There are different periods in Literature divided into Literary Periods and Genres. We started to examine literary periods last week with The Oldest Poems in the World (sorry about Shakespeare coming into that discourse. It was an error).
Today, we will enumerate the periods and then continue from where we left off.
The genre in focus is Poetry. Merriam Webster dictionary defines poetry as: 1a) Metrical writing: verse; 2) Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. 3a) Something likened to poetry especially in beauty of expression.
Literary Periods
Ancient Literature
Classical Literature
Medieval Literature
Renaissance & Reformation Literature
Enlightenment Period
Romanticism
Victorian Literature
Modernism
Shakespeare
American Literature
African American Literature
Southern Literature
African Literature
Asian Literature
Please note that this list is not exhaustive as it can be broken down further. Also note that the discovery of literary works is ongoing, and there are even other literary works like Indian epic poems (Mahabharata and Ramayana Indian) standing behind the ones we are discussing. I just encourage tribes and races, (not Western) to blow their trumpets.
Ancient Literature is simply writings of ancient Egyptian literature, Hittite texts, Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sumerian, the Torah (Old Testament Bible), etc. They are not particularly literary works.
The oldest known literary work still remains the Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2150-1400) which we discussed last week, apart from words of fatherly wisdom from an ancient fellow known as Shuruppak.
The Iliad (about 750 BC) and The Odyssey (about 8th century BC): both epic narratives written in Greek by the Ancient Greek poet, Homer, are of Classical Period. Aeneid, the fourth oldest poem in the world also falls into the Classical Period; a Latin epic poem by ancient Roman poet, Virgil (between 29 – 19 BC).
Beowulf written around the 11th century or (650 and 1000) takes the fifth position. Written in the Anglo-Saxon or Old English language, Beowulf is a medieval poem whose poet is unknown, although set in ancient times.
So, after the Ancient and the Classical Periods, we move to the Middle or Medieval Period in Literature.
The Middle Ages or Medieval Period was a time of backwardness and superstition. This era trailed the Bronze Age.
Social life in medieval period was 90 per cent peasants (or serfs (also called the lord’s villeins)– who worked the land for the nobles or upper class) and tradesmen against 10 per cent nobility.
Clergy was part of the social order, definitely providing a breach between the two classes.
This period started with the collapse of the Roman Empire and ends with the end of the Renaissance (5th – 15th centuries of European history).
Women of the medieval period had no freedom, no privileges of any sort. In fact all non-nobles were servants and lived in cottages (like African huts) while the nobles lived in manors or big houses.
Noble women had some degree of freedom. They were also used to get diplomatic relationships with other noble men and kingdoms through their marriages. So, their fathers more or less used them to secure diplomatic relationships or even friendships.
The merchants or tradesmen had it no easier, only that they worked for themselves and were no servants to the nobles.
In this column, we shall see how far we can go in examining the periods.
The most significant writer in Medieval England is Geoffrey Chaucer. Because of the quality of Chaucer’s literary works, the period he wrote became known as The Age of Chaucer.
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet active (in writing) between 1376 and 1389. He was actually a civil servant whose avocation was writing, especially poetry. But, what an avocation! Chaucer has to his name 493 documents collected under the title, Chaucer Life-Records.
He was probably born in London by a wine merchant around 1340 and 1345. Known as the father of English Poetry, Chaucer was a symbol of the Middle Ages, therefore he falls under the Medieval period.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s audiences were the literati of his time: the royals, aristocrats, the bureaucrats and the learned people; although he was of the middle class.
In his time, only the upper class had knowledge of contemporary politics and the social world. It was an era of learning and of significant development in the socio-political and religious lives of the people of his land, although filled with great challenges.
This period was truly the first literary age in English Literature.
Between 1374 and 1386, Chaucer was Comptroller of Customs and Justice of Peace for London, and in 1389, he was Clerk of the King’s work. It was in this period that he was engaged in public service that Chaucer was also churning out lengthy literary works of great significance. Such great works as The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Griseyde and Parlement of Foules, etc., flowed from his pen. However, he was best known for his legendary work titled The Canterbury Tales.
Excerpts from The Canterbury Tales – Wife of Bath’s Prologue:
But now, sire, – lat me se – what I shall seyn?
A ha! By God, I have my tale ageyn.
Whan that my fourthe housbonde was on beere,
I weepe algate, and made sory cheere,
As wyves mooten, for it is usage,
And with my coverchief covered my visage;
But for that I was purveyed of a make,
I wepte but small, and I undertake!
Chaucer’s poetic form is the rhyming couplets (twos) in iambic pentameter (ten syllables). Read the above excerpt again, you will see that the rhyme scheme is two lines rhyming and each line has ten syllables. So, the rhyme scheme is aa bb cc dd. So, is the rhyme scheme in all his verses. There is no repetition of rhymes, which according to the cognoscenti was because of the pressure on the poet to keep the narrative moving. The rhyming ‘pairs of lines’ is known as couplets.
Most of the Canterbury Tales are funny, absorbing, lively; written in verse (this means that it has poetic elements such as rhythm and rhyme patterns as Merriam Webster dictionary tells us.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories in over 17, 000 lines, written in Middle English (1387-1400). Two out of the 24 tales are written in prose or non-verse.
Legend of Good Women’s opening prologue tells of how the god of love and his queen, Alceste, reprimand Chaucer for writing so much about women betraying men, especially in his two earlier poems: The Canterbury Tales and Toiles and Cynede. So, Chaucer receives instruction to write about good women as penance. So in this poem, Chaucer focuses more on bad men betraying good women. It is humourous as the poet “yabs” himself, as we say in Nigerian parlance, for his concentration on the bad deeds of women, in his earlier works. Thus, The Legend of Good Women, the third longest of Chaucer’s works, extols the virtues of women and their good deeds.
Excerpts from the poem:
For thy trespass, and understood hit here:
Thou shalt, why I that thou
Livest, yeer by yere,
The most party of thy tyme spende
In making of a glorious legend
Of Gode women, maidens and wyves,
That were trewe in loving al hir lyves;
And telle of false men that bitrayen,
That al hir lyf ne doon nat but assayen
The Legend of Good Women is a dream allegory or dream vision. Although popular in the poet’s time, it is not regarded as one of his strongest works. Even the poet himself abandoned it.
Chaucer is also looked at as a Renaissance man because of the varied interests of his subject matters as portrayed in his works. The world is blessed to learn from Geoffrey Chaucer about Medieval life and society from Chaucer’s general Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
It is also recorded that that like Virgil, Chaucer did not finish his epic poems: The Canterbury Tales and Legend of Good Women. Why? Story gleaned from his poem suggest that the father of English poetry, Chaucer, grew weary with the writing and stopped. And I ask, tongue in cheek, why wouldn’t he? The Canterbury Tales has 24 tales in 17, 000 lines – haba!
Chaucer’s contemporaries are: William Langland (1332 – 1386); John Wycliffe (1330 – 1384); John Gower (1330 – 1389), Margery Kempe (1373-1458), Thomas Mlory (1415-1471) etc.
Because we learn a lot from literary works by just reading them, we should write something too. We learn about the times literary works were written, the politics, religion, social lives of the people of the different times. We learn of the different roles of men, women and children, who lived in that time. For instance, from the works of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), we learn how little boys were treated in 19h century England.
We learn from Chaucer’s works, especially from his general Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the lifestyle and challenges of Medieval England.
From Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, we learn the effect of the advent of colonialism on native Africans; how the invasion of Africa by Europeans met Africans, using Okonkwo’s Umuofia and the hero of Achebe’s novel as examples. I must chip in here that because Achebe was the son of a parish worker, he wrote from oral tradition – his grandfather telling his father, and his father telling him.
We need writers from different races, tribes and tongues to write, publish and circulate their Literature. Western Literature is the most written, published and circulated as it is now.
The Old English epic poem, Beowulf, gives us what the Anglo-Saxon people considered important. Such virtues like: manly heroes, loyalty, generous kings, defending the defenceless, etc., were important to these tribal people. Such customs as gift-giving and song-making are revealed as strong cultural values amongst the Anglo-Saxon tribes written about in the poem.
I encourage our readers not to be ashamed to put pen on paper. Write down thoughts and imaginations; capture those native folktales of your people on ink and paper. Choose to enrich Arts and Culture, contribute your quota.