Literature
Poetic Terms
Poetic terms refer to the specific language and techniques used in poetry to convey meaning and create artistic effects. These terms include devices such as metaphor, simile, imagery, rhyme, meter, and symbolism, which are employed by poets to enhance the beauty and impact of their work. Understanding these terms can deepen one's appreciation and analysis of poetry.
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6 Key excerpts on "Poetic Terms"
eBook - PDF- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Wendy Lee, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, Jason Rudy, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
They look to poetry for insights into the nature of human experience, and expect elevated thought in carefully wrought language. In contrast, other readers distrust poetry that seems moralistic or didactic. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” wrote John Keats to his friend J.H. Reynolds; rather, poetry should be “great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.” The American poet Archibald MacLeish took Keats’s idea a step further: in his poem “Ars Poetica” he suggested that “A poem should not mean / But be.” MacLeish was not suggesting that a poem should lack meaning, but rather that meaning should inhere in the poem’s expressive and sensuous qualities, not in some explicit statement or versified idea. Whatever we look for in a poem, the infinitude of forms, styles, and subjects that make up the body of literature we call “poetry” is, in the end, impossible to capture in a definition that would satisfy all readers. All we can do, perhaps, is to agree that a poem is a discourse that is characterized by a heightened attention to language, form, and rhythm, by an expressiveness that works through figurative rather than literal modes, and by a capacity to stimulate our imagination and arouse our feelings. THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY To speak of “the language of poetry” implies that poets make use of a vocabulary that is somehow different from the language of everyday life. In fact, all language has the capacity to be “poetic,” if by poetry we understand a use of language to which some special importance is attached. The ritualistic 1226 Reading Poetry utterances of religious ceremonies sometimes have this force; so do the skipping rhymes of children in the schoolyard.
eBook - PDF- Gerald Morris(Author)
- 1996(Publication Date)
- Sheffield Academic Press(Publisher)
Poetry Defined as the Meeting of Sound and Sense By far the most frequently proposed definition of poetry, and in many ways the most persuasive, is that poetry represents a middle ground between music (sound without verbal meaning) and discourse (meaning without attention to sound). In poetry, both the sound (the 'rhythmic aspect') and the sense (the 'semantic aspect') are important. 59 At different historical periods, one aspect would be elevated above the other, but both elements are necessary, or the work is not poetry. On the one hand, this means that the semantic meaning of the poem is alone insufficient. The poem's meaning should be reflected by the rhythmic aspect as well. Alexander Pope writes: True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. 'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence, The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense. 57. R. Jakobson, 'Linguistics and Poetics', in Pomorska and Rudy (eds.), Language in Literature, p. 71. 58. R. Jakobson, 'Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry', in Pomorska and Rudy (eds.), Language in Literature, p. 127. 59. The terms belong to O.M. Brik, 'Contributions to the Study of Verse Language', in L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (eds.), Readings in Russian Poetics; Formalist and Structuralist Views (trans. C.H. Severens; Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1971), p. 119. 2. Rhetoric and Poetry 37 Then the virtuoso demonstrates at length. For instance: When Ajax strives, some Rock's vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow, Not so when swift Camilla scours the Plain, Flies o'er th'unbending Corn, and skims along the Main. 60 This correlation of the 'rhythmic aspect' with the literal semantic meaning of the poem has been noted by many critics. Northrop Frye refers to it as 'imitative harmony' and describes its use in poetry from Homer to Milton. 61 Wimsatt's book The Verbal Icon takes its title from a similar picture of poetry.
eBook - PDFLiving Poetry
Reading Poems from Shakespeare to Don Paterson
- William Hutchings(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Part One Elements of Poetry 2 Form and Technique Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it. (A. E. Housman) 1 The materials of poetry are words. Poems are created step by step, by building words into structures, beginning with the phrases and clauses that make up the lines, stanzas and other formal sections. A poet – the word derives from the Greek meaning ‘maker’ – con-structs the whole from these parts. It is with this etymology that George Puttenham began his highly significant and influential tract in the development of English rhetoric and poetics, The Arte of English Poesie , published in 1589: ‘A poet is as much to say as a maker.’ 2 Poets’ techniques, the skills they employ in the service of their craft, lie in selecting their material and then shaping it into an expressive work of art. In this chapter we shall look at examples of poets’ handling of these elements, beginning with individual words and building gradually into formal sections of a poem. 2.1 The word A word is the smallest unit of meaning. Syllables and even individ-ual letters can have a purpose within the aural structure of a longer section of writing, but selection of words is the writer’s first step towards expression of thought or feeling. It is, indeed, often the case that we can observe the essence of a poet in her or his range of 13 14 Living Poetry vocabulary. We here look at three examples. Andrew Marvell locates his meaning in the choice and definition of individual words: he is a poet of the concise and the precise. Shakespeare’s sonnets use lan-guage in multiple and shifting ways. His words slide around to create complex and sometimes uncertain textures of meaning. Alexander Pope uses language with Marvell’s precision, but the significance of his key words is often fully revealed only by observing their position within the structure of the whole poem.
eBook - PDF- Geoffrey Tillotson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
In the Preface to his Iliad in 1715, Pope also used the term, or a form of it, in describing Homer as 'the Father of 1 Essays, i. 266. 2 id., ii. 148. 3 Critical Works, ed. E. N. Hooker, Baltimore, 1939-43, i. 47. 4 ibid. 4 6 MORE ABOUT POETIC DICTION Poetical Diction, the first who taught the Language of the Gods to Men'. 1 But of all writers writing expressly on the diction of poetry it is Wordsworth who is best remembered. In the third edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1802 he included an appendix enlarging on 'poetic diction', a term he had used in his preface in its 1800 and later form. In some respects this appendix is a perverse piece of criticism, and I shall look at it later on. Before we attend to what 'poetic diction' meant to these writers, we may ask what it would mean to ourselves if we were to use it. In its narrowest sense it might mean for us (i) the sum of the words used in poetry but not in prose—by 'poetry 5 I mean verse and by 'prose' I mean prosaic prose, not partly poetical prose like, say, Sir Thomas Browne's. If we did give it this meaning, we should use it mainly of the verse of the past, whether poetical or not, for modern verse makes no use of a special vocabulary of this kind. We should mean by it such words as 'ope' or 'morn', shortened forms that were found con-venient because of the local claims of metre, and which, in addition, may have once been felt to be delightful. That would be as strict a use of the term as possible, and it would imply nothing as to the status of the 'poetry' concerned, being applicable to words used in metre, whether or not by a poet. When we use the term otherwise the distinction between words of verse and words of prose gives way before the law that whatever words are used in verse are poetical when—to be obvious—the verse attains to poetry, even though most of the words are prosaic (if I may use that word without pejorative sense) when used in prose.
eBook - PDF- Geoffrey Tillotson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
In the Preface to his Iliad in 1715, Pope also used the term, or a form of it, in describing Homer as 'the Father of 1 Essays, i. 266. 2 id., ii. 148. 8 Critical Works, ed. E. N. Hooker, Baltimore, 1939-43, i. 47. 4 ibid. 4 6 MORE ABOUT POETIC DICTION Poetical Diction, the first who taught the Language of the Gods to Men'. 1 But of all writers writing expressly on the diction of poetry it is Wordsworth who is best remembered. In the third edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1802 he included an appendix enlarging on 'poetic diction', a term he had used in his preface in its 1800 and later form. In some respects this appendix is a perverse piece of criticism, and I shall look at it later on. Before we attend to what 'poetic diction' meant to these writers, we may ask what it would mean to ourselves if we were to use it. In its narrowest sense it might mean for us (i) the sum of the words used in poetry but not in prose—by 'poetry' I mean verse and by 'prose' I mean prosaic prose, not partly poetical prose like, say, Sir Thomas Browne's. If we did give it this meaning, we should use it mainly of the verse of the past, whether poetical or not, for modern verse makes no use of a special vocabulary of this kind. We should mean by it such words as 'ope' or 'morn', shortened forms that were found con-venient because of the local claims of metre, and which, in addition, may have once been felt to be delightful. That would be as strict a use of the term as possible, and it would imply nothing as to the status of the 'poetry' concerned, being applicable to words used in metre, whether or not by a poet. When we use the term otherwise the distinction between words of verse and words of prose gives way before the law that whatever words are used in verse are poetical when—to be obvious—the verse attains to poetry, even though most of the words are prosaic (if I may use that word without pejorative sense) when used in prose.
eBook - ePubRE:Verse
Turning Towards Poetry
- Jeremy Tambling(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Technical terms and phrasesIn this section, technical terms that have appeared throughout this book have been enlarged on where necessary. And others have been introduced and explained. I have divided the discussion up into five sections. In the first, I look at two contrasted passages, one by Shakespeare, one by Milton. This is to examine their poetic techniques and to illustrate a number of Poetic Terms by example, by looking at how their language works. The second discusses more specifically rhythm, and the third considers rhyme and verse forms. In the fourth, I discuss metaphor, symbolism and allegory, and I round off in the fifth with some other technical terms that deserve further expansion.Two passages
Here is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71. It is the source for Christina Rossetti’s ‘Remember’ (see example 34 and Pallotti 1990), and there was an act of translation involved when she took this poem, in which one man writes to another, and transferred it for use in a heterosexual love situation. As a Shakespearian, as opposed to a Petrarchan sonnet (see examples 59 and 60), it has three quatrains, rhyming abab, cdcd, efef, gg . But, as with all sonnets, it is still relevant to note the turn after the eighth line (the volta
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