LITERARY MOVEMENT OVERVIEWAP English Literature and Composition

Literary Movements Metaphysical Poetry Augustans Romantic Poetry The Symbolists Modernism The Harlem Renaissance Post Modernism The Beats Confessional Poets New York School of Poets Black Arts Movement Black Mountain Poets Some that don’t fit:

Emily Dickinson Robert Frost W. H. Auden Elizabeth Bishop Adrienne Rich Seamus Heaney

Metaphysical Poetry: Poets

John Donne (1572-1631) George Herbert (1593-1633) Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

Metaphysical Poetry: Definition Metaphysical poetry broke with Renaissance

tradition of writing love poetry that placed the loved one on a pedestal.

These poets wrote introspective meditations on love, death, God, and human frailty. These are much more realistic poems about sexual relationships.

These poems are famous for their difficulty and obscurity For that reason, they are often chosen for the AP

test.

Metaphysical Poetry: Look for Wit, irony, paradox.

Pairing dissimilar things in a clever analogy. Example: using astronomy & math to illustrate deep love

for a wife. Elaborate stylistic maneuvers (more about this later) Huge shifts in scale.

Example: talking about ants and then planets. Talking about the deep philosophical issues:

Passage of time Difficulty of being sure Fearful qualities that death inspires This may seem like a cliché (ex: time heals wounds)

Augustans

John Dryden (1631-1700)

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

A Quick Definition

● Augustan poetry is best known for its rhymed, heroic-couplet satire.

And then black night. That blackness was sublime.

I felt distributed through space and time:

One foot upon a mountaintop. one hand

Under the pebbles of a panting strand,

One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,

In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.(Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. Canto One. 147-153)

● Reading these heroic couplets aloud helps many people with comprehension.

● The Augustan poets were inspired by ancient writings.

● They translated Greek and Roman epics into English using heroic couplets.

● They also wrote their own original poetry based on classical styles.

What to look for in Augustan Poetry● Wit, irony and paradox are as important

for these guys as they were for the metaphysical poets.

● But these guys also care about brevity.● Their poems might be long, but their

observations are often short and to-the-point.

● Common topic: human frailty.● They often mock human behavior.

● Augustans were likely to place ridiculously boring plots (ex: the cutting of a noble maiden's hair in Rape of the Lock), in the form of heroic epic poetry for comic effect.

● Augustans included references to current events.● Pope’s epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton

mentioned the on-going battle between religion and science.

● Dryden's poem “Mac Flecknoe” makes fun of another poet of his day and takes sides in political debates of the day.

Romantic Poetry

● English Romantic Poets● William Wordsworth (1770-1850)● Percy Shelley (1792-1822)● John Keats (1795-1821)

● American Romantic Poets● Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)● Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Related Prose

● European Romantic Prose– Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe– Victor Hugo: Les Miserables

● American Romantic Prose– Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter– R.W. Emerson: “The Poet” (essay that inspired

W. Whitman to write poetry)– Henry David Thoreau: “Walking” (an essay)

A Quick Definition

● Romantic poets broke away from earlier ideas about poetry by writing in “the real language of men” about “common life” (Wordsworth).

● Emotional and enthusiastic poetry.● Embraces the large, impressive forces of

nature and the human imagination.● These are on the AP exam quite often.

How to Recognize Romantic Poetry● Natural imagery saves the individual from

crowded, industrial city.● The imagination allows the individual to

escape society's control, authority, and fear of death.

● The sublime (extreme, as impressively big, obscure or scary) is emphasized, rather than simply being beautiful

● Also, perhaps most importantly, transcendence (exceeding usual limits of understanding) in the ordinary things of life is the ultimate goal.– Example: Keats turns looking at an old urn into a

meditation on life and death in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Representative French Symbolist Poets: Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

The Symbolists

RSymbolist-influenced poets who wrote in English:

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) Arthur Symons (1865-1945) T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Related Prose

French Symbolist Prose

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907): A Rebours (Against the Grain)

English Symbolist Prose

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray

A Quick Definition:

Some people consider the Symbolists as a link between the Romantics and modernism (which we'll learn about next).

They want the transcendence (a much deeper understanding of something by looking at something relatively simple), but they took this in a direction intended to gratify the senses.

This led to the sexual nature of the modernists.

Many symbolist poems seem obscure on the first few readings, but getting better at analyzing their symbols and associations will help you interpret poems by Yeats or Eliot, which are often on the AP exam.

What to look for in Symbolist Poetry: Many deal with the crepuscular (dusk and

dawn), or with the time between waking and sleeping. Dreams (or dream states) are important to many of these works because dreams allow us opportunities to explore the relationships between states.

Synaesthesia (using one sense to describe another) is popular with the Symbolists. Ex: Rimbaud attributes colors and sounds to different vowels in the poem "Voyelles.“

The French symbolists were good at using words with multiple meanings. So the poems may say a lot more than you might first think, considering their short length.

Many of these poets were drawn to the properties of music, and we see some mellifluous (having a smooth rich flow) word choice and rhythms.

Symbolists are often associated with the "art for art's sake" movement. The art is more important than the "message."

MODERNISM

Representative Modernist Poets Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961) Marianne Moore (1887-1972) T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) e. e. cummings (1894-1962)

Related Modernist Prose

James Joyce (1882-1941): A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): Mrs. Dalloway

William Faulkner (1897-1962): As I Lay Dying

Kate Chopin (1851-1904): The Awakening

Modernism

The 20th century saw a lot of change: Einstein’s theories of physics. Two world wars and the millions who died. Incredible advances in technology that

aided in killing millions of people. Changes in art forms: abstract art,

surrealism, etc. (Picasso, Dali, etc.)

Modernist Literature

So it’s not surprising that 20th century writers questioned what came before them and were willing to experiment with new forms with even more daring than the symbolists before them.

What to look for in Modernist poetry Allusions. Many times human experiences are

reduced to fragments. e. e. cummings poems may seem like

random phrases thrown together.

The influence of Cubism Picasso picture (Guitar, Bottle, Bowl of Fruit

and Glass on Table) Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of

Looking at a Blackbird” comes in 13 sections, each one referring to a blackbird in some way

From the influence of the emerging fields of psychology and sociology…

Poems from this era are often concerned with how an individual relates to his environment (Eliot’s “Prufrock”)…

Or how the environment helps create the individual (Stevens’s “The Snowman”)

Due to the influence of movements such as fascism and socialism that saw human beings not as individuals but as servants of the state…

Some Modernist poems erase individuality and focus on machines or other inanimate objects instead, or they contain imagery of brutality (example: “The Yachts” by William Carlos Williams)

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Representative Poets

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) Claude McKay (1889-1948) Langston Hughes (1902-1967) Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Related Prose

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960): Their Eyes Were Watching God

Nella Larsen (1891-1964): Passing Richard Wright (1908-1960): Black Boy

and Native Son Ralph Ellison (1913-1994): Invisible Man

The Harlem Renaissance: Definition Mostly in the first half of the 20th

century, after World War I, during the movement of African Americans to northern industrial cities (called the Great Migration)

Many of them lived (sometimes due to necessity) in the same neighborhoods – Harlem, in New York City, was one of the most famous of these neighborhoods

Jazz, poetry, painting, dance, and folklore flourished and took on many similar concerns to those of the modernists

Harlem Renaissance poetry (esp. that of Langston Hughes) can be thought of as a branch of modernism

What to look for in Harlem Renaissance literature: Content directly related to African

American concerns of the time. Ex: Dunbar’s “Frederick Douglass” is about

his continuing influence, long after his death

Many HR poems rely on repetitive structure, similar to blues lyrics (ex: Dunbar’s “Sympathy”) or on fragmented structure similar to jazz improvisation (ex: Hughes’s “Montage of a Dream Deferred”)

Several of these poets, especially Langston Hughes, sought a new American idiom (a style or form of artistic expression that is characteristic of an individual, a period or movement ) alongside other African American artists such as blues singer Bessie Smith.

Others combined European forms like the sonnet with a content and a tone more related to African American concerns, such as McKay’s “If We Must Die.”

POSTMODERNISM

Postmodernism: a definition

● Is it really just an extension of Modernism?● Or is it something new?

● A different approach (from the Modernists) seems to be evident in the second half of the 20th century.

● If not a different approach, then different goals.

● If Einstein's theory of relativity (measuring the relationships between time & space) helped define modernism...

● Then Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is the emblem of postmodernism. It holds that one cannot know both the speed and the location of an object simultaneously.● The point: there is always chance or chaos in any

scientific inquiry.

Don't call me that!

● But most artists who fit the postmodern definition reject being called “postmodern.”

● Instead, they prefer different labels:● The Beats● Confessional Poets● The Black Arts Movement● The Black Mountain School● The New York School of Poets.

● Each group has a different focus, but they have these things in common:

● Parody, irony, and narrative instability.● Allusions are just as likely to be made to pop.

culture as they are to the classics.● Strictly binary concepts (hot and cold, black

and white) often collapse. Here, ideas that spread across a spectrum, rather than fit strictly into one box or the other, predominate.

● There is no real center. The Internet is a good example of a postmodern invention.

● The surface is often more interesting to postmodern artists than any ideas of depth. The following quote is attributed to Andy Warhol, a kind of patron saint of postmodernism and a notorious wig wearer:

● “Wear a wig and people notice the wig. Wear a silver wig and people notice the silver.”

THE BEATS

The Beats: Poets

● Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)● Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)● Gregory Corso (1930-2001)● Gary Snyder (b. 1930)

The Beats: Related Prose

● William S. Burroughs (1914-1997): Naked Lunch

● Jack Kerouac (1922-1969): On the Road

The Beats: a definition

● After World War II, the Beats practiced their brand of hallucinagenic, visionary, anti-establishment art.

● There were many locations that had Beat movements, but the hotspots were New York City, San Francisco, Tangiers, Prague, and Mexico City.

● The Beats were good at creating and perpetuating myths about their lives.

● Buddhism was important to many of them (especially Gary Snyder).

● As were many tenets of William Blake's version of Romanticism, such as the importance of the individual, the imagination freed from society's constraints, and the yearning for transcendence.

● In Ferlinghetti's “The Changing Light,” a reader can feel the deep connection Beats often felt to nature, even as the speaker of this poem is describing a city scene.

● In Corso's “Marriage,” the oppositional stance the Beats took toward the suburban bourgeoisie is in bold relief.

● Ginsberg's “America” shares much of the same satirical tone, but Ginsberg was also capable of writing angry, ranting, Whitmanesque masterpieces like “Howl” and a tender, meditative elegy for his mother in “Kaddish.”

● “First thought, best thought” describes the aesthetic ideal of the Beat poet. Moved by jazz improvisation and Buddhist ideas of impermanence, these poets considered themselves the chroniclers of their age.

● Politics directly informs many of their poems, either through specific references to members of the government or specific references to issues important to them, such as Gary Snyder's commitment to the environment.

CONFESSIONAL POETS

Representative Confessional Poets John Berryman (1914-1972) Robert Lowell (1917-1977) Anne Sexton (1928-1967) Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Related Confessional Prose

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar

A Definition of Confessional Poetry The confessional poets took the first-person

pronouns (I, me, my) seriously. They explored intimate content in their

poetry: Love affairs Suicidal thoughts Fear of failure Violent thoughts toward family

members Etc.

The confessional poets revealed the private doubts and anxieties that were behind their public faces.

But they were not just sharing personal stories. These were also poets who were serious about their art.

NEW YORK SCHOOL OF POETS

Representative New York School Poets Barbara Guest (1920-2006) Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) Frank O’Hara (1926-1966) John Ashbery (b. 1927)

A Definition of New York School Poetry They felt connected to the abstract

expressionist school of painters. Many of these poets also wrote art

criticism. Similarities:

Like Beats, spontaneous. Like confessional, very frank

But NYS were more ironic and more interested in the surreal combination of high art and allusions to popular art.

Many of their poems seem to be lists of things one may find on a walk through the city. Ex: a billboard advertising tourism to a

natural paradise may be visible above a traffic jam – something the poet sees & irony.

These poets are often trying to get us to see the world in a new and different way.

They also liked to juxtaposition uncommon objects.

They liked to combine The serious with the silly The profound with the absurd The highly formal with the casual

BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT

Representative Black Arts Movement Poets Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) Amiri Baraka (aka Leroi Jones) (b. 1934) Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934) Ntozake Shange (b. 1948)

A Definition of Black Arts Movement These poets are often associated with

members of the Black Power movement who grew frustrated with the pace of changes enacted by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

These poems are often politically charged, even aggressive, challenges to the white establishment.

BLACK MOUNTAIN POETS

Representative Black Mountain Poets Charles Olson (1910-1970) Denise Levertov (1923-1997) Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

A Definition of Black Mountain Poetry These poets taught at the same place

(Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, NC)

But that’s about all they have in common. Examples: Olson: archeology and history of

Gloucester, MA Levertov: tackling political issues head on.

OTHER IMPORTANT POETS

Some that don’t fit the above categories: Emily Dickinson Robert Frost W. H. Auden Elizabeth Bishop Adrienne Rich Seamus Heaney

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

Basically isolated from others during the transcendental period.

Shares some attributes with the compressed wit and irony of the metaphysical poets

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Active during modernism, but was more concerned with traditionally minded verse forms and a locally colored content that cloaked a profound philosophical vein.

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

He wrote the first half of his poems as an English citizen before WWII.

He wrote the second half of his poems as an American citizen after WWII.

He is a giant of 20th-century literature He is similar to the modernists, but he

really is above labels.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) Sometimes placed with confessional

poets because of her friendship with Robert Lowell, but Bishop is more reticent than the confessional poets.

Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

An important feminist and political poet, she has some background with the confessional poets, but she has taken the role of the poet in society so seriously that she has transcended the personal and become a kind of icon.

Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)

Heaney uses rural imagery to take on issues of identity, from the postcolonial confusion about what it means to be Irish to the late-twentieth-century confusion about what it means to be a poet.