Thomas Taylor
eNotes Educator
Achievements
16
Educator Level
1769
Answers Posted
325
Answers Bonused
About
Ph.D. Univ. of Virginia in Comparative Literature Author of two books on drama
Earned Badges
-
Educator of the Month
This badge is awarded to one Educator each month for outstanding contributions to Homework Help. -
eNotes Educator
This badge is awarded to all eNotes Educators. Only official Educators can answer students' questions on our site. Educators are teachers, professional researchers, and scholars who apply to our... -
Hall of Fame
Educators can earn this badge by contributing over 1,000 answers on eNotes. -
Quiz Taker
This badge is awarded when an Educator has completed 10 quizzes. -
10K Points Earner
Educators earn points for every question they answer. This Educator has earned over 10,000 points. -
25K Points Earner
Educators earn points for every question they answer. This Educator has earned over 25,000 points. -
50K Points Earner
Educators earn points for every question they answer. This Educator has earned over 50,000 points. -
Expert
An expert badge distinguishes Educators who demonstrate strong knowledge in a particular topic, such as Hamlet or Math. It is awarded when an Educator has posted more than 25 answers on a given topic. -
Scholar
The scholar badge recognizes Educators who are especially knowledgeable about a particular author. This badge is awarded once an Educator has posted more than 50 answers on works by a specific author. -
Poetry Whiz
Bonuses are awarded when an Educator has gone above and beyond and impressed the editorial team by offering an especially lengthy, nuanced, or insightful answer. This badge is given to an Educator... -
Literature Whiz
Bonuses are awarded when an Educator has gone above and beyond and impressed the editorial team by offering an especially lengthy, nuanced, or insightful answer. This badge is given to an Educator... -
History Whiz
Bonuses are awarded when an Educator has gone above and beyond and impressed the editorial team by offering an especially lengthy, nuanced, or insightful answer. This badge is given to an Educator... -
Science Whiz
Bonuses are awarded when an Educator has gone above and beyond and impressed the editorial team by offering an especially lengthy, nuanced, or insightful answer. This badge is given to an Educator...
Recent Activity
-
Answered a Question in Bartleby the Scrivener, A Tale of Wall Street
This answer is perfectly legitimate, but ignores the deeper significance of Bartleby’s “I prefer not to.” Melville is trying to dramatize the difference between goal-driven action and... -
Answered a Question in The Stranger
The main distinction from the actual philosophy of existentialism in Camus’ fictive work is his concentration not on the question of whether existence precedes essence (the foundation of the... -
Answered a Question in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The opening lines of this poem have the narrative character speculating on who owns the woods. The main point of this speculation is to inform the reader that the woods are not the narrator’s, but... -
Answered a Question in History
The hierarchy of Shakespeare’s time starts at the top with Queen Elizabeth herself (followed at her death with James I); after her, the other members of the royalty. Because she had no... -
Answered a Question in Hamlet
In addition, a large part of Shakespeare's audience were tourists to London, and university students, so the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would appeal to this commodity phase of... -
Answered a Question in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
“Theme” is a tricky, not very technical term in literary analysis. But what is generally meant by it is “What larger abstract idea is most commonly discerned by a reader when reading the... -
Answered a Question in Literature
In Greek tragedy, a hero is carefully defined – falling from a high place, tragic flaw, catharsis, etc. – as defined and illustrated by Aristotle in The Poetics. By Elizabethan times the term... -
Answered a Question in Shakespeare
William Shakespeare lived and worked in the Elizabethan/ Jacobean times (1564-1616), in the professional and highly competitive business of live stage performance. He wrote a large body of dramatic... -
Answered a Question in Song of Myself
This amazing insight from Walt Whitman is an encapsulation of his philosophy – that we are not so much individuals as “leaves of grass”; superficially we appear to be individual, unique beings, but... -
Answered a Question in Robert Frost
The American poet Robert Frost was an acknowledged traditional poet in that he followed the classic rules of rhyme and meter well before Modernists such as T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings rejected... -
Answered a Question in History (General)
The “importance" of anything is dependent on the circumstance – the “importance” of sugar depends on whether you are baking cookies or Zweiback; the “importance” of auto brakes depends on whether... -
Answered a Question in Ozymandias
This device (which we might call “the poet/narrator”) allows a story-telling element into the “lyric” process, thereby removing the single narrator (a requirement of Aristotle’s division of... -
Answered a Question in Literature
The term “Restoration” refers to the return from France of Charles II in 1660. The major literary changes took place in Drama/Theatre, because that is the genre that reflected the social... -
Answered a Question in My Last Duchess
The entire poem is geared toward a “portrait” of the Duke’s inhumanity and greed. The casual remark “I gave commands and all smiles stopped together” is a sinister hint as to his power... -
Answered a Question in Literature
In literature, these two terms, “contrast” and “duality,” are sometimes used to discuss pairs of utterances or styles or plot configurations. “Duality,” as the derivation of the words... -
Answered a Question in Modernism
Modernism is one of those terms that is attached to a present moment in history, but becomes misleading and clumsy as time (and literature) moves on. At the time of its naming, it referred to... -
Answered a Question in Of Mice and Men
These two plays, besides being both authored by Americans, have very little in common. Glass Menagerie is a family play, set in a small interior space, while Of Mice and Men is a play about a... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for Godot
It is Beckett’s intention to convey his ideas not only through spoken dialogue, by also by means of several “stage languages”: gesture, proxemics, blocking, costume, etc. To do this, it was... -
Answered a Question in A Midsummer Night's Dream
The first “importance” is the entertainment value for the Elizabethan audience, who hugely enjoyed comic antics, especially when they made fun of the London tradesmen, who were socially a cut below... -
Answered a Question in E. E. Cummings
On the surface, the narrator is speaking to a little kitten who has fallen asleep with its eyes open. But the poem also speaks of spring, and in combination these images reflect Cummings’ interest... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for Godot
This is a penetrating question. Of course, the main emphasis is the non-movement, the inertia of inactivity in the plot (emphasized by the important last line: “They do not move.”) But... -
Answered a Question in Walt Whitman
This long poem, a piece of Leaves of Grass, is a spontaneous self-portrait in prose form, celebrating Whitman’s individuality while acknowledging how all humanity is alike (like “leaves of... -
Answered a Question in E. E. Cummings
This poem, convoluted and abbreviated in typical Cummings style, is a homage to individuality, a portrait of Kitty herself, and an admonishment to her “Johns” – a description of the less obvious... -
Answered a Question in Shakespeare
“Famous” is almost a modern term, made viable by today’s technologies – radio, television, Internet, and all the mass-media outlets in daily use today. But in Shakespeare’s day (1564-1616),... -
Answered a Question in The Road Not Taken
This poem, which beautifully exemplifies all of our doubts and concerns about the choices we have made, and the speculation about where our life might have gone had we made other choices, is at the... -
Answered a Question in Sociology and Philosophy
Conformity to social unwritten laws carries with it some assurance of safety, of acceptance, of normalcy. But the benefits of nonconformity, while somewhat more abstract and tentative, can be... -
Answered a Question in Riders to the Sea
It would be quite a stretch to call Mauyra a tragic hero, using Aristotle’s criteria, based on the plays of Sophocles and Euripides. First, the tragic hero must "fall from a high place.” Even on... -
Answered a Question in Samuel Beckett
The sense of this short piece is that Man’s relationship to his earthly existence, represented by the physical objects just out of the protagonist’s reach, leaves him with no choices, just the... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for Godot
Another critical point of view can be found in the work of notable Beckett scholars such as James Knowlson (his biographer) and Martin Esslin, author of The Theatre of the Absurd. The “Godot = God”... -
Answered a Question in E. E. Cummings
First, while it is true that Cummings wrote his own name without punctuation or capitalization (e e cummings), it has become common practice for scholars to normalize the form when citing or... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for Godot
“Absurd” here refers to a genre of dramatic productions that try to put on stage the philosophical notion that perhaps the tendency to make sense, to give meaning to our daily lives, is a human... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for Godot
This play’s existential element lies mainly in the metaphor of “waiting” for a meaning, a purpose in an individual’s existence, personified in the “figure” of Godot (since we exist without being... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for Godot
This famous pair, also known as Didi and Gogo, play a central role in Beckett’s stage attempt to “eff the ineffable” through the use of all the languages of the stage – dialogue plus costume,... -
Answered a Question in Hamlet
There is no deception in this proclamation. Yorick was in fact a jester to Hamlet’s father when Hamlet was a boy. “A man of infinite jest and most excellent fancy” he would pick up Hamlet and give... -
Answered a Question in The Canterbury Tales
While the question is a little unclear (are you writing a tale about the Canterbury Tales, or are you writing a modern piece like the Canterbury Tales?), you might want to find a modern-day... -
Answered a Question in somewhere I have never traveled,gladly beyond
There are several clusters of implicit metaphor in this poem. First, the lover’s body as a journey of discovery; "Somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond any experience"; Second, the poet as... -
Answered a Question in Riders to the Sea
The people of the Aran Islands live by the sea, and the power of the sea in their lives has become a supernatural power that God uses to both reward (in the form of bountiful fish harvests) and... -
Answered a Question in Mending Wall
Setting aside the ambiguity of the term “message,” the poem seems to discuss the contrasts between tradition and new thinking, between habit and modern adjustments to tradition. Frost, who was more... -
Answered a Question in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
The first question to ask is: “Is the poet the narrator in the first person”? This is a legitimate question because, according to Aristotle, a poem only has one narrator, and our assumption is that... -
Answered a Question in Walt Whitman
Today in America we would probably say “Blades of Grass,” but the metaphor speaks to the infinitude of things – stars, individual leaves, individual blades of grass, individual grains of sand,... -
Answered a Question in E. E. Cummings
This poem is an excellent example of Cummings’ irony. As the last line indicates, the “speaker” is actually a political speaker, jamming together many empty clichés (“land of the pilgrims”, “dawn’s... -
Answered a Question in A Modest Proposal
This assignment, usually after discussing Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” serves to demonstrate the student’s understanding of irony and exaggeration to make an argument. When the student understands... -
Answered a Question in History
This is an excellent question for a history student, because hidden in the question is the need to assess the veracity of secondary historical documentation. In other words, one’s “opinion” depends... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for Godot
To understand this witticism, you must be familiar with other “modern” plays, (let us say Ibsen’s or Chekhov’s) enough to realize that they contain, besides character depictions, “plots". That is,... -
Answered a Question in Essays
As is often the case in essays that do not argue one side or another of a controversy, but rather state a point of view, the first task of the essayist is to state a illustratable point of... -
Answered a Question in Waiting for Godot
This utterance, like many others in this intriguing play, is a reference to the seemingly random acts of pain, violence, and injustice that Life brings to all of us, part of Beckett’s claim that... -
Answered a Question in Essays
First, the word “you” is ambiguous. Does the assignment call for a general discussion about the nature of personal beauty, or a discussion of your (the writer’s) own beauty. If the former, you... -
Answered a Question in Shakespeare
The study of the history of Shakespeare’s texts is a life-long discipline for English literature scholars (see Fredson Bowers’ definitive Principles of Bibliographical Description, 1949). They... -
Answered a Question in A Doll's House
I’m going to disagree with this opinion, largely because Ibsen, in his entire canon, does not concern himself much with a character’s self-examination or self-awareness; he focuses rather on the... -
Answered a Question in The Lady, or the Tiger?
This is an excellent opportunity to stretch your mind in three directions: First, there is no tiger, no door, no choice. Like Magritte’s painting of a pipe (called “This is not a pipe”) , it is...
Showing 1-50 of 526