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In this section, the historical development of poetry from ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon epics to twentieth-century Imagist poems will be covered.
Drama and poetry have gone hand in hand since ancient Greece. One source for Greek drama was epic poetry, long narrative poems recounting the courageous deeds of a hero. Originally, these long poems were recited orally for special occasions and improvisation was sometimes a necessity.
The earliest examples of Greek epic poetry are Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, most likely written around 750 BCE.
The Iliad’s plot follows the attempt by the Greeks to rescue Helen, a Greek queen captured by the Trojans during the Trojan War, while the Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus as he travels home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Although written in verse, the Odyssey contains early elements of the novel, such as exciting narrative and flashbacks that add to the dramatic effect of the story.
Old English, also known as Anglo-Saxon, was introduced to Britain when the country was invaded by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who came from the European mainland. The different tribes brought oral hero legends that would later become the subjects of the earliest English literature and poetry.
Early poetry in all cultures had to be memorable, since the printing press had yet to be invented. Across Europe and England, poetry survived as an oral tradition, passing by word of mouth from generation to generation.
In Anglo-Saxon civilization, traveling minstrels known as scops composed, memorized, and presented songs and poems. The minstrels recited epics about great battles and brave heroes.
Beowulf, an epic composed in Old English, dates from between 700 and 1000 A.D. The storyline combines Norse legend with historical Danish events from the early sixth century. Danish invaders carried the oral tradition to England in the mid-sixth century, where the story absorbed hints of Christianity. It was finally written down by one unknown poet around 1000 A.D.
In addition to epics, the Anglo-Saxons and Greeks composed lyric poems. Much like modern song lyrics,
lyric poems were shorter than epics and communicated thoughts and feelings instead of telling a story. Poets were often accompanied by musical instrumentation when they recited the lyrics. The people of ancient Greece used a lyre, a harp-like instrument, to accompany the lyrics, while the minstrels in England often played harps as they recited poetry.
Most of the Anglo-Saxon lyric poetry that survived the ages express belief in the Christian faith. The secular poems that still exist are elegies, or poems of lament and mourning.
The Odyssey is an example of what type of literature?
Most people in Great Britain were illiterate for centuries after the Norman Conquest. They continued the oral traditions of their ancestors—ballads, narrative poems in short stanzas that were often sung. The ballad originated as a folk song relaying exciting stories about love, adventure, disasters, and daring feats of courage.
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press with wooden or metal moveable type which changed literature forever. Prior to Gutenberg’s printing press, literature was available to few people because it had to be copied by hand. With the printing press, the written word could reach a larger audience. For example, William Caxton, who was the first English printer, was able to print works such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.
Chaucer, considered one of the greatest poets of the English language, wrote his greatest achievement, The Canterbury Tales sometime between 1386 and 1395. The Canterbury Tales is a long, narrative poem written as a collection of stories. The tales are contained inside a frame tale and are told by a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas a’Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
The poem is written in Middle English, which visually resembles modern English. The language is unlike the Old English of Beowulf, which requires an English translation.
During the Elizabethan Age (1558–1603), writers focused their attention on poetry and drama. Some Elizabethan writers only wrote lyric poetry, but others, such as playwright William Shakespeare, wrote in blank verse.
During this time in Italy, an important development occurred; the sonnet was created. Petrarch, a great Italian lyric poet, created the fourteen-line lyric poem, now known as the Petrarchan sonnet.
Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney followed Petrarch’s lead by writing their own sonnets, although the English poets altered the form somewhat to what is now recognized as the Shakespearean sonnet.
Shakespeare, the best known author in the English language, wrote much of the important poetry and drama during the sixteenth century. Between 1593 and 1601, Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets exploring themes of life, love, beauty, and friendship in addition to his numerous plays.
The close connection between poetry and drama in English literature during the Renaissance was magical but brief; modern playwrights do not write in verse as Shakespeare and his cohorts did.
Poetry continued to dominate the literary world in the seventeeth century. John Donne wrote Metaphysical poetry, which expresses highly philosophical ideas. Ben Jonson introduced Neoclassicism, a revival of the style and attitude of ancient Greece.
John Milton, one of the most important poets of the seventeenth century, wrote Paradise Lost, an epic poem in twelve books. The opening lines explain the storyline:
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat.
This great epic of the English language contains more than ten thousand lines.
Poetry from the eighteenth century’s Age of Reason and Age of Classicism reflected traditional ideas within structured poetic forms.
Alexander Pope, a literary leader and satirist, expressed neoclassical thinking in his famous mock epic, The Rape of the Lock. A mock epic imitates an epic in structure and features a mundane event that is made to appear ridiculous through the use of elevated, lofty language. Humor results from the elevated treatment of a trivial subject.
In the following lines (Canto IV, lines 171-176) from The Rape of the Lock, Pope describes the young woman’s horror at her hair being cut by the Baron:
The sister-lock now sits uncouth, alone,
And in its fellow’s fate foresees its own;
Uncurl’d it hangs, the fatal shears demands
And tempts once more thy sacrilegious hands.
Oh hadst thou, cruel: been content to seize
Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!
Based on a real incident that happened to Pope’s friends, Pope parodies Greek epics using the events that transpired when Lord Petrie cut off a lock of Annabella Fermor’s hair as the subject matter.
During which period in literary history did drama and poetry interweave and flourish?
Because all things must end, Neoclassicism gave way to Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century. Literature of the Romantic age emphasized emotions and creativity in opposition to the reason and intellect of Neoclassicism.
The following list contrasts elements and attitudes of eighteenth-century Neoclassicism with the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century.
Elements of Neoclassicism and
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Neoclassicism |
Romanticism |
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tradition |
innovation |
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urban |
rural |
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conformist |
independent |
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intellect/reason |
imagination/emotion |
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control |
spontaneity |
The following passage comes from Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”:
As is 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 the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration.
Wordsworth’s poems, all of which are very much like the one above, embody the rural, emotional, and creative elements that mark the poetry of the Romantic age. Although his poetry does not best represent the romantic age, Lord Byron is associated with Romantic poets because of the Byronic hero, which could be found in both his work and his life. Readers often assumed that the heroes of Byron’s poems were self-portraits, although they most likely were not.
The following characteristics describe a typical Byronic hero:
Some well-known literary examples of characters modeled on the Byronic hero include Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and the mysterious Mr. Rochester from Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre.
Romanticism developed later in the United States, but the characteristics of Romanticism suited a young America—innovative, rural, and independent. The work of Wordsworth and Coleridge influenced American writers such as William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Transcendentalism, the American philosophic and literary movement of the nineteenth century, stemmed from the Romantic movement. Transcendentalists, of whom Emerson was the leader, believed that the ideal spiritual state goes beyond ordinary experience. Moreover, they believed that every person was divine and that trusting one’s self was like trusting God, who spoke within one’s self.
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson redefined American poetry in the nineteenth century, but their personalities and poetry could not have been more different.
Outgoing and outspoken, Whitman published poems that celebrated the energy, growth, and turmoil of American life. Whitman’s poetry was revolutionary because it celebrated common America and captured the colorful speech and spirit of a young nation.
Whitman frequently used long, unmetered lines called free verse to echo the sound of everyday speech.
The following lines are from Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”:
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
On the other hand, the reclusive Dickinson, who rarely left her family home, wrote almost 1,800 poems, publishing
only seven during her lifetime.
Dickinson wrote passionate poetry with a distinctive and original style. Dashes and unconventional capitalization
characterize her poems, as in “Much Madness is Divinest Sense.”
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
To a discerning Eye—
Much Sense — the starkest Madness—
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail—
Assent—and you are sane—
Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—
And handled with a Chain—
The innovative and unique styles of Dickinson and Whitman influenced up-and-coming writers and set the stage for twentieth-century poetry.
Whitman and Dickinson paved the way for innovation, and changes continued at the beginning of the twentieth century. A new group of poets, the Imagists, formed in rebellion against traditional poetic forms and sentimental subjects of love and beauty.
Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and Wallace Stevens believed in the following principles:
Ezra Pound, leader of the Imagist movement, writes of a vision he had in a subway station in the poem “In a Station of the Metro.” Pound’s original poem contained thirty lines, but after cutting words and using more precise images, the poet’s final outcome was a striking and powerful poem of only two lines and fourteen words.
Innovations in style continued with E.E. Cummings, whose poetry can be easily recognized merely by its lack of capitalization and punctuation. Cummings also experimented with language and grammar to encourage readers to view the world in a new way.
English writer W. H. Auden established himself as a leader in modern poetry when he published his first poetry collection in 1928. Auden incorporated modern culture and current events into his poetry, which was written in almost every type of verse form.
The poetry of Robert Frost bears few similarities to that of the imagists and Auden, although the influence of Wordsworth, Emerson, and Dickinson is noticeable. Frost’s poetry follows traditional verse forms and draws inspiration from the New England countryside. Modern influences, such as the use of colloquial speech, add freshness to Frost’s poetry and helped maintain his status as one of America’s most beloved poets.
What aspect of Walt Whitman’s poetry made it innovative at the time?
Review of poetic terms |
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| Epic poetry | A long, narrative poem about the courageous feats of a hero |
| Lyric poetry | A brief poem emphasizing sound and expressing the personal feelings of the poet |
| Elegy | A mournful poem, usually about death |
| Ballad | A narrative poem in short stanzas originally meant to be sung |
| Narrative poem | A poem that tells a story |
| Sonnet | A fourteen-line poem usually in iambic pentameter and in one of two rhyme schemes: Italian/Petrarchan or Shakespearean |
| Mock epic | A parody of an epic poem that treats a trivial subject with epic grandeur |