The evolution of English poetry

Meaningful experiences of development of the English poetry start with the epic poem Beowulf, written in a language that cannot be understand today. Indeed, Seamus Heaney had translated Beowulf in modern English.

The poem showed the alliterative use of the line with rhyme couplets. Being an epic poem, it was also a narrative poem: it told the story of the hero Beowulf. It is worth underlining that it was an oral form of poetry and therefore it had to rely a lots of sound devices in order to remember it and to hand down to posterity. It follows that the first forms of poetry are narrative as you can also see in Medieval ballads that generally are about tragic love stories, the supernatural and the fights on the borders between Scotland and England. Such ballads were organised into quatrains, used a very simple language suitable to be understood even by the illiterate. Even in this case of ballads, sound effects were of the most importance because ballads are a form of poetry composed to be danced during public festivals. The characters are just sketched and the novel mixes narration and dialogue. Thone is generally nostalgic. Setting is therefore really relevant because it contributes to atmosphere and mood. 

If ballads were ideally addressed to the common people in the Middle Ages a literary form suitable to the literate is represented by poetic forms like the prologues to the Canterbury Tales. The religious elements play significant role considered that the religious one. Consequently, the traditional values are the ones expressed by the Church.

During the Renaissance the features of the religious code are still present, but the intelligent reader meets courteous and lyrical poetry as you can see from the success of sonnet collections that presented women whose purpose and obligation are to morally raise man.  Gradually, the sonnet moves on from the courteous code even if it keeps its structure that in Elizabethan sonnet and mainly the one constitutes of 3 quatrains and a rhymical couplet. Being sonnets a lyrical form of poetry, they focus on intimate and personal elements and ultimately, they tell about reserved and personal experiences. It will be William Shakespeare through a personal use of parody he who will change the content of the sonnet form. Sufficient to think of Sonnet 130 where “my mistress’ eyes” do no longer remind the blue eyes of Dante’s Beatrice, but they rather are nothing like the sun. As a consequence, the courteous code that dominated all the lyrical experience of and on the contingent shows its first signs of transformation. This happens because human aspects and human virtues come to the first place. Man replaces God, without neglecting the religious element. Considering all Shakespearean drama as well as the Elizabethan: it is written in verse, where the privilege line is the jambic pentameter. It follows that the poetical registers of the dramatic experience have no meet the tastes of whatever spectator. Questions and issues, typically human represents the principle element of the play. Great Shakespearean tragedies being on the stage human beings’ faults: the thirst of power (Macbeth), the difficulty to make decisions and act accordingly (Hamlet), jealousy (Othello), lust (Anthony and Cleopatra). The human being refers however still to religious values respecting the philosophy of the chain of beings, where anybody has been growing a own place. This is reason why John Milton’s Satan is a demonic hero and yet really attractive. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” is Satan’s motto very appreciated by readers because they identify themselves in the peculiar human feature. John Milton is the second poet in importance after Shakespeare and gives voice to the Puritan element in his poetry. Readers appreciate Satan because they recognize themselves in his weaknesses.

An additional meaningful experience is the development of English poetry is given by metaphysical poetry that as T. S. Eliot will say can fuse mind and emotions and the mixture will be totally lost after metaphysical poetry of which John Donne is the most representative figure.

The novelty of metaphysical poetry consists of the poet’s skill to integrate experiences that belong to a different fields of human experience, and include also areas can considered far from the typical content of lyrical poetry. Earthquakes, geometrical aspects and others enter the poetical text resulting for the readers of the ‘700 particularly “strange”.

During the 18^th century poetry becomes mainly mock heroic: lines written to create a parody of aristocracy, a social class that in the period was gradually losing its mainstream position in favour of an emergent middle class. Alexander Pope writes a heroic poem called “The Rape of the Rock”: a poem to speak about a man from aristocracy that has cut a lock of a girl. It is simply to understand as the dignity of epic poetry result de-classed to speak about a trivial topic. Of course, is what the typical literary gender of the 18^th century, being the English literature the century that records the birth of the novel.