Introduction to Poetry

Introduction to Poetry

• Derived from the Greek word "poieo" (I create), poetry employs human language for its aesthetic, notional, and semantic qualities.
• It is mainly oral or literary works where language differs from ordinary prose.

Purpose and Devices

• Poetry uses condensed form to convey emotion or ideas.
• It uses assonance and repetition for musical effects.
• It uses imagery, word association, and musical qualities.
• The layering of these effects creates meaning.

Translation and Meaning

• The emphasis on linguistic form makes poetry hard to translate.
• Hebrew Psalms balance ideas over specific vocabulary.
• Connotations, the "baggage" of words, are crucial.
• Nuances of meaning can lead to varied reader interpretations.
• While interpretations vary, there is no single definitive one.

Nature of Poetry Compared to Prose

• Differs from prose, which conveys meaning expansively with logical or narrative structures.
• Poetry escapes the logical and expresses feelings concisely unlike prose.
• John Keats called this escape from logic Negative Capability.

Prose Poetry and Other forms

• Prose poetry combines poetic characteristics with prose appearance.
• Narrative and dramatic poetry tell stories resembling novels and plays;
• Specific verse features enhance stories.

Great Poetry

• What consists of “great” poetry is debatable.
• Commonly is complex, sophisticated, captures images vividly, and weaves themes, tension, emotion, and thought.

Origins

• The Greek verb ποιεω [poiéo (= I make or create)], gave rise to three words: ποιητης [poiet?s (= the one who creates)], ποιησις [poíesis (= the act of creation)] and ποιημα [poíema (= the thing created)].
• Poem creates poet, poesy, and poem.
• A poet creates, and poetry is what a poet creates.
• In Anglo-Saxon cultures, a poet is a "scop" (shaper or maker), and in Scots, a "makar."

Sound in Poetry

• Rhythm is vital.
• Rhythm arranges each line in a particular meter, and different meters played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry
• Free verse uses looser units of cadence.
• Poetry uses rhyme in English and modern European languages often
• Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of ballads, sonnets, and rhyming couplets.
• The use of rhyme is not universal in modern poetry.
• Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme until the High Middle Ages, adopted from Arabic.
• The Arabic language used rhymes extensively, notably in long, rhyming qasidas.
• Tamil Venpa had rigid grammars.
• Alliteration (alliterative verse) structured early Germanic and English poetry.
• Patterns of Germanic poetry and schemes of Modern European poetry use meter determining when to expect alliteration/rhyme.
• Alliteration and rhyme emphasize a rhythmic pattern.
• Ancient Hebrew Biblical poetry used parallelism (successive lines reflecting each other grammatically), a verse form for antiphonal or call-and-response.
• Sound creates patterns and emphasizes semantic elements.
• Alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance, and internal rhyme are used by poets.

Euphony and Aesthetics

• Euphony is a musical, flowing quality of words aesthetically arranged.

Poetry & Form

• Poetry depends on poetic organization units more than prose's sentences and paragraphs.
• A typical structural element is the line, couplet, strophe, stanza, or verse paragraph.
• Lines are self-contained units like in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
• Enjambment ends lines mid-phrase for dynamic verse, to create expectation.
• Tension derives from using linguistic and formal units.
• Printing gives poets visual control.
• Visual and white space elements enhance the poem.
• Modernist poetry carries visual presentation, with individual line placement to create concrete poetry.

Poetry & Rhetoric

• Rhetorical devices like simile/metaphor are commonly used in poetry.
• Aristotle emphasized metaphors.
• Since Modernism, some poets reduced device use, preferring direct presentation.
• Surrealists pushed devices to extremes with catachresis.

History of Poetry

• Poetry predates literacy.
• Preliterate societies used it for oral history, storytelling, genealogy, law, and knowledge.
• The Ramayana was written in the 3rd century BCE in Sanskrit.
• Poetry is closely tied to liturgy, aiding memorization of priestly incantations.
• Most of the world's sacred scriptures are more often poetry than prose.
• Verse still transmits culture.
• "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" and alphabet and calendar jingles are examples.
• Preliterate societies similarly conserved cultural information.

Origins

• Some say poetry began in song.
• Characteristics like rhythm, rhyme, compression, feeling, and refrains came from the need to fit words to music.
• Homeric and Hesiodic epics were recited or chanted, not purely sung, in the European tradition.
• Rhythm, refrains, and kennings enable reciters' memory, according to 20th-century studies.
• In preliterate societies, poetry was composed for performance.
• Exact wordings could vary.
• Writing fixed poem content and poets composed for absent readers.
• The printing press accelerated these trends.
• Poets wrote more for the eye.

Development of Lyrics

• Literacy led to short, personal lyrics meant to be sung to the lyre from the 7th century BCE onward.
• The Greek's singing of hymns in choruses led to dramatic verse and poetic plays.
• Electronic media and poetry readings led to performance poetry, with poetry for both eye and ear.
• The late 20th-century singer-songwriter and Rap culture increase and slam poetry popularity led to debate over whether poetry is based on academics or popular.

Subjective Poetry

• Subject matter can be external objects or the poet's thoughts/feelings.
• External objects result in objective poetry
• Poet is a detached observer.
• Internal thoughts causes subjective poetry.
• Poet uses personal reflection.
• Viewed outwardly, treatment is objective; inwardly, it's subjective.
• Objective= impersonal
• Subjective= personal.
• Objective focuses on the outward.
• Subjective focuses on the poet's mind.

Objective Poetry

• Objective poetry is the older of the two and more ancient, like with primitive people.
• These people focused on what they saw/heard vs what they thought.
• Experience was valued.
• Little thought was given; more action was valued.
• It deals more often with event or deed. Mental efforts were fewer.
• The focus was not on them. It called for little from their hearers.
• Acquired later. It is the product of civilization.
• Epic poetry and Drama are like this; ballad also, but the writer's personality remained in the background.
• Lyric and elegy are later examples of subjective poetry.

Heroic Couplet

• Lines in iambic pentameter that rhyme in pairs.
• The adjective "heroic" came from its use in heroic poems/dramas in the 17th century.
• Form brought into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer that has been in constant writing ever since.
• Common English measure from John Dryden to Johnson.
• Some poets like Pope used it almost to the exclusion of meter.

Neoclassical Period

• Poets wrote with closed couplets (end coincides w/sentence or syntax).
• The continued use meant the two lines were function of a single stanza.
• Classic poets maxed parts by using endstopped first line (pause).
• Single lines was broken up by balancing around a strong caesura (medial pause) in syntax.
• Passage from John Denham's Cooper's Hill, it was early skillful management of closed couplet to neoclassic, who did again and again and used example.
• Noted how the achieved the change by position in shifts (position of caesuras, rhetorical balance/antithesis in shifts, single in halves).
• By variable positioning of the adjectives in the second couplet.
• Iambic foot in first, last also.
• Contrasting manipulation vowels/consonants.

Modern Use of Couplet

• These contrasts w/Keats' Endymion open penterameter. The syntax is normal and the rhyme colors the verse.

Blank Verse

• Lines of iambic pentameter that are unrhymed.
• Closest to the rhythms of English speech but flexible (used more than other forms).
• Introduced by Earl of Surrey around 1540 (standard meter for Elizabethan/later drama) and free.
• John Milton use it and all other various poets.
• Meditative lyrics have also been writtent from Romantic Period to Now.

Verse Paragraphs

• Divisions are used to set off passage.

Spenserian Stanza

• Created by Edmund Spenser.
• It has nine lines (the first eight is iambic pentameter but the last in iambic hexameter).
• Rhymes as "ababbcbcc".
• Many poets attempted the pattern (with varying success).
• The greatest successes have been done with ample leisure and detail.
• Examples inclide James Thomson's "The Castle of Indolence" (1748), etc, etc

Other Stanzas

• Elaborate forms imported from France are the Rondeau, the villanelle and the triolet (contain intricate repetitions rhymes/verses).
• These often go to light verse mainly, but not exclusively
• Writers like W.H Auden was a renewed sign high artifice and the villanelle is 5 tercets to rhyme in a pattern.

Sestina

• Intcricate that is
• 6 sixline with stanza that which first repeats set in ends and three line envoy in middle.
• Used over times by Italian and Frech people too.

Terza Rima

• Tercets are to link.
• Common rhyme is in this pattern.