This document provides an overview of poetic forms and genres. It discusses literary periods from Old English to postmodernism and how poems carry characteristics of the time period in which they were written. Having knowledge of these periods can aid understanding of individual poems. The document also examines genre as a recognizable type or category of literary work and how poems relate to other works of the same genre. Four poem extracts from different historical periods are included for reference.

1. Poetic Forms & Genres HL1004N Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

2. Reading Reading Poetry by Furniss and Bath (2nd ed. Pearson Longman, 2007) Poetry: the Basics by Jeffrey Wainwright (Routledge, 2004) Read the recommended sections for each week (see weblearn) Preparatory reading is your responsibility. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

3. Literary Period Poems will carry characteristics and concerns of the time in which they were written Having some knowledge of these characteristics and expectations will help you understand individual poems Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

4. extract 1 Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deny’st me is; Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea, our two bloods mingled be (Donne, ‘The Flea’, c.1600) Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

5. extract 2 In Words as Fashions the same Rule will hold; Alike Fantastick if too New or Old; Be not the first by whom the New are try’d, Nor yet the last to lay the Old aside. (Pope, ‘Essay on Criticism’, 1709) Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

6. extract 3 My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? If it were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. (Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, 1802) Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

7. extract 4 Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. (Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving But Drowning’, 1957) Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

8. definitions... By a LITERARY PERIOD we mean a span of time which is thought to display some typical features which differentiate it from the periods which precede and follow it. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

9. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres 450-1066 Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) Period 1066-1500 Middle English Period 1500-1660 The Renaissance 1558-1603 Elizabethan Age 1603-1625 Jacobean Age 1625-1649 Caroline Age 1649-1660 Commonwealth Period (or Puritan Interregnum)

10. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres 1660-1785 The Neoclassical Period 1660-1700 The Restoration 1700-1745 The Augustan Age (or Age of Pope) 1745-1785 The Age of Sensibility (or Age of Johnson) 1785-1830 The Romantic Period 1832-1901 The Victorian Period 1848-1860 The Pre-Raphaelites 1880-1901 Aestheticism and Decadence (fin de siècle)

11. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres 1901-1914 The Edwardian Period 1910-1936 The Georgian Period 1914- The Modern Period 1945- Postmodernism Not everyone will agree on these dates, or even some of the labels for the periods. A period is a kind of useful fiction or myth.

12. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres Many periods that literary historians have identified are marked by a strong sense of a common agenda amongst many but not all writers. An agenda shared by many writers of a period may be dependent either positively or negatively on previous writers and generations.

13. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres ‘One must avoid confusing the grid and the artists, the interpretative schema and the works undergoing interpretation. The categories are only means of investigating these facts, the works; and one should think of them as working hypotheses, instruments of, research, scaffoldings which lose their utility once the building is finished’ Jean Rossuet, quoted by Frank Kermode, History and Value (1988),

14. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres ‘You should never assume that a poem will simply or straightforwardly conform to any general description of the literary period or movement in which it participates, yet you will not be able fully to respond to a poem’s impact if you cannot see how it works within and reworks the conventions of its literary context.’ (Furniss & Bath)

15. Genre When we talk about the ‘genre’ of a work of literature, we mean that it is a recognisable type of work, that it has some sort of relationship to other works of its kind. e.g. Elegy: a poetic genre that expresses mourning and grief. More on genre in future lectures. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres