Blog 3 Topics for Nineteenth Century Literature- due due Friday 29th April: extended to Monday 1st May

Choose any ONE of the following topics:

1/How do the opening paragraphs of Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Poetry present a view that poetry could solve The Condition of England Question?

2/What makes Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” such a personal response to the loss of belief in Victorian England?

3/Prepare a digital kit on the poetry of Christina Rossetti revealing how she was a powerful and original presence in the Victorian Age. To do this find a few really useful web sites which home in on her originality. Produce these links in your digital kit, together with a few comments on why these links are particularly useful. HINT: a good starting place is The Victorian Web  https://victorianweb.org/

4/Use the first line of any one of Christian Rossetti’s poems and construct your own poem on a similar subject (set in the 21^st Century).

5/Matthew Arnold quotes Wordsworth near the start of The Study of Poetry, and says “Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”.

6/Write a short letter, either agreeing or disagreeing with Arnold’s/ Wordsworth’s point of view on this.

7/Write a very short story in which you find that joining a group of people like the gypsies has given you experiences and insights that you could never hope to get in your current life experience.

8/Overall, from your reading and from your viewing of 19^th Century art, write a short paragraph on what you sense is the complex mood of people living in Victorian times. If you wish you might add how you think this mood is similar or different to the mood of our own times.

9/Construct a question of your own that relates to any aspect of what we have been studying in the last two weeks and how it has impacted on your own experience.