User talk:Patrick B1

The Development of English Poetry in the English Renaissance In English poetry, the early years of the Renaissance were those of experiment in one direction or another, as suggested by the poetry of Italy and France and, of course, Greek and Latin. By imitating and introducing other countries` poem into England, they reformed foreign poetic genre into a new one. During the Renaissance epoch, poetry reached its pinnacle. At that time, England was called as “a nest of singing bird”.

A most important lyric genre in the 16th century was the sonnet, which reached the height of its vogue in the 1590s. Its conventions were established by Petrarch, carried on by his numerous imitators in Italy and France, and introduced into England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney in the reign of Henry VIII. Italian sonnet (or Petrarchan sonnet) is a 14 line poem in iambic pentameter, in three principal rhyming patterns, which is composed of an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet. Thus, an Italian sonnet may state a problem in the octave and present a solution in its sestet.

William Shakespeare is one of the most remarkable poets the world has ever known. Among his 154 sonnets, with 3 exceptions (99, 126 and 154) Shakespeare writes his sonnet in the popular English form, first developed by Henry Howard, of three quatrains and a couplet, so, it is called English sonnet (or Shakespearean sonnet), which is composed of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. So, it is usually introduce a subject in the first quatrain, expand and develop in the second and third quatrain, and conclude something about it in the final couplet.

Generally, Renaissance poet would place epic at the pinnacle of their genre system, and pastoral poems at the base. And in 16th century England the only real success in the epic is Spenser`s Faerie Queene, which is properly speaking, a romantic epic, in that it draws more heavily upon the conventions of the romantic Italian epics of Aristo and Tasso than upon the classic epics. Spenser influenced many of the poets who followed, including John Milton, Percy Shelly, John Keats, Lord Byron and Lord Tennyson. The excellence of the Faerie Queene lies in the complicity and depth of Spenser`s moral vision and in the Spenserian stanza, which consists of nine lines, eight of iambic pentameter followed by one of iambic hexameter, rhyming ( abab bcbc c ), which Spenser invented for his masterpiece.

Poetry also has a great influence on dramas. During the Renaissance era, different lyric genres were used in the creation of dramas, and it is became a commonplace at that epoch. We can find it easily on the works of the William Shakespeare and other writers.