A VERY BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF KEY LITERARY MOVEMENTS OF ENGLISH POETRY

1. A History of English Literature in
20 minutes!!!!
Who said detail is important?

2. This is a zippy overview of Literature in
terms of cultural movements...
It is quick, brutal and very brief. It will be useful
for you in revision for mocks (but you need
much more depth than provided here for the
real thing!)

3. Classical Mythology
Key Writers
- Homer (Iliad and Odyssey)
- Sophocles and Euripides (Greek tragic playwrights –
distorted love)
- OVID – The Art of Love (tips on seduction) and
Metamorphoses (the power of love to change people).
These provide us with myths – Oedipus, Pygmalion, Zeus’s
raping, Orpheus, Narcissus and Echo etc. – that will be
drawn upon throughout.
You will NOT be asked to comment in your exams.

4. Medieval Courtly Love
Key Writers
- Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde
- Chaucer The Knights Tale (The Canterbury Tales)
- Malory Le Morte d’Arthur
Courtly Love Conventions:
• Knight in shining armour puts beautiful, unavailable woman on pedestal.
• Knight will be in physical pain though will be inspired by love to achieve great
deeds.
• Woman will deign to fall in love only with help of the messenger/ inbetween.
• Woman is both idealised AND objectified.
• Courtly love will re-establish order and nobility.
Stylistic
• Narrative Poetry, Apostrophes and Idealised imagery.

5. Medieval Fabliaux
Key Works
• Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (especially The Miller’s Tale, The
Merchants Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue)
Fabliaux Conventions
• Farcical, sexually explicit and lower class.
• Puns, rude jokes and innuendos abound.
• Subverts and parodies courtly lover conventions.
• Uses bodily imagery and scatological humour to emphasise the
disruption to the world.
• Often a more realistic depiction of marriage and society – money
grabbing wives, stupidity, sexual desire and lechery.
• Represents rebellion and disorder from the norms of society.

6. Italian Humanism
Key Writers
• Petrarch Canzoniere (Sonnets)
• Dante The Divine Comedy
Key ideas
• A sense of the individual in conflict with the
forces of lower desires.
• The human should aim for transcendence and
the higher order of reason and truth.

7. Medieval Ballads
Key Writers
• Anonymous – folktales passed through
generations portraying a sense of organic, natural
love.
• Greensleeves – Anon.
Conventions
• Pastoral (countryside) setting.
• A story or narration of a dramatic events
• a combination of storytelling, speech and song.
• Popular themes are love and supernatural.

8. Tudor Court Poetry
Key Writers
• Thomas Wyatt – They Flee From Me
• Thomas Nashe
Key features
• Development of lyric poetry – a more subjective
individual voice.
• Were performed in court, so often feature a world of
intrigue, deception and lies.
• Draws on ideas of courtly love with mistress as
beautiful and unattainable love// a woman’s cruelty.

9. Renaissance Sonnets
Key Writers
• Thomas Wyatt (‘I find no peace and all my war is done’)
• Philip Sidney – Astophil and Stella
• William Shakespeare – 18, 130, (the whole collection!!!)
• John Donne – Batter My Heart (inversion using religious theme)
Key Stylistic Features
• Wyatt translates Petrarchan sonnets but using Shakespearean
couplet at end.
• The sonnet addresses an unattainable woman (like Laura in
Petrarch) and admires her.
• Extended similes are used with images of nature and exploration.
• The volta indicates the tension and conflict within the poetry.

10. Metaphysical Poets
Key Writers
• John Donne – A Valediction, The Sun Rising etc.
• Andrew Marvell – To His Coy Mistress
• George Herbert - The Collar
Key Stylistic Forms
• Often poems of seduction using extended conceits with
unexpected objects to seduce woman.
• Combine sensuality with wit and clever intellectual
arguments.
• Often use a range of religious imagery...
• Uses paradoxes, puns and elaborate syntax.

11. Cavalier Poets
Key Writers
• Rochester (very rude poetry)
• Richard Lovelace
Key Stylistic Features
• ‘Seize the day’ and seduction poetry.
• Often addresses women and presents a heartless
male poetic persona.
• Wit and sarcasm used to explain bad behaviour.

12. Augustine
Key Writers
• Alexander Pope – The Rape of the Lock
Key Stylistic Features
• Satirical voice
• Mock Epic poetry – uses high flown language to
depict everyday events (e.g. Stealing a lock of
hair)
• Uses the heroic couplet – has a sense of
insignificance.

13. ‘Old’ Romantic Poetry
Key Writers
• Old Romantics – Wordsworth and Coleridge
• William Blake.
Key Stylistic Features
• Reaction against the ideas of the 18th century with focus on
order, control and rationality.
• Emotion is valued – Wordsworth writes “all good poetry is
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
• Individual consciousness, imagination and personal
experience..
• A Love of Nature and an obsession with the ‘sublime’
infuses work.
• Traditional forms but use simpler everyday speech to
mimic simple rural life and childhood.

14. ‘Young’ Romantics
Key Writers
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Lord Byron
• John Keats
Key Stylistic Features
• A love of nature and concern with the sublime.
• Keats = sensuous imagery (synaesthesia), negative
capability (the openness of texts with many voices), sense
of mortality.
• Shelley = political and social issues explored through
Romantic Expectations
• Byron = Long narrative poems, e.g. Don Juan, with rude,
crude and anarchic events. Irrevent humour and satires
mixed with Romantic imagery,

15. Victorian Women
Key Writers
• Emily Dickinson
• Christina Rossetti
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Key Features
• EBB sonnets are concerned with exploration of
love for Robert Browning and personal.
• Dickinson and Rossetti more concerned with
transience of life, death and nostalgia.

16. Victorian Poets
Key Writers
• Tennyson
• Browning
• Hopkins
Key Features
• Not a clear break from the past like Romantics but
share belief that poetry is a vehicle for emotional
expression.
• Use formal and traditional verse forms with lots of
religion and nature.

17. Turn of the century
Key writers
• Hardy
• Yeats
Key Features
• Still using traditional verse forms – Hardy
using narrative poems in particular.
• Sense of nostalgia for earlier times.

18. Modernism
Key Writers
• T.S. Eliot
• Ezra Pound
• Hart Crane
• William Carlos Williams
• e.e. cummings
Key Stylistic Features
• A clear break from Victorian poetry
• Stream-of-consciousness writing
• Lack of form – out of verses, stanzas, sentences, etc. To
symbolise the breakdown of modern society.

19. Thirties Poets
Key Writers
• W. H. Auden
• Louis Macneice
• Dylan Thomas
Key Features
• Use common and everyday language to represent the
feelings of normal people.
• Often use domestic and insignificant imagery to represent
larger emotions.
• Use regular poetic rhyme schemes, though often rhymes
are shocking or unexpected.

20. Mid-Century
Key Writers
• John Betjeman
• Philip Larkin
• Ted Hughes
• Sylvia Plath
Key Features
• Continue from Thirties Poets to base poetry in everyday
language, though often its more raucous and negative.
• Humour expresses disappointment at the repetitiveness of
life.

21. Post-Modernism
Key Writers
• Carol Ann Duffy
• Adrienne Rich
• Douglas Dunn
• Wendy Cope
• Roger McGough
Key Stylistic Features
• An awareness of the flexibility and lack of meaning in the
world.
• Use media and unexpected imagery to express everyday
feelings.
• Often use free verse and break conventions.

22. Read the two poems (Item A and Item B) carefully,
bearing in mind that they were written at different
writers and are open to different interpretations.
Write a comparison of these two poems.
In your answer you should consider the ways in which
Writer 1 and Writer 2 use form, structure and language
to present their thoughts and ideas; make relevant
references to your wider reading in the poetry of love.