1. Literary Movement Overview
AP English Literature and Composition

2. Literary Movements Metaphysical Poetry Augustans Romantic Poetry
The Symbolists
Modernism
The Harlem Renaissance
Post Modernism
The Beats
Confessional Poets
New York School of Poets
Black Arts Movement
Black Mountain Poets
Some that don’t fit:
Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost
W. H. Auden
Elizabeth Bishop
Adrienne Rich
Seamus Heaney

3. Metaphysical Poetry: Poets
John Donne ( )
George Herbert ( )
Andrew Marvell ( )

4. Metaphysical Poetry: Definition
Metaphysical poetry broke with Renaissance tradition of writing love poetry that placed the loved one on a pedestal.
These poets wrote introspective meditations on love, death, God, and human frailty. These are much more realistic poems about sexual relationships.
These poems are famous for their difficulty and obscurity
For that reason, they are often chosen for the AP test.

5. Metaphysical Poetry: Look for
Wit, irony, paradox.
Pairing dissimilar things in a clever analogy.
Example: using astronomy & math to illustrate deep love for a wife.
Elaborate stylistic maneuvers (more about this later)
Huge shifts in scale.
Example: talking about ants and then planets.
Talking about the deep philosophical issues:
Passage of time
Difficulty of being sure
Fearful qualities that death inspires
This may seem like a cliché (ex: time heals wounds)

6. Romantic Poetry

7. Romantic Poetry English Romantic Poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Percy Shelley ( )
John Keats ( )
American Romantic Poets
Ralph Waldo Emerson ( )
Walt Whitman ( )

8. Related Prose (don’t write this down)
European Romantic Prose
Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe
Victor Hugo: Les Miserables
American Romantic Prose
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (boo…!)
R.W. Emerson: “The Poet” (essay that inspired W. Whitman to write poetry)
Henry David Thoreau: “Walking” (an essay)

9. A Quick Definition
Romantic poets broke away from earlier ideas about poetry by writing in “the real language of men” about “common life” (Wordsworth).
Emotional and enthusiastic poetry.
Embraces the large, impressive forces of nature and the human imagination.
These are on the AP exam quite often.

10. How to Recognize Romantic Poetry
Natural imagery saves the individual from crowded, industrial city.
The imagination allows the individual to escape society's control, authority, and fear of death.
The sublime (extreme, as impressively big, obscure or scary) is emphasized, rather than simply being beautiful

11. Also, perhaps most importantly, transcendence (exceeding usual limits of understanding) in the ordinary things of life is the ultimate goal.
Example: Keats turns looking at an old urn into a meditation on life and death in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

12. Modernism

13. Representative Modernist Poets
Wallace Stevens ( )
William Carlos Williams ( )
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) ( )
Marianne Moore ( )
T. S. Eliot ( )
e. e. cummings ( )

14. Related Modernist Prose
James Joyce ( ): A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Virginia Woolf ( ): Mrs. Dalloway
William Faulkner ( ): As I Lay Dying
Kate Chopin ( ): The Awakening

15. Modernism The 20th century saw a lot of change:
Einstein’s theories of physics.
Two world wars and the millions who died.
Incredible advances in technology that aided in killing millions of people.
Changes in art forms: abstract art, surrealism, etc. (Picasso, Dali, etc.)
20th century writers questioned what came before them and were willing to experiment with new forms with even more daring than the symbolists before them.

16. What to look for in Modernist poetry
Allusions
Reference to someone or something that is well-known
Many times human experiences are reduced to fragments.
E. E. cummings poems may seem like random phrases thrown together.

17. The influence of Cubism
Picasso picture (Guitar, Bottle, Bowl of Fruit and Glass on Table)
Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” comes in 13 sections, each one referring to a blackbird in some way

18. From the influence of the emerging fields of psychology and sociology…
Poems from this era are often concerned with how an individual relates to his environment (Eliot’s “Prufrock”)…
Or how the environment helps create the individual (Stevens’s “The Snowman”)

19. Due to the influence of movements such as fascism and socialism that saw human beings not as individuals but as servants of the state…
Some Modernist poems erase individuality and focus on machines or other inanimate objects instead, or they contain imagery of brutality (example: “The Yachts” by William Carlos Williams)

20. The Harlem Renaissance

21. Representative Poets Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
Claude McKay ( )
Langston Hughes ( )
Countee Cullen ( )

22. Related Prose
Zora Neale Hurston ( ): Their Eyes Were Watching God
Nella Larsen ( ): Passing
Richard Wright ( ): Black Boy and Native Son
Ralph Ellison ( ): Invisible Man

23. The Harlem Renaissance: Definition
Mostly 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)
Many of them lived (sometimes due to necessity) in the same neighborhoods – Harlem, in New York City, was one of the most famous of these neighborhoods

24. Jazz, poetry, painting, dance, and folklore flourished and took on many similar concerns to those of the modernists
Harlem Renaissance poetry (esp. that of Langston Hughes) can be thought of as a branch of modernism

25. What to look for in Harlem Renaissance literature:
Content directly related to African American concerns of the time.
Ex: Dunbar’s “Frederick Douglass” is about his continuing influence, long after his death
Many HR poems rely on repetitive structure, similar to blues lyrics (ex: Dunbar’s “Sympathy”) or on fragmented structure similar to jazz improvisation (ex: Hughes’s “Montage of a Dream Deferred”)

26. Several of these poets, especially Langston Hughes, sought a new American idiom (a style or form of artistic expression that is characteristic of an individual, a period or movement ) alongside other African American artists such as blues singer Bessie Smith.
Others combined European forms like the sonnet with a content and a tone more related to African American concerns, such as McKay’s “If We Must Die.”

27. Other important poets

28. Some that don’t fit the above categories:
Emily Dickinson
Robert Frost
W. H. Auden
Elizabeth Bishop
Adrienne Rich
Seamus Heaney

29. Emily Dickinson ( )
Basically isolated from others during the transcendental period.
Shares some attributes with the compressed wit and irony of the metaphysical poets

30. Robert Frost ( )
Active during modernism, but was more concerned with traditionally minded verse forms and a locally colored content that cloaked a profound philosophical vein.

31. Types of Poetry

32. Ballad
a narrative folk song. Usually created by common people and passed orally due to the illiteracy of the time.
Subjects include killings, feuds, important historical events, and rebellion.

33. Elegy
A type of literature defined as a song or poem, written in elegiac couplets, that expresses sorrow or lamentation, usually for one who has died.

34. Epic
A long poem in a lofty style about the exploits of heroic figures.
These often come from an oral tradition of shared authorship or from a single, high-profile poet imitating the style.

35. Lyric
a song-like poem written mainly to express the feelings of emotions or thought from a particular person, thus separating it from narrative poems.
These poems are generally short, averaging roughly twelve to thirty lines, and rarely go beyond sixty lines.
These poems express vivid imagination as well as emotion and all flow fairly concisely.

36. Ode
Usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, an elevated style, and an elaborate stanza pattern.
It often praises people, the arts of music and poetry, natural scenes, or abstract concepts.

37. Others:
Sonnets
Narrative