Literary Movements

Golden age of classical Arabic poetry centered in Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs; Al-Mutanabbi, Abu Nuwas, and Al-Ma'arri are its major figures; genres such as the bacchanalian, the panegyric, and the philosophical.

Tradition of medieval Latin poetry written by clerics and itinerant students; themes include drinking, love, and satire; the Carmina Burana are its most famous collection.

Medieval English poetic tradition centered on Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales; also includes alliterative poetry like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the work of John Gower.

English poetry from the Victorian era; Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins explore themes of religious doubt, progress, and imperial identity.

Group of British poets gathered in the Georgian Poetry anthologies; they cultivated a rural, accessible, and conservative lyricism in transition to modernism; Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas are central figures.

American poetic movement of intense autobiographical expression and exposure of the inner life, including trauma, mental illness, and sexuality; Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.

American poetic avant-garde that questions the transparency of language and conventions of meaning and representation; Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Bernstein are central figures; parallel but distinct from Conceptual Writing.

Korean lyrical poetic form of three lines with themes of love, philosophy, and nature; cultivated during the Joseon dynasty by scholars and court poets.

Vietnamese poetic tradition in Nôm script (adapted Chinese characters); Nguyễn Du's Truyện Kiều is considered the greatest poem in Vietnamese literature.

Popular Malay poetic form of quatrains with parallel image and sense structure; influenced European poetry through colonial contact and was adopted in French and Portuguese lyric poetry.

Poetic tradition in Swahili language with complex Arabic-influenced strophic forms; cultivated on the East African coast; Utenzi is its main epic genre.

Literary and poetic tradition in the Ge'ez language, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church; includes hymns, psalms, and court poetry; one of the oldest African Christian literatures.

Vast tradition of performative oral poetry from Sub-Saharan African cultures; includes Zulu izibongo (praise poetry), Xhosa poetry, and epic forms from multiple peoples; transmitted by griots and singer-poets.

Emerging literary field of Indigenous poets writing in languages like Quechua, Aymara, Nahuatl, and Guaraní, frequently in bilingual editions; assertion of identities and worldviews in the face of Western literate tradition.

Andean poetic current marked by social commitment, denunciation of indigenous oppression, and fusion of Quechua tradition with European forms; César Vallejo is its major precursor, with continuity in Peruvian and Bolivian poets of the 20th and 21st centuries.