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.