The Poets Over the
Centuries: A Review
16th Century
Renaissance era, height of English drama
Sonnet for predominant, lyric poetry.
Look for sonnet and be able to determine quatrains,
octave, sestet, rhyming couplets.
Look for volta and be able to explain it
Conceits and paradox used constantly (less important
to note if it is an Italian of English, though impressive if
you are right).
16th Century Poets
Shakespeare
Sir Philip Sidney
Christopher Marlowe
Sir Walter Raleigh
Queen Elizabeth and Henry VII were known to pen
the occasional sonnet!
Homework: Perrine’s “When my love swears that she is
made of truth” Shakespeare, page 688. Questions #1-4
17th Century
Age of Enlightenment and Reason
Metaphysical conceits; the pair of concrete
and abstract
Paradox and wit
Look for elements of science, alchemy,
discovery, globes, maps.
Also era of very religious poetry
17th Century Poets
John Donne
Ben Jonson
George Herbert
Robert Herrick
Abraham Cowley(he appears a
lot!)
Andrew Marvell
Henry Vaughan(on the mock)
John Milton
Homework: Perrine’s “On His Blindness” by John Milton.
Page 783-4, Questions #1-4
18th Century
Restoration era
Conflict due to Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans, and
then the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of
England.
Lots of Satire
Rhymed, heroic-couplets in iambic pentameter
“Wickedly funny”
Return to classical forms
18th Century Poets
Jonathan Swift
Samuel Butler
John Bunyan(Pilgrim’s Progress)
John Dryden
Alexander Pope
Thomas Gray
Homework: Perrine’s “Sound and Sense”
by Alexander Pope. Page 867 #1-3
19th Century
Romantics and Transcendentalists
Emphasis on highest form of emotional expression
Return to classics for some of the poets
Emphasis on imagination, the individual, nature,
the supernatural.
Lyrical poetry
Some odes and sonnets
19th Century Poets
William Wordsworth
Walt Whitman
Percy Shelly
Emily Dickinson
Lord Byron
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Ralph Waldo Emerson
John Keats
Homework: Perrine’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
by Wordsworth. Page 1019. Read and do full analysis
with précis
Early 20th Century
Moving away from Romanticism and less description
More pure image as symbol
Called the “Symbolists”
Started in France
Corresponds with artistic movements into Post
Impressionism and Surrealism
Analyze the deep symbols and intuitive associations
AP gods don’t usually use the French symbolists
Early 20th ce. Poets
Charles Baudelaire
Paul Verlaine
Oscar Wilde
W.B. Yeats
T.S. Eliot
Pablo Neruda
Homework: Perrine’s
“The Second Coming”
by W.B. Yeats. Page
1022. Read and outline
an explication with
précis
20th Century
Modernism
Allusions and reducing human experience to fragments(e.e.
Cummings breaks language down into its component parts)
Some influenced by Cubism(like Wallace Stevens)
Systematic representation of human consciousness in the
emerging fields of psychology and sociology so poems are
often concerned with how an individual relates to his
environment or how environment helps to create the
individual
Some focus on machines, can use brutal imagery
20th Century Poets
Wallace Stevens
Robert Frost
William Carlos Williams
W.H. Auden
H.D.
Elizabeth Bishop
Marianne Moore
Adrienne Rich
T.S. Eliot
e.e. Cummings
Homework: Perrine’s “Sunday Morning” by
Wallace Stevens. Page 930-34 #2-4
Later 20th Century
Harlem Renaissance: syncopated rhythms of jazz
Great Migration of African Americans to the north
Thriving neighborhoods
Related to the realities of African American life
Repetitive structure similar to blues or jazz
A new American poetry
Harlem Renaissance
Poets
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Claude McKay
Langston Hughes
Countee Cullen
Homework: Perrine’s “The Weary Blues”
by Langston Hughes. Page 934 #3-6
Postmodernism
Parody
Irony
Narrative instability
Allusions to popular and classical culture
“Out of the box” ideas
No real center
An extension of modernism with a more cynical tone
Beat poets and confessional poets
Beat Poets
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Allen Ginsberg
Jack Kerouac
Confessional Poets
Robert Lowell
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
Homework: Perrine’s “Constantly risking absurdity by
Ferlinghetti. Page 860 #2-4. “The Abortion” by Anne
Sexton. Page 998. Write a précis