Poetry 5: Exploring Contexts

"Ode on a Grecian Um"

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819 and published anonymously in the January 1820. Number 15 issue of the magazine Annals of the Fine Arts (see 1820 in poetry). The poem is one of several "Great Odes of 1819", which include "Ode on Indolence", "Ode on Melancholy", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche". Keats found earlier forms of poetry unsatisfactory for his purpose, and the collection represented a new development of the ode form. He was inspired to write the poem after reading two articles by English artist and writer Benjamin Haydon. Keats was aware of other works on classical Greek art, and had firsthand exposure to the Elgin Marbles, all of which reinforced his belief that classical Greek art was idealistic and captured Greek virtues, which forms the basis of the poem.

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Wallace Stevens' "Anecdote of the Jar"

"Anecdote of the Jar" is a poem from Wallace Steven's first book of poetry, Harmonium. First published in 1919, it is in the public domain. This famous, much anthologized poem succinctly accommodates a remarkable number of different and plausible interpretations, as Jacqueline Brogan observes in a discussion of how she teaches it to her students. It can be approached from a New Critical perspective as a poem about writing poetry and making art generally. From a post structuralist perspective the poem is concerned with temporal and linguistic disjunction, especially in the convoluted syntax of the last two lines. A feminist perspectives reveals a poem concerned with male dominance over a traditionally feminized landscape.
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William Blake's "The Tyger"

"The Tyger" is a poem by the English poet William Blake published in 1794 as part of the Songs of Experience collection. Literary critic Alfred Kazin calls it "the most famous of his poems," and The Cambridge Companion to William Blake says it is "the most anthologized poem in English." It is one of Blake's most reinterpreted and arranged works.

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John Donne's "Death, be not Proud"(poem)

Sonnet X, also known by part of its first line as "Death Be Not Proud", is a fourteen-line poem, or sonnet, by English poet John Donne (1572-1631), one of the leading figures in the metaphysical poets of sixteenth- century English literature. Written between February and August 1609 the poem was not published during Donne's life time and was first published posthumously in 1633. It is included as one of the nineteen sonnets that comprise Donne's Holy Sonnets or Divine Meditations, among his most well- known works. Most editions number the poem as the tenth in the sonnet sequence, which follows the order of poems in the Westmoreland Manuscript (circa 1620), the most complete arrangement of the cycle, discovered in the late nineteenth century. However, two editions published shortly after Donne's death include some of the sonnets in different order where this poem appears as eleventh in the Songs and Sonnets (published 1633) and sixth in Divine Meditations (published 1635).

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A Valediction.

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is a metaphysical poem by John Donne. Written in 1611 or 1612 for his wife Anne before he left on a trip to Continental Europe. "A Valediction" is a 36 line love poem that was first published in the 1633 collection Song and Sonnets, two years after Donne's death. Based on the theme of two lovers about to part for an extended time, the poem is notable for its use of conceits and ingenious analogies to describe the couple's relationship; critics have thematically linked it to several of his other works, including "A Valediction: of my Name, in the Window". Meditation III from the Holy Sonnets and "A Valediction: of Weeping".

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Robert Frost.

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874- January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. One of the most popular and critically respected during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America's rare "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named Poet laureate of Vermont.

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Marguerite Duras (瑪格麗特·莒哈絲）

Marguerite Donnadieu. known as Marguerite Duras (4 April 1914 - 3 March 1996), was a French novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, essayist and experimental filmmaker. She is best known for writing the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, which earned her nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. Duras was born in Gia- Dinh (a former name for Saigon), Cochinchina, French Indochina (now Vietnam), after her parents responded to a campaign by the French government encouraging French people to settle in the colony.

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Hiroshima mon amour (廣島之戀）

Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima My Love; Japanese: 二十四時間の情事, Twenty four hour affair) is a 1959 drama film directed by French film Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness. It was a major catalyst for the Left Bank Cinema, making highly innovative use of minute flashbacks to create a uniquely nonlinear story line.

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Hiroshima, mon amour - moving city scenes.

莫文蔚 Karen Mok & 張洪量 Chang Hung-Liang【廣島之戀 Hiroshima Mon Amour】Official Music Video
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 - 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.

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Muslim.

A Muslim, sometimes spelled Moslem, relates to a person who follows the religion of Islam, a monotheistic and Abrahamic religion based on the Quran. Muslims consider the Quran to be the verbatim word of God as revealed to the Islamic prophet and messenger Muhammad. They also follow the sunnah teachings and practices of Muhammad as recorded in traditional accounts called hadith. "Muslim" is an Arabic word meaning "one who submits (to God)". A female Muslim is sometimes called a Muslimah. There are customs holding that a man and woman or teenager and adolescent above the age of fifteen of a lunar or solar calendar who possesses the faculties of rationality, logic or sanity, but misses numerous successive Jumu'ahs without a valid excuse, no longer qualifies as a Muslim.

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Sadiq Khan.

Sadiq Aman Khan (born 8 October 1970) is a British politician who has been the Mayor of London since May 2016. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Tooting from 2005 to 2016. A member of the Labour Party, he is situated on the party's soft left and has been ideologically characterised as a social democrat. Born in London to a working class British Pakistani family, Khan gained a degree in Law from the University of North London. He subsequently worked as a solicitor specialising in human rights, and chaired Liberty for three ears. Joining Labour, Khan was a Councillor for the London Borough of Wandsworth from 1994 to 2006 before being elected MP for Tooting in 2005. Under the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown he was appointed Minister of State for Communities in 2008, later becoming Minister of State for Transport. A key ally for Labour leader Ed Miliband, he served in Miliband's Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, Shadow Lord Chancellor, and Shadow Minister for London.

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Kubla Khan.

"Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream; A Fragment" is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. According to Coleridge's Preface to "Kubla Khan", the poem was composed one right after he experienced an opium influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon walking , he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by a person from Porlock. The poem could not be completed according to its original 200-300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and kept it for private readings until 1816 when, at the prompting of Lord Byron, it was published.

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Lyrical Ballads.

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry. Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge contributing only four poems to the collection, including one of his most famous works, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".

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James Dickey.

James Lafayette Dickey (February 2, 1923 - January 19, 1997) was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award. James Dickey was born to lawyer Eugene Dickey and Maibelle Swift in Atlanta, Georgia, where he attended North Fulton High School in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. In 1942 he enrolled at Clemson Agricultural College of South Carolina and played on the football team as a tailback. After one semester, he left school to enlist in the Army Air Corps. Dickey served with the U. S. Army Air Forces as a radar operator in a night fighter squadron during the Second World War,and in the U. S. Air Force during the Korean War.

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Emily Dickinson.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. Although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life highly introverted. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a noted penchant for while clothing and became known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom.

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T. S. Eliot.

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 - 4 January 1965), better known by his pen name T. S. Eliot, was an American - born British essayist, publisher, playwright literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He moved to England in 1914 at age 25, setting, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing is American citizenship. Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"(1915), which is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement.

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Classicism.

Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained; of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint and comprehension we are simply objecting to the classicism of classic art. A violent emphasis or a sudden acceleration of rhythmic movement would have destroyed those qualities of balance and completeness through which it retained until the present century its position of authority in the restricted repertoire of visual images.

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Semiotics.

Semiotics (also called semiotic studies; not to be confused with the Saussurean tradition called semiology which is a part of semiotics) is the study of meaning making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. This includes the study of signs and sign processes and meaningful communication. This includes the study of sign processes (semiosis),indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication.

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Courtly Love.

Courtly love (or fin'amor in Occitan) was a medieval European literary conception of love that emphasized nobility and chivalry. Medieval literature is filled with examples of knight setting out on adventures and performing various services for ladies because of their "courtly love". This kind of love originally a literary fiction created for the entertainment of the nobility, but as time passed, these ideas about love changed and attracted a larger audience. In the high Middle Ages a "game of love" developed around these ideas as a set of social practices. "Loving nobly" was considered to be an enriching and improving practice. Courtly love began in the ducal and princely courts of Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne, ducal Burgundy and the Norman Kingdom of Sicily at the end of the eleventh century.

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Chivalric Romance.

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight-errant portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest, yet it is "the emphasis on love and courtly manners distinguishes it from the chanson de geste and other kinds of epic, in which masculine military heroism predominates. Popular literature also drew on themes of romance, but with ironic, satiric or burlesque intent. Romances reworked legends, fairy tales, and history to suit the readers' and hearers' tastes, but by c. 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in his novel Don Quixote. Still, the modern image of "medieval" is more influenced by the romance than by any other medieval genre, and the word medieval evokes knights, distressed damsels, dragons, and other romantic tropes.

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Romanticism.

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, and while for much of the Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, its long term effect on the growth of nationalism was perhaps more significant.

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Individualism.

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self- reliance and advocate that interests of the individual should achieve precedence over the state or a social group, while opposing external interference upon one's own interests by society or institutions such as the government. Individualism is often defined in contrast to totalitarianism or collectivism.

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Modernism.

Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far -reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief.

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Temptation.

Temptation is a fundamental desire to engage in short- term urges for enjoyment. that threatens long term goals. In the context of some religions, temptation is the inclination to sin. Temptation also describes the coaxing or inducing a person into committing such an act, by manipulation or otherwise of curiosity, desire or fear of loss. In the context of self- control and ego depletion, temptation is described as an immediate, pleasurable urge and /or impulse that disrupts an individuals ability to wait for the long term goals, in which that individual hopes to attain.

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Evil.

Evil, in a general context, is the absence or opposite of that which is described as being good. Often, evil is used to denote profound immorality. In certain religious contexts, evil has been described as a supernatural force. Definitions of evil vary, as does the analysis of its motives. However, elements that are commonly associated with evil involve unbalanced behavior involving expediency, selfishness, ignorance, or neglect. In cultures with an Abrahamic religious influence, evil is usually perceived as the dualistic antagonistic opposite of good, in which good should prevail and evil should be defeated.

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Allusions.

Allusion is a figure of speech, in which one refers covertly or indirectly to an object or circumstance from an external context. It is left to the audience to make the connection; where the connection is directly and explicitly stated (as opposed to indirectly implied) by the author, an allusion is instead usually termed a reference. In the arts, a literary allusion puts the alluded text in a new context under which it assumes new meanings and denotations. It is not possible to predetermine the nature of all the new meanings and inter- textual patterns that an allusion will generate. Literary allusion is closely related to parody and pastiche, which are also "text-linking" literary devices.

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Danae.

In Greek mythology, Danae was daughter, and only child of King Acrisius of Argos and his wife Queen Eurydice. She was the mother of the hero Perseus by Zeus. She was credited with founding the city of Ardea in Latium during the Bronze Age. Unwilling to provoke the wrath of the gods or the Furies by killing his offspring and grandchild, King Acrisius cast Danae and Perseus into the sea in a wooden chest. The sea was calmed by Poseidon and, at the request of Zeus, the pair survived. They were washed ashore on the island of Seriphos, where they were taken in by Dictys - the brother of King Polydectes - who raised Perseus to manhood.

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Rapunzel.

"Rapunzel" is a German fairy tale in the collection assembled by the Brothers Grimm, and first published in 1812 as part of Children's and Household Tales. The Grimm Brothers' story is an adaption of the fairy tale Rapunzel by Friedrich Schulz published in 1790. The Schulz version is based on Persinette by Charlotte- Rose de Caumont de La Force originally published in 1698 which in turn was influenced by an even earlier tale, Petrosinella by Giambattista Basile, published in 1634. Its plot has been used and parodied in various media and its best known line ("Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair") is an idiom of popular culture. In volume I of the 1812 annotations (Anhang), it is listed as coming from Fredrich Schulz Kleine Romane, Book 5, pp. 269-288, published in Leipzi 1790.

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The Tempest.

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610-11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone. It is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio's lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso's son, Ferdinand.

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Hubris.

Hubris (also hybris) describes a personality quality of extreme or foolish pride or dangerous over confidence. In its ancient Greek context, it typically describes behavior that defies the norms of behavior or challenges the gods, and which in turn brings about the downfall, or nemesis, of the perpetrator of hubris. Hubris is generally considered a sin in world religions. C. S. Lewis writes, in Mere Christianity, that pride is the "anti- God" state, the position in which the ego and the self are directly opposed to God: "Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites n comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete - God state of mind.

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The Riddle of the Sphinx .

The Sphinx is said to have guarded the entrance to the Greek city of Thebes, and to have asked a riddle of travellers to allow them passage. The exact riddle asked by the Sphinx was not specified by early tellers of the stories, and was not standardized as the one given below until late in Greek history. It was said in late lore that Hera or Ares sent the Sphinx from her Aethiopian homeland (the Greek always remembered the foreign origin of the Sphinx) to Thebes in Greece where she asks all passersby the most famous riddle in history: "Which creature has one voice and yet becomes four- footed and three-footed?" She strangled and devoured anyone unable to answer.

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Onomatopoeia.

An onomatopoeia, adjectival form: "onomatopoeic" or "onomatopoetic") is a word that phonetically imitates, resembles or suggests he source of the sound that it describes. Onomatopoeia (as an uncountable noun) refers to the property of such words. Common occurrences of onomatopoeias include animal noises such as "oink", "miaow" (or "meow"), "roar" or "chirp". Onomatopoeias are not the same across all languages; tey conform to some extent to the broader linguistic system they are part of; hence the sound of a clock may be tick tock in English, dī dā in Mandarin, or katchin katchin in Japanese, or "tik-tik" (टिक-टिक) in Hindi.

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Alliteration.

Alliteration is a stylistic literary device identified by the repeated sound of the first consonant in a series of multiple words, or the repetition of the same sounds in stressed syllables of a phrase. "Alliteration" from the Latin word "litera", meaning "letters of the alphabet", and the first known use of the word to refer to a literary device occurred around 1624. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed, as in James Thomson's verse "Come... dragging the lazy languid Line along. Another example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers".
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Edgar Allan Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

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To Helen.

"To Helen" is the first of two poems to carry that name written by Edgar Allan Poe. he 15- line poem was written in honor of Jane Stanard, the mother of a childhood friend. I was first published in 1831 collection Poems of Edgar A Poe. It was then reprinted in 1836 in the Southern Literary Messenger. In "To Helen," Poe is celebrating the nurturing power of woman. Poe was inspired in part by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, particularly in the second line ("Like those Nicean barks of yore") which resembles a line in Coleridge's "Youth and Age" ("Like those trim skiffs, unknown of yore").

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Anne Boleyn.

Anne Boleyn (c. 1501 - 19 May 1536) was Queen of England from 1533 to 1536 as the second wife of King Henry VIII, and Marquess of Pembroke in her own right. Henry's marriage to Anne, and her subsequent execution by beheading, made her a key figure in the political and religious upheaval that was the start of the English Reformation. Anne was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, and was educated in the Netherlands and France, largely as a maid of honour to Claude of France. she returned to England in early 1522, to marry her Irish cousin James Butler, 9th Earl of Ormond; the marriage plans were broken up by Cardinal Wolsey, and instead she secured a post at court as maid of honour to Henry VIII's wife, Catherine of Aragon.

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Henry VIII of England.

Henry VIII (28 June 1491 - 28 January 1547) was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was the first English King of Ireland, and continued the nominal claim by English monarchs to the Kingdom of France. Henry was the second monarch of the Tudor dynasty, succeeding his father, Henry VII. Besides his six marriages and many extramarital affairs, as well as his effort to obtain an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon which led to conflict with the pope, Henry is known for his subsequent and consequential role in the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church. His disagreements with the Pope led to his separation of the Church of England from papal authority, with himself, as king, as the Supreme Head of the church of England and to the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

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The Other Boleyn Girl.

The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) is a historical novel written by British author Philippa Gregory, loosely based on the life of 16th- century aristocrat Mary Boleyn, the sister of Anne Boleyn, of whom little is known. Inspired by the life of Mary, Gregory depicts the annulment of one of the most significant royal marriages in English history (that of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) and conveys the urgency of the need for a male heir to the throne. Much of the history is highly distorted in her account.

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Introduce of Western Literature

2016年5月28日星期六

Week 14

2016年5月21日星期六

Week 13

莫文蔚 Karen Mok & 張洪量 Chang Hung-Liang【廣島之戀 Hiroshima Mon Amour】Official Music Video
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

2016年5月28日 星期六

Week 14

2016年5月21日 星期六

Week 13

莫文蔚 Karen Mok & 張洪量 Chang Hung-Liang【廣島之戀 Hiroshima Mon Amour】Official Music VideoSamuel Taylor Coleridge.

2016年5月28日星期六

2016年5月21日星期六

莫文蔚 Karen Mok & 張洪量 Chang Hung-Liang【廣島之戀 Hiroshima Mon Amour】Official Music Video
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.