Poetry in English

Dramatic monologue

A dramatic monologue is a poem in which one speaker addresses a silent listener at a moment of tension, and the reader learns about the speaker's character from what he or she reveals, often without intending to. Only the speaker's voice is heard, so the listener's replies must be inferred from the speaker's remarks. Robert Browning perfected the form in collections such as Men and Women (1855) and Dramatis Personae (1864), and his speakers are often historical or invented figures whose self-justifications expose their flaws. Browning also experimented with dramatic forms meant for performance, and The Inn Album (1875), though usually read as a poem, was written in dramatic form and intended for the stage. The form is distinct from a soliloquy, which is spoken alone without an implied listener, and from a dialogue, in which two characters speak in turn. In the twentieth century T. S. Eliot used the same device in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, where a speaker's hesitations and self-doubt are revealed through an implied audience. Example: a shopkeeper who speaks to a stranger about his late business partner, and in doing so reveals his resentment, is a dramatic monologue in miniature.

W. H. Auden's poetry

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) was an Anglo-American poet whose early work of the 1930s dealt with politics, psychology and the crisis of European society. After he moved to the United States in 1939, his poetry became more meditative and more concerned with ethics, faith and the limits of art. His elegy “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) contains the line that poetry makes nothing happen, meaning that a poem has no direct power to change historical events, although it survives in its own way as a human act of speech. Auden often uses irony and satire to attack conformity and the bureaucratic reduction of individuals to statistics, and his poem “The Unknown Citizen” (1939) is the classic example of this mode. Terms to remember: elegy (a poem of mourning), satire (ridicule aimed at social vice), and ironic detachment (a tone in which the speaker's apparent praise implies criticism). Example: a poem that praises a model worker through a list of official records, while the reader perceives the emptiness of such praise, uses Auden's characteristic irony.

W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. His early work drew on Irish legend and the Celtic revival, and his mature poetry uses symbolic images such as the tower, the gyre and the golden bird to explore the relation between art, history and the self. His poems of the 1920s and 1930s, collected in volumes such as The Tower (1928), often treat old age, the conflict between passion and intellect, and the endurance of desire, as in the poem “Politics” (1939). Yeats's poem “The Second Coming”, written after the First World War, is a prophetic vision of violence and disorder in which the centre no longer holds; its opening lines describe an anarchy that spreads across the world. Students should note that Yeats's late style is more austere and more sceptical than his early Romantic lyricism, and that the poems of this period frequently use dramatic speakers who reflect on their own mortality.

Indian English poetry

Indian English poetry developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Indian writers adopted English as a medium for expressing Indian experience. Early figures include Toru Dutt, who wrote nostalgic lyrics about her childhood in Bengal, and Sarojini Naidu, known for her lyrical and musical verse on Indian life. In the mid-twentieth century Nissim Ezekiel and Kamala Das redefined the field by writing in a modern idiom that combines irony, free verse and the depiction of everyday Indian life. Ezekiel's poems often set folk belief beside a modern sensibility, showing the tension between tradition and rational scepticism. Kamala Das's poetry is confessional and explores the search for identity, especially a woman's identity within family, language and social expectation. Students should remember the names of major poets, the shift from imitation of English models to an independent Indian voice, and the central themes of identity, language and tradition.

Romantic poets and their works

The Romantic movement in English poetry roughly spans the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and its major poets include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and William Blake. Romantic poetry values imagination, emotion, the sublime power of nature, and the individual's inner life. The ode, a lofty lyric addressed to a subject, was a favourite form. Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” was first published in 1807, whereas the odes of Keats, such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, and Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”, all date from 1819. Romantic poets also turned to the lament for a lost or fallen nation or ideal, and a speaker who mourns a country's decline while seeking to revive its past glory is a common Romantic situation. Students should match each poet with the works and dates associated with him, because examiners often test this pairing directly.

Shelley's Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” was written in 1819 and is composed in terza rima, a three-line interlocking rhyme scheme, in five sections. The poem's central device is apostrophe, a figure in which the speaker directly addresses an absent or non-human being, here the wind, and asks it for inspiration and renewal. Shelley also uses personification, which gives human qualities, actions or feelings to non-human things, so that leaves become ghost-like creatures fleeing from an unseen enchanter and the wind is treated as a charioteer. Other figures to recognise in poetry include aporia, an expression of doubt or deliberation about what to say or do, and alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words. Students should be able to identify apostrophe and personification quickly, since they are the figures most often tested in the Romantic odes, and should remember that the two figures can appear together in one passage.

Roethke's My Papa's Waltz

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) was an American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1954 for The Waking. His poem “My Papa's Waltz” is written in quatrains with a loose rhyme scheme and a plain, colloquial diction that makes its domestic scene vivid. The poem describes a child's ambivalent memory of a physically rough but affectionate father, and its tone mixes fear and tenderness. The speaker uses simile, a comparison marked by like or as, to express the intensity of his clinging. Images of manual labour, such as a battered hand and a palm caked with dirt, suggest a working-class household in which the father's roughness belongs to his daily life. Students should note the difference between simile and metaphor, the function of concrete, everyday imagery in Roethke's verse, and the ambiguity of a child's perspective on an adult's violence.

Metaphysical poets

The term metaphysical poets was coined by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the English Poets (1779–1781) to describe a group of seventeenth-century English poets whose verse is marked by wit, learned comparisons and intellectual argument. The most important members are John Donne and Andrew Marvell, and George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw are also often included. Their characteristic device is the conceit, an extended and surprising metaphor that links remote ideas, and their diction often mixes colloquial speech with scholarly vocabulary. T. S. Eliot revived critical interest in the group through his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), although Eliot himself is a modernist poet and not a metaphysical one. Students should keep the difference clear: Philip Larkin and the Movement poets of the 1950s are opposed to metaphysical wit, not part of it.