Poetry

• Passionate Shepherd - Christopher Marlowe


  Elizabethan era

  Pastoral poem

  Patriarchal society

  Shepherds were poor at the time

  May Day - associated with sex
• Sonnet 73 - William Shakespeare


  Elizabethan

  Addressed to the Fair Youth

  References to Henry VIII closing the monasteries

  Last of the poems written to the FY
• Sonnet 130 - William Shakespeare

  Elizabethan

  Addressed to the Dark Lady

  Mocks the traditional Petrarch sonnet

  Also mocks the patriarchal soicety
• There is a Garden in her Face - Thomas Campion


  More famous as a musician

  Originally set to music

  Jacobean

  Influenced by Petrarch

  Patriarchal society
• The Flea - John Donne


  Jacobean

  Metaphysical poet

  Sex was viewed as "mingling of the blood"

  Patriarchal society

  Catholic at the time when Catholicism was illegal
• To Virgins, To make much of time - Robert Herrick


  Cavalier poet

  Priest

  Patriarchal society

  Women married young

  Dad died when he was 1 - themes of death
• The Collar - George Herbert


  Caroline

  Clergyman

  Reflects devout, God-fearing views of the era

  Metaphysical poet
• To my Dear and Loving Husband - Anne Bradstreet


  Puritan

  One of the first settlers in the US

  Happily married with 8 children

  1st female poet published in America
• Satirical Elergy on the Death of a late and famous General - Johnathan Swift


  Georgian

  Satirising John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough

  Biblical references

  Criticises other unpopular leaders of the time (George I)
• London - William Blake


  Georgian (George III)

  Songs of Experience

  French Revolution was 5 years earlier

  Industrial Revolution - child labour

  Romantic poet
• The Schoolboy - William Blake


  Songs of Innocence - childhood

  Blake was homeschooled

  Romantic poet

  Georgian

  Partly a pastoral poem
• Composed upon Westminster Bridge - William Wordsworth


  Georgian

  Romantic poet

  Stopped the carriage and sat on top to write the poem

  Written before the factories opened
• She walks in beauty - Lord Byron


  Georgian

  Hedonistic lifestyle

  Romantic poet

  Written about his half cousin, Mrs Wilmot

  Byron was "mad, bad and dangerous to know"
• She walks in beauty - Lord Byron


  Georgian

  Hedonistic lifestyle

  Romantic poet

  Written about his half cousin, Mrs Wilmot

  Byron was "mad, bad and dangerous to know"
• Ozymandias - Percy Shelley


  Late Georgian

  Romantic poet

  Ramesses II - cruel pharaoh; given a Greek name

  Atheist

  Ozymandias - ruler of air
• England in 1819 - Percy Shelley

  George III was incredibly unpopular

  Prince Regent George was immature

  Peterloo massacre

  Prime minister was Robert Jenkinson

  Critical of the church

  Regency era
• Sonnet 43: How do I love thee? - Elizabeth Barrett Browning


  Early Victorian

  Troubled relationship with her parents because her husband (Robert) was a lower class than her

  Married Robert in secret

  Committed Christian throughout her life
• My Last Duchess - Robert Browning


  Victorian

  Based on a true story of the Renaissance period

  Duke Alfonso of Ferrera's wife died of suspicious circumstances

  Reflects patriarchal society of Victorian times
• Remembrance - Emily Brontë


  Victorian

  Emily and her sister Anne wrote the Gondal stories - Rosina Alcona

  An elergy to one of the characters from these stories

  Victorian emphasis on the importance of mourning

  influenced by the Romantics
• The Voice - Thomas Hardy


  1912 - shortly after his wife, Emma Gifford, died

  Edwardian

  Autobiographical

  Lyric poem

  Hardy felt guilty after her death so went to Cornwall (where they first met)

  Marriage was troublesome
• God's Grandeur - Gerald Manley Hopkins


  Late Victorian

  Protestant upbringing but converted to Catholicism

  Became a priest

  Written in 1877 after Darwin published his Theory of Evolution
• To a child dancing in the wind - W. B Yeats


  Symbolist poet

  Failed to persuade Maude Gonne to marry him

  Edwardian era - 1921

  Focused heavily on the aging process
• Leisure - William Henry Davies

  Edwardian era - 1911

  Working class background

  Spent life as a travelling homeless person

  Advances in technology
• The Author to her book - Anne Bradstreet


  Caroline era

  She was a Puritan

  Moved to America

  First collection of poems published in 1650 called The 10th Muse Lately Sprung Up

  Bradstreet didn't want this collection published - her poems were taken by her brother-in-law to be published in England

  Publishers would heavily edit work

  Society was patriarchal - women expected to be mothers, not poets

  Lyric poem
• On First Looking into Chapman's Homer - John Keats

  Romantic poet

  Published in 1816 (Georgian era)

  Keats read Chapman’s translation of Homer on a night in 1815 when

  he and his friend, Cowden Clarke spent the whole night reading it.

  Next morning the friend found this sonnet at breakfast table at 10 O’

  clock

  Uranus had recently been discovered
• Kubla Khan


  Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge


  • Prominent Romantic poet
• Poem was written whilst Coleridge was living in Somerset


  1797
• How the poem was written

  1. Coleridge had been taking opium whilst reading a book describing Xanadu, the summer palace of Kubla Khan

  2. He fell asleep and dreamt about the palace

  3. Upon waking, he set about writing a poem about his dream

  4. When Coleridge returned to his poem, after the visitor had left, he found that he could no longer remember the dream and therefore the poem remained incomplete
• Poem was not actually published until Coleridge's friend and fellow poet Lord Byron persuaded him to publish it


  1816