Poetry in English Language Literature
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UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DO PIAUÍ - UESPI CENTRO DE CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS E LETRAS – CCHL CURSO: LICENCIATURA PLENA EM LETRAS INGLÊS POETRY IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE LITERATURE Part two PROFA. DRA. MARIA DO SOCORRO BAPTISTA BARBOSA OUTUBRO 2012 1 Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. Robert Frost 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 3. Early 16th Century Literature ………………………………………………………. 4 3.1. Introduction: Early 16th century …………………………………………………. 4 Toward the Golden Age – Louis Untermeyer ………………………………………. 4 3.2. Renaissance Authors ……………………………………………………………. 4 Sir Thomas Wyatt ……………………………………………………………………… 4 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey ……………………………………………………… 8 4. Elizabethan Poetry …………………………………………………………………. 11 Elizabethan Poetry – Harry Blamires ………………………………………............. 11 4.1. Sir Philip Sidney ………………………………………………………………… 22 4.2. Edmund Spencer ………………………………………………………………… 25 4.3. William Shakespeare …………………………………………………………….. 28 5. Metaphysical and Cavalier Poets ………………………………………………… 31 Metaphysical and Cavalier Poets – Harry Blamires ……………………………… 31 5.1. John Donne ……………………………………………………………………….. 46 5.2. Richard Lovelace ………………………………………………………………… 50 5.3. Henry Vaughan …………………………………………………………………… 51 6. Restoration ………………………………………………………………………… 53 Milton to Dryden – Harry Blamires ………………………………………………… 53 6.1. John Milton ……………………………………………………………………… 64 Paradise Lost ………………………………………………………………………… 67 6.2. John Dryden ………………………………………………………………………. 82 7. Enlightenment ………………………………………………………………………. 83 Enlightenment – John Rahn ………………………………………………………….. 83 7.1. Alexander Pope ………………………………………………………………… 95 7.2. Robert Burns ……………………………………………………………………… 104 7.3. William Blake………………………………………………………………………. 107 8. Romanticism ………………………………………………………………………… 111 Form in Romantic Poetry – Elizabeth Nitchie ………………………………………. 111 8.1. William Worsworth ……………………………………………………………….. 124 8.2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge ………………………………………………………... 129 8.3. Lord Byron ………………………………………………………………………… 140 3 8.4. Percy Bysshe Shelley ……………………………………………………………. 146 8.5. John Keats ………………………………………………………………………... 151 9. Victorian Age ………………………………………………………………………... 155 Victorian Poetry – Harry Blamires …………………………………………………… 155 9.1. Elizabeth Browning ………………………………………………………………. 185 9.2. Robert Browning …………………………………………………………………. 187 9.3. Christina Rossetti ………………………………………………………………… 192 9.4. Gerard Manley Hopkins …………………………………………………………. 194 9.5. Alfred Tennyson ………………………………………………………………….. 196 10. Twentieth Century Poetry ………………………………………………………... 201 10.1. The Georgian Poets and the two World Wars ………………………………. 201 1898-1945: Hardy to Auden – George G. Gilpin …………………………………… 201 Thomas Hardy …………………………………………………………………………. 221 Rudyard Kipling ………………………………………………………………………... 225 W. H. Auden ……………………………………………………………………………. 227 10.2. Modernism ………………………………………………………………………. 230 Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot – Calvin Bedient ……………………………………………. 230 William Butler Yeats …………………………………………………………………… 231 D. H. Lawrence ………………………………………………………………………… 235 Mina Loy ………………………………………………………………………………... 239 10.3. British Poetry from 1945 to 1990 ……………………………………………… 242 Poetry in England, 1945-1990 – Vincent Sherry …………………………………… 242 Dylan Thomas …………………………………………………………………………. 269 Ted Hughes ……………………………………………………………………………. 271 10.4. British Poetry Now ……………………………………………………………… 273 Directions in late twentieth century and early twenty-first century poetry – Joseph Black et al …………………………………………………………………….. 273 Carol Ann Duffy ……………………………………………………………………….. 276 Alice Oswald …………………………………………………………………………… 278 References …………………………………………………………………………….. 281 4 3. Early 16th Century Literature 3.1. Introduction – Early 16th Century Toward the Golden Age Louis Untermeyer BETWEEN the twelfth and fifteenth centuries English literature was diffused as it was diverse; it was composed for no one type of audience and no special class. The ballads were written primarily for the entertainment of the common people, but even in so "courtly" a writer as Chaucer there is much that is forthright, racy, and vulgar — in the sense of vulgus, pertaining to "the people." As we approach the sixteenth century, literature grows more patrician; with Wyatt, Howard, Raleigh, and Spenser poetry becomes the expression of an aristocracy. The aristocratic spirit remained dominant for almost two centuries, when it gave way to a literature written with organized society as its background, a literature concerned with the middle class and written chiefly by the middle class. Another century brought another change. Society itself was challenged by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century; the "romantic" period of Wordsworth and Shelley was devoted to the idea of individualism. But, as the "new learning" began to lure the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century man of culture, civilization was reflected in an increasing "elevation" of manner. The social sense, as V. de Sola Pinto wrote in THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE, "was established by the Tudors, and exploited by the Stuarts, till it came to an end at the Revolution of 1688," when James II fled to France. -175- 3.2. Renaissance Authors o Sir Thomas Wyatt [1503?-1542] (In UNTERMEYER) THE reputation of Thomas Wyatt rests, rather heavily, on the fact that he was the first to employ the Italian sonnet form in English poetry. This characterization presents Wyatt in the role of a research student and a cold formalist. It is anything but a true picture. Born about 1503, dead before he was forty, Wyatt was a hot- blooded courtier. Married at eighteen to Lord Cobham's daughter, he was Anne 5 Boleyn's lover before she was married to Henry VIII, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London after Anne's later infidelities were discovered. In his mid-thirties he was again imprisoned on suspicion of treason, and it required a strong personal following to procure his release. As a poet, Wyatt was precocious. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, when he was thirteen, in 1516, the year of its opening. His undergraduate verses were being quoted when he received his M.A. at seventeen. At twenty-five, he was sent as an ambassador to Italy, and it was there that he came under the influence of the Italian love poets, especially Petrarch, whom he translated. But Wyatt was more than a translator and transplanter; he was an innovator. His experiments Figure 01. Sir Thomas Wyatt Source: were as bold as they were accomplished; his sonnets http://www.luminarium.org/renlit /wyattholbein.jpg gave a new stimulus to English poetry. The first of the following sonnets, although adapted from Petrarch, is presumed to refer to Anne Boleyn, and the thirteenth line — "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am" -- indicates that Anne Boleyn was either married to the king or was considered his exclusive property. The Hind And graven with diamonds in letters plain Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an There is written, her fair neck round hind, about, But as for me, helas! I may no more. "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am, The vain travail hath wearied me so And wild for to hold, though I seem sore, tame." I am of them that furthest come behind. -188- The Lover Renounceth Love Yet may I, by no means, my wearied mind Farewell, Love, and all thy laws for Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth ever! afore Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore, more: Since in a net I seek to hold the wind. Senec and Plato call me from thy lore Who list her hunt, I put him out of To perfect wealth my wit for to doubt, endeavor. As well as I, may spend his time in In blindest error when I did perséver, vain; 6 Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so I fly aloft yet can I not arise; sore, And nought I have, and all the world I Hath taught me to set in trifles no seize on, store; That locks nor looseth, holdeth me in And 'scape forth, since liberty is lever. prison, Therefore, farewell! go trouble younger And holds me not, yet can I 'scape no hearts, wise: And in me claim no more authority. Nor letteth me live, not die at my With idle youth go use thy property, devise, And thereon spend thy many brittle And yet of death it giveth me occasion. darts; Without eye I see; without tongue I For hitherto though I have lost my time, plain: Me list no longer rotten boughs to I wish to perish yet I ask for health; climb. -189- Description of the Contrarious I love another, and I hate myself; Passions I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain. I find no peace, and all my war is done; Lo, thus displeaseth me both death I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like and life; ice; And my delight is causer of this strife. Although Wyatt is continually classed as a sonneteer, he was a lyric poet of the first order. His passionate measures — at their best in the lines beginning: They flee from me, that sometimes did me seek -- strongly influenced his young friend, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and the lyricists who followed him. Wyatt's verse had its beginnings in the work of foreign poets, but its energetic fulfillment is his own. The quality may be undefinable, but it springs from a fresh awareness, an alertness which is immediately recognizable and finally unmistakable. The Lover Showeth How He Is To take bread at my hand; and now Forsaken they range Busily seeking with a continual change. They flee from me, that sometime did me seek, Thankéd be Fortune, it hath been With naked foot stalking within my otherwise chamber: Twenty times better; but once in Once have I seen them gentle, tame, speciál, and meek, In thin array, after a pleasant guise,