Poetry Timeline

The Odyssey-Homer (8th Century B.C.)

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer folly in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Hyperion; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, too, about all these things, oh daughter of Jove, from whatsoever source you may know them.

SONNET 116- Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

72. John Donne

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,

For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, 5

Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,

Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.

Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell, 10

And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,

And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

excerpt from The Prelude- William Wordsworth

O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek

Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings

From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come

To none more grateful than to me; escaped

From the vast city, where I long had pined

A discontented sojourner: now free,

Free as a bird to settle where I will.

What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale

Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove

Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream

Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about; and should the chosen guide

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!

Trances of thought and mountings of the mind

Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,

That burthen of my own unnatural self,

The heavy weight of many a weary day

Not mine, and such as were not made for me.

Long months of peace (if such bold word accord

With any promises of human life),

Long months of ease and undisturbed delight

Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn,

By road or pathway, or through trackless field,

Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing

Upon the river point me out my course?

Water- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The water understands

Civilization well;

It wets my foot, but prettily,

It chills my life, but wittily,

It is not disconcerted,

It is not broken-hearted:

Well used, it decketh joy,

Adorneth, doubleth joy:

Ill used, it will destroy,

In perfect time and measure

With a face of golden pleasure

Elegantly destroy.

Paul Revere's Ride- William Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march

By land or sea from the town to-night,

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch

Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,--

One if by land, and two if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

.....

excerpt from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock- T.S. Eliot

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question…

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers- Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy

bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

excerpt from Howl- Allen Ginsberg

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking

for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly

connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking

in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating

across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw

Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs

illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes

hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the

scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing

obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

excerpt from Daddy -Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time--

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

Confessionalist Poets

Mid-20th Century

• poetry of the personal
• dealt with issues that had not previously been discussed in American poetry
• private experiences: death, trauma, depression, relationships
• maintained high level of craftmanship
• Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, others

Poetry Timeline

Harlem Renaissance

Early 20th Century

• grew out of blossoming African American culture in creative arts
• sought to break free of Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of their lives
• cultural celebration
• challenge racism and stereotypes with intellect, literature, art, and music to promote progressive or socialist politics
• "Sometimes I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me." -Hurston
• Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, others

Romantic Poets

Late 18th Century- Early 19th Century

Elizabethan and Shakespearean

16th Century

Fireside Poets

Mid-19th Century

Ancient Greek

7th-4th Centuries BC

• by-product of the Italian Renaissance
• ballads and sonnets
• recited before dramas at the theater
• socially open Elizabethan Era allowed poets to write about humanistic and religious subjects
• rise in academic study and literacy during late 16th Century
• resembled expressionism of Ancient Greeks
• William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, others

• wrote about American politics and New England landscapes
• highly didactic, emphasizing conventional 19th Century values: duty, honor, personal responsibility, and hardwork
• "fireside" because families would gather around the fireplace and read the poems together
• valued conventional over experimental
• paid attention to rhyme and strict metrical cadences
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, others

• multi-generational
• first large group to write poems--past poems passed down through oral tradition
• one of the greatest cultural and intellectual communities in the world
• lyric poems with a three-act structure
• foundation f almost all modern literature
• ode, epic, lyric, tragedy, and comedy
• Homer, Sappho, Euripides, many more

• spanned 25 years and included 7 poets
• wrote, traveled, and briefly lived together
• vastly different religious beliefs and divergent lifestyles
• cultivated individualism, reverence for the natural world, idealism, physical and emotional passion, and an interest in the mystic and supernatural
• challenged readers to open their minds and imaginations
• poets died young and their idol, Johann Goethe's death caused era to end
• William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy B. Shelley, John Keats, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, others

1600

1850

1000

1900

B.C.

Modernism

Late 19th Century-Mid-20th Century

American Transcendentalists

Mid 19th Century

Metaphysical Poets

17th and 18th Century

Provencal

11th-13th Century

• Holy Roman Empire did away with artistic expression
• inspired by Latin and Greek poets with Christian precepts
• spiritualization of passion, imagery, and secret love
• began as court singers and progressed to troubadours who traveled to deliver poems, news, songs, and dramatic sketches
• Dante Alighier, Geoffrey Chaucer, others

• philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution
• re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors
• self consciously skeptical of language and its claim on coherence
• Ezra Pound vowed to "make it new" and "break the pentameter"
• played with language and time
• Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, other

• followed Elizabethan era
• defined and compared subjects through nature, philosophy, love, and musings about the hereafter
• poets minimized their place in poem
• looked beyond the obvious
• John Dryden, William Blake, Samuel Cowley, John Donne, others

• Mission: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."
• espoused utopian values, spiritual exploration, and full development of the Arts
• personal expression and development of a socialized community
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, others

The Beats

Mid-20th Century

• combination of wanderlust, disenfranchisement, and creative expression- handful of students and young intellectuals in New York and San Francisco
• a desire to live life as they defined it
• battle against social conformity and literary tradition was central to their work
• Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso, others

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