GAMSAT Humanities: Poetry through the ages
Knowing the various artistic movements that have affected poetry will help you to understand the patterns in a piece of poetry given in a GAMSAT test. A working knowledge of the different artistic movements will help you to identify the characteristics of different types of poems and the themes you can expect to encounter, making unseen analysis of poems for GAMSAT much easier.
Granted, not all of us took an English Literature degree at university, or were necessarily paying attention in English classes in high school! So here’s a list of the major movements in poetry to help you with GAMSAT Section I:
1. Romanticism – a poetic movement started in Britain by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 18th Century, beginning with their Lyrical Ballads in 1798. This literary movement was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the period of Enlightenment with its emphasis on deductive reasoning and the restrictive classical models of poetry. Wordsworth defined poetry in Romantic terms as the “spontaneous overflow of emotion” expressed in “the real language of men”. The main features of Romantic poetry are the focus on Nature and the lyrical quality of the poems (look for strong regular rhyming patterns). Romantic poets wrote about gaining spirituality through a harmonious co-existence with nature. Romantics believed they were restoring the sense of the sublime that they thought had been lost since the time of John Milton.
2. The Victorians – these are poets writing during the Victorian period, or the 19th Century. Poets in this period were influenced by the Romantics. However, one of their biggest concerns was reclaiming history. As a result, the most famous Victorian poems concentrate on stories of heroism and glory. Example: Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which is about King Arthur and his knights. Many Victorian poets liked to recast characters from classical mythology.
3. Modernism – this is largely a 20th Century poetic movement, often said to have begun as early as the 1890s. However, many believe Modernism began in earnest with T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1915. Modern Poets were heavily influenced by the carnage and futility of World War One, which led to poems that are dark and depressing in tone. The Modernists mostly set their poems in urban landscapes, and reacted against the formal nature of Victorian poetry and the optimism of Romantic poetry. They were innovative in their use of free verse, creating a truly ‘modern’ form of poetry. Modernists often critically reflect on what they perceive to be the emptiness of modern society and a century afflicted by two world wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the Cold War. Some extend Modernist movement up to the 1970s, even though the period of what is termed ‘High Modernism’ (the poems written between 1920 and 1940) had ended. So, if you encounter a poem in GAMSAT Section I with depressing images and themes such as death, loss of spirituality, loss of identity, injustice, and post-war disillusionment – the characteristics of modern society, it is most likely a Modernist poem.
Having a working knowledge of these three major literary movements, you will be able to approach a GAMSAT question on a poem with an understanding of its contextual influences. As a result, you will know what ideas and themes can be found in the poem and will be better equipped in answering questions related to it.
