Poetry (or what people did before there were movies)

In 30 Seconds

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.

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

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.

In Under a Minute

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.

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.

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.

Now Pay Attention...

"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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

The Beginning

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.

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.

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.

A Detailed Overview

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.

The Pawns Primogenitor Chattel 2 nd Sons Life in the big City 3 million large The Sinners

Queen Victoria The original Paris Hilton Then along came Prince Albert Morality The Crystal Palace Imperialization: 1/3 of the worlds population

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.

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).

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).

Poetry (or what people did before there were movies)

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