Poetry and Poetics

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"How do I love thee?" "Songs from the Portuguese" 44 Petrarchan sonnets. Raised in Herefordshire, England. Received no formal education but studied the classics. Eloped in Italy. Lived life as an invalid. Developed passion for Italian politics. Aurora Leigh criticizes social forms imposed on women.

Thomas Hardy

"I Look into My Glass". an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. Initially architect.

John Keats

"Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode to Psyche", "Ode ton Melancholy," one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. apprenticed to apothecary surgeon.

Shel Silverstein

"Sick" & "Jimmy Jet and His TV Set" an American writer known for his cartoons, songs, and children's books. He styled himself as Uncle Shelby in some works.

Anne Finch

"The Introduction" & "The Answer (to Pope's Impromptu)" & "A Nocturnal Reverie" as an English poet and courtier. Finch's works often express a desire for respect as a female poet, lamenting her difficult position as a woman in the literary establishment and the court, while writing of "political ideology, religious orientation, and aesthetic sensibility". Exchanged poems with Pope

Jonathan Swift

"The Lady's Dressing Room". an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, "Dean Swift". Tory politics. Irish clergy. Irish resistance.

Andrew Marvell

"The Mower to the Glowworms" and "Bermuda's". Garden and rural life, Cromwell's unofficial poet laureate, replaces Milton as Council of State.

Alexander Pope

"The Rape of the Lock" & "Impromptu to Lady Winchelsea..." & "Windsor Forest". regarded as one of the greatest English poets, and the foremost poet of the early eighteenth century. He is best known for his satirical and discursive poetry—including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism—as well as for his translation of Homer. Tuberculosis and weak spine. Debarred from Uni due to religion.

Henry Vaughan

"The Waterfall" hermetic literature. Secretary to a chief of justice during civil war. Engagement with religious ideas. was a Welsh metaphysical poet, author, translator and physician, who wrote in English. He is chiefly known for the religious poetry contained in Silex Scintillans, published in 1650, with a second part published in 1655

Anne Bradstreet

"To My Dear and Loving Husband" and "Upon the Burning of Our House". Book was published by brother in law without her knowledge. Lived in Boston, new world and new manners. 8 kids.

John Dryden

"To the Memory of Mr. Oldham" was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was made England's first Poet Laureate in 1668. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.

James Thomson

"Winter" as a Scottish poet and playwright, known for his poems The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, and for the lyrics of "Rule, Britannia!".

Charlotte Smith

"Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex". was an English Romantic poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility.

Rudyard Kipling

(1864-1936) English writer and poet; defined the "white man's burden" as the duty of European and Euro-American peoples to bring order and enlightenment to distant lands. "Tommy". an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work. Imperial War Graves Commission and wrote a history of the Irish Guards. Glories of civilization.

sonnet

14 line poem

Mary Wortley Montagu

1689 - 1762 was an English aristocrat and writer. Montagu is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from Turkey, as wife to the British ambassador, which have been described by Billie Melman as "the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient" "The Reasons that Induced Mr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady's Dressing Room"

Romanticism

19th century artistic movement that appealed to emotion rather than reason

Bob Dylan

60's musician. Part of counterculture revolution through music. anti-war and anti-government, "Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands"

John Donne

A Valediction of Weeping, The Ecstasy, The Flea, Elegy XIX, To His Mistress Going to Bed. Marriage to 17 year old niece of Lady Egerton blocked his becoming a courtier. was an English poet and cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons

Let me pour forth / My tears before thy face whilst I stay here, / For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear, / And by this mintage they are something worth, / For thus they be / Pregnant of thee; / Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more; / When a tear falls, that Thou falls which it bore, / So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.

A Valediction of Weeping: John Donne. The poem denotes the grief of separation. The poet is about to go on a voyage and he is trying to console his beloved. He consoles her by saying that she should not weep, as her sighs will result in the death of other. Stanza is significant because it is full of shifts. Coin -> mintage -> pregnant -> fruits, etc.

Conceit

A fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or surprising analogy between seemingly dissimilar objects.

Alexandrine

A line of verse containing 6 iambic feet.

end-stopped line

A line of verse in which the syntactical unit concludes at the end of the line.

refrain

A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem.

ode

A lyric poem usually marked by serious, respectful, and exalted feelings toward the subject.

caesura

A significant pause within a line, often near the middle.

Chiasmus

A verbal pattern of XYYX.

Phillis Wheatley

American poet (born in Africa) who was the first recognized Black writer in America (1753-1784), "A Farewell to America.." "On Being Brought from Africa to America," "To SM, a Young Painter..."

W.B. Yeats

An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, Leda and the Swan. Irish, studied portrait-painting before turning to literature. Irish legends. Co-founded the Abbey Theatre. Nationlist riots drove him back to England. Refurbished Norman Tower.

'No,' said Lizzie: 'No, no, no; Their offers should not charm us, Their evil gifts would harm us.' She thrust a dimpled finger In each ear, shut eyes and ran: Curious Laura chose to linger Wondering at each merchant man.

Christina Rossetti: Goblin Market.

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night. a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion"; the 'play for voices' Under Milk Wood; and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Died an early death in NY.

Thomas Gray

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751. Gray was an extremely self-critical writer who published only 13 poems in his lifetime, despite being very popular.

Christina Rossetti

Goblin Market & in an artist's studio. Italian. You know this.

W.H. Auden

In Praise of Limestone. an English-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form and content. Friend of "Pylon" poets. Series of formative travels. Wars. Settled in USA. Had leftwing poetry but reverted to Anglican. Diagnosed his centuries banalities.

Ezra Pound

In a Station of the Metro, The Garden. an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist sympathizer. Vorticism. modernize while keeping history. Edited "The Waste Land"

Mary Darby Robinson

January, 1795 & london's summer meeting. an English actress, poet, dramatist, novelist, and celebrity figure. She lived in England, in the cities of Bristol and London; she also lived for a time in France and Germany.

William Wordsworth

Leader of English Romanticism who published works in the countryside. "A Slumber did my Spirit Seal" "Resolution and Independence" "The Solitary Reaper" "Tintern Abbey". was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Simon J. Ortiz

My Father's Song. a Puebloan writer of the Acoma Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what has been called the Native American Renaissance.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Ode on a Grecian Urn: John Keats. This is the last stanza.In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going ("To what green altar, O mysterious priest...") and from where they have come. He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will "for evermore" be silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return. In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, "doth tease us out of thought." He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its enigmatic lesson: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know. Keats has spent the whole poem discussing time and beauty, and now he is musing about the future.

Elizabeth Bishop

One Art. was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Massachusetts. Settled in Brazil. Father died and mother hospitalized for mental illness.

Percy Shelley

Ozymandias "Mont Blanc" was one of the major English Romantic poets, who is regarded by some as among the finest lyric and philosophical poets in the English language, and one of the most influential. Expelled for refusing to recant an atheist pamphlet. Radical. Died by Drowning.

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ozymandias: Percy Shelley. Ancient reflecting on modernity.

John Milton

Paradise Lost, "To the Lord General Cromwell" was an English poet and intellectual, who served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse.

heroic couplet

Rhyming iambic pentameter lines.

With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore, Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave; But vain to them the winds and waters rave; They hear the warring elements no more: While I am doomed, by life's long storm oppressed, To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest.

Sonnet Written in the Churchyard at Middleton in Sussex: Charlotte Smith. Lines are significant because she's using nature to reflect her inner turmoil.

Pablo Neruda

Sonnet XVII. a Nobel Prize winning Chilean poet-diplomat and politician

William Blake

The Tyger and The Lamb. an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Engraver apprentice. Developed mythology to explain human history. Determined to follow the Divine Visions.

T.S. Eliot

The Waste Land. one of the twentieth century's major poets", was also an essayist, publisher, playwright, and literary and social critic. Born in St. Louis, Missouri to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and would settle, work and marry there.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You'll have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you. And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said. Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said. Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and gave me a straight look. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

The Wasteland: T.S. Eliot. While it's difficult to find a sense of place within this poem, this section is significant because it integrates sounds of the bar "Hurry up Please it's Time," into the poem. It's as though the conversation is interspersed with outside sounds.

Richard Crashaw

The Weeper, The Tear. Attendant to Italian cardinal, sub canon and Cathedral of Loretto. Saint Teresa. Represent experience of religious ecstasy in words and visual media. was an English poet, teacher, Anglican cleric and Catholic convert, who was among the major figures associated with the metaphysical poets in seventeenth-century English literature.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Windhover. a English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody - particularly his concept of sprung rhythm and use of imagery - established him as an innovative writer of verse

scansion

The act of determine the metrical character of a line of verse or a poem.

meter

The basic (usually repeated) rhythmic sound patterns in a line, group of lines, or poem. Most anglophone poetic traditions determine this by counting syllables and stresses.

The reverend lover with surprise Peeps in her bubbies, and her eyes, And kisses both, and tries—and tries. The evening in this hellish play, Beside his guineas thrown away, Provoked the priest to that degree He swore, 'The fault is not in me. Your damned close stool so near my nose, Your dirty smock, and stinking toes, Would make a Hercules as tame As any beau that you can name.'

The reasons that induced dr. Swift to write a poem called "the lady's dressing room": Mary Wortley Montagu. Line is significant because she is taking what Swift said in his poem and turning it back onto him.

Thomas Wyatt

They Flee From Me, served as a diplomat to France, Spain, and Italy. Knighted but imprisoned in 1534 for brawling and sexual misconduct. Anne Boleyn possible mistress. Translations and imitations of Petrarch introduced the sonnet form to English.

These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As in a landscape to a blind man's eye; But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along them heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love.

Tinted Abbey: Wordsworth. Throughout this poem, Wordsworth is revisiting a place of his youth, and as he travels, the scenery adjusts to his experiences. This stanza is significant because it shows his personal growth, and how things have changed or stayed the same in spite of him. All the things he had done in Tintern Abbey remain there, though he has already left.

Robert Burns

To a Mouse. was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. Adventure School, Scottish landscape and dialect

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me! The present only toucheth thee: But och! I backward cast my e'e, On prospects drear! An' forward tho' I canna see, I guess an' fear!

To a Mouse: Robert Burns. This is the final stanza. Burns has destroyed this mouse's nest with his plough, a man made machine, and now contemplates mortality. This stanza is significant because Burns is saying that, though the mouse is dead, or at the very least her home destroyed, she is still better off than him since she no longer has to deal with the fear of the future.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Ulysses. a British poet. He was the Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets.

free verse

Verse with no regular meter.

Anna Barbauld

Washing Day. a prominent English poet, essayist, literary critic, editor, and author of children's literature. Taught by her father who was a tutor of classical literature at Warrington Academy for Dissenters. Her and her husband managed a school. Supported causes of dissenting, public education, & the French Revolution. Also an editor.

Queen Elizabeth I

When I was Fair and Young. Daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Bastard child, mother executed. Protestant. Rival to Mary Tudor. Peaceful long reign. Translated works by Boethius, Petrarch, and Marguerite of Navarre.

As soon as he had said, such change grew in my breast / That neither night nor day I could take any rest. / Wherefore I did repent that I had said before: / Go, go, go, seek some other where, importune me no more.

When I was fair and young, Queen Elizabeth I. This is the last stanza when Elizabeth is regretting having sent away this man in the previous stanzas.

glow worm

a bug

Elegy

a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.

Apostrophe

address to an absent or imaginary person

picturesque

like a picture; pleasing or charming to look at

Mina Loy

parturition. a British-born artist, writer, poet, playwright, novelist, painter, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Escape parents conservatism. Inspired by Marinetti to write a manifesto. Aphorisms in Futurism. Boxer husband suddenly died by drowning. Found-art collages.

sublime

refers to use of language and description that excites thoughts and emotions beyond ordinary experience

Enjambment

the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.

Prosody

the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry

blank verse

unrhymed iambic pentameter

iambic

unstressed, stressed

Edna St. Vincent Millay

wrote poems celebrating youth and a life of independence and freedom from traditional constraints. I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed, Spring. an American (Maine) poet and playwright. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her feminist activism. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work. Renascence published in The Lyrics Year garnered attention.