What Is a Literary Movement?

• A literary movement (or school of literature or poetry) is a grouping of writers who share similar aims, years of publication, and bases of operation.

Metaphysical Poetry

• Metaphysical poetry is a mostly 17th-century English poetic mode that breaks with earlier Renaissance ideas about romantic poetry.

• Metaphysical poems - often exhibit introspective meditations on love, death, God, and human frailty.

• Metaphysical poetry - is famous for its obscurity (and therefore a favorite choice of the College Board).

What to Look for in Metaphysical Poetry

• Wit, irony, and paradox are paramount—wit is often seen in the pairing of dissimilar objects into the service of a clever, ironic analogy or paradoxical conceit.

• Elaborate stylistic maneuvers (ornamental conceits, dazzling rhymes) are pulled off with aplomb.

• Huge shifts in scale proliferate (for example, ants to planets).

Augustan Poetry

• Augustan poetry - is best known for its rhymed, heroic-couplet satire.

• Coming between the baroque metaphysical poets and the enthusiastically sincere romantic poets, the wickedly funny Augustan poets went back to antiquity for their inspiration.

• They translated Greek and Roman epics into English using heroic couplets and wrote their own original work based on classical forms.

What to Look for in Augustan Poetry

• Wit, irony, and paradox are still as important here as they were for the metaphysical poets, but one must also add brevity to the list when discussing the Augustans. Their poems can be quite long but because they employ the heroic couplet so pointedly, their observations are often quite pithy.

• The ongoing subject of Augustan poetry is human frailty.

• These poets were also likely to dress absurdly mundane plots in the outward appearance of heroic epic poetry for comic effect.

• Current events figure in these poems, either allegorically or directly.

Romantic Poetry

• Romantic poetry - written in English is a (mostly) 19th-century English and American poetic mode that breaks with earlier neoclassical ideas about poetry by specifically emphasizing that these poems were written in.

• This poetry is emotional and often enthusiastic in its embracing of the large, impressive forces of nature and the infinite resources of the human imagination.

What to Look for in Romantic Poetry

• Natural imagery redeems the imagination of the individual stuck in the crowded, industrial torment of the city.

• The human imagination empowers the individual to escape from society’s strictures, established authority, and even from fear of death.

• The sublime (impressively big, obscure, or scary) is the main descriptive mode rather than the “merely beautiful.”

• Transcendence is the ultimate goal of all the romantic poets.

The Symbolists

• The symbolists are often considered the link between the schools of romanticism and modernism.

• Full of the yearning for transcendence, which they inherited from the romantic poets, the symbolists took this yearning in a more decadent and sensual direction, foreshadowing the kind of sexual frankness one often finds in modernist work.

What to Look for in Symbolist Poetry

• Many symbolist poems deal with the crepuscular (dusk and dawn), and with the time between waking and sleep. Dreams or dream states figure prominently in many symbolists works of art, as dream experiences afford human beings one of the best opportunities to explore the relationship between states.

• Synaesthesia, the using of one sense to describe another, proved to be a favorite mode of the symbolists.

• The French symbolists proved particularly adept at using words with three or four simultaneous meanings, creating a resonance among groups of these words. By carefully choosing his words, the speaker of this poem keeps all three meanings viable throughout this beautifully dense piece.

• Often associated with the “art for art’s sake” movement that placed aesthetics and form above political relevance or reducible message.

Modernism

• Modernism is often characterized as a revolutionary force.

• A goal shared with the symbolists but one with which the modernists were much more daring.

• Modern poets valued the idea of “make it new.”

• Modernists believed that poetry should be valuable and understandable.

What to Look for in Modernist Poetry

• Chock full of allusions, these poems reduce human experience to fragments.

• Romantic notions of the importance of individuality were overtaken by systematic representations of human consciousness in the emerging fields of psychology and sociology, so poems from this time are often concerned with how an individual relates to his environment.

• Romantic yearning for freedom was usurped by proponents of political systems, such as socialism or fascism, that saw human beings not as individuals but as servants of the state.

• Modernist poems sometimes efface individuality, choosing to focus on machines or other inanimate objects rather than nature or human beings.

The Harlem Rennaissance

• Art associated with the Harlem Renaissance was mostly created in the first half of the 20th century, after World War I, during the movement of African Americans to northern industrial cities (called the Great Migration).

• Harlem in New York City was one of the most famous African American neighborhoods during this time. Jazz, poetry, painting, novels, dance, electrified blues, and the study of folklore thrived in these neighborhoods and took on many of the same concerns as the modernists.

What to Look for in Harlem Renaissance Poetry

• Content is often directly related to African American concerns and issues of the time.

• Many Harlem Renaissance poems rely on repetitive structure similar to blues lyrics or on fragmented structure similar to jazz improvisation.

Postmodernism

• Academic controversy continues as to whether works labeled postmodern are merely a later version of the modernist tendencies developed in the 20th century or whether they are actually part of a new and separate movement.

• Usually, the most that academics can agree on regarding postmodernism is that the term “postmodern” is insufficient.

• Most postmodern works were created in the second half of the 20th century, and though they share some of the concerns and motivations of modernists, they often take these principles to a much different end.

• Even more so than other literary labels, “postmodern” is a label that is rejected by the majority of artists who are labeled as such. Instead, smaller contingents of writers exist, often in conflict with other postmodern groups.

What to Look for in Postmodern Poetry

• Parody, irony, and narrative instability often inform the tone.

• Allusions are just as likely to be made to popular culture as they are to classical learning.

• Strictly binary concepts often collapse. Here, the predominant ideas are ones that spread across a spectrum rather than fit strictly into one box or the other.

• The Internet is a perfect example of a postmodern invention.

• The surface is often more interesting to postmodern artists than any ideas of depth.

The Beats

• A post–World War II phenomenon, the Beats used different settings over the years to practice their brand of hallucinogenic, visionary, and anti-establishment art: New York City, San Francisco, Tangiers, Prague, and Mexico City witnessed Beat events, as did many places in between.

• Beat poets were quite good at mythologizing themselves, sharing a sense of personal frankness with the confessional poets and a sense of interdisciplinary energy with the New York School.

• Buddhism was important to many members such as the importance of the individual, the imagination freed from society’s constraints, and the yearning for transcendence.

• “First thought, best thought” describes the aesthetic ideal of the Beat poet.

• Politics directly informs many of their poems, either through specific references to members of the government or specific references to issues important to them.

Confessional Poets

• Confessional poets took the personal pronouns (I, me, my) seriously and explored intimate content in their poetry.

• Love affairs, suicidal thoughts, fears of failure, ambivalent or downright violent opinions about family members, and other autobiographically sensitive material moved front and center in these poets’ works.

• More than just poets who shared personal stories with their readers, these poets also invested a good deal of time and effort in their craft, constructing verse that paid careful attention to rewritten prosody.

New York School of Poets

• New York School poets saw themselves as fellow travelers of the abstract expressionist school of painters.

• Their aesthetic mode overlapped with Beat spontaneity and confessional-poet frankness but was much more ironic and more interested in the surreal combination of high art and popular art allusions.

• These poets often viewed themselves as artists who could help the reader see the world in new and different ways.

• These poets reveled in the combination of the serious and the silly, the profound and the absurd, the highly formal and the casual.

Black Arts Movement

• Poets of the Black Arts were often associated with members of the Black Power movement who grew frustrated with the pace of the changes enacted by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

• These poems are often politically charged, unrepentant challenges to the white establishment.

Black Mountain Poets

• Besides teaching in the same place (Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, North Carolina) for some time and sharing an abiding interest in process over product, these poets seem quite different.