Essentials of Literature

Literature is the artistic expression of thought, which is replete with feelings and imagination. it is expressed in such an untechnical form as to make it intelligible and give aesthetic pleasure and relief to the mind of the common man.

According to Lord Morely : ” Literature consists of all books where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form.“

In other words Literature heightens our awareness of human life. It enables us to look at nature with new eyes. It interprets with charm of language the experiences and spiritual intuitions of man.

Literature is one of the instruments, and one of the most powerful instruments for forming character, for giving us, characters armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfastness and courage, and inspired by the public spirit and public virtue of which it has been well said that they are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man.

Bacon rightly bides us by saying ‘read not to contradict and refute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and to consider.’

the literary student is one who through books explores the strange voyages of man’s moral reason, the impulses of the human heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions of truth and virtue. 

Poets, dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political orators— they all are men of literature insofar as they teach us to know man and to know human nature.

According to Emerson : “Literature is the record of best Thoughts.” 
By Literature, We mean the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent men and women arranged in a wa

According to cardinal Newman, the object of Literature is to open the mind, to correct it, to refine, to enable it to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exact, sagacity, address, and expressions.