Threnodia Augustalis
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Threnodia Augustalis
The ''Threnodia Augustalis'' is a 517-line occasional poem written by John Dryden to commemorate the death of Charles II in February 1685. The poem was "rushed into print" within a month. The title is a reference to the classical threnody, a poem of mourning, and to Charles as a "new Augustus" (see Augustan literature). It is subtitled "A Funeral-Pindarique Poem Sacred to the Happy Memory of King Charles II," and is one of several poems on the subject published at the time (see 1685 in poetry). Although not one of Dryden's better-known works, the ''Threnodia'' is cited twice in ''The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations'', for "Mute and magnificent, without a tear" (stanza 2), and a couplet expressing nationalist sentiment (stanza 10): The ''Threnodia'' is marked by "the stately enthusiasm of the time," but also lends itself to charges of bathos. The English critic George Saintsbury noted that the poem "is not exempt from the faults of its kind; but it has merits which for that ki ...
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Occasional Poem
Occasional poetry is poetry composed for a particular occasion. In the history of literature, it is often studied in connection with orality, performance, and patronage. Term As a term of literary criticism, "occasional poetry" describes the work's purpose and the poet's relation to subject matter. It is not a genre, but several genres originate as occasional poetry, including epithalamia (wedding songs), dirges or funerary poems, paeans, and victory odes. Occasional poems may also be composed exclusive of or within any given set of genre conventions to commemorate single events or anniversaries, such as birthdays, foundings, or dedications. Occasional poetry is often lyric because it originates as performance, in antiquity and into the 16th century even with musical accompaniment; at the same time, because performance implies an audience, its communal or public nature can place it in contrast with the intimacy or personal expression of emotion often associated with the term "lyr ...
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John Dryden
'' John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John". Early life Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was the rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Barone t (1553–1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. He was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy, Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, where it is likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Westminst ...
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Charles II Of England
Charles II (29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685) was King of Scotland from 1649 until 1651, and King of England, Scotland and Ireland from the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy until his death in 1685. Charles II was the eldest surviving child of Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland and Henrietta Maria of France. After Charles I's execution at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War, the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II king on 5 February 1649. But England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth, and the country was a de facto republic led by Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, and Charles fled to mainland Europe. Cromwell became virtual dictator of England, Scotland and Ireland. Charles spent the next nine years in exile in France, the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands. The political crisis that followed Cromwell's death in 1 ...
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Threnody
A threnody is a wailing ode, song, hymn or poem of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person. The term originates from the Greek word θρηνῳδία (''threnoidia''), from θρῆνος (''threnos'', "wailing") and ᾠδή (''oide'', "ode"), the latter ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *''h₂weyd-'' ("to sing") that is also the precursor of such words as "ode", "tragedy", "comedy", "parody", "melody" and "rhapsody". Similar terms include "dirge", " coronach", "lament" and "elegy". The '' Epitaphios Threnos'' is the lamentation chanted in the Eastern Orthodox Church on Holy Saturday. John Dryden commemorated the death of Charles II of England in the long poem '' Threnodia Augustalis'', and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a "Threnody" in memory of his son. Examples In written works: *Countee Cullen's "Threnody for a Brown Girl" * Bruce Dawe's poem "Homecoming" *Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Threnody" * Peter H. Gilmore's "Threnody for Humanity" * A. E. Hou ...
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Augustus
Caesar Augustus (born Gaius Octavius; 23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14), also known as Octavian, was the first Roman emperor; he reigned from 27 BC until his death in AD 14. He is known for being the founder of the Roman Principate, which is the first phase of the Roman Empire, and Augustus is considered one of the greatest leaders in human history. The reign of Augustus initiated an imperial cult as well as an era associated with imperial peace, the ''Pax Romana'' or ''Pax Augusta''. The Roman world was largely free from large-scale conflict for more than two centuries despite continuous wars of imperial expansion on the empire's frontiers and the year-long civil war known as the "Year of the Four Emperors" over the imperial succession. Originally named Gaius Octavius, he was born into an old and wealthy equestrian branch of the plebeian ''gens'' Octavia. His maternal great-uncle Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC, and Octavius was named in Caesar' ...
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Augustan Literature
Augustan literature (sometimes referred to misleadingly as Georgian literature) is a literary genre, style of British literature produced during the reigns of Anne, Queen of Great Britain, Queen Anne, George I of Great Britain, King George I, and George II of Great Britain, George II in the first half of the 18th century and ending in the 1740s, with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively. It was a literary calendar era, epoch that featured the rapid development of the novel, an explosion in satire, the mutation of drama from political satire into melodrama and an evolution toward poetry of personal exploration. In philosophy, it was an age increasingly dominated by empiricism, while in the writings of political economy, it marked the evolution of mercantilism as a formal philosophy, the development of capitalism and the triumph of trade. The chronological boundary points of the era are generally vague, largely since the label's origin in ...
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1685 In Poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature (for instance, Irish or France). Events Works published Colonial America * Cotton Mather, ''An Elegy'' ..''on Nathanael Collins'', English Colonial America (Massachusetts)Ludwig, Richard M., and Clifford A. Nault, Jr., ''Annals of American Literature: 1602–1983'', 1986, New York: Oxford University Press Germany * Emilie Juliane of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, German: ** ''Kuhlwasser in grosser Hitze des Creutzes'', hymns; published in Rudolstadt ** ''Tägliches Morgen- Mittags- und Abendopfer'', hymns; published in Rudolstadt Great Britain * Henry Bold, translator, ''Latine Songs, with their English: and Poems'', includes "Chevy Chase", a ballad, and Sir John Suckling's poem "Why so pale and wan fond lover?" * John Cutts, (later Baron Cutts), ''La Muse de Cavalier; or, An Apology for such gentleman as make poetry their diversion, not their business in a letter by a scholar of Mars ...
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Nationalism
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the State (polity), state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a in-group and out-group, group of people),Anthony D. Smith, Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History''. Polity (publisher), Polity, 2010. pp. 9, 25–30; especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland to create a nation-state. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on a combination of shared social characteristics such as culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics (or the government), religion, traditions and belief ...
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Bathos
Bathos ( ;''Oxford English Dictionary'', 1st ed. "bathos, ''n.'' Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1885. grc-gre, ,  "depth") is a literary term, first used in this sense in Alexander Pope's 1727 essay " Peri Bathous", to describe an amusingly failed attempt at presenting artistic greatness. Today, ''bathos'' refers to rhetorical anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one, occurring either accidentally (through artistic ineptitude) or intentionally (for comic effect). Intentional bathos appears in satirical genres such as burlesque and mock epic. "Bathos" or "bathetic" is also used for similar effects in other branches of the arts, such as musical passages marked '' ridicolosamente''. In film, bathos may appear in a contrast cut intended for comic relief or be produced by an accidental jump cut. Alexander Pope's definition ''The Art of Sinking in Poetry'' As a term for the combination of the very high with the ...
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George Saintsbury
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury, FBA (23 October 1845 – 28 January 1933), was an English critic, literary historian, editor, teacher, and wine connoisseur. He is regarded as a highly influential critic of the late 19th and early 20th century. Biography Born in Lottery Hall, Southampton, he was educated at King's College School, London, and at Merton College, Oxford, where he achieved a first class BA degree in Classical Mods, (1865), and a second class in ''literae humaniores'' (1867). He left Oxford in 1868 having failed to obtain a fellowship, and briefly became a master at the Manchester Grammar School, before spending six years in Guernsey as senior classical master of Elizabeth College, where he began his literary career by submitting his first reviews to '' The Academy''. From 1874 until he returned to London in 1876 he was headmaster of the Elgin Educational Institute, with a brief period in 1877 on ''The Manchester Guardian''. From the early 1880s until 1894 he wo ...
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Ancient Greek Literature
Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, ''Theogony'' and ''Works and Days'', constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. The lyric poets Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar were highly influential during the early development of the Greek poetic tradition. Aeschylus is the earliest Greek tragic playwright for whom any plays have survived complete. Sophocles is famous for his tragedies about Oedipus, particularly ''Oedipus the King'' and ''Antigone''. Euripides is known ...
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Pindar
Pindar (; grc-gre, Πίνδαρος , ; la, Pindarus; ) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet from Thebes. Of the canonical nine lyric poets of ancient Greece, his work is the best preserved. Quintilian wrote, "Of the nine lyric poets, Pindar is by far the greatest, in virtue of his inspired magnificence, the beauty of his thoughts and figures, the rich exuberance of his language and matter, and his rolling flood of eloquence, characteristics which, as Horace rightly held, make him inimitable." His poems can also, however, seem difficult and even peculiar. The Athenian comic playwright Eupolis once remarked that they "are already reduced to silence by the disinclination of the multitude for elegant learning". Some scholars in the modern age also found his poetry perplexing, at least until the 1896 discovery of some poems by his rival Bacchylides; comparisons of their work showed that many of Pindar's idiosyncrasies are typical of archaic genres rather than of only the poet himself. ...
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