poet anth - contexts Flashcards
Hawk roosting - Ted Hughes
Spent most of his life living in rural areas and spent lots of his childhood outdoors. Enjoyed hunting, fishing, and swimming. Fascinated by animals as a child. Collected and drew toy animals. Helped his brother when he went shooting.
The violent imagery that appears in Hughes’ writing is influenced by his father, who was a WW1 veteran.
A ‘war poet once removed’.
The image of a bird sat atop a tree (‘The Imperial Eagle’) was a Nazi party symbol in WW2.
Hughes completed his National Service between 1949 and 1951. It was relatively peaceful.
Studied anthropology at university.
Had many jobs before becoming a famous poet, including workingatazoo.
As a boy Hughes regularly caught and tended wild animals around his home in Yorkshire. Perhaps this is why he “thinks of poems as a sort of animal [that] have a vivid life of their own, outside mine.”
A wife in London - Thomas Hardy
Second Boer War (October 1899 - May 1902) - British forces vs the two Boer states (in southern Africa).
Around 22000 soldiers killed.
Use of telegrams to transmit urgent news and normal post otherwise.
Thomas Hardy
A Dorset-born novelist and poet of the Victorian age (1840 – 1928);
Critical of much of Victorian society, as he felt it limited people’s lives and potential for happiness;
Anti-war (Boer Wars and World War 1);
Fate features prominentlyinhiswork.
Death of a Naturalist - Seamus Heaney
Irish poet, born 1939, died 2013, aged 74.
Massively acclaimed - won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995.
Teacher, lecturer, poet.
Grew up in rural Northern Ireland on his family’s farm. He described his childhood as ‘an intimate, physical, creaturely existence… in suspension between the archaic and the modern.’
His younger brother died in 1953, aged 4.
Heaney became a father for the first time in 1966, the same year his book Death of a Naturalist (which contained the poem of the same name)waspublished.
Seamus Heaneyis often known as a ‘farmer poet’ since many of his earliest poems are based on and around the farm and neighbourhood where he was raised.Death of a Naturalistappeared in his first major anthology of the same name, which was published in 1966.
Mametz Wood - Owen Sheers
Owen Sheers
Born in Fiji, but raised in Abergavenny, South Wales.
His work ‘has focused on the way people identify with land and country’ and is also interested in ‘loss, separation and the many different borders that people create between themselves.’
A poet, author, playwright, and university professor.
Wrote the poem in 2005, when war detritus was still being uncoveredinMametzWood.
Mametz Wood
Battle of the Somme. 1916. WW1.
The British army gained 760,000 additional volunteers within two months of WW1 starting.
Men were grouped together based on where they came from, e.g. the 38th (Welsh) Division, who had to reclaim Mametz Wood from German forces.
4000 men dead.
Viewed as ill-trainedandpoorlyled.
The Manhunt - Simon Armitage
Bosnian War: 1992-1995.
Very violent.
UN peacekeepers were sent to protect civilians.
Eddie Beddoes - British soldier, turned peacekeeper - was shot during it
PTSD: An anxiety disorder caused by distressing events. Can be characterised by nightmares and flashbacks, and feelings of isolation, irritability, guilt, and depression.
This poem is also sometimes called ‘Laura’s Poem’ afterEddie’swife.
The Soldier - Rupert Brooke
- Born 1887
- Attended university of Cambridge
- Brooke wrote a sequence of sonnets that were collectively titled 1914. ‘The Soldier’ is the fifth and final sonnet in this collection.
- Enlisted (volunteered) in August 1914 at age 27. Sub-lieutenant (officer).
- Before World War one started Brooke travelled widely. Whilst he was away he did suffer some homesickness which perhaps shows a strong connection with England
- Saw limited action at Antwerp, but never actually engaged.
- Died from sepsis (blood poisioning from a mosquito bite) on April 23rd 1915. He was on his way to take part in the Dardanelles campaign, notorious for the bloodshed at Gallipoli. It is a matter of conjecture whether he would have become as cynical a war poet as Wilfred Owen, with whom he is often compared (and will be by us).
- Was, like many contemporaries, optimistic about the outbreak of war and saw it as an opportunity for young men to cleanse their impurities.
- He was a religious man and his poems often contain imagery of adult baptism.
- He was deeply patriotic, perhaps accounting for the 6 references to England in The Soldier.
Dulce et Decorum Est - Wilfred Owen
Born 1893
Enlisted (volunteered) in October 1915. Eventually became a Lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment.
Unlike Brooke, saw action and suffered several traumatic experiences
Hardly touched on the theme of war in his early poems, until 1917 when he was recuperating from shell-shock at Craiglockhart. Here he became editor of The Hydra, the hospital magazine.
Returned to the front in August 1918. Awarded Military Cross.
Killed 4th November 1918. Mother received telegram on Armistice Day.
The title of the poem is an ironic echo of the line emboldened below. In 1913 the line had been inscribed on the chapel wall at Sandhurst. It is also to be found at Arlington National Cemetery in the US.
Dulce et Decorum Est - gas
- The first use of gas came at Ypres in 1915. The Germans used clouds of chlorine gas, causing injury and panic amongst the allied ranks.
- Chlorine affected the lungs and could be fatal if exposed to it for a significant length of time.
- The first attacks used cylinders, from which the gas was released. This was not an efficient method; when the British first used it, the gas blew back into the faces of the British troops.
- More sophisticated and deadly weapons were subsequently developed, with explosive shells delivering mustard gas, bromine and phosgene.
- Gas masks were quickly developed to fend off the attacks. Soldiers were drilled to get their masks on quickly and ward off the gas, but in the heat of battle they were not always successful. Dulce et Decorum Est recalls such an incident, where a young soldier fails to attach his mask in time and is killed.
Afternoons - Phillip Larkin
- Larkin never married, had children or even left the UK in his whole life.
- Philip Larkin’s poetry celebrates the ordinary details of day-to-day life.
- ‘Afternoons’, like a number of Philip Larkin’s other poems, treats the theme of the passing of youth and the setting-in of middle age. It comes from a collection called The Whitsun Weddings, which includes more poems where unseen observers comment on the lives of others.
- But rather than focusing on his own middle age (Larkin was in his mid-thirties when he wrote the poem, in 1959), Larkin examines the lives of others, analysing the existence of a group of young mothers he observes at the local recreation ground.
Valentine - Carol Ann Duffy
Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955) is a Scottish poet, and former Poet Laureate. Born in Glasgow, she moved with her family to Stafford when she was 7, where she was educated.
Valentine is from a collection of poems entitled Mean Time (1993), and expresses love and affection in the form of a conceit whereby the symbol of love being offered by the speaker is, unconventionally, an onion.
The poem challenges the stereotypical view of a Valentine’s gift when the speaker presents their lover with the metaphorical onion asa “moon wrapped in brown paper”.
This is reminiscent of metaphysical poets such as John Donne, who approached ordinary subjects in original and surprising ways (see The Flea). The multi-layered complexity of the onion represents a real relationship and is used as an extended metaphor throughout.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Sonnet 43
Born 1806. Died 1861.
Born into a reasonably wealthy family: her father owned plantations in Jamaica.
Devoutly Christian, describing her faith as ‘the wild visions of an enthusiast’.
Ill and frail for most of her life. The medication she took for this may have resulted in her wild imagination.
Many family deaths and difficult family relationships.
Robert Browning began writing to Elizabeth in the 1840s, after some of her literary success.
They communicated in secret: Elizabeth knew her father wouldn’t approve.
Amongst the correspondence, Elizabeth wrote Robert a series of sonnets. This is the 43rd out of 44!
The romance revitalised Elizabeth. They married and moved to Italy. After some persuasion, Elizabeth published these poems in Sonnets from the Portuguese.
London - william blake
- 1757 - 1827
- English poet, painter, and printmaker.
- Born, grew up in, and spent most of his life in London.
- Was only formally educated until he was 10 (only long enough to learn reading and writing).
- He and his family were English Dissenters - a type of Protestantism that had separated from the Church of England because they disagreed with
- ‘state interference’.
- Published Songs of Innocence in 1789, which was a collection of positive poetry about childhood and nature.
- Published Songs of Experience in 1794, in which Blake criticised and attacked the church, other elements of contemporary society, and the ‘city’.
- ‘London’ is part of Songs of Experience.
- First supported the French Revolution (‘the people’ overthrowing the monarchy), but later criticised it for turning into chaos and violence.
- ‘London’ was written during the Industrial Revolution.
London - industrial revolution
- A time of mass change in London. Factories opened up across the city, providing the lower classes with difficult, dangerous, poorly-paid jobs.
- Factories = Pollution. London was covered in black smog and nature was ruined.
- Class divisions increased - there were those who ruled (a few people), and those who were ruled (most people).
She walks in beauty - Lord Bryon
- Born in 1788. Died in 1824.
- ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’
- A Romantic poet, politician, and eventual revolutionary.
- A celebrity - famous for both his writing and his aristocratic excesses.
- Involved in a number of sex scandals.
- Had a deformed foot.
- Spent lots of time travelling Europe.
- Well-connected in literary circles.
- SWiB was published in 1815 in the collection Hebrew Melodies. It is intended to be accompanied by music.
Living Space - Imtiaz Dharker
- Imtiaz Dharker is a multi-cultural poet. Born in Pakistan, raised in Scotland, lives in the UK and Mumbai, India.
- Contemporary poet.
- Dharker uses her multicultural perspective throughout her writing.
- As a poet, artist, and filmmaker, Dharker tries to raise awareness of how people in other cultures live.
