Warm-up (课前准备)：

Q1: What are some of the poems that impress you?

Q2: Who is your favorite poet and why?

Q3: What is poetry to you from your reading experience?

An Overview (本章概览)：

Poetry is an ancient art of language. The primitive people had used it, and the most civilized people have cultivated it. Poetry has been written under monarchies, democracies and dictatorships; it has been written in times of war, peace, religious and political persecutions, and natural disasters; it has been written by princes and peasants, by scholars and by hermits and revolutionists, by rationalists and madmen. Poetry has been written in all countries by all kinds of people in all conditions.

But what is poetry? This is a question students of different generations like to ask. Has any poet or critic successfully defined poetry? No, unfortunately. Poets and critics talk about poetry in such very different terms that it is difficult to believe that they are defining the same thing. A textbook declares, in somewhat chilling abstraction, “A poem is a form of expression in which an unusual number of the resources of language are concentrated into a patterned organic unit of significant experience.” Coleridge defined poetry in a terse statement that poetry is “the best words in their best order.” For Wordsworth, good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; however, T. S. Eliot dismissed the notion of human feelings, saying, “Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality… The poet has not a personality to express.” “Poetry is what is lost in translation,” says Robert Frost, whereas one modern poet declares simply that “poetry, unlike prose, is a form of writing in which few lines run to the edge of the page.” What is poetry then?

We may be unable to make a single simple definition of poetry, but they can summarize the distinctive features that tell poetry from fiction and drama. The hallmark of an English poem is the arrangement of a poem’s lines one above the other on the page, and this proves that it is the form that distinguishes poetry from other genres of literature. And it is metrical scheme that determines the form of a poem. Meter means measure. The unit of the measurement in English verse is foot. A foot has an accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables. The different combinations of accented and unaccented syllables produce different foot patterns. These patterns are: Lamb (iambic foot), an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable; Trochee (trochaic foot), an accented syllable followed by an accented syllable; Spondee (spondaic foot), two accented syllables together; Dactyl (dactylic foot), an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables; Anapest (anapestic foot) two unaccented syllables followed by an accented syllable.

A line may have more than one foot. Again, special terms are used to designate different numbers of feet in a poetic line. They are: monometer (one foot), dimeter (two feet), trimester (three feet), tetrameter (four feet), pentameter (five feet), hexameter (six feet), heptameter (seven feet), and octometer (eight feet). The lines of English poetry seldom have more than eight feet. Two measurements are therefore involved in meter: the kind of foot, and the number of feet. The different combinations of the two generate different metrical schemes. “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day” is iambic pentameter; “Twinkle, twinkle little star” is trochaic trimester; “Touch her not scornfully” is dactylic dimeter; “And the sound of a voice that is still” is anapestic trimester.

Poems may be either rhymed or unrhymed. Rhyme is an identity of sounds at the end of lines. If the identity appears in the last syllable of the line, it is called masculine rhyme. It is feminine rhyme if the identity appears in the last two syllables. The rhymes may be internal or half rhymes or slant rhymes. Modern poets are particularly fond of assonance, a chiming of the vowel sounds only, while the consonants play little part in the sound pattern. In addition to rhyme scheme, poets also employ other devices to create sound effect in poetry. Alliteration is the repetition of consonants; onomatopoeia, the imitation of natural sounds in words; cacophony, a succession of harsh slow-moving syllables; euphony, light, harmonious syllables. The couplet is any rhymed patterns of two lines, but its most popular forms are iambic pentameter or octosyllabic. This form is often called heroic couplet. A caesura appears in the middle of the line and breaks the reading of the line. A three-rhymed pattern is called a triplet or tercet. In a tercet, three lines use one set of rhyming words. The rhymes may be linked from verse to verse. This form is called terza rima. Lines form paragraphs called stanzas. A stanza may have one or more lines. A quatrain has four lines. Rhyme royal has seven lines in iambic pentameter with the rhymes running ababbcc. Ottava rima is an eight-line stanza also in iambic pentameter, rhyming abababcc. Spenserian stanzas has nine, eight in iambic pentameter, and the last line in alexandrine, rhyming ababbcbcc.

Poetry of the English language has two basic types: narrative poems and lyric poems. A narrative poem tells a story. It has three kinds: epic, metrical romance, and ballad. An epic is a long narrative poem that records the adventurous deeds of a hero whose exploits are of national significance. It chronicles the origins of a civilization and embodies the history and aspiration of a nation in a grandiose manner. Metrical romance tells a story of adventure, love, chivalry, and deeds of derring-do in verse form. Epic shows tragic seriousness while metrical romance is light-hearted. Ballad is a poetic form of great antiquity. Some of the Engish and Scottish popular ballads (or folk ballads) are attributed to the fifteenth century (thus mediaeval ballads), Mediaeval ballads have abrupt beginning, simple language, the story told through dialogue and action, tragic theme, and repeated lines in a refrain. Ballads imitated by professional poets of later generations are called literary ballads.

A lyric poem is usually short, normally no longer than a hundred lines. It usually expresses the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker in a personal and subjective fashion. There are different kinds of lyrics. If a lyric is mournfully contemplative, especially if it laments a death, it is an elegy. An ode has elaborate stanza structure, marked formality and stateliness in tone and style as it deals with such lofty themes as immortality, nature's grand design, Divinity, God’s grace, and others. Lyrics also include hymns. In Greek, the term hymn means “song in praise of a god or hero.” The sonnet is a complete poem of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. Petrarchan sonnet (also called Italian sonnet), introduced from Italy, is usually divided into an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet rhyming cdecde. The fourteen lines of a Shakespearean sonnet divide into three quatrains and a couple rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, but those of a Spenserian sonnet divide into three quatrains and a couplet rhyming abab bcbc cdcd ee.

Poetry is fundamentally metaphoric and is capable of communicating in very few words thoughts and emotions of great complexity; therefore, close reading is a must in the study of poetry and readers responses are crucial for a better appreciation of the beauty of poetry.

Objectives (学习目标)：

1. To get a knowledge of different genres of poetry.

2. To know the elements and figures of speech for writing poems.

3. To cultivate the ability of appreciating poems and writing small poems.

Knowledge Structure (知识结构):