Important themes:

🞛Images vs. Ideas

🞛The role of poetry (social critique vs. self
expression)
🞛Feminist poetry
🞛Cultural / National identity (representing
Asia)
Images vs. Ideas
🞛Imagery is the name given to the elements in
a poem that spark off the senses. Despite
"image" being a synonym for "picture",
images need not be only visual; any of the five
senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) can
respond to what a poet writes.
🞛http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/g
lossaryItem.do?id=8098
Example:
🞛 An interesting contrast in imagery can be found by comparing Alison
Croggon's 'The Elwood Organic Fruit and Vegetable Shop' with Allen
Ginsberg's 'A Supermarket in California'; although both poets seem to
like the shops they write about, Ginsberg's shop is full of hard, bright
things, corralled into aisles, featuring neon, tins and freezers, while the
organic shop is full of images of soft, natural things rubbing against one
another in sunlight. Without it being said explicitly, the imagery makes it
clear that the supermarket is big, boxy, and tidy, unlike the cosy
Elwood's. This is partly done with the visual images that are drawn, and
in part with Croggon's images that mix the senses (this is called
synaesthesia), such as the strawberries with their "klaxons of sweetness"
or the gardens with "well-groomed scents", having the way the imagery
is made correspond with what the imagery shows.
🞛 http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=132
Romantic poetry
🞛 Romantic poets cultivated individualism,
reverence for the natural world, idealism,
physical and emotional passion, and an interest
in the mystic and supernatural. Romantics set
themselves in opposition to the order and
rationality of classical and neoclassical artistic
precepts to embrace freedom and revolution in
their art and politics.
🞛 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/
5670
Characteristics of Romantic Poetry
🞛 Romanticism saw a shift from faith in reason to
faith in the senses, feelings, and imagination; a
shift from interest in urban society to an interest in
the rural and natural; a shift from public,
impersonal poetry to subjective poetry; and from
concern with the scientific and mundane to
interest in the mysterious and infinite. Mainly they
cared about the individual, intuition, and
imagination.
🞛 http://www.odessa.edu/dept/english/dsmith/rom.lit
.char.pdf
Modernist Poetry
🞛 The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared
that human nature underwent a fundamental
change "on or about December 1910." The
statement testifies to the modern writer's fervent
desire to break with the past, rejecting literary
traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that
seemed too genteel to suit an era of
technological breakthroughs and global violence.
🞛 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5
664
Characteristics of modernist poetry

🞛Break from tradition

🞛Move toward ‘impersonality’
🞛Skepticism towards the nature of language
and the role of art
🞛Fragmentation
🞛Rich in imagery
Feminist Poetry
🞛Working against patriarchal tradition
🞛Often highly subjective and personal
(confessional poetry)
🞛Historical back ground: second-wave Feminist
movement – the personal is political (1960 -70)
🞛Family as a key source of oppression of women
🞛Hollows, Joanne. Feminism, Femininity and
popular Culture. Manchester University Press.
(4-5)
Confessional Poetry
🞛 Confessional poetry renders personal experiences
and emotion as it actually is, regardless of social
conventions.
🞛 Confessional poetry expresses truths and

experiences so painful that most people would

suppress them.
🞛 Promotes psychological liberation.

🞛 Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry:

Modernism and After. Harvard University Press.

588-589.
Cultural/National Identity
🞛Poems that seek to create cultural/national
solidarity
🞛Poems that challenges the
homogeneous/essentialist sense of
cultural/national identity