Poetry Flashcards
Dante’s guide through hell and purgatory
Virgil (Roman poet)
old Mesopotamian poem (oldest epic poem) about a real-life Sumerian king who founds the city of Uruk, __ descends into the underworld to look for his dead friend Enkidu, and faces an apocalypic flood, found preserved on 12 tablets
“Epic of Gilgamesh”
epic religious hymns concerning the deities and religious ideas of the Aryans (settled in India c. 1500 BC), means “knowledge” in sanskrit, became the foundation of Hinduism and Buddhism
vedas
3rd BC Ancient Greek Hellenestic Age poet famous for his triumphal odes, when Alexander conquered Thebes he destroyed all houses except his
Pindar
12th song about a Carolingian hero at the Battle of Roncesvalles in 778, he’s the nephew of Charlemagne, a French epic hero
The Song of Roland
17th French playwright, “Phedre” about Phaedra, daughter of King Minos of Crete who commits suicide after falling for a boy, friends with Moliere, historian for Louis XIV
Jean Racine
16th English poet best known for “The Faerie Queene” an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I (she rewarded him with a pension for life)
Edmund Spenser
16/17th English poet, most famous metaphysical poet (Samuel Johnson’s term for some 17th century poets), used metaphor, ‘No man is an Island, entire of itself’, ‘for whom the bell tolls’, “Death be not proud Mary” poem, monument in St Paul’s Cathedral
John Donne
16/17th English playwright & poet, 2nd most important Elizabethan dramatist behind Shakespeare (friend too), “Volpone” play, “to Celia” poems (‘drink to me only with thine eyes’), killed a man in 1598 and was imprisoned
Ben Jonson
18th English poet knorn for his satirical verse and his translation of Homer, famous use of heroic couplet (rhyming 2 lines), “Rape of the Lock” (Lord cuts a curl from a girl’s hair), “Essay on Man”, “Essay on Criticism”
alexander pope
fools rush in where angels fear to tread’, ‘to err is human, to forgive, divine’, ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast’, ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’
alexander pope
17th English poet during Restoration England, Poet Laureate for Charles II in 1668, only Poet Laureate to be dismissed due to his refusal to sign oath of allegiance to William III
john dryden
18/19th English poet, leader in Romanticism, “Don Juan” (unfinished), “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimmate”, known for his rakish (immoral) behavior, swam the Hellespont, fought with the Greeks for Independence against the Ottomon Empire in 1831
Lord Byron
friends with Percy Shelley, left England after one scandal too many, ‘she walks in beauty, like the night’, died in Greece of rheumatic fever
Lord Byron
18th (very) Scottish Romantic poet, considered the national poet of Scotland, “Auld Lang Syne” (poem and song), “Tam o’ Shanter”, ‘the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men’, ‘my luve’s like a red, red rose’
Robert Burns
18/19th English Romantic poet, ‘Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright, in the forests of the night’, ‘little lamb, who made thee?’
William Blake
18/19th English Romantic poet, a “lake poet” (because he was born in the Lake District of England), “The Prelude” (a semiautobiographical poem of his early years), friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (wrote “Lyrical Ballads” with him), “Tintern Abbey”
William Wordsworth
19th English Romantic poet, “Endymion” begins ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has ‘truth is beauty, beauty is truth, –that is all’, many other Odes, died at 25 of tuberculosis in Rome (visit his house near Spanish Steps)
John Keats
19th English Romantic poet, “Adonais” (eligy to John Keats), “Prometheus Unbound”, “Ode to the West Wind”, expelled from Oxford for writing “The Necessity of Atheism”, ‘if winter comes, can spring be far behind?’, died while sailing in Tuscany at 30
Percy Bysshe Shelley
18th German Romantic poet and playwright, “Ode to Joy” poem, “William Tell” play, friends with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Friedrich Schiller
19th English poet and playwright, “Pippa Passes” play (Pippa passes the time on her day off from a silk mill, she sings ‘God in his heaven - All’s right with the world’ )
Robert Browning
wrote love letters and married Elizabeth Barrett (his little Portuguese), ‘grow old along with me! The best is yet to be!”
Robert Browning
19th English Poet Laureate for Queen Victoria, “Idylls of the King” (about King Arthur and quest for holy grail), “In Memoriam” eligy for his best friend
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
wrote ‘tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all’, ‘theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die’, ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
19th French poet and essayist, “Les Fleurs du
Charles Baudelaire
29th French poet, wrote all of his poetry as a teenager and stopped writing at age 20, “Le Bateau ivre”, shot in the armby another poet Paul Verlaine
Arthur Rimbaud
19th American poet, part of transition from transcendentalism to realism, “Drum-Taps” inspired by his work as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, known as the “good gray poet” due to his bushy gray beard, “I Hear America Singing”, “Song Of Myself”
Walt Whitman
wrote ‘when lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d’, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ (on the death of Abraham Lincoln)
Walt Whitman
19th American poet who lived a reclusive life in Amherst, MA, (known as The Bell of Amherst, then the Nun), rarely left her room, wrote 1775 poems (only 7 published), upon her death her sister found nearly 1000 poems hidden
Emily Dickinson
poems that deal with death and immortality, ‘Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me’, ‘Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed’
Emily Dickinson
19/20th Irish poet, first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, friends with Ezra Pound, “Easter 1916”, ‘no country for old men’, ‘cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman, pass by’ epitaph
William Butler (W.B.) Yeats
