AP Literature: Quarter Three Poetry Project

AP Literature: Quarter Three Poetry Project

AP Literature: Quarter Three Poetry Project

This quarter, you will be using the historical and biographical critical lens to research and analyze a particular poet.

You will pick a poet from the list at the bottom of the page. Then, you will fully research his/her life and the time period in which your poet was writing, as well as read 5-10 poems from your poet. You will combine all of this into a comprehensive paper in which you analyze how the author’s life and time period influenced his/her poetry.

  • The paper should be 6-8 pages long
  • MLA format with in-text citations
  • Include a bibliography of your sources

In order to prepare for your poetry paper, you will use at least 3 of your poet’s poems for your weekly poetry responses. Use this as an opportunity to look deeply at the poems, through a formalist, biographical, and historical critical perspective.

Due dates:

February 4th: 1 page typed summary of your poet’s life and 1 page typed summary of your poet’s time period.

Questions to consider:

  • Full name (as well as any pen names used).
  • Place and date of birth.
  • Where the poet grew up (and what might have impacted his work as a result of his upbringing).
  • What made this poet want to write poetry?
  • What movement (or schools of poetry) was s/he involved with?
  • Why is this poet famous?
  • What are the poet’s most important pieces?
  • Was s/he friends with other poets (or in some way influenced by other poets)?
  • Was s/he famous during his/her lifetime?
  • What major historical events were occurring at the time the poet was writing?
  • What were some major social values and norms during that period? Was the writer conforming or rebelling against those values and norms?
  • Anything else the researcher (you!) find significant.

February 18: Rough draft 1 due

March 17: Final paper due

Poets

  1. Maya Angelou
  2. Margaret Atwood
  3. W. H. Auden
  4. Elizabeth Bishop
  5. Gwendolyn Brooks
  6. Robert Browning
  7. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
  8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  9. Lord Byron
  10. Billy Collins
  11. Robert Creeley
  12. e.e. cummings
  13. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
  14. Emily Dickinson
  15. John Donne
  16. T.S. Eliot
  17. Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  18. Robert Frost
  19. Allen Ginsberg
  20. Nikki Giovanni
  21. Thomas Gray
  22. Seamus Heaney
  23. George Herbert
  24. Robert Herrick
  25. Gerard Manley Hopkins
  26. Langston Hughes
  27. Randall Jarrell
  28. John Keats
  29. Rudyard Kipling
  30. Denise Levertov
  31. Robert Lowell
  32. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  33. Andrew Marvell
  34. Claude McKay
  35. Edna St. Vincent Millay
  36. John Milton
  37. Marianne Moore
  38. Frank O’Hara
  39. Charles Olson
  40. Winfred Owen
  41. Sylvia Plath
  42. Alexander Pope
  43. Ezra Pound
  44. Adrienne Rich
  45. Theodore Roethke
  46. Anne Sexton
  47. Percy Shelley
  48. William Shakespeare
  49. Gary Snyder
  50. Edmund Spenser
  51. Wallace Stevens
  52. Sir Phillip Sydney
  53. Jonathan Swift
  54. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
  55. Dylan Thomas
  56. Phillis Wheatley—first published African American female poet
  57. Walt Whitman
  58. William Carlos Williams
  59. William Wordsworth
  60. William Butler Yeats

16th‐17th Century

  • Sir Phillip Sydney Sonnets from Astrophel and Stella, 1 & 31
  • William Shakespeare Sonnet 116
  • John Donne “Death, be not proud”
  • George Herbert “The Collar”
  • Andrew Marvell “To His Coy Mistress”

Augustans: Wit irony and paradox are still important, but so is brevity. The ongoing subject is human frailty, often mocking human behavior (for example absurdly mundane plots in the outward appearance of heroic epic poetry, for comic effect).

John Dryden (1631-1700), Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Metaphysical Poetry: 17th century English; breaks with earlier Renaissance ideas about romantic poetry, often-introspective meditations on love, death, God, a human frailty. Wit, irony and paradox are paramount; wit is often seen as the pairing of dissimilar objects into the service of a clever, ironic analogy or paradoxical conceit. Elaborate style, deep philosophical issues.

John Donne (1572-1631), George Herbert (1593-1633), Andrew Marvell (1621-78)

18th Century

  • Thomas Gray “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
  • Alexander Pope Excerpts from An Essay on Man
  • Jonathan Swift “A Description of the Morning”

19th Century

  • William Wordsworth “Ode,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
  • Gerard Manley Hopkins “God’s Grandeur”
  • John Keats “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
  • Emily Dickinson: “Because I could not stop for Death—,” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” “There’s a certain Slant of light”
  • Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, 1, 6, & 52 and “O Captain! My Captain!,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

(Late 18th Century into the 19th) Romantic Poetry: natural imagery redeems the imagination of the individual stuck in the crowded city. Human imagination empowers the individual to escape society’s strictures, established authority, and even the fear of death. Transcendence is the ultimate goal of the Romantic poets, transcendence in the ordinary. (Transcendental: beyond ordinary experience, idealistic, lofty. The seer-poet opens the hearts of men; it does to call to the mind; it calls to the heart. It is not meant to make the audience feel good or bad, but to feel.)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Percy Shelley (1792-1822), John Keats (1795-1821)

The Symbolists: Link Romanticism and Modernism. Contain the yearning for transcendence lean in a more decadent and sensual direction (leading into the Modernists). Crepuscular (dusk and dawn), dreams and dream states; synaesthesia (using one sense to describe another); drawn to music and harmony.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91)

(Late 19th Century into the 20th) Modernism: Revolutionary force, reducing human experience to fragments; influenced by cubism, try to see the world from as many points of view as possible at the same time. Concerned with how an individual relates to his environment (“Prufrock”). May focus on machines/objects rather than nature or human beings.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961), Marianne Moore (1887-1972), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)

20th Century

Harlem Renaissance: took on the same concerns of the modernists, in the first half of the 20th century. Relies on repetitive structure similar to blues lyrics, sought a new American idiom.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), Claude McKay (188-1948), Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Postmodernism: tough to define, but takes up some of the concerns of the modernists during the 20th century—no one really uses this term. Contains parody, irony and narrative instability; allusions to pop culture as often as classical learning; binary concepts (hot and cold; black and white) often collapse; there is no real center (like the Internet); the surface is more interesting than any ideas of depth (Andy Warhol: “Wear a wig and people notice the wig. Wear a silver wig and people notice the silver.”)

May contain the Beats, Confessional, Black Arts, Black Mountain School and the New York School.

The Beats: (from Beatific, meaning saintly or blissful) stressed personal frankness; Buddhism; some tenants of Romanticism (the imagination freed from society’s constraints and the yearning for transcendence.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Gary Snyder (b. 1930)

Confessional: Intimate content; rips the façade off of the outwardly comfortable suburban life to reveal doubts and anxieties.

John Berryman (1914-1972), Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Anne Sexton (1928-1967), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

New York School: Overlapped with Beat spontaneity and Confessional frankness, but much more ironic, more interested in the surreal combination of high art and popular art allusions; wanted the reader to see the world in new and different ways, inspiring us to look or listen again.

Frank O’Hara (1926-66), John Ashberry (b. 1927), Kenneth Koch (1925-2002)

The Black Arts Movement: saw Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s as too slow; politically charged challenges to the white establishment.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Amiri Baraka (also known as Leroi Jones, b. 1934), Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934), NtozakeShange (b. 1948)

Black Mountain Poets: different poetry, but all taught in the same place (Black Mountain collage, North Carolina).

Charles Olson (1910-70), Denise Levertov (1923-97), Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Other Important Poets:

  • Emily Dickinson (1830-86): During transcendental period, but not; compressed with and irony of metaphysical poets: “Because I could not stop for death,” “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
  • Robert Frost (1874-1963): Active during modernism, but concerned with traditionally minded verse with a profound, philosophical vein.
  • A.H. Auden (1907-73): Similar to the modernists, but transcends labels: “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “In Memory of W. Be. Yeats,” “Musee des Beaux Arts.”
  • Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79): More reticent than the confessionals: “In the Waiting Room, “ “Filling Station,” “One Art”
  • Adrienne Rich (b. 1929): Feminist and political, like the confessional poets, but takes the role of the poet so seriously, she is beyond them: “Diving into the Wreck,” North American Time.”
  • Seamus Heaney (1939): Uses rural imagery to take on issues of identity. “Digging,” “The Harvest Bow.”
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