The earliest English poetry (written in Anglo-Saxon) celebrates the heroic deeds of kings and warriors in the period between the arrival of the Angles and Saxons in the fifth century A.D. and their conversion to Christianity in the seventh century. But this poetry does not survive in original form. The earliest recorded poems (from the second half of the seventh century) are written, like all Old English poetry, in alliterative verse form, in which sounds at the beginnings of words are repeated in each line. Some are secular paeans to kings, such as “Widstith;” others, including the nine-line “Caedmon’s Hymn,” are early examples of a centuries-long tradition of English Christian devotional poems. Caedmon, a Northumbrian monk, (ca. 658–80) is the first known English poet. “The Dream of the Rood” (ca. 700), in which the rood, or Christ’s cross, describes its experience to the dreamer, is considered the best example of the Anglo-Saxon devotional poem. While it is often ascribed to the early English poet, Cynewulf, there is doubt as to whether he is actually its author.
Beowulf is the finest example of the Old English heroic epic, a narrative verse form depicting the deeds of a valorous hero. Written in the eighth century by an unknown author, it is set in Scandinavia and tells the story of Beowulf, who comes to the aid of his neighbors, the Danes, who are besieged by the water monster, Grendel, and his mother. Beowulf slays both Grendel and Grendel’s mother after all others have failed. The epic is overlaid with Christian elements, including a judging God and a biblical lineage for the monster Grendel, but remains a celebration of courage and honor, the virtues of a harsh, pre-Christian heroic age. Later examples of heroic poems include the “Battle of Maldon” and the “Battle of Brunanburgh” (both undated).
Middle English poetry first flourished in the 14th century, although some short lyrical poems, poems of an emotionally expressive nature, appeared as early as the 12th and 13th centuries. So, too, did lyrical ballads, mostly anonymous, which were popular into the 15th century. Among these lyrics, which have themes of nature (especially of springtime), love,
and Christian piety, are “The Cuckoo Song” and “Westron Wind.” Numerous short ballads—narrative verse meant to be sung or spoken aloud—such as “Barbara Allen,” “Lord Randall,” and “Sir Patrick Spens,” appeared from about 1200 to 1700.
Three other forms rose to prominence in the Middle English period. The romance, a narrative in which knights and other characters of chivalry are the main actors, is exemplified by Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1380–1400), the story of a brave knight who must defend the honor of King Arthur and his court after its invasion by the mysterious Green Knight. The elegy, a poem of mourning written to commemorate the death of a person and often used as a meditation on death or life, is exemplified by The Pearl (ca. 1360), believed to have been occasioned by the death of the poet’s daughter. The allegory, in which virtues or states of being are represented as persons or other objective forms, is exemplified by Piers Plowman (ca. 1362), which may have been written, or partly written, by William Langland, of whom little is known. The poem is an account of the Plowman’s dream vision of the history of Christianity and its current, somewhat corrupted, state.
♦Geoffrey Chaucer Considered the first great English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer was a Londoner who wrote in a Middle English dialect. His Canterbury Tales, which he began in 1386, is a narrative cycle told by 22 richly varied travelers brought together on a religious pilgrimage. It is one of the greatest works of English literature—ribald and comic in parts, yet profound and vivid in its portrayal of medieval life and character. Although Chaucer never completed this work, it develops unity and artistic resonance from the interplay among the characters, and through their tendency to respond to the stories of others in their own stories. Chaucer’s other poems include the love story Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls.
♦The Tudor Period The era of Tudor England, which began in 1485 with the accession of King Henry VII and lasted through the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, saw a modernizing of the English language, allowing it to reflect the humanist ideas and images of the European Renaissance. Fittingly, the sonnet, the 14-line form first developed in Italy, began to carve a deep impression into English poetry of the 16th century. Nearly all sonnets were love poems, often expressing disappointment or despair. The earliest English practitioners were Thomas Wyatt and Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey, who wrote the first sonnets with an “English” rhyme scheme, which arranged the poem in three four-line sections and one two-line section, rather than the Italian pattern of eight- and six-line sections. Howard also composed the first English blank verse, unrhymed 10-syllable lines with a regular meter, usually iambic pentameter (a set of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, repeated five times). Philip Sidney produced a similarly patterned sequence of love sonnets, Astrophel and Stella (ca. 1580).
During the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), there was a sudden outpouring of excellent poetry and drama that remains at the heart of the canon of English literature. The greatest nondramatic Elizabethan poet was Edmund Spenser, whose romantic and allegorical Faerie Queene (1590–96) is one of the finest English epics and stands apart from all other 16th-century narrative poetry. Its six books are each dedicated to a courtly virtue, and its strong ecclesiastical views mark it as the first masterly English Protestant poem. Among Spenser’s innovations was the nine-line stanza that is named for him. He, too, wrote a sonnet sequence, Amoretti (1595).
The leading Elizabethan dramatists, Christopher Marlowe and, greatest of all English writers, William Shakespeare, were also significant lyric and narrative poets. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) retold a classical Greek love story. Shakespeare used the Roman poet Ovid as the source of two narrative poems of his early career, the mythological Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). His 154-sonnet sequence, written in the 1590s and addressed to both a young man and a woman, is the crown of that Elizabethan tradition. (See Weekend 21, “William Shakespeare.”)
♦The Metaphysical Poets The turn of the 17th century brought with it the reign of James I (1603–25) and introduced two new traditions in English poetry that would endure until the century’s end: the Metaphysical style originated by John Donne, and the Cavalier style, embraced by the followers of Ben Jonson. John Donne created a poetry of intellectual and spiritual reaching, which in a later period was labeled “metaphysical.” Donne’s poetry was witty and sometimes abrupt in manner, allowing content to take precedence over form. Within his poetry, he made unusual imagistic and intellectual connections. Donne, a clergyman, wrote beautiful religious poetry including the Holy Sonnets, but
his equally trenchant poems of physical love would inspire others who wrote in this tradition.
Other poets of the Metaphysical school included George Herbert, who approached God with more certainty than Donne, but with similar leaps of imagery. In poems such as “Easter Wings” (1633) and “The Altar” (1633), he arranged the lines on the page such that they took the shape of his subject. Richard Crashaw, a convert to Catholicism, was influenced by Italian poetry and wrote idiosyncratic, baroque, passionately devotional verse that incorporated notably Italian Catholic flesh-and-blood images.
♦The Cavalier Poets Ben Jonson wrote spare, smooth lines modeled on classical poetry that are in striking contrast to those of the Metaphysical poets. Jonson’s poems included satires, a celebrated tribute to a great house (“To Penshurst,”1616), and a powerful memorial to Shakespeare. But it was his lyrics addressed to women, notably “To Celia,” published in 1616 (“Drink to me only with thine eyes”) that influenced the casual yet polished style of the Cavalier poets. In addition to being a poet, Jonson was also a leading Jacobean playwright.
The term Cavalier refers to supporters of Charles I, the king beheaded in 1649 during Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Revolution, eight years after Jonson’s death. The Cavalier poets modeled their work on the classical beauty of Jonson’s verse. The first and finest of the Cavalier poets, Robert Herrick, was one of a group of Jonson’s companions and admirers who called themselves “Sons of Ben.” Herrick’s lyrics, mainly short and sometimes programmatic, were often concerned with the natural things and the females that delighted him. These two subjects were often addressed in the same poem: “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”); or “Corinna’s Going-A-Maying.” These direct addresses to women, as well as urges to “seize the day” (carpe diem), were repeated by later Cavalier poets. The greatest carpe diem poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” was composed by Andrew Marvell, who wrote in both the Cavalier and Metaphysical traditions. A creator of lyrics, odes, and dialogues that married playful wit with deep significance, he has been called England’s most important minor poet.
♦John Milton is considered one of the greatest English poets, as well as a political and religious activist and tract writer. He lived through
the execution of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate (for which he served as foreign secretary) and the restoration of the monarchy with King Charles II. Milton was married twice, and twice made a widower, with three daughters from his first wife surviving into adulthood. His strained marriage with his first wife led to his controversial pamphlets in favor of divorce. His tract on censorship, Areopagitica (1644), anticipated modern views opposing government supervision of what could be printed. Blind after 1651, he wrote some of the finest English sonnets as well as the long paired poems, L’Allegro and Il Pensoroso (1645). His towering stature rests on the long, biblically-based poems of his later years: the epics Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671).
Paradise Lost is written entirely in blank verse. It begins with an invocation to a muse—a nod to classical Greek and Latin epics. Grappling with themes of predestination versus free will, Milton retells the story of humankind’s original sin, embellishing heavily on the book of Genesis and relating a richly detailed story involving Satan’s own estrangement from Heaven. Milton’s complex and compelling portrayal of Satan is considered one of the first literary portrayals of an antihero.
The narrative begins in Hell, where Satan, once a glorious member of God’s coterie, and his followers have been banished after rebelling against God. They plot revenge with a scheme to sabotage God’s beloved new creations: Earth and humankind. Satan travels to Earth, meeting his offspring, Sin and Death, on the journey. God sees Satan’s approach and predicts that humankind will fall from grace. God’s Son offers himself as a sacrifice in their place.
Satan deceives the archangel Uriel into ushering him into Paradise, where Adam and Eve share an idyllic existence. Satan overhears Adam reiterating to Eve that God has forbidden them to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Uriel realizes his error and warns the other archangels of the imposter. Satan is discovered and evicted from Eden. God sends the archangel Raphael to caution Adam and Eve, reminding them that their own free will determines their destiny. Satan slips back into Paradise, disguised as a serpent. Finding Eve alone, he convinces her to partake from the Tree of Knowledge. Adam is horrified, but decides to join her in mutual doom. Lust is the first manifestation of their fall from God’s favor. God’s Son comes to Earth and tells Adam and Eve that the consequences of their disobedience will be a life of pain, toil, and
eventual death. Satan returns to Hell, expecting to celebrate, but he and his followers are turned into serpents. Adam and Eve bicker, but resolve to survive by loving each other and serving God. God sends the archangel Michael to cast Adam and Eve out of Paradise. Michael shows Adam a vision of humankind’s future, which will be plagued with sin and grief, but Adam also sees that God’s Son will someday provide redemption. Adam and Eve sadly leave Paradise to begin an uncertain future.
Paradise Lost is considered the definitive epic poem of the English language. Paradise Regained, the counterpart to Paradise Lost, is a brief epic poem dramatizing Jesus as the epitome of Christian heroism, with a Joblike ability to constantly reaffirm faith in God and resist temptation while enduring increasingly difficult trials. The poem is structured as a series of arguments in which Satan unsuccessfully tries to tempt Jesus. Milton drew inspiration for the poem from the Book of Job and from the accounts of Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
In the Romantic period, the focus of poetry moved away from society, toward nature and the individual expression of inner feelings. Arising in the wake of the French Revolution, Romanticism tilted to the political left, embraced nationalistic yearnings, and expressed rebellious impulses. Its poets reached beyond 18th-century restraints to commune with realities and absolute principles, such as love, beauty, and truth, which existed outside the boundaries of everyday life.
William Blake, a visionary poet-artist who, wrote both lyrics (Songs of Innocence, 1789; and Songs of Experience, 1794) and long prophetic and narrative poems. Blake was characteristically Romantic in his deep concern for economic oppression, as well as in his simple diction and use of symbolism. He is viewed as both a political revolutionary and a religious mystic. His prophetic poems include “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (ca. 1793) and “America” (1793).
The year 1798 (marking the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s collaborative effort, Lyrical Ballads) remains a boundary line for the Romantic movement. In a manifesto-like preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), William Wordsworth explicitly separated poetry’s future from its neoclassical past, prescribing that
poems should deal with “common life” in “language really used by men,” and pronouncing poetry to be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Wordsworth grew up in the English Lake District, the beauty of which inspired his poetic career. With simple diction, he described humble people and celebrated nature. Wordsworth’s output includes short lyric poems, meditative odes such as “Tintern Abbey” and “Intimations of Immortality,” and long poems, including the masterly, autobiographical The Prelude, completed in 1805 but published posthumously.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known for narrative poems tinged by supernatural effects, particularly “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which was published in Lyrical Ballads, as well as “Kublai Khan” and “Cristabel,” both published in 1816. He also excelled in writing more sober, meditative poems such as “Frost at Midnight” (1798) and “Dejection: An Ode” (1802). His output was constricted by physical suffering and opium addiction.
The relative brevity of the Romantic era was caused in part by the early deaths of three of its greatest poets of the second generation, George Gordon (better known as Lord Byron), Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. The eldest of these, Byron, was a notorious lover who had affairs with more than 200 women, including his half sister, and several men. He was an enormously popular writer in his own time, regarded most notably for his long narrative and satirical poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24). His “Byronic hero,” the individualistic, iconoclastic immoralist, appears definitively in his tragedy Manfred (1817). He died in Greece at age 36 while training troops for the country’s war of independence.
Shelley was a more philosophical poet who believed in the transforming power of love. Born to wealth, he was attracted to nonconformity and radical causes. He was a composer of lyrics and politically inflected poems such as “Ode to the West Wind,” and his advocacy of the Romantic impulse to overcome human limitations is well expressed in the title of his great versedrama, Prometheus Unbound (1820), which offers the possibility of humanity’s moral triumph over evil. He eloped with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (best known as the author of Frankenstein) in 1814, fleeing to France, then Italy, where he created his finest works before drowning at the age of 30.
John Keats was a poet of sensuous and emotional experience to whom life was “a vale of soul-making.” He pronounced, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” (1819) the quintessentially Romantic sentence: “Beauty is truth,
truth beauty.” Yet his beautiful works also expressed the sadness that accompanies human yearning. Keats produced more great writing in a comparably brief period than any other English poet. Important early poems included “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and Endymion. In 1819, poor, sickly, and unhappily in love, he wrote an astonishing series of superior poems, including his six great odes, published in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems. He also composed some of the finest English sonnets and two aborted, but celebrated “epics,” Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. In melodious, exquisitely sensuous, beautifully phrased verse, Keats expressed the tension between the richness and sadness of physical and emotional experience. He died in 1821 at the age of 26, believing his work would never survive.
Sir Walter Scott, a Scotsman who achieved distinction as a novelist and as a narrative lyric poet, is also considered a Romantic poet. Like other Romantics, including Keats, Scott sometimes reached into the medieval past for his themes, which informed his first full-length narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), and his most successful poetic work, The Lady of the Lake (1810).
♦The Victorian Age During the long reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901, England was transformed into the most vigorous industrial, capitalist society ever known, and its empire gained its farthest reach. It was an age in which the population began to shift from the country to the cities, and the advance of science encroached on the ground of religious certainty. These matters roiled the poetic imagination and diversified poetic points of view.
During the Victorian age, religion was subject to experimentation, renunciation, and doubt. The dominant, longest-lived poet of the period, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, absorbed, early in his career, the age’s uncertainty about material and scientific progress. Tennyson, racked by the early death of his best friend, expressed his melancholy and longing for faith in his first successful volume of poems, and later, in an extended elegy for that friend, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850). Tennyson embraced faith in God and the afterlife. He found further assurance in his country’s distant past, most thoroughly explored in his epic Idylls of the King (1859–62).
Faith and doubt were also pervasive issues for Victorian poets Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold. As a young man, Browning made the transition from atheism to belief, and he has often been misconstrued as
having harbored a Pollyanna-ish certainty that, as he once wrote, “God’s in his heaven/All’s right with the world.” In fact, he was a writer of psychological depth, keenly aware of human corruption and fully conscious of the implications of Darwin’s science, whose belief in a transcendent God was buffeted from many sides. Although Arnold wrote two renowned pastoral poems, “The Scholar Gipsy” (1853) and “Thyrsis” (1865), he is considered the emblematic Victorian poet of doubt and alienation, particularly for his most famous poem, “Dover Beach” (1867), in which he spoke hauntingly of an “eternal note of sadness.”
Between Tennyson and Browning, particularly, there is an obvious difference of poetic style. While Tennyson wrote within the great tradition of fluid and sonorous English verse, Browning’s diction was more colloquial, his rhythms less regular, and his poetic modes more experimental, all of which traits appear in his brilliant dramatic monologues, such as “My Last Duchess” (1842). Both styles had disciples. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, leader of the “Pre-Raphaelite” artistic-poetic movement (which advocated an earlier, simpler style of painting than was prevalent at the time) was a poet of rich color and smooth meter. His sister, Christina Rossetti, was a lyrical poet of strong religious sensibility. Browning’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was best known for an extended series of love sonnets, including Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). Edward FitzGerald translated and revised the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1857–59), a selection of poems by a 12th-century Persian poet; his version, recognized for its polished beauty, quickly gained great popularity. Algernon Charles Swinburne, a Pre-Raphaelite in his early career, later became entranced by the sound of words and metrical experiment.
♦Late Victorian and Early 20th–Century Poetry In late Victorian times, a number of strains ran independently through English poetry. In the 1890s, one of the great novelists of the second half of the 19th century, Thomas Hardy, brought his dark but compassionate vision to the writing of lyric poetry, and over the next 30 years he developed into a major poet. He wrote poetry of plain language but stark power, including Wessex Poems and Other Verses, a selection of 51 poems set against the bleak Dorset landscape so often featured in his novels. In the same decade, A.E. Housman, a famous classics scholar, published a wistful and classically spare volume of lyrics, A Shropshire Lad (1896).
The term decadent refers to a school of writing, most popular in France, but present in England as well, in which art took precedence over nature. The Decadents produced poems that rejected Victorian convention and reflected the somewhat antisocial ideal of “art for art’s sake.” The two most important poets of the British Decadent movement were Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson. Dowson, the iconic English Decadent, was a sonorous, incantatory poet who characteristically expressed the loss of love, youth, and beauty, as well as a weariness with life that may have contributed to his dissipation and early death. Oscar Wilde, whose novel The Picture of Dorian Gray exemplifies the Decadent school’s preoccupation with art and decay, looked back to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites as a model for his verse, which includes The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897).
The most influential poet of the Victorian age, the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, is often not considered a Victorian at all. Because of his extraordinary break with the poetic traditions of his era, and because he was not published until 1918, long after his death, he is instead often grouped among poets of the 20th century. His originality included the development of an irregular “sprung” meter in which poetic feet of varying syllables are used in an attempt to mirror the rhythms of prose, a style that changed poetic rhythm; a precise diction that was partly invented; and the extensive, forceful use of alliteration.
Hopkins’s verse is at times bright and at times somber. He is considered one of the language’s most powerful religious poets. Like many of his predecessors, he was a master of the sonnet. Some of his best-known poems are “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (1876), “God’s Grandeur” (1877), and “Pied Beauty” (1877).
♦The End of the Victorian Age World War I had a profound influence on the direction of English poetry. Rudyard Kipling’s patriotic poems, featuring stoically virtuous troops in India and other distant places, gave way to palpable expressions of combat experience by England’s World War I poets. One of these, Rupert Brooke (1877–1915), still sang patriotically, “There’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England;” but others, such as Wilfred Owen (1893–1918); “Anthem for Doomed Youth”), Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), and Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918), wrote with darker realism and increasing bitterness. Their vivid lines, like the Great War itself, delivered a decisive finish to Victorian times.