Seventeenth Century Anglo-American Poetry

1. Seventeenth Century Anglo-American Poetry

2. Renaissance • John Done • The Flea • The Sunne Rising

3. Reading Poetry • How do we read and thereby understand poetry? • What’s the point?

4. Forms • Elegy: 17C, refers to a reflective poem that laments the “loss of something or someone (or loss or death more generally, although in Elizabethan times it was also used to refer to certain love poems” (Murfin 102). • Epic: “A long and formal narrative poemwritten in an elevated style that recounts the adventures of a hero of almost mythic proportions, who often embodies the traits of a nation or people” (105). • Ballad: “A poem that recounts a story—generally some dramatic episode—and that has been composed to be sung. . . . Use simple language” (27). • Verse satire: The critique of social or political subjects in verse form. Satire comes in to general forms—direct and indirect.

5. Versification • Rhyme and Meter • Rhyme royal: Introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer. A seven line stanzaic form written in iambic pentameter with the rhyme sheme ababbcc. • Ballad Stanza: four line stanza with an abcb rhyme. First and third lines have four accented syllables while the second and fourth lines have three.

6. Purpose • “Whether public or private, poetry helped reveal the preordained order presumed to govern human lives—a goal especially important to settlers facing the illegibility of a strange new world” (532).

7. Edward Taylor • Meditative Poetry: the end of which is “not to . . .celebrate the person being elegized but yet another demonstration of God’s being glorified in man’s dependence” (Pearce 42).

8. A sheaf of Poems • What commonalities do you perceive in these poems?

9. Edward Taylor