Language Arts: Poetry, Prose and Drama

1. Poetry

Major Forms of Poetry
From man's earliest days, he expressed himself with poetry. A large percentage of the surviving literature from ancient times is in epic poetry, utilized by Homer and other Greco-Roman poets. Epic poems typically recount heroic deeds and adventures, using stylized language and combining dramatic and lyrical conventions. Epistolary poems, poems that are written and read as letters, also developed in ancient times. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the ballad became a popular convention. Ballads are often structured with rhyme and meter and focus on subjects such as love, death, and religion.
From these early conventions, numerous other poetic forms developed, such as elegies, odes, and pastoral poems. Elegies are mourning poems written in three parts: lament, praise of the deceased, and solace for loss. Odes evolved from songs to the typical poem of the Romantic time period, expressing strong feelings and contemplative thoughts. Pastoral poems idealize nature and country living. Poetry can also be used to make short, pithy statements. Epigrams (memorable rhymes with one or two lines) and limericks (two lines of iambic dimeter followed by two lines of iambic dimeter and another of iambic trimeter) are known for humor and wit.

Haiku
Haiku was originally a Japanese poetry form. In the 13th century, haiku was the opening phrase of renga, a 100-stanza oral poem. By the 16th century, haiku diverged into a separate short poem. When Western writers discovered haiku, the form became popular in English, as well as other languages. A haiku has 17 syllables, traditionally distributed across three lines as 5/7/5, with a pause after the first or second line. Haiku are syllabic and unrhymed. Haiku philosophy and technique are that brevity's compression forces writers to express images concisely, depict a moment in time, and evoke illumination and enlightenment. An example is 17th-century haiku master Matsuo Basho's classic: 'An old silent pond… / A frog jumps into the pond, / splash! Silence again.' Modern American poet Ezra Pound revealed the influence of haiku in his two-line poem 'In a Station of the Metro'—line 1 has 5+7 syllables, line 2 has 7, but it still preserves haiku's philosophy and imagistic technique: 'The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.'

Sonnets
The sonnet traditionally has 14 lines of iambic pentameter, tightly organized around a theme. The Petrarchan sonnet, named for 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch, has an eight-line stanza, the octave, and a six-line stanza, the sestet. There is a change or turn, known as the volta, between the eighth and ninth verses, setting up the sestet's answer or summary. The rhyme scheme is ABBA/ABBA/CDECDE or CDCDCD. The English or Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains and one couplet, with the rhyme scheme ABAB/CDCD/EFEF/GG. This format better suits
English, which has fewer rhymes than Italian. The final couplet often contrasts sharply with the preceding quatrains, as in Shakespeare's sonnets—for example, Sonnet 130, 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun…And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.' Variations on the sonnet form include Edmund Spenser's Spenserian sonnet in the 16th century, John Milton's Miltonic sonnet in the 17th century, and sonnet sequences. Sonnet sequences are seen in works such as John Donne's La Corona and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.

2. Prose

Common Forms of Historical Fiction
Historical fiction is set in particular historical periods, including prehistoric and mythological. Examples include Walter Scott's Rob Roy and Ivanhoe; Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace; Robert Graves' I, Claudius; Mary Renault's The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea (an historical novel using Greek mythology); Virginia Woolf's Orlando and Between the Acts; and John Dos Passos's U.S.A trilogy. Picaresque novels recount episodic adventures of a rogue protagonist or pícaro, like Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote or Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. Gothic novels originated as a reaction against 18th-century Enlightenment rationalism, featuring horror, mystery, superstition, madness, supernatural elements, and revenge. Early examples include Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Matthew Gregory Lewis' Monk, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Bram Stoker's Dracula. In America, Edgar Allan Poe wrote many Gothic works. Contemporary novelist Anne Rice has penned many Gothic novels under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure. Psychological novels, originating in 17th-century France, explore characters' motivations. Examples include Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut; George Eliot's novels; Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment; Tolstoy's Anna Karenina; Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary; and the novels of Henry James, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Forms of Prose

Novels of Manners
Novels of manners are fictional stories that observe, explore, and analyze the social behaviors of a specific time and place. While deep psychological themes are more universal across different historical periods and countries, the manners of a particular society are shorter-lived and more varied; the novel of manners captures these societal details. Novels of manners can also be regarded as symbolically representing, in artistic form, certain established and secure social orders. Characteristics of novels of manners include descriptions of a society with defined behavioral codes; the use of standardized, impersonal formulas in their language; and inhibition of emotional expression, as contrasted with the strong emotions expressed in romantic or sentimental novels. Jane Austen's detailed descriptions of English society and characters struggling with the definitions and restrictions placed on them by society are excellent models of the novel of manners. In the 20th century, Evelyn Waugh's Handful of Dust is a novel of social manners, and his Sword of Honour trilogy is a novel of military manners. Another 20th-century example is The Unbearable Bassington by Saki (the pen name of writer H. H. Munro), focusing on Edwardian society.

Western-World Sentimental Novels
Sentimental love novels originated in the movement of Romanticism. Eighteenth-century examples of novels that depict emotional rather than only physical love include Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Also in the 18th century, Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy (1760-1767) is an example of a novel with elements of sentimentality. The Victorian era's rejection of emotionalism caused the term 'sentimental' to have undesirable connotations. Even non-sentimental novelists such as William Makepeace
Thackeray and Charles Dickens incorporated sentimental elements in their writing. A 19th-century author of genuinely sentimental novels was
Mrs. Henry Wood (e.g., East Lynne, 1861). In the 20th century, Erich Segal's sentimental novel Love Story (1970) was a popular bestseller.

Epistolary Novels
Epistolary novels are told in the form of letters written by their characters rather than in narrative form. Samuel Richardson, the best-known author of epistolary novels like Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), widely influenced early Romantic epistolary novels throughout Europe that freely expressed emotions. Richardson, a printer, published technical manuals on letter-writing for young gentlewomen; his epistolary novels were natural fictional extensions of those nonfictional instructional books. Nineteenth-century English author Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone (1868) was a mystery written in epistolary form. By the 20th century, the format of well-composed written letters came to be regarded as artificial and outmoded. A 20th-century evolution of letters was tape-recording transcripts, such as in French playwright Samuel Beckett's drama Krapp's Last Tape. Though evoking modern alienation, Beckett still created a sense of fictional characters' direct communication without author intervention as Richardson had.

Pastoral Novels
Pastoral novels lyrically idealize country life as idyllic and utopian, akin to the Garden of Eden. Daphnis and Chloe, written by
Greek novelist Longus around the second or third century, influenced Elizabethan pastoral romances like Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde (1590), which inspired Shakespeare's As You Like It, and Philip Sidney's Arcadia
(1590). Jacques-Henri Bernardin de St. Pierre's French work Paul et Virginie (1787) demonstrated the early Romantic view of the innocence and goodness of nature. Though the style lost popularity by the 20th century, pastoral elements can still be seen in novels like The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), both by D. H. Lawrence. Growing realism transformed pastoral writing into less ideal and more dystopian, distasteful and ironic depictions of country life in George Eliot's and Thomas Hardy's novels. Saul Bellow's novel Herzog (1964) may demonstrate how urban ills highlight an alternative pastoral ideal. The pastoral style is commonly thought to be overly idealized and outdated today, as seen in Stella Gibbons' pastoral satire, Cold Comfort Farm (1932).

Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman is German for 'education novel.' This term is also used in English to describe 'apprenticeship' novels focusing on coming-of-age stories, including youth's struggles and searches for things such as identity, spiritual understanding, or the meaning in life. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) is credited as the origin of this genre. Charles Dickens' two novels David Copperfield (1850) and Great
Expectations (1861) also fit this form. H. G. Wells wrote bildungsromans about questing for apprenticeships to address modern life's complications in Joan and Peter (1918) and from a Utopian perspective in The Dream (1924).
School bildungsromans include Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes (1913). Many Hermann Hesse novels, including Demian, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Magister Ludi, and Beneath the Wheel are bildungsromans about a struggling, searching youth.
Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (1903) and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) are two modern examples.
Variations include J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951), set both within and beyond school, and William Golding's Lord of the Flies
(1955), a novel not set in a school but one that is a coming-of-age story nonetheless.

Roman à Clef
Roman à clef, French for 'novel with a key,' refers to books that require a real-life frame of reference, or key, for full comprehension. In Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Nun's Priest's Tale contains details that confuse readers unaware of history about the Earl of Bolingbroke's involvement in an assassination plot. Other literary works fitting this form include John Dryden's political satirical poem 'Absalom and Achitophel' (1681), Jonathan Swift's satire 'A Tale of a Tub' (1704), and George Orwell's political allegory Animal Farm (1945), all of which cannot be understood completely without knowing their camouflaged historical contents. Roman à clefs disguise truths too dangerous for authors to state directly. Readers must know about the enemies of D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley to appreciate their respective novels: Aaron's Rod (1922) and Point Counter Point (1928). Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherché du temps perdu, 1871-1922) is informed by his social context. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is an enormous roman à clef containing multitudinous personal references.

Realism
Realism is a literary form with the goal of representing reality as faithfully as possible. Its genesis in Western literature was a reaction against the sentimentality and extreme emotionalism of the works written in the literary movement of Romanticism, which championed feelings and their expression. Realists focused in great detail on immediacy of time and place, on specific actions of their characters, and the justifiable consequences of those actions. Some techniques of realism include writing in the vernacular (conversational language), using specific dialects and placing an emphasis on character rather than plot. Realistic literature often addresses ethical issues. Historically, realistic works have often concentrated on the middle classes of the authors' societies. Realists eschew treatments that are too dramatic or sensationalistic as exaggerations of the reality that they strive to portray as closely as they are able. Influenced by his own bleak past, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote several novels, such as Crime and Punishment (1866) that shunned romantic ideals and sought to portray a stark reality.
Henry James was a prominent writer of realism in novels such as Daisy Miller
(1879). Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) skillfully represented the language and culture of lower-class Mississippi in his novel Huckleberry Finn (1885).

Satire
Satire uses sarcasm, irony, and/or humor as social criticism to lampoon human folly. Unlike realism, which intends to depict reality as it exists without exaggeration, satire often involves creating situations or ideas deliberately exaggerating reality to be ridiculous to illuminate flawed behaviors. Ancient Roman satirists included Horace and Juvenal. Alexander Pope's poem 'The Rape of the Lock' satirized the values of fashionable members of the 18th-century upper-middle class, which Pope found shallow and trivial. The theft of a lock of hair from a young woman is blown out of proportion: the poem's characters regard it as seriously as they would a rape.
Irishman Jonathan Swift satirized British society, politics, and religion in works like 'A Tale of a Tub.' In 'A Modest Proposal,' Swift used essay form and mock-serious tone, satirically 'proposing' cannibalism of babies and children as a solution to poverty and overpopulation. He satirized petty political disputes in Gulliver's Travels.

3. Drama

Early Development
English drama originally developed from religious ritual. Early Christians established traditions of presenting pageants or mystery plays, traveling on wagons and carts through the streets to depict biblical events. Medieval tradition assigned responsibility for performing specific plays to the different guilds. In Middle English, 'mystery' meant both religious ritual/truth, and craft/trade. Historically, mystery plays were to be reproduced exactly the same every time like religious rituals. However, some performers introduced individual interpretations of roles and even improvised. Thus, drama was born. Narrative detail and nuanced acting were evident in mystery cycles by the Middle Ages. As individualized performance evolved, plays on other subjects also developed. Middle English mystery plays extant include the York Cycle, Coventry Cycle, Chester Mystery
Plays, N-Town Plays, and Towneley/Wakefield Plays. In recent times, these plays began to draw interest again, and several modern actors such as Dame Judi Dench began their careers with mystery plays.

Defining Characteristics
In the Middle Ages, plays were commonly composed in verse. By the time of the Renaissance, Shakespeare and other dramatists wrote plays that mixed prose, rhymed verse, and blank verse. The traditions of costumes and masks were seen in ancient Greek drama, medieval mystery plays, and Renaissance drama. Conventions like asides, in which actors make comments directly to the audience unheard by other characters, and soliloquies (dramatic monologues) were also common during Shakespeare's Elizabethan dramatic period. Monologues date back to ancient Greek drama. Elizabethan dialogue tended to use colloquial prose for lower-class characters' speech and stylized verse for upper-class characters. Another Elizabethan convention was the play-within-a-play, as in Hamlet. As drama moved toward realism, dialogue became less poetic and more conversational, as in most modern English-language plays. Contemporary drama, both onstage and onscreen, includes a convention of breaking the fourth wall, as actors directly face and address audiences.

Comedy
Today, most people equate the idea of comedy with something funny, and of tragedy with something sad. However, the ancient Greeks defined these differently. Comedy needed not be humorous or amusing; it needed only a happy ending. The classical definition of comedy, as included in Aristotle's works, is any work that tells the story of a sympathetic main character's rise in fortune. According to Aristotle, protagonists need not be heroic or exemplary, nor evil or worthless, but ordinary people- 'average to below average' morally. Comic figures who were sympathetic were usually of humble origins, proving their 'natural nobility' through their actions as they were tested, rather than characters born into nobility—who were often satirized as self-important or pompous.

Shakespearean Comedy
William Shakespeare lived in England from 1564-1616. He was a poet and playwright of the Renaissance period in Western culture. He is generally considered the foremost dramatist in world literature and the greatest author to write in the English language. He wrote many poems, particularly sonnets, of which 154 survive today, and approximately 38 plays.
Though his sonnets are greater in number and are very famous, he is best known for his plays, including comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies and historical plays.
His play titles include: All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Winter's Tale, King John, Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and
Cymbeline. Some scholars have suggested that Christopher Marlowe wrote several of Shakespeare's works. While most scholars reject this theory, Shakespeare did pay homage to his contemporary, alluding to several of his characters, themes, or verbiage, as well as borrowing themes from several of his plays: Marlowe's Jew of Malta influenced Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, etc.

When Shakespeare was writing, during the Elizabethan period of the Renaissance, Aristotle's version of comedies was popular. While some of Shakespeare's comedies were humorous and others were not, all had happy endings. A Comedy of Errors is a farce. Based and expanding on a Classical
Roman comedy, it is lighthearted and includes slapstick humor and mistaken identity. Much Ado About Nothing is a romantic comedy. It incorporates some more serious themes, including social mores, perceived infidelity, marriage's duality as both trap and ideal, honor and its loss, public shame, and deception, but also much witty dialogue and a happy ending.

Dramatic Comedy
Three types of dramas classified as comedy include the farce, the romantic comedy, and the satirical comedy.

Farce
The farce is a zany, goofy type of comedy that includes pratfalls and other forms of slapstick humor. The characters in a farce tend to be ridiculous or fantastical in nature. The plot also tends to contain highly improbable events, featuring complications and twists that continue throughout, and incredible coincidences that could never occur in reality. Mistaken identity, deceptions, and disguises are common devices used in farcical comedies. Shakespeare's play The Comedy of Errors, with its cases of accidental mistaken identity and slapstick, is an example of farce.
Contemporary examples of farce include the Marx Brothers' movies, the Three Stooges movies and TV episodes, and the Pink Panther movie series.

Romantic Comedy
Romantic comedies are probably the most popular of the types of comedy, in both live theater performances and movies. They include not only humor and a happy ending, but also love. In the typical plot of a romantic comedy, two people well suited to one another are either brought together for the first time, or reconciled after being separated. They are usually both sympathetic characters, and seem destined to be together yet separated by some intervening complication—such as ex-lovers, interfering parents or friends, or differences in social class. The happy ending is achieved through the lovers' overcoming all these obstacles. William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing; Walt Disney's version of Cinderella (1950); Broadway musical Guys and Dolls (1955); and movies Princess Bride (1987), directed by Rob Reiner; Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998), both directed by Nora Ephron and starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan; and Forget Paris (1995), co-written, produced, directed by and starring Billy Crystal, are examples of romantic comedies.

Satirical Comedy and Black Comedy
Satires generally mock and lampoon human foolishness and vices. Satirical comedies fit the classical definition of comedy by depicting a main character's rise in fortune, but they also fit the definition of satire by making that main character either a fool, morally corrupt, or cynical in attitude. All or most of the other characters in the satirical comedy display similar foibles. These include cuckolded spouses, dupes, and other gullible types; tricksters, con artists, and criminals; hypocrites; fortune seekers; and other deceptive types who prey on the gullible, who are their willing and unwitting victims. Some classical examples of satirical comedies include The Birds by ancient Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes, and Volpone by 17th-century poet and playwright Ben Jonson, who made the comedy of humors popular. When satirical comedy is extended to extremes, it becomes black comedy, wherein the comedic occurrences are grotesque or terrible.

Tragedy
The opposite of comedy is tragedy, portraying a hero's fall in fortune. While by classical definitions, tragedies could be sad, Aristotle went further, requiring that they depict suffering and pain to cause 'terror and pity' in audiences. Additionally, he decreed that tragic heroes be basically good, admirable, and/or noble, and that their downfalls be through personal action, choice, or error, not by bad luck or accident.

Aristotle's Criteria for Tragedy
In his Poetics, Aristotle defined five critical terms relative to tragedy. (1) Anagnorisis: Meaning tragic insight or recognition, this is a moment of realization by a tragic hero(ine) when s/he suddenly understands how s/he has enmeshed himself/herself in a 'web of fate.'
(2) Hamartia: This is often called a 'tragic flaw,' but is better described as a tragic error. Hamartia is an archery term meaning a shot missing the bull's eye, used here as a metaphor for a mistake—often a simple one—which results in catastrophe. (3) Hubris: While often called 'pride,' this is actually translated as 'violent transgression,' and signifies an arrogant overstepping of moral or cultural bounds—the sin of the tragic hero who over-presumes or over-aspires. (4) Nemesis: translated as 'retribution,' this represents the cosmic punishment or payback that the tragic hero ultimately receives for committing hubristic acts. (5) Peripateia: Literally 'turning,' this is a plot reversal consisting of a tragic hero's pivotal action, which changes his/her status from safe to endangered.

Hegel's Theory of Tragedy
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) proposed a different theory of tragedy than Aristotle (384-322 BCE), which was also very influential. Whereas Aristotle's criteria involved character and plot, Hegel defined tragedy as a dynamic conflict of opposite forces or rights. For example, if an individual believes in the moral philosophy of the conscientious objector, i.e., that fighting in wars is morally wrong, but is confronted with being drafted into military service, this conflict would fit Hegel's definition of a tragic plot premise. Hegel theorized that a tragedy must involve some circumstance in which two values, or two rights, are fatally at odds with one another and conflict directly. Hegel did not view this as good triumphing over evil, or evil winning out over good, but rather as one good fighting against another good unto death. He saw this conflict of two goods as truly tragic. In ancient Greek playwright Sophocles' tragedy Antigone, the main character experiences this tragic conflict between her public duties and her family and religious responsibilities.

Revenge Tragedy
Along with Aristotelian definitions of comedy and tragedy, ancient Greece was the origin of the revenge tragedy. This genre became highly popular in Renaissance England, and is still popular today in contemporary movies. In a revenge tragedy, the protagonist has suffered a serious wrong, such as the assault and murder of a family member. However, the wrongdoer has not been punished. In contemporary plots, this often occurs when some legal technicality has interfered with the miscreant's conviction and sentencing, or when authorities are unable to locate and apprehend the criminal. The protagonist then faces the conflict of suffering this injustice, or exacting his or her own justice by seeking revenge. Greek revenge tragedies include Agamemnon and Medea. Playwright Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1582-1592) is credited with beginning the Elizabethan genre of revenge tragedies. Shakespearean revenge tragedies include Hamlet (1599-1602) and Titus Andronicus (1588-1593). A Jacobean example is Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1606, 1607).

Hamlet's 'Tragic Flaw'
Despite virtually limitless interpretations, one way to view Hamlet's tragic error generally is as indecision. He suffers the classic revenge tragedy's conflict of whether to suffer with his knowledge of his mother's and uncle's assassination of his father, or to exact his own revenge and justice against Claudius, who has assumed the throne after his crime went unknown and unpunished. Hamlet's famous soliloquy, 'To be or not to be' reflects this dilemma. Hamlet muses 'Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?' Hamlet both longs for and fears death, as 'the dread of something after death … makes us rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not … Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.' For most of the play, the protagonist struggles with his responsibility in avenging his father, who was killed by Hamlet's uncle Claudius. So Hamlet's tragic error at first might be considered a lack of action. But he then makes several attempts at revenge, each of which end in worse tragedy, until his efforts are ended by the final tragedy – Hamlet's own murder.

Historical Background for English Literature
The ancient Greek Athenian elite were highly educated and developed philosophies and principles for creating poetry and drama. During the Roman Empire, the Romans assimilated and adapted the culture of the Greeks they conquered into their own society. For example, the gods of Roman mythology were essentially the same as in Greek myth, only renamed in Latin. However, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the many European countries formerly united under Roman rule became fragmented. There followed a 1,000-year period of general public ignorance and illiteracy—called the Dark Ages as well as the Middle Ages. Only the Church remained a bastion of literacy: monks and priests laboriously copied manuscripts one at a time by hand. Johannes Gutenberg's 1450 invention of the movable-type printing press changed everything: multiple copies of books could be printed quickly. This enabled a public return to literacy, leading to the Renaissance, or 'rebirth'—reviving access and interest for Greek and Roman classics, and generating a creative explosion in all arts.

Medieval Poetry
The medieval time period was heavily influenced by Greek and Latin Stoic philosophies. Medieval Christians appreciated Greek and Latin Stoic philosophies for emphasis of spiritual virtues rather than material. Pagan stoic values were often adapted to Christian beliefs, and these were incorporated into early English literature.

Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales
Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), called the 'Father of English Literature,' chiefly wrote long narrative poems, including The
Book of the Duchess, Anelida and Arcite, The House of Fame, The Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. His most famous work is The Canterbury Tales. Its historical and cultural context is life during the Middle Ages, representing a cross-section of society—tradespeople, professionals, nobility, clergy, and housewives, among others—and religious pilgrimages, a common practice of the time. Its literary context is a frame-tale, a story within a story. Chaucer described a varied group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, taking turns telling stories to amuse each other. Tales encompass a broad range of subjects: bawdy comedy, chivalry, romance, and religion.
These include: The Knight's Tale, The Miller's Tale, The Reeve's Tale, The Cook's Tale, The Man of Law's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Tale, The Friar's Tale, The Summoner's Tale, The Clerk's Tale, The Merchant's Tale, The Squire's Tale, The Franklin's Tale, The Physician's Tale, The Pardoner's Tale, and The Nun's Priest's Tale.


The Parlement of Foules
In the brief preface to his poem 'The Parlement of Foules,' Chaucer refers to classic Roman author Cicero's 'The Dream of Scipio,' a dream-vision dialogue reflecting Stoic philosophy. Chaucer takes Cicero's broad scope of macrocosm (viewing the universe as a whole) and narrows it to a microcosm (individual focus) as he explores themes of order, disorder, and the role of humanity in nature. By using animals as characters, he is able to both parody and probe human nature for the reader.

Sir Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) had an immeasurable influence on the development of English literature. Both his writing style and thought process were highly original. The Oxford English Dictionary credits Browne with coining over 100 new words (and quotes him in over 3,000 other entries), such as approximate, literary, and ultimate. His creativity and vision have inspired other authors over the past four centuries and were instrumental in developing much of the vocabulary used in today's prose and poetry. In 1671 he was knighted by Charles II in recognition of his accomplishments, which continue to affect literature today.

Metaphysical Poets
Dr. Samuel Johnson, a famous 18th-century figure, who wrote philosophy, poetry, and authoritative essays on literature, coined the term 'Metaphysical Poets' to describe a number of mainly 17th-century lyric poets who shared certain elements of content and style in common. The poets included John Donne (considered the founder of the Metaphysical Poets), George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and Henry Vaughan. These poets encouraged readers to see the world from new and unaccustomed perspectives by shocking and surprising them with paradox; contradictory imagery; original syntax; combinations of religious, philosophical, and artistic images; subtle argumentation; and extended metaphors called conceits. Unlike their contemporaries, they did not allude to classical mythology or nature imagery in their poetry, but to current geographical and scientific discoveries. Some, like Donne, showed Neo-Platonist influences—like the idea that a lover's beauty reflected Eternity's perfect beauty. They were called metaphysical for their transcendence—Donne in particular—of typical 17th-century rationalism's hierarchical organization through their adventurous exploration of religion, ideas, emotions, and language.

Romanticism
The height of the Romantic movement occurred in the first half of the 19th century. It identified with and gained momentum from the French Revolution (1789) against the political and social standards of the aristocracy and its overthrowing of them. Romanticism was also part of the Counter-Enlightenment, backlash against the Enlightenment's insistence on rationalism, scientific treatment of nature, and denial of emotionalism. Though expressed most overtly in the creative arts, Romanticism also affected politics, historiography, natural sciences, and education. Though often associated with radical, progressive, and liberal politics, it also included conservatism, especially in its influences on increased nationalism in many countries. The Romantics championed individual heroes, artists, and pioneers; freedom of expression; the exotic; and the power of the individual imagination.
American authors Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Laurence Sterne in England, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Germany were included among well-known Romantic authors. The six major English Romantic poets were William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.

William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the earliest and foremost English Romantic poets. He was also an artist and printmaker. In addition to his brilliant poetry, he produced paintings, drawings, and engravings, impressive for their technical expertise, artistic beauty, and spiritual subject matter. Because he held many idiosyncratic opinions, and moreover because he was subject to visions, reporting that he saw angels in the trees and other unusual claims, Blake was thought crazy by many others during his life. His work's creative, expressive character, and its mystical and philosophical elements, led people to consider him both precursor to and member of Romanticism, and a singular, original, unclassifiable artist at the same time. Blake illustrated most of his poetry with his own hand-colored, illuminated printing. His best-known poetry includes Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
and Jerusalem.

William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was instrumental in establishing Romanticism when he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge collaboratively published Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth's 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads' is considered a manifesto of English Romantic literary theory and criticism. In it, Wordsworth described the elements of a new kind of poetry, which he characterized as using 'real language of men' rather than traditional 18th-century poetic style. In this Preface he also defined poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [which] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.' Lyrical Ballads included the famous works 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge, and 'Tintern Abbey' by Wordsworth. His semi-autobiographical poem, known during his life as 'the poem to Coleridge,' was published posthumously, entitled The Prelude and regarded as his major work. Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843-1850. Among many others, his poems include 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' (often called 'Daffodils'), 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality,' 'Westminster Bridge,' and 'The World Is Too Much with Us.'

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was also a philosopher and literary critic and collaborated with William Wordsworth in launching the Romantic movement. He wrote very influential literary criticism, including the major two-volume autobiographical, meditative discourse Biographia Literaria (1817). Coleridge acquainted English-language intellectuals with German idealist philosophy. He also coined many now familiar philosophical and literary terms, like 'the willing suspension of disbelief,' meaning that readers would voluntarily withhold judgment of implausible stories if their authors could impart 'human interest and a semblance of truth' to them. He strongly influenced the American Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Coleridge's poem Love, a ballad (written to Sara Hutchinson), inspired John Keats' poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci.' He is credited with the origin of 'Conversational Poetry' and Wordsworth's adoption of it.
Some of his best-known works include 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,' 'Christabel,' 'Kubla Khan,' 'The Nightingale,' 'Dejection: An Ode,' and 'To William Wordsworth.'

George Gordon, Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, commonly known as Lord Byron (1788-1824) is known for long narrative poems 'Don Juan,' 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,' and the shorter lyric poem 'She Walks in Beauty.' The aristocratic Byron travelled throughout Europe, living in Italy for seven years. He fought in the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, making him a national hero in Greece, before dying a year later from a fever contracted there. He was the most notoriously profligate and flamboyant Romantic poet, with reckless behaviors including multiple bisexual love affairs, adultery, rumored incest, self-exile, and enormous debts. He became friends with fellow Romantic writers Percy Bysshe Shelley, the future Mary Shelley, and John Polidori. Their shared fantasy writing at a Swiss villa the summer of 1816 resulted in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Byron's Fragment of a Novel, and was the inspiration for Polidori's The Vampyre, establishing the romantic vampire genre. Byron also wrote linguistic volumes on American and Armenian grammars. His name is synonymous today with the mercurial Romantic.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was not famous during life but became so after death, particularly for his lyric poetry. His best-known works include 'Ozymandias,' 'Ode to the West Wind,' 'To a Skylark,' 'Music,' 'When Soft Voices Die,' 'The Cloud,' 'The Masque of Anarchy'; longer poems 'Queen Mab'/'The Daemon of the World' and 'Adonaïs'; and the verse drama Prometheus Unbound. Shelley's second wife, Mary Shelley, was the daughter of his mentor William Godwin and the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman).Mary Shelley was also famous for her Gothic novel Frankenstein.
Early in his career Shelley was influenced by William Wordsworth's Romantic poetry, and wrote the long poem Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude. Soon thereafter he met Lord Byron, and was inspired to write 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'. He composed 'Mont Blanc,' inspired by touring the French Alpine commune Chamonix-Mont-Blanc. Shelley also encouraged Byron to compose his epic poem Don Juan. Shelley inspired Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and others to civil disobedience, nonviolent resistance, vegetarianism, and animal rights.

John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821), despite his short life, was a major English Romantic poet. He is known for his six Odes: 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,'
'Ode on Indolence,' 'Ode on Melancholy,' 'Ode to a Nightingale,' 'Ode to Psyche,' and 'To Autumn.' Other notable works include the sonnet 'O Solitude,' 'Endymion,' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci,' 'Hyperion,' and the collection Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems. The intensity and maturity he achieved in only six years are often praised since his death, though during life he felt he accomplished nothing lasting. He wrote a year before dying, 'I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have lov'd the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remember'd.' He was proven wrong. His verse from 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is renowned: ''Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Modernism in Yeats' Poetry
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was among the greatest influences in 20th-century English literature and was believed transitional from Romanticism to Modernism. His earlier verses were lyrical, but later became realistic, symbolic, and apocalyptic. He was fascinated with Irish legend, occult subjects, and historical cycles—'gyres.' He incorporated Irish folklore, mythology, and legends in 'The Stolen Child,' 'The Wanderings of Oisin,' 'The Death of Cuchulain,' 'Who Goes with Fergus?' and 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.' Early collections included The Secret Rose and The Wind Among the Reeds. His later, most significant poetry collections include The Green Helmet, Responsibilities, The Tower, and The Winding Stair. Yeats's visionary, apocalyptic poem 'The Second Coming' (1920) reflects his belief that his times were the anarchic end of the Christian cycle/gyre: 'what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?'

Poetic Themes and Devices

Carpe Diem Tradition in Poetry
Carpe diem is Latin for 'seize the day.' A long poetic tradition, it advocates making the most of time because it passes swiftly and life is short. It is found in multiple languages, including Latin, Torquato Tasso's Italian, Pierre de Ronsard's French, and Edmund Spenser's
English, and is often used in seduction to argue for indulging in earthly pleasures. Roman poet Horace's Ode 1.11 tells younger woman Leuconoe to enjoy the present, not worrying about inevitable aging. Two Renaissance Metaphysical Poets, Andrew Marvell and Robert Herrick, treated carpe diem more as a call to action. In 'To His Coy Mistress,' Marvell points out that time is fleeting, arguing for love, and concluding that because they cannot stop time, they may as well defy it, getting the most out of the short time they have. In 'To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,' Herrick advises young women to take advantage of their good fortune in being young by getting married before they become too old to attract men and have babies.
'To His Coy Mistress' begins, 'Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.' Using imagery, Andrew
Marvell describes leisure they could enjoy if time were unlimited. Arguing for seduction, he continues famously, 'But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.' He depicts time as turning beauty to death and decay. Contradictory images in 'amorous birds of prey' and 'tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life' overshadow romance with impending death, linking present pleasure with mortality and spiritual values with moral considerations. Marvell's concluding couplet summarizes carpe diem: 'Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.' 'To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time' begins with the famous 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.' Rather than seduction to live for the present, Robert Herrick's experienced persona advises young women's future planning: 'Old time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today, / Tomorrow will be dying.'

Couplets and Meter to Enhance Meaning in Poetry
When a poet uses a couplet—a stanza of two lines, rhymed or unrhymed—it can function as the answer to a question asked earlier in the poem, or the solution to a problem or riddle. Couplets can also enhance the establishment of a poem's mood, or clarify the development of a poem's theme.
Another device to enhance thematic development is irony, which also communicates the poet's tone and draws the reader's attention to a point the poet is making. The use of meter gives a poem a rhythmic context, contributes to the poem's flow, makes it more appealing to the reader, can represent natural speech rhythms, and produces specific effects. For example, in 'The Song of Hiawatha,' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow uses trochaic (/ ᴗ) tetrameter (four beats per line) to evoke for readers the rhythms of Native American chanting: 'By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water / Stood the wigwam of Nokomis.'
(Italicized syllables are stressed; non-italicized syllables are unstressed.)

Effects of Figurative Devices on Meaning
Through exaggeration, hyperbole communicates the strength of a poet's or persona's feelings and enhances the mood of the poem. Imagery appeals to the reader's senses, creating vivid mental pictures, evoking reader emotions and responses, and helping to develop themes. Irony also aids thematic development by drawing the reader's attention to the poet's point and communicating the poem's tone. Thematic development is additionally supported by the comparisons of metaphors and similes, which emphasize similarities, enhance imagery, and affect readers' perceptions. The use of mood communicates the atmosphere of a poem, builds a sense of tension, and evokes the reader's emotions. Onomatopoeia appeals to the reader's auditory sense and enhances sound imagery even when the poem is visual (read silently) rather than auditory (read aloud). Rhyme connects and unites verses, gives the rhyming words emphasis and makes poems more fluent. Symbolism communicates themes, develops imagery, and evokes readers' emotional and other responses.

Poetic Structure to Enhance Meaning
The opening stanza of Romantic English poet, artist and printmaker William Blake's famous poem 'The Tyger' demonstrates how a poet can create tension by using line length and punctuation independently of one another: 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?' The first three lines of this stanza are trochaic (/ᴗ), with 'masculine' endings—that is, strongly stressed syllables at the ends of each of the lines. But Blake's punctuation contradicts this rhythmic regularity by not providing any divisions between the words 'bright' and 'In' or between 'eye' and 'Could.' This irregular punctuation foreshadows how Blake disrupts the meter at the end of this first stanza by using a contrasting dactyl (/ᴗᴗ), with a 'feminine' (unstressed) ending syllable in the last word, 'symmetry.' Thus Blake uses structural contrasts to heighten the intrigue of his work.
In enjambment, one sentence or clause in a poem does not end at the end of its line or verse, but runs over into the next line or verse.
Clause endings coinciding with line endings give readers a feeling of completion, but enjambment influences readers to hurry to the next line to finish and understand the sentence. In his blank-verse epic religious poem
'Paradise Lost,' John Milton wrote: 'Anon out of the earth a fabric huge / Rose like an exhalation, with the sound / Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet, / Built like a temple, where pilasters round / Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid / With golden architrave.' Only the third line is end-stopped. Milton, describing the palace of Pandemonium bursting from Hell up through the ground, reinforced this idea through phrases and clauses bursting through the boundaries of the lines. A caesura is a pause in mid-verse. Milton's commas in the third and fourth lines signal caesuras. They interrupt flow, making the narration jerky to imply that Satan's glorious-seeming palace has a shaky and unsound foundation.

Reflection of Content Through Structure
Wallace Stevens' short yet profound poem 'The Snow Man' is reductionist: the snow man is a figure without human biases or emotions.
Stevens begins, 'One must have a mind of winter,' the criterion for realizing nature and life does not inherently possess subjective qualities; we only invest it with these. Things are not as we see them; they simply are. The entire poem is one long sentence of clauses connected by conjunctions and commas, and modified by relative clauses and phrases. The successive phrases lead readers continually to reconsider as they read. Stevens' construction of the poem mirrors the meaning he conveys. With a mind of winter, the snow man, Stevens concludes, 'nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is' (ultimate reductionism).

Contrast of Content and Structure
Robert Frost's poem 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' (1923) is deceptively short and simple, with only four stanzas, each of only four lines, and short and simple words. Reinforcing this is Frost's use of regular rhyme and meter. The rhythm is iambic tetrameter throughout; the rhyme scheme is AABA in the first three stanzas and AAAA in the fourth. In an additional internal subtlety, B ending 'here' in the first stanza is rhymed with A endings 'queer,' 'near,' and 'year' of the second; B ending 'lake' in the second is rhymed in A endings 'shake', 'mistake,' and 'flake' of the third.
The final stanza's AAAA endings reinforce the ultimate darker theme. Though the first three stanzas seem to describe quietly watching snow fill the woods, the last stanza evokes the seductive pull of mysterious death: 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep,' countered by the obligations of living life: 'But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.' The last line's repetition strengthens Frost's message that despite death's temptation, life's course must precede it.

Repetition to Enhance Meaning
A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem composed of five tercets and one quatrain. The defining characteristic is the repetition: two lines appear repeatedly throughout the poem. In Theodore Roethke's 'The Waking,' the two repeated lines are 'I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow,' and 'I learn by going where I have to go.' At first these sound paradoxical, but the meaning is gradually revealed through the poem. The repetition also fits with the theme of cycle: the paradoxes of waking to sleep, learning by going, and thinking by feeling represent a constant cycle through life. They also symbolize abandoning conscious rationalism to embrace spiritual vision. We wake from the vision to 'Great Nature,' and 'take the lively air.' 'This shaking keeps me steady'—another paradox—juxtaposes and balances fear of mortality with ecstasy in embracing experience. The transcendent vision of all life's interrelationship demonstrates, 'What falls away is always. And is near.' Readers experience the poem holistically, like music, through Roethke's integration of theme, motion, and sound.
Sylvia Plath's villanelle
'Mad Girl's Love Song' narrows the scope from universal to personal but keeps the theme of cycle. The two repeated lines, 'I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead' and '(I think I made you up inside my head.)' reflect the existential viewpoint that nothing exists in any absolute reality outside of our own perceptions. In the first stanza, the middle line, 'I lift my lids and all is born again,' in its recreating the world, bridges between the repeated refrain statements—one of obliterating reality, the other of having constructed her lover's existence. Unlike other villanelles wherein key lines are subtly altered in their repetitions, Plath repeats these exactly each time. This reflects the young woman's love, constant throughout the poem as it neither fades nor progresses.