English 126: Poetry (or what people did before there were movies)
Transcript
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Poetry (or what people did before there were movies)
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In 30 Seconds
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The Renaissance "Renaissance," French for "rebirth," perfectly
describes the intellectual and economic changes that occurred in
Europe from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. During
the era known by this name, Europe emerged from the economic
stagnation of the Middle Ages and experienced a time of financial
growth. Also, and perhaps most importantly, the Renaissance was an
age in which artistic, social, scientific, and political thought
turned in new directions.
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The Protestant Reformation During the Renaissance, a churchman
named Martin Luther changed Christianity. On October 31, 1517, he
went to his church in the town of Wittenburg, Germany, and posted a
list of things that worried him about the church. His list included
the church's practice of selling indulgences, a means by which
people could pay the church to reduce the amount of time their
souls must spend in purgatory instead of atoning for their sins via
contrition. Luther also requested that, when appropriate, Mass be
said in the native language instead of in Latin so that the
church's teachings would be more accessible to the people
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Two Schools of Thought Emerged The secular, humanist idea held
that the church should not rule civic matters, but should guide
only spiritual matters. The church disdained the accumulation of
wealth and worldly goods, supported a strong but limited education,
and believed that moral and ethical behavior was dictated by
scripture. Humanists, however, believed that wealth enabled them to
do fine, noble deeds, that good citizens needed a good,
well-rounded education (such as that advocated by the Greeks and
Romans), and that moral and ethical issues were related more to
secular society than to spiritual concerns.
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In Under a Minute
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Before There was Sexting.. During the age of Elizabeth,
painting was dominated by portraiture, particularly in the form of
miniatures, while elaborate textiles and embroidery prevailed.
Intended for private viewing, portrait miniatures were highly
personal and intimate objects that often depicted lovers or
mistresses.
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Keeping up With the Joneses... In the decorative arts, demand
for domestic silver significantly increased during the
mid-sixteenth century because of rapid growth in population and
subsequent expansion of the middle and upper classes. The Museum's
silver salt, characteristic of Elizabethan plate, is decorated with
a melody of embossed sculptural vegetal forms, fruit, grotesque
figures, and strapwork, topped with a figure finial to help
vertically emphasize its placement on a table.
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But How Did They Breathe? But, as is always the case, there
were artists who made large-scale, full-length paintings that
portrayed the noble class in richly decorative costumes with armor,
embroidery, ruffs, hunting gear, weapons, and lace. These intricate
designs of foliage and patterning were also applied to suits of
armor.
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Now Pay Attention...
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"Pastoral" (from pastor, Latin for "shepherd") refers to a
literary work dealing with shepherds and rustic life. Pastoral
poetry is highly conventionalized; it presents an idealized rather
than realistic view of rustic life. Classical (Greek and Latin)
pastoral works date back to the 3rd century B.C., when the Greek
poet Theocritus wrote his Idylls about the rustic life of Sicily
for the sophisticated citizens of the city of Alexandria. In the
first century B.C., Virgil wrote Latin poems depicting himself and
his equally sophisticated friends and acquaintances as shepherds
living a simple, rural life.
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Common topics of pastoral poetry include love and seduction;
The value of poetry; Death and mourning; The corruption of the city
or court vs. the "purity" of idealized country life; Politics
(generally treated satirically: The "shepherds" critique society or
easily identifiable political figures).
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The affectation of rustic life in pastoral poetry is a purely
artistic device; it creates a distancing effect which allows the
poet to step back from and critique society. The artificiality of
pastoral poetry is most explicit in the courtly language and dress
of the "shepherds," which better fit the drawing rooms of polite
society than the hills, swamps and sheepfolds of real rustic
life.
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Eclogue A common pastoral poetic genre is a dialogue between
two shepherds. This conversation may be between a shepherd and the
shepherdess he loves (generally his attempt to seduce her).
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As was common of Elizabethan poets, Marlowe plays with the
traditional pastoral formula. He introduces sexuality and includes
images that make the shepherds plea seem ridiculous rather than
ideal.
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The Beginning
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Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought
of as "romantic. Rather, it is an international artistic and
philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which
people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their
world.
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The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often
called the "age of revolutions"--including, of course, the American
(1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in
political, economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed
the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A
revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism, which
quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and
practice of poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the
world.
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And in the early years of 178995, the enthusiasm for the
Revolution had the impetus and high excitement of a religious
awakening, because they interpreted the events in France in
accordance with the apocalyptic prophecies in the Hebrew and
Christian Scriptures; that is, they viewed these events as
fulfilling the promise, guaranteed by an infallible text, that a
short period of retributive and cleansing violence would usher in
an age of universal peace and blessedness that would be the
equivalent of a restored Paradise.
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A Detailed Overview
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Until 1830, England was primarily an agrarian society. There
still held two primary social levels: Nobility and gentry on top
and commoners and peasants on the bottom. There was very little, if
any, in the middle. These sects had, for the most part, an amicable
relationship.
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The Pawns Primogenitor Chattel 2 nd Sons Life in the big City 3
million large The Sinners
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Queen Victoria The original Paris Hilton Then along came Prince
Albert Morality The Crystal Palace Imperialization: 1/3 of the
worlds population
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Decadence was a cultural attitude manifested in the late
nineteenth century, containing two primary features: A belief that
certainty in knowledge, science, morality, and society was gone,
which demanded a new attitude in life and art to compensate for the
loss of certainty, an attitude that privileged sensations,
impressions, epiphanies over systematic theorizing That art and
morality were distinct realms. Art was completely autonomous, free
of ethical boundaries.
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Decadence: The Antithesis of Progress The 19th century lived
through earth shattering advances: in industrial production
(industrial revolution, capitalist accumulation); social
organization (bourgeois revolutions and class warfare, imperialist
expansion and the rise of nation states, urbanization, the factory
system); scientific and intellectual advancement (e.g. evolutionary
theory, positivism, historical materialism, the philosophical
systems of Hegel and others); and technological revolutions
(telegraph, telephone, railroads, electricity).
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The furiously energetic march of progress generated a kind of
blind faith in the promises of science and technology to solve our
ills through the machinations of social engineering, a devoted
allegiance to the pleasures of commodity fetishes and consumption,
and the voracious appetite for knowledge, while at the same time
the upheaveals brought on by revolutionary change engendered a
world weariness, an overwhelmed sense of ennui in intellectual and
artistic circles (not to mention the very real suffering and
hardship felt among the proletariat and subjugated peoples of the
globe on the wrong side of imperialistic accumulation).