VMOU
B.A.
English -2020-21
EG
-05
Poetry
and Drama-III
Max Marks: 30
Note:
The Question paper is divided into three sections A, B, and C. Write Answer as
per the given instruction.
Section-A
(Very
Short Answer Type Questions)
Note:
Answer all questions. As per the nature of the question you delimit your answer
in one word, one sentence or maximum up to 30 words. Each question carries 1
mark.
6x1=06
1.
i.
What is Oedipus complex?
-
The Oedipus Complex is the attachment of the
child to the parent of the opposite sex, accompanied by envious and aggressive
feelings toward the parent of the same sex.
ii.
What was the origin of the play
“Hayavadana”?
-
Hayavadana (1971) is a play by Indian writer
Girish Karnad. Karnad was inspired by Thomas Mann's ‘The Transposed Heads’,
which in turn was inspired by an eleventh-century Sanskrit text called ‘the
Kathasaritsagara’.
iii.
Explain “water skin” and “a bloated
buffalo”?
-
A water skin is a leather bag by holding on
to which one can float on the surface of the water. The tail of a bloated
buffalo: One can float on the surface of the water by holding on to the tail of
a buffalo.
iv.
What is the underlying idea of the poem
“Genesis”?
-
In the poem ‘Genesis’, the poet leads the
readers to a realm of myth, reality and vision and leaves up to them for
analysis.
v.
Explain the phrase ‘unquiet wanderer’?
-
The phrase ‘unquiet wanderer’ is used for the
ghost of Charles Parnell in the poem ‘To a Shade’ by W. B. Yeats.
vi.
What does the poet hope for in “A Song
for Simeon”?
-
Simeon is hoping for the consolation of
Israel, after being promised that "he should not see death before he had
seen the Lord's Christ".
- Section-B
(Short Answer Questions)
Note:
Answer any 4 questions. Each answer should not exceed 100 words. Each question
carries 3 marks.
-
4x3=12
2.
Discuss the theme of “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus?
-
The poem is about human nature of
indifference. The poet takes the reference of mythological character Icarus to
talk about human tendency to indifference. When Icarus fell from the sky, it
was spring and a farmer was ploughing his field. Similarly, the edge of the sea
was concerned with itself. Furthermore, the sun too had no pity upon Icarus.
The poem establishes a theme of growing selfishness and individualism among
mankind. At present no one has time to think and worry about others' problems. Under
the impact of commercialization and monetary value, a man has no time and
interest to be generous, kind and supportive. Fall of Icarus is the fall of
humanity.
3.
What are the views of Eliot about modern man in his play?
-
With ‘The Family Reunion’, T. S. Eliot offers
his version of a modern man’s tragedy. The theme that Eliot explores, is family
conflict. He extends this theme to the dualistic love-hate relationships
between generations and among siblings of the same generation. Although most of
the family members are physically united, their actions before and during the
party push them ever further apart. Amy’s death at the play’s end signals the
dissolution rather than reunion of the family. The power of place is also a
thematic undercurrent, as the physical estate assumes outsize importance in
Amy’s scheme, which the younger characters variously endorse or reject. The
negative inspirations for and repercussions of many characters’ behavior
suggest a theme of inevitable destiny.
4.
Assess the various themes amalgamated as one in Nissim Ezekiel’s poem “Enterprise”.
-
The theme of the poem, ‘Enterprise’ revolves
around a metaphorical journey to a pilgrimage started by some enthusiastic
people. The enterprise, though started in high spirit, faced some setbacks in
the middle. Finally, when they reached the destination, they doubted the importance
of that troublesome journey. They realized its futility and concluded: “Home is
where we have to gather grace”. Thus the narrative poem ‘Enterprise’ delivers a
great message. The poem is didactic. When people start an enterprise in group,
they often put their own interest and opinion above the group’s need. That
finally leads to a failure.
5.
What is the responsibility of the poet according to Jayant Mahapatra?
-
The end of poetry reading is pleasure.
Poetry, of course, must be read for pleasure; but it should not be forgotten
that poetry and other genres of literature has a definite therapeutic value,
not only for the author, but possibly also for his reader. Mahapatra’s poems,
in this sense, are pieces of knowledge, which carry the problems of individual
man and his society, and also the diagnosis, if not remedies. Jayant
Mahapatra’s poems are great exercises of the human spirit in the perilous
times. The poet doesn’t make any preference. The poet’s intention is not to
point out what is right or what is wrong.
6.
Critically appreciate the poem “Hawk Roosting” as monologue or a soliloquy?
-
This poem is written in the form of
a monologue or a soliloquy. The speaker here is a hawk. The hawk here is to be
imagined as speaking and expressing his ideas about himself and the universe of
which he is a denizen. The hawk speaks with a sense of authority, and with the
fullest confidence in himself. His whole concern is to distribute death; and he
never wavers in carrying out this task because he knows only one path, and that
is the path leading him directly through the bones of the living creatures.
Section
‘C’
(Long
Answer Questions)
Note:
Answer any two questions. You have to delimit each answer maximum up to 400
words. Each question carries 06 marks.
7.
Critically appreciate the poem “Sunday Morning” as an eloquent and thematically
resonant poem?
- “Sunday
Morning,” one of the collected pieces in Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923),
has been singled out as one of his most eloquent and thematically resonant
poems. Stevens’s poetry is “a prolonged exploration, both in theoretical
speculation within the poetry itself and in poetic practice, of the power of
language not so much to name reality as to uncover it.”
Sunday
Morning chronicles one woman’s search for spiritual fulfillment in a
philosophical dialogue between her and Stevens’s poetic persona. Throughout the
poem, the two examine two contrasting ideologies: that of Christianity and of
paganism. The woman must decide which will help her find the spiritual
satisfaction she is seeking.
Stevens
said about this poem that “the poem is simply an expression of paganism” and that
the poem suggests “a naturalistic religion as a substitute for supernaturalism”
The
poet presents compelling arguments through a series of eloquent images
centering on the beauty of the natural world. When the woman notes that this
beauty is transitory, the poet counters, “death is the mother of beauty,”
insisting that the fact of death enhances beauty. After careful consideration of
the poet’s line of reasoning, by the end of the poem, the woman determines that
a devotion to earthly pleasures and not the dead religion of the past will
provide her with divine bliss.
She
recognizes that the secular beauty she appreciates is not eternal, and so the
colorful oranges and parrot, earlier appearing so full of life, now “seem
things in some procession of the dead.”
The
voice of the poet questions the woman’s decision to turn her back on the beauty
of the natural world and devote herself to her religion. He insists that she
could find divinity through a connection to the splendor of the earth.
The
argument is presented as a conclusive one, and the woman accepts it. Her
recognition
that
Jesus is a historical figure and that she is alone, a part of “unsponsored”
nature, frees her from the prison in which her traditional beliefs had locked
her. She cannot believe in gods because they are, to her, shadowy substances.
The conflict between Nature and religion is not resolved even in the end.
In
Sunday Morning the woman has wiped away the gods like shadows. It is ironical
as well as pathetic that the day which started so complacently for the
aristocratic lady should end in leaving her sceptical, agitated and longing.
8.
William Carlos Williams is a poet closely associated with modernism and
imagery. Elaborate with illustrations from his poems?
- Williams
was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a community near the city of Paterson. He
became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions
that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
Williams
got to know the Dadaist movement, which may explain the influence on his
earlier poems of Dadaist and Surrealist principles. His involvement with The
Others made Williams a key member of the early modernist movement in America. He
advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and unnecessary
literary allusions, and try to see the world as it is.
Williams’
most anthologized poem is The Red Wheelbarrow, considered an example of the Imagist
movement’s style and principles. Williams
is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature,
and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one.
Williams
tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose
subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of
common people. The reformist movement known as Imagism lay its emphasis on
direct apprehension of natural things. Minor social phenomena was attractive to
WCW who had already forseen that his best poetic strategy would be simply the
deft, uncalculated transcription of what he saw and felt.
Concretion,
exactitude, observation without comment, vulgar subject matter, common speech
homely details glittering with a mineral clarity- William exhibits them all and
achieves over and over again that complexity of emotion within as instant of
time that was the goal of the Imagist. He believed that a focus on concrete
imagery was a necessary step toward the rehabilitation of the poem, yet he felt
that Imagism ‘lost its place finally because as a form it completely lacked
structural necessity.
Imagism
was never for American poets quite the doctrinaire thing it was for a small
group of English poets, notably those under the aegis of T. E. Hulme, its
unofficial philosopher. Imagism nevertheless provided a healthy climate for a
man of Williams’ persuasions and a mode of expression in which his nervous sort
of poetic shorthand seemed less idiosyncratic. He perhaps contributed to the
movement as much as he learned from it, and helped to make it the crucible in
which many talents far different from his own were refined.
9.
What role did Eliot play in reviving poetic drama?
- T.
S. Eliot is a major twentieth century poet-playwright, and critic. Eliot
appeared as the chief supporter of poetic plays for which he made sufficient
ground in his criticism. With the publication of the first two plays – Murder
in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion – the case for poetic drama was
strengthened, and it attracted the attention of other modern writers. Eliot says,
that poetry and drama are unified. Poetry and drama comprise parts of a unity
and they are fundamentally unified modes of literary expression. English poetic drama in the present
century arose as a reaction to the naturalistic prose drama of Ibsen, Shaw and
Galsworthy. T.S. Eliot has achieved considerable success in establishing
tradition of poetic plays in the 20th century.
He had a full understanding of the nature of
poetic drama, the difference between verse drama and prose drama, the causes of
the failure of 19th century verse dramatists, the problem, technical and
otherwise, which face a writer of verse plays in the modern age. Through his
critical writings, he tried to demolish many of the misconceptions about verse
drama, emphasized its superiority over prose drama, and in this way created a
favourable atmosphere, “a current of fresh ideas”, for the flourishing of
poetic drama. Through his own practice, he showed that verse drama is possible
in the modern age.
Through his practice, Eliot solved the thematic
problem. His verse-plays are concerned not with the outer, but with the inner
emotional and psychic realities. He has also demonstrated the relevance of
religion to all human activity. Eliot has been contributing to the creation of
the kind of wholeness of outlook without which poetic drama cannot be accepted
as the normal mode of drama.
Eliot distinguishes between false and true
rhetoric and says that the employment of false rhetorical utterances is
incompatible with the concept of poetry as a medium.
Eliot placed a high ideal of verse drama before
his age, an ideal which he said was unattainable. He emphasized, that instead
of limiting the emotional range, the use of verse enlarges the appeal and
influence of the play. Verse drama can appeal to the most varied audience. His
own dramas bear out this increased range and capability of poetic drama. On the
surface, they have many of the characteristics of contemporary farces, comedies
of manner, and melodramas. Beneath the surface, there is an under pattern for
the more sensitive and conscious among the audience.
10.
Lowell’s genius lies in the rendering of sensuous images. Discuss?
- Amy
Lowell was a poet, performer, editor, translator who devoted her life to the
cause of modern poetry. She wrote and published over 650 poems, yet scholars
cite Lowell’s tireless efforts to awaken American readers to contemporary
trends in poetry as her more influential contribution to literary history. She
is best remembered for bringing the Imagism of Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda
Doolittle) to the attention of Americans, but her work has many facets.
A
flamboyant woman whose behavior belied her upbringing in a proper and
prestigious New England family, she flouted convention with her proto-feminist
poetry and unabashedly public persona.
Lowell
journeyed to London with the goal of meeting with Pound. Back in Boston, Lowell
undertook a campaign to make Imagist poetry both a critical and financial
success in the United States and began traveling often between the two
countries.
Lowell’s
editorship of the collections of Imagist poetry began in 1915 with Some Imagist
Poets: An Anthology, to which she also contributed; two more volumes were
published in subsequent years. In her introduction to the 1915 volume, Lowell
attempted to set down some criteria for Imagist writers.
Amy
Lawrence Lowell was a consummate lecturer and conversationalist, as well as a
joker and friend-maker among the great literary figures of her day. She
enhanced her promotion of imagism as a viable alternative to traditional forms
with the composition of over 600 poems. The sheer volume of verse mars her
canon by the inclusion of mediocre works among such masterpieces as
"Patterns" and "The Sisters," a defense of female artistry.
Until feminist criticism defended her place among early-twentieth-century
poets, she was largely neglected, in part because homophobic critics rejected
her bisexual and lesbian views on human relationships.
Lowell
published her first sonnet, "A Fixed Idea," in Atlantic Monthly in
1910, followed by three more submissions and the translation of a play by
Alfred de Musset, staged at a Boston theater.
Lowell's
own output in the new poetry genre of imagism included Men, Women and Ghosts
(1916), Can Grande's Castle (1918), Pictures of the Floating World (1919),
which contains some of her best short works, and Legends (1921), a critically
successful collection of narrative verse.
Lowell
earned a reputation for violating conservative standards by flaunting her
obesity, swearing, smoking cigars, and having a same-sex lover, actress Ada
Dwyer Russell, with whom Lowell remained all her life.
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