication of Lucrece to Southampton in the following year. In the second objective, his triumph must have outstripped all expectation. Venus and Adonis went though 15 editions before 1640; if was first entered in the Stationers’ Register on April 18, 1593. It is a fine and elegantly printed book, consisting of 1,194 lines in 199 six-line stanzas rhymed ababcc . The verse form was a token of social and literary ambition on Shakespeare’s part. Its aristocratic cachet derived from its popularity at court, being favored by several courtier poets, such as Sir Walter Ralegh , Sir Arthur Gorges , and Sir Edward Dyer . Venus and Adonis is unquestionably a work of its age. In it a young writer courts respectability and patronage. At one level, of course, the poem is a traditional Ovidian fable, locating the origin of the inseparability of love and sorrow in Venus’s reaction to the death of Adonis: “lo here I prophesy, / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend /... all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe.” It invokes a mythic past that explains a painful present. Like so many texts of the 1590s, it features an innocent hero, Adonis, who encounters a world in which the precepts he has acquired from his education are tested in the surprising school of experience. His knowledge of love, inevitably, is not firsthand (“I have heard it is a life in death, / That laughs and weeps, and all but with a breath”). There is a staidly academic quality to his repudiation of Venus’s “treatise,” her “idle over-handled theme. Shakespeare’s literary and social aspirations are revealed at every turn. In his Petrarchism, for example, he adopts a mode that had become a staple of courtly discourse. Elizabethan politicians figured themselves and their personal and political conditions in Petrarchan terms. The inescapable and enduring frustrations of the courtier’s life were habitually figured via the analogy of the frustrated, confused, but devoted Petrarchan lover. Yet Shakespeare’s approach to this convention typifies the 1590s younger generation’s sense of its incongruity. Lines such as “the love-sick queen began to sweat” are understandably rare in Elizabethan courtly discourse. Power relations expressed through the gendered language of Elizabeth’s eroticized politics are reversed: “Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing / ... Her eyes wooed still, his eyes disdain’d the wooing.” It is Venus who deploys the conventional carpe diem arguments: “Make use of time / ... Fair flowers that are not gath’red in their prime, / Rot, and consume themselves in little time”; she even provides a blason of her own charms: “Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow, / Mine eyes are grey, and bright, and quick in turning.” Like most Elizabethan treatments of love, Shakespeare’s work is characterized by paradox (“She’s love, she loves, and yet she is not lov’d”), by narrative and thematic diversity, and by attempts to render the inner workings of the mind, exploring the psychology of perception (“Oft the eye mistakes, the brain being troubled”). The poem addresses such artistic preoccupations of the 1590s as the relation of poetry to painting and the possibility of literary immortality, as well as social concerns such as the phenomenon of “masterless women,” and the (to men) alarming and unknowable forces unleashed by female desire, an issue that for a host of reasons fascinated Elizabeth’s subjects. Indeed, Venus and Adonis flirts with taboos, as do other successful works of the 1590s, offering readers living in a paranoid, plague-ridden city a fantasy of passionate and fatal physical desire, with Venus leading Adonis “prisoner in a red-rose chain.” In its day it was appreciated as an erotic fantasy glorying in the inversion of established categories and values, with a veneer of learning and the snob appeal of association with a celebrated aristocrat. Since the Romantic period the frank sexuality of Shakespeare’s Venus has held less appeal for literary critics and scholars than it had to Elizabethan and Jacobean readers. C.S. Lewis concludes in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954) that “if the poem is not meant to arouse disgust it was very foolishly written.” In more recent years a combination of feminism, cultural studies, renewed interest in rhetoric, and a return to traditional archival research has begun to reclaim Venus and Adonis from such prejudice. The elevated subject of Shakespeare’s next publication, Lucrece , suggests that Venus and Adonis had been well received, Lucrece comprises 1,855 lines, in 265 stanzas. The stanza (as in Complaint of Rosamund ) is the seven-line rhyme royal ( ababbcc ) immortalized in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1385) and thereafter considered especially appropriate for tragedy, complaint, and philosophical reflection. In places the narrator explicitly highlights the various rhetorical set pieces (“Here she exclaims against repose and rest”). Lucrece herself comments on her performance after the apostrophes to “comfort-killing Night, image of Hell,” Opportunity, and Time. Elizabethan readers would have appreciated much about the poem, from its plentiful wordplay (“to shun the blot, she would not blot the letter”; “Ere she with blood had stain’d her stain’d excuse”) and verbal dexterity, to the inner debate raging inside Tarquin. Though an exemplary tyrant from ancient history, he also exemplifies the conventional 1590s conflict between willful youthful prodigality and sententious experience (“My part is youth, and beats these from the stage”). The arguments in his “disputation / ‘Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will” are those of the Petrarchan lover: “nothing can affection’s course control,” and “Yet strive I to embrace mine infamy.” But the context of this rhetorical performance is crucial throughout. Unlike Venus and Adonis , Lucrece is not set in a mythical golden age, but in a fallen, violent world. This is particularly apparent in the rhetorical and ultimately physical competition of their debate--contrasting Tarquin’s speeches with Lucrece’s eloquent appeals to his better nature. The combination of ancient and contemporary strengthens the political elements in the poem. It demonstrates tyranny in its most intimate form, committing a private outrage that is inescapably public; hence the rape is figured in terms both domestic (as a burglary) and public (as a hunt, a war, a siege). It also reveals the essential violence of many conventional erotic metaphors. Shakespeare draws on the powerful Elizabethan myth of the island nation as a woman: although Tarquin is a Roman, an insider, his journey from the siege of Ardea to Lucrece’s chamber connects the two assaults. His attack figures a society at war with itself, and he himself is shown to be self-divided.” Tyranny, lust, and greed translate the metaphors of Petrarchism into the actuality of rape, which is figured by gradatio , or climax: “What could he see but mightily he noted? / What did he note but strongly he desired?” The historically validated interpretation—for Shakespeare’s readers, descendants of Brutus in New Troy—is figured by Brutus, who “pluck’d the knife from Lucrece’s side.” He steps forward, casting off his reputation for folly and improvising a ritual (involving kissing the knife) that transforms grief and outrage at Lucrece’s death into a determination to “publish Tarquin’s foul offense” and change the political system. Brutus emerges from the shadows, reminding the reader that the poem, notwithstanding its powerful speeches and harrowing images, is also remarkable for what is unshown, untold, implicit. Until recently few commentators have taken up the interpretative challenge posed by Brutus. Traditionally Lucrece has been dismissed as a bookish, pedantic dry run for Shakespeare’s tragedies, in William Empson ‘s phrase, “the Bard doing five-finger exercises,” containing what F.T. Prince in his 1960 edition of the poems dismisses as defective rhetoric in the treatment of an uninteresting story. Many critics have sought to define the poem’s genre, which combines political fable, female complaint, and tragedy within a milieu of self-conscious antiquity. But perhaps the most significant recent developments have been the feminist treatments of the poem, the reawakening interest in rhetoric, and a dawning awareness of the work’s political engagement. Lucrece , like so many of Shakespeare’s historical tragedies, problematizes the categories of history and myth, of public and private, and exemplifies the bewildering nature of historical parallels. The self-conscious rhetorical display and the examination of representation is daringly politicized, explicitly, if inconclusively, connecting the aesthetic and the erotic with politics both sexual and state. At the time of its publication, Lucrece was Shakespeare’s most profound meditation on history, particularly on the relations between public role and private morality and on the conjunction of forces—personal, political, social—that creates turning points in human history. In it he indirectly articulates the concerns of his generation and also, perhaps, of his young patron, who was already closely associated with the doomed earl of Essex. In 1598 or 1599 the printer William Jaggard brought out an anthology of 20 miscellaneous poems, which he eventually attributed to Shakespeare, though the authorship of all 20 is still disputed. At least five are demonstrably Shakespearean. Poem 1 is a version of Sonnet 138 (“When My Love Swears that She Is Made of Truth”), poem 2 of Sonnet 144 (“Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair”), and the rest are sonnets that appear in act 4 of Love’s Labor’s Lost (1598). Investigation of Jaggard’s volume, called The Passionate Pilgrime, has yielded and will continue to yield insight into such matters as the relationship of manuscript to print culture in the 1590s, the changing nature of the literary profession, and the evolving status of the author. It may also, as with The Phoenix and Turtle (1601), lead to increased knowledge of the chronology and circumstances of Shakespeare’s literary career, as well as affording some glimpses of his revisions of his texts. “With this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” wrote William Wordsworth in “ Scorn not the Sonnet “ (1827) of the Sonnets . “If so,” replied Robert Browning in his poem “House” (1876), “the less Shakespeare he.” None of Shakespeare’s works has been so tirelessly ransacked for biographical clues as the 154 sonnets, published with A Lover’s Complaint by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. Unlike the narrative poems, they enjoyed only limited commercial success during Shakespeare’s lifetime, and no further edition appeared until Benson’s in 1640. The title page, like Jaggard’s of The Passionate Pilgrim , relies upon the drawing power of the author’s name and promises “SHAKE-SPEARES / SONNETS / Never before Imprinted.” The 154 sonnets are conventionally divided between the “young man” sonnets (1-126) and the “dark lady” sonnets (127-152), with the final pair often seen as an envoy or coda to the collection. There is no evidence that such a division has chronological implications, though the volume is usually read in such a way. Shakespeare employs the conventional English sonnet form: three quatrains capped with a couplet. Drama is conjured within individual poems, as the speaker wrestles with some problem or situation; it is generated by the juxtaposition of poems, with instant switches of tone, mood, and style; it is implied by cross-references and interrelationships within the sequence as a whole. There remains a question, however, of how closely Shakespeare was involved in preparing the text of the sonnets for publication. Some commentators have advocated skepticism about all attempts to recover Shakespeare’s intention. Others have looked more closely at Thorpe, at Benson, and at the circulation of Shakespeare’s verse in the manuscript culture: these investigations have led to a reexamination of the ideas of authorship and authority in the period. Although scholarly opinion is still divided, several influential studies and editions in recent years have argued, on a variety of grounds, for the authority, integrity, and coherence of Thorpe’s text, an integrity now regarded as including A Lover’s Complaint . The subsequent history of the text of the sonnets is inseparable from the history of Shakespeare’s reputation. John Benson’s Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent (1640) was part of an attempt to “canonize” Shakespeare, collecting verses into a handsome quarto that could be sold as a companion to the dramatic folio texts (“to be serviceable for the continuance of glory to the deserved author in these his poems”). Benson dropped a few sonnets, added other poems, provided titles for individual pieces, changed Thorpe’s order, conflated sonnets, and modified some of the male pronouns, thereby making the sequence seem more unambiguously heterosexual in its orientation. In recent years there has been increasing study of Benson’s edition as a distinct literary production in its own right. The Romantic compulsion to read the sonnets as autobiography inspired attempts to rearrange them to tell their story more clearly. It also led to attempts to relate them to what was known or could be surmised about Shakespeare’s life. Some commentators speculated that the publication of the sonnets was the result of a conspiracy by Shakespeare’s rivals or enemies, seeking to embarrass him by publishing love poems apparently addressed to a man rather than to the conventional sonnet-mistress. The five appendices to Hyder Edward Rollins’s Variorum edition document the first century of such endeavors. Attention was directed toward “problems” such as the identity of Master W. H., of the young man, of the rival poet, and of the dark lady (a phrase, incidentally, never used by Shakespeare in the sonnets). The disappearance of the sonnets from the canon coincided with the time when Shakespeare’s standing as the nation’s bard was being established. The critics’ current fascination is just as significant for what it reveals about contemporary culture, as the “Shakespeare myth” comes under attack from various directions. The sonnets were apparently composed during a period of ten or a dozen years starting in about 1592-1593. In Palladis Tamia Meres refers to the existence of “sugared sonnets” circulating among Shakespeare’s “private friends,” some which were published in The Passionate Pilgrim. The fact of prior circulation has important implications for the sonnets. The particular poems that were in circulation suggest that the general shape and themes of the Sonnets were established from the earliest stages. Evidence suggesting a lengthy period of composition is inconvenient for commentators seeking to unlock the autobiographical secret of the sonnets. An early date (1592-1594) argues for Southampton as the boy and Christopher Marlowe as the rival poet; a date a decade later brings George Herbert and George Chapman into the frame. There are likewise early dark ladies (Lucy Negro, before she took charge of a brothel) and late (Emilia Lanier, Mary Fitton). There may, of course, have been more than one young man, rival, and dark lady, or in fact the sequence may not be autobiographical at all. No Elizabethan sonnet sequence presents an unambiguous linear narrative, a novel in verse. Shakespeare’s is no exception. Yet neither are the Sonnets a random anthology, a loose gathering of scattered rhymes. While groups of sonnets are obviously linked thematically, such as the opening sequence urging the young man to marry (1-17), and the dark lady sequence (127-152), the ordering within those groups is not that of continuous narrative. There are many smaller units, with poems recording that the friend has become the lover of the poet’s mistress (40-42), or expressing jealousy of the young man’s friendship with a rival poet (78-86). Sonnet 44 ends with a reference to two of the four elements “so much of earth and water wrought,” and 45 starts with “The other two, slight air and purging fire.” Similarly indivisible are the two “horse” sonnets 50 and 51, the “Will” sonnets 135 and 136, and 67 and 68. Sonnets 20 and 87 are connected as much by their telling use of feminine rhyme as by shared themes. Dispersed among the poems are pairs and groups that amplify or comment on each other, such as those dealing with absence (43-45, 47-48, 50-52, and 97-98). “My name is Will,” declares the speaker of 136. Sonnet 145 apparently puns on Anne Hathaway’s name (“I hate, from hate away she threw”). Elizabethan sonneteers, following Sir Philip Sidney , conventionally teased their readers with hints of an actuality behind the poems. Sidney had given Astrophil his own coat of arms, had quibbled with the married name of the supposed original for Stella (Penelope Rich) and with the Greek etymology of his own name (Philip, “lover of horses”) in Astrophil and Stella sonnets 41, 49, and 53. Shakespeare’s speaker descends as much from Astrophil as from Daniel’s more enigmatic persona, most obviously in the deployment of the multiple sense of will in 135 and 136. Yet Shakespeare’s sequence is unusual in including sexual consummation (Spenser’s Amoretti led to the celebration of marriage in Epithalamion , 1595) and unique in its persuasion to marry. There is evidence that some contemporary readers were disturbed by the transgressive and experimental features of 1590s erotic writing. Works by Marston and Marlowe were among those banned in 1599 along with satires and other more conventional kindling. Benson’s much-discussed modification of the text of the Sonnets indicates at least a certain level of anxiety about the gender of the characters in the poems. Benson retained Sonnet 20 but dropped 126 (“O Thou My Lovely Boy”) and changed the direct address of 108 (“Nothing, Sweet Boy”) to the neutral “Nothing, Sweet Love.” The speaker sums up his predicament in 144, one of the Passionate Pilgrim poems: Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still: The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman color’d ill. The speaker’s attraction to the “worser spirit” is figured in harsh language throughout the sequence: in fact, the brutal juxtaposition of lyricism and lust is characteristic of the collection as a whole. The consequent disjointedness expresses a form of psychological verisimilitude by the standards of Shakespeare’s day, where discontinuity and repetition were held to reveal the inner state of a speaker. The anachronism of applying modern attitudes toward homosexuality to early modern culture is self-evident. Where Shakespeare and his contemporaries drew their boundaries cannot be fully determined, but they were fascinated by the Platonic concept of androgyny, a concept drawn on by the queen herself almost from the moment of her accession. Sonnet 53 is addressed to an inexpressible lover, who resembles both Adonis and Helen. Androgyny is only part of the exploration of sexuality in the sonnets, however. A humanist education could open windows onto a world very different from post-Reformation England. Plato’s praise of love between men was in marked contrast to the establishment of capital punishment as the prescribed penalty for sodomy in 1533. In the Sonnets the relationship between the speaker and the young man both invites and resists definition, and it is clearly presented as a challenge to orthodoxy. If at times it seems to correspond to the many Elizabethan celebrations of male friendship, at others it has a raw physicality that resists such polite categorization. Even in sonnet 20, where sexual intimacy seems to be explicitly denied, the speaker’s mind runs to bawdy puns. The speaker refers to the friend as “rose,” “my love,” “lover,” and “sweet love,” and many commentators have demonstrated the repeated use of explicitly sexual language to the male friend (in 106, 109, and 110, for example). On the other hand, the acceptance of the traditional distinction between the young man and the dark lady sonnets obscures the fact that Shakespeare seems deliberately to render the gender of his subject uncertain in the vast majority of cases. For some commentators the sequence also participates in the so-called birth of the author, a crucial feature of early modern writing: the liberation of the writer from the shackles of patronage. In Joel Fineman’s analysis, Shakespeare creates a radical internalization of Petrarchism, reordering its dynamic by directing his attention to the speaker’s subjectivity rather than to the ostensible object of the speaker’s devotion: the poetry of praise becomes poetry of self-discovery. Sidney’s Astrophil had inhabited a world of court intrigue, chivalry, and international politics, exemplifying the overlap between political and erotic discourse in Elizabethan England. The circumstances of Shakespeare’s speaker, in contrast, are not those of a courtier but of a male of the upwardly mobile “middling sort.” Especially in the young man sonnets, there is a marked class anxiety, as the speaker seeks to define his role, whether as a friend, a tutor, a counselor, an employee, or a sexual rival. Not only are comparisons drawn from the world of the professional theater (“As an unperfect actor on the stage” in sonnet 23), but also from the world of business: compared to the prodigal “Unthrifty loveliness” of the youth (sonnet 4), “Making a famine where abundance lies” (1), the speaker inhabits a bourgeois world of debts, loans, repayment, and usury, speaking in similar language to the Dark Lady: “I myself am mortgaged to thy will” (134). Yet Shakespeare’s linguistic performance extends beyond the “middling sort.” He was a great popularizer, translating court art and high art—John Lyly, Sidney, Edmund Spenser —into palatable and sentimental commercial forms. His sequence is remarkable for its thematic and verbal richness, for its extraordinary range of nuances and ambiguities. He often employs words in multiple senses (as in the seemingly willfully indecipherable resonance, punning, polysemy, implication, and nuance of sonnet 94). Shakespeare’s celebrated verbal playfulness, the polysemy of his language, is a function of publication, whether by circulation or printing. His words acquire currency beyond himself and become the subject of reading and interpretation. This linguistic richness can also be seen as an act of social aspiration: as the appropriation of the ambiguity axiomatically inherent in courtly speech. The sequence continues the process of dismantling traditional distinctions among rhetoric, philosophy, and poetry begun in the poems of 1593-1594. The poems had dealt in reversal and inversion and had combined elements of narrative and drama. The Sonnets occupy a distinct, marginal space between social classes, between public and private, narrative and dramatic, and they proceed not through inverting categories but rather through interrogating them. Variations are played on Elizabethan conventions of erotic discourse: love without sex, sex without love, a “master-mistress” who is “prick’d ... out for women’s pleasure” as the ultimate in unattainable (“to my purpose nothing,” 20) adoration. Like Spenser’s Amoretti , Shakespeare’s collection meditates on the relationships among love, art, time, and immortality. It remains a meditation, however, even when it seems most decided. The consequences of love, the pain of rejection, desertion, and loss of reputation are powerful elements in the poem that follows the sequence. Despite Thorpe’s unambiguous attribution of the piece to Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint was rejected from the canon, on distinctly flimsy grounds, until quite recently. It has been much investigated to establish its authenticity and its date. It is now generally accepted as Shakespearean and dated at some point between 1600 and 1609, possibly revised from a 1600 first version for publication in Thorpe’s volume. The poem comprises 329 lines, disposed into 47 seven-line rhyme-royal stanzas. It draws heavily on Spenser and Daniel and is the complaint of a wronged woman about the duplicity of a man. It is in some sense a companion to Lucrece and to All’s Well That Ends Well (circa 1602-1603) as much as to the sonnets. Its connections with the narrative poems, with the plays, and with the genre of female complaint have been thoroughly explored. The woman is a city beseiged by an eloquent wooer (“how deceits were gilded in his smiling”), whose essence is dissimulation (“his passion, but an art of craft”). There has been a growing tendency to relate the poem to its immediate context in Thorpe’s Sonnets volume and to find it a reflection or gloss or critique of the preceding sequence. Interest in Shakespeare’s nondramatic writings has increased markedly in recent years. They are no longer so easily marginalized or dismissed as conventional, and they contribute in powerful ways to a deeper understanding of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and the Elizabethan era in which he lived and wrote. Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, on what may have been his 52nd birthday.",
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"DOB": "1616-04-23",
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"location": "Stratford-upon-Avon, United Kingdom",
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"name": "Jean Ingelow",
"bio": "<br><br>\r\nNineteenth century British poet, novelist, and chlidren’s author Jean Ingelow was born in Lincolnshire, England to a banker and his Scottish wife. The family moved to Ipswich and then London, where Ingelow remained throughout her life.\r\n<br><br>\r\nIngelow began publishing poems in periodicals as a girl, under the pseudonym Orris, and later published some of her work anonymously. Many of her long narrative poems were written in blank verse, with themes of Christian faith and romantic love relayed with a tenderness of emotion. Her work was widely read during her lifetime, and she was known for her charitable “copyright dinners,” in which she hosted her poorer neighbors for dinners paid for with the profits from her books.\r\n<br><br>\r\nIngelow’s first collection of poetry, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings (1850), earned the praise of Alfred Lord Tennyson, with whom she built a lasting friendship. Over the course of her career Ingelow published numerous volumes of poetry, including Poems (1863), Song of Seven (1866), and A Story of Doom, and Other Poems (1867). Her prose includes the novels Allerton and Dreux (1851) and Off the Skelligs (1872), and the children’s tale Mopsa the Fairy (1869).\r\n<br><br>\r\nIngelow died on July 2, 1897 and is buried at Brompton Cemetery in London",
"raw_bio": "\r Nineteenth century British poet, novelist, and chlidren’s author Jean Ingelow was born in Lincolnshire, England to a banker and his Scottish wife. The family moved to Ipswich and then London, where Ingelow remained throughout her life.\r \r Ingelow began publishing poems in periodicals as a girl, under the pseudonym Orris, and later published some of her work anonymously. Many of her long narrative poems were written in blank verse, with themes of Christian faith and romantic love relayed with a tenderness of emotion. Her work was widely read during her lifetime, and she was known for her charitable “copyright dinners,” in which she hosted her poorer neighbors for dinners paid for with the profits from her books.\r \r Ingelow’s first collection of poetry, A Rhyming Chronicle of Incidents and Feelings (1850), earned the praise of Alfred Lord Tennyson, with whom she built a lasting friendship. Over the course of her career Ingelow published numerous volumes of poetry, including Poems (1863), Song of Seven (1866), and A Story of Doom, and Other Poems (1867). Her prose includes the novels Allerton and Dreux (1851) and Off the Skelligs (1872), and the children’s tale Mopsa the Fairy (1869).\r \r Ingelow died on July 2, 1897 and is buried at Brompton Cemetery in London",
"slug": "jean-ingelow",
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"url": "/sootradhar/jean-ingelow",
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"created": "2023-09-22T12:17:48.436441",
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"name": "Ebenezer Elliott",
"bio": "<p>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\tEbenezer Elliott was an English poet, known as the Corn Law rhymer.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>Early Life\r\n<br>\r\n<br>Elliott was born at the New Foundry, Masbrough, in the Parish of Rotherham, Yorkshire. His father, (known as \"Devil Elliott\", for his fiery sermons) was an extreme Calvinist and a strong Radical, and was engaged in the iron trade. His mother suffered from poor health, and young Ebenezer, although one of a family of eleven children, of whom eight reached mature life, had a solitary and rather morbid childhood. At the age of six he contracted small-pox, which left him \"fearfully disfigured and six weeks blind.\" His health was permanently affected, and he suffered from illness and depression in later life.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>He was first educated at a dame school, then attended the Hollis School in Rotherham, where he was ‘taught to write and little more.’, but was generally regarded as a dunce. He hated school, and preferred to play truant, spending his time exploring the countryside around Rotherham, observing the plants and local wildlife. At about fourteen he began to read extensively on his own account, and in his leisure hours he studied botany, collected plants and flowers, and was delighted at the appearance of \"a beautiful green snake about a yard long, which on the fine Sabbath mornings about ten o'clock seemed to expect me at the top of Primrose Lane.\" When he was sixteen he was sent to work at his father's foundry, working for the next seven years with no wages beyond a little pocket money.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>Early Works\r\n<br>\r\n<br>In a fragment of autobiography printed in The Athenaeum (12 January 1850) he says that he was entirely self-taught, and attributes his poetic development to long country walks undertaken in search of wild flowers, and to a collection of books, including the works of Young, Barrow, Shenstone and John Milton, bequeathed to his father. His son-in-law, John Watkins, gave a more detailed account in \"The Life, Poetry and Letters of Ebenezer Elliott\", published 1850. One Sunday morning, after a heavy night’s drinking, Elliott missed chapel and visited his Aunt Robinson where he picked up a botany book, Sowerby’s “English Botany.” He was entranced by the colour plates of flowers and when she encouraged him to make his own flower drawings, he was thrilled to find he had a flair for it. \r\n<br>\r\n<br>His younger brother, Giles, whom he had always admired, read him a poem from James Thomson's “Seasons” which described polyanthus and auricular flowers, and this was a turning point in Elliott's life. He realised that he could successfully combine his love of nature, and his talent for drawing, with writing poems and decorating them with flower illustrations.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>In 1798, aged seventeen, he wrote his first poem Vernal Walk in imitation of James Thompson. He was also influenced by Byron and the Romantic poets and Robert Southey who later became Poet Laureate. In 1808 Elliott wrote to Southey asking for advice on getting published. Elliott was delighted when Southey replied. Their correspondence over the years encouraged him and reinforced his determination to make a name for himself as a poet. Although they only met once, they exchanged letters until 1824, and Elliott declared that it was Southey who had taught him the art of poetry.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>Other early poems were Second Nuptials and Night, or the Legend of Wharncliffe, which last was described by the Monthly Review as the ‘Ne plus ultra of German horror and bombast.’ His Tales of the Night, including The Exile and Bothwell, were considered to be of more merit, and brought him high commendations. His earlier volumes of poems, dealing with romantic themes, received much unfriendly comment, however the faults of Night, the earliest of these, are pointed out in a long and friendly letter (30 January 1819) from Southey to the author.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>The Corn Law Rhymes\r\n<br>\r\n<br>Elliott married Frances (Fanny) Gartside in 1806, and they had thirteen children. He invested his wife's fortune in his father's share of the iron foundry, but the affairs of the family firm were then in a desperate condition, and money difficulties hastened his father's death. Elliott lost everything, and in 1816 he was declared bankrupt. In 1819 he obtained funds from his wife's sisters and began another business as an iron dealer in Sheffield. The business prospered, and by 1829 he had become a successful iron merchant and steel manufacturer.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>He remained bitter about his earlier failure. He attributed his father's pecuniary losses and his own to the operation of the Corn Laws and the demand to repeal them became the greatest issue in his life. When he was made bankrupt, he had been homeless and out of work; he had faced starvation and contemplated suicide. He knew what it was like to be impoverished and desperate and, as a result, he always identified with the poor. He became well known in Sheffield for his strident views demanding changes which would improve conditions both for the manufacturer and the worker. He formed the first society in England to call for reform of the Corn Laws: the Sheffield Mechanics' Anti-Bread Tax Society founded in 1830. Four years later, he was the prime mover in establishing the Sheffield Anti-Corn Law Society and he also set up the Sheffield Mechanics' Institute. He was very active in the Sheffield Political Union, and he campaigned vigorously for the 1832 Reform Act. He took an active part in the Chartist agitation, but withdrew his support when the agitation for the repeal of the corn laws was removed from the Chartist programme. Until the Chartist Movement advocated the use of violence, Elliott was one of the leaders of the Sheffield organisation. He was the Sheffield delegate to the Great Public Meeting in Westminster in 1838 and he chaired the meeting in Sheffield when the Charter was introduced to local people.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>The strength of his political convictions was reflected in the style and tenor of his verse, earning him the nickname \" the Corn Law Rhymer\", and making him internationally famous.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>The Corn Law Rhymes, first published in 1831, had been preceded by the publication of the single long poem The Ranter in 1830. They were inspired by a fierce hatred of injustice, and are vigorous, simple and full of vivid description. The poems campaigned against the landowners in the government who stifled competition and kept the price of bread high. They were aggressive and sarcastic, attacking the status quo and demanding the repeal of the Corn Laws. They also drew attention to the dreadful conditions endured by working people, and ruthlessly contrasted their lot with the sleek and complacent gentry. In 1833-1835 Elliott also published The Splendid Village; Corn-Law Rhymes, and other Poems (3 vols.), which included The Village Patriarch (1829), The Ranter, an unsuccessful drama, Keronah, and other pieces.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>His poems were published in the USA, and in Europe. The French magazine, Le Revue Des Deux Mondes, sent a journalist to Sheffield to interview him. The Corn Law Rhymes were initially thought to be written by an uneducated Sheffield mechanic who had rejected conventional Romantic ideals for a new style of working class poetry aimed at changing the system. Elliott was described as \"a red son of the furnace \" and called \" the Yorkshire Burns\" or \" the Burns of the manufacturing city \". The journalist was surprised when he found Elliott to be a mild man with a nervous temperament.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>Asa Briggs called Elliott \"the poet of economic revolution\" while Elliott himself observed: \"I claim to be a pioneer of the greatest, the most beneficial, the only crimeless Revolution, which man has yet seen. I also claim to be the poet of that Revolution - the Bard of Freetrade; and through the prosperity, wisdom and loving-kindness which Free-trade will ultimately bring, the Bard of Universal Peace.\"\r\n<br>\r\n<br>He also contributed verses from time to time to Tails Magazine and to the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. In 1837 his business failed and he again lost a great deal of money. This misfortune was also ascribed to the corn laws. He retired in 1841 with a small fortune and settled at Great Houghton, near Barnsley, where he lived quietly until his death in 1849 aged 68. He was buried in Darfield churchyard.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>Contemporary Criticism\r\n<br>\r\n<br>In 1850, appeared two volumes of More Prose and Verse by the Corn-Law Rhymer. Elliott lives by his determined opposition to the bread-tax, as he called it, and his poems on the subject are saved from the common fate of political poetry by their transparent sincerity and passionate earnestness.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>An article by Thomas Carlyle in the Edinburgh Review (July 1832) is the best criticism on Elliott. Carlyle was attracted by Elliott's homely sincerity and genuine power, though he had small opinion of his political philosophy, and lamented his lack of humour and of the sense of proportion. He thought his poetry too imitative, detecting not only the truthful severity of Crabbe, but a slight bravura dash of the fair tuneful Hemans. His descriptions of his native county reveal close observation and a vivid perception of natural beauty.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>His obituary appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine in February 1850. Two biographies were published in 1850, one by his son-in-law, John Watkins, and another by January Searle (G. S. Phillips). A new edition of his works by his son, Edwin Elliot, appeared in 1876.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>The Peoples Anthem\r\n<br>\r\n<br>This was one of Elliott’s last poems. It was written for music in 1847, and was usually sung to the tune \"Commonwealth\". The People’s Anthem first appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Review in 1848. The refrain “God save the people!” parodies the British national anthem, God Save the Queen and demands support for ordinary people instead. Despite its huge popularity, some churches refused to use hymn books which contained it, as it can also be seen as a criticism of God. In his notes on the poem, Elliott demanded that the vote be given to all responsible householders. “The People’s Anthem” was a great favourite for many years, and in the 1920s it was suggested that Elliott’s poem qualified him to be designated Poet Laureate of the League of Nations.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>The People's Anthem\r\n<br>When wilt thou save the people?\r\n<br>Oh, God of mercy! when?\r\n<br>Not kings and lords, but nations!\r\n<br>Not thrones and crowns, but men!\r\n<br>Flowers of thy heart, oh, God, are they!\r\n<br>Let them not pass, like weeds, away!\r\n<br>Their heritage a sunless day!\r\n<br>God! save the people! \r\n<br>\r\n<br>Epitaph\r\n<br>\r\n<br>Towards the end of his life, Elliott suffered much pain and depression. His thoughts often turned to his own death and he wrote his own epitaph:\r\n<br>\r\n<br>The Poet's Epitaph\r\n<br>\r\n<br> Stop, Mortal! Here thy brother lies,\r\n<br> The Poet of the Poor\r\n<br> His books were rivers, woods and skies,\r\n<br> The meadow and the moor,\r\n<br> His teachers were the torn hearts’ wail,\r\n<br> The tyrant, and the slave,\r\n<br> The street, the factory, the jail,\r\n<br> The palace – and the grave!\r\n<br> The meanest thing, earth’s feeblest worm,\r\n<br> He fear’d to scorn or hate;\r\n<br> And honour’d in a peasant’s form\r\n<br> The equal of the great.\r\n<br> But if he loved the rich who make\r\n<br> The poor man’s little more,\r\n<br> Ill could he praise the rich who take\r\n<br> From plunder’d labour’s store\r\n<br> A hand to do, a head to plan,\r\n<br> A heart to feel and dare –\r\n<br> Tell man’s worst foes, here lies the man\r\n<br> Who drew them as they are.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>After his death, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem in his memory, titled Elliott.\r\n<br>\r\n<br>A bronze statue of Elliott by Neville Northey Burnard, paid for by the people of Sheffield and Rotherham, was erected in 1854 in Sheffield market-place at a cost of £600. The statue was moved to Weston Park, Sheffield, in 1874, where it remains.\r\n\t\t\t\t\t</p>",
"raw_bio": "\r \t\t\t\t\t\tEbenezer Elliott was an English poet, known as the Corn Law rhymer.\r Early Life\r Elliott was born at the New Foundry, Masbrough, in the Parish of Rotherham, Yorkshire. His father, (known as \"Devil Elliott\", for his fiery sermons) was an extreme Calvinist and a strong Radical, and was engaged in the iron trade. His mother suffered from poor health, and young Ebenezer, although one of a family of eleven children, of whom eight reached mature life, had a solitary and rather morbid childhood. At the age of six he contracted small-pox, which left him \"fearfully disfigured and six weeks blind.\" His health was permanently affected, and he suffered from illness and depression in later life.\r He was first educated at a dame school, then attended the Hollis School in Rotherham, where he was ‘taught to write and little more.’, but was generally regarded as a dunce. He hated school, and preferred to play truant, spending his time exploring the countryside around Rotherham, observing the plants and local wildlife. At about fourteen he began to read extensively on his own account, and in his leisure hours he studied botany, collected plants and flowers, and was delighted at the appearance of \"a beautiful green snake about a yard long, which on the fine Sabbath mornings about ten o'clock seemed to expect me at the top of Primrose Lane.\" When he was sixteen he was sent to work at his father's foundry, working for the next seven years with no wages beyond a little pocket money.\r Early Works\r In a fragment of autobiography printed in The Athenaeum (12 January 1850) he says that he was entirely self-taught, and attributes his poetic development to long country walks undertaken in search of wild flowers, and to a collection of books, including the works of Young, Barrow, Shenstone and John Milton, bequeathed to his father. His son-in-law, John Watkins, gave a more detailed account in \"The Life, Poetry and Letters of Ebenezer Elliott\", published 1850. One Sunday morning, after a heavy night’s drinking, Elliott missed chapel and visited his Aunt Robinson where he picked up a botany book, Sowerby’s “English Botany.” He was entranced by the colour plates of flowers and when she encouraged him to make his own flower drawings, he was thrilled to find he had a flair for it. \r His younger brother, Giles, whom he had always admired, read him a poem from James Thomson's “Seasons” which described polyanthus and auricular flowers, and this was a turning point in Elliott's life. He realised that he could successfully combine his love of nature, and his talent for drawing, with writing poems and decorating them with flower illustrations.\r In 1798, aged seventeen, he wrote his first poem Vernal Walk in imitation of James Thompson. He was also influenced by Byron and the Romantic poets and Robert Southey who later became Poet Laureate. In 1808 Elliott wrote to Southey asking for advice on getting published. Elliott was delighted when Southey replied. Their correspondence over the years encouraged him and reinforced his determination to make a name for himself as a poet. Although they only met once, they exchanged letters until 1824, and Elliott declared that it was Southey who had taught him the art of poetry.\r Other early poems were Second Nuptials and Night, or the Legend of Wharncliffe, which last was described by the Monthly Review as the ‘Ne plus ultra of German horror and bombast.’ His Tales of the Night, including The Exile and Bothwell, were considered to be of more merit, and brought him high commendations. His earlier volumes of poems, dealing with romantic themes, received much unfriendly comment, however the faults of Night, the earliest of these, are pointed out in a long and friendly letter (30 January 1819) from Southey to the author.\r The Corn Law Rhymes\r Elliott married Frances (Fanny) Gartside in 1806, and they had thirteen children. He invested his wife's fortune in his father's share of the iron foundry, but the affairs of the family firm were then in a desperate condition, and money difficulties hastened his father's death. Elliott lost everything, and in 1816 he was declared bankrupt. In 1819 he obtained funds from his wife's sisters and began another business as an iron dealer in Sheffield. The business prospered, and by 1829 he had become a successful iron merchant and steel manufacturer.\r He remained bitter about his earlier failure. He attributed his father's pecuniary losses and his own to the operation of the Corn Laws and the demand to repeal them became the greatest issue in his life. When he was made bankrupt, he had been homeless and out of work; he had faced starvation and contemplated suicide. He knew what it was like to be impoverished and desperate and, as a result, he always identified with the poor. He became well known in Sheffield for his strident views demanding changes which would improve conditions both for the manufacturer and the worker. He formed the first society in England to call for reform of the Corn Laws: the Sheffield Mechanics' Anti-Bread Tax Society founded in 1830. Four years later, he was the prime mover in establishing the Sheffield Anti-Corn Law Society and he also set up the Sheffield Mechanics' Institute. He was very active in the Sheffield Political Union, and he campaigned vigorously for the 1832 Reform Act. He took an active part in the Chartist agitation, but withdrew his support when the agitation for the repeal of the corn laws was removed from the Chartist programme. Until the Chartist Movement advocated the use of violence, Elliott was one of the leaders of the Sheffield organisation. He was the Sheffield delegate to the Great Public Meeting in Westminster in 1838 and he chaired the meeting in Sheffield when the Charter was introduced to local people.\r The strength of his political convictions was reflected in the style and tenor of his verse, earning him the nickname \" the Corn Law Rhymer\", and making him internationally famous.\r The Corn Law Rhymes, first published in 1831, had been preceded by the publication of the single long poem The Ranter in 1830. They were inspired by a fierce hatred of injustice, and are vigorous, simple and full of vivid description. The poems campaigned against the landowners in the government who stifled competition and kept the price of bread high. They were aggressive and sarcastic, attacking the status quo and demanding the repeal of the Corn Laws. They also drew attention to the dreadful conditions endured by working people, and ruthlessly contrasted their lot with the sleek and complacent gentry. In 1833-1835 Elliott also published The Splendid Village; Corn-Law Rhymes, and other Poems (3 vols.), which included The Village Patriarch (1829), The Ranter, an unsuccessful drama, Keronah, and other pieces.\r His poems were published in the USA, and in Europe. The French magazine, Le Revue Des Deux Mondes, sent a journalist to Sheffield to interview him. The Corn Law Rhymes were initially thought to be written by an uneducated Sheffield mechanic who had rejected conventional Romantic ideals for a new style of working class poetry aimed at changing the system. Elliott was described as \"a red son of the furnace \" and called \" the Yorkshire Burns\" or \" the Burns of the manufacturing city \". The journalist was surprised when he found Elliott to be a mild man with a nervous temperament.\r Asa Briggs called Elliott \"the poet of economic revolution\" while Elliott himself observed: \"I claim to be a pioneer of the greatest, the most beneficial, the only crimeless Revolution, which man has yet seen. I also claim to be the poet of that Revolution - the Bard of Freetrade; and through the prosperity, wisdom and loving-kindness which Free-trade will ultimately bring, the Bard of Universal Peace.\"\r He also contributed verses from time to time to Tails Magazine and to the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent. In 1837 his business failed and he again lost a great deal of money. This misfortune was also ascribed to the corn laws. He retired in 1841 with a small fortune and settled at Great Houghton, near Barnsley, where he lived quietly until his death in 1849 aged 68. He was buried in Darfield churchyard.\r Contemporary Criticism\r In 1850, appeared two volumes of More Prose and Verse by the Corn-Law Rhymer. Elliott lives by his determined opposition to the bread-tax, as he called it, and his poems on the subject are saved from the common fate of political poetry by their transparent sincerity and passionate earnestness.\r An article by Thomas Carlyle in the Edinburgh Review (July 1832) is the best criticism on Elliott. Carlyle was attracted by Elliott's homely sincerity and genuine power, though he had small opinion of his political philosophy, and lamented his lack of humour and of the sense of proportion. He thought his poetry too imitative, detecting not only the truthful severity of Crabbe, but a slight bravura dash of the fair tuneful Hemans. His descriptions of his native county reveal close observation and a vivid perception of natural beauty.\r His obituary appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine in February 1850. Two biographies were published in 1850, one by his son-in-law, John Watkins, and another by January Searle (G. S. Phillips). A new edition of his works by his son, Edwin Elliot, appeared in 1876.\r The Peoples Anthem\r This was one of Elliott’s last poems. It was written for music in 1847, and was usually sung to the tune \"Commonwealth\". The People’s Anthem first appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Review in 1848. The refrain “God save the people!” parodies the British national anthem, God Save the Queen and demands support for ordinary people instead. Despite its huge popularity, some churches refused to use hymn books which contained it, as it can also be seen as a criticism of God. In his notes on the poem, Elliott demanded that the vote be given to all responsible householders. “The People’s Anthem” was a great favourite for many years, and in the 1920s it was suggested that Elliott’s poem qualified him to be designated Poet Laureate of the League of Nations.\r The People's Anthem\r When wilt thou save the people?\r Oh, God of mercy! when?\r Not kings and lords, but nations!\r Not thrones and crowns, but men!\r Flowers of thy heart, oh, God, are they!\r Let them not pass, like weeds, away!\r Their heritage a sunless day!\r God! save the people! \r Epitaph\r Towards the end of his life, Elliott suffered much pain and depression. His thoughts often turned to his own death and he wrote his own epitaph:\r The Poet's Epitaph\r Stop, Mortal! Here thy brother lies,\r The Poet of the Poor\r His books were rivers, woods and skies,\r The meadow and the moor,\r His teachers were the torn hearts’ wail,\r The tyrant, and the slave,\r The street, the factory, the jail,\r The palace – and the grave!\r The meanest thing, earth’s feeblest worm,\r He fear’d to scorn or hate;\r And honour’d in a peasant’s form\r The equal of the great.\r But if he loved the rich who make\r The poor man’s little more,\r Ill could he praise the rich who take\r From plunder’d labour’s store\r A hand to do, a head to plan,\r A heart to feel and dare –\r Tell man’s worst foes, here lies the man\r Who drew them as they are.\r After his death, John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem in his memory, titled Elliott.\r A bronze statue of Elliott by Neville Northey Burnard, paid for by the people of Sheffield and Rotherham, was erected in 1854 in Sheffield market-place at a cost of £600. The statue was moved to Weston Park, Sheffield, in 1874, where it remains.\r \t\t\t\t\t",
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"name": "Pritish Nandy",
"bio": "<br>\r\nPritish Nandy (born 15 January 1951) is an Indian poet, painter, journalist, politician, media and television personality, animal activist and maker of films, TV and streaming content. He was member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament representing Maharashtra based party Shiv Sena.[2] He is the author of forty books of poetry in English and has translated poems by other writers from Bengali and Urdu into English as well as a new version of the Isha Upanishad. Apart from these, he has authored books of stories and non fiction as well. He was Publishing Director of The Times of India Group and Editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India and Filmfare in the eighties. He founded Pritish Nandy Communications Ltd, the content company, in 1993.",
"raw_bio": "\r Pritish Nandy (born 15 January 1951) is an Indian poet, painter, journalist, politician, media and television personality, animal activist and maker of films, TV and streaming content. He was member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament representing Maharashtra based party Shiv Sena.[2] He is the author of forty books of poetry in English and has translated poems by other writers from Bengali and Urdu into English as well as a new version of the Isha Upanishad. Apart from these, he has authored books of stories and non fiction as well. He was Publishing Director of The Times of India Group and Editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India and Filmfare in the eighties. He founded Pritish Nandy Communications Ltd, the content company, in 1993.",
"slug": "pritish-nandy",
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"created": "2023-09-22T12:17:48.580358",
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"description": "<p style=\"text-align: center; font-size: 24px;\"> The Great Poets and Writers in Indian and World History! </p>",
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