Background on Some Major Poetic Movements
Metaphysical Poetry (17th c.)
Neoclassical (Augustan) Poetry (early 18th c.)
The term “metaphysical,” as applied to English and continental European
poets of the seventeenth century, was used by Augustan poets John Dryden and
Samuel Johnson to reprove those poets for their “unnaturalness.” As Goethe
wrote, however, “the unnatural, that too is natural,” and the metaphysical poets
continue to be studied and revered for their intricacy and originality.
John Donne, along with similar but distinct poets such as George Herbert,
Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughn, developed a poetic style in which
philosophical and spiritual subjects were approached with reason and often
concluded in paradox. This group of writers established meditation—based on
the union of thought and feeling sought after in Jesuit Ignatian meditation—as a
poetic mode.
The metaphysical poets were eclipsed in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries by romantic and Victorian poets, but twentieth century readers and
scholars, seeing in the metaphysicals an attempt to understand pressing political
and scientific upheavals, engaged them with renewed interest. In his essay “The
Metaphysical Poets,” T. S. Eliot, in particular, saw in this group of poets a
capacity for “devouring all kinds of experience.”
John Donne (1572–1631) was the most influential metaphysical poet. His
personal relationship with spirituality is at the center of most of his work, and
the psychological analysis and sexual realism of his work marked a dramatic
departure from traditional, genteel verse. His early work, collected in Satires and
in Songs and Sonnets, was released in an era of religious oppression. His Holy
Sonnets, which contains many of Donne’s most enduring poems, was released
shortly after his wife died in childbirth. The intensity with which Donne
grapples with concepts of divinity and mortality in the Holy Sonnets is
exemplified in “Sonnet X [Death, be not proud],” “Sonnet XIV [Batter my heart,
three person’d God],” and “Sonnet XVII [Since she whom I loved hath paid her
last debt].”
George Herbert (1593–1633) and Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) were
remarkable poets who did not live to see a collection of their poems published.
[…] Marvell wrote politically charged poems that would have cost him his
freedom or his life had they been public. He was a secretary to John Milton, and
once Milton was imprisoned during the Restoration, Marvell successfully
petitioned to have the elder poet freed. His complex lyric and satirical poems
were collected after his death amid an air of secrecy.
The Augustan era in English poetry is noted for its fondness for wit,
urbanity, and classical (mostly Roman) forms and values. Named for the
Augustan period or “Golden Age” in Roman poetry, the English Augustans both
translated and modeled their own verse after poets such as Virgil, Horace, and
Propertius. This period is marked by the end of the Restoration era at its
beginning, approximately 1690, and by the death of Alexander Pope in 1744.
The Augustans were eventually overshadowed by the growth of English
Romanticism. Practitioners of Augustan models included Pope, John Dryden,
John Gay, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson. These poets are famous for
their long verse narratives or mock epics, which are often satirical and imitate
classical models. Prime examples include The Rape of the Lock by Pope and
MacFlecknoe by Dryden. These poems take features found in classical epics—
invocations to deities, grandiose speeches, battles, divisions into cantos—and
apply them to trivial subjects (in MacFlecknoe, lambasting the work of a minor
poet; in The Rape of the Lock, a clandestine haircut). These conventions would
have been well-known to readers of the day, and the juxtaposition between high
rhetoric and low subject matter adds to the humor of the poem. Pope and Dryden
were masters of the heroic couplet (lines of iambic pentameter that rhyme in
pairs), a verse form first introduced by Chaucer in the fourteenth century.
Note: This handout is excerpted from the “Poetic Schools and
Movements” section of Poets.org, a website published by the Academy
of American Poets and from M.H. Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms.
See http://poets.org/page.php/prmID/193 and eee.
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Romanticism (late 18th – early 19th c.)
Transcendentalism (mid to late 19th c., American)
Romanticism was arguably the largest artistic movement of the late 1700s.
Its influence was felt across continents and through every artistic discipline into
the mid-nineteenth century, and many of its values and beliefs can still be seen
in contemporary poetry.
It is difficult to pinpoint the exact start of the Romantic movement, as its
beginnings can be traced to many events of the time: a surge of interest in
folklore in the mid- to late-eighteenth century with the work of the brothers
Grimm, reactions against neoclassicism and the Augustan poets in England, and
political events and uprisings that fostered nationalistic pride.
Romantic poets cultivated individualism, reverence for the natural world,
idealism, physical and emotional passion, and an interest in the mystic and
supernatural. Romantics set themselves in opposition to the order and rationality
of classical and neoclassical artistic precepts to embrace freedom and revolution
in their art and politics. German romantic poets included Fredrich Schiller and
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and British poets such as William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Lord Byron,
and John Keats propelled the English Romantic movement. Victor Hugo was a
noted French Romantic poet as well, and romanticism crossed the Atlantic
through the work of American poets like Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe.
The Romantic era produced many of the stereotypes of poets and poetry that
exist to this day (i.e., the poet as a highly tortured and melancholy visionary).
Romantic ideals never specifically died out in poetry, but were largely
absorbed into the precepts of many other movements. Traces of romanticism
lived on in French symbolism and surrealism and in the work of prominent poets
such as Charles Baudelaire and Rainer Maria Rilke.
A philosophical and literary movement, centered in Concord and Boston, which
was prominent in the intellectual and cultural life of New England from 1836
until just before the Civil War. Transcendentalism was neither a systematic nor a
sharply definable philosophy, but rather an intellectual mode and emotional
mood that was expressed by divers, and in some instances rather eccentric,
voices. Modern historians of the movement tend to take as its central exponents
Emerson and Thoreau. The term “transcendental' was taken from Immanuel
Kant. Kant had confined the expression “transcendental knowledge' to the
cognizance of those forms and categories – such as space, time, quantity,
causality – which, in his view, are imposed whenever we preceive by the
constitution of all human minds; he regarded these aspects as the universal
conditions of all sense-experience. Emerson and others, however, extended the
concept of transcendental knowledge, in a way whose validity Kant had
specifically denied, to include an intuitive cognizance of moral and other
antecedents of other truths that transcend the limits of human sense-experience.
What the various Transcendentalists had in common was less what they
proposed than what they were reacting against. By and large, they were opposed
to rigid rationalis; to eighteenth-century empirical philosophy of the school of
John Locke, which derived all knowledge from sense impressions; to highly
formalized religion, especially the Calvinist orthodoxy of New England; and to
the social conformity, materialism, and commercialism that they found
increasingly dominant in American life. Among the counter-views that were
affirmed by Transcendentalists were confidence in the validity of a mode of
knowledge that is grounded in feeling and intuition, and a consequent tendency
to accept what, to logical reasoning, might seem contradictions; and ethics of
individualism that stressed self-trust, self-reliance, a turn away from modern
society to the scenes and objects of the natural world; and, in place of a formal
or doctrinal religion, a faith in a divine “Soul” in which both humanity and the
cosmos participate.
Victorian (mid to late 19th c. British)
England’s Victorian period, named for the time of Queen Victoria’s reign (18371901), was characterized by dramatic changes, including a shift from an
economy based on land ownership to a more modern urban economy based on
trade and manufacturing. There was the Industrial Revolution, challenges to
religious faith, advances in science, and the changing roles of women. Overall,
Victorian England was a time of peace, prosperity, social and technological
advances, and sophisticated sensibilities. Victorian poetry reflected this through
its interest in visual descriptions, chivalry and nobility, genteel manners, and
social norms and practices.
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Modernism (early 20th c.)
The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent
a fundamental change “on or about December 1910.” The statement testifies to
the modern writer’s fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary
traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an
era of technological breakthroughs and global violence.
“On or about 1910,” just as the automobile and airplane were beginning to
accelerate the pace of human life, and Einstein’s ideas were transforming our
perception of the universe, there was an explosion of innovation and creative
energy that shook every field of artistic endeavor. Artists from all over the world
converged on London, Paris, and other great cities of Europe to join in the
ferment of new ideas and movements: Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism,
Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most influential banners under which
the new artists grouped themselves. It was an era when major artists were
fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art forms: Matisse and Picasso
in painting, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in literature, Isadora Duncan in
dance, Igor Stravinsky in music, and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture.
The excitement, however, came to a terrible climax in 1914 with the start of
the First World War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe,
catapulted Russia into a catastrophic revolution, and sowed the seeds for even
worse conflagrations in the decades to follow. By the war’s end in 1918, the
centuries-old European domination of the world had ended and the “American
Century” had begun. For artists and many others in Europe, it was a time of
profound disillusion with the values on which a whole civilization had been
founded. But it was also a time when the avante-garde experiments that had
preceded the war would, like the technological wonders of the airplane and the
atom, inexorably establish a new dispensation, which we call modernism.
Among the most instrumental of all artists in effecting this change were a
handful of American poets.
Ezra Pound, the most aggressively modern of these poets, made “Make it
new!” his battle cry. In London Pound encountered and encouraged his fellow
expatriate T. S. Eliot, who wrote what is arguably the most famous poem of the
twentieth century—The Waste Land—using revolutionary techniques of
composition, such as the collage. Both poets turned to untraditional sources for
inspiration, Pound to classical Chinese poetry and Eliot to the ironic poems of
the 19th century French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
followed Pound to Europe and wrote poems that, in their extreme concision and
precise visualization, most purely embodied his famous doctrine of imagism.
Among the American poets who stayed at home, Wallace Stevens—a mild-
mannered executive at a major insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut—had a
flair for the flashiest titles that poems have ever had: “Peter Quince at the
Clavier,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Le Monocle de Mon
Oncle.” Stevens, the aesthete par excellence, exalted the imagination for its
ability to “press back against the pressure of reality.”
[…]
William Carlos Williams wrote in “plain American which cats and dogs can
read,” to use a phrase of Marianne Moore. “No ideas but in things,” he
proclaimed. In succinct, often witty poems he presents common objects or
events—a red wheelbarrow, a person eating plums—with freshness and
immediacy, enlarging our understanding of what a poem’s subject matter can be.
Unlike Williams, Robert Frost favored traditional devices—blank verse, rhyme,
narrative, the sonnet form—but he, too, had a genius for the American
vernacular, and his pitiless depiction of a cruel natural universe marks him as a
peculiarly modern figure who is sometimes misread as a genial Yankee sage.
Of the many modern poets who acted on the ambition to write a long poem
capable of encompassing an entire era, Hart Crane was one of the more notably
successful. In his poem “The Bridge,” the Brooklyn Bridge is both a symbol of
the new world and a metaphor allowing the poet to cross into different periods,
where he may shake hands in the past with Walt Whitman and watch as the train
called the Twentieth Century races into the future.
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Harlem Renaissance (early 20th c.)
In the decades immediately following World War I, huge numbers of
African Americans migrated to the industrial North from the economically
depressed and agrarian South. In cities such as Chicago, Washington, DC, and
New York City, the recently migrated sought and found (to some degree) new
opportunities, both economic and artistic. African Americans were encouraged
to celebrate their heritage and to become “The New Negro,” a term coined in
1925 by sociologist and critic Alain LeRoy Locke in his influential book of the
same name.
Countee Cullen thought long and hard in his poems about his own and
collective African-American identity. Some of his strongest poems question the
benevolence of a Creator who has bestowed a race with such mixed blessings.
Claude McKay, born and raised in Jamaica, wrote of the immigrant’s nostalgia
and the American negro’s pride and rage. Jean (Eugene) Toomer remains a
mystery. Light enough to “pass” and alone constituting the generation’s
Symbolist avant-garde, he appeared briefly on the Harlem Renaissance scene,
became a follower of the mystic Gurdjieff, and disappeared into the white world.
Sterling Brown, for many years a professor at Howard University, emerged
in the thirties with sometimes playful, often pessimistic poems in standard
English and black vernacular and in African American and European forms. In
many of Brown’s poems strong men and women resist the oppression of racism,
poverty, and fate.
The legacy of the Harlem Renaissance opened doors and deeply influenced
the generations of African American writers that followed, including Robert
Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or “I.” This style of writing
emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such
as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath,Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass.
Lowell’s book Life Studieswas a highly personal account of his life and familial
ties and had a significant impact on American poetry. Plath and Sexton were
both students of Lowell and noted that his work influenced their own writing.
The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject matter
that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry. Private
experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships
were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner.
Sexton in particular was interested in the psychological aspect of poetry, having
started writing at the suggestion of her therapist.
The confessional poets were not merely recording their emotions on paper; craft
and construction were extremely important to their work. While their treatment
of the poetic self may have been groundbreaking and shocking to some readers,
these poets maintained a high level of craftsmanship through their careful
attention to and use of prosody.
Confessional Poetry (20th c.)
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The New York School (20th c.)
The New York School of poetry began around 1960 in New York City and
included poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch,
and Frank O’Hara. Heavily influenced by surrealism and modernism, the
poetry of the New York School was serious but also ironic, and incorporated an
urban sensibility into much of the work.
Abstract expressionist art was also a major influence, and the New York School
poets had strong artistic and personal relationships with artists such as Jackson
Pollock and Willem DeKooning. Both O’Hara and James Schuyler worked at
the Museum of Modern Art, and Guest, Ashbery, and Schuyler were critics
for Art News. O’Hara also took inspiration from artists, entitling two poems
“Joseph Cornell” and "On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing
the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art.” O’Hara’s poem “Why I
am Not a Painter” includes the lines “I am not a painter, I am a poet. / Why? I
think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.”
A second generation of New York School poets arose during the 1960s and
included Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Joe
Brainard. These poets were also influenced by art, and their work contained
much of the same humour and collaborative spirit. Their scene grew up around
downtown New York and was associated with the Poetry Project at St.
Mark’s Church, a poetry organization started in the mid 1960s.
New Formalism (20th c.)
New Formalism, or Neo-formalism, was a late-twentieth century
development in American poetry that sought to draw fresh attention
to traditional forms of verse in terms of meter, rhyme, and stanzaic
symmetry.
Disheartened both by the overwhelming popularity of free verse during the Cold
War and by the notion that metrical patterns were somehow antithetical to
organic truth, New Formalist poets and their advocates rallied behind the
traditions, aesthetics, and practices they believed had been all but abandoned by
many of their contemporaries.
Though poets like Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur,
and Mona Van Duyn had continued to explore the possibilities of form
during the 1960s and ’70s, they had been schooled by New Critics,
including Yvor Winters, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate, who had
been outspoken in defense of formalist verse all along. The poets who
considered themselves New Formalists in the ’80s and ’90s were drawn to form
in response to the free verse standard that was handed to them.
In the preface to the anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New
Formalism (1996), editors Jarman and David Mason wrote, “It is no surprise that
the most significant development in recent American poetry has been a
resurgence of meter and rhyme, as well as narrative, among large numbers of
young poets, after a period when these essential elements of verse had been
suppressed.”
Critics of the movement decried neo-formalists for privileging metrical artifice
and (sometimes) stylized speech over otherwise more ambitious, visionary, and
free forms. Some have gone so far as to call New Formalism patriarchal. Still,
others make the case that free verse is no more or less a form than traditional
(metrical, rhythmical) verse.
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