AQA ALevel English Lit - Unseen Poetry Context

When Renaissance period?

1500 - 1670

Key poets Renaissance period?

Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson Christopher Marlow, John Milton, Sir Thomas Wyatt

Key features Renaissance period?

Rhetorical genius, emotional complexity, Frequently ostentatious, repetitious, subtle wit. Aimed to encapsulate beauty and truth in words. Looked outward at turbulent world of early modern history but also gazed inwards to focus on issues of identity and questions of human desire.

Context Renaissance period?

English Civial War took place during the 1640s, a period of 'Restoraion' occured from 1660 - 1689

When Restoration?

1660 - 1710

Key features Restoration?

Literary tastes changed, readers coming to prefer clarity over ambiguous figurative language of Metaphysical.

Key poets Restoration?

John Dryden, John Wilmot 2nd Earl of Rochester, William Wycherly, Margaret Cavendish.

Context Restoration?

Civil War, Cromwell's Puritan sympathies led to paring down of liturgical serrvices and closure of local churches.

When Enlightenment Era?

1700 - 1800

Key poets Enlightenment era?

Samuel Johnson, John Locke, Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Wilmot, Richard Lovelace

Key features Enlightenment Era?

Shaped by order and restraint. Celebration of the capability of the mind and what could be achieved through science. Favoured a simpler, precise style and the rise of satire.

Context Enlightenment Era?

Intellectuals began to consider the possibility that freedom and democracy were the fundamental rights of all people.

When Romantic period?

1798 - 1870

Key poets Romantic period?

Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats

Key features Romantic period?

More concerned with the individual more than the socieety. 'Melancholy'. Strong connection with medievalism and mythology. Nature as inspiration.

Context of the romantic period

Reaction to Enlightenment. In response to the Industrial Revolution in Europe, Romanticism emphasised tranquility of rural landscape. The ideals of freedom. independence and equality that characterised from the French Revolution spread throughout Eruope. Romantics resisted that society could control the individual mind.

When Victorian Period?

1837 - 1901

Key poets Victorian Period?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rosetti, Alfred Tennyson, Oscar Wilde

Key features Victorian Poetry?

Escapist, abstract imagery particularly in the early victorian period. Myth, folklore, sensory elements and sentimentality.
By mid century, most poets moved away from the abstractions and metaphysical tropes of the Romantics and chose a more realistic verse. Arguably this period bridged the move from Romanticism to modernism.

When Modernism?

1910 - 1965

Key Poets Modernism?

T.S Elliot, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, W.H Auden, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Edna St Vincent Millay.

Key features Modernism?

Took advantage of the new spirit of the times. Minimalist language and a lessening of structural rules for imagist poetry. Imagist poetry where writer does not talk about the themes behind the image but lets the image be the focus. Stylistic experimentation, disrupted syntax, stream of consciousness, focus on images, theme of alienation.