Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was one of the most influential figures in American literature, widely recognized for his mastery of Gothic fiction, horror, and detective stories. He was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old. He was taken in by the Allan family (John and Frances Allan) as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia, and adopted the name as his middle name. However, his relationship with his foster father was often strained. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and, later, to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave university when Allan refused to pay Poe’s gambling debts.
Thursday, February 5, 2026
Monday, February 2, 2026
Christina Rossetti's "Echo": A brief description
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894):
Christina Georgina Rossetti was one of the most important Victorian poets of England. She was born on December 5, 1830, in London into a highly literary family. Her father was the poet Gabriele, and her brothers, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti, were founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This artistic movement emphasized emotional sincerity, medieval symbolism, and intense imagery.
Sunday, January 11, 2026
Elegy: Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard
An elegy is a poem of sorrow or mourning for the dead; also, a reflective poem in a solemn or sorrowful mood. The adjective ‘elegiac’ is used to describe poetry that exhibits the characteristics of an elegy.
Well-known elegies lamenting the death of a particular
person include John Milton's Lycidas (Edward King), P.B.
Shelley's Adonais (John Keats), Alfred Lord Tennyson's In
Memoriam (Arthur H. Hallam), and Walt Whitman's When Lilacs Last
in the Dooryard Bloom'd (Abraham Lincoln). Perhaps the most famous
elegy, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, is a
solemn, meditative poem mourning not the death of a person, but the passing of
a way of life. Closely related terms of elegy are monody, threnody, and dirge.
The main characteristics of the
Friday, January 9, 2026
Latin and Foreign Abbreviation and Meaning
An abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or phrase, used to represent the full form. It is a broad term that encompasses acronyms (e.g., NASA, SCUBA) and initialisms (e.g., FBI, CIA), although common usage often uses "abbreviation" to encompass all forms of shortening.
Thursday, January 8, 2026
An Introduction to the Sonnets of Shakespeare
Shakespeare wrote a long sonnet-sequence consisting of 154 pieces. These sonnets were written over a number of years and, though there are several strands to impart to them a unity of sorts, they do not have the kind of continuity which one might expect from a collection which has been called a sequence. These sonnets were written during thé years 1592 and 1597 or 1598; but they were not published until 1609, only seven years before Shakespeare's death. They were not published by Shakespeare himself. The publisher was a man called Thomas Thorpe, a literary-minded man who had previously published a number of famous plays, particularly those written by Ben Jonson and Chapman, and who had also published Marlowe's translation of Lucan. Now, this Thomas Thorpe had obtained the manuscripts of the sonnets from one Mr. W.H. but nobody really knows who this Mr. W.H. was.
Edgar Allan Poe's "To Helen"
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was one of the most influential figures in American literature, widely recognized for his mastery of Gothic f...
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Phonology is a level of linguistics that studies the sound systems of languages. Phonology is concerned with the range and function of soun...
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Without sentences, we would have a great deal of difficulty in communicating with each other. A sentence is a group of words that makes co...