AP Exam Flashcards - Movements

Question 1

Metaphysical Poetry (late 1500s - late 1600s)

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

Donne; Herbert; Marvell

Answer 2

Metaphysical poets

Question 3

Augustans

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

Dryden; Pope; Swift; Gay; “Gulliver’s Travels”; “A Beggar’s Opera”

Answer 4

Augustan poets and prose

Question 5

Romanticism

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

Wordsworth; Shelley; Keats; Blake; Emerson; Whitman; “Les Miserables”; “The Scarlet Letter”

Answer 6

Romantic poets and prose

Question 7

Symbolists

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

Baudelaire; Mallarme; Verlaine; Rimbaud; Wilde; Yeats; Symons; Eliot

Answer 8

Symbolists

Question 9

Modernism

Answer 9

• 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

Question 10

Stevens; Carlos Williams; H.D.; Moore; Eliot; cummings; Pound; “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”; “Heart of Darkness”

Answer 10

Modernist poets and prose

Question 11

The Harlem Renaissance

Answer 11

• takes place during Great Migration
• focus on contemporary African American issues
• musical; could be repetitive (like blues) or fragmented (jazz) segments

Question 12

Dunbar; McKay; Hughes; Cullen; “Their Eyes Were Watching God”; “Invisible Man”

Answer 12

Harlem Renaissance poets and prose

Question 13

Postmodernism

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

Beats/Beatniks

Answer 14

• hallucinogenic, visionary, anti-establishment art forms
• freedom of imagination, transcendence, individuality
• some integration of Buddhist ideals
• “first thought, best thought”
• politically informed

Question 15

Ferlinghetti; Ginsberg; Corso; Snyder; Kerouac

Answer 15

Beat poets and authors

Question 16

Confessional movement

Answer 16

• intimate, personal content
• “ripping off the facade”
• doubts, anxieties, mental illness

Question 17

Berryman; Lowell; Sexton; Plath; “The Bell Jar”

Answer 17

Confessional poets and prose

Question 18

New York School

Answer 18

• spontaneity, frankness, allusions to popular arts and culture
• juxtaposition of uncommon objects
• matching of serious with silly, formal with casual, profound with absurd

Question 19

Guest; Koch; O’Hara; Ashberry

Answer 19

New York School poets

Question 20

Black Arts Movement

Answer 20

• formed from Black Power movement, frustration with slow pace of civil rights advocacy
• politically charged, militant, perseverant challenges to white society

Question 21

Brooks; Baraka (LeRoi Jones); Sanchez; Shange

Answer 21

Black Arts Movement poets

Question 22

Black Mountain

Answer 22

• process over product
• taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina

Question 23

Olson; Levertov; Creeley

Answer 23

Black Mountain poets

Question 24

Emily Dickinson

Answer 24

• isolation during transcendental period
• wit, irony similar to metaphysical poets

Question 25

Robert Frost

Answer 25

• active during modernism, usually more concerned with traditional verse forms and customs

Question 26

W. H. Auden

Answer 26

• wrote both before and after WWII
• similar to modernists but transcendent of most labels

Question 27

Elizabeth Bishop

Answer 27

• sometimes grouped with confessionals, but more reticent with her own emotions

Question 28

Adrienne Rich

Answer 28

• feminist and political poet advocating for women of the past/present

Question 29

Seamus Heaney

Answer 29

• rural imagery as vehicle for issues of identity
• Irish heritage, confusion of being a poet