Topographical Poetry Notes

Topographical Poetry

• Defined as a mode rather than a sub-genre due to its varied poetic forms.
• It's a topic around which different poems converge.
• Poems about places can range from elegies to panegyrics to experimental poetry.
• Key aspects:
  • Represents a place.
  • Presents the place in terms specific to the historical time.
  • Speculates about the broader significance of the place.

Definition of Place Poetry

• George Puttenham (16th century): Topographical poem as a "counterfeit place."
• A poetic form concerned with the invention of place, either real or imagined.
• Poetry is a product of the imagination; it represents places through a literary filter.

Samuel Johnson on Local Poetry

• Local poetry is tied to specific, real places.
• Poets add embellishments drawn from history, memory, thought, or philosophy.
• The poem adds to the place, achieving something through its description.

John Thelwell on Place Poetry

• Place poetry uses geography to explore national identity, values, history, morality, and politics.
• It's a genre with a cultural agenda, involved in defining or redefining national identity.
• It is a public form of poetry, acting as a mouthpiece for national identity.

Key Phases in Topographical Poetry:

• Classical:
  • Pastoral: Idealizes rural life. Examples: Theocritus & Virgil’s Eclogues
  • Georgic: Focuses on farming and labor. Examples: Hesiod, & Virgil’s Georgics
• Early Modern/Renaissance:
  • Includes pastoral and georgic elements.
  • Country-house poem: Describes a patron's house and values. Examples: Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst”, Aemelia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell
  • Prospect poem: Describes a landscape view and meditates on political values. Example: John Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill.”
• Eighteenth-Century: Prospect poetry dominates.
• Romantic: Prospect poetry mediates between poet's emotions and places.
• Modernist: Crisis in representation after WWI. Examples: T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, William Carlos Williams's Paterson.
• Contemporary: Responds to ecological crisis (anthropocene) and decolonial place-unmaking. Example: Evelyn Araluen's Learning Bundjalung on Tharawal.