Definition of Poetry

Poetry is an oldest form of art, and is reputed as the most democratic art. All people, the talkative and the mute, have at least once felt like writing or uttering something poetical. In the broadest sense, anyone can be a poet. The French woman writer George Sand says, “He who draws noble delights from the sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life." (The Haunted Pool, ch. 2)

It is not uncommon to hear people say that some novels have reached the level of poetry, or that something is poetic. Herman Melville's Moby Dick is called by many a poetic novel. A landscape may be poetic, too. Therefore, poetry means a quality or a state more than a form. Poetry as a genre must be a particular form combined with a particular quality. For this very reason, poetry is to be defined in terms of degree.

The word “poetry” brings to our mind a picture of words of special arrangements. In a poem, the sentences are seldom placed one after another in the sane line. Usually, one sentence occupies one line, and sometimes, one word or one phrase is given a line, or one single sentence runs over a few lines. In this case the reader has to actually “read between the lines.

Poetry uses language and it uses language in a different manner. Linguistics shows that language has several dimensions. Language is used for communication, for persuasion, and other purposes. In most cases, only one dimension of language is used. In daily life, language is mainly used to communicate information and to keep the communication channels open.

Now compare what an encyclopedia says and what a poem says about the tiger:

“Tiger: large carnivore (Panthera tigris) of the cat family, found in the forests of Asia. Its yellow-orange coat features numerous prominent black stripes. Males may attain 10 ft (3 m) in length and 650 Ib (290 kg) in weight. Tigers are solitary, mainly nocturnal hunters and are good swimmers but poor climbers. They have been extensively hunted for their pelts and for their bones (used in traditional Chinese medicines) and are a threatened species." (The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, 1991)

William Blake' s poem “The Tiger”:

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright

In the forest of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand forged thy dread feet?

Only half of the poem is quoted here to equal the number of words used by the encyclopedia entry. The difference between the two descriptions of the tiger is obvious. By providing mere facts about the tiger, the encyclopedia aims to communicate information. Reading its entry, people will not have emotional response. It does pass value judgments— “hunted for their pelts and for their bones... and are a threatened species”—but they are economic and ecological values. Black’s poem doesn’t tell so many facts about the tiger, but it conveys a kind of emotional experience. The reader can “see” the tiger’s “burning” eyes and “fearful” symmetrical body. Most of all, the reader can feel the spirit of the tiger. This comparison shows that poetry is a multidimensional language. Poetic language has an intellectual dimension, an emotional dimension, sensuous dimension, and an imaginative dimension. These dimensions work together to pass experience to the reader.

Poetry uses every dimension of language, so it must be very intense or compact. Poetry's most noticeable and important characteristic is compactness. Poetry tries to say the most in the fewest possible words.

Poetry 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. Therefore, poetry is a literary genre that communicates experience in the most condensed form.

Brief History of Poetry

It is impossible to date the first poem or poet in the world, since poetry originated in a time before written languages were born. The origins of poetry can be found in the communal expression, probably originally taking the form of dance, of the religious spirit. This can be proved by the fact that the dance rhythm could be marked not only by clapping, stamping, or rhythmic cries, but also by chanting or otherwise intoning or singing words. Song (work songs, lullabies, and play songs) is the progenitor of poetry. Religious songs also play a very important role in the development of poetry. The ritual aspect of poetry can still be seen in the songs of many native cultures.

Types of poetry are found among Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions dated about 2600 BC. They include laments, odes, elegies and hymns.

Narrative verse might have originated in the religious impulse. The earliest narrative songs, or epics, tell the stories of the creation of mankind and the myths of the gods. Later poetry became more and more concerned with human life. Epics of later times relate the lives of godlike heroes; and still later ones deal with the lives of historical heroes. Among the earliest epics are the Babylonian creation myth and the' Gilgamesh" epic, the Greek Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, the medieval French Song of Roland and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf.

One change in composition of poetry should be mentioned. At first, poetry grew out of music, so sound effect was much emphasized and spelling did not count. For example, in English “poet" and “know it,” in French “parlait" and "allaien" were considered to rhyme. But when poetry began to appear in the written form, selling took over the precedence. The examples above were considered nonstandard. Words like “word” and “lord”, “mer” and “aimer” were considered as rhymed. In the 20th century, poets are able to play ticks with the graphic aspect of poems. As a result, Concrete Poetry has been a vogue.

In British literature, the epic Beowulf, written in the 8th century, is among the earliest recorded poems while in American literature the first collection of poems is The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672).

Kinds of Poetry

Poems, according to their forms and contents, can be divided into several categories. Obviously ,these categories are not absolutely clean-cut ones, each sharing some elements with others.

Ballad

Ballad enjoys a very long history. The word comes from the Latin and Italian “ballare” meaning “to dance." Originally, the anonymous folk ballads were sung as accompaniment to dances, passed along orally, and changed in transmission. A ballad is a short simple narrative poem often relating a dramatic event.

Ballads vary from time to time and from place to place. But the bulk of ballads share the following characteristics:

1) The beginning is usually abrupt.

2) The language is simple.

3) The story is told through dialogue and action.

4) The theme is usually tragic.

5) There is often a refrain.

A ballad displays all or some of the five characteristics.

Basically, there are two kinds of ballads. The folk or popular ballad is anonymous, existing among the illiterate and semi-illiterate. It belongs to the oral tradition. The literary ballad is written down and/or created by a poet. The literary ballad is more elaborate, a prime example being S.T. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The earliest record of folk ballads dates back to about 12th century and that of literary ballads to the 18th century. From the late 18th century hundreds were collected-- historical, romantic, supernatural, nautical, or heroic. Many ancient English ballads deal with national heroes, wars and outlaws. A famous English ballad is “Robin Hood.” American ballads deal with cowboys, outlaws, folk heroes, and African Americans. The famous example is “Yankee Doodle.” In the mid-20th century, folk music has drawn on the tradition.

Lyric

Any poem is in a sense lyrical, and sometimes writings other than poetry that are smoothly structured and intimately presented are described as lyrical. In Greek a "lyric" is a song to be accompanied with a lyre. This reminds one of the musical quality of poetry. Usually, a lyric is short, within fifty or sixty lines. Lyrics treat the thoughts and feelings, usually powerful emotions of the poet or some invented speaker. They adopt various tones, but frequently personal and reflective ones.

Narrative Poem

The ordinary reader's idea of poetry is usually that of lyrics, and indeed the bulk of poetry consists of lyrics. However, poetry does tell stories and in its early history poetry serves mainly as a recorder of events (see Ballad and Epic). If a poem mainly tells a relatively complete story, it is called a narrative poem. Narrative poems are widespread in many literatures and continue to be written and read. Noteworthy examples from the English language are Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Marine”.

Epic

Epic is one of the ancient types of poetry and plays a very important role in the early development of literature and civilization. An epic is a long narrative poem of great scale and grandiose style about the heroes who are usually warriors or even demigods. Like tragedy defined by Aristotle, the epic deals with noble characters and heroic deeds.

The epic is polygonal. Basically, it is a story about a hero. Meanwhile it incorporates myth, legend and folk tale. More significantly, it reflects national history. An epic is more cultural than literary.

There are two kinds of epic, the primitive and the literary epics. The primitive epic belongs to the oral tradition. Iliad, Odyssey and Beowulf are primitive epics. Literary epics, like literary ballads, are the results of improvement by literary men on the existent works. The Aeneid and Paradise Lost belong to this kind.

The term “epic” is also applied to works that do not treat heroic deeds or national history, but that have some qualities embodied by true epics, namely, coverage of vast space, concentration on characters and unusual happenings. In this sense, Divine Comedy, Faerie Queene, Moby Dick, War and Peace can be taken as epics.

Sonnet

Sonnet is one of the most conventional and influential forms of poetry in Europe. A sonnet is a lyric invariably of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, restricted to a definite rhyme scheme.

Sonnets were highly popular in Renaissance Italy, and thereafter in Spain, Portugal, and other European countries. German and English Romantics revived the form, which remains popular. Among the notable sonneteers are, besides Petrarch and Shakespeare, Dante, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, John Keats, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and W.H. Auden. This list testifies the everlasting popularity of the sonnet form.

There are three prominent types of sonnet, all named after their founders or perfecter.

Shakespearean Sonnet

Also called Elizabethan sonnet or English sonnet, this sonnet form is perfected by Shakespeare. It is structured of three quatrains and a terminal couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern abab cdcd efef gg.

Petrarchan Sonnet

Also called Italian sonnet, this sonnet form originated in Italy in the 13th century and was consummated by Francesco Petrarch, a crowned laureate. This form contains an octave with the rhyme pattern abbaabba and a sestet of various rhyme patterns such as cdecde or cdcdcd.

Spenserian Sonnet

A Spenserian sonnet form comprises three quatrains and a couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee. This sonnet form is considered by some a variation of Shakespearean sonnet. Some poets write sonnets on a single subject or under one controlling idea and thus create a sonnet sequence or sonnet cycle.

Ode

An ode is a dignified and elaborately structured lyric poem of some length, praising and glorifying an individual, commemorating an event, or describing nature intellectually rather than emotionally.

There are two types of odes, the Pindaric and the Horatian odes. Pindar was a greatest lyric poet of ancient Greece and he patterned the ode form after the movements of the chorus in Greek drama, and thus the name of choral ode. The Pindaric ode has three stanzas: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. This structure embodies a turn from one intellectual position to another and then a recounting of the entire ode subject. The strophe and antistrophe are written In the same metrical scheme while the epode in a different structure. The Horatian ode is named after the Roman poet Horace who imitated the single-voice ode in Greece cultivated by poets like Sappho. The Horatian ode has a simpler structure, with the same metrical scheme running throughout the whole poem and the stanzas shaped more regularly. And the Horatian ode presents a more personal style.

The modern form of the ode started during the Renaissance (14th to 17th centuries ). Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell were major Renaissance odists. Edmund Spenser's Epithalamion is among the best.

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) neglected the formal characteristics of the classical ode and took the ode to be a loft and tempestuous composition. Because of his deep influence the ode in English is usually a sequence of stanzas in lines of varying length and meter. Poets as Keats, P B. Shelley and others continued to write odes, but tended to be freer in form and subject matter than the classical ode. The ode form experienced a decline in the Victorian times but revived in the 20th century with works such as "Ode to the Confederate Dead " by the American writer Allen Tate and a variety of ode lyrics by the English poet W.H. Auden.

Elegy

The word " elegy” comes from a Greek word meaning “lament”. Elegies have been written by both ancient and modern poets, and are thus divided into two types. Originally, in classical Greek and Roman poetry, elegies are poems written in distichs or couplets (in hexameter and pentameter couplets).

They can be of any subjects, from love, lamentation to war and politics. They are distinguished from other types of poetry by their metrical form rather than by their subject matters.

Since the 16th century, elegies have come to be associated mainly with lamentation and death, and composed no set metrical form. Subject matters begin to play a crucial role in defining an elegy. Elegies written thereafter are invariably melancholy. Among the best-known elegies is Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, which laments not only an individual death but ponders over the human condition as well.

A subtype of elegy is the pastoral elegy that originated in Greek and Sicilian poetry in the third and second centuries BC. The pastoral elegy has the following characteristics:

1)The setting is pastoral. The poet and the person he mourns are depicted as shepherds.

2)The poem begins by appealing to the Muses and refers to various mythological figures in its progression.

3) Nature takes part in the mourning, more or less.

4) The poet asks the guardians of the dead where they were when death came.

5)The poem describes the procession of mourners.

6) The poem describes the decoration of the bier in a flowery passage.

7)The poem reflects on divine justice and evils of the day.

8)In the end the poem shows hope and joy, expressing the idea that death is the beginning of life.

John Milton's “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “Adonais” can be cited as examples of the pastoral elegy.

Pastoral

The word “Pastoral” has a Latin etymology, meaning “pertaining to shepherds " and can be applied to works of any literary genre that deal with the simple and unspoiled life of the shepherds or countryside. The exaltation of the rural life is idealistic and the expressed sentiment is nostalgic. However, reservations should be made about John Gay and George Crabbe who in their respective works “Shepherd's Week” and “The Village” presented realistic pictures of country life, as the latter put it, "Paint the cot/ As Truth will paint and as bards will not." In discussing poetry, pastoral poems are those professing to portray the innocence of shepherd life, according to a specific literary convention. They include poems from love lyrics to elaborate elegies. Classical pastoral poetry was descendant of the folk songs and ceremonies that honored the pastoral gods. Pastoral poetry as a literary type is believed to be set up by the Greek poet Theocritus with his “Idylls” in the third century BC.

The pastoral eclogue is a subtype of pastoral poetry that is composed in the form of dialogue or conversation. The poet contrasts the purity and simplicity of rural life with the corruption and artificiality of court and city life.

Blank Verse

Blank verse refers to poems of unrhymed lines, usually written in iambic pentameter. Because the poems are unrhymed, the rhyme scheme is “blank,” hence the name.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, introduced blank verse into the English language when he translated Virgil's Aeneid. Ever since the mid-16th century, blank verse had been the dominant verse form of English dramatic and narrative poetry, because it was one closest to the rhythm of everyday English speech and provided more freedom for the poet. John Milton argument in the preface to his Paradise Lost for blank verse holds true:

The Measure is English Heroic Verse

without Rhyme, as that of Homer in

Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; Rhyme

being no necessary Adjunct to true

Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in

larger Works especially...

Blank verse continued to prevail in the 19th and 20th centuries. English poets such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and American poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost achieved poetical excellence in blank verse. Blank verse in the 20th century has been employed for less lofty themes, becoming more colloquial in tone.

Free Verse

“Free verse” is the translation of the French term “vers libre”. In the 19th century, a group of French poets, including Gustave Kahn and others intended to free French poetry of restrictions of formal metrical pattern and therefore composed vers libre. Free verse is rhymed or unrhymed poetry free from conventional rules of meter. The aesthetic and musical effect of free verse is achieved through rhythms and cadence of natural speech. Poets famous for their works composed in free verse include Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound. T S. Eliot, Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg. The King James Bible is also labeled as free verse.