Michael Otis

Kubla Khan, a poem published in 1816 by leading Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge originated in an opium-induced dream nearly thirty years before in 1797. The poem of 54 lines fitly bears all...

At lines 450 to 469 of Comus, a masque first published in 1637 by John Milton, the Elder Brother of the piece is in the midst of a lively defense of his sister's "hidden strength" -...

At a cursory reading, "A Birthday", by Christina Rossetti seems to be nothing more than the poet exultantly rejoicing over the return of her beloved. Yet many of the images employed, the balance of...

Ezra Pound's 1911 imagistic masterpiece "In a station of the Metro" aligns two images -  The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. in a deeply evocative...

The earliest dream-vision poem in the English language and one of the central documents of Anglo-Saxon literature, The Dream of the Rood was most likely composed during the 8th century. In this...

Tiresias is a figure from Greek mythology and literature, the blind soothsayer who appears in Book xi of The Odyssey. Being the most renowned prophet of the non-biblical world...

William Blake's "The Clod and the Pebble", one of his Songs of Experience published in 1794, is a deceptively simple three-stanza poem. In it the poet personifies a lump of clay which, though...

It is in the act of perception that American author and T.S. Eliot contemporary, William Carlos Williams in "Spring and All" parts company with the sensibility of "The Waste Land". On the...

In Homer's Odyssey, Scylla is a six-headed, man-eating monster positioned across a narrow strait from an enormous ship-swallowing whirlpool, Charybdis. Odysseus' dilemma is how to...

In Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More, Chancellor of England and eventual martyr, is a multi-faceted character: Alternatively  beguiling, incisive, authoritative, and pious, More...

Chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby features the bacchic dinner parties thrown by their nearly invisible host, Jay Gatsby. Like moths to a flame, men and girls from all walks of life - the high-born...

"The Sojourner", is an early short story by 'southern gothic' author Carson McCullers, best known for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a novel which is concerned with the theme of the fragility of...

Bolt's character of the Common Man in A Man for All Seasons is in modern drama both something new and old: New, because he acts in many different roles to establish his credentials as a mouthpiece...

"Babylon Revisited" - which as critic John Higgins remarks, "stands as [F. Scott] Fitzgerald's one virtually flawless contribution to the canon of the short story" -relates the return of...

Three examples of forehadowing in Death of a Salesman will suffice: The first emerges before the beginning of the play, where Willy Loman's car accident presages his suicide at the end of Act...

When controversial author and essayist George Orwell first published the dystopian classic 1984, some critics superficially read into it a thinly-veiled denunciation of Stalin's...

In 1949, following the enthusiastic public reception of Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller himself reflected on this question in an essay entitled "Tragedy and the Common Man". In it Miller...

Verbal irony - wherein the words used convey a meaning different from the literal meaning - abounds in Macbeth, Shakespeare's paradigm of equivocation. Verbal irony achieves its finest...

A century old this year, T.S. Eliot's Preludes raises the curtain on his great modernist masterpieces, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. In essence four...

Published in the second decade of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot's early somber poem Preludes deserves its title.  In its four sections Preludes 'raises the curtain' on many of the...

Mary Shelley herself, along with numerous critics, has acknowledged her debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in her Frankenstein. Clearly, the epic of...

In 1819, the final year of productivity as a full-time poet, John Keats wrote five odes, one of which was the masterful "To Autumn". Arranged in three stanzas of 11 lines each, "To Autumn" pays...

Winston Smith’s observation – that the man sitting near him “was not a real human being but some kind of dummy” – takes place during lunch in the canteen of the Ministry of Truth. Winston has just...

Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), an early Renaissance poet, wrote more than 300 sonnets addressed to Laura, a lady forever unobtainable. Thus, he established the model of love poetry...

The second stanza of the famous Frost poem published (1923) in New Hampshire contains a highly significant allusion: My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near...

Walking out the door with whores in tow, Biff and Happy leave their father to founder in his delusions in the restroom of Frank's Chop House. As they return home later that evening, Happy...

Edgar adopts what critics call a southern stage dialect in his confrontation with Oswald: Edg. Chill not let go, zir, without vurther [cagion]. Osw. Let go, slave, or thou di'st! Edg. Good...

In the fifth and final act of Macbeth, wherein the usurping king meets his bloody end, a paradox and a pun both propel the dramatic movement of the tragedy. The former occurs in Scene 3 when...

As she turns down the bed to await her husband, Othello, Desdemona recalls for Emilia how she heard and learned "a song of 'Willow'," from her mother's maid, Barbary: My mother had a maid call'd...

Napoleon, pig-in-charge of Animal Farm, commands that in addition to rebuilding the windmill--the original one having been dynamited in the recent battle--a schoolhouse for piglets is to be...

Death of a Salesman's author Arthur Miller originally wanted to entitle his landmark American tragedy The Inside of His Head to reflect the time shifting from present to past of...

The title of Stephen Vincent Benet's post-apocalyptic short story, "By the Waters of Babylon" alludes to the first line of Psalm 137 (136), Super flumina Babylonis: "By the rivers [waters] of...

H.G. Wells' The Time Machine - like most science fiction - is more diagnosis than prognosis. In his novella Wells offers a critique of the capitalist structure of the Victorian society in which he...

In a work of literature, foreshadowing is the presentation - usually near the beginning - of hints of what comes to light later. Foreshadowed events are often seen clearly in hindsight. In the...

Eliot refers to lilacs at the very outset of his landmark modernist poem, "The Waste Land": April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire,...

The arrival of a New York reporter, chasing down rumours about Jay Gatsby, provides the opportunity for Nick to give the true facts (which he learned much later) about the man: James Gatz, Nick...

Mixed construction in a sentence begins with one grammatical form and ends with another, resulting in confusion. In the following example, the writer begins the sentence with a dependent...

Near the end of chapter 12 -  "What I Saw of the Destruction of Weybridge and Shepperton" - in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, a frenzied crowd, including the narrator, rush...

Following on the grisly murder of King Duncan at the end of Scene ii, Act II, Scene iii opens with the comical protestations of the drunken porter of Inverness. Some critics have famously seen...

In a word, 'no'. That Biff and Happy address Charley as 'uncle', and Bernard greets Willy in the same way seems to imply a familial relationship, but their use of this term of address is the...

In "Shooting an elephant", the master essayist of the twentieth century, George Orwell, maintains that a minor incident of shooting an elephant in colonial Burma symbolizes the evil and...

"To His Coy Mistress", by 17th century English poet, Andrew Marvell, is a notable example of metaphysical poetry, a type characterized by among other traits, startling, fanciful metaphors and...

Winston Smith's work at the Ministry of Truth is to rectify or update  the historical record so that it corresponds with previously published newspaper articles. A case in point is...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th century Middle English alliterative romance recounting an adventure of Gawain, an Arthurian knight. The anonymous author goes out of his way - taking...

"Dover Beach", by 19th century poet Matthew Arnold, is an elegy on the retreat of faith - under the twin assaults of science and rationalism - from the contemporary world. Both the...

William Blake's "The Divine Image", one of the Songs of Innocence and Experience is a hymn to the attributes humanity shares with God. The poem is divided into five quatrains with the rhyme...

In the short story, "Through the Tunnel," by Doris Lessing, the reader encounters a young English boy on vacation at a pivotal point of his life. Use of the third person omniscient point of view...

As Act I of Death of a Salesman begins, and we watch and listen to the careworn Willy Loman, we become painfully aware of his multi-faceted hamartia, or tragic flaws. They include...

Boy's Life, by erstwhile horror fiction author Robert McCammon, tells the story of one summer in the life of 12-year-old Cory Mackenson, a resident of the fictitious town of Zephyr,...

The second chapter of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men - where George and Lennie arrive at the ranch in the late morning and meet some of the other major characters of the novel - functions as...