Unseen Poetry - Eras of Poetry

Between roughly 1500-1660 (Elizabethan and Jacobean)

Poets include: William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and John Milton

The sonnet, ballad and epic were all popular forms of poetry

Themes of heroism, mythology, identity and subjectivity and objects of human desire (ie love)

Iambic pentameter fairly common, with almost all poetry having meter in one form or another

Between roughly 1800-1850

Poets include: William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Forms include: Sonnet - Shakespearean and Petrarcahan, Ode and Lyrical Poetry

Themes include:individualism, imagination, idealization of childhood, families, love, nature, and the past

Between 1837 - 1901

Authors include: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde and Thomas Hardy

The form and structre of poetry became more diverse as poets began to explore new ideas and ways of expressing them.

Victorian poetry tends to be highly pictorial, using detailed imagery to convey thoughts and emotions.

Themes of the time included: the struggles between religion and science, nostalgia and sentimentality

From about 1900 to the present day

Famous Modern/Post-Modern Poets: Rupert Brooke, E. E. Cummings, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, Sylvia Plath, W. B. Yeats, Maya Angelou

Again as writers begin to explore new themes for writing the form of poetry changes, eaning the form of poetry varies depending on the writer.

The themes of modern and postmodern poetry vary however at the during WW1 and 2 war poetry, both pro and anti war, was fairly common