Seventeenth Century AngloAmerican Poetry

1
Seventeenth Century Anglo-American Poetry
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Renaissance

• John Done
• The Flea
• The Sunne Rising

3
Reading Poetry

• How do we read and thereby understand poetry?
• Whats the point?

4
Forms

• Elegy 17C, refers to a reflective poem that
  laments the loss of something or someone (or
  loss or death more generally, although in
  Elizabethan times it was also used to refer to
  certain love poems (Murfin 102).
• Epic A long and formal narrative poemwritten in
  an elevated style that recounts the adventures of
  a hero of almost mythic proportions, who often
  embodies the traits of a nation or people (105).
• Ballad A poem that recounts a storygenerally
  some dramatic episodeand that has been composed
  to be sung. . . . Use simple language (27).
• Verse satire The critique of social or political
  subjects in verse form. Satire comes in to
  general formsdirect and indirect.

5
Versification

• Rhyme and Meter
• Rhyme royal Introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer. A
  seven line stanzaic form written in iambic
  pentameter with the rhyme sheme ababbcc.
• Ballad Stanza four line stanza with an abcb
  rhyme. First and third lines have four accented
  syllables while the second and fourth lines have
  three.

6
Purpose

• Whether public or private, poetry helped reveal
  the preordained order presumed to govern human
  livesa goal especially important to settlers
  facing the illegibility of a strange new world
  (532).

7
Edward Taylor

• Meditative Poetry the end of which is not to .
  . .celebrate the person being elegized but yet
  another demonstration of Gods being glorified in
  mans dependence (Pearce 42).

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A sheaf of Poems

• What commonalities do you perceive in these poems?

9
Edward Taylor