intro poetic forms and genres

POETIC FORMS & GENRES

HL1004N

Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres


READING Reading Poetry by Furniss and Bath (2nd

ed. Pearson Longman, 2007) Poetry: the Basics by Jeffrey Wainwright

(Routledge, 2004) Read the recommended sections for each

week (see weblearn) Preparatory reading is your

responsibility.


LITERARY PERIOD Poems will carry characteristics and

concerns of the time in which they were written

Having some knowledge of these characteristics and expectations will help you understand individual poems


EXTRACT 1Mark but this flea, and mark in this,How little that which thou deny’st me is;Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be

(Donne, ‘The Flea’, c.1600)


EXTRACT 2In Words as Fashions the same Rule will

hold;Alike Fantastick if too New or Old;Be not the first by whom the New are

try’d,Nor yet the last to lay the Old aside.

(Pope, ‘Essay on Criticism’, 1709)


EXTRACT 3My genial spirits fail;

And what can these availTo lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

If it were a vain endeavour,Though I should gaze for ever

On that green light that lingers in the west:I may not hope from outward forms to winThe passion and the life, whose fountains are

within. (Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, 1802)


EXTRACT 4Nobody heard him, the dead man,But still he lay moaning:I was much further out than you thoughtAnd not waving but drowning.

(Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving But Drowning’, 1957)


DEFINITIONS...

By a LITERARY PERIOD we mean a span of time which is thought to display some typical features which differentiate it from the periods which precede and follow it.


450-1066 Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) Period

1066-1500 Middle English Period 1500-1660 The Renaissance

1558-1603 Elizabethan Age 1603-1625 Jacobean Age 1625-1649 Caroline Age 1649-1660 Commonwealth Period (or Puritan

Interregnum)


1660-1785 The Neoclassical Period 1660-1700 The Restoration 1700-1745 The Augustan Age (or Age of

Pope)1745-1785 The Age of Sensibility (or Age of

Johnson) 1785-1830 The Romantic Period 1832-1901 The Victorian Period

1848-1860 The Pre-Raphaelites 1880-1901 Aestheticism and Decadence (fin

de siècle)


1901-1914 The Edwardian Period 1910-1936 The Georgian Period 1914- The Modern Period 1945- Postmodernism Not everyone will agree on these dates, or

even some of the labels for the periods. A period is a kind of useful fiction or myth.


Many periods that literary historians have identified are marked by a strong sense of a common agenda amongst many but not all writers.

An agenda shared by many writers of a period may be dependent either positively or negatively on previous writers and generations.


‘One must avoid confusing the grid and the artists, the interpretative schema and the works undergoing interpretation. The categories are only means of investigating these facts, the works; and one should think of them as working hypotheses, instruments of, research, scaffoldings which lose their utility once the building is finished’

Jean Rossuet, quoted by Frank Kermode, History and Value (1988),


‘You should never assume that a poem will simply or straightforwardly conform to any general description of the literary period or movement in which it participates, yet you will not be able fully to respond to a poem’s impact if you cannot see how it works within and reworks the conventions of its literary context.’ (Furniss & Bath)


GENRE

When we talk about the ‘genre’ of a work of literature, we mean that it is a recognisable type of work, that it has some sort of relationship to other works of its kind.

e.g. Elegy: a poetic genre that expresses mourning and grief.

More on genre in future lectures.

intro poetic forms and genres

Education