Gerald R. Lucas

Mythos — a story or plot, either true or false. Myths involve rituals (prescribed forms of sacred ceremony), and each myth represents one story in a mythology. A mythology is a system of hereditary stories once believed as true, but which we no longer believe. Poets use myths and mythology as literary conventions and devices [...]

Ezra Pound, in his essay “The Renaissance,” writes: “The first step in a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing” (214). Pound suggests that a renaissance artist needs to develop his own “table of values” from his great predecessors — values that he likens to a painter’s palette of [...]

“The first thing you picked up from us was that Hitler broadcast. Why did you make contact?” “The picture, of course, was alarming. We could tell you were in deep trouble. But the music told us something else. The Beethoven told us there was hope.” (Contact 359) Throughout his life, the great Renaissance artist and [...]

The opening of Gilgamesh states that it is an old story “About a man who loved and lost a friend to death.” This statement also holds true for the Iliad; friendship and its loss represent both a motivating force and an important source for a happy life in both epics. Both Achilles and Gilgamesh lose [...]

SGGK is written in long stanzas and short, metered and rhymed, couplets, called “bob” and “wheel,” at the end of each verse. The alliteration, free from rhyme and rhythm, in the long stanzas is obviously influenced by Old English, while the “bob” and “wheel” signifies a Middle English influence. Each blow, or, more precisely, the [...]

Allusion in Neoclassical poetry has various functions: allusion provides a contrast between the virtues of the past and the insanity of the present; allusion enriches the meaning and the texture of the poem; and allusion suggests a universality: people are not as different as they might believe being separated by time and space. Dryden believed [...]