This article needs additional citations for verification .(October 2006) |
Sentimental poetry is a melodramatic poetic form. It is aimed primarily at stimulating the emotions rather than at communicating experience truthfully. Bereavement is a common theme of sentimental poetry.
Friedrich Schiller discussed sentimental poetry in his influential essay, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry .
Isaac Pray described a sentimental poet as "He who plays off the amiable in verse, and writes to display his own fine feelings". [1]
Romantic poetry is rooted in and springs from sentimental. Charlotte Turner Smith is the first poet in England to be called romantic. Her poetry illustrates the common ground of sentimental and romantic as well as their differential qualities. [2]
Sara Teasdale was praised for her lyrical mastery and romantic subjects. During World War I she wrote several poems regarding sentiments of the war but never published them. When she shared one poem with critic Louis Untermeyer and poet John Meyers O'Hara, they cautioned her against publishing it. But she did publish "Union Square", [3] although she did not publicly share the sentiments she wrote of. [4]
Sentimental poetry was parodied by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . [5]
Felicia Dorothea Hemans was an English poet. Two of her opening lines, "The boy stood on the burning deck" and "The stately homes of England", have acquired classic status.
Charlotte Mary Mew was an English poet whose work spanned the eras of Victorian poetry and Modernism.
Charlotte Smith was an English novelist and poet of the School of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets (1784) contributed to the revival of the form in England. She also helped to set conventions for Gothic fiction and wrote political novels of sensibility. Despite ten novels, four children's books and other works, she saw herself mainly as a poet and expected to be remembered for that.
Sara Trevor Teasdale was an American lyric poet. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and used the name Filsinger after her 1914 marriage. In 1918, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs.
Mary Coleridge was a British novelist and poet who also wrote essays and reviews. She wrote poetry under the pseudonym Anodos. Other influences on her were Richard Watson Dixon and Christina Rossetti. Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, described her poems as 'wonderously beautiful… but mystical rather than enigmatical'.
Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but in current usage the term commonly connotes a reliance on shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason.
Jane West (1758–1852), was an English novelist who published as Prudentia Homespun and Mrs. West. She also wrote conduct literature, poetry and educational tracts.
Khurshidbanu Natavan was an Azerbaijani poet and philanthropist. She is considered one of the best lyrical poets of Azerbaijan. Her poems are in either Azerbaijani or Persian and she was most notable for her lyrical ghazals.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Scars Upon My Heart is an anthology of poetry written by American and British women during the First World War, compiled and edited by Catherine W. Reilly and published by Virago Press in 1981. Scars Upon My Heart is recognized as a pioneering presentation of women's literary expression during the First World War, giving voice to women's experiences, thoughts, and emotions. In the words of Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, the book 'largely contributed to the current reevaluation of poetry written by women during World War I'.
Annie Finch is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, playwright, and performer and the editor of the first major anthology of literature about abortion. Her poetry is known for its often incantatory use of rhythm, meter, and poetic form and for its themes of feminism, witchcraft, goddesses, and earth-based spirituality. Her books include The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, A Poet's Craft, Calendars, and Among the Goddesses.
English literature is literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English. Despite being set in Scandinavia, it has achieved national epic status in England. However, following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society. The English spoken after the Normans came is known as Middle English. This form of English lasted until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a London-based form of English, became widespread. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400), author of The Canterbury Tales, was a significant figure developing the legitimacy of vernacular Middle English at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were still French and Latin. The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 also helped to standardise the language, as did the King James Bible (1611), and the Great Vowel Shift.
The sonnet was a popular form of poetry during the Romantic period: William Wordsworth wrote 523, John Keats 67, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 48, and Percy Bysshe Shelley 18. But in the opinion of Lord Byron sonnets were “the most puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic compositions”, at least as a vehicle for love poetry, and he wrote no more than five.
Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Scholars regard the publishing of William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 as probably the beginning of the movement in England, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 as its end. Romanticism arrived in other parts of the English-speaking world later; in the United States, about 1820.
Elegiac Sonnets, titled Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Essays by Charlotte Sussman of Bignor Park, in Sussex in its first edition, is a collection of poetry written by Charlotte Smith, first published in 1784. It was widely popular and frequently reprinted, with Smith adding more poems over time. Elegiac Sonnets is credited with re-popularizing the sonnet form in the eighteenth century. It is notable for its poetic representations of personal emotion, which made it an important early text in the Romantic literary movement.
Beachy Head is a long blank verse poem by the English Romantic poet and novelist Charlotte Turner Smith, published in 1807, the year after her death, as part of the volume Beachy Head and Other Poems. The poem imagines events at the coastal cliffs of Beachy Head from across England's history, to meditate on what Smith saw as the modern corruption caused by commerce and nationalism. It was her last poetic work, and has been described as her most poetically ambitious work.
Isabella Lickbarrow was an English poet from Kendal who is sometimes associated with the Lake Poets. She published two collections: Poetical Effusions (1814) and A Lament upon the Death of Her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte; and Alfred, a Vision (1818). Her work covers a wide variety of subjects, but scholars have noted in particular her topographical poetry and political poetry about the Napoleonic Wars.
The Emigrants is a narrative blank verse poem by Charlotte Smith first published in 1793.
Jane Harvey (1771–1848) was a Tyneside poet and novelist. She wrote both fiction and nonfiction, sometimes anonymously, and is best known for her romantic novels.
Susan Evance was an English romantic poet. Her poems focus on sentiment, often with melancholy themes, and also reveal her religious convictions and socially progressive ideals. She is noted for her use of the sonnet form, following the legacy of Charlotte Smith as part of the English Romantic revival of that form. Her sonnets on decay, especially on the ruin of Netley Abbey, have been considered Gothic in tone.