The Poetry

Poetry

Topic :

Poetry, the theory in analyzing poetry ( Figurative Language, extrinsic and intrinsic elements)

Definition :

Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define.

Example :

 “Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,

“And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

“I’ve heard it in the chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
(Emily Dickinson)

 Figurative Language Of Poetry

1. Simile is the rhetorical term used to designate the most elementary form of resemblances: most similes are introduced by "like" or "as." These comparisons are usually between dissimilar situations or objects that have something in common, such as "My love is like a red, red rose."

2. A metaphor leaves out "like" or "as" and implies a direct comparison between objects or situations. "All flesh is grass." For more on metaphor, click here.

3. Synecdoche is a form of metaphor, which in mentioning an important (and attached) part signifies the whole (e.g. "hands" for labour).

4. Metonymy is similar to synecdoche; it's a form of metaphor allowing an object closely associated (but unattached) with a object or situation to stand for the thing itself (e.g. the crown or throne for a king or the bench for the judicial system).

5. A symbol is like a simile or metaphor with the first term left out. "My love is like a red, red rose" is a simile. If, through persistent identification of the rose with the beloved woman, we may come to associate the rose with her and her particular virtues. At this point, the rose would become a symbol.

6. Allegory can be defined as a one to one correspondence between a series of abstract ideas and a series of images or pictures presented in the form of a story or a narrative. For example, George Orwell's Animal Farm is an extended allegory that represents the Russian Revolution through a fable of a farm and its rebellious animals.

7. Personification occurs when you treat abstractions or inanimate objects as human, that is, giving them human attributes, powers, or feelings (e.g., "nature wept" or "the wind whispered many truths to me").

8. Irony takes many forms. Most basically, irony is a figure of speech in which actual intent is expressed through words that carry the opposite meaning.

• Paradox: usually a literal contradiction of terms or situations

• Situational Irony: an unmailed letter

• Dramatic Irony: audience has more information or greater perspective than the characters

• Verbal Irony: saying one thing but meaning another

• Overstatement (hyperbole)

• Understatement (meiosis)

• Sarcasm

Irony may be a positive or negative force. It is most valuable as a mode of perception that assists the poet to see around and behind opposed attitudes, and to see the often conflicting interpretations that come from our examination of life. 

Elements Of  Poetry

1.      Rhythm: This is the music made by the statements of the poem, which includes the syllables in the lines. The best method of understanding this is to read the poem aloud, and understand the stressed and unstressed syllables.

2.      Meter: This is the basic structural make-up of the poem. Do the syllables match with each other? Every line in the poem must adhere to this structure. A poem is made up of blocks of lines, which convey a single strand of thought. Within those blocks, a structure of syllables which follow the rhythm has to be included. This is the meter or the metrical form of poetry.

3.      Stanza: Stanza in poetry is defined as a smaller unit or group of lines or a paragraph in a poem. A particular stanza has a specific meter, rhyme scheme, etc. Based on the number of lines, stanzas are named as couplet (2 lines), Tercet (3 lines), Quatrain (4 lines), Cinquain (5 lines), Sestet (6 lines), Septet (7 lines), Octave (8 lines).

4.       Rhyme: A poem may or may not have a rhyme. When you write poetry that has rhyme, it means that the last words or sounds of the lines match with each other in some form. Rhyme is basically similar sounding words like cat and hat, close and shows, house and mouse, etc. Free verse poetry, though, does not follow this system.

5.       Rhyme Scheme: As a continuation of rhyme, the rhyme scheme is also one of the basic elements of poetry. In simple words, it is defined as the pattern of rhyme. Either the last words of the first and second lines rhyme with each other, or the first and the third, second and the fourth and so on. It is denoted by alphabets like aabb (1st line rhyming with 2nd, 3rd with 4th); abab (1st with 3rd, 2nd with 4th); abba (1st with 4th, 2nd with 3rd), etc.

6.      Theme: This is what the poem is all about. The theme of the poem is the central idea that the poet wants to convey. It can be a story, or a thought, or a description of something or someone; anything that the poem is about.

7.      Symbolism: Often poems will convey ideas and thoughts using symbols. A symbol can stand for many things at one time and leads the reader out of a systematic and structured method of looking at things. Often a symbol used in the poem will be used to create such an effect.

8.      Imagery: Imagery is also one of the important elements of a poem. This device is used by the poet for readers to create an image in their imagination. Imagery appeals to all the five senses. For e.g., when the poet describes, the flower is bright red, an image of a red flower is immediately created in the readers mind.

 

Part Of  Poetry

1.      Ode: It is usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, an elevated style, and an elaborate stanza pattern.

2.      Elegy: It is a lyric poem that mourns the dead. [It's not to be confused with a eulogy.]It has no set metric or stanzaic pattern, but it usually begins by reminiscing about the dead person, then laments the reason for the death, and then resolves the grief by concluding that death leads to immortality. It often uses "apostrophe" (calling out to the dead person) as a literary technique. It can have a fairly formal style, and sound similar to an ode.

3.      Sonnet: It is a lyric poem consisting of 14 lines and, in the English version, is usually written in iambic pentameter. There are two basic kinds of sonnets: the Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet and the Shakespearean (or Elizabethan/English) sonnet. The Italian/Petrarchan sonnet is named after Petrarch, an Italian Renaissance poet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains (four lines each) and a concluding couplet (two lines). The Petrarchan sonnet tends to divide the thought into two parts (argument and conclusion); the Shakespearean, into four (the final couplet is the summary).

4.      Ballad: It is a narrative poem that has a musical rhythm and can be sung. A ballad is usually organized into quatrains or cinquains, has a simple rhythm structure, and tells the tales of ordinary people.

5.      Epic: It is a long narrative poem in elevated style recounting the deeds of a legendary or historical hero.    

6.      Haiku: It has an unrhymed verse form having three lines (a tercet) and usually 5,7,5 syllables, respectively. It's usually considered a lyric poem.

7.      Limerick: It has a very structured poem, usually humorous & composed of five lines (a cinquain), in an aabba rhyming pattern; beat must be anapestic (weak, weak, strong) with 3 feet in lines 1, 2, & 5 and 2 feet in lines 3 & 4. It's usually a narrative poem based upon a short and often ribald anecdote.

 

 

 

Assignment Introduction To Literature

Poetry

Group 1

Name :                                    SRN :

1. Ita Riyanti                                       2113003

2.Andri Saputra                                  2113004

3.Windi Virginia                                 2113006

4.Neli Suryani                                     2113009

a.       Poetry

Robert Burns (1759 - 1796)

A Red, Red Rose

O My Luve's like a red, red rose,

That's newly sprung in June;

O My Luve's like a melodie

That's sweetly played in tune.

As fair art though, my bonnie lass,

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a' the seas gang dry.

Definition:

Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary. Poetry is an ancient form that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define.

Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic^[1][2][3] qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a fundamental creative act employing language.

Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, or to evoke emotive responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of speech such as metaphor, simile and metonymy^[4] create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.

Some poetry types are specific to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Mickiewicz and Rumi may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter; there are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other means to create rhythm and euphony. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition,^[5] playing with and testing, among other things, the principle of euphony itself, sometimes altogether forgoing rhyme or set rh

Examples in Poetry

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,
“And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
“I’ve heard it in the chilliest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.”
(Emily Dickinson)
In the poem given above, Emily Dickinson has remarkably made use of the tool of extended metaphor by comparing “hope” with the “little bird”.
Example
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief.”
(Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet)
Here again, Shakespeare has made use of extended metaphor by comparing “Juliet” with the “sun”.