Educational Galaxy

Story of English Poetry — EG's own notes, in simple English

Book: Rainbow Bhag-1 (Purani pustak — 2025 se pehle wali) — Story of English (BSTBPC, Class 11)  |  Story of English 5  |  Type: Story of English

This page carries Educational Galaxy's own original notes — a summary in simple English in EG's own words, not a copy of the textbook. No official textbook PDF is given here.

Diagram (labels are printed on the image): The ages of English poetry: Chaucer, the Elizabethan trio, Milton, Augustan Pope, Romantic Wordsworth and Coleridge, then modern and world poetry — ending in poetry written in English anywhere in the world.

A poet on a hill at sunset — a general picture of Romantic feeling for nature.

What the chapter is about

You have read many poems in your textbooks 'Rainbow' Part 1 and 2, and you must have noticed certain common things in them. The meaning of words in a poem is quite different from what we find in a short story or in a drama: here words are used not just for meaning, but also for their sound and images. The section recalls W. H. Auden's lines — 'Now the leaves are falling fast, / Nurse's flowers will not last; / Nurses to the graves are gone, / And the prams go rolling on' — where the images of leaves, flowers, graves and prams, arranged in lines rhyming at the end, together suggest the cyclic process of life and death. Poetry started its journey from the time Man used language to express his emotion, and it began with the beginning of the history of the English people on the continent. During the Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon period English was in its primitive form, and the poets told stories of great crusades and sea-voyages; the tales of King Arthur and his Round Table were the result of this trend.

During the Middle English period we notice the emergence of a national language and literature. Geoffrey Chaucer made a great contribution here. In his Canterbury Tales he describes the country, the people and their beliefs — characters such as the Wife of Bath, the noble knight, the Squire, the Friar and the Prioress still amuse us because of their peculiarities. In his poetic works Chaucer did not use the Old English irregular lines and alliteration, 'the rim, ram, roff' as he humorously calls it. Another important poet of the time was William Langland, whose Vision of Piers the Plowman consists of a series of dream visions: in it he attacks the social ills and urges men to 'learn to love'. It may be surprising to know that for nearly 200 years after Chaucer there was no great literary work produced in England — one important exception is Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, a collection of stories about King Arthur.

During the 15th century an intellectual movement called the Renaissance swept Europe. The word Renaissance means 'rebirth' and refers to the revival of ancient Greek learning. The spread of learning was aided by the printing presses, which made the classics available for the common men, generated a new spirit of enquiry, and overthrew the institutions and beliefs of the mediaeval age. In England the influence of the Renaissance was felt clearly during the period from the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 to the death of James I in 1625. Under Elizabeth's brilliant rule England experienced internal peace and economic prosperity and emerged a world power. The three great poets of the time were Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, who practised and perfected several kinds of verse-forms such as epic-romance, pastoral, elegy, sonnet, lyric and satire. Marlowe was basically a lyric poet, and even his plays like Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus and Edward II reveal his imaginative approach and a quest for ideas. Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar is a pastoral poem, and his best known work, The Faerie Queene, is a romantic epic based on chivalry, read also for its allegorical meaning and design, portraying the political and religious problems of the age. Shakespeare was the greatest poet of the age: in his romantic comedies and tragedies he presents the Renaissance concept of 'free will' — human destiny is shaped by human actions themselves, and God or fate does not influence it. His tragedies, especially Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, contain fine poetic passages, written in blank verse, exploring the working of human passion and emotions. Shakespeare also has to his credit two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and a sequence of 154 sonnets dealing with tragic failure in love and broken friendship; he developed his own structure and rhyme-scheme of a sonnet, which is why his sonnets are called Shakespearean sonnets. It was the time when poetry began to be published in anthologies, the best known being Tottel's Miscellany (1557), containing songs and sonnets of poets like Wyatt and Surrey, who adopted the Italian sonnet for English use. A third nobleman with a talent for writing was Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote the beautiful sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591).

The 17th century is called both an age of transition and an age of revolution. English society witnessed political and social struggles resulting in the civil war and the formation of government under Oliver Cromwell. The old unity of Elizabethan life was gone, national pride lessened as the crown lost dignity, and the activities of James I, Charles I and Charles II showed a downfall from the Elizabethan height. A new middle class began to show power, and the imagination and enthusiasm of Marlowe and Spenser gave way to a rational and scientific attitude. The scientific spirit of the time, however, did not destroy poetry. The great poet of the time was John Milton, a Puritan who served Cromwell as Latin Secretary. He first wrote some short poems such as L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and his elegy Lycidas laments the death of a friend. He is mainly known for producing truly English epics such as Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which seek to 'justify the ways of God to Man'. Milton is regarded the most sublime of English poets and a master of what is called 'the grand style', making use of abstract words, many of them of Latin origin. An important group of 17th-century writers were the metaphysical poets: with John Donne as the leading figure, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan wrote on spiritual aspects of life, and their love poems are equally fascinating — in Donne's poems, uncommon similes and metaphors bring to our notice relationships among uncommon things. The major poet of the later part of the century was John Dryden, whose Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel are satires dealing with the political controversies of the time; he is basically a satirist, yet makes imaginative and creative use of language, and is known for his use of the classic or heroic couplet for serious English poetry. Only one other poet of the period is important for us: Samuel Butler, whose Hudibras is a satire on the Puritans.

When we approach the 18th century, we find reason and optimism as the main qualities of the age. People believed theirs was a golden period similar to that of the Roman Emperor Augustus, so the name 'Augustan' was given to the early 18th century. The poets used Greek and Roman authors, or classical antiquity, as models of style, so the period is also described as 'neo classic'. Alexander Pope was the representative poet of the time: he wrote some short poems on nature and seasons, such as Four Pastorals, but he is mainly known for his critical and satirical poems such as the Rape of the Lock, the Dunciad and the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. His poetry is noted for 'verbal intelligence', also called 'wit', and he makes fine use of the classic couplet to make condensed observations, such as 'A little learning is a dangerous thing' or 'To err is human, to forgive divine.' Before we come to the early 19th century we meet several poets who contributed to the 'romantic revival' in English poetry: James Thomson, Robert Blair, William Collins, Thomas Gray, Robert Burns and William Cowper, whose love for nature and presentation of human feelings in simple language are noteworthy — Burns's 'My love is like a red, red rose' and Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' look like any other romantic poems.

The Romantic Revival in English poetry is often associated with the works of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The movement refers to a renewed interest in Nature and simple life, an interest in the past and the exotic, with certain common things in the poets' works: individualism, free play of imagination and a humanitarian outlook. You may regard it as a 'democratic or liberalising movement': the poets sought to do away with the rigid application of classic norms and conventions in their writing. Among its influences were the French Revolution, which made 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' the very basis of social life, the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the works of the German Schlegel brothers, and the growing interest in ballads and English medieval literature — Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) kindled this interest. Wordsworth wrote lyrics, ballads, odes, sonnets, verse-tales and reflective poems; in his Lucy poems and The Prelude his love of nature is always prominent, and Nature, for him, is a spiritual presence that provides creative training to human sensibility. Coleridge joined Wordsworth in the publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1798), the book which gave a new direction to English poetry: while Wordsworth represented the familiar as 'unfamiliar', Coleridge did the reverse, and in Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner and Christabel he shows his interest in medieval folklore and legend. Other poets, like Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, are regarded the younger Romantics: Byron's works — Manfred, Cain, Childe Harold, Vision of Judgement and Don Juan — show his passion for liberty and defiance of convention; Shelley, a revolutionary idealist, wrote Adonais, The Skylark, The Cloud, Ode to the West Wind, Revolt of Islam and Queen Mab, giving vent in his longer poems to his passion for reform and lamenting in his shorter odes and lyrics the hardships into which he had landed; and in Keats's narrative poems like the Eve of St Agnes and Lamia, and in his odes and ballads, we find his sensitive approach to the beauty of nature, his admiration for the Greek love of perfection, and, most strikingly, his appeal to the senses.

As we proceed further, we find Queen Victoria ascending the throne. The period from 1837 to 1901 witnessed the rise of democracy, the expansion of the British Empire and the progress of science and technology, with a number of inventions and discoveries — the most significant being Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species, which challenged the biblical version of creation and shook people's faith in Christianity. Despite this, the romantic tradition continued in the later part of the 19th century. However, the rise of democracy and the expansion of the reading public changed the function of poetry: it came to be related more to life than the romantic. The representative poets of the age, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold, gave voice to the common man's doubts, fears and distractions, and at the same time reassured them that all was right with the world. Tennyson's poems and his well-known elegy In Memoriam make an attempt to reconcile the conflicting claims of science and religion. Browning's poetry made use of a new technique known as 'dramatic monologue', used to explore the thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. Arnold describes poetry as the criticism of life: his Sohrab and Rustam, The Scholar Gipsy and memorable poems like 'Dover Beach' express the doubts and frustrations of the age, while insisting on a code of conduct — for him, the object of poetry is to make men happy. Besides these poets, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, A. C. Swinburne and C. G. Rossetti also deserve attention: they are known as the Pre-Raphaelites, a term owing its name to a school of painting called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which aimed to revive in poetry the ideals of painting — sincerity, simplicity and truth to life — that inspired the Italian painters before Raphael. In their works there is a stress on beauty, an interest in the middle ages, and a use of words for their pictorial quality. Gerard Manley Hopkins is a poet different from his age: his poems were published in 1918, after his death, and normally deal with religious aspects of life — some, like 'Pied Beauty', portray Nature — but he certainly turns away from the romantic style of poetry, and his imagery and rhythm are quite modern, influencing many poets of the 20th century.

English poetry in the 20th century is varied in theme but more sensitive to the new crises in human life. Poets like Robert Bridges, A. E. Housman and John Mansfield continued with the 'romantic themes' and also expressed the 'pessimism' of the age. Walter de la Mare, in his 'Songs for Children', 'Peacock Pie' and other poems, explores the wonder of the child's world. Poets who had Irish origin, like W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Lord Dunsany, were rooted in the history and tradition of Ireland and looked to their own country for inspiration: W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), in poems such as 'Among School Children', 'Sailing to Byzantium' and 'Second Coming', reveals his concern for youth, 'age' and the possibility of regeneration. The early part of the 20th century witnessed World War I, which, along with annihilation of life and property, brought disillusionment and frustration, and poets voiced the concern that knowledge and progress could not save humanity. Some of the early poets, like Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, had an ideal view on war. T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was certainly the most influential poet of the time: in his early poems, such as 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and 'The Waste Land', he presents the hollowness and vulgarity of the modern civilization which does not have any awareness of spiritual values, while his later poems, such as 'Ash Wednesday' and 'Four Quartets', portray disillusionment, agony and a search for values. During the 1930s a group of poets such as W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender reacted against 'Art for Art's sake', trying to combine Marxist philosophy with Freud's psychology — Auden, in his 'Poems' (1930), and particularly 'Look, Stranger', reveals his impatience with capitalism. William Empson and Dylan Thomas belong to another group of poets who sought to escape from the world of ideas and problems, choosing to express the inner chaos through devices such as 'ambiguity' and 'inexact'; Dylan Thomas was a new romantic, and his poems have rich Freudian overtones, exploring the relation between man and his natural environment. During and after World War II, English poetry became quite diverse, and it is difficult to use any single defining term or movement: significant poets of the period are Thomas Gunn, Ted Hughes, Donald Davie and Philip Larkin — while Hughes, in 'Jaguar' and 'Hawk Roosting', depicts the violence and ferocity of the animal as well as the human world, Larkin was an anti-romantic who presents in an objective way the harsh realities such as time and death. Some distinctive poets writing during the 1980s and 1990s are Blake Morrison, Peter Reading and Craig Raine. Women poets such as Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Jennings and Carol Ann Duffy made their presence felt in the second part of the 20th century, touching sensitive aspects of relationships between husband and wife and mother and children.

The story of English poetry will remain incomplete if we do not take into account poets from the Commonwealth countries, who also used the English language for creative purposes. The use of English in America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Nigeria and the Caribbean islands is certainly the result of British colonialism: what was first the language of commerce and administration soon emerged as a natural medium of exploring and understanding social realities. American poetry in English began from the American War of Independence. It was basically patriotic but imitative of English poetry; the real poetry, however, was written during the period 1850–55, also called the American Renaissance. The favourite poets of the 19th century were Edgar Allan Poe and W. H. Longfellow — Longfellow was a story-teller in verse, and you may remember his 'A Psalm of Life'. Except for E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, American poetry in the early 20th century was largely experimental: Frost portrays the countryside with a tone of sadness and a hint of life's responsibility, while poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings used concrete images and precise words to represent ideas and attitudes of mind, and Pound and Eliot made significant contributions by their objective and impersonal account of the degeneration and depravity of modern life. Most of the American poets writing in English were engaged in two-fold tasks — to define the 'self' and to identify the 'nation' — and the two concerns often merge in the question, 'What is an American?' In India, poetry began to be written as early as the early part of the 19th century. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Kashprasad Ghosh, Toru Dutt and Manmohan Ghosh were the pioneers, and their major concerns were patriotism and the glorious past of India. Sarojini Naidu, also known as the nightingale of India, wrote poems with ease: her poems such as 'Village Song', 'Songs of Radha' and 'A Soul's Prayer' reveal the real 'heart of India'. Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate, in 'The Gitanjali', and Aurobindo Ghosh in 'The Savitri', made a moral and spiritual quest, and their poetry was an attempt to restore the lost glory of India. Indian poetry in English matured and began to express modern Indian sensibility in the later part of the 20th century, with poets like Nissim Ezekiel, A. K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, Jayant Mahapatra, P. Lal, Keki N. Daruwala, Shiv K. Kumar, Pritish Nandi, Arun Kolatkar and Kamala Das: when Ezekiel describes the island of Bombay as 'Unsuitable for song as well as sense / the island flowers into slums and skyscrapers', reflecting precisely the growth of his mind, he voices the disillusionment of his age, using controlled statements with ironical meaning, in a language suitable for depicting harsh realities of life, while Kamala Das is more bold and bitter in portraying her frustration as a woman. Canadian poetry is quite varied in its thematic concerns: poets like Jeannette Armstrong, Claire Harris, Cyril Dabydeen and Arnold Itwaru suggest a closeness to and harmony with Nature, reflecting the Native's concept of the land as Mother, and their poetic works — First People, Blood of My Country and Wind Women by Armstrong; Translation into Fiction by Harris; The Forest by Dabydeen; and Sacred Presence by Itwaru — are rich in symbols and metaphors, depicting the agony of 'colonialism' and an intense search for 'roots'. Margaret Atwood (The Circle Game, and The Animals in that Country), Robert Kroetsch (The Stone Hammer Poems and Seed Catalogue), and Fred Wah (Breathin' My Name With a Sigh) are some other representative Canadian poets in English, and the Montreal Group of poets, such as A. J. M. Smith and A. M. Klein, uses simple language to express the metaphysical agony of the uprooted people. It is quite interesting to know that we have some of the finest poetic utterances by the Nigerian, Caribbean, African and South African poets, who are committed to 'a cause': South African poets like Dennis Brutus (Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, Stubborn Hope) and Chinua Achebe (Beware Soul-Brother, Christmas in Biafra) record the violence and torture of 'white' rule and wrote against the intrusion of Western customs into their 'native culture'. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian poet, reveals an uncompromising sense of justice and humanity, and in his Poems from Prison he tries to locate traditional African beliefs in modern life; he got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. Chinua Achebe, basically a novelist, is another important Nigerian poet, resenting the loss of traditional values. Dennis Brutus, a South African poet, is an opponent of apartheid, voicing the suffering and agony of the fellow blacks. Derek Walcott, who got the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992, worked for a Caribbean culture, and his famous poetic works are In a Green Night, The Castaway, The Gulf and the autobiographical poem Another Life; he has tried to develop English as the language of the educated people — 'Where nothing was / the language of a race.' This discussion clearly shows that English as a language is spoken in many parts of the world, and poets from the Commonwealth nations and from African and Asian countries have successfully used English for creative purposes, adding variety to and infusing vitality into what we today call 'English poetry'. Would you not agree that English poetry does not mean today poetry written by English poets alone? It is the total body of poetry being written in English in any part of the world!

What you should learn

English poetry grew by sound and image — from Chaucer and the Elizabethans through Milton, Pope, the Romantics and the Victorians to a world poetry written in English everywhere.

Chart / Table

Practice set (try on your own)

1. How do words work differently in a poem than in a story?
   Hint: Think about meaning plus two more things.
2. What did Chaucer refuse to use from Old English poetry?
   Hint: Think about irregular lines and a funny nickname for alliteration.
3. Name the three great Elizabethan poets and their dates.
   Hint: Think about 1558 to 1625 and three names.
4. What is a 'dramatic monologue', and whose technique is it?
   Hint: Think about Browning and a poet's own thoughts.
5. What does English poetry mean today?
   Hint: Think about every part of the world, not only England.

Core Questions with Answers — from the book's exercises

These answer the chapter's own exercise questions, one by one, in EG's own words.

1. Complete: Words in a poem are used for ............, ............ and ............
   Meaning, sound and images — in a poem words are used not just for meaning, but also for their sound and images.
2. Complete: In his poetic works, Chaucer did not use the ............
   Old English irregular lines and alliteration — 'the rim, ram, roff' as he humorously calls it.
3. Complete: The word Renaissance means ............
   'Rebirth' — the revival of ancient Greek learning.
4. Complete: The three great poets of the Elizabethan period are ............, ............ and ............
   Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.
5. Complete: The Faiery Queene is a ............
   Romantic epic based on chivalry — also read for its allegorical meaning and design.
6. Complete: Shakespeare's sonnets deal with ............
   Tragic failure in love and broken friendship.
7. What does Langland do in The Vision of Piers the Plowman?
   In a series of dream visions, he attacks the social ills and urges men to 'learn to love'.
8. When was the influence of the Renaissance felt clearly in England?
   From the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 to the death of James I in 1625.
9. Who wrote Astrophel and Stella?
   Sir Philip Sidney (1591).
10. Name the two epics in English.
    Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, by John Milton — the truly English epics.
11. Name four leading Romantic poets of the nineteenth century.
    William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley (with John Keats as the fifth younger Romantic).
12. Who has described poetry as the criticism of life?
    Matthew Arnold.
13. Name any three Pre-Raphaelites poets.
    Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and A. C. Swinburne (C. G. Rossetti is the fourth named).
14. What aspect of modern civilization does T. S. Eliot present in his poems?
    Its hollowness and vulgarity — a modern civilization without any awareness of spiritual values (in his early poems; his later poems add disillusionment, agony and a search for values).
15. What were the two concerns of the American poets writing in English?
    To define the 'self' and to identify the 'nation' — the two concerns often merge in the question, 'What is an American?'
16. What were the major concerns of the early Indian poets writing in English?
    Patriotism and the glorious past of India.
17. Name four Canadian poets writing in English.
    Jeannette Armstrong, Claire Harris, Cyril Dabydeen and Arnold Itwaru (others named are Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch and Fred Wah).

Extension Questions with Answers

1. Why does the section open with Auden's falling leaves?
   Because the four short lines prove its definition in miniature: the images of leaves, flowers, graves and prams, plus end-rhymes, work by sound and image as well as meaning, and together suggest the cyclic process of life and death.
2. How did printing change English poetry?
   Printing presses spread learning and made the classics available to common men, which generated a new spirit of enquiry and overthrew mediaeval institutions and beliefs — and, by the Elizabethan age, poetry itself began to be published in anthologies like Tottel's Miscellany (1557).
3. What changed in poetry's function in the Victorian age?
   The rise of democracy and a wider reading public made poetry relate more to life than the romantic: Tennyson, Browning and Arnold voiced the common man's doubts, fears and distractions, and reassured him that all was right with the world.
4. Why does the section end with the Commonwealth, not with England?
   Because its conclusion is that English poetry is no longer English alone: poets from America, India, Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere, writing in a language that came through colonialism, have added variety and vitality to it. English poetry today is all poetry written in English anywhere in the world.

Board-pattern Questions with Answers

1. Short: What is the difference between a poem's words and a story's words?
   In a short story or drama, words mainly carry meaning. In a poem, words are used not just for meaning but also for their sound and images, as Auden's lines about falling leaves, flowers, graves and prams show.
2. Short: Why are Shakespeare's sonnets called Shakespearean sonnets?
   Because Shakespeare developed his own structure and rhyme-scheme for the sonnet form, in his sequence of 154 sonnets dealing with tragic failure in love and broken friendship.
3. Long: Trace English poetry from Chaucer to the Elizabethan trio.
   Chaucer, in the Middle English period, helped create a national language and literature: his Canterbury Tales describes the country, its people and their beliefs, and he dropped the Old English irregular lines and alliteration ('rim, ram, roff'). Langland's Piers the Plowman followed, attacking social ills. Then for nearly 200 years no great work appeared except Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, until the Renaissance — the rebirth of Greek learning, spread by printing — was felt clearly in England from Elizabeth's accession in 1558 to James I's death in 1625. Under Elizabeth's peaceful and prosperous rule, the three great poets Marlowe, Spenser and Shakespeare perfected verse-forms from epic-romance and pastoral to sonnet and satire: Marlowe the lyric quester, Spenser of the allegorical Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare, greatest of all, of free will in blank verse and of 154 sonnets in his own form.
4. Long: How did English poetry become a world poetry?
   It began as the poetry of one island, passed through Chaucer, the Elizabethans, Milton, Pope, the Romantics and the Victorians, and then travelled with colonialism: English, first the language of commerce and administration, became a natural medium for exploring social realities in America, India, Canada, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere. American poets asked 'What is an American?' while defining the self and the nation; early Indian poets sang patriotism and India's glorious past, and later ones, like Ezekiel and Kamala Das, voiced modern disillusionment and a woman's frustration; Canadian poets searched for roots against colonialism; Soyinka and Walcott won Nobel Prizes for African and Caribbean voices. So the section concludes: English poetry today is not poetry by English poets alone, but the total body of poetry written in English in any part of the world.

How to use this page: First read the summary, say the key terms in your own words, then try the practice set without looking. Finally check yourself with the questions and answers. Get your answers checked by your teacher or parents.