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The Beatles: The Icons of British Culture

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The Beatles were one of the most successful and influential rock bands of the 20th century. The group was formed by the "Fab Four": John Lennon (rhythm guitar, vocals), Paul McCartney (bass guitar, vocals), George Harrison (lead guitar, vocals), and Ringo Starr (drums, vocals). From Liverpool to Global Domination Formed in Liverpool in 1960, they dominated the British and international charts from 1962 to 1970. In the early 1960s, their enormous popularity sparked a global phenomenon known as "Beatlemania." As their music grew in sophistication—led by primary songwriters Lennon and McCartney—the band evolved from pop idols into the embodiment of the 1960s counterculture. They experimented with psychedelia, Indian classical music, and studio techniques that changed the face of the recording industry forever. A Prolific Legacy The Beatles wrote over 200 songs (including 186 original compositions released during their active years). Their catalog includes timeless mast...
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Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1972 into a rich family in Horsham, Sussex.
According to family tradition, he went to school at Eton and, then, to Oxford.
At Eton he came to regard the tyranny and repression in the outside world and he rebelled against it.
At Oxford, Shelley collaborated in writing a pamphlet called The necessity of Atheism (1811), for which he was expelled from the university.

In London he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he will have two children, and they lived together for three years, moving from place to place.
During this period, he wrote his first poem Queen Mab (1813), in which he revealed his aversion to institutions and hatred against tyrants, Christian orthodoxy and the conventions of current morality.

He collaborated with the radical philosopher William Godwin, whose libertarian ideas were decisive on his cultural formation and imagination as a writer. The first two novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) show a tendency to the "Gothic" genre.

In 1814 Shelley fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, William Godwin’s daughter and went with her to France and Switzerland, where they met Lord Byron, abandoning Harriet, who comitted suicide.
Shortly after, Shelley married Mary and in 1818 they left England for Italy, where much of Percy’s best lyrics were written.

In 1818 he published the epic poem The revolt of Islam, The masque of anarchy (posthumously, 1832) and England in 1819, lyrics written under the impression of the "Peterloo massacre", caused by the intervention of the army against the workers of Manchester who challenged the wheat laws and demanded universal suffrage.

Percy and Mary lived in various Italian locations, including Lucca, Este, Naples, Rome, Florence, Pisa and Lerici.
During his stay in Italy he composed his best poetry: the verse dramas The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus unbound (1820); in 1821 he published the famous elegy for the death of Keats, Adonais, and the poem Epipsychidion, which sang the theme of platonic and passionate love.

During an excursion to Livorno by boat, Shelley drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia.
He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome next to the tomb of John Keats.

The best lyrics of Percy B. Shelley written during his four years in Italy show his truly Romantic temper: they are both pervaded by natural scenery and natural forces and by the poet’s own spirit of communion with the universe.

They are also full of Shelley’s social ideals.

Ode to the West Wind, for example, may be read as a prophecy of political and social revolution.
Shelley not only expresses in his poem a desire for change, but he also turns the poem into an agent of change in itself, which will be transmitted to the world of men.
So, the poet becomes a prophet, a transmitter of forces present in the universe.
Shelley unites lyrical grace with the creation of powerful myths, founded on natural elements and ancient myths.
In Ode to the West Wind, natural scenery is seen as animated by moral forces; in Prometheus Unbound, myth is used to express man’s rebellion against oppressive powers and his constant striving towards justice, freedom and happiness.

Then, Shelley expresses his convictions on the nature and function of poetry in the prose work Defence of poetry (1821): the poetry is a means of expressing the imagination.

According to him, Poets are endowed with the highest degree of imagination, with which they can realize artistic representation. They have the ability to see beyond immediate reality and are the only ones who can establish true contact with reality through language and transmit its authentic meaning. Shelley acutely felt "the inadequacy of man's condition towards his ideas" and his reaction was not Byron's satirical skepticism, but a continuous struggle for a moral regeneration of humanity.

Like Byron, Shelley was representative of the second generation of Romantic poets’ restlessness and incapacity to come to terms with society.
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Analisi del testo. Tre cose solamente mi so 'n grado di Cecco Angiolieri

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Testo Tre cose solamente mi so 'n grado, le quali posso non ben men fornire: ciò è la donna, la taverna e 'l dado; queste mi fanno 'l cuor lieto sentire. Ma sì me le conven usar di rado, ché la mie borsa mi mett'al mentire; e quando mi sovvien, tutto mi sbrado, ch'i' perdo per moneta 'l mie disire. E dico: – Dato li sia d'una lancia! – Ciò a mi' padre, che mi tien sì magro, che tornare' senza logro di Francia. Trarl'un denai' di man serìa più agro, la man di pasqua che si dà la mancia, che far pigliar la gru ad un bozzagro. Parafrasi Solamente tre cose mi piacciono delle quali, però, non posso disporre: cioè la donna, l'osteria e il gioco d'azzardo; queste cose rendono allegro il mio cuore. Purtroppo, posso permettermele di rado perché la mia borsa non mi consente di realizzare tutti i miei desideri; quando mi rendo conto di ciò, mi metto a sbraitare poiché per mancanza di denaro perdo il mio desiderio. Perciò, dico a me stesso ch...
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Wars and social revolt in 14th century

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Agincourt battle In 1337, war between England and France broke out when Edward III claimed the vacant throne of France. One of the most famous victories in English history was achieved by Henry V at Agincourt. The conflict was interrupted by other tragic events such as the Bubonic plague or Black Death. Under Henry VI's reign, the French obtained spectacular victories thanks to Joan of Arc. In the end, the English kings had lost all their continental possessions. Opposition to the Church developed in the second half of the 14th century under the leadership of John Wycliffe, a member of Oxford University who attacked the supremacy of the Pope. From 1454 to 1485 there was a civil war between the two noble houses of York and Lancaster. It was called the War of the Roses because symbols of Lancaster and York families were respectively red rose and white rose. The war was won by Henry Tudor of the Lancastrian dynasty, and he became Henry VII of England.
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Comparison between Joyce's "Ulysses" and Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway"

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James Joyce (1882-1941) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) belonged to the first generation of Modernists and it’s possible to make a comparison between their literary production analyzing their masterpieces: Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway . Ulysses Ulysses is one of the greatest examples of reworking of myth in Modernist literature. Joyce uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism, ideals, love and trust in the modern world. The plot utterly takes place in Dublin in a single day which involves the life of three characters: Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, Sthephen Dedalus, a sensitive young man with literary ambitions, and Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife. Leopold Bloom, compared to Homer’s Ulysses, makes common actions: he wanders throughout the day in the streets of Dublin making errands, stopping at the advertising office and joining a funeral. He is distressed with two deep emotional burdens: the unsolved grief over his baby son’s death and the crumbling relationship with his unfa...
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The Ballad of Lord Randal

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Text "O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son? And where ha you been, my handsome young man?” I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my bed soon, “For I’m wearied wi hunting and fain wad lie down.” “An wha met ye there, Lord Randal, my son? An wha met you there, my handsome young man?” “O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my bed soon, “For I’m wearied wi hunting and fain wad lie down.” “And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son? And what did she give you, my handsome young man?” “Eels fried in a pan; mother, mak my bed soon, “For I’m wearied wi hunting and fain wad lie down.” “An wha gat your leavins, Lord Randal my son? And wha gat your leavins, my handsome young man?” “ My hawks and my hounds; mother, mak my bed soon, “For I’m wearied wi hunting and fain wad lie down.” “And what becam of them, Lord Randal my son? And what becam of them, my handsome young man?” “ They stretched their legs out and died; mother, mak my bed soon, “For I’m wearied wi hunting and fain wad lie ...
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Giovanni Pascoli: Lavandare

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Testo Nel campo mezzo grigio e mezzo nero resta un aratro senza buoi che pare dimenticato, tra il vapor leggero. E cadenzato dalla gora viene lo sciabordare delle lavandare con tonfi spessi e lunghe cantilene: Il vento soffia e nevica la frasca, e tu non torni ancora al tuo paese, quando partisti, come son rimasta, come l’aratro in mezzo alla maggese. Analisi e commento Lavandare è un madrigale, ossia un componimento metrico breve a sfondo pastorale, scritto da Giovanni Pascoli ed appartenente alla raccolta Myricae . In questa raccolta l'autore parla della natura che ci circonda, la campagna e gli oggetti quotidiani, osservandoli con lo stupore e la meraviglia di un bambino. Essa incorpora componimenti brevi e lineari che illustrano quadretti di vita campestre che, circondandosi di un alone di mistero, evocano l'idea della morte. Questa caratteristica è presente in Lavandare , nella quale emergono i temi ricorrenti nelle poesie di Pascoli: l'abbandono e la solitudine. Il...
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Analisi del testo. La vita fugge, et non s'arresta una hora di Francesco Petrarca

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Testo La vita fugge, et non s'arresta una hora, et la morte vien dietro a gran giornate, et le cose presenti et le passate mi dànno guerra, et le future anchora; e 'l rimembrare et l'aspettar m'accora, or quinci or quindi, sí che 'n veritate, se non ch'i' ò di me stesso pietate, i' sarei già di questi penser' fòra. Tornami avanti, s'alcun dolce mai ebbe 'l cor tristo; et poi da l'altra parte veggio al mio navigar turbati i vènti; veggio fortuna in porto, et stanco omai il mio nocchier, et rotte arbore et sarte, e i lumi bei che mirar soglio, spenti. Parafrasi La vita fugge e non si ferma nemmeno un'ora, e la morte arriva a marce forzate, e, pertanto, tormenta sia il presente che il passato ed anche il futuro; la mia anima è angosciata sia nel ricordo del passato che nell'attesa del futuro, per cui se ad impedirmelo non fosse la pietà che avverto per la mia anima, avrei posto fine alla mia esistenza. A consolarmi è il ricordo di qu...
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I contributi a livello di poesia di Francesco Petrarca e Dante Alighieri a confronto

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