WB SLST English : Critics comments on the Writings of Wb SLST

 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."

---

🎭 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.”

---

📖 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.