The first poetry to have been written in the English tongue was that of the Anglo-Saxon period. Due to the lack of a printing press until the 15^th century and the fact that this was largely a pre-literate society, it was necessary for poets to employ complex systems of rhyme, familiar repeated phrases and alliteration to make their verse memorable as well as beautiful. Poems transmitted ideas. Surviving examples include histories celebrating bravery even in defeat by marauding Vikings ("The Battle of Maldon"¹), religious writings (versions of Genesis and Exodus among other Biblical stories; and ‘dream-vision’ poems such as "The Dream of the Rood") and a fair number of lewd riddles. For a culture we know relatively little about and from which survives only a small and random selection of texts (a mere 30,000 lines of poetry, in fact), Anglo-Saxon poetry offers an extremely rich and wide range of literature. Poems such as "The Wanderer", "The Seafarer", and "The Wife’s Lament" articulate profound sadness and alienation felt in a culture with little religious certainty (torn as it was between pagan and Christian beliefs) and the destabilizing effect of unpredictable and vicious Scandinavian invasions. In the six centuries before the Norman Conquest of 1066, a versatile oral poetic tradition had developed. What survives of this was finally written down towards the end of the period.

The purpose of this poetry was clearly to educate and confirm new religious thinking. Christianity existed in tandem with the old beliefs for a century or more – old beliefs die hard. The most famous Old English poem, Beowulf (probably written in the later 8^th century), acknowledges and mourns the passing of the pre-Christian heroic age – of monsters such as Grendel and the dragon – but with the wisdom of maturity and understanding of transience. The hero’s weapons and treasures symbolic of the dying pagan time are buried at the end "as useless to men as at that former time".

Talking Pearls and Geoffrey Chaucer

Inevitably, some of the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry survived into the Middle Ages. Poems such as "The Owl and the Nightingale" (circa 1200) retain the familiar alliterative style and a tendency to anthropomorphize and therefore have animals and inanimate objects speaking as if human. Similarly, heroic journey stories did not die with Beowulf by any means and ‘romances’ such as King Horn (c. 1225) were common in the 13^th century. The next century brought a number of Christian moral poems (Piers Plowman (c. 1367-70) and the Gawain poet’s dream vision poem about a lost daughter and the New Jerusalem which is referred to as "Pearl" (c.1400)). It was Chaucer, though, above Langland, Gower or Malory who is considered foremost in 14^th century literature. His Troilus and Criseyde, tells a tragic love story set in the time of the siege at Troy and is still much revered for its majesty and impeccable construction in rhyme-royal verse. More famous, though, and more varied are The Canterbury Tales which surely need little introduction. This cornucopia of stories - derivative of Boccaccio’s Decameron both for certain plots and in being a varied selection of tales spoken by different characters – has remarkable scope. A group of pilgrims from the lowliest (a miller) to the noblest (a knight) tell each other a series of variously polite, lewd, scandalous and satirical stories in a selection of different verse forms. Chaucer was a respected member of society but could rarely resist a jibe at the expense of the corrupt (the Summoner), the absurd (the Monk) or the vain (the Prioress). Meanwhile he allows himself a wry smile when depicting unconventional social dissidents like the Wife of Bath. Chaucer’s sense of humour sets him apart from the more tiresomely heroic and religious writers of the Middle Ages.

However, as in the case of prose fiction, the flourishing of poetry came with Caxton’s printing press. Indeed Chaucer, Malory (author of Le Morte D’Arthur) and suchlike were the first authors to be printed by Caxton. By the 1470s these were ‘classics’, no less. It was in the 16^th century, though, that the great period of English poetry began and - some would say – ended: the English Renaissance. C S Lewis, the great 20^th century critic of medieval literature described² two periods in the 16^th century. The first, the "Drab", was personified principally by Wyatt (sometimes seen as a forerunner of Donne) and Skelton; while the second, the "Golden", is of less esoteric interest to the modern reader. The masters of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean poetic ages have managed to retain their vitality for four centuries. Perhaps due to their perfection of the love sonnet or the ambition of their grander works, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and Samuel Daniel especially have retained their power to express longing and desire exceptionally well. Each of these writers wrote beautiful verse sequences to imaginary or actual lovers alongside their famous major works in poetry, plays and prose. Versatility was vital, as evidenced by the popular concept of following the poetic (specifically Virgilian) career running from pastoral early works to a mature epic, with love poetry as a personal and passionate side project. Only Spenser followed this pattern precisely: experimenting with pastoral ‘eclogues’ in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) before starting work on his Arthurian epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596) in which he innovated a rhyme scheme totally unsuited to the English language’s word-endings in imitation of continental sonneteers. The poetic masterpieces of the age were assisted – made possible even - by the existence of a system of patronage whereby aristocrats would effectively commission poets to praise them in verse. Elizabeth I inevitably received the most lavish praise.

By the time of John Donne’s poems in the 1590s and the early 17^th century, however, patronage was becoming hard to attain and as such he wrote to numerous different aristocratic women, developing a novel ‘metaphysical’ style, crammed with metaphors and born of understandable insecurity about his subjects’ interest in his verse. Donne was unusual in his frank, if obtuse, declarations of the dark inspirations for love; in Spenser and Sidney, love had tended to be either pure or impure. The continued popularity of Donne’s poems can be put down to their amusingly innocuous subject matter: most famously the pseudo- sexual mixture of lovers’ blood allowed for by "The Flea". If his later religious poetry and sermons appeal less to the modern taste, then than is not for any diminished poetic sensibility on his part. He continued to envision life and belief as a series of allegories and metaphors (the hill of truth etc.). Only Marvell (a poetic non-entity in his time) in the later 17th century competed with the ambitious and dark metaphysical conceits of Donne in "The Garden" and "To his Coy Mistress". The Earl of Rochester, though, merits a mention for the sheer sordidness of his poetic experiments in the metaphysical style and for being the most sexually frank poet in English before the 20^th century.

Alexander Pope was the next poet of note and fame. His The Rape of the Lock (1712) and "Windsor Forest" (1713) particularly have remained traditional school texts long past their respective expiry dates. His wit has not aged terribly well and his poetry is of predominantly historical and technical interest. Yet, he has had his followers in the 20^th century in the form of Leavis and Empson who credit his poems with complexity and variation³. The 19^th century view of his poetry as tedious, however, dwells. Back then, W L Bowles referred to Pope’s poetry as being akin to "a game of cards", and even this seems unduly generous.

The rise of the novel after 1740 as good as ended the tradition of epic poetry as espoused by Milton and Spenser. More than this, it diminished the number of writers choosing to write only or predominantly in verse. Dr Samuel Johnson’s "London" (1738) and sporadically written other poems in English and Latin are interesting but not as compelling as his prose. Until the later part of the 18^th century, in fact, poets were people to write about, not to be. This was not least due to the fact that there was no money in writing poetry and certainly no patrons. This Johnson found out to his cost, living in poverty writing (very fine) hack journalism for magazines such as "The Idler" for much of his life. It is little surprise then that William Blake, writing at the end of the 18^th century, published and illustrated his own poetry. Described as ‘mystical’, this was written in long lines of violently inspired verse and is quite unlike anything before or since. His personal mythology fills his Book of Thel, the more famous Songs of Innocence in 1789, and is present in his Songs of Experience (1794) that contains some of his more approachable verse. At the time, though, Blake did not find an audience for his work. It was only as the new vanguard of Romantic poets such as Wordsworth began to compare him favourably to Scott and Byron that his positive reputation started to take shape.

Poems were to a great extent no longer public by the 1790s. Poets began to look inward for inspiration and the Romantic movement was born. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of inner torment in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison", as well as mystical (or rather narcotic) visionary poetry in his justly revered "Kubla Khan"⁴. The world of inner sorrows was reflected in this poetry’s vision of the outside, in pathetic fallacy. Like Wordsworth, Coleridge was inconsistent. When he borrows the setting and concerns of the Gothic vogue in "Christabel" he writes some absolutely dire and embarrassingly self-consciously titillating verse (predictably the poem does have its admirers). It is with the torment of the mariner in "The Rime…" and the lonely voyage of guilt on the ghostly sea, where even the creatures of the water and the sun’s light seem to mimic his emotions, that he achieves true sublimity. This was the poetry of escape through the written word, of joyful appreciation of nature and loneliness. In this vein, "Dejection: an Ode" (1802) explores the destructive effects of opium addiction, but soon after his move to the continent in 1804 his poetry took a turn for the worse and his opinions to the conservative. He became, of course, a critic.

Wordsworth’s career followed a similar pattern: beginning with their joint venture Lyrical Ballads (1798), he went on to write of and from suffering (the early deaths two of his children etc. – see "Surprised by joy" (1815)) before settling down into conservative and patriotic ways to the great chagrin of his young poetic admirers. He did, however, go on to write the substantial and admired The Prelude, published posthumously in 1850. His ambition was to write in the language of the common man, for the sake of purity and comprehensibility. This hardly fits with his later near-snobbish attitudes, but it was an aim that would inform the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Philip Larkin.

The early 19^th century produced many enduringly appreciated but short-lived poets: notably Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, and Lord Byron (a close friend of the former). Considered to be the second phase of ‘Romantic’ poets, these men tend to be somewhat unfairly judged together. Keats was a fragile and ill-starred poet, much of whose poetry such as Hyperion was inspired by travels in the rugged landscapes of the Lake District (also associated with Wordsworth). The finest of his passionate and beautiful poems were written between 1818 and 1819: "The Eve of St Agnes", "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and "Ode to a Nightingale" stand out particularly. At his death he had not even reached thirty.

Shelley lived only slightly longer and died the year after Keats in 1822. An exceptionally gifted young man, Shelley experimented with the Gothic horror prose form (more associated with his second wife, Mary) before turning to the revolutionary poetry of Queen Mab (1813) etc. Faced with the horror of his first wife’s suicide by drowning and financial difficulties he wrote most of his best poetry in a one year period after the summer of 1919, including Prometheus Unbound and The Mask of Anarchy as well as lyric poetry of note such as "To a Skylark". Although frequently intellectually arrogant and often immersed in melancholy and self-pity (not always without reason), Shelley is still highly regarded.

After the second phase of the Romantics, the Victorian age brought a succession of more self-consciously public poets to the scene: centrally Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson. This new group was comprised of the academically gifted and the passionate. Both Browning and Tennyson are somewhat of an acquired taste now and often considered to be over formal and dated. They represent the very English tendency to litter poetry with bookish references to the classics of English, Latin and Greek poetry, and created a new form of almost elitist verse that requires substantial background knowledge to appreciate beyond the superficial. This was especially true of Browning who grew up with the benefit and influence of his father’s 6000-strong and extremely eclectic library. Despite his uncommon learning, he nonetheless enchants with the poems of Paracelsus (1835) - his first critical success - and his collection Men and Women (1855). Even less renowned collections such as Dramatic Romances contain some beautifully fatalistic love poetry (see "The Last Ride Together". His masterpiece, though, is widely considered to be The Ring and the Book (1868-9). This twelve-book poem in blank verse was inspired by a book the poet found in a Venetian market relating to a murder trial of the 17^th century. Told by a succession of untrustworthy Roman citizens, the poem was as ambitious a poetic project as any since Milton. It was also a success critically, although it did not raise Browning to the popular level of poet laureate Tennyson.

Tennyson, like Browning, was an exponent of the ‘dramatic monologue’ form and is now known principally for his poems The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854), and In Memoriam (1850) which mourned the loss of his friend A H Hallam in 1833. His best early and shorter poems were published in his Poems volumes of 1833 and 1842, including The Lotos-Eaters, Ulysses and Locksley Hall. Working on a £200 a year civil list pension and the laureateship, he produced The Princess (1847), Maud, and other Poems (1855) and The Idylls of the King (1859-). Bleak in his outlook but ambitious in the variety of his subject matter, he was a favourite of Queen Victoria. However, though popular at the time, Tennyson is usually at his best in his lyrical poetry rather than the dramatic and epic forms that he employed so often in his later poetry. He was certainly influential but can now appear over-wrought and melancholic.

Unlike their contemporary, Matthew Arnold, who went on from poetry such as "Tristram and Iseult" (1852) and "Dover Beach" (1867) to express himself in pithy prose (notably Culture and Anarchy (1869)), neither Browning nor Tennyson seemed to see the value of brevity. The same could be said of Walt Whitman in America, who repeatedly enlarged his Leaves of Grass (1848-) from a slim twelve- poem book of Emerson-inspired verse into a comprehensive and vast expression of a disturbed self. Yet Whitman brought with Leaves of Grass a new freedom in verse that was almost chaotic in its rejection of tradition of poetic rules and traditions. Certainly, other poets would go further and deconstruct down to the word itself but Whitman began the trend and was a maverick figure unrivalled in the second half of the 19^th century. Influential though he was in the United States, the effect and acceptance of Whitman’s free and personal verse took time to filter through to England where formal, traditional and majestic poetry still held sway.

In fact, Thomas Hardy aside, turn-of-the-20^th-century ‘English’ poetry of quality tended to originate outside England. William Butler Yeats, for instance, was an Irishman and wrote verse with Celtic themes, especially at the beginning of his career (see The Wanderings of Oisin and other poems (1889) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Signalling the movement away from nostalgic-revolutionary Pre-Raphaelite tendencies (in poetry this meant Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his circle) and towards what became known as Modernism. The most important (and certainly the most self-important) movement in 20^th century poetry, Modernism in poetic form begins with American Thomas Stearns Eliot’s Prufrock and other Observations (1917) and the poetry of his fellow American and (later) collaborator Ezra Pound. It was a movement born of disillusionment and intellectual fury, and this is keenly felt in the Modernist novels of Polish Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness (1899) etc.) and Irishman James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) especially). Much of the success of Eliot and Pound can be put down to the sheer newness of their writing, integrating foreign tongues and forms, rebelling in lonely intolerance against foolishness and the stagnant waters of post World War I Britain; but also to the fact that they took it upon themselves to become the major critics of the age (and in Eliot’s case a director of poetry publishers Faber). Pound severely but beneficially edited down his friend’s first masterpiece, The Waste Land (1922). It confirmed Eliot as the foremost voice of his generation with its free but often terrifyingly bleak and pessimistic images of a corrupt London. The complex and philosophical Four Quartets (published in complete form 1943) is now seen as Eliot’s crowning achievement and is less experimental than its predecessors. There is nothing in the way of Sanskrit phrases and impressionist verse to deal with. Instead, we are given of a sense of sympathy and humanity - qualities the Anglo- American Modernist movement tended to lack.

The American poetic movement immediately following World War I defied the elitism, mysticism and academic inclination of Eliot, Yeats and Pound. William Carlos Williams, who had known Pound as a friend, saw the man’s decline. Williams called him "an ass", and eventually Pound was driven to criminal insanity. Williams’s early poems have something in common with Joyce’s ‘epiphanies’ (see Williams’s Spring and All (1923) especially "At the Ball Game"). Later poems such as The Desert Music (1954) and Paterson (1946-58) displayed something of the everything-in policy of Modernism (see David Jones In Parenthesis (1927) for similar prose-poetry). Williams was to be the main influence of Allen Ginsberg and through him the Beat movement of the 1950s and beyond. America also had e.e. cummings, whose experiments with poems as they appear on the page were a major influence on the free verse common in the later 20^th century. His poems ("verse" is often the wrong word entirely with Cummings) formed the basis of the Cubist movement of the 1950s that included Dylan Thomas and Mallarme among others and harked back to acrostics and 17^th century poet George Herbert’s The Altar (a poem about an altar in the shape of an altar, no less). Cummings innovated spatially on the page with poems such as "r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r" and "the sky" to such an extent that it is unclear where one starts and finishes reading. Satirical phonetic wordplay (in "ygUDuh" especially) was well within his reach as was pure, sensual beauty ("in Just-/ spring"). There was a purposeful childish simplicity to this poetry, which strained against the excessive ‘adultness’ of European Modernism. Welshman Dylan Thomas shared this instinct and further innovated linguistically (the wonderfully inventive phrase "a grief ago" is typically impressionistic) and spatially.

In England, meanwhile, the ‘Puritan’ simplicity embraced by Wordsworth (see the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads) had its new exponents in Philip Larkin, John Betjeman and W H Auden. They saw England teeming with contrary images: factory and field; industrial grime and natural purity. Within this stood the poet: lonely, alienated and cynical, like Marvell in The Garden (see Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974)). Yet, humour and satire filled their poetry. It is telling that Larkin defaced a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in St. John’s library at Oxford University, wittily declaring a hatred of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Beowulf at the same sitting. Tradition, he implied, is bunk. To an extent he correctly gauged the new vanguard of individualist poets, less ignorant than uninterested in classics and complex forms. Modern poets have written from their own experience, or in a stream of images but avoiding literary allusions. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes alike shared this, taking respectively but probably unknowingly William Carlos Williams’s twin Paterson declarations as if their muse: "no ideas but in the truth" and "no ideas but in things".

In the later 20^th century and early 21st, it has become perfectly possible to eschew modern poetry altogether and feel little shame. Innumerable fine poets such as Simon Armitage and Edwin Morgan simultaneously achieve recognition but condemn themselves by allowing their poems to be anthologized for teenage exams. Poetry has become a matter for study only, and volumes sell in the low thousands at best unless written by the dead or by our sole remaining public poet of any dignity and ambition: Seamus Heaney. Indeed, poetry books make up only 3 of all book sales in England. The lover of verse is best advised to seek the voices set to popular music such as Tom Waits, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen (an exceptional poet before and during his songwriting), Bob Dylan and Nick Cave. We might blame the lack of recent whole-world conflict or fear of God for our poetic decline and look to those shaken by political turmoil for inspiration. In fact, the Anglo-centrism of ‘classic’ poetry – thoroughly endorsed, unfortunately but inevitably, by this brief guide through poetry in English – has ensured that after exploiting oppression, repressed sexuality, bigotry and finally indulging in experimental poetry, we must now listen to those with something to say (American poets such as Ai and Sonia Sanchez spring to mind). This is neither a call to arms nor a declaration of the end of poetry, merely a promise that white male middle-class poetry will now have competition from the other billions of voices that make up the world and can now shout eloquently with a chance of being heard.