Literary Movements

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Metaphysical (1633-1680)

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Authors: John Donne (The Sun Rising, Love's Alchemy), George Herbert (Easter Wings, The Collar), Andrew Marvell (The Mower's Song, The Garden)
Definition: This poetry broke away from the traditional Renaissance ideas about romantic poetry and focused on deep contemplations of love, death, God and human frailty. The obscurity and difficulty of these poems make it famous.
What to Look for: 1. Wit, irony, and paradox. 2. Elaborate stylistic maneuvers (ornamental conceits, dazzling rhymes) are pulled off with aplomb (self-confidence or assurance). 3. Huge shifts in scale proliferate (ex. ants to planets). 4. Discuss deep philosophical issues unfolded through irony, conceits, and scale shifts

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Augustans (late 1600s - early 1700s)

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Authors: John Dryden (Marriage a-la-mode, Absalom and Architophel), Alexander Pope (Windsor Forest, The Rape of the Lock)
Definition: Through its iambic pentameter rhyme scheme, these poems become a satire using rhymed, heroic couplets. Their inspiration is ancient events and are famous for turning Greek & Roman epics into English heroic couplets.
What to Look for: 1. wit, irony, paradox, brevity. 2. ongoing subject is human fraility. Tone normally mocks human behavior. 3. These poets make absurd plots to have a heroic or comic effect. 4. Current events are addressed either allegorically or directly

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Romantic (1798-1832)

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Authors: William Wordsworth (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Lucy), Percy Shelley (Ozymandias, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty), John Keats (Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale)
American Transcendental Authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson (Song of Nature), Walt Whitman (A Noiseless Patient Spide, When I Heard the Learn's Astronomer)
Definition: It defies the neoclassical traditional ideas and instead emphasizes the common life of man through emotional content. Also, the human imagination and nature are heavly used throughout which produces a thematic content.
What to Look for: 1. natural imagery redeems the imagination of an individual stuck in city. 2. human imagination empowers individual to escape society's strictures, authority or even fear of death. 3. Main mode is sublime (big, obscure, scary). 4. transcendence (the state of being beyond material experience) is goal of romantic poets to create their characters into

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Symbolists (1870s-1890s)

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Authors: Charles Baudelaire (Spleen, Harmonie du soir), Stephane Mallarme (L'Apres-midi d'un faune, Salut), Paul Verlaine (Il pleure dans mon couer, Langueur), Arthur Rimbaud (Voyelles)
Definition: Authors: John Donne (1572-1631), George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
Definition: A connection between romanticism and modernism because of its use of transcedence, but with a more immoral and sendual direction. This lead to its emphazise on sexual issues.
What to Look for: 1. Deal with the dusk & dawn and with the time between waking and sleeping. 2. Synaesthesia, the using of one sense to describe another. 3. Use words with 3 or 4 meanings. 4. Drawn to the properties of music and attempted to create same effects in poetry by concentrating on simultaneous effects and choosing words to inspire a king of languor. 5. Associate with the "art for art's sake" movement of aesthetics

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Modernism (1890s-1940s)

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Authors: Wallace Stevens (Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, The Snowman), William Carlos Williams (Red Wheelbarrow, The Great Figure), Hilda Doolittle or H.D. (Star Wheels in Purple, Helen), Marianne Moore (Baseball and Writing, To a Snail), T.S. Eliot (Ash Wednesday), E. E. Cummings (Sprint is like a perhaps hand, anyone lived in a pretty how town)
Definition: A revolutionary force that experimented with new forms of poetry.
What to Look for: 1. allusions, poems reduce homan experience to fragments. 2. Influenced by cubism and try to see the world from as many points of view as possible at the same time. 3. Systematic representations of human consciousness. Poems consentrate on individual relating to enviroment or how enviroment creates individual. 4. Focus on machines or other inanimate objects rather than nature or human beings and efface individuality. Also, don't feel personal.

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Harlem Renaissance (1918-1930)

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Authors: Paul Laurence Dunbar (Frederick Douglass, We Wear the Mask), Claude McKay (If We Must Die, The White House), Langston Hughes (I, Too, Sing America, The Negro Speaks of Rivers), Countee Cullen (Incident, For A Lady I Know)
Defintion: After WWI when African Americans traveled to northern industrial cities. A branch of modernism because took many of the same concerns.
What to Look for: 1. Related to African American concerns and issues of the time. 2. Rely on repetitive structure or fragmented structure. 3. Poets sought a new American idiom

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Postmodernism (1945-present)

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Definition: These authors have similarities with modernists in certain concerns and motivations, but they have many very different outlooks upon these ideas. The Beats, confessional poets, black arts movement, black mountain school and the new york school of poets strongly disagreed and conflicted with postmodernist authors.
What to Look for: 1. parody, irony, and narrative instability often inform the tone. 2. allusions. 3. Strictly binary concepts (hot and cold; black and white) often collapse. Many ideas are spread across a spectrum not centralized to a specific topic range. 4. No real center (ex. Internet). 5. The surface is more interesting to authors than the ideas depth.

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The Beats (post-WW2: 1950s-1960s)

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Authors: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind, The Changing Light), Allen Ginsberg (Howl, America, A Supermarket in California), Gregory Corso (Marriage, Bomb), Gary Snyder (Four Poems for Robin, Hay for the Horses)
Definition: The Beats were famous in New York City, San Francisco, Tangiers, Prague and Mexico City. These authors emphazised Buddhism and some principles of romanticism, for instance transendence, imagination, nature and individual importance. They were also influenced by jazz improvisation and politics. Many considered their work to be very dreamy and imaginative in a mythological sense at times.

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Confessional Poets (early and mid 1900s)

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Authors: John Berryman (Dream Song 1, Dream Song 4, Dream Song 29), Robert Lowell (Skunk Hour, Memories of West Street and Lepke), Anne Sexton (Wanting to Die, The Truth the Dead Know), Sylvia Plath (Daddy, Balloons, Ariel)
Definition: Confessional poets took an extremely personal approach to their poetry through first person pronouns and included intimate and deep issues (ex. love affairs, suicide feelings).

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New York School of Poets (mid and late 1900s)

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Authors: Barbara Guest (The Blue Stairs, Echoes), Kenneth Koch (One Train May Hide Another, To Various Persons Takled to All at Once), Frank O'Hara (In Memory of My Feelkings, The Day Lady Died), John Ashbery (The Painter, The Instruction Manual, Daffy Duck in Hollywood)
Definition: Many of these poets were art critics and there work was very ironic. Also, it is filled with art allusions to help the reader experience a new or different outlook upon the world. Their particular approaches could be satrical or solemn, casual or formal, thought provoking or ridiculous.

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Black Arts Movement (1950s-1960s)

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Authors: Gwendolyn Brooks (The Bean-Eaters, We Real Cool, The Lovers of the Poor), Amiri Baraka or Leroi Jones (Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Black Art), Sonia Sanchez (Ballad, For Sweet Honey in the Rock), Ntozake Shange (My Father is a Retired Magician, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf)
Definition: This movement was a reaction towards to the changes of the civil rights movement. The poems seem almost violent because of the passionate political view of these poets. They wanted to challenge the whites during this time period.

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Black Mountain Poets (mid and late 1900s)

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Authors: Charles Olson (The Maximus Poems), Denise Levertov (The Mutes, In California During the Gulf War), Robert Creeley (Age, For Love)
Definition: These poets taught at Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, NC, but had extremely different views on how to write their poems. However, they did focus on the process more than the final product.

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Emily Dickinson (1830-1866)

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Writing in near absolute isolation during the transcendental petiod, this astonishgly prolific and powerful poet does not easily fit into the transcendental rubic, and she shares man ymore attributes with the compressed wit and irony of the metaphysical poets
Poems: I heard a fly buzz when I died, I measure every grief I meet

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Robert Frost (1874-4963)

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Frost was active during modernism's heyday, and concerned himself with more traditionally minded verse forms and a lovally colored content that cloaked a profound philosophical vein
Poems: Birches, The Death of the Hired Man, Mending Wall

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W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

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Auden wrote the first half of this poems in England before WW2, then the others in America after WW2. He is more similar to the modernists, but really transcends labels.
Poems: As I Walked Out One Evening, In Memory of W. B. Yeats, The Unknown Citizen

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Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

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Bishop is normally associated with confessional poets because of her friend, Robert Lowell, but she is not as willing as others in this movement.
Poems: In the Waiting Room, Filling Stations, At the Fishhouses, One Art, The Moose

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Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

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Known as a feminist and political poet, Rich shares similar background with the confessional poets, but her profession became so serious that she transcended the personal and became a type of icon.
Poems: Diving into the Wreck, North American Tiem, Miracle Ice Cream

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Seamus Heaney (b .1939)

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Heaney uses rural imagery to take on issues of identity, from the post-colonial confusions of what it means to be Irish to the late-twentieth-century confusion of what it means to be a poet.
Poems: Digging, The Harvest Bow