Alfred Austin
Alfred Austin (30 May 1835 – 2 June 1913) was an English poet, who was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896 upon the death of Tennyson.
Alfred Austin was born in Headingley, near Leeds, on 30 May 1835. His father, Joseph Austin, was a merchant in Leeds; his mother, a sister of Joseph Locke, M.P. for Honiton. Austin was educated at Stonyhurst College (Clitheroe, Lancashire), and University of London, from which he graduated in 1853.
He became a barrister in 1857 before leaving law to concentrate on literature.
Politically conservative, Austin edited National Review for several years, and wrote leading articles for The Standard.
On Tennyson’s death in 1892 it was felt that none of the then living poets, except Algernon Charles Swinburne or William Morris, who were outside consideration on other grounds, was of sufficient distinction to succeed to the laurel crown, and for several years no new poet-laureate was nominated. In the interval the claims of one writer and another were assessed, but eventually, in 1896, Austin was appointed to the post after Morris had declined the post.
Austin died of unknown causes in Ashford, Kent, England.
n 1861, after two false starts in poetry and fiction, he made his first noteworthy appearance as a writer with The Season: a Satire, which contained incisive lines, and was marked by some promise both in wit and observation. In 1870 he published a volume of criticism, The Poetry of the Period, which was conceived in the spirit of satire, and attacked Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold and Swinburne in an unrestrained fashion. The book aroused some discussion at the time, but its judgments were extremely uncritical.
As poet-laureate, his topical verses did not escape negative criticism; a hasty poem written in praise of the Jameson Raid in 1896 being a notable instance. The most effective characteristic of Austin’s poetry, as of the best of his prose, was a genuine and intimate love of nature. His prose idylls, The Garden that I love and In Veronica’s Garden, are full of a pleasant, open-air flavour. His lyrical poems are wanting in spontaneity and individuality, but many of them possess a simple, orderly charm, as of an English country lane. He had, indeed, a true love of England, sometimes not without a suspicion of insularity, but always fresh and ingenuous. A drama by him, Flodden Field, was acted at His Majesty’s theatre in 1903.
Valentine Ackland
Valentine Ackland (20 May 1906 – 9 November 1969) was an English poet, an important figure in the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century British poetry. Born Mary Kathleen Valentine Ackland and nicknamed Molly by her family, Ackland was the child of privilege and of emotional abuse and neglect. With no sons born to the family, Valentine’s father Robert, a West End London dentist, worked at making a symbolic son of Molly, teaching her to shoot rifles and to box. This attention to Molly made her sister Joan immensely jealous. Older by eight years, Joan psychologically tormented and physically abused Molly as a way of unleashing her jealousy and anger.
Molly received an Anglo-Catholic upbringing in Norfolk and a convent school education in London. In 1925 at the age of nineteen, she impetuously married Richard Turpin, a homosexual youth who was unable to consummate their marriage. Upon her marriage, she was also received into the Catholic church, a religion that she later abandoned, returned to, and then abandoned again in the last decade of her life. In less than a year, she had her marriage to Turpin annulled, and, despite numerous pleas from her family and much psychological pressure from them, never returned to a serious relationship with a man again.
Alert to social mores of her day, she became aware of societal patterns of male privilege and female submission set about challenging the female gender identifications expected of her. She took to wearing men’s clothing, cut her hair in a short style called the Eton crop, and was at times mistaken for a handsome young boy. She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s. Her poetry appeared in British and American literary journals during the 1920s to the 1940s, but Valentine deeply regretted that she never became a noted and widely read poet. In this regard, a good deal of her poetry was published posthumously, and she received little attention from critics until a revival of interest in her work in the 1970s.
In 1930, Valentine was introduced to the short story writer and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner with whom she had a lifelong relationship, albeit tumultuous at times given Valentine’s increasing alcoholism and infidelities. Sylvia was twelve years older than Valentine, and the two lived together until Valentine’s death from breast cancer in 1969. Warner went on to outlive Ackland by nineteen years, dying in 1978. The pair were together for thirty-nine years. Valentine’s reflections upon her relationship with Sylvia and the latter’s long affair with the American heiress and writer Elizabeth Wade White (1908-1994) were posthumously published in “For Sylvia: An Honest Account” (1985).
Valentine was a highly emotional woman prone to numerous self-doubts and shifts in emotions and intellectual interests. She was responsible for involving Sylvia in membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s and in the Spanish civil war as well as numerous socialist and pacifist activities. The two women’s involvement in the Communist Party came under investigation by the British government in the late 1930s and remained an open file until 1957, when the investigation was halted
After World War II, Valentine turned her attention to confessional poetry and a memoir concerning her relationship with Warner and its many emotional issues as Valentine pursued involvements with other women. At first, Warner was tolerant with her younger lover’s dalliances, but the seriousness and length of Ackland’s relationship with Elizabeth Wade White was distressing to Warner and also pushed her relationship with Ackland to the edge. Ackland’s distresses at loving two women simultaneously and of endeavoring to balance her feelings for each woman with the responsibilities and commitments of her primary relationship with Warner are presented openly in Ackland’s poetry and in her memoir of this period.
Ackland was struggling with additional doubts and conflicts during this period as well. She continued to battle her alcoholism, and she was undergoing shifts in her political and religious alliances. Doubts about her sexual identity and her identity as a poet as well as about her Christian faith and her political convictions are evident in her poetry.
In 1934, Ackland and Warner produced a volume of poetry, “Whether a Dove or a Seagull” that was an unusual and democratic experiment in writing as none of the poems are ascribed to either author. The volume was also an attempt by Warner to introduce Ackland to publication as Warner had an already established reputation as a novelist, and her work was widely read in the 1930s. The volume was controversial for its frank discussion of lesbianism at a time and in a society in which lesbianism was regarded as deviant and immoral behaviour.
In 1937, Ackland and Warner moved from Dorset to a house near Dorchester. Both became involved with Communist ideals and issues, with Ackland writing a column called “Country Dealings” concerning rural poverty for the “Daily Worker” and the “Left Review.” In 1939, the two women attended the American Writers Congress in New York City to consider the loss of democracy in Europe and returned when World War II broke out. Ackland’s poetry of this period attempted to capture the political dynamics she saw at work, but she had a difficult time as a poetry mastering the craft of combining political polemics with her natural tendency toward lyrical expression. In a similar vein, her distress over the loss of democracy in Europe became a broader identification with Existentialism and the sense that the human condition itself was hopeless.
Ackland died on 9 November 1969 from breast cancer that had metastasised to her lungs. She was buried in a churchyard at Chaldon Herring with the inscription Non omnis moriar (“Death is not the end”) on her gravestone.
Human languages
Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of studying them falls under the purview of linguistics. A common progression for natural languages is that they are considered to be first spoken, then written, and then an understanding and explanation of their grammar is attempted.
Languages live, die, move from place to place, and change with time. Any language that ceases to change or develop is categorized as a dead language. Conversely, any language that is in a continuous state of change is known as a living language or modern language.
Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible. For instance, there are a few dialects of German similar to some dialects of Dutch. The transition between languages within the same language family is sometimes gradual (see dialect continuum).
Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not possible to make a well-defined distinction between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.)
The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.
Origin of language
Even before the theory of evolution made discussion of more animal-like human ancestors commonplace, philosophical and scientific speculation casting doubt on the use of early language has been frequent throughout history. In modern Western Philosophy, speculation by authors such as Thomas Hobbes and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau led to the Académie française declaring the subject off-limits.
The origin of language is of great interest to philosophers because language is such an essential characteristic of human life. In classical Greek philosophy such inquiry was approached by considering the nature of things, in this case human nature. Aristotle, for example, treated humans as creatures with reason and language by their intrinsic nature, related to their natural propensities to be “political,” and dwell in city-state communities (Greek: poleis).
Hobbes, followed by John Locke and others, claimed that language is an extension of the “speech” which humans have within themselves, which in a sense takes the classical view that reason is one of the most primary characteristics of human nature. Others have argued the opposite – that reason developed out of the need for more complex communication. Rousseau, despite writing before the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution, claimed that there had once been humans who had no language or reason and who developed language first–rather than reason–the development of which things he explicitly described as a mixed blessing, with many negative characteristics.
Since the arrival of Darwin, the subject has been approached more often by scientists than philosophers. For example, neurologist Terrence Deacon in his Symbolic Species has argued that reason and language “coevolved.” Merlin Donald sees language as a later development building upon what he refers to as mimetic culture, emphasizing that this coevolution depended upon the interactions of many individuals. He writes that:
A shared communicative culture, with sharing of mental representations to some degree, must have come first, before language, creating a social environment in which language would have been useful and adaptive.
The specific causes of the natural selection that led to language are however still the subject of much speculation, but a common theme which goes right back to Aristotle is that many theories propose that the gains to be had from language and/or reason were probably mainly in the area of increasingly sophisticated social structures.
In more recent times, a theory of mirror neurons has emerged in relation to language. Ramachandran has gone so far as to claim that “mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments”. Mirror neurons are located in the human inferior frontal cortex and superior parietal lobe, and are unique in that they fire when completing an action and also when witnessing an actor performing the same action. Various studies have proposed a theory of mirror neurons related to language development.
