How does Machiavelli reflect the values and idea of humanism and Research Paper

How does Machiavelli reflect the values and idea of humanism and religion in The Prince - Research Paper Example The ‘Powerful Chairs’ (Kings, politicians, top bureaucrats etc) are always there to outsmart the ‘Chair--less Powers.’ (The common people) Machiavelli did advise the princes on how to hold on to power but he also advised the citizens seeking to maintain their liberty and how to go about it. He showed a new path for them and cautioned how his native Florence was getting engulfed in tyranny. He explained how ancient Rome preserved its freedom better, as the ordinary citizens there were more responsible and were able to checkmate the power of the elite. As a state employee Machiavelli led by example. His public life was spotless and free from corrupt practices. He was investigated for embezzlement and he came out with a clean slate and he was reimbursed the amount that was due to him. He would often say about him, â€Å"my poverty is evidence of my honesty†. Machiavelli articulated for a free city, where the citizens lived freely without any restrictions , without being absolutely controlled by a particular individual or group. A tyrant who emerges from within the political system is as dangerous for the country like the external invader. In the absence of constant vigil by the citizen body as a whole, and without their being organized properly, tyrannical individuals are bound to take over the reins of power. In essence, this proves the humanism in the approach of Machiavelli to the societal issues of his era. What a destructive weapon corruption is from the societal point of view, how adversely it affects the free-life—understand the advice of Machiavelli. In such a corrupt system, public interest is sacrificed at the altar of private or factional interests. Arbitrary interference does the maximum damage to the mass of people, according to him. The rulers must consider themselves to be the servants of public interest, not masters. Machiavelli is prophetic when he asserts that the resources of the elite combined with extensi ve discretion enjoyed by political office holders is the principal threat to the society and the nation. The expectations of the ordinary citizens are simple and straightforward. They are neither like power-hungry politicians nor like the ambitious elites. They have no desire for power to rule over others. At the same time, they have self-respect and essential dignity and do not desire to be dominated and would not like the arbitrary power to subjugate them. They are perpetually fearful of such societal developments. The sterling qualities of Machiavelli’s humanism are revealed in his opinion that the key to the resilience of Rome was its system and institutions—how they ensured the participation of ordinary citizens. They were the final guardians of freedom, not the grandi. He paid hearty compliments for the â€Å"tribunes of the plebs† (an institution of only the lower class) for exercising check and control over the power-grabbing craze of the grandi. Machiav elli goes a step further. The tribunes are vested with powers to frame charges against the members of the senate and indict them for corruption publicly and the private citizens will be punished accordingly if they try to exert pressure on the politics of the republic. That was a model system of punishment where

Minority Corporate Leader Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Minority Corporate Leader - Assignment Example The paper further draws clarity from the way a leader deals with situations and various outcomes. Upon keen exploration of Sage, it is clear that leaders have to enhance teamwork and approach every situation with a clear and innovative mind. Minority Corporate Leader Leadership is an indulging role in any sector. Leaders have to be assertive and make decisions depending on prevailing situations. Apparently, many decisions are made depending on the situation at hand. Some decisions require harnessing information and discussing with relevant stakeholders parties. With such an approach, a leader is definitely going to arrive at the right decision (Armstrong, 2011). However, neglecting some of these aspects could lead to poor decision making. For example, when making a decision in the nursing sector, there is the need to incorporate all the concerned parties. This will ensure that decision implementation is smooth and all inclusive. Ola Sage is 45 years old and exhibits the desirable cha racteristics of a leader. She is married and lives in Silver Spring. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Strayer University and a master’s degree from George Mason University. She is currently the CEO of E-management, which is a federal Information Technology company. Since its inception, Sage has been skeptical about improving the performance of the company to greater heights. In the initial stages, the company was struggling to stay put in the market since it was not attracting a large number of people in demand for its services. She has struggled to develop the company to reach out to a larger market in offering its services. Previously, Sage had dreams of becoming a concert pianist. However, she decided to concentrate on offering IT services. This was a successful idea as she is currently one of the most respected IT experts. The first aspect that should be considered in a leader is the way a leader overcomes barriers. In any sector, there is a high probability that there will be barriers, challenges and setbacks. Ola Sage is a leader that accepts challenges while managing other people. She states that a challenge in a work place strengthens a leader. As such, she is decisive and makes the appropriate changes when there are challenges. For example, the technology sector is changing and improving with each passing day. As such, there is a need for a leader that will give a positive approach to these enhancements (Reese, 2003). This includes purchase of better and improved technology. This ensures the organization is prepared to face all the other challenges in the sector. Similarly, Sage ensures all the other workers are incorporated into finding solutions for the barriers of success. Apparently, she states that a leader has to be on the forefront in overcoming barriers. Such a leader is destined for greatness as all the barriers and challenges will be solved in the meanest time. As such, the organization will be on a gradual improvement. Team building is an important aspect in an organization. An organization that ensures the workers are working as a team is on the verge of making positive accrual with time. For example, all the leaders should work in unison with the other workers. Sage acknowledges that all leaders should enhance team work each and every time in an organization. She states that people should accept that they are not able to make accomplishments on their own. As such, they should decipher that every person

Premises Of Cognitive Development Theory Psychology Essay

Premises Of Cognitive Development Theory Psychology Essay Fruitful practical work of the outstanding Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and theoretical work of the famous Russian scientist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) awaken our scientific interest to the cognitive-psychological researches which cover the whole human life. It is necessary to discuss cognitive development theory and forms of cognitive knowledge in the body of this essay. Also we will compare and contrast the stages of cognitive development and intelligence from the perspective of above mentioned theorists for children and adolescents. In this part of the essay it is necessary to define the term cognitive development and describe the basic premises of cognitive development theory. Lets begin our discussion from the theoretical facts presentation. It is well-known fact that cognitive development is a base area of study within developmental psychology. Oakley (2004) defined developmental psychology as the study of the psychological changes that take place between birth and old age. Thus, the purpose of developmental psychology is to describe and explain the changes in human mind from the birth to adulthood. Cognitive development is the study that explains how psychological processes and activities involved in knowing and thinking develop children and adolescents world. Adults thinking greatly differs from children thinking and cognitive development deeply studies these developments and changes. Piaget was the first person who noted that the childs mind is arranged quite differently than the adult psyche and children were not just small copies of adults, but in fact children were different in their ways of surrounding reality cognition and interpretation. Piaget proved his idea that knowledge in adult mind and in child mind has different structure and it doesnt mean that adults simply know more than children. For example, children believe that if the object moves, then it is alive, and the name of the object is sitting inside it. Childrens question why? is associated with the confidence that every thing has its purpose. Writing a scientific answer to the childs question: Why do stars shine? means its absolutely misunderstanding by adult person. Lack of social orientation is noticeable in the childrens conversations: children rather speak for other people than with others. In contrast to the self-centered adults who become such people on their own will, self-centered childre n show such behavior because they are almost incapable to put themselves on others place, or take someone elses point of view. Comparing and contrasting views of Vygotsky and Piaget on cognitive development and in continuation of the topic we see the next: Vygotsky considered Piagets work revolutionary, but at the same time he stressed that its pioneering quality suffered on dualism, that is, uncertainty about the materialist and idealist positions. Since the psychology of intellectual development has been studied in the tradition of scientific materialism, inevitably there was a conflict between the actual essence of this method and idealistic theories of human intelligence. It was a serious debate, especially between 1920 and 1930, when the development of experimental psychology became a serious threat to the idealistic, nonmaterialistic and philosophical trends in psychology. Neisser (1967) stated that there were three main principles in the base of Peagets theory of cognitive development: assimilation (the process of putting a new experience into already existing mental structure), accommodation (the revising of an existing schema due to a new experience) and equilibrium (the process of seeking to achieve  cognitive  stability through assimilation and accommodation). And Oakley (2004) stated that Vygotskys theory focused upon three key factors. These were culture, language and the zone of proximal development. According to Wertsch (1985), Vygotsky agreed with Piaget that a child does not sit back and somehow passively absorb knowledge but instead actively constructs knowledge. This idea was in direct contrast to the view of Pavlov that learning was essentially a passive activity. However, Vygotskys theory differs in key principles from Piaget. He stated that childrens complex thinking was acquired through social interactions between children and the adults around them. The child will interact with others peers, parents and teachers and these interactions will result in learning. Contrasting two theorists points of views we see that Piaget considers that the childs thinking develops from autistic form through egocentric to a socialized. Vygotsky agrees with the general periodization of Piaget, but rejects the genetic predetermination of the sequence. In other words, Piaget believed that development precedes learning, and Vygotsky believed that learning precedes development. Other point of disagreement between these two theorists was the nature and function of speech. Piaget considers that egocentric childs speech, addressed to itself during the thinking aloud, paving the way for social speech, and allows child to learn experience patterns and begin to use speech for communication. Vygotsky considers that the mind of the child from the birth has the social nature and egocentric speech has also social origins and social objectives: children learn egocentric speech of others, and use it to communicate with others. This premise is the main point of the theory of Vygotsky and the main aspect of differences between the positions of these two theorists. Analyzing stages of cognitive development Wertsch (1985) shows four Piagets stages of cognitive development: sensorimotor stage  (infancy) motor activity without symbols use is necessary for intelligence demonstration; pre-operational stage  (toddler and early childhood) symbols are used, memory and imagination are developed, language use matures, but egocentric thinking predominates; concrete operational stage (elementary and early adolescence) egocentric thinking diminishes, systematic and logical symbols manipulation related to concrete objects; formal operational stage  (adolescence and adulthood) abstract concepts used in thinking process. While Piagets cognitive development theory has four concrete stages, Vygotsky said that there are no set stages at all, but put our attention on affiliation, play, learning, peer, work. For the last part of the paper I want to use Slavins (2003) words who said that a possible classroom application of Vygotskys cognitive theory could take place in a first grade classroom. First grade students are often on varying levels of knowledge. Some children may already know how to read while others are still trying to master this concept. A good way to help the children who are not reading as well as the others may be to give these children help sounding out a word when they get stuck while reading a story. Thus, basing on above observed information we could conclude that according to both theorists formal operational thinking marks the end of intellectual growth. The child went a long way from simple reflexes to complex thoughts newborn adolescents and adults. And Piaget came to the conclusion that reality is not the thing that an individual reaches the outside, but inside, through his own logic, depending on the structure of the psyche.

Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart :: essays research papers

"[Trembles] with hate, unable to utter a word... in a flash Okonkwo drew his machete. The messenger crouched to avoid the blow. It was useless. Okonkwo's machete descended twice and the man's head lay beside his uniformed body." (204) This is a graphic illustration of Okonkwo?s desperate last attempt to reassert his manhood and to make a statement to the tribe. Regrettably for Okonkwo though it was a failure, and Okonkwo knew that the tribe would never stand up and fight, like he wanted them to. This incident is directly related to Okonkwo?s obsession with not looking weak like his father. Some people might say that Okonkwo was just trying to protect the tradition and cultural of his tribal village but in actuality this is far from the truth. When Okonkwo cut down the guard, he made the swift assumption that his clansmen were as passionate about fighting colonialism as him and would follow him into war. When he found otherwise, he could not understand what had happened to his village. The next place he was seen was hanging from a noose in a selfish show of hypocrisy. In the end, Okonkwo's status among his tribe counted for nothing because his own despair over the colonization of his village led him to kill himself. His whole life Okonkwo strived to not to look weak like his father, but in the end he took the cowards way out, suicide. Suicide was a great sin against the Earth. Because he took his own life, Okonkwo, a great leader of Umuofia, had to be buried by strangers. All of his work and perseverance amounted to nothing because of what he had done. Another claim that people might make is that he is justified because he was just finishing what the white people had started by imprisoning him and his fellow villagers. This may be true, but is revenge a very good justification for murder suicide? Though the corrupt court messengers were in the wrong for what they had done, Okonkwo had no right to do what he did either. Okonkwo failed to realize that two wrongs don?t equal a right, he thought that he could solve every thing with brute violence and war but he paid for his mistake with his life. Okonkwo made a fatal mistake by being so quick to war and to diplomacy. Okonkwo?s life mission was to be every thing his father wasn?

Progress of Agriculture Before and After Independence of India Essay

Agriculture has been the backbone of the Indian economy and it will continue to remain so for a long time. It has to support almost 17 per cent of world population from 2. 3 per cent of world geographical area and 4. 2 per cent of world’s water resources. The economic reforms, initiated in the country during the early 1990s, have put the economy on a higher growth trajectory. Annual growth rate in GDP has accelerated from below 6 percent during the initial years of reforms to more than 8 percent in recent years. This happened mainly due to rapid growth in non-agriculture sector. The workforce engaged in agriculture between 1980-81 and 2006-07 witnessed a very small decline; from 60. 5 percent to 52 percent. The present cropping intensity of 137 per cent has registered an increase of only 26 per cent since 1950-51. The net sown area is 142 Mha. The net irrigated area was 58. 87 Mha in 2004-05. Presently, the total net irrigated area covers 45. 5 per cent of the net sown area, the remaining 54. 5 per cent is rainfed. The degradation of land and surface as well as ground water resources results in fast deterioration of soil health. Losses due to biotic (insect-pests, diseases, weeds) and abiotic (drought, salinity, heat, cold, etc. ) stresses account for about one-fourth of the value of agricultural produce. The storage, transportation, processing, value addition and marketing of farm produce need to be improved to enhance household food, nutrition and livelihood security. Indian agriculture is characterized by agro-ecological diversities in soil, rainfall, temperature, and cropping system. Besides favorable solar energy, the country receives about 3 trillion m3 of rainwater, 14 major, 44 medium and 55 minor rivers hare about 83 per cent of the drainage basin. About 210 billion m3 water is estimated to be available as ground water. Irrigation water is becoming a scarce commodity. Thus proper harvesting and efficient utilization of water is of great importance. Intensive cultivation as a result of introduction of high yielding varieties in the mid 1960’s required higher energy inputs and better management practices. Land preparation, harvesting, threshing and irrigation are the operations, which utilize most of the energy used in agriculture. The share of animate power in agriculture decreased from 92 er cent in 1950-51 to 20 per cent in 2000-01. For desired cropping intensity with timeliness in field operations, animate energy sources alone were no longer adequate. Farmers opted for mechanical power sources to supplement animate power. Average size of farm holdings gradually reduced from 2. 58 ha to 1. 57 ha (Table 1). Small and marginal farmers have limited resources especially in rain-fed regions where only animate power is used resulting in low productivity. Though agricultural production is high, the per hectare productivity is much lower than world average. There is an urgent need to increase productivity.

Intro to The Romantic Period Essay

At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist, and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace. In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a beneficial visual: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworth’s romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, â€Å"The Prelude† (1805–50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world. The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. In Keats’s great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographia Literaria (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground–breaking books on human, and women’s, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary  criticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary. ————————————————- Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics. The Romantic period The nature of Romanticism As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th, â€Å"Romantic† is indispensable but also a little misleading: there was no self-styled â€Å"Romantic movement† at the time, and the great writers of the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the  Ã¢â‚¬Å"organic,† â€Å"plastic† qualities of Romantic art and the â€Å"mechanical† character of Classicism. Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that â€Å"a new heaven is begun† was matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s â€Å"The world’s great age begins anew.† â€Å"These, these will give the world another heart, / A nd other pulses,† wrote John Keats, referring to Leigh Hunt andWilliam Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human endeavour. As that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon end. The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and having as his end the conveyance of â€Å"truth,† the Romantics found the source of poetry in the particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: â€Å"To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.† The poet was seen as an individual distinguished from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the criterion by which it was to be judged. The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some ways a continuation of the earlier â€Å"cult of sensibility†; and it is worth remembering that Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart. But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry â€Å"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,† and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as â€Å"feeling itself, employing thought only as the medium of its utterance.† It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the Neoclassical era to a new stress onimagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw  the imagination as the supre me poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being. Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as â€Å"invention, imagination and judgement,† but Blake wrote: â€Å"One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.† The poets of this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the restrictions of civilized â€Å"reason.† Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the â€Å"noble savage† was often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type was adumbrated in the â€Å"poor Indian† of Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of the diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to th e dictates of the creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, â€Å"You feel strongly; trust to those feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle that actuates it.† This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of â€Å"genres,† each with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable except in short passages. Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or â€Å"gaudy and inane,† and totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory. Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely conventional language. Poetry BLAKE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had been written primarily to express  their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought. His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Expe rience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas), written from about 1796 to about 1807. Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic) condition. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the implication s of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems â€Å"The Ruined Cottage† and â€Å"The Pedlar† (both to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister, Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west  of England, were in close contact with Coleridge. Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads(1798). The volume began with Coleridge’s â€Å"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,† continued with poems displaying delight in the powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative â€Å"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,† Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature faith in nature and humanity. His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously, 1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child â€Å"fostered alike by beauty and by fear† by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the â€Å"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.† In poems such as â€Å"Michael† and â€Å"The Brothers,† by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives. Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly brought together images of nature and the mind in â€Å"The Eolian Harp† (1796), he devoted himself to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as â€Å"Religious Musings† and â€Å"The Destiny of Nations.† Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however, and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relatio nship between nature and the human mind. Poems such as â€Å"This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,† â€Å"The Nightingale,† and â€Å"Frost at Midnight† (now sometimes called the â€Å"conversation poems† but collected by Coleridge himself as â€Å"Meditative Poems in Blank Verse†) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with subtlety of psychological comment. â€Å"Kubla Khan† (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that Coleridge said came to him in â€Å"a kind of Reverie,† represented a new kind of exotic writing, which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of â€Å"The Ancient Mariner† and the unfinished  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Christabel.† After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks, literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic. â€Å"Dejection: An Ode† (1802), another meditat ive poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his â€Å"shaping spirit of Imagination.† The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise ofNapoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that, while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves. From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal†¦as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer projected work, The Recluse, â€Å"a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.† The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the failure of French revolutionary ideals. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable, his playRemorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and he was sought there as â€Å"the most impressive talker of his age† (in the words of the essayist William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers. No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. Romanticism, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. In America, the Romantic Movement was slightly delayed and modulated, holding sway over arts and letters from roughly 1830 up to the Civil War. Contrary to the English example, American literature championed the novel as the most fitting genre for Romanticism’s exposition. In a broader sense, Romanticism can be conceived as an adjective which is applicable to the literature of virtually any time period. With that in mind, anything from the Homeric epics to modern dime novels can be said to bear the stamp of Romanticism. In spite of such general disagreements over usage, there are some definitive and universal statements one can make regarding the nature of the Romantic Movement in both England and America. First and foremost, Romanticism is concerned with the individual more than with society. The individual consciousness and especially the individual imagination are especially fascinating for the Romantics. â€Å"Melancholy† was quite the buzzword for the Romantic poets, and altered states of consciousness were often sought after in order to enhance one’s creative potential. There was a coincident downgrading of the importance and power of reason, clearly a reaction against the Enlightenment mode of thinking. Nevertheless, writers became gradually more invested in social causes as the period moved forward. Thanks largely to the Industrial Revolution, English society was undergoing the most severe paradigm shifts it had seen in living memory. The response of many early Romantics was to yearn for an idealized, simpler past. In particular, English Romantic poets had a strong connection with medievalism and mythology. The tales of King Arthur were especially resonant to their imaginations. On top of this, there was a clearly mystical quality to Romantic writing that sets it apart from other literary periods. Of course, not every Romantic poet or novelist displayed all, or even most of these traits all the time. On the formal  level, Romanticism witnessed a steady loosening of the rules of artistic expression that were pervasive during earlier times. The Neoclassical Period of the eighteenth century included very strict expectations regarding the structure and content of poetry. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, experimentation with new styles and subjects became much more acceptable. The high-flown language of the previous generation’s poets was replaced with more natural cadences and verbiage. In terms of poetic form, rhymed stanzas were slowly giving way to blank verse, an unrhymed but still rhythmic style of poetry. The purpose of blank verse was to heighten conversational speech to the level of austere beauty. Some criticized the new style as mundane, yet the innovation soon became the preferred style. One of the most popular themes of Romantic poetry was country life, otherwise known as pastoral poetry. Mythological and fantastic settings were also employed to great effect by many of the Romantic poets. Though struggling and unknown for the bulk of his life, poet and artist William Blake was certainly one of the most creative minds of his generation. He was well ahead of his time, predating the high point of English Romanticism by several decades. His greatest work was composed during the 1790s, in the shadow of the French Revolution, and that confrontation informed much of his creative process. Throughout his artistic career, Blake gradually built up a sort of personal mythology of creation and imagination. The Old and New Testaments were his source material, but his own sensibilities transfigured the Biblical stories and led to something entirely original and completely misunderstood by contemporaries. He attempted to woo patrons to his side, yet his unstable temper made him rather difficult to work with professionally. Some considered him mad. In addition to writing poetry of the first order, Blake was also a master engraver. His greatest contributions to Romantic literature were his self-published, quasi-mythological illustrated poetry collections. Gloriously colored and painstaking in their design, few of these were produced and fewer still survive to the present day. However, the craft and genius behind a work like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell cannot be ignored. If one could identify a single voice as the standard-bearer of Romantic sensibilities, that voice would belong to William Wordsworth. His publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is identified by many as the opening act of the Romantic Period in English literature. It was a hugely successful  work, requiring several reprinting over the years. The dominant theme of Lyrical Ballads was Nature, specifically the power of Nature to create strong impressions in the mind and imagination. The voice in Wordsworth’s poetry is observant, meditative and aware of the connection between living things and objects. There is the sense that past, present, and future all mix together in the human consciousness. One feels as though the poet and the landscape are in communion, each a partner in an act of creative production. Wordsworth quite deliberately turned his back on the Enlightenment traditions of poetry, specifically the work of Alexander Pope. He instead looked more to the Renaissance and the Classics of Greek and Latin epic poetry for inspiration. His work was noted for its accessibility. The undeniable commercial success of LyricalBallads does not diminish the profound effect it had on an entire generation of aspiring writers. In the United State, Romanticism found its voice in the poets and novelists of the American Renaissance. The beginnings of American Romanticism went back to the New England Transcendental Movement. The concentration on the individual mind gradually shifted from an optimistic brand of spiritualism into a more modern, cynical study of the underside of humanity. The political unrest in mid-nineteenth century America undoubtedly played a role in the development of a darker aesthetic. At the same time, strongly individualist religious traditions played a large part in the development of artistic creations. The Protestant work ethic, along with the popularity and fervor of American religious leaders, fed a literary output that was undergird with fire and brimstone. The middle of the nineteenth century has only in retrospect earned the label of the American Renaissance in literature. No one alive in the 1850s quite realized the flowering of creativity that was underway. In fact, the novelists who today are regarded as classic were virtually unknown during their lifetimes. The novelists working during this period, particularly Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, were crafting dens ely symbolic and original pieces of literature that nonetheless relied heavily upon the example of English Romanticism. However, there work was in other respects a clean break with any permutation of Romanticism that had come before. There was a darkness to American Romanticism that was clearly distinct from the English examples of earlier in the century. Herman Melville died penniless and unknown, a failed writer who recognized his own  brilliance even when others did not. It would take the Modernists and their reappraisal of American arts and letters to resuscitate Melville’s literary corpus. In novels like Benito Cereno and Moby Dick, Melville employed a dense fabric of hinted meanings and symbols that required close reading and patience. Being well-read himself, Melville’s writing betrays a deep understanding of history, mythology, and religion. With Moby Dick, Melville displays his research acumen, as in the course of the novel the reader learns more than they thought possible about whales and whaling. The novel itself is dark, mysterious, and hints at the supernatural. Superficia lly, the novel is a revenge tale, but over and above the narrative are meditations of madness, power, and the nature of being human. Interestingly, the narrator in the first few chapters of the novel more or less disappears for most of the book. He is in a sense swallowed up by the mania of Captain Ahab and the crew. Although the novel most certainly held sway, poetry was not utterly silent during the flowering of American Romanticism. Arguably the greatest poet in American literary history was Walt Whitman, and he took his inspiration from many of the same sources as his fellows working in the novel. His publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855 marked a critical moment in the history of poetry. Whitman’s voice in his poetry was infused with the spirit of democracy. He attempted to include all people in all corners of the Earth within the sweep of his poetic vision. Like Blake, Whitman’s brand of poetics was cosmological and entirely unlike anything else being produced at the time. Like the rest of the poets in the Romantic tradition, Whitman coined new words, and brought a diction and rhythmic style t o verse that ran counter to the aesthetics of the last century. Walt Whitman got his start as a writer in journalism, and that documentary style of seeing the world permeated all his creative endeavors. In somewhat of a counterpoint to Whitman’s democratic optimism stands Edgar Allen Poe, today recognized as the most purely Romantic poet and short story writer of his generation. Poe crafted fiction and poetry that explored the strange side of human nature. The English Romantics had a fascination with the grotesque and of â€Å"strange† beauty, and Poe adopted this aesthetic perspective willingly. His sing-song rhythms and dreary settings earned him criticism on multiple fronts, but his creativity earned him a place in the first rank of American artists. He is credited as the inventor of detective fiction, and was likewise one of the  original masters of horror. A sometimes overlooked contribution, Poe’s theories on literature are often required reading for students of the art form. The master of symbolism in American litera ture was Nathaniel Hawthorne. Each of his novels represents worlds imbued with the power of suggestion and imagination. The Scarlet Letter is often placed alongside Moby Dick as one of the greatest novels in the English language. Not a single word is out of place, and the dense symbolism opens the work up to multiple interpretations. There are discussions of guilt, family, honor, politics, and society. There is also Hawthorne’s deep sense of history. Modern readers often believe that The Scarlet Letter was written during the age of the Puritans, but in fact Hawthorne wrote a story that was in the distant past even in his own time. Another trademark of the novel is its dabbling in the supernatural, even the grotesque. One gets the sense, for example, that maybe something is not quite right with Hester’s daughter Pearl. Nothing is what it appears to be in The Scarlet Letter, and that is the essence of Hawthorne’s particular Romanticism. Separate from his literary production, Hawthorne wrote expansively on literary theory and criticism. His theories exemplify the Romantic spirit in American letters at mid-century. He espoused the conviction that objects can hold significance deeper than their apparent meaning, and that the symbolic nature of reality was the most fertile ground for literature. In his short stories especially, Hawthorne explored the complex system of meanings and sensations that shift in and out of a person’s consciousness. Throughout his writings, one gets a sense of darkness, if not outright pessimism. There is the sense of not fully understanding the world, of not getting the entire picture no matter how hard one tries. In a story like â€Å"Young Goodman Brown,† neither the reader nor the protagonist can distinguish reality from fantasy with any sureness. As has been argued, Romanticism as a literary sensibility never completely disappeared. It was overtaken by other aesthetic paradigms like Realism and Modernism, but Romanticism was always lurking under the surface. Many great poets and novelists of the twentieth century cite the Romantics as their greatest inspirational voices. The primary reason that Romanticism fell out of the limelight is because many writers felt the need to express themselves in a more immediate way. The Romantic poets were regarded as innovators, but a bit lost in their own imaginations. The real problems of  life in the world seemed to be pushed aside. As modernization continued unchecked, a more earthy kind of literature was demanded, and the Romantics simply did not fit that bill.

Role of Fate Romeo and Juliet Essay Example

Role of Fate Romeo and Juliet Essay Example Role of Fate Romeo and Juliet Paper Role of Fate Romeo and Juliet Paper In William Shakespeares play, Romeo and Juliet have fate is one of the main contributors that lead to their deaths. Because of fate, the play becomes exciting and it is exactly what makes the two young lovers meet each other in the first place. It was fate that a Capulet’s serving man told Romeo and Benvolio about the party where the two lovers meet, in the prologue of the play Shakespeare says that Romeo and Juliet are â€Å"star-crossed lovers†, and lastly, the flaws in Friar Lawrence’s plan also contributed to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet. Therefore, fate is undoubtedly the most responsible for the couples heartbreaking tragedy. It is not a coincidence that Romeo and Juliet meet in the first place. A serving man comes across Romeo and Benvolio in the first act, unaware that they are Montague’s, and informs them about the Capulet party: My master is the great rich Capulet: and if you be not of the house of Montague’s, I pray come and crush a cup of wine ( Act 1, scene 2, 81-84). It is by fate that Romeo and Benvolio run into the Capulet serving man and discover the party. In the prologue the chorus says pair of star-crossed lovers take their life; (Line 6) â€Å"star-crossed† meaning opposed of by the stars. Finally, it is also a result of fate that the flaws in Friar Lawrences plan eventually lead to Romeo and Juliets deaths. For example, Friar Lawrences plan is ruined because Friar John is unable to deliver the message to Romeo: I could not send it here it is again nor get a messenger to bring it thee, so fearful were they of infection (Act 5, Scene 2, 14-16). Because Friar Lawrences message is crucial to the plan he says that the fact that it is never sent creates a major flaw that can turn out to be very deadly. For these reasons, Romeo and Juliets first meeting is sure to happen, fate being the most powerful force at work, determining their future. In conclusion, Romeo and Juliet were star-crossed lovers who were never supposed to be happy together, and both Romeo and Juliet knew that no good would come with their love for each other (Romeo, 1. . 106-111) (Juliet, 1. 5. 141). In this, it is learned that the tragic ending to Romeo and Juliet was inevitable, and that no matter what, they would not end up living happily as a couple. Taking into consideration that Romeo and Juliet are doomed to meet, love and die together, fate is clearly the dominant force for the most part of the play.