[alert-success] HEL - William J. Long [/alert-success]
[alert-warn] UNIT I : INTRODUCTION - THE MEANING OF LITERATURE[/alert-warn] [alert-primary] Qualities of Literature[/alert-primary]
[alert-primary] Qualities of Literature[/alert-primary]
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First, literature is artistic. All art is the expression of life in forms of truth and beauty. In other words, life is the reflection of truth and beauty in the world that remain unnoticed until brought to our attention by a sensitive soul. Consider this example: One man pauses by a Roumanian meadow where girls are making hay and singing as they work. He sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass and writes a poem in which the hay tells its own story.
Yesterday's flowers am I,
And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew.
Young maidens came and sang me to my death;
The moon looks down and sees me in my shroud,
The shroud of my last dew.
One who reads only "Yesterday's flowers are I" will never again see hay without remembering its beauty.
All art must be pleasing and surprising. Literature is the written record of the race, including history, sciences, poems, and novels. In the narrower sense, literature is the artistic record of life. History or science can be literature, but only if we forget the subject and focus on the expression's beauty.
Second, literature is suggestive, appealing to emotions and imagination rather than intellect. Its charm is what it awakens in us, not what it says.
Milton opens up a world of speculation and imagination when Satan says, "I am Hell" Faustus doesn't expect an answer when he asks Helen, "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?" Words are magical. It makes us play truant with the present world and run away to live in the pleasant realm of fancy.
All art is meant to delight, and only when literature delights us and causes each reader to build a "lordly pleasure house" in his own soul is it worthy of its name.
Permanence is the third and final characteristic of literature. The world does not live on bread alone. Despite its hurry and obvious materialism, it doesn't let beauty die. Caxton brought the first printing press from Flanders 400 years ago and advertised his wares as "good and cheap".
A thousand years before Caxton and his printing press, the busy scholars of the great library of Alexandria found the number of scrolls too great to handle. Now, we print more in a week than all the Alexandrian scholars could copy in a century.
Literature is like a river in flood: mud settles to the bottom and scum rises to the top. When we examine the writings that make up our literature, the clear stream purified of its dross, we find at least two more qualities that determine its permanence.
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