The work of Robert Burns is an enduring testament to Scotland’s poetic heart. From his revolutionary and thought-provoking works to his traditional folk songs, Burns has captivated generations with his imaginative and passionate writing. His words have been immortalized in the hearts and minds of all Scots, whether they are part of the diaspora or still call Scotland their home. This article will explore why Robert Burns is such an important cultural figure in Scotland and how his works have impacted the world.

Robert Burns was born in Ayrshire, Scotland in 1759. He was a member of the lower classes and grew up with a strong sense of social justice and empathy for others. This sense of compassion would fuel many of his ballads and songs, which depicted rural life with honesty and insight. His works were often revolutionary in nature and he was also known for his passionate views on politics, economics, and religion. Furthermore, much of his poetry was written in the vernacular of the Scottish people, allowing him to accurately capture their feelings and experiences.

Poet has had an undeniable influence on Scotland’s culture over the centuries, with his work being a source of national pride and identity. His songs have been performed at celebrations, festivals, and other gatherings for centuries. He has also been credited with reviving many traditional Scottish songs and poems, preserving them for future generations to enjoy. Furthermore, he was one of the first to focus on themes such as justice, poverty, love, and loyalty in his works. These are concepts that are still relevant today and demonstrate why his works are still so important.

Burns’ works have had a global influence, with translations of his works being published in countries around the world. His writings have been translated into almost every major language and continue to speak to people today, showing that poetry can bridge cultural divides. He has also inspired many other writers, including Walt Whitman and John Keats. Ultimately, Robert Burns is an important cultural figure in Scotland and his works will continue to be celebrated for years to come.

The Literary Legacy of Robert Burns

As an 18th-century poet, he composed some of the most lovely and heartfelt works that are still celebrated centuries later. His poetic legacy is as alive today as it was when he wrote during his lifetime.

Beyond his impact on Scotland’s culture, Burns’ work has had a profound influence on many other writers. His vivid language and passionate themes have inspired many generations of poets and continue to do so today. He popularized the poetic forms of the ballad, sonnet, and ode which are still used in modern literature. In addition to these traditional forms, Burns also experimented with more modern structures such as the epigram and elegy. His writing style was also ahead of its time in that he often wrote from a first-person perspective, bringing life to his characters and stories.

Ultimately, Robert Burns is an important figure in both literature and culture. His works continue to speak to people around the world, showing us why poetry can be such a powerful way of expression.

Followers of Robert Burns

Many of Robert Burns’ followers are inspired by his powerful and emotive poetry. His works have been cited as a source of inspiration for writers, politicians, and activists alike. In addition to being an influential figure in literature and culture, Burns was also a pioneer of social justice issues. His works speak on topics such as poverty, gender equality, and civil rights which are still relevant today.

Burns’ followers have kept his memory alive by creating clubs, societies, and foundations in his honor. These organizations not only celebrate the poet’s works but also help to preserve and promote Scotland’s literary heritage. Through these organizations, they are able to pass on Burns’ legacy to future generations so that they can appreciate the power of poetry.

The Influence of Robert Burns on Modern Poetry

Robert Burns is an iconic figure in the history of Scottish poetry and his works have had a lasting effect on modern poets. His vivid language and emotive themes have inspired many generations of writers, from Walt Whitman to John Keats. In addition to popularizing poetic forms such as the ballad, sonnet, and ode, he also experimented with more modern structures such as the epigram and elegy. His works are a testament to the power of poetry and its ability to bridge cultural divides.

Today, Burns’ influence can be seen in the work of contemporary poets. His vivid language and emotive themes continue to inspire writers who seek to capture their own experiences in a similar way. His works are still studied in classrooms around the world and continue to be celebrated centuries later. Ultimately, Robert Burns is an important figure in literature and culture, and his works will continue to inspire writers for generations to come.

Burns had a tumultuous life with many personal struggles including poverty, alcoholism, and depression. Despite these hardships, he was able to channel his inner feelings into his work which is what makes it so powerful and timeless.

Burns’ death was sudden and unexpected; he had been suffering from fever and rheumatism for some time but seemed to be recovering before tragically passing away. He left behind a legacy of work that has been celebrated and studied ever since. His works are still used as an example of the power of poetry and continue to influence modern poets.

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Not only war poetry, but also romantic poetry as a whole, previously constrained by prose genres, was in its heyday. The Romanticists united under the banners of poetry were not a group, many of them knew nothing about each other and lived in different cities and towns in the United States. It is noteworthy, however, that all of them (with the exception of W. Whitman, born on Long Island and in New York, respectively, and H. Melville, the novelist and “dissenter”) were natives of New England or the Southern states.

In terms of this discussion, the development of New England Romantic lyricism, rooted in the tradition of spiritual quests of Puritan poetry by A. Bradstreet and E. Taylor. An example of innovative development and reinterpretation of this tradition and at the same time a clear indication of the late high rise of American Romanticism is the work of Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-1886).

Emily Dickinson is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of world literature, both humanly and creatively. Her creative destiny is extraordinary: all her life even her closest neighbors had no idea that she wrote poetry. Nor did her relatives, who lived in the same house with her – her mother, her father, her brother Austin, and her sister Lavinia – know about it for a long time. During Dickinson’s life in print only eight of her poems appeared – all unsigned. Her first collection, published posthumously in 1890, attracted almost no attention.

Her fame began in the twentieth century. In 1955 appeared a complete collection of E. Dickinson’s poems, which consisted of three volumes and included more than 1,700 poems, and a year later – a three-volume collection of letters – a kind of “poet’s prose”. Here is a sample of it: “You ask me, who are my friends? The hills, sir, and the sunset. And a brown dog as tall as me…”

The literature on Dickinson now numbers dozens of monographs, and yet the controversy continues. What sometimes happens to poets happened to Emily Dickinson – she was ahead of her time. In the nineteenth century her verse, too original, too individual, too unlike anyone else’s, obviously could not be understood. When it was understood, it was recognized that she was an inspired poet, deeper than anyone before her, who had penetrated uncharted realms of the spirit and paved the way for twentieth-century poetry.

The daughter of a lawyer, Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, a small provincial town in Massachusetts, and here, apart from brief trips to Boston, Philadelphia and Washington in her youth, has spent her life. In the last twenty-five years she did not leave home at all, and to the indignation of her family stopped attending even church meetings. Emily Dickinson, however, was a deeply religious person. “When the family went to church,” she explained, “I was never alone. God sat beside me and looked right into my soul.”

Dickinson was neither a nun, nor a mystic, nor simply an eccentric. All her “oddities” had reasons both in her personal, intimate life and in the spiritual situation that America and New England were experiencing at the time. In fact, all the reasons boiled down to one, the name of which is romanticism. Romanticism as a protest against the soullessness and baseness of the existence around her, with all its wars, the struggle for position in society, for influence and literary recognition.

Her refusal to publish was also a protest. She did not want to dirty the pure banner of poetry relations with booksellers, did not want to please the then literary tastes “smooth” their poems to be published: “Let my poems remain barefoot,” – she said. E. Dickinson was a romantic and a rebel by nature, though her rebellion had a special quality and manifested itself in a stoic rejection of what she considered alien to herself.

When Charles Wordsworth moved to another state in 1861, and began for Emily Dickinson the time of her “white election” (she dressed in white and confined herself to the walls of her home for the rest of her life). Biographers have wondered what this meant-the color of “royal mourning” (as we know, mourning kings are white) or the “bride’s white color” of waiting (a new meeting did take place, but only twenty years later)? It is more likely that Wordsworth’s departure was only the impetus. The reclusion in which Emily Dickinson cherished her unfulfilled love was an attempt to build some kind of alternative universe in this mundane, down-to-earth and ordinary world. The poetess’s reference to the “country” that “a friend has left” is not coincidental. It must be said that she managed to build her own, self-sufficient world: this is her poetry.

As in the poems of her direct predecessors, the Puritan poets of 17th and 18th century New England, an exceptional place in the lyrics of E. Dickinson’s lyricism occupies an exceptional place with the Bible. Researchers who have undertaken to identify the poetess’s “biblical” poems have found that this is virtually her entire body of work; even texts that do not mention events and characters from the Bible touch with it in one way or another.

A great many of E. Dickinson’s poems are directly based on Scripture. She is in constant conversation with God, discussing episodes in the history of Israel, the characters of heroes, kings, and prophets, while demonstrating a not at all puritanical independence of judgment. For example, it “seems unfair to her how Moses was treated” when he was given to see the Promised Land, but was not allowed to enter it. God is her Father, loving but sometimes overly strict, while she is not always the submissive daughter, eager to understand everything on her own and to get to the bottom of it.

The themes of Emily Dickinson’s other, not so numerous, poems are eternal themes of poetry: nature, love, life, death, immortality. Distinctive features of her lyrics – the peculiarity of interpretation, which lies in the organic interaction of the ordinary and philosophical plans; the dominant place taken by the question of immortality; and unusual in the literature of the XIX century form of expression.

Dickinson’s immortality is not the posthumous fame that poets usually have in mind and for which she, who did not even publish her poems, clearly did not count, just as death for her is not the end of everything or complete hopelessness, for faith in a Savior provides “eternal life. Her understanding of love is also peculiar: it is not a purely spiritual union, as in the poetry of most romantics, but not simply a carnal connection, but both, and something else – a heavenly revelation. In fact, this is a deeply Christian interpretation of love, which includes various shades, comprehensive and self-sufficient, like the love of God.

All of Emily Dickinson’s indigenous poetic concepts take on their original, religious-philosophical meaning. At the same time, these concepts are not abstractions for her, but something quite real and concrete. In her poems, usually very short, devoted to the everyday phenomena of life (morning, a clover flower, a well in the garden), there is necessarily a second, philosophical plane.

Such is the lyrics of Emily Dickinson, a phenomenon, at the same time, and contradictory, and in its own way whole. It is indicative that, for all the breadth of spiritual interests, the nature of the problems that concerned the poetess, almost unchanged. In her case it is not necessary to talk about the evolution of creativity: it is a growing deepening of motives outlined in her very first texts, the evidence of the ever deepening life of the spirit.

Emily Dickinson’s innovative and original verse seemed “too elusive” or “shapeless” to her contemporaries. Higginson, the publisher of eight poems published in her lifetime, wrote that they “resemble vegetables dug out of a vegetable garden at a moment’s notice, with rain and dew and bits of earth clinging clearly to them.” This definition seems quite correct, especially if by “earth” we mean not dirt, but soil as the primary basis of all that is and is essential. E. Dickinson’s lyrics really lack the euphony and smoothness that readers of her time appreciated so much. It is a poetry of dissonance, whose author has not experienced the polishing and standardizing influence of any “circle” or “school,” and has therefore retained a distinctive style, clarity, precision, and sharpness of thought.

Her poetic technique is only Emily Dickinson’s technique. What, then, is her specificity? First of all, in the laconicism that dictates the omission of conjunctions, truncated rhymes, truncated sentences. The peculiarity is also evident in the system of punctuation invented by the poetess – the extensive use of dashes, emphasizing the rhythm, and capital letters, emphasizing key words and emphasizing the meaning. This form was born not of an inability to write smoothly (Dickinson also has quite traditional poems) and not of a desire to stand out (she wrote exclusively for herself and for God), but of a desire to highlight the very grain of thought – without a husk, without a shiny shell. This, too, is a kind of rebellion against the then fashionable verbal “curls.

The form of Dickinson’s poems is natural to her and determined by thought. Moreover, her incomplete rhymes, irregularities of style, convulsive changes of rhythm, the very unevenness of her poetry is now perceived as a metaphor for the surrounding life and is becoming increasingly relevant. Actually, Emily Dickinson’s time came only in the 50-70s of the XX century, when one of the most important trends in American poetry was the philosophical lyric, filled with complex spiritual and moral collisions, and when the author’s innovative and free style stopped shocking compatriots already accustomed to dissonance.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) had the strongest impact on the American cultural world. How powerfully the profound originality of American culture broke through can be seen in his work as a document of the spiritual history of the nineteenth century.

This American poet and writer, his world of ideas, and even his appearance had a great impact not only on American culture of the mid-nineteenth century. With great difficulty, overcoming conservatism and hostility, Poe invaded world literature. He might not have been able to break through the critics’ intolerant appraisals had it not been for the striking musical sound of his works, which contain profound philosophical meanings. Strongly influenced in his youth by Byron, Coleridge, and Hoffmann, E. Poe wrote a vivid page in the era of mature American Romanticism. It was a period of “nativism”-the romantic appropriation of American reality. American Romanticism, to a greater extent than European Romanticism, reveals a deep connection with the philosophical and aesthetic principles of the Enlightenment. The beginning of the mature Romanticism is conventionally associated with the economic crisis that shook the foundations of American society in 1837. The activities of a number of democratic literary journals, in particular, the Democratic Review O. Sullivan, created an atmosphere of creative freedom, which played a significant role in the evolution of the romantic consciousness of American artists.

In the course of the birth of national art criticism as part of the literary process, the work of E. Poe was a significant factor. With a keen eye for contemporary American consciousness, the writer was absorbed in exploring the human psyche.

Poe was a century ahead of his contemporaries, creating a rigorous aesthetic concept, a theory of the story. These ideas are outlined in the articles “The Philosophy of Creativity”, “The Poetic Principle”, “The Theory of Verse”, in various literary reviews.

Poe wrote that there should not be a single word in any work that did not directly or indirectly lead to a single intended purpose. It is customary to note the precision, the alignment of his works. He was one of the first to understand the need to change the human consciousness involved in the creative process, to the idea of synthesis rather than the opposition of logical thinking and imagination.

However, no theoretical constructions allow us to unravel the magic of the artist’s prose and poetry. His prose reveals a striking fusion of the fantastic and the realistic, the parodic and the serious. The mechanism of creativity is set in motion by two opposing forces: the meticulous activity of consciousness (a feature of the realist worldview) and the flight of fancy, intuition. In doing so, Poe achieves a remarkable synthesis that encourages a worldview in which, in the writer’s own words, the tree both remains and ceases to be a tree.

This approach later inspired the writers and artists of Symbolism, but in the middle of the nineteenth century it was a powerful counterposition of his creative self to the prevailing rationalism Another extreme in the form of “pure poetry,” “pure art,” emerged on the road to Symbolism, but Edgar Allan Poe never belonged to it: as strange as it sounds, he always stood his ground firm, coming from a truly deep understanding of the laws of life in the young North American republic, from a social reality he knew and understood perfectly.

A failed thirst for action, contempt for the surrounding squalor and calculating pragmatism created in his work a conflict of the moral and the aesthetic, typical of a certain tradition of artistic culture in Europe, beginning with Socrates, Plato, Aurelius, Augustine, then Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Baudelaire, and others. By the way, Europe owes its acquaintance with Poe’s unfading masterpieces to Baudelaire: The Raven, Annabelle Leigh, The City by the Sea, Ulyalume, Eldorado, etc.

Baudelaire wrote that Poe’s poetry, like any high poetic work, comprehends before all philosophical systems the inner and secret relations between things.

From the fifties of the 19th century short stories and novellas of the artist were published. Poe introduced into literature the genre of small fiction form. In his expressive narratives there is nothing superfluous, no redundant elements, the author’s idea is always revealed with a minimum of necessary words. The writer did not distract from the main idea, creating a kind of concentration of thoughts, images and words. It was not until a century later that American literature fully appreciated Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, making this form one of the favorite and most popular genres. The character, the situation, the atmosphere of the work, the writer never ceased to control analytically, consistently leading the reader to the disclosure of the central idea. At the same time, his individual style abounds in the techniques of romanticism, primarily manifested in an undoubted predilection for the supernatural. Poe seemed to laugh at the primitiveness of realism, constantly rising to poetic heights and philosophically embracing the sad world. He took a step toward symbolism without losing touch with the proper American soil, with the peculiar American culture.

Edgar Allan Poe was also the founder of the detective story, which had a great future in America (and not only here). A deep and skeptical mind, a character going against all odds, he rejected the platitudes of modernity and created a phenomenon of global significance, his own aesthetic school, opened up new horizons of the poetic imagination. It was not for nothing that Hegel, in completing his Philosophy of History, spoke of America as the country of the future – the talents of its citizens already promised to make that future bright.

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If we are talking about the avant-garde of English-language literature, very soon we are directed to Walt Whitman, born May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, the son of Walter Whitman y Louise Van Welsor, who had nine children.

The childhood of the residents of the Whitman van Welsor home It was not an easy one, for due to financial difficulties Walt and his brothers had to drop out of school to maintain a home, which soon led him to seek work and find it as an assistant printer, laying the foundation from age twelve for his love of letters.

Mostly self-taught, by 1835 Walt Whitman was avidly reading the works of Shakespeare, Homer, Dante y The Bible while learning the profession of lyricist. After a great fire in New York City that destroyed the printing industry a year later, Walt left these offices to teach in the New York City public schools. Brooklyn y Long Island until 1839, when he finally turned to journalism as a full-time career.

Thus he founded a weekly newspaper, the Islander, and later edited several Brooklyn y New York newspapers including the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, from there he became editor of the New Orleans Crescent for three months. After seeing the slave auctions in New Orleans, Return to Brooklyn in the fall of 1848 and co-founded another newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman, which he edited until the following fall.

These years spent in editorials opened the door for him to meet his writing contemporaries, including his idol. Ralph Waldo Emerson and illustrator Andrew Rome, with whom he would collaborate to create an image of his first work.

Consecration of Walt Whitman and his Weed

As early as 1855, with the aforementioned friendship, Walt published the first edition of the book. Leaves of Grass, consisting of twelve poems with no title or preface. A year later Whitman published a second edition of the book, which contained thirty-two poems, a letter from Emerson praising the first edition, and a long open letter from himself. Whitman continued to refine the volume of his Leaves of Grass in the following years, publishing several more editions of the book, a world-renowned test of the moral, psychological, and political constraints of English-language poetry and literature.

From this work come three of Walt Whitman’s major poems, ‘I Sing the Electric Body,’ ‘Sleepers’ AND ‘Song of Myself,’ which were combined in the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

Like many of his generation and some other writing and art professionals, Walt witnessed military conflicts, particularly the Civil War in 1861, so he vowed to live life clean as a freelance journalist and chronicler of the wounded in New York City hospitals. He then went to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for one of his brothers who had also been wounded in the war.

This experience brings a sensitivity and compassion that complements his poetic work as he sees himself overwhelmed by the suffering of the wounded, polishes his pen, and further makes his way as one of America’s most important lyricists.

For a little over a decade Whitman stayed and worked in hospitals, taking a job at a hospital. The Office of Indian Affairs that he would later lose because his boss did not look favorably on Leaves of Grass, his years work.

In 1873, after leaving the care of the wounded, Walt Whitman suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and realizing that his life was nearing its end, he traveled to Camden, New Jersey, to visit his dying mother in the home of one of his brothers. There he remained in the company of his family and published the last issue of the book. Leaves of Grass in 1882, along with several other poems and prose such as Farewell, My Fantasy, providing him with enough funds to build the house in which he died on March 26, 1892. He was buried in a grave he designed in a plot in Harley Cemetery.

In Leaves of Grass, Whitman holds an important position in English-language literature and, more importantly, is at the forefront of world literature, influencing later styles such as Futurism, Creationism, Imaginism y Ultraism, as well as some of the most famous names in poetry, such as: Reuben Dario, José Martí, Cherie Martinelli, Federico García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Guillaume Apollinaire, y Allen Ginsberg, who was one of the most prominent figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950 decade.

His struggles with the guild

Unlike many of his other colleagues who did not struggle to gain the recognition they deserved, Walt had no support that could give him any more decline, even in other parts of the world he never reached.

For example, Henry James y William Dean HowellsRepresentatives of the young creative generation of 1865 believed that Whitman’s reputation was undeserved because he was not a writer with a sensitivity to language, with a musical or verbal ear.

Gerald Manley HopkinsOn the other hand, he acknowledged his literary contributions, but objected that Walt Whitman’s “wild” style lacked rigor. George Santayana He said he did not read him because of his verbal grace, which Shakespeare did not excel at, but he had his own merit: his message, born of inspiration and delivered through the shouting voice of nature in the wilderness of convention.

The Idaho poet, Ezra Pound, considers him his “spiritual father” and recognizes in him a poet who in North America takes the place of Dante in Italy, thus justifying his inevitable influence.

Yet despite the controversy he may or may not face because of his wicked, assertive, discursive and prophetic style, or the fact that doubts arise as to whether his ideas of equality, freedom and solidarity are only one of his poetic resources, Walt Whitman stands alongside Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe y Henry David Thoreau as the most influential poets in the United States, because although Whitman, the man, does not take Whitman’s place as a poet, it is important to save the importance of his work for modern literature.

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Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Massachusetts.

Her parents, Otto Emil and Aurelia Plath, adored their daughter, who idolized only her father, who taught at Boston University and was a specialist in bees. His scientific writings and will made a great impression on the sensitive Sylvia, and she imitated her father in everything. His death from diabetes in 1940 was a tragedy for Sylvia, but perhaps it was this sad event that awakened her literary talent. Sylvia’s first poem appeared when she was less than eight years old in the pages of the school paper, the Boston Herald. She was a star in school, getting straight A’s, publishing her poems and short stories, winning contests in which she participated, and being a model student and daughter.

In 1950 she won a grant to attend Smith College, where she wrote more than four hundred poems and several dozen short stories. For one of these she won first place in the Mademoiselle magazine contest and the opportunity to go to New York. After a short trip, depressed by the big city and the cruelty of those around her, Sylvia fell into a severe depression, which ended with a note: “Gone for a walk, do not lose me, I will be home tomorrow. She took a blanket, a bottle of water, and a pack of sleeping pills with her. A week later her mother and brother found Sylvia in the basement of their house. She didn’t want to be found. The recovery was long, painful, but successful. The following year, Plath graduated with honors from college and wrote a paper entitled “The Magic Mirror: Doppelgangers in Novels,” for which she received a grant to study at Cambridge.

She immediately fell in love with this small and cozy city. She gave all her time to her studies, and in the 1950s, this 23-year-old single girl seemed to others, to say the least, strange. But one day, buying another issue of the student almanac, she read a poem by the young poet Ted Hughes, whom she had met that very evening. Then she wrote in her diary, “One day he will bring me death.

On June 16, 1956, they were married. Hughes was a really talented, independent poet, and his first book, A Hawk in the Rain, won an award from the New York Poetry Center. The couple was able to use the money to travel to America, where they spent several years teaching college and creating new poems and stories. Sylvia’s style was designed for publication in women’s magazines, which was unacceptable for the serious literature into which she aspired. It was not until after the birth of her first child that her book, Johnny’s Fears and the Dream Bible, was published, and the following year her first poetry collection, Collosum and Other Poems, was published, which was critically acclaimed. But at the time, no one could even imagine the depth, power, and beauty in Sylvia Plath’s poems.

In the spring of 1962, she and her husband moved to Devon, where Sylvia completed her most famous novel, Under the Glass Cover, and a few months later she had her second child. In the fall of 1962, because of Ted’s infidelity, a divorce took place, and it was a tragedy for Sylvia. But October 1962 was a real poetic boom in her writing. She wrote 25 poems, all of which went into the golden fund of American and world literature. “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Detective,” and “Nick and the Candle” were imbued with genuine passion, anguish. Sylvia claimed that the Lord God spoke through her lips. She woke up at four in the morning and wrote poems until sunrise.

In November, Sylvia wrote equally outstanding poems, “Death and ©,” “Poppies in November,” “Gulliver” and “Winter Trees.” But material hardship crippled Sylvia’s already frail health. The winter of 1963 was the coldest winter of the twentieth century in Britain. Sick, helpless, Sylvia tried to find help, but to no avail. Her last poems were imbued with resignation to fate, some somnambulism, indifference.

Sylvia’s creative legacy is small: several poetry collections, a novel. Her diaries… But one cannot find in them, either, the reasons for her departure at such a young age. It is said that her husband censored her diaries, he even burned two of them, where there was a clue. Hugh later confessed that he had burned the diaries and said it was his way of trying to protect his children. It was only just before his death that he published his “Birthday Letters,” in which he shared only in part what he had been silent about for years.

Sylvia Plath, a beautiful, brilliant, promising young poet, left many letters, diaries, and poems that were published after her death. She is considered a martyr poetess who sought union with her late father, but at the same time struggled with a sense of hopelessness and clung to life as best she could.

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His full name is Oscar Fingal O’Flaherty Wills Wilde. Of Irish descent. He was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854, into a very prominent family. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a world-renowned ophthalmologist and author of many scientific works; his mother was a socialite who wrote poetry about Ireland and the liberation movement and considered her receptions a literary salon.

Young Wilde grew up in an atmosphere of poetry and affective-theatrical exaltation, which could not but affect his later work and lifestyle. After leaving school, he spent several years at Dublin’s privileged Trinity College before enrolling at Oxford. Here, influenced by the lectures of John Ruskin, the Romantic poets, and the art of the Pre-Raphaelites, the brilliant student’s aesthetic views are formed.

The cult of the Beautiful, of which Wilde was an ardent propagandist, led the young man to a rebellion against bourgeois values, but more of a purely aesthetic rebellion, which manifested itself not only in his elegantly beautiful poems but also in a deliberately flamboyant style of dress and behavior – an extravagant suit with a sunflower in the buttonhole (later the sunflower would be replaced by Wilde’s famous green carnation), artificially mannered, almost ritualistic speech intonations.

Almost for the first time in the history of culture, the artist, the writer considered his whole life as an aesthetic act, becoming the forerunner of the celebrities of the Russian Silver Age, the Futurists or the most consistent adherent of the epatage lifestyle – Salvador Dali.

However, what had become almost an artistic norm in the twentieth century was, for Victorian England in the late nineteenth century, inadmissible. This led Wilde to tragedy. Already Wilde’s first poetry collection – Poems (1881) demonstrated his commitment to the aesthetic direction of decadence, which is characterized by the cult of individualism, pretentiousness, mysticism, pessimistic moods of solitude and despair. His first experience in drama – “Faith, or the Nihilists” – also belongs to this time.

However, for the next ten years he did not work on drama, turning to other genres – essays, fairy tales, literary and artistic manifestos. At the end of 1881 he went to New York, where he was invited to give a course of lectures on literature. In these lectures Wilde first formulated the basic principles of English decadence, later elaborated in detail in his treatises, consolidated in 1891 in his book Convictions. The denial of the social function of art, earthiness, plausibility, the solipsistic concept of nature, and the assertion of the artist’s right to full self-expression are reflected in Wilde’s famous works – his fairy tales, however, objectively breaking out into the limits of decadence. It is impossible not to note the magical, truly mesmerizing charm of these very beautiful and sad stories, undoubtedly addressed not only to children but also to adult readers. However, from the point of view of theatrical art, something else is more important in Wilde’s tales: they crystallize the aesthetic style of polished paradox that distinguishes Wilde’s little dramaturgy and makes his plays a unique phenomenon, almost unparalleled in world literature.

Perhaps the only correct stylistic analogy to Wilde’s plays can be found in the dramaturgy of Bernard Shaw, for all the polarity of their creative and life principles. Before returning to drama, however, Wilde wrote his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), commissioned by an American publisher, as a kind of transition from fairy tales, in which the writer clearly outlined the range of his problems. The aestheticization of immorality, the concept of cynical hedonism, the spicy charm of the vice that flourishes in the luxurious interiors of aristocratic salons – all this would later pass into Wilde’s refined comedies.

Wilde’s plays were all written in the early 1890s: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), The Woman Not Worth Noticing (1893), The Holy Harlot, or The Woman Sprinkled with Jewels (1893), The Perfect Husband (1895), The Importance of Being Serious (1895) – and were immediately staged on the London stage. They were a great success; critics wrote that Wilde had brought a revival to English theatrical life, a continuation of Sheridan’s dramatic tradition. As time passed, however, it became clear that these plays could hardly be classified as mere “comedies of manners.

Today it is Wilde who, along with Shaw, is rightly considered the founder of intellectual theater, which in the mid-20th century was developed into a current of absurdism. In the 1890s almost all of Wilde’s work was accompanied by high-profile public scandals. The first of these arose with The Portrait of Dorian Gray, when a broad discussion of the novel was reduced to an accusation of immorality. Then, in 1893, the British censorship forbade the production of the drama “Salome”, written in French for Sarah Bernhardt. Here the accusations of immorality were much more serious, since the biblical subject had been translated into a decadent style. The stage history of “Salome” came only at the beginning of the 20th century, with the rise of Symbolism: it was staged by the famous German stage director Max Reinhart in 1903; in 1905 Richard Strauss wrote an opera based on it; in 1917 Russia saw a performance by Alexander Tairov with Alisa Cohnen in the leading part. But the major scandal that shattered not only his career as a playwright, but his entire life, began in 1895, shortly after the premiere of the playwright’s last comedy. Wilde, defending himself against public accusations of homosexuality, sued the Marquis of Queensberry, father of his closest friend Alfred Douglas. But Douglas, who had effectively separated Wilde from his family and had been his lavish support for three years, testified at the trial as a witness for the prosecution. Wilde was convicted of immorality and sentenced to imprisonment.

The titles of Wilde’s plays immediately disappeared from theater posters and his name was no longer mentioned. The only colleague of Wilde’s who petitioned for clemency was Shaw. The two years the writer spent in prison turned out to be his last two literary works of great artistic power. They were the prose confession De Profundis (From the Deep), written during his imprisonment and published posthumously, and the poem The Ballad of Reading Prison, written soon after his release in 1897. It was published under a pseudonym, which was Wilde’s prison number, S.3.3. He wrote nothing else. Adopting the name Sebastian Melmoth, Wilde went to France.

One of the most brilliant and sophisticated aesthetes of nineteenth-century England spends the last years of his life in poverty, obscurity and loneliness. Oscar Wilde died Nov. 30, 1900 of acute meningitis caused by an ear infection. He died in a run-down hotel. His last words were, “It was either me or that ugly floral wallpaper. He was buried in Paris in the Bagno Cemetery. About ten years later he was reburied in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. In 1914 a winged sphinx of stone by Jacob Epstein was placed on his grave.

For a century admirers expressed their love for the great writer by leaving inscriptions and kisses on the monument, having previously covered their lips thickly with lipstick. Greasy cosmetics had a detrimental effect on the stone. The monument was cleaned and restored many times, but tourists coming from all over the world continued to kiss the stone angel. On the 111th anniversary of the death of the poet and writer Oscar Wilde, Paris authorities unveiled the renovated monument. The degreased stone sculpture is now surrounded by a glass barrier designed to keep the writer’s fans at a proper distance.

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William Shakespeare, the great Renaissance playwright of England and national poet of international acclaim, was born in the town of Stratford, north of London. History has only preserved information about his baptism on April 26, 1564.

In Stratford little William Shakespeare received a good education for those times. As a child he entered a grammar school, where they studied Latin and ancient Greek. For a deeper and fuller mastery of the ancient languages, students were supposed to participate in the school’s productions of plays in Latin.

According to some reports, in addition to this school, William Shakespeare in his youth also attended the royal school, which was also located in his native town. There he had an opportunity to get acquainted with the ancient Roman poetic works.

Unknown seven years

William Shakespeare is one of the few authors about whom information was collected literally in bits and pieces. Very few direct accounts of his life remain. For the most part, all information about William Shakespeare has been extracted from secondary sources, such as the statements of contemporaries or administrative records. Therefore, about seven years after the birth of his twin and before the first mentions of his work in London, researchers build enigmas.

Shakespeare is attributed both to his service to a noble landowner as a teacher and to his work in London theaters as a prompter, stagehand, and even a horse breeder. But there is no truly reliable information about this period of the poet’s life.

The London period

In 1592 the English poet Robert Green’s opinion of young William’s work appears in the press. This is the first mention of Shakespeare as an author. The aristocrat in his pamphlet tried to ridicule the young playwright, as he saw him as a strong competitor, but which was not distinguished by noble birth and good education. At the same time mentions the first productions of Shakespeare’s play “Henry VI” in London’s “Rose” theater.

This work was written in the spirit of the popular English genre of chronicle. This type of performance was common in Renaissance England; it bore the epic nature of the narrative, with scenes and pictures often unconnected. Chronicles were intended to celebrate the statehood of England as opposed to feudal fragmentation and internecine wars.

It is known that William from 1594 enters a major acting community, the Servants of the Lord Chamberlain, and soon becomes its co-founder. Productions brought great success, and the troupe in a short time became so rich that allowed himself to build over the next five years, the famous building of the theater “Globe. And by 1608 the theatergoers also acquired a closed room, which they called “Blackfriars.

Much of the success has contributed to the favor of the rulers of England: Elizabeth I and her heir, James I, from whom the theater company has acquired permission to change its status. Since 1603 the company was called “Servants of the King. Shakespeare was not only engaged in writing plays, he also took an active part in the productions of his works. In particular, evidence has survived that William played leading roles in all of his plays.

Periods of creativity

The great playwright created an immortal treasure trove that has nourished world culture for more than five centuries in a row. The plots of his plays have become an inspiration not only for the artists of dramatic theaters, but also for many composers, as well as film directors. Throughout his creative life, Shakespeare repeatedly changed the nature of his writing.

His first plays often copied in structure the genres and plots popular at the time, such as chronicles, Renaissance comedies (The Taming of the Shrew), and “tragedies of horror” (Titus Andronicus). These were unwieldy works with a large number of characters and unnatural for the perception of the syllable. The young Shakespeare learned the basics of writing drama on the classic forms of the time.

The second half of the 1690s was marked by the appearance of dramaturgically refined in form and content works for the theater. The poet seeks a new form, not departing from the given framework of Renaissance comedy and tragedy. He fills old obsolete forms with new content. Thus came the brilliant tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, and the comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice. The freshness of verse in Shakespeare’s new works is combined with an unusual and memorable plot, making these plays popular with audiences of all walks of life.

At the same time, Shakespeare created a cycle of sonnets, the famous genre of love poetry at the time. For almost two centuries, these poetic masterpieces of the master were forgotten, but with the emergence of Romanticism they regained their fame. In the nineteenth century, it became fashionable to quote the immortal lines written at the end of the Renaissance by the English genius.

Thematically, the poems are love letters to an unknown young man, and only the last 26 sonnets of the 154 are appeals to a black-haired lady. Many scholars see autobiographical features in this cycle, suggesting an unconventional orientation of the playwright. But some historians believe that these sonnets use William Shakespeare’s address to his patron and friend, the Earl of Southampton, in the then accepted secular form.

At the turn of the century in the works of William Shakespeare appear works that made his name immortal in the history of world literature and theater. Practically established, successful creatively and financially the playwright creates a number of tragedies that brought him fame not only in England. These are the plays “Hamlet”, “Macbeth”, “King of Lear”, “Othello”. These works have raised the popularity of the Globe Theater to the heights of one of the most visited entertainment institutions in London. At the same time, the fortune of its owners, including Shakespeare, increased many times over a short period.

At the twilight of his career, Shakespeare composed a number of immortal works that surprised his contemporaries with their new form. They combine tragedy with comedy, and fairy tales are woven into the description of the situations of daily life. First of all, the plays-fantasy The Tempest, The Winter Tale, as well as dramas on ancient subjects – Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra. In these works Shakespeare acted as a great connoisseur of the laws of drama, which is easily and elegantly put together features of tragedy and fairy tale, a complex high syllable and clear speech patterns.

Individually many of Shakespeare’s dramatic works were published during his lifetime. But a complete collection of works which included almost all of the playwright’s canonical plays, appeared only in 1623. The collection was printed at the initiative of Shakespeare’s friends William John Heminge and Henry Condel, who worked with the Globe troupe. The book, consisting of 36 plays by the English author, was published under the title of the First Folio.

During the seventeenth century, three more folios were published, with some changes and additions of previously unpublished plays.

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