Poetry Information (Taken from The Norton Anthology of Poetry)
Explanation of Poetry:
-“A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice. What your eye sees on the page is the composer’s verbal score, waiting for you to bring it alive as you read it aloud or hear it in your mind’s ear. Unlike our reading of a newspaper, the best reading—that is to say, the most satisfying reading—of a poem involves a simultaneous engagement of eye and ear: the eye attentive not only to the meaning of words, but to their grouping and spacing as lines on a page; the ear attuned to the grouping and spacing of sounds. The more one understands of musical notation and the principles of musical composition, the more one will understand and appreciate a composer’s score. Similarly, the more one understands of versification (the principles and practice of writing verse), the more one is likely to understand and appreciate poetry, and in particular, the intimate relationship between its form and its content. What a poem says or means is the result of how it is said, a fact that poets are often at pains to emphasize. ‘All my life,’ said W.H. Auden, ‘I have been more interested in technique than anything else.’ And T.S. Eliot claimed that ‘the conscious problems with which one is concerned in the actual writing are more those of a quasi-musical nature, in the arrangement of metric and pattern, than of a conscious exposition of ideas.’ Fortunately, the principles of versification are easier to explain than those of musical composition.”
Categories of Poetry:
- Epic: a long narrative poem, frequently extending into several “books”.
- Dramatic: poetry, monologue or dialogue, written in the voice of a character assumed by the poet.
- Lyric: originally, song performed in ancient Greece to the accompaniment of a small harp-like instrument called a lyre. The term is now used for any fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker, although that speaker may sometimes quote others. The reader should be wary of identifying the lyric speaker with the poet, since the “I” of the poem will frequently be that of a fictional character invented by the poet.
Rhythm:
Syllables: sequence of the basic units of pronunciation. Can consist of a vowel sound or a vowel sound and consonant. Example: syl-la-ble.
Stress:In words of two or more syllables, one syllable is almost always given more emphasis, or more heavily stressed than others. Example of stressed and unstressed (bold is stressed):
A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice.
Scansion: an analysis of stressed and unstressed syllables
Meter:
A poem’s rhythm is structured into a regular pattern of equal units. There are four types of metrical systems in English poetry: the accentual, the accentual-syllabic, the syllabic, and the quantitative. We will focus on the accentual-syllabic.
Accentual-syllabic meter: provided the metrical structure of the new poetry to emerge in the fourteenth century, and its basic unit was the foot, a combination of two or three stressed and/or unstressed syllables. The four most common metrical feet in English poetry are: iambic, trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic.
Foot: how meter is measured. A combination of a stressed and unstressed syllable(s). Below are the most common types of feet.
Iambic (iamb): an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, as in New York. Most similar to ordinary speech. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” –Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Trochaic (trochee): a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable, as in London. Has a quicker, lighter movement. “Londonbridge is falling down…” –nursery rhyme
Anapestic (anapest): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as in Tennessee.
Dactylic (dactyl): a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in “Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me…” from Thomas Hardy’s “The Voice.” This has an energetic movement.
Iambs and anapests, which are stressed on the last syllable, are said to be a rising meter, whereas trochees and dactyls, end with an unstressed syllable and are considered falling meter.
Monometer: one foot per line. Examples “Thus I / Pass by / And die, / As one, / Unknown / And gone: / I’m made / A shade, / And laid / I’th grave, / There have / My cave. / Where tell / I dwell / Farewell. –From Herrick’s “Upon His Departure Hence” is like reading a tombstone.
Dimeter: two feet. “Cannon to right of them, / Cannon to left of them, / Cannon in front of them” –from Donne’s “A Valediction of Weeping”
Trimeter: three feet. In “My Papa’s Waltz: “The whiskey on your breath / Could make a small boy dizzy; / But I hung on like death: / Such waltzing was not easy.”
Tetrameter: four feet.
Pentameter: five feet. The most popular metrical line in English poetry, the iambic pentameter provides the basic rhythmical framework for many poems from the 14th-20th centuries.
Hexameter: six feet
Heptameter: seven feet
Octameter: eight feet
- Syllabic meter: measures only the number of syllables in a line, without regard to their stress.
Rhyme:
End Rhyme: rhyme at the end of a line. “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; / It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil” –from Hopkin’s “God’s Grandeur”
Internal Rhyme: rhyme within a line. “And all is seared with trade; bleared, smearedwith toil;/”
Assonance: the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. “Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?/”
Onomatopoeia: a combination of words whose sound seems to resemble the sound it denotes. “ooze of
oil”
Masculine Rhyme: all of the above rhymes. Consist of a single stressed syllable.
Feminine Rhyme: words in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable: chiming/ rhyming.
Eye Rhymes: words whose endings are spelled alike, and in most instances were pronounced alike, but have in the course of time acquired a different pronunciation: prove/love, daughter/laugher.
Vowel Rhyme: only vowel sounds in common: climb/eyes/light.
Off-rhyme: changing the vowel sound and/or the concluding consonants: gone/alone, room/storm.
Forms:
- Blank Verse: unrhymed iambic pentameters. Often used by Shakespeare.
- Couplet: two lines of verse, usually coupled by rhyme. When couplets are set off as a stanza, they are called closed couplets or heroic couplets.
- Tercet: a stanza of three lines usually linked with a single rhyme.
- Quatrain: a stanza of four lines, rhymed or unrhymed, is the most common of all English stanza forms. The most common type of quatrain is the ballad stanza, in which lines of iambic tetrameter alternate with iambic trimeter, rhyming abcb or abab.
- Rhyme Royal: a seven-line iambic-pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc. Introduced by Chaucer.
- Ottava Rima: an eight-line stanza rhyming abababcc.
- Spenserian stanza: nine lines, the first eight being iambic pentameter and the last iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc.
- Sonnet: poem of fourteen iambic pentameters linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. They differ in rhyme schemes. English Sonnet: abab cdcd efef gg Italian Sonnet: abab bcb cbcb ee
- Limerick: a five-line stanza thought to take its name from an old custom at convivial parties where each person was required to sing a “nonsense verse” which was followed by a chorus containing the words “Will you come up to Limerick?” Edward Lear, who was acknowledge as the Old Master of the limerick, required that the first and fifth lines end with the same word. This, however, is abandoned by modern poets. “There once was a man from Nantucket / Who kept all his cash in a bucket; / But his daughter named Nan / Ran away with a man, / And as for the bucket, Nantucket.” –anonymous.
- Irregular forms: will use rhyme and meter but follow no fixed pattern.
- Open forms/free verse: makes little or no use of traditional rhyme and meter. Ezra Pound is a poet who uses free verse. He recovered for poets what was typical used by novelists; everyday speech and private rather than public language. William Carlos Williams, in his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” uses the simplest of common speech to reveal the extraordinary nature of ordinary things:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Each line depends upon the next to complete it, indicating the interdependence of things in the poem, and by extension, the world.
*Epigraph: motto or quotation, as at the beginning of a literary composition, setting forth a theme.