Poetry context Flashcards
Shelly
- Romantic period (critical of tyrannical leaders)
- Time and nature can destroy memories of omnipotent leaders; power is temporary
- Inspired by digging up of Ramses II statue
Blake
- Romantic period (critical of tyrannical leaders)
- Written in times of poverty in London (overcrowding, high death rates etc)
- London was greatest city on Earth; Blake was disgusted
Wordsworth
- Romantic period (critical of tyrannical leaders)
- Power of nature in altering human mood
- How memories of Nature could return to people and make them consider their place in the universe
- Nature had the power to awe people
Browning
- Romantic period (critical of tyrannical leaders)
- Critical of powerful people’s arrogance
- Appreciated qualities such as kindness and lack of pretension (making a claim to something as being yours)
Tennyson
- Written in Victorian times
- England building an overseas empire (India!)
- Brave deeds of soldiers + patriotism encouraged; Britain wanted to be great
Owen
Officer in the Great War
Wanted to express “the pity of war” - very sympathetic to ordinary soldiers
Feelings conveyed strongly across his poems, including Exposure, but others such as Dulce et Decorum Est
Honesty is clear - doesn’t usually hide his emotions (though the penultimate stanza of Exposure is ambiguous)
Heaney
Grew up in a farming community in Ireland - kind of storm he would’ve known
Also strongly Catholic - “huge nothing” could be talking about religion + God
Hughes
Has been in the RAF, but never in the infantry - different perspective from Owen
Great interest in nature and history - “threw up a yellow hare that rolled like a flame”
Armitage
Interviewed soldiers
Shocking and direct - typical of Armitage
Questions ideas about duty and patriotism (e.g. Charge of the Light Brigade)
Weir
Based on modern conflicts, but shows that wars never really stop - WW1 and WW2 were so bad that people thought all wars would end.
Textile artist - lots of imagery to do with fabrics and clothes (e.g “lapel”, “bias binding”). These contrast the overall issue driving this poem - WAR.
She cannot bring herself to say what she fears most - she switches back and forth between the past and present, as well as potentially ambiguous metaphors, to show how convoluted her mind is
Duffy
Modern day - photographers expected to go to war zones and take powerful pictures
She wanted to explore how this job affected these people - evident in some of the nihilistic / shocking language of the poem (e.g. “nightmare heat” - a heat is a race, which connotes fun. ‘Nightmare’ juxtaposes this)
What responsibility do those who are not soldiers have to tell the real truth of war?
Dharker
Pakistani origins; raised in Glasgow. As a result, many of her poems look at ideas to do with identity and what makes us who we are.
Written from the perspective of someone today looking at the world, showing that nothing lasts. She relates this to the fragility of tissue paper - a recurring motif throughout the poem.
She keeps the poem quite vague and cryptic - she references many things such as ‘buildings’ and ‘maps’, yet doesn’t explicitly mention what this poem is aimed at. This leads the reader to make inferences from themselves, potentially making the poem more timeless than others
Rumens
The poem was published in 1993, and - within it - explores the effects of war on ordinary people.
Rumens, when interviewed herself about the poem, gave a completely different interpretation of the poem: ‘the speaker is an inner émigré, not politically but emotionally’. This could completely change the meaning of the poem - instead of literally talking about being sent out of her country due to actual war, perhaps the persona of the poem feels alienated by what their country has become
Agard
Caribbean background - contrasts the people who are important to him (in relation to history) with the people he learns about from history classes
Some say that history is the story of winners
Agard challenges this idea, bringing up historical figures that are important to him and who he shows as being equally important and heroic in what they did - ‘Toussaint L’Ouverture’ and ‘Mary Seacole’, for example.
