Literary Movements
Discover the main literary movements
Abbasid Arabic poetry
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.
Goliards
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 courtly poetry
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.
Victorian poetry
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.
Georgian poets
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.
Confessional poetry
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.
Language poetry
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.
Classical Korean poetry (Sijo)
Korean lyrical poetic form of three lines with themes of love, philosophy, and nature; cultivated during the Joseon dynasty by scholars and court poets.
Classical Vietnamese poetry (Nôm)
Vietnamese poetic tradition in Nôm script (adapted Chinese characters); Nguyễn Du's Truyện Kiều is considered the greatest poem in Vietnamese literature.
Classical Malay poetry (Pantun)
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.
Classical Swahili poetry
Poetic tradition in Swahili language with complex Arabic-influenced strophic forms; cultivated on the East African coast; Utenzi is its main epic genre.
Classical Ethiopian poetry (Ge'ez)
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.
African oral poetry
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.
Contemporary Latin American indigenous poetry
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 social poetry
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.