Literary Movement Overview

1. Literary Movement Overview AP English Literature and Composition

2. 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: • Emily Dickinson • Robert Frost • W. H. Auden • Elizabeth Bishop • Adrienne Rich • Seamus Heaney

3. Metaphysical Poetry: Poets • John Donne (1572-1631) • George Herbert (1593-1633) • Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

4. 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 test.

5. 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 • This may seem like a cliché (ex: time heals wounds)

6. Augustans John Dryden (1631-1700) Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

7. 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. (Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. Canto One. 147-153)

8. 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 based on classical styles.

9. 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 observations are often short and to-the-point.

10. Common topic: human frailty. • They often mock human behavior.

11. Augustans were likely to place ridiculously boring plots (ex: the cutting of a noble maiden's hair in Rape of the Lock), in the form of heroic epic poetry for comic effect.

12. 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 another poet of his day and takes sides in political debates of the day.

13. Romantic Poetry • English Romantic Poets • William Wordsworth (1770-1850) • Percy Shelley (1792-1822) • John Keats (1795-1821) • American Romantic Poets • Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) • Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

14. 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) • Henry David Thoreau: “Walking” (an essay)

15. 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. • These are on the AP exam quite often.

16. 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, obscure or scary) is emphasized, rather than simply being beautiful

17. 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 meditation on life and death in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

18. The Symbolists • Representative French Symbolist Poets: • Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) • Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) • Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) • Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

19. R Symbolist-influenced poets who wrote in English: • Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) • W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) • Arthur Symons (1865-1945) • T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

20. Related Prose • French Symbolist Prose • Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907): A Rebours (Against the Grain) • English Symbolist Prose • Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray

21. 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 deeper understanding of something by looking at something relatively simple), but they took this in a direction intended to gratify the senses.

22. 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 poems by Yeats or Eliot, which are often on the AP exam.

23. 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 different vowels in the poem "Voyelles.“

24. 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 properties of music, and we see some mellifluous (having a smooth rich flow) word choice and rhythms.

25. Symbolists are often associated with the "art for art's sake" movement. The art is more important than the "message."

26. Modernism

27. 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) • e. e. cummings (1894-1962)

28. 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 Awakening

29. 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. • Changes in art forms: abstract art, surrealism, etc. (Picasso, Dali, etc.)

30. Modernist Literature • So it’s not surprising that 20th century writers questioned what came before them and were willing to experiment with new forms with even more daring than the symbolists before them.

31. What to look for in Modernist poetry • Allusions. • Many times human experiences are reduced to fragments. • e. e. cummings poems may seem like random phrases thrown together.

32. 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 sections, each one referring to a blackbird in some way

33. 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”)… • Or how the environment helps create the individual (Stevens’s “The Snowman”)

34. 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 individuality and focus on machines or other inanimate objects instead, or they contain imagery of brutality (example: “The Yachts” by William Carlos Williams)

35. The Harlem Renaissance

36. Representative Poets • Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) • Claude McKay (1889-1948) • Langston Hughes (1902-1967) • Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

37. 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 • Ralph Ellison (1913-1994): Invisible Man

38. 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) • Many of them lived (sometimes due to necessity) in the same neighborhoods – Harlem, in New York City, was one of the most famous of these neighborhoods

39. Jazz, poetry, painting, dance, and folklore flourished and took on many similar concerns to those of the modernists • Harlem Renaissance poetry (esp. that of Langston Hughes) can be thought of as a branch of modernism

40. 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 (ex: Hughes’s “Montage of a Dream Deferred”)

41. 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 related to African American concerns, such as McKay’s “If We Must Die.”

42. Postmodernism

43. 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 20th century. • If not a different approach, then different goals.

44. 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 scientific inquiry.

45. 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 • The New York School of Poets.

46. 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 strictly into one box or the other, predominate.

47. 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 a silver wig and people notice the silver.”

48. The Beats

49. The Beats: Poets • Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) • Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) • Gregory Corso (1930-2001) • Gary Snyder (b. 1930)

50. The Beats: Related Prose • William S. Burroughs (1914-1997): Naked Lunch • Jack Kerouac (1922-1969): On the Road