We care for literature primarily on account of its deep and lasting human significance. A great book grows directly out of life: in reading it, we are brought into large, close, and fresh relations with life; and in that fact lies the final explanation of its power.
Literature is a vital record of what men have seen in life, what they have experienced of it, what they have thought and felt about those aspects of it which have the most immediate and enduring interest for all of us. It is thus fundamentally an expression of life through the medium of language. Such expression is fashioned into the various forms of literary art. But it is important to understand, to begin with, the literature lives by virtue of the life which it embodies. By remembering this, we shall be saved from the besetting danger of confounding the study of literature with the study of philology, rhetoric, and even literary technique.
Grieving parents have become such a movie staple[iii] that the theme is now a demonstrable cliché[iv]. Such grief isn’t new in movies, but the preponderance of these stories — recent examples include “The Lovely Bones,”“Creation,”“Antichrist,”“I’ve Loved You So Long” and the forthcoming “Rabbit Hole” — suggests that filmmakers believe that there’s something compelling[v] about the agony[vi] of others. To this strange canon add “Welcome to the Rileys,” about a middle-aged couple and the young stripper who comes between them with platform heels and the kind of sad eyes you used to see on the side of milk cartons.
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have
thought so much about poverty--it is the thing you have feared all your
life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it, is
all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite
William Wordsworth's "Michael" is a narrative, pastoral poem with 484 unrimed lines. The speaker's purpose is to praise the rural life, lived close to nature.
