Anglo-Irish playwright, novelists, poet, and critic oscar Wilde is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the victorian era. He was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin. Ireland.

Oscar Wilde in his lifetime wrote numerous poems, one novel, nine plays, short stories, and essays. He was imprisoned for his homosexual relationship because at that time it was considered a crime. His father sir Willam Wilde was an eye doctor and his mother jane Francisca Elgee was a poet and journalist. He published his first collection of poetry in 1881.

The picture of Dorian is his first and only novel. He attended oxford’s Magdalen college between 1874-1878 where he gets involved in the aesthetic movement and became an advocate for ‘art for art’s sake’.

Arts for art’s sake was an idea that art should not exist for any other motive than beauty. He also wrote children’s stories, the happy prince, and other tales.

The Picture of Dorian Gray( Poem), The Ballad of Reading Gaol (poem), and The Importance of Being Earnest (play) are some of his famous works.

Marry Shelly was born on 30 august 1797 in London, England. Frankenstein is her most famous novel. When the book was published she was only twenty-one years old. She also wrote two dramas, numerous short stories, travelogues, and biographies.

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 Her father William Godwin was a philosophy and political writer. Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after Shelley’s birth.

Mounseer Nongtonpow was her first poem, which was published in 1807. Mary met poet Percy Bysshe in 1812. They fell in love. The couple was married in 1816, after the suicide of Shelley’s wife.

In 1822 Percy selly died, and after his death, she returned to London. Mary also compiled the collection of poems by her husband.

She worked very hard to support herself and her only child Percy Florence. She wrote several novels before she died of brain cancer in 1851 at the age of 53.

Works:

Valperga(1823)

The last man (1826)

Lodore (1835)

Posthumously published Mathilde.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. -DANTE ALIGHIERI

Italian poet, literary theorist, prose writer, philosopher, and political thinker Dante Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy. Best known for his poem la Commedia.

La Commedia (the divine comedy) is considered as one of the world literature’s greatest poems. The divine comedy is about the journey through the afterlife, it’s a very long poem of about 14,233 lines.

It took 10 years Dante to write this poem. Dante to write this poem.

The poem is divided into 3 sections (each section consisting of 33 verses); Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. In La Commedia, he recounts his journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. Beatrice was the lover of Dante, who died too soon at the age of 25. Virgil (Roman poet) guides Dante through Inferno(hell) and Purgatorio(purgatory), while Beatrice guides him through Paradiso(heaven).

After that Dante comes face to face with God himself and the journey ends with true heroic and spiritual fulfillment.

The poem is written from Dante’s perspective and follows Dante’s journey through hell, purgatory, and final heaven. Dante the character in the poem is a fictional creation of Dante the poet. Dante’s journey through the afterlife was his spiritual journey.

English Victorian novelist George Eliot was born in rural Warwickshire. Her real name was Mary Ann Evans. George Eliot was her pen name. When her mother died, she left school to help run her father’s household. When her father died in 1849, she moved to London to pursue a career in journalism.

In 1850 she published a review for the Westminster Review and later in 1851 she became assistant editor of the Westminster Review. while in London she met many well-known people, henry Lewis was one of them. She fell in love with henry Lewis, a drama critic and author. Later they both decided to live together, their relationship caused a scandal because Lewis was already married to Agnes Jervis. Lewis encouraged her to write.

She published her first collection of short stories in 1858. After one year Her book Adam Bede was published. But in 1878 Lewis died.  Later in 1880, she married John Walter cross who was a banker, but due to a throat infection, she died the same year.

Notable works

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Silas Marner (1861)

Romola (1862–1863)

Middlemarch (1871–72)

Felix Holt (1866)

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

Adam Bede (1859)

The Spanish Gypsy

 John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London, was an English romantic poet. he published fifty-four novels. He was the oldest of four children. His father was a livery-stable keeper. When he died Keats was only eight years old. After six years his mother also died.

Keats was a licensed apothecary but he never practiced his profession. Keats published his first volume of poem( poems by John Keats), in 1817.  In the same year his Endymion, a four thousand line erotic romance novel got published.in

July 1820 he published his third volume of poetry (Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of st. Angnes, and other poems).

Keats is also famous for his letters, His famous letters include; To Charles Cowden Clarke, To George and Thomas Keats, To Charles Cowden Clarke“, ”To Benjamin Robert Haydon.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art is one of his best poems, this poem written three year before his death.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

James Joyce is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He is known for his unique and complex writing.

1. Your battles inspired me-not the obvious battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.

2. I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am what I established yesterday or some previous day.

3. First we feel. Then we fall

4. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. 

5. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

6. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

7. There’s no friends like the old friends.

8. Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother’s love is not.

9.  All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light.

10. Absence, the highest form of presence.

James Joyce was born into a middle-class, catholic family on February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland. He was the oldest of ten children who survived childhood.

After he completed his graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to study medicine, but he soon abandoned his study. He returns to Dublin when he received a telegram saying that his mother is deathly ill. After his mother’s died, he started teaching and writing book reviews.

 In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, who later became his wife. His first published book was chamber music( a collection of poetry). It took him 10 years to write Dubliners(a short story collection book), which was published in 1914.

On his 40th birthday, his famous novel Ulysses was published. The book is famous for its use of the stream of consciousness technique.

Joyce’s final book, Finnegans Wake was published in 1939, and like his other novels, it’s also considered puzzling because the book is written in several languages at once. Innovative use of symbolism, attention to language, and the use of interior monologue make him a great writer.

Some of his major works include Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(It is a semi-autobiographical novel ), Exiles,(It is the only play by James Joyce, Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake.

John Keats was an English Romantic poet.

1. Touch has a memory.

2.  A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

3. Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

4. I have been astonished that men could die martyrs

 for their religion–

I have shuddered at it

I shudder no more.

I could be martyred for my religion.

 love is my religion and I could die for that.

I could die for you.

 My creed is love and you are its only tenet.

5. Imagination is a monastery, and I am a monk.

6. We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.

7. Don’t be discouraged by failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, in as much as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully avoid.

8. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

9. Life is divine chaos. It’s messy, and it’s supposed to be that way.

10. Poetry should..should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thought, and almost a remembrance.