English 10A Background and Terminology

Cavalier Poets

-Cavalier = royalist associated with court in civil wars -Cavalier kind of means warrior or knight, and describes poets somewhat affiliated with the court. -Neoclassical poets, a better way to think of the cavaliers due to their love of demonstrating their learning in the classics and especially, their love/appreciation of the world.

Model of Christian Conduct

-Christ = turn the other cheek, forgive, sacrifice, brotherly love, avoid sin (bodily suffering), obedience to father, love thine enemy, etc. -NO revenge. None! -Virginity (body bad, soul good). Christianity is radical because in classical culture, growing the population was of paramount importance. But in Christianity abstinence is the goal. Gave rise to a cult called the imitation of Christ

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey

-Early 16th century -Renaissance lyric/RELIGIOUS -Surrey's is more comical and funnier, more droll. Love in Surrey is a little bit more personified-it has a face as opposed to "hideth and appeareth" gentler and refined words in Wyatt. Surrey is more graphic and material "Dare not show your face"

Sir Thomas Wyatt

-Early 16th century -Renaissance lyric/RELIGIOUS -Wyatt's is more gentile, controlled, and decorous and more chivalrous.

Wife of Bath's Tale Background

-Geoffrey Chaucer -Written in 14th-15th centuries -Focused on Tales and their Tellers -Her /tale/ vs. /Her/ tale ^he relationship between the messiness of her own life and her story about it and her story about the knight. Better = ethically? (How people ought to behave?) Texts offer a golden world with poetic justice, but this does not happen in life. Better = pleasurably? ( How we wish people would or could behave? i.e., "Wish fulfillment": literature provides what life, in all its messy disappointments, cannot.) She keeps getting married even though her marriages are not pleasant. The story is wish fulfillment for the wife, to be young and beautiful again and practice total control over her husband. The tale is a fantasy solution to some of the problems the wife has had.

John Donne

-Holy Sonnets published in posthumanely in 1633, early -17th century -Flea, the sun rising, the canonization! Usually petrarchan... -Metaphysical poet -Lots of enjambments, especially in the holy sonnets. Making other things important that serve his own poetry. Donne is good at reversing priorities, taking one thing you thought was important and making it not important, or vice versa. -Love poetry comes first, religious poetry later. Love poetry forms a ridge to the religious stuff. His holy sonnets are harrowing, is god there?

Paradise Lost

-John Milton -Genre: epic poem, blank verse -Published in 1667 -Milton reverses expectations, mainly with Satan and the devils (but also Adam and Eve). New kind of hero and new kind of poetry.

Reformation

-Re-form church= restore to purity of "primitive church", prior to papacy -Abolish idolatry, superstition, icons, clerical 'chastity', pardons, indulgences, confessions, latin scripture, purgatory, status of eucharist as miracle (vs memorial historical re-enactment of Last Supper) -Promote Bible in vernacular -Believed that the way to get to heaven was not good works but scripture, grace, and faith. -Sola Scriptura, Sola Fida, Sola Gratia

Mystery Plays/Cycle Plays

-Short dramas of the Middle Ages based on events of the Old and New Testaments and often organized into historical cycles. Order doesn't matter because it is all about: Fall, grace, redemption -Genre is ultimately comic: as in Christian Comedy (not ha ha, but providential shape in which ultimately it all turns out okay and Justice is done). -Every story is all times, as well as the time it represents -Cycle Structure: Creation → Noah → Nativity → Passion → Doomsday → back to creation -The Second Shepherd's Play.

Ben Jonson

-Sonnets published in early 17th century -On my first son and daughter. -Cavalier poet -Sad poems about the deaths of his children, of whom he was clearly attached to. And Inviting A Friend to Supper.

Robert Herrick

-Sonnets published in mid 17th century -His farewell to sack... begins with farewell, middle is (eternal...) and eye of admiration, penultimate is her inadulterate strength -Cavalier poet -His Farewell to Sack: a silly poem, but the persona is vowing to renounce sack, but the proportion of the poem devoted to the praise of liquor as opposed to the renunciation is much greater, suggesting a lingering attention that may be really actually difficult to renounce. In a christian universe, there is something risque about the things these poets praise in their writings-the things that make the body happy.

Heptarchy

A group of seven kingdoms. A collective name applied to the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the 5th century until the 8th century consolidation into the four kingdoms of Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex and East Anglia.

end-stopped line

A line ending in a full pause, usually indicated with a period or semicolon. "may no more./ The vain travail"

headless line

A line from which an unstressed syllable has been dropped at the beginning. It is permissible to omit the initial (unaccented) syllable. /Woods/ or /steep/y /moun/tain /yields/ ( [-] / -/ -/ -/). Note that although the poem is iambic tetrameter, this line has only 7 syllables.

Alexandrine

A line of poetry that has 12 syllables; six iambic feet

poetic feet

A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables; unit of repetition iamb: - / Trochee: / - Spondee: / / Pyrrhic: - - For poems written in an iambic meter, in any given foot the expected iamb can be replaced by a trochee spondee, or pyrrhic:

caesura

A natural pause or break in a line of poetry, usually near the middle of the line. Beowulf example: "High-born and powerful. He ordered a boat" (198).

feminine rhyme

A rhyme of two syllables, one stressed and one unstressed, as "waken" and "forsaken" and "audition" and "rendition." Feminine rhyme is sometimes called double rhyme. Last syllable is unstressed. If the final syllable is unaccented, it doesn't count. And /I/ will /make/ thee /beds/ of /ros/es (-/ -/ -/ -/ -).

Chronicle History

A type of historical play based upon the chronicles of England. History plays are a strange genre-an oxymoron-speaking to fact and truth in history but fiction and made up things in play. Henry IV, Part I

Allegory

An extended metaphor operating on multiple levels ("by figure a moral play"): e.g., 1) one guy prepares for death during the course of a given day 2) The moment when his life flashes before his eyes In the modern adaptation, it takes place between when the man falls off the balcony and hits the ground 3) the confrontation of the soul and body with death throughout the course of a life 4) the operation of grace and the church in the work of salvation... Prayer... is the person on stage really praying (?) 5) The history of the world itself, facing the last judgment Everyman!

Wergyld

Blood price, man price, an eye for an eye, compensation, payment that is exacted upon one's death

Humanism

Chaucer was a humanist! Classical texts are being reborn in vernacular languages and people are learning latin and greek and Hebrew: why the renaissance is called "rebirth" Intellectual movement concerned with recovery, printing, translation and imitation of classical texts (starts 13/14thc on the continent, 16th in E.) Studia humanitatis: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, moral philosophy. Latin, Greek, Hebrew. What you would study if you went to college. Most people went to college to become preachers, which is ironic because in college people read Pagan literature, which provided models of thinking and argument to keep people believing.

Kennings

Compound metaphors, compound nouns, e.g. whales-road, swan's riding, ring-give, corpse-maker, word-hoard, coast-guard, etc...

squishing

Elison: when one word ends in a vowel and the next begins with a vowel (or "h"): The evening → th'evening; worthy of → worth'of; who at → wh'at Y-glide: - / - / → - / - Melodious → melodious (mel-o-dyus) / - - → / - Studying → studying (stud-ying) W-glide / - → / Ruinous (rwn-us) flowers (flowrs) Power, heaven, and spirit are almost always monosyllables (powr, heavn, spirt)

Imitatio Christi

Latin for "the imitation of Christ." The belief that Christians ought to structure their spiritual and moral lives around the imitation of Jesus Christ.

Memento Mori

Latin language a reminder of human mortality sometimes signified by a skull. Suggests, of course, that we are prone to forgetting/denying/distracting ourselves from it, despite the fact that it is omnipresent

Reinassance Period

Rebirth; 1484-1660 (180yrs); modern English Aka Reformation ("reform" of the church, Protestantism) Aka Early Modern (beginning of us) Aka Tudor-Stuart, Elizabethan-Jacobean

stretching

Separable -ed suffix: - / - / -: ~Marlowe I. 15 "Fair lin / ed slippers" Diaeresis: make diphthong into 2 syllables: ~E.g., the "tion" or "sion" suffix can, if need be, always be a di-syllable (tee-yon or see-yon instead of shon). Milton thus regularly rhymes "session" with "throne"

homiletic/didactic

Texts offer a negative example, to be avoided: for instance, as in a satiric comedy, at which we are to view characters and their exploits with scorn or contempt. Or a tragedy, which might scare us off of behaving hubristically, even as we feel sympathy for a hero's plight... Wife of Bath's tale?

Morality play

The essential theme of the morality play is the conflict between the forces of good (the good angel, the virtues) and the forces of evil (the bad angel or devil, the vices) for possession of man's soul. Everyman.

Soteriology

The study of the doctrine of salvation

Noble

Two definitions in Gawain 1. rank (aristocrats, aka the nobles)/ blueblood, toff, etc. 2. conduct: magnanimous, generous, (princely, high station), but treat all persons the same regardless of rank or their own conduct, don't abuse power (really good manners). True nobility: Christ: son of God who asserts all souls potentially worthy, not just the rich ones

Tragedy play

a genre of drama focusing on stories of human suffering. The drama typically consists of a human flaw or weakness in one of the work's central characters. No such happy ending. There really are no tragedies before Marlowe in English literature-always a sense that God's safety net is offered. But once you reach protestantism you see the possibility of people falling through the cracks. Doctor Faustus.

epic poetry

a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants. Beowulf, Paradise Lost

iambic

a metrical foot in poetry that consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. -/-/-/

spondee

a metrical unit with stressed-stressed syllables

Petrarchan/Italian sonnet

a sonnet consisting of an octave with the rhyme pattern abbaabba, followed by a sestet with the rhyme pattern cdecde or cdcdcd

digressions

a temporary departure from the main subject in speech or writing. e.g., inset songs at feats; genealogical foray. Used in Beowulf a lot

volta

associated with sonnet, italian word for turn, change in thought/argument and occurs between octet and sestet in petrarch, but in shakespearean it happens after line 12.

Litotes

ironic understatement (in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary) Beowulf example: Hrothgar tells him that ''It isn't far, nor is it / A pleasant spot'' (lines 1372-1373). This description is quite an understatement, since the lair is located at the bottom of a deep lake full of monsters that nobody has yet been able to defeat.

Erotic Poetry

love of and longing for an earthly object. Petrarch, 14thc. Italian poet, author of a sonnet sequence. Sonnet: 14 lines.

Religious Poetry

love of and longing for divine object. Psalms of David (as in shepherd, singer, giant slayer, king, warrior, adulterer, penitent): 150 poems c. 1000-450 BCE, several authors, and many moods: praise, thanksgiving, calls for vengeance, lament, self-recrimination.

boasts

overstatements, common in Beowulf world, not necessarily a bad thing

pun

two (or more) meanings at once, usually one base/low, one elevated (double entendre) Second Shepherd's Play

blank verse

unrhymed iambic pentameter

Soliloquy

with theater/drama. Person on stage speaking aloud what they would be doing/thinking. Nobody else can respond to or hear the person speaking

Anglo-Saxon Period; "Dark" ages

449-1066 AD (~600 years); old English

saeculum

"time in the world." The local time that belongs to us in which we need to remedy the sins we are responsible for.

Psychomachia

(Greek words: Spirit+battle): struggle for the soul/mind between two (or more) rival forces/principles/inner voices. For instance: -staying and going -good angel, evil angel

metaphysical poetry

-17th century, 2nd generation, -Elaborate conceits / extended metaphors -Everyday diction -Yoking together of heterogeneous/incongruous ideas

Andrew Marvell

-Andrew Marvell -Sonnets written in mid 17th century but published posthumously, later in 17th century -Bermudas, the picture of little TC in a prospect of flowers -Cavalier poet -Marvell also celebrates earthly pleasure but always puts them in quotes, knowing they are impermanent, perhaps dangerous, and provisional. Marvell was an amatuer in the sense that he loved what he wrote but he was not a court poet nor did he have patrons, he just wrote for self expression. He was also fond of tetrameter couplets, eight beat couplets. He was willing to move beyond the iambic line into something that seemed lighter and dancelike. Seize the day-both its mentality and its reversal. Also an appreciation of nature as God's work.

Everyman

-Anonymous author, printed by John Skot -Genre: Morality play, homiletic. -Written in the late 14th-15th centuries, middle English -rhyming verse in irregular meter and rhyme scheme, but tending toward rhyming couplets in four- or five-stress lines that often would be, if smoothed out by an editor, passable iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter -Single protagonist although issues he faces are common to all. The problem of limited time on earth and how best to spend it.

Gawain and the Green Knight

-Anonymous poet -Written in the late 14th century in Middle English -Genre: Romance, idealized and fashionable behavior of aristocratic, beautiful people behaving beautifully; chivalry, heroic quest/test; sublimated religious meaning; Arthurian setting of 12-13th centuries in France. -It is a celebration of "courtly love": relations between the sexes not according to political reality but fantasy of courtesy and delicacy -Dialect: Northwest Midlands -Sonic: alliteration ("oral"-esque ). linked letters, one main consonant per line. Requires big vocab (Show-off quality). -Verse: stanza of long lines of irreg. unrhymed meter, followed by a kind of rhymed chorus or refrain in "bob and wheel": ababa, consisting of One short line with one stress - / (bob) followed by four three stress lines: - / - /- / - (wheel) -Tone: Nostalgia, melancholy, tragedy, finitude, elegy: civilizations born, prosper, decline and die (like Beowulf!).

William Shakespeare

-Sonnets published in the 1590s to early 1600s -Always ABABCDCDEFEFGG -Renaissance lyric/EROTIC -Originality is part of the terrain of sonnets. It is how to be more original than the poem you yourself just wrote. Sonnet sequences are constantly self imitating in that they are just doing the same thing over and over again. Shakespeare's bid to be original is switching genders. Instead of writing to a woman exclusively, he writes sonnet 1-126 about urging a man to procreate, then after that poems ABOUT a woman (not TO a woman, but about one), a woman who is neither blonde nor ideal nor chaste. There is also the suggestion in the middle of the sequence that the poet's male friend and poet's girlfriend got something going on together. So in Shakespeare love is full of betrayal and mistrust and hurt feelings and blackmail.

Sir Philip Sidney

-Sonnets published in the late 16th century -Renaissance lyric/EROTIC -Astrophil and Stella -Sidney is a master of the last line-he is a punchline poet (almost always has something going on in just the last line-not even the couplet!). -Logical, piece-by-piece poems, If A then B sequences. A contrast between the exteriority of reading other stuff and the interiority of his own psyche and Stella. We hear an AWFUL lot about Astrophil and his psyche but no clearer on the picture of Stella. A lot of movement and tension and dynamism in Sidney's poems. He does a great deal in the little space of the sonnet. We get, as a result, the drama of the psyche. Every sonnet is a struggle with himself to get Stella to feel for him. It is a battle all the way through. Last line, the struggle and psyche and sense of representation, the joke about not using cliches then using cliches, or how it is a cliche to say you are not going to use any cliches... self-contradicting author who cannot help but fall over himself as he writes

George Herbert

-Sonnets written in early 17th century, but published later -Jordan (1) → my god my king, the collar → no more to child, my lord!, Denial → come, come -Metaphysical poet -Unlike Donne, Herbert feels more confident that God will hear your prayers and will make sense of things for you, prayers help you make sense of things according to Herbert. Herbert is a good preacher. He wrote poems on the side and just seems constitutionally more cheerful than Donne. There are times when he is dark and feels abandoned, but for the most part he manages to find his way out of it. Doesn't seem like it is TRYING to sound poetic, not a slave to the form but still obeys the meter. A lot of his poems are 15 lines

Gentilesse

-Trothe (truth, oath) -Patience (politeness: treat all people the same, whether rude or non-noble) -Freedom (generosity-- of spirit, goods, person (life or bodily favors) Seen in Gawain and Wife's tale

Henry IV, Part I

-William Shakespeare -Written in 1598 -Genre: history play. -Blank verse

Doctor Faustus

-Written by Christopher Marlowe -Published in 1604 -Genre: Tragedy Play in early modern English, -Blank verse iambic pentameter-iambic in that there are 5 beats but black in the sense that it is unrhymed. Allows for a psychological realism. You are able to write in a way that resembles speech (we do not go around rhyming-it seems artificial, not a natural occurrence. Even intense alliteration is not a natural occurrence, speech much more arbitrary and messy). So Marlowe invents this mechanism that becomes the guidelines for all theater in the future. -Marlowe puts pressure on the pressure points of protestantism and makes a play on them -Doctor Faustus is about making a deal with the devil because he can be seen and spoken to, unlike God who is essentially invisible.

Canterbury Tales: General Prologue Background

-Written by Geoffrey Chaucer -Written in the "Middle" Ages, 14-15th century -Catholic church is now a well established institution, with hierarchies from Cardinals to friars and summoners. Chaucer was interested in the interplay between ideals and reals. Social (kinds of people), literary (kinds of forms and their associations), and ethical (kinds of values) norms. -Genre: Poetry, frame narrative, verse, with rhyming couplets, mostly iambic pentameter

Beowulf Background

-Written by a Christian poet but one who was fascinated by Pagan cultures -Composed between 700 and 900 BCE -A single manuscript, late 10th century. Severely damaged in 1731 fire -Originally in the dialect of Mercia (midlands); translated/converted into West Saxon (southwest). -Characters (and conventions) are the Germanic/Scandinavian forbears of Anglo-Saxons. -Epic-ish, (commemorative, hero-worship, battles; community-founding, origins, public) with Elegiac tone (begins and ends with funerals)

The Second Shepherd's Play

-Written by the Wakefield Master -late 15th century, Middle English -Genre: Medieval drama, cycle/mystery play. The stanza is traditionally printed as nine lines (with an opening quatrain of four long lines, the first halves of which rhyme with one another) is rendered as "thirteeners", rhyming ababababcdddc -see cycle play details for the exact context of them!

Protestant

-grace alone (and scripture!!), not works (no A for effort). -Heaven and Hell only, no Purgatory. No icons, saints, relics, confession, etc. Protestants believed that people used images as substitutes -Pro: cut out the middleman, less mediated relationship to God -Con: God scarier. Isolated and remote and mysterious.

Four levels of EXEGESIS (the word for the way of interpreting scripture)

1. Literal: historical (what "really" happened) 2. Typological: the way Old Testament events foreshadow those of the New, e.g. Jonah = Christ (because both undergo trial) 3. Moral (e.g., we should all learn to suffer and persevere); story of Fall... Redemption in our daily lives. You could find the ethical meaning in every story of the Bible. 4. Prophetic: of future events, e.g. world will be reborn at the end of time

Middle Ages/Medieval Period

1066-1485 (400yrs); Middle English

Wyrd

fate; used in Beowulf

rhythm

for any given line, its actual sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables (i.e., include substitutions)

lyric poetry

sonnets

Personification (GK: prosopopoeia):

the anthropomorphic description of an abstract entity, e.g. "Fellowship", "Kindred" "Goods". Frequently as female, due (in part) to gendering of Latin nouns. (Personification is a central trope of Christianity, in that Christ is God made flesh, i.e., the divine in human, "homely" form, comprehensible and to our own scale).

Enjambment

the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza; syntax spills over the line break. "may no more./ The vain travail"

meter

the implicit regular pattern of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables; the underlying beat of the verse, overall. Applies specifically to English poetry from ca 1570-1900, although it also works for Chaucer. What differentiates verse from prose is that in verse the stressed and unstressed syllables alternate according to a regular repeating pattern. Foot type + number of feet per line = meter, I.e. the meter of a poem written in iambics with 4 feet per line would be iambic tetrameter

true rhyme

the last syllable rhyme sounds (and is usually spelled) exactly the same

Alliteration

the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.