Poetry (from the Greek ποίησις, poiesis, "making" or "creating") is a form of art in which language is used for its
aesthetic qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its ostensible meaning.
Poetry has a long history. Early attempts to define it, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in
rhetoric, drama, song and comedy.[1] Later attempts focused on features such as repetition and rhyme, and
emphasised 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 expand the literal meaning of the words,
or to invoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration and rhythm
are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poetry's use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other
stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly, metaphor and simile
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 Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe may
think of poetry as being written in rhyming lines and regular meter, there are other traditions, such as those of Du Fu
and Beowulf, which use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphony. In today's globalized world, poets often
borrow styles, techniques and forms from different cultures and languages.
Contents
1 Poetics and history
1.1 Classical and early modern Western traditions
1.2 Twentieth-century disputes
2 Basic elements
2.1 Prosody
2.1.1 Methods of creating rhythm
2.1.2 Scanning meter
2.1.3 Common metrical patterns
2.2 Rhyme, alliteration and assonance
2.2.1 Rhyming schemes
2.3 Poetic form
2.3.1 Lines
2.3.2 Stanzas and verse paragraphs
2.3.3 Visual presentation
2.4 Poetic diction
3 Common poetic forms
3.1 Sonnets
3.2 Jintishi
3.3 Villanelle
3.4 Tanka
3.5 Ode
3.6 Ghazal
4 See also
5 Notes
6 References
7 External links
Poetics and history
The Deluge tablet of the Gilgamesh epic in Akkadian, circa 2nd millennium BC.
Poetry as an art form may predate literacy[4] Thus many ancient works, from the Vedas (1500 - 500 BC) to the
Odyssey (700 - 500 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in
prehistoric and ancient societies.[5] Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic
fragments found on early monoliths, rune stones and stelae.
The oldest surviving poem is the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the 3rd millennium BC in Sumer (in Iraq/Mesopotamia), which
was written in cuneiform script on clay tablets and, later, papyrus.[6] The Epic of Gilgamesh is based on the historical
king Gilgamesh. The oldest love poem, found on a clay tablet now known as Istanbul #2461, was also a Sumerian
poem. It was recited by a bride of the Sumerian king Shu-Sin, who ruled from 2037-2029 BC.[7] The oldest
epic poetry besides the Epic of Gilgamesh are the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey and the Indian epics Ramayana and
Mahabharata. The longest epic poems ever written were the Tibetan Epic of King Gesar and the Mahabharata.
Ancient thinkers sought to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form and what distinguishes good poetry
from bad, resulting in the development of "poetics", or 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 struggled to find a definition that could
encompass formal differences as great as those between Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Matsuo Bashō's Oku
no Hosomichi, as well as differences in context that span from the religious poetry of the Tanakh to love poetry to rap.
[8]
Context can be critical to poetics and to the development of poetic genres and forms. For example, poetry employed
to record historical events in epics, such as Gilgamesh or Ferdowsi's Shahnameh,[9] will necessarily be lengthy and
narrative, while poetry used for liturgical purposes in hymns, psalms, suras and hadiths is likely to have an
inspirational tone, whereas elegies and tragedy are intended to invoke deep internal emotional responses. Other
contexts include music such as Gregorian chants, and formal or diplomatic speech[10] political rhetoric and invective,
[11] light-hearted nursery and nonsense rhymes, and even medical texts.[12]
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."
Classical and early modern Western traditions
Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Notably, Aristotle's
Poetics describes the three genres of poetry: the epic, comic, and tragic, and develops rules to distinguish the
highest-quality poetry of each genre, based on the underlying purposes of that genre.[13] Later aestheticians
identified three major genres: epic poetry, lyric poetry and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as
subgenres of dramatic poetry. Aristotle's work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden
Age,[14] as well as in Europe during the Renaissance.[15] Later poets and aestheticians often distinguished poetry
from, and defined it in opposition to, prose, which was generally understood as writing with a proclivity to logical
explication and a linear narrative structure.[16] This does not imply that poetry is illogical or lacks
narration, but rather that poetry is an attempt to render the beautiful or sublime without the burden of engaging the
logical or narrative thought process. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic, "Negative
Capability."[17] This "romantic" approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract
and distinct from the underlying notional logic. This approach remained influential into the twentieth century. During
this period, there was also substantially more interaction among the various poetic traditions, in part due to the
spread of European colonialism and the attendant rise in global trade. In addition to a boom in translation, during the
Romantic period numerous ancient works were rediscovered.
Twentieth-century disputes
Some 20th-century literary theorists, relying less on the opposition of prose and poetry, focused on the poet as
simply one who creates using language, and poetry as what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as
creator is not uncommon, and some modernist poets essentially do not distinguish between the creation of a poem
with words, and creative acts in other media such as carpentry.[18] Yet other modernists challenge the very attempt
to define poetry as misguided, as when Archibald MacLeish concludes his paradoxical poem, "Ars Poetica," with the
lines: "A poem should not mean / but be."[19]
Intellectual disputes over the definition of poetry, and over its distinction from other genres of literature, have been
inextricably intertwined with the debate over the role of poetic form. The rejection of traditional forms and structures
for poetry that began in the first half of the twentieth century, coincided with a questioning of the purpose and
meaning of traditional definitions of poetry and of distinctions between poetry and prose. Numerous modernist poets
have written in non-traditional forms or in what traditionally would have been considered
prose, although their writing was generally infused with poetic diction and often with rhythm and tone established by
non-metrical means.[20] While there was a substantial formalist reaction within the modernist schools to the
breakdown of structure, this reaction focused as much on the development of new formal structures and syntheses
as on the revival of older forms and structures.[21]
More recently, postmodernism has fully embraced MacLeish's concept and come to regard boundaries between prose
and poetry, and also among genres of poetry, as having meaning only as cultural artifacts. Postmodernism goes
beyond modernism's emphasis on the creative role of the poet, to emphasize the role of the reader of a text, and to
highlight the complex cultural web within which a poem is read.[22] Today, throughout the world, poetry often
incorporates poetic form and diction from other cultures and from the past, further confounding attempts at definition
and classification that were once sensible within a tradition such as the Western canon.
Basic elements
Prosody
Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter, although closely related,
should be distinguished.[23] Meter is the abstract pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter), while
rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Thus, the meter of a line may be described as being
"iambic", but a full description of the rhythm would require noting where the language causes one to pause or
accelerate and how the meter interacts with other elements of the language. Prosody also may be used more
specifically to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to show meter.
Methods of creating rhythm
The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions. Languages are often
described as having timing set primarily by accents, syllables, or moras, depending on how rhythm is established,
though a language can be influenced by multiple approaches.[24] Japanese is a mora-timed language. Syllable-timed
languages include Latin, Catalan, French and Spanish. English, Russian and, generally, German are stress-timed
languages. Varying intonation also affects how rhythm is perceived. Languages also can rely on either pitch, such as
in Vedic or ancient Greek, or tone. Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian, and most subsaharan
languages.[25]
Metrical rhythm generally involves precise arrangements of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet
within a line. In Modern English verse the pattern of stresses primarily differentiate feet, so rhythm based on meter in
Modern English is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (alone or elided). In the
classical languages, on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define
the meter. Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of
strong stresses in each line.[26]
The chief device of ancient Hebrew Biblical poetry, including many of the psalms, was
parallelism, a rhetorical structure in which successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound
structure, notional content, or all three. Parallelism lent itself to antiphonal or call-and-response performance, which
could also be reinforced by intonation. Thus, Biblical poetry relies much less on metrical feet to create rhythm, but
instead creates rhythm based on much larger sound units of lines, phrases and sentences. Some classical poetry
forms, such as Venpa of the Tamil language, had rigid grammars (to the point that they could be expressed as a
context-free grammar) which ensured a rhythm.[27] In Chinese poetry, tones as well as stresses create rhythm.
Classical Chinese poetics identifies four tones: the level tone, rising tone, falling tone, and entering tone. Note that
other classifications may have as many as eight tones for Chinese and six for Vietnamese.
The formal patterns of meter used developed in Modern English verse to create rhythm no longer dominate
contemporary English poetry. In the case of free verse, rhythm is often organized based on looser units of cadence
than a regular meter. Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams are three notable poets who
reject the idea that regular accentual meter is critical to English poetry.[28] Jeffers experimented with sprung rhythm
as an alternative to accentual rhythm.[29]
Scanning meter
Meters in the Western poetic tradition are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the
number of feet per line. For example, "iambic pentameter" is a meter composed of five feet per line in which the kind
of feet called iambs predominate. The origin of this tradition of metrics lies in ancient Greek poetry, and poets such as
Homer, Pindar, Hesiod, Sappho, and the great tragedians of Athens made use of such a metric system.
Meter is often scanned based on the arrangement of "poetic feet" into lines.[30] In
English, each foot usually includes one syllable with a stress and one or two without a stress. In other languages, it
may be a combination of the number of syllables and the length of the vowel that determines how the foot is parsed.
For example, in Greek, one syllable with a long unstressed vowel may be treated as the equivalent of two syllables
with short vowels. In Anglo-Saxon meter, the unit on which lines are built is a half-line containing two stresses rather
than a foot.[31] Scanning meter can often show the basic or fundamental pattern underlying a verse, but does not
show the varying degrees of stress, as well as the differing pitches and lengths of syllables.[32]
As an example of how a line of meter is defined, in English language iambic pentameter, each line has five metrical
feet, and each foot is an iamb, or an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. When a particular line is
scanned, there may be variations upon the basic pattern of the meter; for example, the first foot of English iambic
pentameters is quite often inverted, meaning that the stress falls on the first syllable.[33] The generally accepted
names for some of the most commonly used kinds of feet include:
One of Henry Holiday's illustrations from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, written predominantly in anapestic
tetrameter: "In the midst of the word he was trying to say / In the midst of his laughter and glee / He had softly and
suddenly vanished away / For the snark was a boojum, you see."
spondee — two stressed syllables together
iamb — unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
trochee — one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable
dactyl — one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables
anapest — two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable
The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows:
dimeter — two feet
trimeter — three feet
tetrameter — four feet
pentameter — five feet
hexameter — six feet
heptameter — seven feet
octameter — eight feet
There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb of four syllable metric foot with a
stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing with a stressed syllable. The choriamb is derived
from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Languages which utilize vowel length or intonation rather than or in
addition to syllabic accents in determining meter, such as Ottoman Turkish or Vedic, often have concepts similar
to the iamb and dactyl to describe common combinations of long and short sounds.
Each of these types of feet has a certain "feel," whether alone or in combination with other feet. The iamb, for
example, is the most natural form of rhythm in the English language, and generally produces a subtle but stable
verse.[34] The dactyl, on the other hand, almost gallops along. And, as readers of The Night Before Christmas or Dr.
Seuss realize, the anapest is perfect for a light-hearted, comic feel.[35]
There is debate over how useful a multiplicity of different "feet" is in describing meter. For example, Robert Pinsky has
argued that while dactyls are important in classical verse, English dactylic verse uses dactyls very irregularly and can
be better described based on patterns of iambs and anapests, feet which he considers natural to the language.[36]
Actual rhythm is significantly more complex than the basic scanned meter described above, and many scholars have
sought to develop systems that would scan such complexity. Vladimir Nabokov noted that overlaid on top of the
regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse was a separate pattern of accents resulting
from the natural pitch of the spoken words, and suggested that the term "scud" be used
to distinguish an unaccented stress from an accented stress.[37]
Common metrical patterns
Different traditions and genres of poetry tend to use different meters, ranging from the Shakespearian iambic
pentameter and the Homerian dactylic hexameter to the Anapestic tetrameter used in many nursery rhymes.
However, a number of variations to the established meter are common, both to provide emphasis or attention to a
given foot or line and to avoid boring repetition. For example, the stress in a foot may be inverted, a caesura (or
pause) may be added (sometimes in place of a foot or stress), or the final foot in a line may be given a feminine
ending to soften it or be replaced by a spondee to emphasize it and create a hard stop. Some patterns (such as
iambic pentameter) tend to be fairly regular, while other patterns, such as dactylic hexameter, tend to be highly
irregular. Regularity can vary between language. In addition, different patterns often develop distinctively in different
languages, so that, for example, iambic tetrameter in Russian will generally reflect a regularity in the use of
accents to reinforce the meter, which does not occur or occurs to a much lesser extent in English.[38]
Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include:
Iambic pentameter (John Milton, Paradise Lost[39])
Dactylic hexameter (Homer, Iliad;[40] Ovid, The Metamorphoses)
Iambic tetrameter (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")
Iambic tetrameter (Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin)[41]
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