©March 2014 Mary Crockford For the Anglo-Saxon citizen, a functioning and intact society depended on principles designed to create order out of Europe’s chaotic and violent past. Among these principles were loyalty, generosity, and courage, which promoted a sense of community that could withstand the constant threats of war and internal strife. The medieval poem […]
©April 2014 Mary Crockford In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” nature is portrayed in numerous guises—nature as the feral, undeniable force underpinning all life, inner nature in the form of human flesh and its instinctive drives, and nature as a divine expression of the benevolent but powerful Christian Creator God. In the anonymously penned […]
©2014 Mary Crockford John Dryden called Geoffrey Chaucer “the father of English poetry,” impressive praise from a poet himself noted “after John Donne and John Milton” as “the greatest English poet of the 17th century” (Poetry Foundation, Para 1). Chaucer’s contributions to the poetic tradition were those of an innovator and originator, for his departure […]
©November 2013 Mary Crockford Through the dramatic monologues of “Charge of the Light Brigade” and “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning typify the popular Victorian ethic of ascribing honor to military deaths that would otherwise be seen as senseless, and even suicidal. This was especially common immediately preceding […]
© November 2013 Mary Crockford In his essay collection titled A Philosophical Enquiry, Edmund Burke wrote that “All privations are great, because they are all terrible. Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude, and Silence. (Burke and Smith, 65)” This statement could be applied directly to the central theme of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Isolation. By way of the novel’s […]
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