AP Exam Flashcards - Movements
Metaphysical Poetry (late 1500s - late 1600s)
- break from Renaissance ideas
- highlight of realistic ideas through obscure references
- true, though cliched, ideas on love, death, God, and human frailty
- wit, irony, paradox to mask deeper statements
- comparisons used across scales (universality); e.g. worms to cosmos
Donne; Herbert; Marvell
Metaphysical poets
Augustans
- rhymed, heroic-couplet satire
- humor, comic effects
- iambic pentameter
- wit, irony, paradox; brevity in expressing ideas
- focus on human frailty
- current events, debates, etc. usually included
Dryden; Pope; Swift; Gay; “Gulliver’s Travels”; “A Beggar’s Opera”
Augustan poets and prose
Romanticism
- break from neoclassic ideas
- focus on common life, instead of myths and Greek/Roman ideas
- emotional
- focus on natural imagery and its relationship to imagination; BIG themes
- freedom from social limits, authority, fear of death
- focus on scale and sublime (impressively large, obscure, scary)
- ordinary transcendence
Wordsworth; Shelley; Keats; Blake; Emerson; Whitman; “Les Miserables”; “The Scarlet Letter”
Romantic poets and prose
Symbolists
- between romanticism and modernism; yearning for transcendence in the form of frankness
- symbols
- focus on crepuscular, dream states
- use of synaesthesia to highlight different sense
- words with multiple meanings
- focus on aesthetics, form, similarities to music rather than political comments
Baudelaire; Mallarme; Verlaine; Rimbaud; Wilde; Yeats; Symons; Eliot
Symbolists
Modernism
- twist of old topics through modern lenses
- allusions to highlight fragments of the human experience (component parts)
- focus on relationship between the individual and the environment; images through multiple points of view
- machines, inanimacy rather than humans
Stevens; Carlos Williams; H.D.; Moore; Eliot; cummings; Pound; “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”; “Heart of Darkness”
Modernist poets and prose
The Harlem Renaissance
- takes place during Great Migration
- focus on contemporary African American issues
- musical; could be repetitive (like blues) or fragmented (jazz) segments
Dunbar; McKay; Hughes; Cullen; “Their Eyes Were Watching God”; “Invisible Man”
Harlem Renaissance poets and prose
Postmodernism
- rejected by its artists
- characterized by subgroups (Beats, confessionals, New York School, Black Arts, Black Mountain)
- parody, irony, instability
- challenge of binaries and concretes
- allusions to both popular culture and classical ideas
- focus on the surface, rather than depth/center of ideas
Beats/Beatniks
- hallucinogenic, visionary, anti-establishment art forms
- freedom of imagination, transcendence, individuality
- some integration of Buddhist ideals
- “first thought, best thought”
- politically informed
Ferlinghetti; Ginsberg; Corso; Snyder; Kerouac
Beat poets and authors
Confessional movement
- intimate, personal content
- “ripping off the facade”
- doubts, anxieties, mental illness
Berryman; Lowell; Sexton; Plath; “The Bell Jar”
Confessional poets and prose
New York School
- spontaneity, frankness, allusions to popular arts and culture
- juxtaposition of uncommon objects
- matching of serious with silly, formal with casual, profound with absurd
Guest; Koch; O’Hara; Ashberry
New York School poets
Black Arts Movement
- formed from Black Power movement, frustration with slow pace of civil rights advocacy
- politically charged, militant, perseverant challenges to white society
Brooks; Baraka (LeRoi Jones); Sanchez; Shange
Black Arts Movement poets
Black Mountain
- process over product
- taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina
Olson; Levertov; Creeley
Black Mountain poets
Emily Dickinson
- isolation during transcendental period
- wit, irony similar to metaphysical poets
