Literary Movements

LITERARY MOVEMENT

OVERVIEW

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:

Metaphysical Poetry: Poets

 John Donne (1572-1631)

 George Herbert (1593-1633)

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

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

Augustans

John Dryden (1631-1700)

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.

●

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

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

●

Common topic: human frailty.

●

Augustans were likely to place

ridiculously boring plots (ex: the cutting of

a noble maiden's hair in

Rape of the

●

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

Romantic Poetry

●

English Romantic Poets

●

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Percy Shelley (1792-1822)

●

John Keats (1795-1821)

American Romantic Poets

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)

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.

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,

●

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



Representative French Symbolist Poets:

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)



Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898)

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)



Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

Symbolist-influenced poets

who wrote in English:



Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)



W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)



Arthur Symons (1865-1945)

Related Prose



French Symbolist Prose

 _{Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907): A Rebours}

(Against the Grain)



English Symbolist Prose

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

 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

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

 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

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)

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

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.

Modernist Literature

What to look for in Modernist

poetry

 Allusions.

 Many times human experiences are reduced to fragments.

 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

 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”)…

 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

Representative Poets

 Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

 Claude McKay (1889-1948)

 Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

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

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)

 Jazz, poetry, painting, dance, and

folklore flourished and took on many similar concerns to those of the

modernists

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

 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

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 20

century.

●

If not a different approach, then different

● 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

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

● 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

● 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

The Beats: Poets

●

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

The Beats: Related Prose

●

William S. Burroughs (1914-1997): Naked

Lunch

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,

● 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

●

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

●

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

● “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

Representative

Confessional Poets

 John Berryman (1914-1972)

 Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

 Anne Sexton (1928-1967)

Related Confessional Prose

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

 The confessional poets revealed the

private doubts and anxieties that were behind their public faces.

Representative New York

School Poets

 Barbara Guest (1920-2006)

 Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)

 Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)

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

 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

 They also liked to juxtaposition uncommon objects.

 They liked to combine

 The serious with the silly

 The profound with the absurd

Representative Black Arts

Movement Poets

 Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

 Amiri Baraka (aka Leroi Jones) (b. 1934)

 Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934)

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

Representative Black

Mountain Poets

 Charles Olson (1910-1970)

 Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

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

Some that don’t fit the

above categories:

 Emily Dickinson

 Robert Frost

 W. H. Auden

 Elizabeth Bishop

 Adrienne Rich

Emily Dickinson

(1830-1886)

 Basically isolated from others during the transcendental period.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

 Active during modernism, but was more concerned with traditionally minded

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

Elizabeth Bishop

(1911-1979)

 Sometimes placed with confessional poets because of her friendship with Robert Lowell, but Bishop is more

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

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