The Aeneid

The Aeneid is the story of a historical hero, the founding myth of Rome, and also an epic about nation building itself. C.S. Lewis, among other critics, has interpreted it as a poem of praise on all three of these levels. Considering its subject matter, and the Roman inclination to praise the glories of…

Macbeth

The Tragedy of The Villain

Out, out, brief candle!/Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more. It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.

Yeats

The Artist and the Antithetical

In an anecdote Yeats recounts about the painter Audrey Beardsley and himself in The Tragic Generation, Yeats asks the painter if all that he draws is inspired by rage against antiquity, and Beardsley replies, “If it were so inspired, the work would be in no…

Blake & Othello

Blackness as Badness

One of Blake’s most fundamental and ever-present ideals is the unification of good and bad — the “marriage of heaven and hell,” the necessity of contradictions. In Blake’s work, he constantly asserts that there is no clear line between good and bad and…

Written on the Body

Written on the Body

Written on the body tries to deconstruct the specific ideas expressed in love stories to their a priori statements about love. In doing so, the novel maintains internal integrity: it does not bring up ideas of love through narrative, it simply…

Lord Jim

The Power of Conrad

“That man there seemed to be aware of his hopeless difficulty,” Marlow said of Lord Jim, upon first looking at him. The same can be said of Conrad, upon first reading him. But if we pursue Conrad’s novels with the tenacity with which Marlow pursued the essence of…

The Sonnets

Sonnet 129 immediately appealed to me for its utter disgust with lust. In its extreme hyperbole, it almost seems sarcastic, ironic: not only is “lust in action” described as “th’expense of spirit” — the loss of semen through orgasm, which was commonly believed to shorten life — but “th’expense of spirit in…

Ulysses 1

Ulysses 1 (Sections 1–4)

Every piece of literature is trying to illuminate the reality of human experience, and thus in choosing a narrative form, an author asserts how and where that illumination is best found. Eliot observed her illuminations by assuming the perspective of a…

The Heart of Darkness

Conrad and the Darkness

One of Conrad’s ever-present themes is submersion into the negative — the submersion of his characters, his readers, and himself, into the negative aspects of life, the negative sides of the imagination, the darkness. This theme is…