Literature Review | ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT

Running Head: ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT
English Assignment
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author's Note:
Table of Contents

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Aeneid VI – Virgil..................................................................................................................................2
Iliad – Homer.........................................................................................................................................3
The Earthquake in Chili – Heinrich von Kleist.....................................................................................4
The Fly – Katherine Mansfield..............................................................................................................5
Shooting an Elephant- George Orwell...................................................................................................6
To His Coy Mistress – Andrew Marvel..................................................................................................7
Marina by T.S. Eliot..............................................................................................................................8
Daddy by Sylvia Plath..........................................................................................................................10
The Lamb- William Blake...................................................................................................................11
Still, I Rise- Maya Angelou..................................................................................................................12
Work Cited...........................................................................................................................................14

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Aeneid VI – Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro or simply Virgil was a Roman poet of the Augustan period
regarded as the national poet of his time. His work Aeneid is an epic which shows the glory
of Rome as the educator of the civilization. The work was to be divided into twelve parts, but
only eight parts were completed due to his death and are speculated that he wanted it to be
burnt on his death, but his adopted son and the ruler Augustan decided otherwise. The book
shows the ushering of the Golden Era of Rome and is shown to be as the work establishing
Augustan as the lineage of Caesar. He was deeply inspired by the Greek poet Homer and
intentionally studied his works to develop upon them which is visible from the development
of Aeneas's character in the epic.
Aeneas was already a known figure in the literary world due to his character portrayal
in Homer's Iliad and the display of the Greco-Roman myth. His study of Homer was based on
the motive of producing another work which will be a symmetric show of Legendary Trojan
Wars and the establishment of the Gods of Rome and Troy (Maclennan). As his aim, he was
able to succeed, and Aeneid was declared as one of the best Latin literature and was taught in
schools even centuries later. The sixth book is the last of the part in which the main character
is shown to finally gain the knowledge he was seeking and the journey to the underworld
gave him the clarity he was searching.
The work shows affinity to the mythic genre as it starts with an invocation to the
muse, which shows Aeneas's primary conflict in the achievement of the Roman people in
establishing and their struggle in the War (Maclennan). In the book, we start by Aeneas
finally coming to the temple of Apollo and meeting the prophetess, Sibyl. She gives him the
task of attaining a mythic 'Golden Bough' which will let him come back from the underworld.
The use of Sibyl is again not new in the mythical work for there has been the presence of
several Sibyl in the ancient world who were medium or the oracle to communicate to Apollo.

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The work depicts the major theme prevalent in the Latin literature, Pietas, which is shown to
be one of the essential character traits of Aeneas, which shows the selfless sense of duty
towards societal obligation. The character and the complete book is considered as bringing
the Roman foundation to life.
Iliad – Homer
Homer was a Greek poet and was considered to be the best poet of his time, and his
works are few of the significant works of myth and have been an inspiration to various great
poets such as that of Virgil. Like the Aeneid, Iliad is also about the Trojan wars and the siege
of the city of Troy by the Greek, and it includes rhetoric of all three appeals- ethos, pathos
and logos. It is a primary epic which starts with the invocation of Gods and Aeneid in all its
form ad theme resembles to be an extensive expansion on the book of Iliad (Catanzaro). The
book offers elaborate details of the combat style and the infantry of both the sides which is
one of the rhetoric of the poem for it works as a persuasive measure in which the myth is
made believable by including the pre-existing oral tradition of storytelling.
The poem is simple in its structure for it was originally meant to be recited, and most
of the audience were not educated, but there is no lack of visual imageries that works as a
balance. The long Trojan Wars are covered with specific information regarding the
involvement of Gods which shows the importance of religion in the society. The themes of
the poem are the foundation of the Greek literature with the presence of a tragic hero and the
role of fate that cannot be averted by anyone. The whole narrative is based on the emotion of
anger and pride, which is associated with societal norms (Catanzaro). The story like most
original epic starts in amidst the battle when the Greeks have been waging War against the
Trojan for ten years for Paris has taken away Helen who is considered to be the most
beautiful women in the world. The theme of anger is based on the betrayals in the story,
which again is based on the value of honor. The value of honor and pride is mostly displayed

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by the Gods whose anger is bestowed on the mortals if they fail to comply with their
demands and bend to fate.
The Earthquake in Chili – Heinrich von Kleist
Bernd Heinrich von Kleist is considered to be one of the finest writers of the realist
and the existentialist movement of the nineteenth century and was taken as the writer who
was able to comprehend the shortcoming of the modern era even before it occurred. His
writings depict the shortcomings of human society, which he saw continuously moving
towards a period of incomprehensible violence. His writings depict his personal dilemma of
men being confused with the meaning of heroism and cowardice.
'The Earthquake in Chili' or 'Das Erdbeben in Chili' was first published under the
name of its main characters- 'Jeronimo and Josephe. Eine Scene au dem Erdbeben zu Chili
vom Jahr 1647' in a German periodical. Kleist's writing career was always in a crisis because
of his uncertainty and later on due to his study of Immanuel Kant, which shook the
foundation of his trust in knowledge. He turned towards emotion to find his center and this
conflict in his mindset reflects in his works. Kleist wrote a total of eight novellas in his life
out of which 'The Earthquake in Chili was a success almost instantly after it's published.
The work shows the German society, which is devoid of reasoning and the central
characters are shown to be struggling with prevailing violence. The story starts with the
central character, Jeronimo in prison for being caught to have an illicit relationship with a
student Josephe out of which they had a child, Philip. He was preparing to hang himself on
account of the fact that Josephe has been sentenced to death. The novella is filled with the
theme of the contrast between natural and human violence. The human violence inflicted
upon the unwed couple is shown to be rescued by the natural violence of earthquake when
both of them are preparing for their death. Josephe escapes after the tremble realizing that the

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whole city has been destroyed and that she is free to escape. In the same way, the earthquake
destroys the prison, but both of them fear that the other is dead. In the middle of destruction,
the union of the family looks like one made in heaven, where they both escapes further into
the forest and settles down under a pomegranate tree. Nature's way of inflicting violence is
compared to that of God's wrath on Sodom, but in the forest, everyone is shown to be treated
equally as they were all a victim.
The Fly – Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield's was a writer who was suffering from the psychological effect
of the First World War due to the loss of her own beloved brother during training after a very
short time of being deployed. In 'The Fly', we can see the psychological conflict in the
protagonist who remains unnamed intentionally for she wanted to show the prolonged effect
of the War nationally. The short story was written at a time when Britain was reeling from the
loss and grief suffered in the War and young lives being lost due to the government's decision
of sending them to the brink of War.
'The Fly' opens in a posh office in London where the boss is shown to be displaying
his newly decorated office to Mr Woodifield who himself is a man suffering from the
psychological effect and is in grieving for his son's death as well. The situation is shown to
happen after six years of War, but the presence of the son's photograph in the room is shown
to be the constant reminder of the loss. The psychological reading of ethos and pathos is a
vivid presence throughout when we see people understanding the necessity of soldiers and
the emotional grief of losing their loved ones (Kimber and Janet).
The story of the fly in the story of the helplessness of people who have become
accustomed to the brutality of the War and has become habituated living with the ghosts of
the War. The ghost of the story is not limited to the dead but the living and breathing people

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who are unable to move on with their life despite the ever passing the time and the mortality
of the human society. The short-lived memory or the effect of the War, which has rendered
people numbed is shown with two examples. One is Mr Woodifield, who is shown to be
overwhelmed by the boss's display of wealth and is visibly struggling to remember the
subject he wanted to share with his boss. It is only after consuming the 'fine' quality of
whisky offered by the boss that he remembers that he wanted to tell him about his daughters
being in Belgium and visiting his son's grave and has come across his son's grave as well
(Kimber). The meaninglessness of the graves being kept in good condition is shown to be the
reflection of the newly decorated office which is containing the living dead corpses of two
fathers who have been trying to deal with losses in different ways.
Shooting an Elephant- George Orwell
George Orwell, as a writer, started with writing articles for papers and journals to earn
enough till the time he could establish himself as an author. 'Shooting an Elephant' is a story
based British occupied Burma and shows the period of colonialized land and the attitude of
the people and the officials who had a totalitarian attitude towards people. It shows the side
of life, which represents the two side of the dealings where the people in power were shamed
into bending to the power of the people they thought they had control over them. 'Shooting an
Elephant' is a short essay which also reflects the effort of the writers of the time to get people
who were not as literate into literature (Settersten). But above all, the essay has a biographical
connotation to it. Orwell was born in India and has had a first-hand experience of witnessing
the colonizer and the colonized.
The elephant in the story stands as a symbol for the colonizer, or the British
government who has got hold of the Indian land with the help of The English East India
Company. The story shows the work of imperialism and the brutality of the colonizers when
dealing with the native people. The essay opens up with a brief introduction to the kind of

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hatred which was common among the people for the Europeans and how a small action of
tipping an officer in the football field was a symbol of their hatred or throwing betel juice on
the dress of the European women while taking a walk to the bazaar (marketplace). The
psychological aspect of the officers present in British occupied Burma shows the growth of
hatred and the expectation of hatred and violence from them (Lebovics). The elephant, while
being a majestic animal, is forced to be killed at the hand of the officer who had no intention
of killing it. This can be seen as the author's symbolizing the psychology of the officials who
did not want to inflict violence and suffering to the people but were forced and liable under
their administration to carry out their task. The helplessness of the riffle bearing officer who
walked in the leading front crowd but whose actions were dictated by that of the crowd
reflects the totalitarian aspect of colonization where the people's view and choices did not
matter and were suppressed under the demand and desire of the ruling government.
To His Coy Mistress – Andrew Marvel
Andrew Marvel was an English poet and during the transitional age of Elizabethan to
the Restoration Period in which literary approaches towards poetry was changing extensively.
The change was against the Elizabethan style of poetry which showed love and time to an
infinite and immortal entity, and poets wrote long descriptive poems where their love
survived the change of time, tide and season. 'To His Coy Mistress' is considered to be one of
the finest works of Marvell and is representative of the Metaphysical poets of the time.
The metaphysical poems had a few distinct characteristics which are vividly present
in the poem, the first of which is the sudden and abrupt opening:
"Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime…" [To His Coy Mistress- Andrew Marvell]
This is similar to another physical poem we have seen, John Donne in 'The Good Morrow':

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"I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?" [The Good Morrow- John Donne]
The metaphysical poets saw the passing of time and the Elizabethan concept of writing
immensely long epithets in the form of wordy sentences and adapted to go against the
convention (Wang). Marvell's abrupt beginning shows the urgency of the matter signifying
the theme of 'carpe dium' which translates to 'seize the day or the moment (Krznaric). The
author directly breaks into the conversation, and it is attention-demanding for in the very next
line, we are made aware of the fact that he was talking to his beloved. The characteristic
feature of dramatic quality of words and narrative can be seen with the help of the mention of
Rubies and the Flood.
The metaphysical poetries keeping in with the theme of carpe dium shows the
presence of two arguments of what could have happened and what could be and the end
consists of the solution of showing the importance of the present moment. In the poem,
marvel talks about the length to which he would have gone to prove his love if he had time
which is cut off by the visual imagery of:
"But at my back, I always hear
Times winged chariot hurrying near:"
And wittily shows how the time can be immortal but they are not. The second part of the
argument shows how the loss of time can leave their unconsummated with the lover's
virginity being ravaged by the worms in the grave (Marvell). In the last stanza, when Marvell
concludes: "Now let us sport while we may;" he shows the urgency of the matter and that
though there will be time to express their love for each other, they may not have the time for
it. So, they should utilize this time to express love.

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Marina by T.S. Eliot
The poem, in its beginning, addresses a question that Hercules in his epigraph
in Latin as "Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?" which is translated as 'what place
is this? what region, what quarter of the world? (Eliot)" The contrast is between the
rediscovery of the daughter of Pericles (Shakespeare) and that of the ominous reference in
the story of Seneca's Hercules.
According to the story, Hercules ends up killing his own children in a fit of
madness whereas the last act of Pericles shows how Marina with the help of her voice helps
to revive her father from a coma. Eliot had written a letter in 1958 where he reveals that he
had intended the recognition scene of Shakespeare's Pericles and that of his own poem
Marina contains the same theme of the father-daughter relationship. He also stresses on the
fact that since he had no daughter of his own, the only way to explore this relationship was
with the help of his poetic creation. By allowing his characters to inhabit in the play, Eliot
seems to follow the example of dramatic monologues by Robert Browning (Eliot). There are
close allusions to the language as well as the atmosphere which were not just limited to the
recognition scene. According to some critics, "sty of contentment, meaning/Death (Eliot)" is
deeply connected to the description that is given by Marina regarding her state of being as she
says "most ungentle Fortune have plac'd me in this Site." The description of the sea clearly
depicts the process of the birth of Marina.
A part of the Ariel Poems, Marina contains meaning in terms of fulfilment in
the life of the poet. The previous poems of Eliot such as The Wasteland, Hollow Men,
Gerontion, speak about the modern meaninglessness of life. However, the readers come
across a very different poet, and author as Eliot moves to his later works such as Murder in
the Cathedral, and Ariel Poems, it is evident that he has found a sense of anchor that was
missing in his entire life (Eliot). Eliot also returns to the Christian faith and the ritualistic

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nature of it from which he had earlier diverted. The journey that began with Murder in the
Cathedral finds completion in his Ariel poems, namely Marina.
Daddy by Sylvia Plath
Daddy was written four months prior to the death of Plath, after which she
ended up taking her own life. For this very reason, Daddy was published posthumously. The
themes of Plath's poetry is mainly death as most of her poems are based on death in the form
of confessional poetry. This gave a completely different dimension to her works as she
resorted to literature in order to confess the deeply personal experiences, traumas, and
psychological turmoil. The poems gain further significance due to the use of "I" by the poet
(Plath).
It is no doubt that Daddy is Plath's best creation for which it has gathered a
very distinct variety of criticism that vary from a feminist reading of the text to the sense of
wariness in its use of imagery from the Holocaust. The beauty of the poem lies in the fact that
none of these interpretations can be fully negated. It surely does contain violent imagery
along with the invocation of the sufferings of the Jews- a juxtaposition that makes the reading
extremely difficult (Plath). The poem successfully traces the journey of Plath as she comes to
terms with the overshadowing father of hers because he passed away when she was eight
years old. This particular scenario also casts her as a victim followed by the evil depiction of
this father figure in the manner of a Nazi, and devil who was resurrected as her husband.
Plath also states that she had to kill this figure which she later explained in an interview.
According to Plath, the speaker of the poem definitely has signs of Electra complex. The
scenario is further complicated as her father was a Nazi while her mother was part-Jew. The
daughter in the poem marry each of her own personas and hence end up paralyzing each other
(Plath).

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Hence, the contradiction lies in the heart of the poem. Daddy is one of Plath's
masterpiece, the child she decided to save before taking her own life. Hence, it perfectly sums
up not only her literary life but also personal as it is simple and complicated at the same time.
The reading process of the poem is not continuous and smooth. Instead, it is jarred and halted
in many places that make the readers pause and make attempts to read between the lines.
The Lamb- William Blake
William Blake was one of the greatest poets of the Romantic Age and is considered to
be only prophet poet till date as his writings though consisted of elements representing the
romantic period was not in accordance to it rather his writings were what set the salient
features of the period. After his death, he was considered by many critics to be writing
against religious conventions, but a close reading of the poem shows that he was not against
religion but against the Church and the Methodist view of the children which was prevalent at
that time. 'The Lamb' is one of the most popular from his book and is considered to be
influenced by the Puritans view. The prevailing view of the time consisted of a child being
born with the original sin' rather than being an innocence being free from evil. This lead to
their perception of children treated as being strict in order to rectify the sin present in them
and to make them live in accordance with God's will.
Blake's lamb is the exact opposite and shows the innocence of a newly born child who
is given the blessing of the god and is considered to be as innocent as Christ himself. The
lines in the poem are clear to his comparison of the child to being a lamb, and they are both a
reincarnation of God. The child is the reflection of God can be seen as the connotation of the
Holy Trinity of the Holy Spirit, the Father and the Son (Rix). This can be seen in the poem in
the lines: "He became a little child: I a child & thou a lamb," here, Blake shows his direct
reflection of a child-free from any sin.

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The historical context of the poem, along with the analysis shows how Blake was not
writing against religion for his innocence, compares it to the purity of Christ. The simple
question in the first line of the poem shows how Blake portrays the deeper meaning of
existence in terms of the creation. By including a deeper question of life and existence, Blake
shows how the Puritans imbue in the children the societal pressure when God himself has
created them free of such pressures.
Still, I Rise- Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou's name is one of the most respected under the African-American
writers for she was a poet, an author and a social right activist. Her works were a success
during her lifetime, and she was the first black women to recite at an American President's
inauguration in 1961 in John F Kennedy's inauguration ceremony. Her autobiographical
works were published in three parts and the first one 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing'
where her life till the age of seventeen was described. Angelou's life history was filled with
tragic incidences with her working as a slave and escaping the owner. Her works are
considered to be representative of the Black people suffering and the violence and insult they
have been put into under the colonial abuse of power.
Through her works, she shows the different way they have been made to feel inferior
from their White counterparts and the feminist approach of her work shows the confidence
she harbored as a Black woman. Form the very line of the poem it is apparent to the reader of
the oriental view she had about the historical context behind the written history about the
societies: "You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,"; here she marks her point in the reader's mind that she is no
longer unaware of the lies being peddled in the society where the White powers have buried
their crimes under the pretense of being a liberal. She emanates confidence in her own root of

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being an individual of Black origin. She uses the negative terminal of dust as the liberating
agent of being free from the clutches of their power and shows that irrespective of all
bondages, they will rise (Birch). The theme of Black pride and her empathetic nature of
writing is communicated through most of her work and can be seen in the poem where she
shows the concept of slavery in 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' from the lines:
"But a caged bird stands on the grave of the dreams
his shadows shout on a nightmare scream"
The poem shows her vision of the Black women breaking the barrier of racial
discrimination and racial biases and rising from the ashes like a phoenix.

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Work Cited
Birch, Eva Lennox. Black American Women's Writings. Routledge, 2016.
Catanzaro, Andrea. Politics through the Iliad and the Odyssey: Hobbes writes Homer.
Routledge, 2019.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The complete poems and plays of TS Eliot. Faber & Faber, 2011.
Kimber, Gerri, and Janet M. Wilson. Re-forming World Literature: Katherine Mansfield and
the Modernist Short Story. Ibidem, 2018.
Kimber, Gerri, ed. Katherine Mansfield and psychology. Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Krznaric, Roman. Carpe Diem Regained: The Vanishing Art of Seizing the Day. Unbound
Publishing, 2017.
Lebovics, Herman. Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies. Duke University Press,
2006.
Maclennan, Keith. Virgil: Aeneid VI. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
Marvell, Andrew. "To His Coy Mistress" and Other Poems. Courier Dover Publications,
2016.
Plath, Sylvia. Daddy. na, 1962.
Rix, Robert. William Blake and the cultures of radical Christianity. Routledge, 2016.
Settersten, Richard. Lives in Time and Place and Invitation to the Life Course: The Problems
and Promises of Developmental Science. Routledge, 2018.
Wang, Pengfei. Metaphysical and Mid-Late Tang Poetry: A Baroque Comparison. Vernon
Press, 2020.

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