Poetry From The late 17th Century to the 19th Century
Overview
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Poetry From The late 17th Century to the 19th Century
After John Donne and John Milton, John Dryden was the greatest English poet of the 17th century. Dryden is best known today as a satirist. His most famous poem, Absalom and Achitophel contains several brilliant satiric portraits. Dryden's mastery of the heroic couplet aided him in writing cutting satires.
“Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense,
But good men starve for want of impudence.”
― John Dryden
John Dryden died in 1700, but his death signaled no dramatic change in poetic style. Poets walked in his footsteps. William Congreve was Dryden's poetical successor, but Pope was his genuine heir. Pope dominated poetry with the publication of his Pastorals in 1709. His impact can be seen in Robert Dodsley's Collection of Works, by Several Hands (1748), in William Mason's Museaus (1747), in the half-dozen additional poems devoted to Pope.
William Blake is considered to be one of the greatest visionaries of the early Romantic Era. In addition to writing such poems as “The Lamb” and “The Tyger” Blake was primarily occupied as an engraver and watercolour artist. Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1794) is arguably William Blake’s most well-known poetic composition. The Lamb and the Tyger function as complementary symbols of the protection and corruption of innocence, respectively. Lord Byron was a British Romantic poet and satirist whose poetry and personality captured the imagination of Europe. Although made famous by the autobiographical poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and his many love affairs he is perhaps better known today for the satiric realism of Don Juan. Percy Bysshe Shelley, English Romantic poet whose passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language. The life and works of Percy Bysshe Shelley exemplify English Romanticism in both its extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair. Romanticism’s major themes—restlessness and brooding, rebellion against authority, interchange with nature—all of these Shelley exemplified in the way he lived his life. John Keats was an English Romantic lyric poet. He devoted his life to the perfection of a poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. All his greatest poetry was written in a single year, 1819: “Lamia,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the great odes, and the two unfinished versions of an epic on Hyperion.