Poetry through the Ages

Poetic forms in Elizabethan, Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist

Poetry

History of Poetry

• from the Greek word poesis, which means “making,” or “creating.”

• Originally composed and shared orally; often set to music

• Commonalities with folktales• Beowulf first known recorded English (old English)

poem

Genres of Poetry

• Ballad: to be sung/recited; physical courage and love; about common people

• Sonnet: Italian/Petrarchan and English/Shakespearian; 14 lines (ending with rhyming couplet). abab cdcd efef gg

• Blank Verse: unrhymed but in iambic pentameter ( ĕé)

• Free Verse: does not follow set rhyme, meter, rhythm

• Lyric: often set to melody; focus on personal emotion

Poetry Timeline

• Elizabethan: 1560-1600• Romantics: 1780-1830• Victorians: 1833-1903• Modernist: 1920-1960• Post-modernist: 1980-

Elizabethan poetry

• Queen Elizabeth 1st reigned from 1558-1603• Bloody time in English history • William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlow,

Edmund Spenser most popular• Sonnets, blank verse, narrative poems

Romantics

• 1780-1830 Focus on:• Libertariansim • Nature and the sublime• Alternate sources of truth and beauty• The supernatural Popular Poets• William Wordsworth, William Blake, Samuel Coleridge,

Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Victorian

• 1833-1903Focus on: • Hope vs. Uncertainty• Science vs. Spirituality• The Rise of Women Popular Poets: • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barret Browning, the

Brönte sisters, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rosetti, Lord Alfred Tennyson

Modernist

• 1920-1960Focus on: • Imagism• Free verse• Fundamental Spirituality• Destruction and Darkness• Self-reflection on artPopular poets: • T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, e.e. cummings