POETRY ANTHOLOGY REVISION MATERIALS

Poems to use for pursuit of love

Sir Thomas Wyatt — Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde

Richard Lovelace — The Scrutiny

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester — A Song (Absent from thee)

Poems to use for damaging / dangerous love

Sir Thomas Wyatt — Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde

John Keats — La Belle Dame sans Merci

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester — A Song (Absent from thee) — IRONIC

Poems to use for superficial love

John Donne — The Flea

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester — A Song (Absent from thee)

Thomas Hardy — At an Inn

Ernest Dowson — Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae

poems to use for enduring love

William Shakespeare — Sonnet 116

Robert Burns — Song (Ae fond kiss)

Christina Rossetti — Remember

Poems to use for barriers to love

Thomas Hardy At an Inn

Sir Thomas Wyatt Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde

Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress

Robert Burns Song (Ae fond kiss)

CONTEXT: Sir Thomas Wyatt Who so list to hount I knowe where is an hynde

• COURTLY LOVE - glorifying women, amorous love, suffering lover

• PETRARCH - Italian renaissance, courtly love

• ANNE BOLEYN - suggested links, affair, the deer

• COURTS - Wyatt was in the court of Henry VIII, poetry was often recited.

CONTEXT: William Shakespeare Sonnet 116

• Elizabethan period, peacetime

• abundance of sonnets

• Innovative sonnet style, although the genre originated in renaissance Italy.

• seen as addressed to the “young man”

CONTEXT: Donne The Flea

• also written in the 1590’s boom of sonnetry

• satirising traditional love poetry

• metaphysical poetry - beyond the physical - complex arguments and wit - paradox, conceit, wit, religious imagery, carpe diem.

• eventually converted to protestantism and was famous for his sermons.

CONTEXT: Marvell To His Coy Mistress

• post civil-war - politics avoided in his poetry

• metaphysical, involves wit, abstract arguments, and paradoxes

• Petrarchan Blazon is used (physical body description)

• he was also a politician, and friends with the republican John Milton, he helped pioneer political satire.

CONTEXT: Lovelace The Scrutiny

• Cavalier Poetry - Pro-monarchy, boisterous and womanising

• strict forms and meter, tackling Carpe Diem attitudes and themes of nature, social life, and sex.

• meant to be entertaining - to be performed

CONTEXT: Wilmot Absent From Thee

• restoration poetry, new king, liveliness, free speech, liberalism

• A courtier, infamously lifestyled, nihilistic atheist, alcoholic

CONTEXT: Wilmot The Garden Of Love

• romantic poet

• worked as painter, printer, engraver - was a worker

• He was, himself, religious - but he was deeply critical of organised religion and the COE in particular.

• subjectivity, emotion, nature, anti-industrialisation — romantic tropes

CONTEXT: Burns Ae Fond Kiss

• Agnes Maclehouse is being addressed - they had an affair but she had to return to her husband in the Caribbean.

• Scottish influence on language, widely regarded as the national poet

• regarded as a pioneer of the romantic movement.

• subjectivity, emotion, nature, anti-industrialisation — romantic tropes

CONTEXT: Burns She Walks In Beauty

• poet and politician - leading figure of the Romantic poets

• famous and popular, notorious for his alleged romance with his half-sister

• subjectivity, emotion, nature, anti-industrialisation — romantic tropes

CONTEXT: Rosetti Remember

• Taught well in Italian literature by her family, studied Dante and Petrarch.

• Suffered great illness and mental issues, was often surrounded by death.

• Family greatly connected to the arts

• Customs of mourning and bleak Romantic poetry (connected to Prince Albert’s death?)

• subjectivity, emotion, nature, anti-industrialisation — romantic tropes — not all present

CONTEXT: Hardy TWO POEMS: The Ruined Maid & At An Inn

• Victorian period - deep class division

• critical of social norms of sexism and exploitation

• prostitution was a major social issue, deeply exploitative but gave some economic freedom

• period of sexual strictness and censorship

• At An Inn is likely biographical, mirroring his failed affair with Florence Henniker

• victorian realist.

CONTEXT: Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci

• negative capability - suspension of reasoning and philosophical certainty in the face of artistic beauty - related to suspension of disbelief

• Georgian-era poetry / romantic

• used tropes of medievalism and fantasy - supernatural

• his brother - to whom he was very close - died 1818

• his relationship with Fanny Brawne.

CONTEXT: Dowson Non Sum Qualis

• Decadent movement - obsession with excess and eroticism

• radical, self-indulgent, hedonistic.

• Perversity, excess, egotism.