The following questions are based on reading material assigned for John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins.
1). How does Ruskin define what makes good art? How does this definition contrast with Hazlitt’s focus on “gusto” during the Romantic Period? Explain how you think one writer that we have studied in this period might fit Ruskins’ requirement about having “great ideas” in a work of literature or art.
2). In “Dover Beach,” what does the speaker of the poem see as the source of problems in the modern world, and what is his remedy?
3). Arnold defines culture as “knowing the best that has been known and said in the world.” Why does he think that this is important? What kind of education does he think will help us to achieve this, and why?
4). Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote poems that often use powerful sound effects–rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and unusual syntax–to emphasize his ideas. Select one of the poems we read (“God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover” or “Spring and Fall”) and discuss at least TWO examples of interesting sound elements in that poem. What technique is used, and how does it help to reinforce the point of the poem?
5). In Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and in Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall,” the authors project a sense of anxiety about the future and the idea that human beings are isolated and alone in dealing with their fears. This is often seen as a kind of foreshadowing of a “modern” view of life, later made worse by the horrors of WWI. Why do you think people in the late Victorian and modern eras were so full of negative feelings? What was happening in their world that might be creating this reaction? Do you agree that this is a “modern” problem? Why, or why not?
