Poetry: A Brief Introduction

Poetry can often beguile us, bewilder us, repel us--perhaps by its 

images, references, or the complexity of the form itself. Some find 

poetry more of a challenge than reading plays or long narratives 

because of its simplicity. When the eighteenth-century poet Phillis 

Wheatley penned "On Imagination," she summoned images

of the muses, of Sylvanus, and of Helicon, and conveys her heart 

in the sumptuous, evocative language of her day: 

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?

Soaring through air to find the bright abode,

Th' empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,

We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,

And leave the rolling universe behind:

From star to star the mental optics rove,

Measure the skies, and range the realms above.

There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,

Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

(Phillis Wheatley)

Very pretty, yes? But what does it mean? Poetry, unlike the forms 

mentioned above, is simplistic, yet packed with meaning--some 

poems belie very personal meaning for the poet. However, a poem 

can have many meanings, depending on the reader. 

What is poetry? Is it simply a collective of rhyming stanzas? 

Looking at one of the chief literary terms--that of verse--we see 

that poetry is not simply an arrangement of rhyming lines. 

Verse: Any composition written in rhyme

However, just because words are arranged in lines that rhyme, the

composition isn't necessarily a poem. Kennedy and Gioia give this

    example of verse:

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November, 

All the rest have thirty-one

Excepting February alone,

To which we twenty-eight assign

Till leap year makes it twenty-nine (Kennedy and Gioia) .

The above isn't quite a poem, but a mnemonic device: an assembly of lines put together to help us remember something--in this case, the number of days in each month. 

So, what is poetry? For eighteenth century poet William Wordsworth, poetry should be the expression of feeling, written in the vernacular of the common man. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth expounded on this concept, explaining that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also though long and deeply" (Preface). These powerful emotions, of course, are expressed in moments of quiet reflection. Like many of the forms we've studied, poets too engage their art to express emotion, find catharsis, challenge established norms--or some, simply to enjoy the play of language. In Japan the form Haiku (hokku)--a poem of only seventeen syllables or fewer--was made popular in the U.S. by poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot:

On a branch
        floating downriver        

           a cricket, singing (poetryfoundation). 

Wordsworth, too, was challenging the rigid and pretentious forms of the earlier century, whose language made poetry inaccessible and unrepresentative of the people--the peasantry--about which many poems spoke, particularly in a form called the pastoral, poems that painted an idyllic portrait of life in the country.

Though there is insufficient time to cover all of the various modes and forms of poetry--let alone its history of trends and schools--let it be sufficient for now to cover some of the chief terms associated with the form. 

Haiku: A poem of three lines containing five, seven, and five syllables

Stanza: Standard grouping of lines in a poem that form a verse

Quatrain: A four-line stanza

Couplet: Two lines of verse with the same meter that rhyme: 

"To meet, to know, to love--and then to part,
Is the sad tale of many a human heart." (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Lyric Poetry: A formal style of poem in which the poet expresses his feelings in first person narrative

Sonnet: A poem of fourteen lines

Ex: Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18"

      "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

       Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

       Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

       And summer's lease hath all too short a date;

       Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

       And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

       And every fair from fair sometimes declines,

       By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd

       But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 

       Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; 

       Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

       When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

               So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

               So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

   

Closed Form: The familiar form of the poem in which the poet 'strives for perfection' in creating an exact rhyme scheme and meter. A sonnet is one such example.

Open Form: Here, the rules are disregarded totally: there is no set rhyme or rhyme scheme, set meter, or set number of lines in a stanza.

Onomatopoeia: "Sound words": words created to imitate sound--i.e., buzz, whoosh, hiss, and so on.

Meter: The pattern of beats in poetry.

While these terms familiarize us with the technical aspects of poetry, to enjoy poetry, it must be read more slowly than most of the literature we enjoy. Often, through multiple passes, a poem's meaning to the reader can increase. When you read a poem aloud--or hear it read aloud--listen to it. What sounds do you hear? In what ways is rhythm created? Listen to poet e.e. cummings read his famous poem, "Anyone Live in a Pretty How Town":