Poetry groups and movements or schools may be self-identified by the poets that form them or defined by critics who see unifying characteristics of a body of work by more than one poet. To be a 'school', a group of poets must share a common style or a common ethos. A commonality of form is not in itself sufficient to define a school; for example, Edward Lear, George du Maurier and Ogden Nash do not form a school simply because they all wrote limericks.
There are many different 'schools' of poetry. Some of them are described below in approximate chronological sequence. The subheadings indicate broadly the century in which a style arose.
Prehistoric The oral tradition is too broad to be a strict school but it is a useful grouping of works whose origins either predate writing, or belong to cultures without writing.
Second century BC (100-200BC) China: Zenith of Han poetry, a movement away from the ancient Chinese poetry of the Classic of Poetry and the Chu Ci.
Third century (200–300) China: Jian'an poetry, a poetic movement occurring during the end of the Han dynasty, in the state of Cao Wei.
China: Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, a group of poets active during the late Cao Wei to early Jin dynasty era, poets incorporating the Wei-Jin Xuanxue movement.
China: Start of Six Dynasties poetry (220–589).
Fourth century (300–400) China: Six Dynasties poetry period (220–589).
China: Emergence of Midnight Songs poetry.
China: Orchid Pavilion Gathering of 353, which led to the publication of the Lantingji Xu and the related movement in Classical Chinese poetry.
Fifth century (400–500) China: Six Dynasties poetry period (220–589).
China: Emergence of Yongming poetry (483-93) within the state of Southern Qi, a major movement within Classical Chinese poetry.
Sixth century (500–600) China: End of the Six Dynasties poetry period (220–589).
China: Emergence of the brief Sui poetry movement of the Sui dynasty (581–618).
Seventh century (600–700) China: Emergence of Tang poetry (618–907), and the Early Tang (初唐) and High Tang (盛唐) movements.
Eighth century (700–800) China: Period of Tang poetry (618–907), and the zenith of the High Tang (盛唐) movement, leading into the Middle Tang (中唐) movement.
Ninth century (800–900) China: Period of Tang poetry (618–907), and the end of the Middle Tang (中唐) movement, leading into the Late Tang (晚唐) movement.
Tenth century (900–1000) China: Emergence of Song poetry (960–1279).
Twelfth century (1100–1200) China: Emergence of Yuan poetry (1271–1368).
Thirteenth century (1200–1300) The Sicilian School was a small community of Sicilian and mainland Italian poets between 1230 and 1266 headed by Giacomo da Lentini.Mendola, Louis (2015). Sicily's Rebellion against King Charles (with poem of Cielo d'Alcamo). New York: Trinacria.
Fourteenth century (1300–1400) China: Emergence of Ming poetry (1368–1644).
The Renaissance poetry within the Renaissance literature is a wide movement which arose in the 14th-century Italy—Petrarch is the most important representative—and continued until the mid-17th century in England.
Fifteenth century (1400–1500) The Makars or Scottish Chaucerians were a diverse genere of Scottish court poets who wrote in Middle Scots during the 15th and 16th century Northern Renaissance. The most important representatives are Robert Henryson, Walter Kennedy, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, David Lyndsay, and Alexander Montgomerie. Figures such as William Drummond of Hawthornden wrote in English might loosely be seen as forming a continuation into the 17th century.
Sixteenth century (1500–1600) Mannerism was a movement and style that emerged in the later Italian High Renaissance. Mannerism in poetry is notable for its elegant, highly florid style and intellectual sophistication. The style involved poetry of Michelangelo, Clément Marot, Giovanni della Casa, Giovanni Battista Guarini, Torquato Tasso, Veronica Franco, and Miguel de Cervantes.
Petrarchism was a trans-European movement of Petrarch's style followers, partially coincident with Mannerism, including Pietro Bembo, Michelangelo, Mellin de Saint-Gelais, Vittoria Colonna, Clément Marot, Garcilaso de la Vega, Giovanni della Casa, Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Joachim du Bellay, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and Bálint Balassi.
Grobianism is a particular movement in 16th-century German literature that parodied moralizing works and ridiculed in the most extreme caricatures the imitation of Romanesque fashions by gentle circles. The Grobianus Tischzucht (1538) and Friedrich Dedekind's Grobianus (1549) works give their name to Grobianism. The poet representatives include Sebastian Brant, Thomas Murner, Hans Sachs, Friedrich Dedekind, and Johann Fischart.
The Areopagus was a club dedicated to the reformation of English poetry. The club may have involved figures such as Edmund Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, Edward Dyer and Philip Sidney.
The Castalian Band was a court grouping of Scottish makars led by the King James VI. The group included Alexander Montgomerie, William Fowler, John Stewart of Baldynneis, William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, and others.
Seventeenth century (1600–1700) The Baroque poetry replaced Mannerism and includes several schools, especially most artificial poetic style of the early 17th-century. It involved Giambattista Marino, Lope de Vega, John Donne, Vincent Voiture, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Georges de Scudéry, Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, John Milton, Andreas Gryphius, and Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau.
Classical or Neoclassical poetry movement echoes the forms and values of classical ancient Greek and Latin literature, favouring formal, restrained forms. Major dramatist and other genres figures include Pierre Corneille, Molière, Jean Racine, John Dryden, William Wycherley, William Congreve, Joseph Addison, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
Marinism was Italian Baroque poetic school and techniques of Giambattista Marino and his followers was based on its use of extravagant and excessive extended metaphor and lavish descriptions. Among Giambattista Marino's followers were Cesare Rinaldi, Bartolomeo Tortoletti, Emanuele Tesauro, Francesco Pona, Francesco Maria Santinelli, and others.
was a Baroque poetic school in the Spanish literature, a similar to the Marinism. Major figures include Francisco de Quevedo and Baltasar Gracián.
was another Spanish Baroque movement, in contrast to Conceptismo, characterized by an ornamental, ostentatious vocabulary and a highly latinal syntax. It involved such poets as Luis de Góngora, Hortensio Félix Paravicino, Conde de Villamediana, and Juana Inés de la Cruz.
The Précieuses was a French Baroque movement, similar to the Spanish culteranismo. Its main features are the refined language of aristocratic salons, periphrases, hyperbole, and puns on the theme of gallant love. Poets associated with the Précieuses were Vincent Voiture, Charles Cotin, Antoine Godeau, and Isaac de Benserade.
Metaphysical poets was an English Baroque school using extended conceit, often (though not always) about religion. They include such figures as John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell.
Cavalier poets in England were Baroque royalist group, writing primarily about courtly love, called Sons of Ben (after Ben Jonson) and included Richard Lovelace with William Davenant.
The Pegnesischer Blumenorden (1644 – present) is a German Baroque literary society represented the Nuremberg Poetic School of Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and other figures.
Emergence of Qing poetry (1644–1912) in China.
Danrin school in Japan.
Eighteenth century (1700–1800) The 17th-century Classicism has recurred in various Neoclassical schools and poets such as Voltaire and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock since the eighteenth century.
Augustan poets such as Alexander Pope.
Rococo, also known as Late Baroque, is the final expression of the Baroque movement that began in France in the 1730s and characterized by a cheerful lightness and intimacy of tone, and an elegant playfulness in erotic light poetry and principally small literary forms. The poets associated with style are Paolo Rolli, Pietro Metastasio, Friedrich von Hagedorn, P. J. Bernard, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Johann Uz, Johann Nikolaus Götz, Christoph Martin Wieland, Alexandre Masson de Pezay, Abbé de Favre, Évariste de Parny, Ippolit Bogdanovich, and others.
The was a from 1767 till 1785 literary group, precursor to the Romanticism. Its literature often features a protagonist which is driven by emotion, impulse and other motives that run counter to the enlightenment rationalism. The key members were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with Friedrich Schiller, among other poets Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart, and Gottfried August Bürger.
Nineteenth century (1800–1900) Romanticism started in the late 18th century Western Europe, but existed largely within the nineteenth. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads is considered by some as the first important publication in the movement. Romanticism stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom within or even from classical notions of form in art, and the rejection of established social conventions. It stressed the importance of "nature" in language and celebrated the achievements of those perceived as heroic individuals and artists. Romantic poets include William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats (those previous six sometimes referred to as the Big Six, or the Big Five without Blake); other Romantic poets include James Macpherson, Robert Southey, Emily Brontë, Adelbert von Chamisso, Alexander Pushkin, and Mikhail Lermontov.
The Lake Poets was a group of Romantic poets from the English Lake District who wrote about nature and the sublime. Among them were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a primarily English art and poetic school, founded in 1848, based ostensibly on undoing innovations by the painter Raphael. Some members were both painters and poets. Most significant figures include Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti.
The Fleshly School was realistic, sensual school of poets.
The Transcendentalists were from the mid-19th-century American movement: poetry and philosophy concerned with self-reliance, independence from modern technology. It includes Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
The is a derivative of literary realism and naturalism that began in post-unification Italy. The poets which associated with the movement are Giosuè Carducci and Cesare Pascarella.
The Aesthetes were an artistic and literary movement of Victorian era from 1860s related to the Decadent Movement that cultivated beauty, rather than didactic purpose, and illustrated by the slogan "art for art's sake." The poets most strongly associated with the aestheticism are Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and A. E. Housman.
The Parnassians were a group of the 1860s–1890s French poets, named after their journal, the Parnasse contemporain. They included Charles Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Sully Prudhomme, Paul Verlaine, François Coppée, and José María de Heredia. Non-French parnassians were Felicjan Faleński, Alberto de Oliveira, Olavo Bilac, and others. In reaction to the looser forms of romantic poetry, they strove for exact and faultless workmanship, selecting exotic and classical subjects, which they treated with rigidity of form and emotional detachment.