Poetry

"Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain," by China's Emperor Gaozong
Poem on a gravestone in an English churchyard
Literature
Major forms
Novel · Poem · Drama
Short story · Novella
 
Genres
Epic · Lyric · Drama
Romance · Satire
Tragedy · Comedy
Tragicomedy
 
Media
Performance (play) · Book
Techniques
Prose · Verse
History and lists
Basic topics · Literary terms
History · Modern history
Books · Writers
Literary awards · Poetry awards
Discussion
Criticism · Theory · Magazines

Poetry (from the Greek "ποίησις", poiesis, a "making") is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns or lyrics.

Poetry, and discussions of it, have a long history. Early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy.[1] Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from prose.[2] From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more loosely defined as a fundamental creative act using language.[3]

Poetry often uses particular forms and conventions to suggest at alternative meanings in the words, or to evoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly, metaphor, simile and metonymy[4] create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Some forms of poetry are specific to particular cultures and genres, responding to the characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. While readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as being written in rhyming lines and regular meter, there are traditions, such as those of Du Fu and Beowulf, that use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphony. Much of modern British and American poetry is to some extent a critique of poetic tradition,[5] 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.[6][7][8] In today's globalized world, poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from diverse cultures and languages.

 

 

History

Main articles: History of poetry and Literary theory
The Deluge tablet of the Gilgamesh epic in Akkadian, circa 2nd millennium BC.

Poetry as an art form may predate literacy.[9] Many ancient works, from the Indian Vedas (1700–1200 BC) and Zoroaster's Gathas (1200-900 BC) to the Odyssey (800–675 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies.[10] Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones and stelae.

The oldest surviving poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the 3rd millennium BC in Sumer (in Mesopotamia, now Iraq), which was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, papyrus.[11] Other ancient epic poetry includes the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the Old Iranian books the Gathic Avesta and Yasna, the Roman national epic, Virgil's Aeneid, and the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata.

The efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in "poetics" — the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as the Chinese through the Shi Jing, one of the Five Classics of Confucianism, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance. More recently, thinkers have struggled to find a definition that could encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context spanning Tanakh religious poetry, love poetry, and rap.[12]

Context can be critical to poetics and to the development of poetic genres and forms. Poetry that records historic events in epics, such as Gilgamesh or Ferdowsi's Shahnameh,[13] will necessarily be lengthy and narrative, while poetry used for liturgical purposes (hymns, psalms, suras and hadiths) is likely to have an inspirational tone, whereas elegy and tragedy are meant to evoke deep emotional responses. Other contexts include Gregorian chants, formal or diplomatic speech,[14] political rhetoric and invective,[15] light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, and even medical texts.[16]

The Polish historian of aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, in a paper on "The Concept of Poetry," traces the evolution of what is in fact two concepts of poetry. Tatarkiewicz points out that the term is applied to two distinct things that, as the poet Paul Valéry observes, "at a certain point find union. Poetry [...] is an art based on language. But poetry also has a more general meaning [...] that is difficult to define because it is less determinate: poetry expresses a certain state of mind." [17]

Prose poetry

Main article: Prose poetry
Charles Baudelaire, by Gustave Courbet.

Prose poetry is a hybrid genre that shows attributes of both prose and poetry. It may be indistinguishable from the micro-story (aka the "short short story," "flash fiction"). It qualifies as poetry because of its conciseness, use of metaphor, and special attention to language.

While some examples of earlier prose strike modern readers as poetic, prose poetry is commonly regarded as having originated in 19th-century France, where its practitioners included Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé.

The genre has subsequently found notable exemplars:

Julio Cortázar

Since the late 1980s especially, prose poetry has gained increasing popularity, with entire journals devoted solely to that genre.

See also

Notes

  1. Heath, Malcolm (ed). Aristotle's Poetics. London, England: Penguin Books, (1997), ISBN 0140446362.
  2. See, for example, Immanuel Kant (J.H. Bernhard, Trans). Critique of Judgment. Dover (2005).
  3. Dylan Thomas. Quite Early One Morning. New York, New York: New Direction Books, reset edition (1968), ISBN 0811202089.
  4. John R. Strachan & Richard G. Terry, Poetry, (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). pp119.
  5. As a contemporary example of that ethos, see T.S. Eliot, "The Function of Criticism" in Selected Essays. Paperback Edition (Faber & Faber, 1999). pp13-34.
  6. James Longenbach, Modern Poetry After Modernism (Oxford University Press US, 1997). pp9, pp103, and passim.
  7. pp xxvii-xxxiii of the introduction, in Michael Schmidt (Ed.), The Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English (Harvill Press, 1999)
  8. As would be evident from the sources, particularly reading the previous two sources referenced, it should be noted that, at least in the works of well-known poets, there is usually a poetic reason for non-poetic effects, e.g contrast, surprise, or to allow the use of irregular rhythms in a poetic way.
  9. Many scholars, particularly those researching the Homeric tradition and the oral epics of the Balkans, suggest that early writing shows clear traces of older oral poetic traditions, including the use of repeated phrases as building blocks in larger poetic units. A rhythmic and repetitious form would make a long story easier to remember and retell, before writing was available as an aide-memoire.
  10. For one recent summary discussion, see Frederick Ahl and Hannah M. Roisman. The Odyssey Re-Formed. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, (1996), at 1–26, ISBN 0801483352. Others suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing. See, for example, Jack Goody. The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, (1987), at 98, ISBN 0521337941.
  11. N.K. Sanders (Trans.). The Epic of Gilgamesh. London, England: Penguin Books, revised edition (1972), at 7–8.
  12. See, e.g., Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. "The Message (song)," Sugar Hill, (1982).
  13. Abolqasem Ferdowsi (Dick Davis, Trans.). Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. New York, New York: Viking, (2006), ISBN 0-670-03485-1.
  14. For example, in the Arabic world, much diplomacy was carried out through poetic form in the 16th century. See Natalie Zemon Davis. Trickster's Travels. Hill & Wang, (2006), ISBN 0809094355.
  15. Examples of political invective include libel poetry and the classical epigrams of Martial and Catullus.
  16. In ancient Greece, medical and scholarly works were often written in metrical form. A millennium and a half later, many of Avicenna's medical texts were written in verse.
  17. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, "The Concept of Poetry," Dialectics and Humanism, vol. II, no. 2 (spring 1975), p. 13.
  18. Heath (ed), Aristotle's Poetics, 1997.
  19. Ibn Rushd wrote a commentary on the Aristotle's Poetics, replacing the original examples with passages from Arabic poets. See, for example, W. F. Bogges. 'Hermannus Alemannus' Latin Anthology of Arabic Poetry,' Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1968, Volume 88, 657–70, and Charles Burnett, 'Learned Knowledge of Arabic Poetry, Rhymed Prose, and Didactic Verse from Petrus Alfonsi to Petrarch', in Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke. Brill Academic Publishers, (2001), ISBN 90-04-11964-7.
  20. See, for example, Paul F Grendler. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, (2004), ISBN 0-8018-8055-6 (for example, page 239) for the prominence of Aristotle and the Poetics on the Renaissance curriculum.
  21. Immanuel Kant (J.H. Bernard, Trans.). Critique of Judgment at 131, for example, argues that the nature of poetry as a self-consciously abstract and beautiful form raises it to the highest level among the verbal arts, with tone or music following it, and only after that the more logical and narrative prose.
  22. Christensen, A., Crisafulli-Jones, L., Galigani, G. and Johnson, A. (Eds). The Challenge of Keats. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi, (2000).
  23. See, for example, Dylan Thomas's discussion of the poet as creator in Quite Early One Morning. New York, New York: New Directions Press, (1967).
  24. The title of "Ars Poetica" alludes to Horace's commentary of the same title. The poem sets out a range of dicta for what poetry ought to be, before concluding with its classic lines.[1]
  25. See, for example, Walton Liz and Christopher MacGowen (Eds.). Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. New York, New York: New Directions Publications, (1988), or the works of Odysseus Elytis.
  26. See, for example, T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land, in T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London, England: Faber & Faber, (1940)."
  27. See, Roland Barthes essay "Death of the Author" in Image-Music-Text. New York, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (1978).
  28. Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry at 52.
  29. See, for example, Julia Schülter. Rhythmic Grammar, Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, (2005).
  30. See Yip. Tone. (2002), which includes a number of maps showing the distribution of tonal languages.
  31. Howell D. Chickering. Beowulf: a Dual-language Edition. Garden City, New York: Anchor (1977), ISBN 0385062133.
  32. See, for example, John Lazarus and W. H. Drew (Trans.). Thirukkural. Asian Educational Services (2001), ISBN 81-206-0400-8. (Original in Tamil with English translation).
  33. See, for example, Marianne Moore. Idiosyncrasy and Technique. Berkeley, California: University of California, (1958), or, for examples, William Carlos Williams. The Broken Span. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, (1941).
  34. Robinson Jeffers. Selected Poems. New York, New York: Vintage, (1965).
  35. Paul Fussell. Poetic Meter and Poetic Form. McGraw Hill, (1965, rev. 1979), ISBN 0-07-553606-4.
  36. Christine Brooke-Rose. A ZBC of Ezra Pound. Faber and Faber, (1971), ISBN 0-571-09135-0.
  37. Robert Pinsky. The Sounds of Poetry. New York, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, (1998), 11–24, ISBN 0374526176.
  38. Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry.
  39. John Thompson, The Founding of English Meter.
  40. See, for example, "Yertle the Turtle" in Dr. Seuss. Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. New York: Random House, (1958), lines from "Yurtle the Turtle" are scanned in the discussion of anapestic tetrameter.
  41. Robert Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry at 66.
  42. Vladimir Nabokov. Notes on Prosody. New York, New York: The Bollingen Foundation, (1964), ISBN 0691017603.
  43. Nabokov. Notes on Prosody.
  44. Two versions of Paradise Lost are freely available on-line from Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg text version 1 and Project Gutenberg text version 2.
  45. The original text, as translated by Samuel Butler, is available at Wikisource.[2]
  46. The full text is available online both in Russian[3] and as translated into English by Charles Johnston.[4] Please see the pages on Eugene Onegin and on Notes on Prosody and the references on those pages for discussion of the problems of translation and of the differences between Russian and English iambic tetrameter.
  47. The full text of "The Raven" is available at Wikisource[5].
  48. The full text of "The Hunting of the Snark" is available at Wikisource.[6]
  49. The full text of Don Juan is available on-line.[7]
  50. See the Text of the play in French as well as an English translation, Phaedra at Project Gutenberg
  51. Rhyme, alliteration, assonance or consonance can also carry a meaning separate from the repetitive sound patterns created. For example, Chaucer used heavy alliteration to mock Old English verse and to paint a character as archaic, and Christopher Marlowe used interlocking alliteration and consonance of "th", "f" and "s" sounds to force a lisp on a character he wanted to paint as effeminate. See, for example, the opening speech in Tamburlaine the Great available online at Project Gutenberg.
  52. For a good discussion of hard and soft rhyme see Robert Pinsky's introduction to Dante Alighieri, Robert Pinsky (Trans.). The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. New York, New York: Farar Straus & Giroux, (1994), ISBN 0374176744; the Pinsky translation includes many demonstrations of the use of soft rhyme.
  53. Dante (1994).
  54. See the introduction to Burton Raffel. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York, New York: Signet Books, (1984), ISBN 0451628233.
  55. Maria Rosa Menocal. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, (2003), ISBN 0812213246. Irish poetry also employed rhyme relatively early, and may have influenced the development of rhyme in other European languages.
  56. Indeed, in translating the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Edward FitzGerald sought to retain the scheme in English. The original text is available from the Gutenberg Porject on-line for free.etext #246
  57. Works by Petrarch at Project Gutenberg
  58. The Divine Comedy at wikisource.
  59. See Robert Pinsky's discussion of the difficulties of replicating terza rima in English in Robert Pinsky (trans). The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation. (1994).
  60. For examples of different uses of visual space in modern poetry, see E. E. Cummings works or C.J. Moore's poetic translation of the Fables of LaFontaine, which usees color and page placement to complement the illustrations of Marc Chagall. Marc Chagall (illust) and C.J. Moore (trans.). Fables of La Fontaine. The New Press, (1977), ISBN 1565844041.
  61. A good pre-modernist example of concrete poetry is the poem about the mouse's tale in the shape of a long tail in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, available in Wikisource. [8]
  62. See, for example, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge for a well-known example of symbolism and metaphor used in poetry. The albatross that is killed by the mariner is a traditional symbol of good luck, and its death takes on metaphorical implications.
  63. See The Poetics of Aristotle at Project Gutenberg at 22.
  64. Aesop's Fables, repeatedly rendered in both verse and prose since first being recorded about 500 B.C., are perhaps the richest single source of allegorical poetry through the ages. Other notables examples include the Roman de la Rose, a 13th-century French poem, William Langland's Piers Ploughman in the 14th century, and Jean de la Fontaine's Fables (influenced by Aesop's) in the 17th century (available in French on wikisource).[9].
  65. See Act III, Scene II in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, available at Wikisource.[10]
  66. Arthur Quiller-Couch (Ed). Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford University Press, (1900). Note that the relative prominence of a poet or a set of works is often measured by reference to the Oxford Book of English Verse or the Norton Anthology of Poetry, with many people counting poems or pages allocated to a given poet or subject.
  67. E.g., "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" in Dylan Thomas. In Country Sleep and Other Poems. New York, New York: New Directions Publications, (1952).
  68. "Villanelle", in W. H. Auden. Collected Poems. New York, New York: Random House, (1945).
  69. "One Art", in Elizabeth Bishop. Geography III. New York, New York, Farar, Straus & Giroux, (1976).
  70. Etsuko Yanagibori, BASHO'S HAIKU ON THE THEME OF MT. FUJI: FROM THE PERSONAL NOTEBOOK OF Etsuko Yanagibori, link
  71. The extant Odes of Pindar as translated by Ernest Myers are freely available on-line from Gutenberg.
  72. In particular, the translations of Horace's odes by John Dryden were influential in establishing the form in English, though Dryden utilizes rhyme in his translations where Horace did not.
  73. For a general discussion of genre theory on the internet, see Daniel Chandler's Introduction to Genre Theory[11].
  74. See, for example, Northrup Frye. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, (1957).
  75. Jacques Derrida, Beverly Bie Brahic (Trans.). Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, And Genius: The Secrets of the Archive. New York, New York: Columbia University Press(2006), ISBN 0231139780.
  76. Hatto, A. T.. Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry (Vol. I: The Traditions ed.). Maney Publishing. 
  77. Shakespeare parodied such analysis in Hamlet, describing the genres as consisting of "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral..."
  78. See Press Release from the Nobel Committee, [12], accessed January 20, 2008.
  79. A. Berriedale Keith, Sanskrit Drama, Motilal Banarsidass Publ (1998).
  80. A. Berriedale Keith at 57-58.
  81. William Dolby, "Early Chinese Plays and Theatre," in Colin Mackerras, Chinese Theatre, University of Hawaii Press, 1983, p. 17.
  82. The Story of Layla and Majnun, by Nizami, translated Dr. Rudolf Gelpke in collaboration with E. Mattin and G. Hill, Omega Publications, 1966, ISBN 0-930872-52-5.
  83. Dick Davis (January 6, 2005), "Vis o Rāmin," in Encyclopaedia Iranica Online Edition. Accessed on April 25, 2008.

References

Anthologies

Main article: List of poetry anthologies