Literary Context for Unseen Poetry

Literary Context 

Renaissance- 1500- 1670 

Key Poets: Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Thomas More, Sir Thomas Wyatt

Key Features: Rhetorical genius, emotional complexity

Renaissance poets looked outward at the turbulent world of early modern history, which they measured in terms of a mythic glorious past, but also gazed inwards to focus on issues of identity and questions of human desire

Aimed to encapsulate beauty and truth in words 

Frequently ostentatious, repetitious, and often betrayed a subtle wit 

The English Civil War took place during the 1640s and a period of 'Restoration' occured from 1660 to 1689 

Enlightenment- 1700-1800 

Key Poets: Samuel Johnson, John Locke, Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Andrew Marvell, John Wilmot, Richard Lovelace 

Key Features: Shaped by order and restraint, celebration of the capability of the mind and what could be achieved through science. 

Intellectuals began to consider the possibility that freedom and democracy were the…