The History of English poetry
The earliest
known English poem is a hymn on the creation; Bede attributes this
to Cædmon (fl. 658–680), who was, according to legend, an
illiterate herdsman who produced extemporaneous poetry at a monastery at Whitby. This is generally taken as marking the beginning
of Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Much of the
poetry of the period is difficult to date, or even to arrange chronologically. By and large, however, Anglo-Saxon poetry is
categorised by the manuscripts in which it survives, rather than its date of
composition. The most important manuscripts are the four great poetical codices
of the late 10th and early 11th centuries, known as the Cædmon manuscript, the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book, and the Beowulf manuscript.
With the Norman conquest of England, beginning in 1111 the
Anglo-Saxon language rapidly diminished as a written literary language. The new
aristocracy spoke predominantly Norman. While Anglo-Norman or Latin was preferred for
high culture, English literature by no means died out, and a number of
important works illustrate the development of the language. Around the turn of
the 13th century, Layamon wrote his Brut, based on Wace's 12th century Anglo-Norman epic of the same
name. It was
with the 14th century that major works of English literature began once again
to appear; these include the so-called Pearl Poet's Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight; Langland's political and religious allegory Piers Plowman; Gower's Confessio Amantis; and the works of Chaucer, the most highly
regarded English poet of the Middle Ages, who was seen by his contemporaries as
a successor to the great tradition of Virgil and Dante.
The Renaissance was slow in coming to England, with the generally
accepted start date being around 1509. It is also generally accepted that the
English Renaissance extended until the Restoration in 1660. The writings
of English humanists like Thomas More and Thomas Elyot helped bring the ideas and attitudes associated with
the new learning to an English audience.
With the
consolidation of Elizabeth's power, a genuine court sympathetic to poetry and
the arts in general emerged. This encouraged the emergence of a poetry aimed
at, and often set in, an idealised version of the courtly world.
Among the best
known examples of this are Edmund
Spenser's The Faerie
Queene, which
is effectively an extended hymn of praise to the queen, and Philip
Sidney's Arcadia. This courtly trend can also be seen in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender. This poem marks the introduction into an
English context of the classical pastoral, a mode of poetry that assumes an
aristocratic audience with a certain kind of attitude to the land and peasants.
The explorations of love found in the sonnets of William Shakespeare and the poetry of Walter
Raleigh and
others also implies a courtly audience. Shakespeare also popularized the English
sonnet, which made
significant changes to Petrarch's model. A collection of 154 by sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage
of time, love, beauty and mortality, were first published in a 1609 quarto.
John
Milton (1608–74)
is considered as one of the greatest English poets. He is generally seen as the last major poet of the English Renaissance,
though his most renowned epic poems were written in the Restoration period,
including Paradise Lost (1671). Among the important poems Milton
wrote during this period are L'Allegro, 1631; Il Penseroso, 1634; Comus (a masque), 1638; and Lycidas (1638). Paradise Regained (1671) and Samson Agonistes (1671) are also
highly regarded.
A number of women poets of note emerged during the period of the
Restoration, including Aphra Behn, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Chudleigh, Anne Finch, Anne Killigrew, and Katherine Philips.
The last quarter of the 18th century was a time of social and political
turbulence, with revolutions in the United
States, France, Ireland and elsewhere. The
main poets of this movement were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. The birth of English
Romanticism is often dated to the publication in 1798 of Wordsworth and
Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads.
The Victorian era was a period of great political, social and economic
change. The major Victorian poets were John Clare, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins, though Hopkins was not
published until 1918. The Victorian era continued into the early years of the
20th century and two figures emerged as the leading representative of the
poetry of the old era to act as a bridge into the new. These were Alfred
Tennyson and Thomas Hardy.
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