TS Elliot's The Use of Poetry

It is unrealistic that a teenage boy could survive upwards of 200 days in the middle of the Pacific Ocean alongside a 450-pound tiger. But literature does not reflect ordinary life, therefore it is important in the study of literature to separate the two, because literature is not about being practical or realistic, it is about being imaginative. The unreality of Life of Pi allows the Hero’s Journey archetype to be easily identifiable, for example, as literature provides the extremes of scenarios, stretching the capacity of the imagination to the very heights and depths of what the human mind can conceive. Literature provides us with an experience that reality cannot, because in reality, the imagination is limited to what is physically possible, but in literature, the imagination is able to be free. Through understanding the conventions of literature, the individual, in studying more complex works, is able to appreciate the use of the imagination to reach beyond what reality offers us and is able to refine his sensibilities as he recognizes the partition between life and literature.

Rabbit, Run by John Updike is a novel about a young man named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom who leaves his pregnant wife and young child and begins a journey to find happiness and freedom. He gets involved with a prostitute and stays with her until his wife has their baby girl. While he is away from his wife he is counseled by Reverend Eccles who tries to help Rabbit’s situation, although it does not do much good. After the new baby is born Rabbit leaves his wife again to go back with Ruth, the woman he was with before. While he is away the second time, his wife drinks too much and accidentally drowns their newborn. In the end, Rabbit runs away from both his family and Ruth.

Controversy in Rabbit Run The novel, Rabbit Run by John Updike, commences by describing Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom’s background. He was a high school basketball player and now is married to a woman named Janice Springer. Rabbit discovers that his wife is pregnant and he mentions to his wife that he is going to pick up his son, Nelson, but instead drives far away when he gets frustrated with his wife’s behavior.

Literature is susceptible to misconception. At times, the presentation of content, enticing details, and storyline take away from the morals and ideas being presented in a piece of text. Most times, as a result of focusing on the distracting elements of a novel, audiences fail to recognize the deeper meaning or purpose of why the author choses to include certain sections of a novel. A book’s intention is to accurately express an author’s thoughts, but, many times, the delivery of unfamiliar content results in fear and a lack of understanding from the reader.

John Updike's novel, Rabbit, Run, is about a man named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. Rabbit is a brainless guy whose career as a high school basketball star peaked at age 18. In his wife's view, he was, before their early, hasty marriage, already drifting downhill.

In reality, there are some things to be taken away from this paper. First, literature helps us define what it means to be human. To read about others and their experiences and emotions is to really understand what it means to be real and to think outside of your own small world.

Although physically literature is simply written work, it serves as various functions to many. One of the main functions of literature is to entertain the reader. In the poem Undetectable, Justin Chin is able to keep the reader fascinated throughout the entire poem. His syntax grapples your attention quickly at the beginning, and then continues to keep you engrossed throughout the entire length. When reading through the poem, I personally was trying to put together the big picture. Too me the poem served as a puzzle, that I slowly had to piece together by reading the rest of the poem. Another function that literature possesses is the ability to portray a message. Messages can be hidden or stated obviously. For example Chin is trying to inform

Saramago’s quote “Some people spend…” speaks well to the depth of works and the recongnition of themes within them. Stories create a broad path from beginning to end in order to engage a reader, and sometimes even link these two ends to an extreme degree. Other stories, however, lead the reader on a journey from the beginning to end, and they grow lost between what the focus of the novel and what other subplots are trying to establish. Saramago, Sartre, and Marquez all show how a flowing river of literature may seem to detract from the overarching theme of a work, but in actuality enhance the reader’s experience.

In his essay ”Formative Fictions: Imaginative Literature and the Training of the Capacities”, Joshua Landy, professor at Stanford University, aims to explain the function of fiction and the reward of our engagement with literary works. Landy highlights three theories of the function of fiction: the exemplary branch, which invites the reader to consider characters as models for emulation or avoidance, the affective branch, which focuses on what fiction does to our emotions, and the cognitive branch, that believes that fictions grants us access to knowledge. Landy is specifically interested in “formative fiction”, works “whose function it is to fine-tune our mental capacities” (Landy 183). The purpose is not to acquire a superior understanding of the story, but to practice methods that allow readers to take an active stance towards works, whether it be picking holes in the logic or mending those holes. Rather than describing what happens to readers, he emphasizes that readers ought to do something with formative fictions that admittedly, they can easily fail to do. Landy argues that readers who look for a moral or message of a novel have misinterpreted the purpose of literature, which is not to have a genuine connection to the reader’s lives. While accepting that his theory is not universal and only applies to some literary works, Landy’s new option for interpreting texts, his

According to The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia literature is, “Words set apart in some way from ordinary everyday communication. In the ancient oral traditions, before stories and poems were written down, literature had a mainly public function - mythic and religious. As literary works came to be preserved in writing, and, eventually, printed, their role became more private, serving as a vehicle for the exploration and expression of emotion and the human situation.” Literature enables us to develop our minds analytically and promotes open minds. We can see the world through the eyes of different writers from different cultures and in turn learn to better handle certain scenarios in our own lives. It allows the reader to escape to a

Indeed, the best works of literature are those which are of relevance to our lives today. Through their relevance, these novels continue to persist and endure on. Through their relevance, we can better comprehend the messages, the themes, and the ideas that are imbued in them. Rather than literature being contradictory and in conflict with the truth and unpleasant reality of daily life, it becomes a weapon through which we can be educated about the existential crises facing our world today. In fact, the statement above could not be more far and distant from the reality of literature today. It is fatally flawed. Literature, whilst at the surface, seems whimsical and amusing is, at its very core, a medium through which we are enlightened

Personally, I think the point of literature is entirely subjective. Even the definition of literature can be interpreted differently. In class just now, it was defined as written works with artistic value, which I agree with to some extent, but then again, what does and doesn’t constitute as artistically valuable is also subjective. I feel like I’m on a fast-track to my history and philosophy class here, being all like “everything is subjective, nothing is real”. The point, the purpose, the goal of literature can be so many things. In earlier human evolution, the Homo Sapiens’ ability of more advanced communication than that of other animals, the way we evolved to understand and communicate not only the tangible reality of our surroundings (after all, the Neanderthal could do this too), but also perceive and deal in hypotheticals and what’s referred to as the imaginary reality – the capability to believe in made-up concepts like gods, money, nations – is what made us the sole surviving human species; it gave us reasons to unite, to coexist in larger groups and eventually entire societies. Without this crucial cognitive development, we wouldn’t have

Jorge Luis Borges is a well known author for his unique style of writing that is unlike many others. In one of his widely known work titled as Ficciones, we see the particular magical surrealism style Borges is immensely popular for. In this collection of short stories, Borges demonstrates a theme of reality vs. fantasy. Each unique story has a plot twist that makes the reader think out of the ordinary in order to understand the message that is hidden within the fiction. Borges uses dreams, fantasies, and many unrealistic events that confuses the readers experience. However the reader's understanding changes progressively comparing from the beginning of the fiction to the end because of the authors mysterious style of writing.

Many critics of poetry are of the opinion to approach the poems or works of an author ignoring or disregarding their biographical features , as if did not influence at all on the design and creation of his poems . While it is true that some sepsis can help when it comes to not fall into false interpretations or twisted and complicated analogies , which amounts to combine meanings of certain verses to personal circumstances experienced by its author, it is no less true that a good biographical knowledge of vital events of the authors can greatly help clear this or that dark side that we find in a poem or a work, the reasons why the title of one form or another or even the way they were ordered poems.

As defined by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks in his book ‘Understanding Poetry’ published in 1978, “poetry is a kind of saying. It is a kind that many people, until they become well acquainted with it, feel is rather peculiar and even useless. They feel this way for two reasons: the “way of saying” and the “nature of the said.” As for the way of saying, the strongly marked rhythms, the frequent appearance of rhyme, and the figurative language may seem odd and distracting; and as for the “nature of the said,” it generally contains neither a good, suspenseful story nor obviously useful information. Poetry, in short, may seem both unnatural and irrelevant. Yet poetry has existed from the time of the emergence of the human race from shadowy prehistory and has survived, in one form or another, in every society since that time. When we realize this, we may be inclined to consider the possibility that poetry only seems unnatural and irrelevant. We may even decide, on reflection, that it does spring from deep human impulses and does fulfill human needs.