Literature And Essence Of Writer Personality

Every work of literature reflects the author’ personality. The quality of literature becomes vital of we try to think of the author as a man who wrote to satisfy needs and to resolve difficulties which are common to us. Literature is the product of men and women who wrote it out of their lives.

Literature Vs Writer Personality

Mattew Arnold expressed his view that every book is a reflection of the personality of the author. Goethe has also expressed the danger of forsaking the inner light and the impossibility of severing expression from personality. expressing the some view that in every great work of literature there must be fidelity to the personal vision of the artist.

The above mentioned examples may be the subjective or personal views of people. But there are some critics who hold the opposite view i.e., the personality of others is greater than Byron who projects his own personality in his plays but his sonnets are among the most intimate of personal utterances.

Ultimately works must bear the impress of his personality in one form or the other. Though Mitton wrote paradise Lost with the purpose of subduing to the strict form of epic he could not rule out his own personality out of it. Infect, it becomes a reflection of his own personality.

Romanticism & Classicism

Two distinctive tendencies in the history of Literature are classic and Romantic. They appear alternately one following the other. Elizabethan period may be called the first Romantic period, dominated by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser and others, in the history of English literature. Most important figures of the Classical period in the eighteenth century were Dryden, Pope, Addison swift and Dr. Johnson.

Prominent poets of the later part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century were words worth, Coleridge, Scott, Shelley, Byron, Keats, was dominated by the romantic period. Twentieth century literature shows signs of the classical tendency. Symptoms of classicism are; belief in reason: emphasis on the civilized, modern and sophisticated modes of life, interest in urban society; preoccupation with human nature; love for mundane actuality; satirical tendency etc.

On the other hand, the symptoms of Romanticism are: belief in feelings, imagination and intuition; emphasis on the primitive, medieval and natural modes of life, interest in rural solitude pre-occupation with the aesthetic and spiritual values of external nature; love for vision of the mysterious, the ideal and the infinite etc. Terms classical and Romants are not so strictly opposed, infect they overlap each carried to the extreme do much damage to genuine literature.

The former de generates into rigid formalism and slavish obedience to rules, which suppress and undermine all initiative and originality of the writer, as was the case during the eighteenth into license, extravagance and lack of restraint, which leads to chaos, as it happened in the later phases of Elizabethan Romanticism. The best type of literature combines in equal proportion both the classical and Romantic elements.