AP Lit Notes Part 1

Anglo-Saxon Poetry (449-1066)

  • Written in Old English

  • Used alliteration (a challenge): Famed was this Beowulf: far flew the boast of him…

  • Beowulf is an example

  • Varied themes: heroes, narratives of battle, and religious works are common


Middle English Poetry (1200-1500)

  • Normans (French-Vikings) invade England in 1066

  • More emphasis on food order

  • Romance: story of adventure and longing

  • Taught moral lessons

  • Arthurian influence (from the Celts and the French)

  • Poetic Meter


Renaissance and Metaphysicals (1500-1660)

  • Concerned with form, meter, and structure

  • Shakespeare (page 976)

  • Puritanism: influenced poets like Milton

    • Rebellion against ornamentation

  • Metaphysicals (like John Donne) (page 1348)

    • Religious and mystical subject matter

    • Lengthy metaphors and comparisons


18th Century Poetry (1660-1800)

  • “Augustan” poets/Classical influence5x2+5x3(03)

  • Heroic couplets (no enjambment, punctuation matches lines)

  • Sometimes called “neoclassical”

  • Satire

  • Conventions are important

  • Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Jonathan Swift


Romanticism (1785-1870)

  • Emotion, passion, and uncontrolled desire

  • Age of Revolution (political and philosophical)

  • Focused on nature and appreciation of nature

  • Opposed to “excessive” logic and rigidity of previous periods

  • William Wordsworth, William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats

  • Worship of Beauty

  • La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1358)


Victorian (1830-1900)

  • Difficult to categorize as one thing

  • Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  • Some distance from emotion

  • Gerard Manley Hopkins is a bridge between Victorian and modern (page 929)


Modernism (1890-1950)

  • Also difficult to categorize as one thing

  • T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, e.e. cummings, William Butler Yeats (page 1376)

  • Experimentation with form and imagery

  • Post World War I (the world changed with that war)

  • Very diverse range


More Recent Poetry (1950-present)

  • IMPOSSIBLE to categorize

  • Difficult to know what will survive and what will not

  • Experimentation with form and imagery

  • Free verse is common, stretching the definition of a poem

  • Beat Poets, Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky