In Plato’s Symposium love (eros) is a ladder that climbs from one beautiful body to the Form of Beauty itself. The medieval poets made it a religion of its own: Geoffrey Chaucer‘s Troilus is “converted” by Criseyde’s glance, and the Prioress’s brooch in The Canterbury Tales reads Amor vincit omnia — love conquers all, though which love she means is left in doubt. William Shakespeare gave English its great love tragedies and comedies, and Dante ends the Divine Comedy with “the love that moves the sun and the other stars”.
The English novel turned love into a question of judgement. In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth Bennet must learn to see Darcy truly before she can love him; Jane Austen insists that one must not marry without affection — nor without the means to live. In Great Expectations Pip loves Estella “against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope”. In Frankenstein the creature’s crime begins in a refusal of love: “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
The Romantics made love a revelation. John Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne, “Love is my religion — I could die for that.” Against them stand the sceptics: La Rochefoucauld, who thought few people would fall in love if they had never read about it, and the Buddha, for whom craving and attachment are the roots of suffering.
Thinkers & Authors
17
Geoffrey Chaucer
The father of English poetry — a London wine merchant’s son, courtier, diplomat and customs officer whose Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde made English a language for great literature and filled it with the first gallery of living characters.
John Donne
The greatest of the metaphysical poets — Catholic-born rake turned Dean of St Paul’s — whose argumentative, dramatic, startling love poems (“The Flea”, “The Sun Rising”, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”) and Holy Sonnets (“Death, be not proud”) fused passion and intellect; and the preacher of “No man is an island”.
Mir Taqi Mir
The first great master of Urdu poetry (1723–1810) — “Khudā-e-Sukhan”, the God of poetry — whose six dīvāns of ghazals, written amid the sack and ruin of eighteenth-century Delhi, made grief, love and loss sing in a language of heartbreaking simplicity.
Jane Austen
The novelist of “three or four families in a country village” — a clergyman’s daughter whose six comedies of courtship, money and moral growth (Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion) perfected the English novel with irony, free indirect style and an unerring eye for self-deception.
John Keats
The Romantic poet of beauty, sensation and mortality — a stable-keeper’s son and trained surgeon who, before dying of tuberculosis at twenty-five, wrote the great odes of 1819, “The Eve of St. Agnes”, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and some of the finest letters in English.
Charlotte Brontë
The eldest Brontë sister to survive childhood, a Yorkshire parson’s daughter who, as “Currer Bell”, published Jane Eyre (1847) — the passionate first-person story of a plain, poor governess who demands to be loved as an equal — and then Shirley and Villette.
Emily Brontë
The most mysterious of the Brontë sisters — a solitary, fierce, visionary poet of the Yorkshire moors who, as “Ellis Bell”, wrote one novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), a wild tale of love, revenge and the elemental passions of Catherine and Heathcliff, and died at thirty.
Thomas Hardy
The stonemason’s son from Dorset who created “Wessex” in Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure — tragedies of chance, desire and an indifferent universe — then abandoned the novel and became one of the great poets of the twentieth century.
Jaishankar Prasad
Poet, dramatist, novelist and philosopher of Banaras, the first of the four pillars of Chhāyāvād — author of the epic Kāmāyanī, the lyric sequence Āṁsū, and historical plays like Skandagupta and Chandragupta that recreated India’s ancient glory.
Harivansh Rai Bachchan
The Hindi poet whose Madhushālā (“The House of Wine”, 1935) — a tavern, a wine-bearer and a cup as an allegory of life — became the most popular poem in modern Hindi; also a translator of Shakespeare and the Rubaiyat, a Cambridge scholar of Yeats, and a great autobiographer.
Mahadevi Varma
The “modern Mīrā” — the fourth pillar of Chhāyāvād, poet of mystical longing for an unseen beloved in Nīhār, Rashmi, Nīrajā, Sāndhyagīt and Dīpśikhā; pioneering feminist essayist of Śṛṅkhalā kī Kaṛiyāṁ; memoirist of the poor and of animals; principal of a women’s college in Allahabad for decades.
Agyeya
Revolutionary, prisoner, soldier, editor and the pioneer of modernism in Hindi — founder of the Tār Saptak anthologies that launched Prayogvād and Nayī Kavitā, author of the psychological novel Śekhar: Ek Jīvanī and of Nadī ke Dvīp, and a poet of the solitary, self-aware individual.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz
The greatest Urdu poet of the twentieth century — a Marxist and lover whose ghazals and nazms fused the classical language of love with revolution, prison and protest; jailed in Pakistan, exiled in Beirut, sung across the subcontinent: >- “Mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat”, “Bol”, “Ham dekhẽge”.
Ismat Chughtai
The boldest woman of Urdu fiction — author of “Liḥāf” (The Quilt), tried for obscenity in 1944, of the novel Ṭeṛhī Lakīr and of stories of women’s desire, the zenana and middle-class Muslim households, told in a racy, colloquial voice that changed Urdu prose.
Phanishwar Nath "Renu"
The Hindi novelist of Bihar’s Purnea countryside who created the “regional novel” (āñcalik upanyās) with Mailā Āñcal (1954) — a whole village of Maryganj told in its own dialects, songs and rumours — and wrote “Mare Gaye Gulfām”, filmed as Teesri Kasam.
Sahir Ludhianvi
The Urdu poet of protest and heartbreak who became the greatest lyricist of Hindi cinema — author of Talkhiyā̃ (“Bitterness”) and of film songs like “Ye mahlõ ye takhtõ”, “Kabhī kabhī mere dil mẽ” and “Allah tero nām” — who brought progressive poetry to hundreds of millions.
Mohan Rakesh
The playwright who created modern Hindi theatre — Āṣāṛh kā Ek Din, Laharõ ke Rājhaṁs, Ādhe Adhūre — and a leader of the Nayī Kahānī, writing of artists, lovers and families broken between ambition and longing.
Works
9
The Canterbury Tales
Chaucer’s unfinished masterpiece (c. 1387–1400): thirty pilgrims of every rank ride from Southwark to Canterbury and compete by telling stories — knightly romance, bawdy farce, saints’ lives, sermons, beast fables — each tale a mirror of its teller.
Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare’s early tragedy of young love (c. 1595): two teenagers from feuding families in Verona fall in love at first sight, marry in secret, and within four days are dead — the most famous love story in the world.
Othello
Shakespeare’s tragedy of jealousy (c. 1603–04): Othello, a Black general in the service of Venice, secretly marries the young Desdemona; his ensign Iago, out of hatred he never fully explains, persuades him that she is unfaithful, and Othello kills her — then learns the truth.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen’s most famous novel (1813): witty Elizabeth Bennet, one of five daughters with no fortune, misjudges the proud and wealthy Mr Darcy — and he her — until a letter, a visit to Pemberley and a family scandal teach them both to see clearly.
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë’s novel (1847): an orphan girl survives a cruel aunt and a harsh charity school, becomes governess at Thornfield Hall, falls in love with its brooding master Mr Rochester, discovers on her wedding day that he already has a wife — locked in the attic — and flees, to return at last as his equal: “Reader, I married him.”
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë’s only novel (1847): on the Yorkshire moors, the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw love each other with a ferocity beyond reason; when she marries the gentle Edgar Linton, Heathcliff’s revenge destroys two families across two generations — until, in death, the lovers seem to walk the moors together.
Middlemarch
George Eliot’s masterpiece (1871–72): in a Midlands town on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act, the idealistic Dorothea Brooke marries a dry old scholar and the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate marries a pretty, selfish wife — and a whole community of lives, marriages, debts and secrets is woven into “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”.
Ulysses
Joyce’s modernist epic (1922): a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, following the young artist Stephen Dedalus, the Jewish advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, mapped onto Homer’s Odyssey and told in eighteen different styles — ending in Molly’s unpunctuated “yes”.
Kāmāyanī
Jaishankar Prasad’s epic (1936): after the great Flood, Manu, the last of the gods, is loved by Shraddhā (faith) and later seduced by Iḍā (intellect), builds a kingdom of reason that ends in rebellion and ruin, and is led by Shraddhā to the Himalayas and the bliss of harmony — the allegory of the human mind and the greatest poem of modern Hindi.
Ideas
1
Schools & Movements
2Chhāyāvād
The romantic movement of Hindi poetry (c. 1918–1936) — Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala”, Sumitranandan Pant and Mahadevi Varma — which turned from didactic verse to the inner self, nature, love, mysticism and a new music of language, and made modern Hindi a language of lyric poetry.
Nayī Kahānī
The “New Story” movement in Hindi fiction of the 1950s and 1960s — Mohan Rakesh, Kamleshwar, Rajendra Yadav, Nirmal Verma, Mannu Bhandari, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti — which turned from Premchand’s village and idealism to the lonely, uprooted urban middle class of independent India and its broken relationships.
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William Shakespeare
The playwright and poet of Stratford whose 37-odd plays and 154 sonnets gave English its richest store of quotation and gave philosophy Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth.
Progressive Writers' Movement
The movement of Urdu, Hindi and other Indian writers founded in 1936 (presided over at its first meeting by Premchand) which demanded a literature of social realism against colonialism, feudalism, poverty and religious obscurantism — and produced Faiz, Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Krishan Chander, Sahir and Kaifi Azmi.
Victorian Literature
English literature in the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) — the great age of the novel (Dickens, the Brontës, Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Hardy), of Tennyson and Browning, of the sage-writers Carlyle, Ruskin and Mill, and of a society wrestling with industry, empire, class, faith and doubt.
Mirza Ghalib
The greatest poet of Urdu (1797–1869) — master of the ghazal, of wit, paradox, grief and doubt — who lived through the fall of the Mughal world in 1857 and wrote its elegy in letters and verse.
T. S. Eliot
The American-born banker, publisher and poet who became the most influential English-language poet of the twentieth century — author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men” and Four Quartets — and the critic who redefined tradition, impersonality and the “dissociation of sensibility”.
Abhinavagupta
The towering Kashmiri polymath (c. 950–1016) — the great systematiser of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism and the greatest theorist of Indian aesthetics, who taught that in the experience of art (rasa) the self tastes its own blissful consciousness.