Crash Course in Poetry
Poetic Subgenres
Narrative:
General characteristics:
1. The persona is the poet, but the events rendered are not those of the poet.
2. Nondramatic, objective verse with regular rhyme scheme and meter which relates a story or narrative.
3. The narrative poem tells a story, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated, sometimes brief, sometimes long (as in the epic). Because of the increasing acceptance of the novel and shorter forms of prose fiction, narrative verse appears less frequently today. Almost opposite of the lyric, it can be characterized as follows:
4. It is highly objective.
5. It is told by a speaker detached from the action.
6. The thoughts and feelings of the speaker do not enter the poem.
7. The rhyme scheme is regular.
Specific types:
1. Epic: A long, dignified narrative poem which gives the account of a hero important to his/her nation or race. Epics will follow many conventions, including: the invocation of a muse, the use of epithets, the listing of heroes and combatants, and the beginning in medias res.
a.
Anonymous: Beowulf
b. Lord Byron: “Don Juan”
c. John Milton: “Paradise Lost”
d. Homer: “The Illiad,” “The Odyssey”
e. Longfellow: “The Song of Hiawatha”
2. Ballad: Simple, narrative verse which tells a story to be sung or recited; the folk ballad is anonymously handed down, while the literary ballad has a single author. Ballads were usually created for singing, dealing with a dramatic episode, usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is told simply, impersonally, and often with vivid dialogue. Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming; but some ballads are in couplet form, and some others have six-line stanzas.
a. John Keats: “La Belle Dame sans Merci”
b. Edward Arlington Robinson: “Richard Cory”
c. William Butler Yeats: “The Fiddler of Dooney”
Dramatic:
General Characteristics:
The persona of the poem is not the poet, but some other “character.” The events of the poem relate the experiences of this character.
Specific Type:
1. Dramatic Monologue: A lyric poem in which the speaker tells a silent audience about a dramatic moment in his/her life and, in doing so, reveals his/her character.
The dramatic monologue was brought to great heights by the Victorian poet Robert Browning. As the title suggests, it is a poem told by one speaker about a significant event. Several qualities exist in the form:
The speaker reveals in his/her own words some dramatic situation in which he/she is involved.
The speaker demonstrates his/her character through the poem.
The speaker addresses a listener who does not engage in dialogue but helps to develop the speech.
We enter the psyche of the speaker, and the skillful poet makes much of his/her own nature, attitudes, and circumstances available in words to the reader who discerns the implications of the poem.
The dramatic monologue differs from a soliloquy in a play in that, in drama, time and place are developed before the character ascends the stage alone to make his/her remarks, whereas the dramatic monologue by itself establishes time, place, and character.
a. Robert Browning: “My Last Duchess”
b. T. S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Lyric:
General Characteristics:
The persona is the poet (implied), and the events rendered are those of the persona.
Subjective, reflective poetry with regular rhyme scheme and meter which reveals the poet’s thoughts and feelings to create a single, unique impression.
a. Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach”
b. William Blake: “The Lamb,” “The Tiger”
c. Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
d. Langston Hughes: “Dream Deferred”
e. Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress”
f. Walt Whitman: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”
The lyric is the most widely used type of poem, so diverse in its format that a rigid definition is impossible. However, several qualities are common to all lyrics:
They are limited in length.
They are intensely subjective
They are personal expressions of personal emotions.
Each expresses the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker.
They are highly imaginative.
Each as a regular rhyme scheme.
Actually, many other types of poems are lyrics, but they occur so frequently that they merit a separate classification. Among them are the following:
During classical Greece the elegy took a specific form (couplets in metric unison) to deal with the poet’s attitude not only about death, but also about life and love. Now the term refers specifically to poems that mourn the death of an individual, the absence of something deeply loved, or the transience of humankind.
A form of the lyric, the poem has a solemn, dignified tone as it laments the loss of something dear to the poet or to humankind.
A particular subset is the Pastoral Elegy, a mourning poem with a joyous ending. The format involves a shepherd set in a pastoral world, a rustic, fertile environment marked by eternal summer and fecund nature. Among the more famous ones are Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “Adonais.”
An ode is an exalted, complex, rapturous lyric poem to ceremoniously address a person or an abstract quality. The original ancient odes were written in Greece, delivered by a chorus singing and performing an elaborate dance. The Greek poet Pindar developed the first odes consisting of complex stanzaic forms in units of three, the strophe, antistrophe, and epode. Each section had a movement of the chorus in dance rhythm; together they were meant to correspond to ebbs and flows of emotion.
In English there are three approximate types of odes:
a. The Pindaric or regular ode consists of the same strophe, antistrophe, epode division of its historical antecedent. Metrics and verse vary at times, but a regular rhythmic pattern emerges.
b. The Horation or homostrophic ode is patterned after the subject, form, and tone of the Roman poet Horace’s verse. It consists of one repeated stanza type, although it may vary within is form (e.g., Keat’s “Ode to Autumn”).
c. The irregular ode, growing from the work of the seventeenth century poet Abraham Cowley, imitates the spirit of the Pindaric or regular ode, but disregards the strophe and stanza rules. It is very flexible and offers the poet an opportunity to change stanza line structure, length, meter, and rhyme to suit his/her subject, mood, and tone. Because of the freedom in the irregular ode, it is the most common in English poetry.
i. Robert Lowell: “Salem”
ii. William Shakespeare: “Shall I Compare Thee?”
iii. John Milton: “On His Blindness”
i. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “How Do I Love Thee?”
ii. John Donne: “Death, Be Not Proud”
Many great poets have maintained the sonnet tradition, among them (in addition to those already mentioned) Sidney, Wordsworth, Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Wyatt (who first wrote them in English) and Surrey, along with Americans Longfellow, Robinson, Millay, and cummings.
A very legitimate question to ask is why this form has existed so long, given the incredible limitations and rigors it imposes on the poet. The most obvious answer is that these very restrictions tax the poet’s skill to make the poem seem to escape the form. What the sonneteer seeks is to adhere to the form but to make the form totally subservient to the meaning and movement of the poem. The compressed form invites intense expressions of idea, sound, and devices. With little ground to dig into, the poet must be very exacting as he/she plants ideas.
Many poets have chosen to write a series of sonnets unified by subject. This is called a sonnet sequence. Some of the better known ones include Spenser’s Amoretti, Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, and E. B. Browning’s Sonnets for the Portuguese.
Although a highly specialized form, the villanelle is a difficult kind of poem to write without seeming trite or repetitive. Originally a light, pastoral verse, the villanelle has been used by modern poets to outstanding effect.
Verse Types
Blank Verse: Unrhymed lines, but each line is basically iambic pentameter (È/ È/ È/ È/ È/). Generally, we find this type used most often in plays, especially Shakespeare’s. The tone of blank verse tends to be serious. Today, critics employ the term to include many unrhymed metric forms, where iambic pentameter occurs but not constantly.
Good blank verse is hard to write. The absence of rhyme seemingly would leave a great deal of latitude for the poet, but he/she must compensate for this in many other ways. The use of enjambement (run-on lines) and caesuras (pauses within a line) must be meticulously done. In addition, the form must accommodate many different emotions: humorous, solemn, happy, melancholic, exalted, condescending, praising, angry, etc.
a. Robert Frost: “Birches”
b. John Milton: “Paradise Lost”
c. Theodore Roethke: “I Knew a Woman”
d. William Shakespeare: Macbeth
e. Robert Frost: “Mending Wall”
Free Verse (Vers libre): Unrhymed lines without regular rhythm.
Free verse is free from the limitations of fixed meter and rhyme; but this is not to say that it lacks poetic techniques. In fact, its freedom allows the poet to pick and choose among many rhyming, metric, and language devices to develop each line successively. Free verse is very rhythmic, often patterned after the spoken word.
In the mid-1800s Walt Whitman introduced it extensively, and free verse had since grown in usage. Given the extreme mechanization and technology of the twentieth century, many modern poets turn to free verse in an effort to escape formal conventions and to give freedom and life to their poetry.
In free verse, the poet makes frequent use of such devices as image, symbol, internal rhyme, and figurative language. The difficulty of writing free verse lies in achieving unity within the poem, given the endless possibilities for developing the ideas. Deciding lines, grammar, and rhythm are formidable tasks. When the poet succeeds in gathering his/her resources to create a consistently unified poem, a great work develops. This characteristic of unity is what separates excellent form mediocre free verse poems.
Light Verse: A general category of poetry written to entertain, such as lyric poetry, epigrams, and limericks. It can also have a serious side, as in parody or satire.
a. Vachel Lindsay: “The Congo”
b. Lewis Carroll: “Jabberwocky”
Limerick: Humorous nonsense-verse in five anapestic lines rhyming aabba, a-lines being trimeter and b-lines dimeter.
a. Edward Lear: various
Japanese Verse: Unrhymed verse in lines of particular number of syllables, often depicting a delicate image.
Haiku—three lines of five, seven and five syllables.
Tanka—five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables.
Cinquain—five lines of two, four, six, eight, and two syllables.
a. Matsuo Basko: various
Poetic Meter
Meter is poetry’s rhythm, or its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Meter is measured in units of feet; the five basic kinds of meter are indicated below. An ictus indicates stressed ( / ), and a breve indicates an unstressed ( È ) syllable.
Iambic (Iamb): ( È/ )
Trochaic (Trochee): ( /È )
Anapestic (Anapest): ( ÈÈ/ )
Dactylic (Dactyl): ( /ÈÈ )
Spondaic (Spondee): ( // )
Other Metric Terms
Amphibrach: a foot of unstressed, stressed, unstressed syllables ( È/È ).
Anàcrusis: an extra unaccented syllable at the beginning of a line before the regular line begins.
Amphimacher: a foot with stressed, unstressed, stressed syllables ( /È/ ).
Catalexis: an extra unaccented syllable at he ending of a line after the regular meter ends (opposite of anàcrusis).
Caesura: a pause in the meter or rhythm of a line.
Enjambement: a run-on line, continuing into the next without a grammatical break.
Aspects of Poetry
Tone: the author’s attitude toward his/her audience and subject.
Theme: the author’s major idea or meaning.
Dramatic Situation: the circumstances of the speaker.
GLOSSARY
OF LITERARY TERMS
accentual meter: Lines of verse organized by number of stresses rather than by feet or number of syllables. This was the form of poetry written in Old English (which combined stress with alliteration). For a modern example, see Richard Wilbur, "Junk" (1961). Accentual meter is the basis of sprung rhythm.
accentual-stress meter: Lines of verse based on the metrical foot. This is the most common form of English poetry.
alliteration: The repetition of sounds in nearby words, most often involving the initial consonants of words (and sometimes the internal consonants in stressed syllables).
allusion: An indirect reference to a text, myth, event, or person outside the poem itself (compare echo). Although it is woven into the context of the poem, it carries its own history of meaning: for example, see the reference to Hamlet in T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917).
ambiguity: The ability to mean more than one thing.
analogy: Resemblance in certain respects between things that are otherwise unlike; also, the use of such likeness to predict other similarities.
anapest: Two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one, as in "unabridged" (see foot).
anaphora: Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines. For example, see Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678).
apostrophe: an address to a person or personified object not present.
assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds in a line or series of lines. Assonance often affects pace (by working against short and long vowel patterns) and seems to underscore the words included in the pattern. For example, see the beginning of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan" (1816).
aubade: A lyric about the dawn (e.g., see John Donne, "The Sun Rising" [1633]).
ballad: A narrative poem, impersonally related, that is (or originally was) meant to be sung. Characterized by repetition and often by a repeated refrain (a recurrent phrase or series of phrases), the earliest ballads were anonymous works transmitted orally from person to person through generations. For example, see "Sir Patrick Spens." Modern literary ballads imitate these folk creations (e.g., Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [1798]).
ballad stanza: A four-line stanza, the second and fourth lines of which are iambic trimeter and rhyme with each other; the first and third lines, in iambic tetrameter, do not rhyme. This form, frequently used in hymns, is also known as "common meter"; a loose form of it is often used by Emily Dickinson.
blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter; for (or originally was) meant to be sung. Characterized by repetition and often by a repeated refrain (a recurrent phrase or series of phrases), the earliest ballads were anonymous works transmitted orally from person to person through generations. For example, see "Sir Patrick Spens." Modern literary ballads imitate these folk creations (e.g., Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" [1798]).
ballad stanza: A four-line stanza, the second and fourth lines of which are iambic trimeter and rhyme with each other; the first and third lines, in iambic tetrameter, do not rhyme. This form, frequently used in hymns, is also known as "common meter"; a loose form of it is often used by Emily Dickinson.
blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter; for example, see Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses" (1842).
caesura: A sign, used in scansion, that marks a natural pause in speaking a line of poetry.
conceit: an extended metaphor comparing two unlike objects with powerful effect. (It owes its roots to elaborate analogies in Petrarch and to the Metaphysical poets, particularly John Donne.)
concrete poetry: An attempt to supplement (or replace) verbal meaning with visual devices from painting and sculpture. A true concrete poem cannot be spoken; it is viewed, not read (compare pattern poetry).
confessional poem: A relatively new (or recently defined) kind of poetry in which the speaker focuses on the poet's own psychic biography. This label is often applied to writings of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton.
connotation: What is suggested by a word, apart from what it explicitly and directly describes (compare denotation). For example, the "cypresses" of Eavan Boland's "That the Science of Cartography Is Limited" (1994) connote death, because of their traditional associations with mourning.
controlling metaphors: Metaphors that dominate or organize an entire poem. For example, metaphors of movement structure John Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" (1633).
conventions: Standard ways of saying things in verse, employed to achieve certain expected effects. Conventions may pertain to style (e.g., the rhyme scheme of the sonnet) or content (e.g., the figure of the shepherd in the pastoral).
couplet: A pair of lines, almost always rhyming, that form a unit.
dactyl: A stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in "screwdriver" (see foot).
denotation: The direct and literal meaning of a word or phrase (as distinct from its implication). Compare connotation.
dramatic poetry: Poetry written in the voice of one or more characters assumed by the poet. For example, Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are dramatic narratives.
dramatic monologue: A poem written in the voice of a character, set in a specific situation, and spoken to someone. This form is most strongly identified with poems of Robert Browning (e.g., "My Last Duchess" [1842]); see also Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses" (1842).
echo: A reference that recalls a word, phrase, or sound in another text. For example, "And indeed there will be time" in Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) recalls both Ecclesiastes 3.1 ("To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven") and Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (1681; "Had we but world enough and time"). It is less specific than an allusion.
elegy: In classical times, any poem on any subject written in "elegiac" meter (dactylic couplets comprising a hexameter followed by a pentameter line), but since the Renaissance usually a formal lament for the death of a particular person. For example, see W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1940).
end stop: A line break that coincides with the end of the sentence (vs. a run-on line; compare enjambment).
English sonnet: Three four-line stanzas and a couplet, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg. For example, see William Shakespeare, Sonnet 146 (1609; "Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth").
enjambment: The use of a line that "runs on" to the next line, without pause, to complete its grammatical sense (compare end stop). For example, see Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool" (1960).
envoy: A short concluding stanza found in certain poetic forms (e.g., the sestina) that often provides a concise summing-up of the poem.
epic: A long poem, in a continuous narrative often divided into "books," on a great or serious subject. Traditionally, it celebrates the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines, using elevated language and a grand, high style (e.g., Homer's Iliad), but later epics have been more personal (e.g., William Wordsworth's Prelude [1805 / 1850]) and less formal in structure (e.g., H. D. 's Helen in Egypt [1961]).
epigram: Originally any poem carved in stone (on tombstones, buildings, gates, etc.), but in modern usage a very short, usually witty verse with a quick turn at the end (e.g., much of the light verse of Ogden Nash).
extended metaphors: Detailed and complex metaphors that extend over a long section of a poem (e.g., the metaphor of grass in Whitman's "Song of Myself" [1881], section 6 or of the compass in Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning").
feminine rhyme: Rhymes comprised of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (e.g., see George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan 1.38 [1819]: "He learn'd the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, / And how to scale a fortress— or a nunnery"). Compare masculine rhyme.
figures of speech: Uses of a word or words that go beyond the literal meaning to show or imply a relationship, evoking a further meaning. Such figures, sometimes called "tropes" (i.e., rhetorical "turns"), include anaphora, metaphor, metonymy, and irony.
foot: The basic unit, consisting of two or three syllables, into which a line is divided in scansion. Verse is labeled according to its dominant foot (e.g., iambic) and the number of feet per line (e.g., pentameter). Lines of one, two, three, four, five, and six feet are respectively called monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter. See anapest, iamb, dactyl, spondee, and trochee.
free verse: Poetry that does not follow the rules of regularized meter and strict form. However, these open forms continue to rely on patterns of rhythm and repetition to impose order; for example, see Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1881).
heroic couplet: A pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. For example, see Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Pardoner's Tale"; perhaps the most polished instances of this form are provided by Alexander Pope.
hyperbole: gross exaggeration for effect: overstatement.
iamb: An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in "above" (see foot). Iambic is the most common meter in English poetry.
image: A mental representation of a particular thing able to be visualized (and often able to be apprehended by senses other than sight).
irony: A figure in which what is stated is the opposite of what is meant or expected, or the contrast between actual meaning and the suggestion of another meaning.. For example, see Wilfred Owen's ironic use of Horace, Odes 3.2.13, in "Dulce Et Decorum Est" (1920).
verbal irony—meaning one thing and saying another.
dramatic irony—two levels of meaning—what the speaker says and what he/she means, and what the speaker says and the author means.
situational irony—when the reality of a situation differs from the anticipated or intended effect; when something unexpected occurs.
Italian sonnet: An octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines); typically rhymed abbaabba cdecde, it has many variations that still reflect the basic division into two parts separated by a rhetorical turn of argument (e.g., see Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese [1850]).
limerick: A five-line light poem, usually in anapestic rhythm. The first, second, and fifth lines are rhymed trimeter; lines three and four are rhymed dimeter. The rhymes are frequently eccentric, and the subject matter is often nonsensical or obscene.
litotes: a form of understatement in which the negative of an antonym is used to achieve emphasis and intensity.
lyric: Originally a poem meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Now, a lyric is the most common verse form: any fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker, usually expressing personal concerns rather than describing a narrative or dramatic situation.
masculine rhyme: Rhymes that consist of a single stressed syllable. This is the most common form of end rhyme in English (compare feminine rhyme).
meditation: A contemplation of some physical object as a way of reflecting upon some larger truth, often (but not necessarily) a spiritual one. For example, see Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning" (1923).
metaphor: A figure of speech that relies on a likeness or analogy between two things to equate them and thus suggest a relationship between them. For example, in "A Far Cry from Africa" (1962) Derek Walcott portrays the continent as an animal, with a "tawny pelt" and "bloodstreams." Compare metonymy, simile.
meter: The formal organization of the rhythm of a line into regular patterns; see foot, scansion.
metonymy: A figure that relies on a close relationship other than similarity (compare metaphor) in substituting a word or phrase for the thing meant. For example, the "scepter" in Tennyson's "Ulysses" (1842) represents the rule of Ithaca.
mnemonic devices: Forms, such as rhyme, built into poems to help reciters remember the poems.
motif: A recurrent device, formula, or situation that deliberately connects a poem with preexisting patterns and conventions. For example, Edmund Spenser's Sonnet 75 (1595; "One day I wrote her name upon the strand") relies on the motif of immortality through poetry (cf. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 55 [1609]).
mythologies: Large systems of belief and tradition on which cultures draw to explain and understand themselves. These are often political or religious, and often become conventional over time (for example, see the use of "Venus' son" in Elizabeth's "When I Was Fair and Young").
narrative: Poetry that tells a story and is primarily characterized by linear, chronological description.
occasional poem: A poem written about or for a specific occasion, public or private (e.g., Maya Angelou's poem for the 1993 presidential inauguration, "On the Pulse of Morning"). Such poems can transcend the particular incident that inspired them; for example, see William Butler Yeats, "Easter 1916" (1916).
ode: An extended lyric, usually elevated in style and with an elaborate stanzaic structure (e.g., see Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Dejection: An Ode" [1817]).