Modern Poetics
Timeline
1080 Rise of the Nizari Ismaelis
1124 Hasan-i-sabbah dies at Alamut
1129 Knights Templar founded
1202 Liber Abbaci Fibonacci, introduces Arabic numerals & Hindi/Arabic decimal system
1207 Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī born in Persia
1225 Sonetto form, Giacomo da Lentino in court of Holy Roman Emp. Frederick II
also in the same court: the canzone
Fibonacci comes to Fred’s court, meets the crew
1256 Alamut sacked by Mongols
1265 Dante Alighieri born in Florence
1273 Rumi dies
1274 Dante meets Beatrice, age 9, love at first sight, sees her frequent in street age 18 onward
1294 La Vita Nuova Dante, world’s 1st known Sonnet Sequence
1300
1304 De vulgari eloquentia Dante on development of vernacular Lit, 1st discussion of sonnets
Francesco Petrarca born, Dante was father’s friend
1308 Dante begins Divine
Comedy, invents terza rima
1312 Knights Templar disbanded by Pope
Clement V (began in France 1307 witch-hunts)
1321 Dante dies, end Divine Comedy
1327 Petrarch sees Laura,
leaves church, never attains her
1346 Siege Guns used by
English at Calais, 1st
Gunpowder in Europe
1348 Black Death Plague in
Europe, to ’50, kills 30% -60% of pop, 75m-200miliion
1368 last poems of the Canzoniere
Petrarch
1374 Petrarch dies
1382 Red Book of Hergest just
post this year
1394 Ikkyu Sojun born at Kyoto court, bastard of Emperor Go
Komatsu
1400 Chaucer dies
1401 Renaissance ‘begins’ in Florence w/ competing designs for Florence Cathedral doors
1415 Cosimo de’ Medici becomes Priore of Florence
1431 Joan of Arc burned at the stake
Francois Villon born
1450 Printing Press 1st
1453 Fall of Constantinople to Ottoman
Turks
1461 Le Grand Testament Villon
between prison bids
1463 Villon disappears
1471 Corpus Hermeticum in Latin de Medici court, Ikkyu
meets Mori
1482 Ikkyu dies
1492 Columbus plague ships
‘discover’ Americas
1497 Bonfire of the Vanities
in Florence, Girolamo Savonarola
1500 Printing Press 20
million volumes
1519 Leonardo da Vinci dies
1521 Martin Luther excommunicated – can’t buy salvation
1552 Edmund Spenser born?
1558 Elizabeth (daughter of
Henry VIII) crowned, Dee/Ralegh/Drake, begin British Empire
Renaissance begins in England
1564 William Shakespeare born
1582 John Dee meets Edward Kelly – Enochian angelic downloads
1588 Spanish Armada invasion of England
fails
1599 Edmund Spenser dies
1600
1603 Elizabeth dies, James IV of Scotland
1609 Shake-speares Sonnets
1616 Shakespeare dies
1637 Discourse on
Method Rene Decartes, sets rules for scientific method
1650 1st NE Whale fishery Long Island,
Corpus Hermeticum in English
1665 Great Plague of London,
70k dead
1666 Great Fire of London
1687 Principia
Mathematica Isaac Newton
1700
1718 Edward Teach / Blackbeard KIA age 38
1719 Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe, one of 1st English novels
1731 Defoe dies, age 71
1737 last Grand Duke de’ Medici dies
1757 William Blake born
1759 Robert Burns born
1760 George II dies, George III
1775 American Revolutionary War begins
1776 Declaration of
Independence Thomas Jefferson
Common Sense Thomas Paine
The Wealth of
Nations Adam Smith
1780 1st Police Force as
result of Gordon Riots in London
1781 10hp Watt Steam Engine, 1st
patent rotary
1783 American Revolutionary War
ends
1784 Blake’s print shop, Joseph Johnson’s house (T. Paine,
Wollstonecraft, Godwin, etc)
1787 American Constitution
adopted
1791 Bill of Rights (1-10 Amendments to
Am. Constitution)
Rights Of Man Thomas Paine
1793 Louis XVI executed
1796 Robert Burns dies
1800
1802 Napoleonic Wars begin
Age of Enlightenment ends
1803 Louisiana Purchase Jefferson
(<3 cents/acre = $15 million)
1807 Internal Combustion 1st
1809 Alfred, Lord Tennyson born
1812 War of 1812
Napoleon invades Russia
Childe Harold
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Europe/Russia fame
Charles Dickens born Portsea, England
1814 The Star Spangled Banner
Francis Scott Key
1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon defeated
1816 Shelleys & Byron in Geneva
1818 Frankenstein,
Mary Shelley
Endymion
John Keats
Prometheus
Unbound Percy Bysshe Shelley work begins
Shelleys, Byron, Leigh Hunt in Italy
1819 Don Juan Byron,
sections published
Walt Whitman born rural Long Island
Herman Melville born NYC
1820 George III dies, George IV
1821 Electromagnetism discovered,
Faraday Electro-rotation motor
The Defense of
Poetry Shelley essay
Keats dies of tuberculosis & negative reviews,
age 26
1822 Shelley drowns, boat Don Juan capsizes, age 30
1824 Byron dies of fever on maneuvers, age 36
1827 William Blake dies
1828 Jules Verne born
1830 George IV dies, William IV
Indian Removal Act / Trail of
Tears (Eastern tribes to OK)
1831 4-4-0 Locomotive
1835 Samuel Clemens born MO
1836 Pickwick Papers
Dickens 1st Serialized
1837 Queen Victoria after William IV dies
Oliver Twist serialized to ’39 Dickens
1840 Thomas Hardy born
1843 A Christmas Carol
Dickens
1845 US annexes Texas, Mexican American
War (’46-’48)
1st metal ammo cartridge, rimfire, France
The Raven Poe
1846 Peak New England Whaling, to ‘52
1848 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded:
Dante Rossetti, William Hunt, John Millais
The Communist
Manifesto Karl Marx
The Mabinogion trans
Lady Charlotte Guest
1849 CA Gold Rush
Poe dies, age 40
1851 Moby Dick Melville
1854 Arthur Rimbaud born
1855 Leaves of Grass
Whitman
1857 Smith & Wesson Model 1, 1st
commercial metal cartridge revolver
Flowers of Evil
Baudelaire
1859 1st Commercial Drilled
Oil Well, Titusville, PA; begin oil boom
On
the Origin of Species Charles
Darwin
1860 Great Expectations
serial Dickens to ‘61
1861 American Civil War begins
1863 Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln
Black Elk born
1865 Am. Civil War ends
Abraham Lincoln assassinated
Jumping Frog
Twain 1st
Alice in
Wonderland Lewis Carroll
Five Weeks in a
Balloon Jules Verne 1st
William Butler Yeats born in Dublin
1866 2-8-0 Consolidation Locomotive
Butch Cassidy born
1867 Alaska Purchase
Das Kapital
part 1 Karl Marx, Part 2 ’85 & Part 3 ’94 ed. Friedrich Engels
1869 Transcontinental Railroad
UP & CP meet in Utah
1870 Dickens dies, last serial printed
20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea Verne, inspires The
Drunken Boat
1871 Paris Commune
The Drunken
Boat Rimbaud (’69 1st)
God and the
State Mikhail Bakunin
1872 Hague Congress: Bakunin (Social
Anarchy) vs Marx (Communism)
1873 Market Panic
Around the World in 80 Days Verne
Statism and
Anarchy Bakunin
1874 Rimbaud stops writing
1876 American Centennial, Colorado becomes a State in US
Battle of Little Bighorn, Crazy
Horse vs. Custer
Bell patents telephone
Tom Sawyer Twain
1880 1st Commercial use carbon
filament Light Bulb
1,300 Reefers on American Rails
Butch Cassidy arrested for IOU age 14
1881 Billy the Kid killed by Pat Garret
1882 1st Electric Power Plants
London & NYC, Edison
God is Dead
Nietzsche The Gay Science
Jesse James murdered by Robert Ford
1884 Nikola Tesla emigrates to US, age 29, works for Edison
Machine Works
1885 Ezra Pound born in Idaho, move to PA age 2
Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn Twain
1886 Verse Libre, La Vogue magazine
1887 Mosada: A Dramatic Poem
Yeats 1st
Karl Benz 1st
‘automobile’
1888 Roundhay Garden Scene, 1st
Motion Picture
Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn founded
1889 The Wanderings of Oisin
Yeats, he meets Maude Gunn
Gerard Manley Hopkins dies, age 45
1890 Candlestick Telephone
introduced
24,000 Reefers
Wounded Knee Massacre
Rhymers Club in London
founded by Yeats
The Golden
Bough Sir James Frazier
1891 Melville dies, Rimbaud dies
1892 Whitman dies, Alfred Lord Tennyson dies
Edna St. Vincent Millay born
1893 Market Crash, Silver
devalued, ‘Railroad Bubble’ bursts
Stein at Radcliffe(Harvard) student of William James
until ‘97
1895 Ragtime music
The Time Machine HG Wells
1896 Butch Cassidy forms Wild Bunch gang in Wyoming
1897 The War of the Worlds,
The Invisible Man HG Wells
Romantic Songs
Herman Hesse poetry 1st
1899 The Wind Among the Reeds Yeats
The
Interpretation of Dreams Freud
The Symbolist
Movement in Literature Arthur Symons
The Abbey Theatre Dublin
founded by Yeats & Lady Gregory
1900 70,000 Reefers
Haiku form invented from renga starting lines
The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz L. Frank Baum
1901 Victoria dies, Edward VII
1902 WCW, Pound, HD meet at U of Penn
1903 Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, NC
W.C. Handy discovers Delta
Blues
Steins move to Paris, 27 rue de Fleurus
1904 Tungsten filament Light Bulbs
Liber AL vel
Legis Crowley
1905 First Convention of Industrial Workers of the World,
Chicago
Jules Verne dies
1906 writing Making of
Americans Stein to ‘08 or ‘11
1907 Financial Panic
Chamber Music
Joyce 1st poems
Proto-Cubist painting style
begins, develops through ‘11
1908 Ford Model T affordable automobile
Newsreel film format P. Freres
France
1st Commercial Radio transmission
Pound moves to London, age 23, befriends Yeats
A Lume Spento
Pound 1st
Butch Cassidy & Sundance Kid supposedly killed in
Bolivia
1909 Cubism begins w/ Picasso according
to Stein
Poems
Williams 1st book
1910 Edward VII dies, George V
Georgian
Poetry anthology
Rites
of Eleusis Crowley performance at
Caxton Hall
Twain dies, Charles Olson born Worcester, MA
1911 Atomic Nucleus identified
Imagism
Salon des Independants 1st
Cubist exhibition, Paris
1912 Tender Buttons
Stein
Renascence
Millay wins 4th in The Lyric
Year mag, controversy
Salon de la
Section d’Or, Cubist retrospective exhibition, 200 works, Paris
largest ship RMS Titanic
hits iceberg 1500 killed
1913 Federal Reserve Act
1914 World War One begins
Leo Stein moves to Italy w/ part of Stein Collection
Pound & Eliot meet in England
Dubliners
Joyce 1st prose
William S. Burroughs born in KS?
1915 Des Imagistes
anthology by Pound
The Birth of a
Nation D.W. Griffith film, Hollywood rising
Joe Hill framed (’14) & executed: “Don’t mourn,
Organize.”
1916 Theory of Relativity Einstein
Technicolor introduced (to 1952)
Cabaret Voltaire founded in
Zurich by Hugo Ball Tristan Tzara, others, Dada
1917 Bolshevik October Revolution
Lenin
1st three Cantos Pound
Prufrock and
Other Observations Eliot 1st
Renascence and Other Poems Edna St. Vincent Millay 1st
Gwendolyn Brooks born KS, grew
up Chicago
1918 World War One ends
Major Flu epidemic in US
Pulitzer Prize Sara Teasdale 1st woman
1919 d’Annunzio takes Fiume
(through ’20): Anarchist Republic
1st Commercial International Airplane Flight, USA
– Canada
1920 Woman’s Suffrage 19th
Amendment in US, many others
Prohibition on Alcohol begins
Jazz Age & Speakeasys
1st Commercial Radio Broadcast
Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley Pound
A Few Figs from
Thistles Millay on fem sexuality & feminism
Pound moves to Paris
Charles Bukowski born
1921 Nobel Prize Physics Einstein
1922 Soviet Union formed at end
Russian Civil War
Tutankhamen’s Tomb discovered by Carter & Herbert
The Waste Land
Eliot
Ulysses
Joyce
Siddhartha
Hesse
The Fugitive
mag to 1925
1923 Tulips and Chimneys
Cummings 1st
Nobel Prize for Poetry to Yeats
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Edna St. Vincent Millay (1st
woman) for The Ballad of the Harp Weaver
1924 Lenin dies, Stalin era follows
Pound moves to Italy
J. Edgar Hoover joins the Bureau of Investigation
Surrealist
Manifesto Andre Breton
1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos
Pound
1926 Schrodinger’s Quantum
equation (published ’27)
Rilke dies of leukemia, age 51
1927 A Survey of Modernist
Poetry Graves & Riding
Poem beginning
“The” Zukofsky to Pound
Zukovsky begins work on “A”
Thomas Hardy dies
Last New England Whaling
Vessel sails, New Bedford
1929 Great Depression Stock
Market Crash
1930 Seven Types of
Ambiguity William Empson
Whoroscope Samuel
Beckett 1st
Gwendolyn Brooks begins prolific magazine poems, age
13
Swing bands become popular
Silent Films extinct
1931 Hesse begins planning Glass
Bead Game
1932 Animated Color Cartoons
Black Elk
Speaks John Neihardt
1933 Adolf Hitler comes to power
End of Prohibition
King Kong
Merian C. Cooper film
Black Mountain College founded, NC
1934 I, Claudius Graves,
using analeptic process
John Dillinger killed outside Biograph Theater
Chicago
also
Bonnie & Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd
1935 FBI founded by J. Edgar Hoover
BoI roots
EPR Paradox paper (Einstein,
Podolsky, Rosen) QT incomplete
1936 George V dies, Edward VIII abdicates,
George VI
The Hobbit JRR Tolkien
1937 Hindenburg disaster live
audio coverage
1938 Murphy Beckett 1st
novel
Understanding
Poetry R.P. Warren & Cleanth
Brooks, textbook
The War of the
Worlds Welles radio broadcast hoax
1939 World War Two begins,
invasion of Poland
Manhattan Project begins
Heinkel He 178 1st
turbojet aircraft
Wizard of Oz film
Graves & Riding’s intense 12 year relationship
ends abruptly
Pound visits US, begins association w/ Mussolini
Yeats dies
1940 Section 10 of “A”
Zukofsky
1941 Pearl Harbor
The New
Criticism Ransom
Citizen Kane
Orson Welles film 1st
Joyce dies
1943 The Glass Bead Game
Hesse
The Roebuck in the Thicket Graves begins 3G/ogham
work, age 48
Tesla dies
1944 D-Day 6 June: 5000 ships, 160k
soldiers land
13
June 1st V1 Buzzbombs hit London
September
– March ’45: 3000 V2 rockets
Pisan Cantos Pound in stockade for treason
1 x 1
Cummings
Bukowski 1st Story in print
1945 Nuclear Fission:
Trinity, Little Boy, Fat Man
World War Two ends
A Street In Bronzeville Gwendolyn
Brooks 1st
Nag Hammadi
Library Gnostic Gospels discovered, Egypt
1946 Bebop Jazz begins
Nobel Prize for Literature Herman Hesse
Paterson
book one Williams
Bukowski stops writing for 10 years
HG Wells dies
1947 Solid State Transistor
Motorola VT-71 television for $189.95,
affordable
Home Refridgerators, Telephones
Roswell,
NM UFO Crash
The White Goddess Graves
To Carrado
Cagli Olson 1st
1948 State of Israel begin by UN
recommendation
Nobel Prize for Poetry Eliot
Beckett writing Godot
RA Heinlein & wife have idea for Stranger from Jungle Book
1949 People’s Republic of China
under Chairman Mao Zedong
Bollingen Prize for Poetry to Pound, uproar
1950 Korean War begins
Projective
Verse Olson
Pulitzer for Poetry Gwendolyn Brooks for Annie Allen
E. Vincent Millay dies, Black Elk dies
1951 On the Road Kerouac
(Town & Country ’50 1st)
1952 George VI dies, Elizabeth II
1st Commercial Jet Service, London to
Johannesburg
A City Winter,
and Other Poems O’Hara 1st
1953 Korean War ends
Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro
City Lights
Bookstore & Press founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In Cold Hell,
In Thicket and Maximus Poems 1-10
Olson
Waiting for
Godot Beckett premiere in the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris
1954 Rock Around the Clock
Bill Haley & the Comets
55% US households have a
television
The Lord of the
Rings Tolkien to ‘55
1955 Viet Nam War begins
Montgomery Alabama Bus Boycott
to 56
The Vestal Lady
on Brattle Corso 1st
Pictures of the
Gone World Ferlinghetti 1st
Bukowski begins to write poetry
1956 COINTELPRO of FBI begins
Black Mountain collapse
Howl Ginsberg
1st, obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti
1957 Sputnik launched
The Return of
the Rivers Richard Brautigan 1st
1958 Pound released from sanitorium “incurably insane but
harmless”
1959 Alaska becomes a State in US
Shunryu Suzuki arrives in San Francisco, age 55
1960 The Twist (’59 Hank
Ballad) song & dance by Chubby Checker
The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 anthology Donald Allen ed.
1961 A Stranger in a Strange
Land RA Heinlein Hugo & Nebula
Black Elk
Speaks reprinted
Bay of Pigs CIA failed
invasion of Cuba
1962 90% US households have a television
Love Me Do Beatles 1st Hit
Naked Lunch
Burroughs Grove (’59 Olympia wrong ms.)
Cummings dies
1963 JFK Assassination
The Fugs Sanders/Kupferberg/Weaver
V. Thomas
Pynchon 1st
WCW dies
1964 Civil
Rights Act bans racial discrimination in workplace & public places
Bell’s theorem arguing nonlocality
British Invasion of the US
pop market lead by The Beatles
Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr.
Furthur bus trip Kesey, Cassady
The Sonnets Berrigan
77 Dream Songs
Berryman
Lunch Poems
O’Hara
1965 US Combat Troops in Viet Nam
Freak Out album Zappa/Mothers of Invention
1966 Tassajara Zen Mountain
Center, 1st Buddhist monastery outside Asia, S. Suzuki / Richard Baker
O’Hara dies
1967 Summer of Love 100k kids to San
Francisco
Trout Fishing in America Brautigan (writ in ’61)
1968 Dr. King assassinated
1969 Apollo 11 lands on Moon
1st
Woodstock Music Festival
400k kids; proto-punk, proto-metal, psychedelic rock
Nobel Prize in Literature Beckett
Kerouac dies of alcoholism
Black Sparrow Press begins funding Bukowski
1970 USA Peak Oil Production, steady
decline from here
Olson dies
Zen Mind,
Beginner’s Mind Shunryu Suzuki
1971 COINTELPRO ends
This mag
Language Poets begin?
Be Here Now
Ram Dass
Nobel Prize in Poetry Neruda
Lew Welch suicide
1972 Pound dies in Venice, J. Edgar Hoover dies still Director of
FBI
1973 Wm Casey CIA: Job done when
everything American Public believes is a lie
Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion
Gravity’s
Rainbow Pynchon Nat Book Award
Pablo Neruda dies, age 69, no poison traced according
to 2013 forensics
1974 Beat Conference at Naropa Institute founding
1975 Viet Nam War ends
1976 Mao dies, Deng Xiopeng takes power,
modern reforms
American Bicentential; Sex Pistols, Ramones, Clash
1977 TRS-80 Personal Computer
SETI receives WOW signal
from 200 lightyears away
Star Wars Lucas film
1978 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
mag begin, to 1982
The Stand
Stephen King
1979 1st Hip-hop Album
The Wall Pink Floyd album
1980 Ronald Reagan steals American election, begin Reaganomics: Politics of Greed
John Lennon assassinated
Riddley Walker Russell Hoban
1981 HIV/AIDS pandemic
recognized by CDC
1982 TCP/IP standard
Compact Disc commercially
available
1983 1st Generation Cell Phone
network, Digital Answering Machines
The Exquisite Corpse mag Codrescu
1984 Apple Macintosh 128k w/ GUI (1st
Xerox ’82)
Neuromancer
William Gibson Hugo, Nebula, PKD, begin Cyberpunk Genre
Brautigan suicide
1986 ‘Internet’ begin, 56kps
access to Supercomputers via Nat. Science Foundation
Chernobyl nuclear plant
disaster
Gangsta Rap begins w/
N.W.A.
Slam Poetry
at Get Me High Lounge in Chicago, Marc Smith 1st
1988 Naropa Institute accredited
American Poetry
since 1970: Up Late, anthology Codrescu ed.
1990 First Gulf War (Kuwait) to 1991, Broadcast Live
1st National Poetry Slam
1991 Collapse of Soviet Union
2G Cell Phones
1992 Snowcrash
Neal Stephenson
1994 Bukowski dies
1995 Internet fully commercialized
1996 Infinite Jest David
Foster Wallace
Fight Club
Chuck Palahnuik (1999 film hit)
1997 Allen Ginsberg dies, WS Burroughs dies,
The Exquisite
Corpse goes Online to 2011
1998 International Space Station
launched, 230 miles
1999 Seattle WTO Protests – begin 2nd
Gen Professional Activists worldwide
The Outlaw
Bible of American Poetry, anthology Alan Kaufman ed.
The Matrix
Wachowski Brothers film
2000 George Bush Jr. steals American election w/ aid of Gov. Jeb Bush of FL
‘Internet Bubble’ bursts,
dot.com devalued, Market Crash into ‘01
Gwendolyn Brooks dies
2001 9/11 Terrorist Attacks on World Trade
Towers NYC and Pentagon
US Patriot Act erodes civil rights
3G Smart Phones
2003 Second Gulf War (Iraq War) begins
Human Genome Map completed
2006 World Peak Oil Production
2007 Recession to ’09, Credit
crisis due to Housing bubble peak in ‘06
2008 Barack Obama, 1st Black
President (vs Hillary Clinton in primary, 1st woman)
2011 Iraq War ends(?)
Fukushima Nuclear Disaster from earthquake/tsumani
Occupy Wall Street, worldwide protest
2012 Higgs Bosun proven?
2013 Quantum Fact: No Speed
Limit, Time is pre-Instantaneous
Nelson Mandela dies
2014 Amiri Baraka dies, age 79
2015 CO2 Emissions Peak
2025 Lake Mead Critical Failure, no water to AZ, LA
2029 2014 NASA Study: First World Collapse
2030 9 Billion World Population; 50% increase in Food production or mass starvation/resource wars
2050 51% American population
Latino/Indigenous
2200 Stephen Hawking: Interplanetary Travel or Extinction
