English Literature in Early Period
Contents: Preface. 1. Middle English literature: fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 2. Humanism and reformation. 3. Poetry and prose in earlier years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. 4. Drama to 1600. 5. Later Elizabethan poetry and prose. 6. Religion, philosophy and myth: 1350-present day. 7. Narrative literature from romance to the novel: 1350-present day. Bibliography. Index.
"English literature in early period seems always the sign of a genuine literary revival, and yet song lives on whether the professing masters of literature write lyrics or not. Ballads and popular songs gave voice to the fevor of individual feeling before the renaissance and after it, when the age had given place to satire and didacticism. Yet thee is no doubt that lyric poets were more numerous during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than they had been before or have ever been since. Genuine lyrical poetry, already existent, came into literary fashion with the renaissance. John Skelton, although eccentric and usually inharmonious, was not without lyrical ability. King Henry VIII wrote a few very good lyrics, such as Green growth the holly, and his contemporaries, William Cornish and John Hey Wood, had already learned the art of song writing.
Yet the book has been significant and deeply satisfying to many readers. Human beings have always had to struggle with the hard facts of the surroundings in which they live moreover they have usually had to continue the struggle from generations to generation, so that no one in a single lifetime could claim the satisfaction of victory, but only of continuance and survival. In the middle ages, and in earlier, mythologizing times, men transfigured the repetitive tedium of the struggle by dramatizing the sequence of reviving and subsiding life in the revolutions of the seasons. A change came about when colonizing began, such as that of the Puritan settlers during the 17th century on the Eastern American seaboard, for the colonists were able to see the transformation of wilderness into cultivated land in the space, of a lifetime; labour then took on the shape of heroic enterprise. Defoe, by showing how Crusoe constructed for himself a habitable and even prosperous settlement by his unaided effort and ingenuity, achieved a kind of prose epic of the humdrum and his book became permanent inspiration to sober, patient and practical men such as his fellow dissenters of the 18th century." (jacket)
