Author Archives
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San Francisco Renaissance
In the two decades following World War II, an overarching reevaluation of art and its purpose occurred. This reconsideration gave rise to a number of identifiable movements and schools worldwide in the same period; even though those movements had some… Read More ›
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The Objectivist Poets
The term objectivist was coined by Louis Zukofsky in 1930 for “‘Objectivists’ 1931,” a special issue of Poetry for which he served as guest editor. Of the many poets included in that issue and in its follow-up anthology, An “Objectivists”… Read More ›
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The New York School of Poetry
The New York school of poetry was an innovative group of poets made up principally by Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. Their poetry was experimental, philosophical, staunchly antiestablishment, and antiacademic. The group began writing… Read More ›
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The Language Poets
The writers who emerged in the 1970s and have been identified variously as “Language poets,” “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets” and “so-called Language poets” generally conceive of themselves less as a movement or school than as a loosely knit community of writers who,… Read More ›
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Black Mountain School of Poetry
What came to be known as the Black Mountain school of poetry represented, in mid-20th-century America, the crossroads of poetic innovation. The name of this poetic movement derives from Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an experimental college founded in… Read More ›
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Deep Image Poetry
Deep image poetry was part of the post–World War II, New American poetry inspired by the Beats and the Black Mountain School. The “deep” of deep image refers not to some attempt at political or philosophical “profundity” but to the… Read More ›
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Fugitive/Agrarian School of Poetry
The Fugitives, a group of poets from Nashville, Tennessee, led the vanguard for modernist verse in the South in the 1920s. In contrast to the Imagist movement centered in England, the Fugitives emphasized traditional poetic forms and techniques, and their… Read More ›
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Harlem Renaissance
Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later… Read More ›
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An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts movement was a controversial literary faction that emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic arm of the Black Power movement, a militant political operation that rejected the integrationist purposes and practices of the Civil Rights… Read More ›
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An Introduction to the Beat Poets
The Beat poets were a group of friends living in New York City in the decade following World War II who, through their collaborations, experiments with poetry rhythms, and questioning of the status quo, forever altered the relationship of poetry… Read More ›
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Analysis of Andrew Marvell’s The Garden
Andrew Marwell’s The Garden (1681) remains a favorite among critics of poetry by Andrew Marwell. Although he most probably wrote it during retirement between 1650 and 1652, some critics have argued convincingly it may have been produced earlier in his… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Literary critics place the writing of John Donne’s A Valediction Forbidding Mourning in the year 1611, when he traveled to Europe. He left behind his pregnant wife, and their separation probably inspired his poem. The title term mourning suggests the… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Donne’s To His Mistress Going to Bed
By far John Donne’s most erotic poem, To His Mistress Going to Bed (1669) , also known as Elegy 19, is composed of 48 lines of rhyming couplets with a meter of iambic pentameter. Not an elegy at all in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress
One of his best poems, To His Coy Mistress (1681) is the most read of all work by Andrew Marvell, characterized by some critics as the best metaphysical poem in English. Widely anthologized, this poem appears often in undergraduate poetry… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
As have other of works by Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712) has inspired many full-length books of critical consideration, so important was its effect upon Pope, his readership, the genre of poetry, and Pope’s legacy. The new… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Milton’s Paradise Regained
Written in four books, John Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671) tells the story of Christ’s temptation by Satan and ultimate victory, using as a historical basis the version of the tale found in the Gospel of Luke. Milton preferred Luke’s version… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe
Although a first authorized published edition of Mac Flecknoe; or, A satyr upon the True-Blue-Protestant Poet, T.S. by John Dryden appeared in Miscellaney Poems in 1684, it had been circulated in unapproved versions since 1682. Critics cannot pinpoint the year… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Milton’s Lycidas
John Milton had known Edward King at Cambridge and wrote Lycidas (1638) as an elegy for his friend’s death. When word arrived that King had drowned in the Irish Sea returning to Dublin in 1637, his many friends were strongly… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Donne’s A Hymn to God the Father
Scholars of the works of John Donne continue the search for various elements in his poetry to aid in the dating of their creation and even in the ways to refer to the poems. As Donne did not title his… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther
John Dryden wrote The Hind and the Panther (1687) in order to contribute to an ongoing dispute between Protestant and Catholic factions. While his exact date of conversion from devotion to the Church of England to Catholicism remains uncertain, it… Read More ›
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