Poetry

I

Introduction

Poetry, form of imaginative literary expression that makes its effect by the sound and imagery of its language. Poetry (the word is often used synonymously with the term verse) is essentially rhythmic and usually metrical, and it frequently has a stanzaic structure. It is in these characteristics that the difference between poetry and other kinds of imaginative writing can be discerned.

II

The Nature of Poetry

Poetry is one of the most ancient and widespread of the arts. Originally fused with music in song, it gained independent existence in ancient times—in the Western world, at least as early as the classical era. Where poetry exists apart from music, it has substituted for lost musical rhythms its own purely linguistic one. It is this rhythmic use of language that most easily distinguishes poetry from imaginative prose, the other great division of literature, and that forms the basis of the dictionary definition of poetry as “metrical writings”. This definition does not, however, include cadenced poetry (as in the Bible) or modern free verse; both types of verse are rhythmic but not strictly metrical. Nor does it take into account the unwritten songs of many cultures past and present. It is, however, a useful starting point for considering what is now commonly meant by the word poetry.

Poetry generally projects emotionally and sensuously charged human experience in metrical language. Metre, the highly regular component of verse rhythm, depends basically on the relative strength and weakness of adjacent syllables and monosyllabic words. Whether a syllable is strong or weak, stressed or unstressed, may be a matter of length—longer or shorter, as in Arabic verse or classical Greek and Latin verse; and, in Greek verse at least, pitch as well as syllable length played a role in determining stress. It may also be a matter of intensity—louder or softer, as in medieval Latin verse and English and Germanic verse generally. Not all languages have such marked differences in syllabic emphasis, however; nor do all poets choose to exploit these differences to create rhythmic patterns. In many languages, poetic rhythm depends less on differences between syllables than on line length. This is traditionally determined by the total number of syllables in a line (syllabic verse), as in French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Welsh poetry; or by the number of stressed syllables in a line (accentual verse), as in Old English alliterative poetry; or by some combination of number and stress, as in the foot verse that has been characteristic of English poetry since the time of the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer. See Versification.

III

Poetic Forms

Most poetry in English is iambic, that is, made up of divisions, or feet, that alternate a weak and a strong syllable (designated here by x or /, respectively) in rising rhythm (softer followed by louder): “The Bustle in a House”, or “We shall not want to use again”. The metre of the first example is formally described as iambic trimeter (three iambic feet per line); that of the second as iambic tetrameter (four such feet per line). The most frequently used metre in English is iambic pentameter (in its unrhymed form this is called blank verse), which has five iambic feet in each line, as in the opening line of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, by the English poet John Keats: “Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness”. The other most common feet are two in falling rhythm, the trochee (/x) and the dactyl (/xx); and another in rising rhythm, the anaepest (xx/).

Lines in poetry are frequently interlocked by rhyme into stanzas, as in this poem by the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson:

Here, not only can the lines be metrically described—as iambic trimeter and tetrameter—but the stanzas also follow a traditional form. Dickinson is using one of the metres of the hymnals, short metre: a four-line stanza in which the first, second, and fourth lines are iambic trimeter and the third line iambic tetrameter; and in which the second line rhymes with the fourth (and, sometimes, the first with the third). In Dickinson's poetry, rhymes are sometimes full, or exact (May/day) and sometimes, as here, near rhymes, called off-rhymes or slant rhymes (Death/Earth, away/Eternity).

Poets writing in other languages use other kinds of sound echoes besides rhyme to structure their stanzas. They may, for instance, use assonance (the repeating of a vowel) and consonance (the repeating of a consonant), and they may choose not to limit these effects to the ends of lines. Again, a poet writing in a language in which syllables show either level or deflected (changing) pitch, as in Chinese, can create patterns of contrast and repetition impossible in English. In nonstanzaic poetry, particularly accentual verse, the stressed syllables may be linked by the repetition of their initial consonants, one form of alliteration: “In a Summer Season when Soft was the Sun”.

To return to Dickinson's poem and its more familiar prosodic principles (prosody being the study of versification, especially of metre), it can be noted that all the metrical elements influence the overall rhythm of the poem—fairly regular alternation of softer and louder syllables, the grouping of feet into lines of a specific length (with a pause at the end of each line, unless the meaning absolutely forbids it), and the further grouping of lines into stanzas with patterned sound echoes. In reciting a poem, it is necessary to remember the constant interplay between the rhythm of ordinary speech (prose rhythm) determined by the meaning, and the independent working of these underlying metrical patterns that add, shorten, or lengthen pauses, speed up some words and phrases and slow down others, and throw particular words and phrases into prominence. In poetry, the sound shapes the sense to a much greater degree than in prose. The position of a word in the line, a shift in metre, and the use of rhyme and other sound echoes to highlight key words are tools relatively unavailable to the prose writer; so is the simple control over speed and emphasis provided by the division into lines and stanzas.

A poem, then, generally has a very different rhythm from that of ordinary literary prose, although it is true that the two art forms exist on a continuum and metrical patterns are discernible, irregularly, in good prose. An excellent example may be found in the highly concentrated rhythmic sentences in Ulysses by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Poetic craft capitalizes on these rhythmic possibilities. Dickinson's poem, for example, is actually only one sentence; but its two stanzas and rhyme scheme provide the formal opportunity for four discrete, yet closely related, units of thought, feeling, and awareness within a single complex curve of movement. Thus, the first two lines conjure up the bustle of domestic tidying up, while the second pair complicates this busyness with the suggestion of a gravely special importance to all this activity related somehow to the death of a loved one. (Note the stately formality of the words “solemnest” and “Enacted”.) Neither the activity nor its unique importance is made clear until the second stanza, however. Here, introducing specifically housework-related imagery, the poem launches into metaphor. What is being tidied up—discarded or shelved—is not trash or unneeded furnishings, but the “Heart” and “Love”. (Dickinson's capitalization and punctuation are idiosyncratic.) The poem's full bite, bitterness, and desolate sense of loss, presented ironically in terms of such familiar daily activity, are brought home only in the last two lines. In very short compass, then, Dickinson's poem has made vivid to the imagination an exact quality and intensity of feeling.

IV

Types of Poetry

Compression, extensive use of imagery, and a strong emotional—and frequently sensuous—component are characteristic of the great variety of poems called lyric. The other major divisions of poetry, narrative (epics, ballads, metrical romances, verse tales) and dramatic (poetry as direct speech in specified circumstances), are more amenable to characterization. Lyric poetry, however, covers everything from hymns, lullabies, drinking songs, and folk songs to the huge variety of love songs and poems; from savage political satires to rarefied philosophical poetry; from verse epistles to odes; and from 2-line epigrams or 14-line sonnets to lengthy reflective lyrics and substantial elegies. The content of lyric poetry is as varied as the concerns of human beings in every period and in every corner of the globe.

A clear distinction exists between poetry as pure art form and most so-called didactic poetry, which, at its extreme, is merely material that has been versified as an aid to memory (“Thirty days hath September”) or to make the learning process more pleasant. Where the emphasis is on communication of knowledge for its own sake or on practical instruction, the designation poetry is rather a misnomer; in his Georgics,Virgil actually tried to teach readers how to farm. In such works, the rules of ordinary discourse apply, rather than those of poetic art. Clarity, logical arrangement, and completeness of presentation are valued over the poetic projection of human experience, although didactic materials, like any others, can serve this poetic end if handled properly. This distinction between poetry as art and poetry as versified discourse is part of the larger question of the boundaries of imaginative literature, a problem treated with particular incisiveness by the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer. Her Feeling and Form (1953) provides an excellent discussion of the difference between the use of language for ordinary communication, as in expository writing, and its use as an artistic medium.

Among lyric poets, the Japanese are unequalled in the extreme compression of their poetry. Two favourite forms are the tanka, which has had a continuous tradition of some 1,300 years, and the haiku, which dates from the 16th century and had a marked effect on Western poets at the beginning of the 20th century. Both forms are unrhymed and in syllabic metre: the tanka is five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables, and the haiku is three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. (Longer poems also use these five- and seven-syllable lines, and shorter poems are frequently linked into sequences or are carefully arranged in anthologies to provide a cumulative effect.)

Some of the short poems by one of the major 20th-century American poets, Ezra Pound, capture much of the haiku quality. His “Fan-Piece, for Her Imperial Lord”, for instance, although based on a 1st-century bc Chinese poem (much longer in the original but still terse by Western standards), is quite Japanese in its prosody and effect:

Two simple yet emotionally and sensuously powerful images—one evoking a courtly, gracious style of living, the other suggesting both the end of summer and the frosting over of vibrant life (which applies to the woman's sense of her own situation)—are associated here. They join with the lightly sketched motion of laying the fan aside—as the woman “also” has been laid aside by her “Imperial Lord”. The three short lines exquisitely suggest, without any direct comment, the poignant end of a relationship and of a whole way of life. The original Chinese poem also allows the images, for the most part, to speak for themselves, with little direct comment, and it was this aspect that especially struck European poets. Also, the rhymeless Japanese tradition that Pound was following in his translation-adaptation gave an added impetus to the development of free verse in English. Pound's “Fan-Piece” may therefore be considered either as a syllabic (five, seven, seven) poem, or as one alluding specifically to the haiku tradition in its content and number of words (five, seven, five), or as an outstanding example of free verse of the Imagist school.