A very fast chronology of poetry in history
Seriously, a super fast one. Hang on.
And as a reminder, with pretty much all arbitrary divisions of eras and periods of anything, the years and dividing lines aren’t clearcut. They’re simply helpful designations to identify significant styles, shifts, and ways of approaching poetry.
The first poetry.
Epic of Gilgamesh usually comes up as the first recorded example of poetry. It dates to the 18th century BC and is Sumerian. In case you’ve forgotten, Sumer was a pretty important civilization in the Fertile Crescent, an area then known as Mesopotamia and now called (southern) Iraq.
Other super old epic poetry - and in this case we might think of “epic” as meaning “really long,” would include the Ramayana, which is an important story in Hindu and Buddhist mythology.
Them Greeks.
In the Western world, you can’t talk about poetry without talking about Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. The former is a wonderful account of gods and tragic heroes in the Trojan War; the latter is a companion piece about the Greek hero Odysseus’s quest to return home after the war, and the many fateful and dangerous adventures he has in trying to get back to his wife and son.
Hint: if you don’t speak Greek, don’t try reading it in Greek. I’ve read and reread various versions in English, which is probably the language I speak best, and both The Iliad and the The Odyssey are masterpieces of adventure and intrigue that lay the groundwork for so many modern works you’re probably familiar with.
Early Middle Ages (400 - 1000 AD)
Popularly called The Dark Ages. Yeah, these weren’t necessarily the greatest of times for introspection, deep intellectual inquiry, and earnest literary output. Pretty brutal in fact. When Rome fell, stability across Europe disintegrated. Learning, literature, art took a backseat to survival. In spite of this a few pieces survive, including a magnificent and bloody Scandinavian epic about a heroic warrior who faces off against a terrifying monster…and later the monster’s mother. The monster is Grendel, the poem is Beowulf, and it is considered to be the first significant English-language work of literature.
High Middle Ages (1000 - 1500 AD)
I try not to make our children memorize dates just for the sake of memorizing them. But 1066 is just one you gotta know. You gotta. If nothing else, it’s kind of like one of those Uber-rich families who become famous for being famous, and keep their fame perpetuated simply by…staying famous. Maybe that’s a terrible analogy. But 1066 is one of the biggest dates in history because it was the year William, Duke of Normandy (modern France) successfully invaded England. Why was this a big deal?
Well, because William won, and instituted a series of changes. Some changed the remainder of the Medieval Ages, like feudalism and strengthening England’s relationships with Europe, which in turn have affected Britain’s culture, language, and way of living today. But how it pertained to poetry then was that these changes helped to begin bringing literature and art back to importance, thus implanting the roots of what would later grow into the Renaissance.
The most famous English writer from this period is Geoffrey Chaucer, who penned The Canterbury Tales.
Other writers, such as Italian Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy) and poets, such as the poet Rumi (Persia) wrote enduring works during this time period.
Renaissance : Elizabethan Period / Sonnets (1400s - late 1600s)
Where to begin? This explosion of art, literature, science, ideas…of creativity birthed in Florence, Italy, and spread throughout Europe.
One of the major ways that literature was changed during this time was with the invention of moveable type. This allowed books and works in print to be mass produced and shared with everyone. This severely diluted the ability of the Catholic Church to control the spread of ideas and works, and severely escalated the ability of writers and poets to spread their ideas and works.
The Elizabethan Period ran from the beginning to end of Queen Elizabeth’s 45-year reign (1558 - 1603). Well-known genres during this period were sonnets, elegies, and pastoral poems.
John Donne’s works are remembered well, including the beloved No Man is an Island and A Burn Ship.
William Shakespeare, also known as The Bard, is also a name that may sound familiar. This is his era. Go here for more interpretations and thoughts on his works.
Renaissance : Enlightenment (late 1600s - 1785)
Restoration Period (1660 - 1689) and satire.
This is the period in English literature after the Restoration of the monarchy. Specifically Charles II, but don’t worry about remembering his name. The Age of Reason (or Enlightenment) was underway and people were eager to use logic and reason to explain the world. Satire was popular and authors such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope wrote humorous (the former) and dense (the latter) critiques on society and humankind.
Also, John Milton wrote one of the most famous poems ever about the Biblical fall of man: Paradise Lost, in which Adam and Eve get kicked out of, you know, that one Garden.
The Romantics (1785 - 1830)
Ah, that famous Newtonian law about actions and reactions. For every movement, there is a counter-movement in response. And the Romantics responded to the reason and thinking of the Enlightenment with emotion and spontaneity that they connected to nature. They became less focused on structure and adherence to formal rules and language and more enamored of a natural rhythm and vocabulary; an interest with blank verse and imaginative language.
The Big Seven Romantics included:
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
George Gordon
Victorian Era (1837 - 1901)
This is what I meant about the arbitrary choices of a writer belonging to this period or a poet belonging to that period : some of the Victorian-era poets (Poe, Whitman) don’t appear to have radically different styles than those of the Romantics. In fact, they seem in some ways much more connected to the Romantics than to the Era they’re placed in. The Victorian Era runs concurrent with the reign of Queen Victoria, and poetry in this period was the most popular form of literature, even with a certain prolific writer by the name of Charles Dickens cranking out narrative stories that captivated the public.
Industrialization and factories were growing fast, leading to massive changes in urbanization and overcrowding in the cities. Poets found plenty of material in the real world, often focusing on social topics and issues affecting regular people.
Notable Victorian Era poets included:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Edgar Allan Poe
Walt Whitman
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Robert Louis Stevenson
Emily Dickenson
Modern Period (1900 - 1945)
Experimentation! Poets tried out all kinds of new ideas, experimenting and turning upside down the art form. Populations were exploding, war was happening on unimaginable scales, and huge changes in technology were affecting the ways people lived, worked, and traveled. Poets reacted against the Victorian Era realism and focused on creating vivid imagery.
So Modernism’s big things were making things new and questioning the ideas of self and identity.
Notable Modern poets included:
William Carlos Williams
Ezra Pound
William Butler Yeats
Langston Hughes
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
Edna St. Vincent Millay
T.S. Eliot
Robert Lowell
Sylvia Plath
Postmodern Period (The 20th century to now)
Postmodern poets were all about questioning. Questioning the idea of questioning, big meta ideas about the nature of existence and the deconstruction of art and life. Their poetry ranged wildly in terms of style, but shared commonalities in often being free form and frequently stream of consciousness.
They have often created works that can be difficult to decipher, and have stubbornly resisted the idea sometimes of even being understood; the idea being to use the disjointedness of life as analogous to poetry and to reflect that in a challenging, chaotic, sometimes meaningless and shapeless form of writing. These works can be simultaneously challenging and frustrating to delve into - and sometimes enormously rewarding as well.
There are many movements, schools, and styles contained in each of these eras, perhaps most of all in the Postmodern Period. Notable ones have included The Harlem Renaissance and Beat Poetry.
Notable postmodern poets include:
John Updike
ee cummings
Pablo Neruda
Allen Ginsberg
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So to recap:
The first poets
The Greeks
Early Middle Ages
High Middle Ages
Renaissance - Elizabethan Period
Renaissance - The Enlightenment
The Romantics
Victorian Era
Modern Era
Postmodern Era
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Other literature links below
