Conceptions of Poetry.

Poetic Elements.
Method Guide to SEMINAR 2

in INTRODUCTION to LITERATURE
For the 1-st year students of the English Department

Compiled by

Candidate of Philology Shkuropat M.Y.

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SEMINAR2
T O P I C : Conceptions of Poetry.
Poetic Elements. Poetic forms.
Activity 1

 Read the abstracts from the article “The Art of Literature” by Kenneth Rexroth
(p.7-8) and get ready to answer the questions.

Questions

1. What literary traditions raised the question of the broad and narrow
conceptions of poetry? What was the reason for raising this question? (p.6)
2. What is the regular length of Chinese and Japanese poetry? (p.6)
3. What tendencies are observed in the West? (p.6)
4. What elements of poetry deal with patterning of sound in time? (p.8-9)
5. What elements are the most important in English poetry and which ones
are of less importance? (p.9)

Activity 2

 Read the study material on the poetic elements and poetic forms (pp.3-7).
Answer the questions.
Questions

1. What is the definition of poetry? Do you agree with any of the given? Can
poetry be accurately defined?
2. What forms of language and what devices does poetry use?
3. What is one of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form?
4. How may poetry be distinguished from prose literature in terms of form?
5. What distinguishes poetry from other literary compositions in terms of
emotional value?
6. What does the characteristic emotional content of poetry find expression
through?
7. What modes does poetry include?
8. What was the purpose of using poetic forms by nonliterate societies?
9. What tendencies could be observed in the 19th and 20th centuries Western
poetry? What are the modern tendencies?
10. What elements of sound are used in poetry? What effects do they help to
achieve?(See also the GLOSSARY)
11. What are the typical structural elements of poetic texts? (p.6)
12. What are the traditional poetic forms? (p10)

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WHAT IS POETRY?

 A short piece of imaginative writing, of a personal nature and laid out in lines.

 There are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. Wordsworth defined
poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;" Emily Dickinson said, "If I
read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is
poetry;" and Dylan Thomas defined poetry this way: "Poetry is what makes me laugh
or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to do this or
that or nothing."

 Poetry is the chiseled marble of language; it's a paint-spattered canvas - but the poet
uses words instead of paint, and the canvas is you.

There's your definition of poetry. Because defining poetry is like grasping at the wind -
once you catch it, it's no longer wind. Mark Flanagan

POETRY

Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is
used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic
content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner
that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or
listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve
musical effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the
musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to
generate meaning is what marks poetry.

One of the most definable characteristics of the poetic form is economy of language. Poets
are miserly and unrelentingly critical in the way they dole out words to a page. Carefully
selecting words for conciseness and clarity is standard, even for writers of prose, but poets
go well beyond this, considering a word's emotive qualities, its musical value, its spacing,
and yes, even its spacial relationship to the page. The poet, through innovation in both
word choice and form, seemingly rends significance from thin air.

Poetry may be distinguished from prose literature in terms of form

 by its compression,

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  by its frequent (though not prescribed) employment of the conventions of meter and
rhyme,

 by its reliance upon the line as a formal unit,

 by its heightened vocabulary, and

 by its freedom of syntax.

Poetry may be distinguished from prose literature in terms of emotional value

Poetry is surely distinguished by moving us deeply. In fact, for all but Postmodernists,
it is an art form, and must therefore do what all art does — represent something of
the world, express or evoke emotion, please us by its form, and stand on its own as
something autonomous and self-defining.

The characteristic emotional content of poetry finds expression through a variety of

techniques, from direct description to highly personalized symbolism. One of the most
ancient and universal of these techniques is the use of metaphors and simile to alter
and expand the reader's imaginative apprehension through implicit or explicit
comparison.

Poetry includes many modes: narrative, dramatic, aphoristic, celebratory, satiric,

descriptive, didactic, erotic, and personal.

Poetry is an ancient mode of expression; it was often used by nonliterate societies who
formulated poetic expressions of religious, historical, and cultural significance and
transmitted these to the next generation in hymns, incantations, and narrative poems. . In
preliterate societies, poetry was frequently employed as a means of recording oral history,
storytelling (epic poetry), genealogy, law and other forms of expression or knowledge that
modern societies might expect to be handled in prose. The Ramayana, a Sanskrit epic which
includes poetry, was probably written in the 3rd century BC in a language described by
William Jones as "more perfect than Latin, more copious than Greek and more exquisitely
refined than either." Poetry is also often closely identified with liturgy in these societies, as
the formal nature of poetry makes it easier to remember priestly incantations or
prophecies. The greater part of the world's sacred scriptures are made up of poetry rather
than prose.

In the 19th and 20th centuries Western poetry has responded more to the expressive
possibilities of poetic idiom and convention in different traditions. Some poets have
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experimented with reviving or adapting the subject matter and the verse forms of other
times and places. For other poets it has been important to break with tradition and
convention of the relaxed rhythms and colloquial vocabulary for ordinary speech, and a
self-consciously "prosaic" imagery.

For Modernists, a poem is an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real
world but is created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references.
Postmodernists look on poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-
contained — they employ, challenge and/or mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing
beyond themselves.

Much of modern British and American poetry is to some extent a critique of poetic
tradition, playing with and testing (among other things) the principle of euphony itself, to
the extent that sometimes it deliberately does not rhyme or keep to set rhythms at all.

In today's globalized world poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from diverse
cultures and languages.

Sound in poetry

Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line
is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early
European, Eastern and Modern poetry.

Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the
end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms, such as ballads, sonnets and
rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for
example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry
did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle
Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language..

Alliteration and rhyme, when used in poetic structures, help to emphasise and define a
rhythmic pattern. By contrast, the chief device of Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew was
parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in
grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three; a verse form that lent
itself to antiphonal or call- and-response performance.

In addition to the forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure much poetry,
sound plays a more subtle role in even free verse poetry in creating pleasing, varied
patterns and emphasising or sometimes even illustrating semantic elements of the poem.
Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are
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among the ways poets use sound. Euphony refers to the musical, flowing quality of words
arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.

What is generally accepted as "great" poetry is debatable in many cases. "Great" poetry
usually follows the characteristics listed above, but it is also set apart by its complexity and
sophistication. "Great" poetry generally captures images vividly and in an original,
refreshing way, while weaving together an intricate combination of elements like theme
tension, complex emotion, and profound reflective thought.

Poetry and form

Compared with prose, poetry depends less on the linguistic units of sentences and
paragraphs, and more on units of organisation that are purely poetic. The typical structural
elements are the line, couplet, strophe, stanza, and verse paragraph.

Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the well-known lines from William
Shakespeare's Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question.
Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
This linguistic unit is completed in the next line,
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the
reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.
In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of
linguistic and formal units. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over
the visual presentation of their work. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of
the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox.
Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or
groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most
extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.

CLASSROOM GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS

Elements of Poetry

Poetry is a literary form characterized by a strong sense of rhythm and meter and an emphasis on
the interaction between sound and sense. The study of the elements of poetry is called prosody.
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Rhythm and Meter

Rhythm and meter are the building blocks of poetry. Rhythm is the pattern of sound created by the
varying length and emphasis given to different syllables. The rise and fall of spoken language is
called its cadence.

Meter

Meter is the rhythmic pattern created in a line of verse. There are four basic kinds of meter:

Accentual (strong-stress) meter: The number of stressed syllables in a line is fixed, but the
number of total syllables is not. This kind of meter is common in Anglo-Saxon poetry, such as
Beowulf. Gerard Manley Hopkins developed a form of accentual meter called sprung rhythm,
which had considerable influence on 20th-century poetry.

Syllabic meter: The number of total syllables in a line is fixed, but the number of stressed
syllables is not. This kind of meter is relatively rare in English poetry.

Accentual-syllabic meter: Both the number of stressed syllables and the number of total
syllables is fixed. Accentual-syllabic meter has been the most common kind of meter in English
poetry since Chaucer in the late Middle Ages.

Quantitative meter: The duration of sound of each syllable, rather than its stress, determines the
meter. Quantitative meter is common in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Arabic but not in English.

The Foot

The foot is the basic rhythmic unit into which a line of verse can be divided. When reciting verse,
there usually is a slight pause between feet. When this pause is especially pronounced, it is called
a caesura. The process of analyzing the number and type of feet in a line is called scansion.

These are the most common types of feet in English poetry.

Iamb: An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable: “to day ”

Trochee: A stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable: “ car ry”

Dactyl: A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables: “ diff icult”

Anapest: Two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable: “it is time ”

Spondee: Two successive syllables with strong stresses: “stop, thief”

Pyrrhic: Two successive syllables with light stresses: “up to”

Most English poetry has four or five feet in a line, but it is not uncommon to see as few as one or
as many as eight.

Monometer: One foot

Dimeter: Two feet

Trimeter: Three feet

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Tetrameter: Four feet

Pentameter: Five feet

Hexameter: Six feet

Heptameter: Seven feet

Octameter: Eight feet

Types of Accentual-Syllabic Meter

Accentual-syllabic meter is determined by the number and type of feet in a line of verse.

Iambic pentameter: Each line of verse has five feet (pentameter), each of which consists of an
unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (iamb). Iambic pentameter is one of the most
popular metrical schemes in English poetry.

Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse bears a close resemblance to the
rhythms of ordinary speech, giving poetry a natural feel. Shakespeare’s plays are written primarily
in blank verse.

Ballad: Alternating tetrameter and trimeter, usually iambic and rhyming. Ballad form, which is
common in traditional folk poetry and song, enjoyed a revival in the Romantic period with such
poems as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Free verse: Verse that does not conform to any fixed meter or rhyme scheme. Free verse is not,
however, loose or unrestricted: its rules of composition are as strict and difficult as traditional
verse, for they rely on less evident rhythmic patterns to give the poem shape. Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass is a seminal work of free verse.

Line and Stanza

Poetry generally is divided into lines of verse. A grouping of lines, equivalent to a paragraph in
prose, is called a stanza. On the printed page, line breaks normally are used to separate stanzas
from one another.

Types of Rhyme

One common way of creating a sense of musicality between lines of verse is to make them rhyme.

End rhyme: A rhyme that comes at the end of a line of verse. Most rhyming poetry uses end
rhymes.

Internal rhyme: A rhyme between two or more words within a single line of verse, as in “God’s
Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins: “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.”

Masculine rhyme: A rhyme consisting of a single stressed syllable, as in the rhyme between “car”
and “far.”

Feminine rhyme: A rhyme consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, as

in the rhyme between “mother” and “brother.”

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Perfect rhyme: An exact match of sounds in a rhyme.

Slant rhyme: An imperfect rhyme, also called oblique rhyme or off rhyme, in which the sounds
are similar but not exactly the same, as between “port” and “heart.” Modern poets often use slant
rhyme as a subtler alternative to perfect rhyme.

Rhyme Schemes

Rhymes do not always occur between two successive lines of verse. Here are some of the most
common rhyme schemes.

Couplet: Two successive rhymed lines that are equal in length. A heroic couplet is a pair of
rhyming lines in iambic pentameter. In Shakespeare’s plays, characters often speak a heroic
couplet before exiting, as in these lines from Hamlet: “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, /
That ever I was born to set it right!”

Quatrain: A four-line stanza. The most common form of English verse, the quatrain has many
variants. One of the most important is the heroic quatrain, written in iambic pentameter with an
ABAB rhyme scheme.

Tercet: A grouping of three lines, often bearing a single rhyme.

Terza rima: A system of interlaced tercets linked by common rhymes: ABA BCB CDC etc. Dante
pioneered terza rima in The Divine Comedy. The form is hard to maintain in English, although
there are some notable exceptions, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.”

Other Techniques

Punctuation: Like syllable stresses and rhyme, punctuation marks influence the musicality of a line
of poetry.

When there is a break at the end of a line denoted by a comma, period, semicolon, or other
punctuation mark, that line is end-stopped.

In enjambment, a sentence or clause runs onto the next line without a break. Enjambment creates
a sense of suspense or excitement and gives added emphasis to the word at the end of the line,
as in John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Thy plaintive anthem fades / Past the near meadows,
over the still stream.”

Repetition: Words, sounds, phrases, lines, or elements of syntax may repeat within a poem.
Sometimes, repetition can enhance an element of meaning, but at other times it can dilute or
dissipate meaning.

Alliteration: The repetition of sounds in initial stressed syllables (see Figures of Speech, above).

Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds (see Figures of Speech, above).

Refrain: A phrase or group of lines that is repeated at significant moments within a poem, usually
at the end of a stanza.

Poetic Forms

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Certain traditional forms of poetry have a distinctive stanza length combined with a distinctive
meter or rhyme pattern. Here are some popular forms.

Haiku: A compact form of Japanese poetry written in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables,
respectively.

Limerick: A fanciful five-line poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme in which the first, second, and
fifth lines have three feet and the third and fourth have two feet.

Sonnet: A single-stanza lyric poem containing fourteen lines written in iambic pentameter. In
some formulations, the first eight lines (octave) pose a question or dilemma that is resolved in the
final six lines (sestet). There are three predominant sonnet forms.

Italian or Petrarchan sonnet: Developed by the Italian poet Petrarch, this sonnet is divided into
an octave with the rhyme scheme ABBAABBA or ABBACDDC and a sestet with the rhyme
scheme CDECDE or CDCCDC.

Shakespearean sonnet: Also called the English sonnet or Elizabethan sonnet, this poetic form,
which Shakespeare made famous, contains three quatrains and a final couplet. The rhyme
scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Spenserian sonnet: A variant that the poet Edmund Spenser developed from the Shakespearean
sonnet. The Spenserian sonnet has the rhyme scheme ABAB BCBCCDCD EE.

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What is Poetry?

A poem may appear to mean very different things

to different readers, and all of these meanings
may be different from what the author thought he
meant. For instance, the author may have been
writing some peculiar personal experience, which
he saw quite unrelated to anything outside; yet
for the reader the poem may become the expression
of a general situation, as well as of some
private experience of his own. The reader's
interpretation may differ from the author's and
be equally valid-- it may even be better. There
may be much more in a poem than the author was
aware of. The different interpretations may all
be partial formulations of one thing; the
ambiguities may be due to the fact that the poem
means more, not less, than ordinary speech can
communicate.
T.S. Eliot

What is a Poet?

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses

his feelings through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they
feel -- but that's thinking or believing or
knowing; not feeling. and poetry is feeling --
not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe
or know, but not a single human being can be
taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think
or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other
people; but the moment you feel, you're
NOBODY-BUT-YOURSELF.

(taken from Fire and Ice, ed. R.J. McMaster. Toronto: Longmans, 1970.)

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