WB SLST English : Critics comments on the Writings of Wb SLST
📘 Poetry
1. Wordsworth – Lucy Poems
Francis Jeffrey: “A lover trots away… ‘If Lucy should be dead!’ And there the poem ends!” (mockery of simplicity).
John Wilson: “Powerfully pathetic.”
2. Wordsworth – The World Is Too Much with Us
Matthew Arnold: “Wordsworth is the poet of the healing power of Nature.”
3. Shelley – Ode to the West Wind
Leigh Hunt: “The trumpet of prophecy.”
4. Shelley – To a Skylark
Arthur Symons: “The skylark is not a bird, it is a spirit.”
5. Keats – Ode to a Nightingale
T. S. Eliot: “Keats’s odes are perfect poems… the very voice of poetry itself.”
6. Keats – To Autumn
Harold Bloom: “The most perfect short poem in the English language.”
7. Tennyson – Ulysses
Matthew Arnold: “Poetry of nobility and high seriousness.”
8. Browning – The Last Ride Together
George Saintsbury: “A noble and novel view of love’s defeat.”
9. Hardy – The Darkling Thrush
Lionel Johnson: “A song of hope in the midst of desolation.”
10. Yeats – The Wild Swans at Coole
Cleanth Brooks: “An image of changeless beauty against human transience.
11. Owen – Strange Meeting
W. B. Yeats (ironically dismissive): “Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.”
Edmund Blunden (supportive): “A masterpiece of tragic pity.”
12. de la Mare – The Listeners
Walter de la Mare himself: “It is but a mood caught in words.”
Critics often call it “the finest ghostly lyric of English poetry."
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🎠Drama
1. Goldsmith – She Stoops to Conquer
Dr. Johnson: “I know of no comedy for many years that has so much exhilarated an audience.”
2. Shaw – Arms and the Man
Shaw himself (in preface): “An anti-romantic comedy of love and war.”
William Archer: praised it as “a delightful exposure of military romance.”
3. Galsworthy – Justice
The Times review (1910): “A most moving appeal for prison reform.”
Harley Granville-Barker: “The theatre used as an engine of social justice.”
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📖 Prose & Short Stories
1. Lamb – Dream Children
Swinburne: “A sweetness like no other fragrance, a magic like no second spell in letters.”
2. Conrad – The Lagoon
Edward Garnett: praised Conrad’s “psychological depth and atmosphere.”
3. Maugham – The Lotos-Eater
Richard Cordell: “A parable of escape and its price.”
4. O. Henry – The Gift of the Magi
Burton Raffel: “The purest expression of O. Henry’s ironic humanism.”
5. H. E. Bates – The Ox
V. S. Pritchett: admired Bates’s “tender, exact prose of rural life.”
✍️ Essays
1. Lamb – Dream Children
(Already above with Swinburne).
2. L. A. Hill – Principles of Good Writing
Critics of language teaching note Hill as “the champion of clarity and simplicity in modern English prose.
