Poetry

• Lyric poetry is typically characterized by brevity, melody, and emotional intensity. • The music of lyrics makes them memorable, and their brevity contributes to the intensity of their emotional expression.
• Poetry does engage our thoughts and ideas. If the writer does not communicate the emotion of discovering thought, we are not likely to find poetry in his work. Like Hamlet, they may pose an abstract Q: To be…” “Nature and Nature’s Laws hid in Night. God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.
• Poetry is the true language of emotion. We have all had the experience of joy, love, or sadness so great that no matter how urgently we need to express it, words fail us. • However, poetry succeeds where ordinary speech fails to communicate those urgent and subtle feelings that are most essentially human. That is why poetry is the most enduring form of literature.
• For the reader rhyme is a pleasure, for the poet a challenge. Part of its pleasure for the reader is in anticipating and hearing a poem’s echoing song. Part of its challenge for the poet is in rhyming naturally, without forcing the rhythm, the syntax, or the sense. • When the challenge is met successfully, the poem is a pleasure to listen to; it sounds naturally to the ear, and its rhyme makes it easier to remember.
• Rhythm refers to the regular recurrence of the accent or stress in poem or song. • If rhythm is the pulse or beat we hear in the line, then we can define meter as the measure of stresses in a poetic line. Meter is a count of the stresses we feel in the poem’s rhythm. By convention the unit of poetic meter in English is the foot, a unit of measure consisting of stressed and unstressed syllables.
• In discussions of poetry, the word form is often used to refer specifically to such technical and mechanical matters as rhyme, meter, and stanza arrangement. • Couplets, tercets, quatrains, sonnets, and so on are called poetic forms.
• When the flower falls, The leaf is no more cherished. Every day I fear. ---Amy Lowell
Types of Poetry
• Poetry can be classified as narrative or lyric. Narrative poems stress action, and lyrics song(韵律)。 • Narrative poetry：epic, romance and ballad; lyric poetry: elegy, epigram(讽刺短诗), sonnet, ode, sestina(六节诗),villanelle(维拉内拉诗). • Epics are long narrative poems that record the adventures of a hero whose exploits are important to the history of a nation. Typically they chronicle the origins of a civilization and embody its central beliefs and values. • Epics are formal, complex and serious.
Sound of Poetry
• The most familiar element of poetry is rhyme, which can be defined as the matching of final vowel and consonant sounds in two or more words. • When the corresponding sounds occur at the ends of lines we have end rhyme; when they occur within lines we have internal rhyme.
• Although narrative poems, esp literary ballads, combine story with song, action with emotion, story and action predominate. In lyric poetry, however, story is subordinated to song, and action to emotion. We can define lyrics as subjective poems, often brief, that express the feelings and thoughts of a single speaker (who may or may not represent the poet).
• Ballads are perhaps the most popular form of narrative poetry. Originally ballads were meant to be sung or recited. Folk/popular ballads were passed on orally, only to be written down much later. This accounts for the different versions of many ballads.
In the romance, adventure is a central feature. The plots of romances tend to be complex, with surprising and even magical actions common. The chief characters are human beings, though they often confront monsters, dragons, and disguised animals in a world that does not adhere consistently to the laws of nature as we know them.
Poetry
1. 2. 3. 4. What is poetry? Types of poetry Sound of y Forms of poetry
--Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. --Robert Frost viewed it as that property of speech that is “untranslatable”. But it “begins in delight, and ends in wisdom”. --Poetry is more intense ---than other writings---more intense with feelings, and more intense than in its concentration of meaning.