Poetry Flashcards
Two types of poetry
Narrative poetry and Lyric poetry
narrative poetry: poet explores ideas through the medium of a story
lyric poetry: poet gives immediate response to life/ expresses thought and emotion
Narrative poetry + main kinds (3)
A narrative poem is a poem that tells a story.
The main kinds are the epic, the ballad and the romance
Lyrics + main kinds (3)
Vast majority of poems are lyrics
A lyric is a poem in which the poet writes about his or her thoughts and feelings, a direct response to some aspect of experience (e.g. the death of a friend)
Basic type of lyric is the song, but we use the term Lyric’ as general label for everything that’s not a narrative poem such as the sonnet, the ode and the elegy
Lyric poetry characteristics (3)
- works on the basis of a contrast between some problem or some unattractive or disorderly aspect of life vs. an idea of a better, more attractive order
- experiences: love, death, nature, religion or a domestic, social or political ssue, but we are always offered the poet’s direct response
- a lyric is an attempt to confront and understand some aspect of our complex experiences in life
- a lyric will either lean more towards an ordered, harmonious picture or lean more towards the disorder that experience offers
(e.g. a love poem will contrast the unhapiness of not being in love with the happiness caused by love)
Disorder/order structure is inherent to poetry in general. This broad structural opposition makes studying poetry easier as you can start by looking for this pattern!
Alliteration
repetition of the same letter (or, more precisely sound) at the beginning of two or more words in a line of poetry
(e.g. five miles meandering with a mazy motion)
When you notice a feature such as this in a text, explain its function too (e.g. it reinforces the meaning of the words or it clusters certain words together)!
Main function: to lend ideas and images additional emphasis and force
Archaism and function
The use of old or antiquated words in poetry
creates the picture and signal to the reader that we are removed from ordinary experience, and ordinary language
Archaic words are an example of
poetic diction
poetic diction and function
words found in poetry which are not used in everyday speech or prose
most commonly used is ‘O’
to indicate that the poet is leaving dull reality in pursuit of something perfect, but often followed by the stark not ideal reality
assonance
repetition of the same vowel sound in two or more words in a line of poetry
e.g. a host of golden daffodils
// alliteration, it reinforces the meaning of the words and links them together - NOT necessarily about the sound effect itself but the MEANING
consonance
the repetition of the same consonant sound before and after different vowels in two words
e.g. live - love, escaped - scooped
when consonance replaces rhyme it is called
half-rhyme
half-rhyme vs. rhyme effect
- half-rhyme
- is more clumsy, unlyrical and unharmonious e.g. groined - groaned, escaped - scoped
- used especially by 20th C poets to suggest a world in fragments without order
- rhyme
- neat, orderly
ballad
the traditional ballad is a song that tells a story
ballad characteristics (10)
- theme is often tragic (personal misfortune, public events like battles)
- supernatural themes
- oral form, dating back to the later Middle Ages
- simple in structure - four-line stanzas
- stock phrases
- simple language
- the story is central
- beginning abrupt, usually when tragedy occurs
- unhappy event (unharmonious events) in contrast with music (harmony)
- often incremental repetition
incremental repetition
often used in ballads, where lines are repeated from stanza to stanza, but with some small but crucial alteration as the line is repeated
e.g. a sad tale through the town is gaen
a sad tale on the morrow
literary ballad characteristics
more difficult than traditional ballad (that confront a personal or public disaster)
18th C poets took same form and subject matter BUT it does not deal with a tragedy directly
the author writes from a puzzled perspective at life and by presenting a story that refuses a simple interpretation, it offers an impression of the complexity and meaning of the world
blank verse
unrhymed poetry, but a disciplined verse form as each line is an iambic pentameter (a 10-syllable line with five emphasis/stresses)
blank verse use
- appears less formally contrived than a poem that rhymes
- good medium for long narrative poem about a complex story or exploring experience
- good medium for lyric poem where the poet is thinks in a discursive way rather than fitting his thoughts into stanza and rhyme patterns (–> sonnet)
- maintains variety by shifting the pause in the line and by using run-on lines in the verse paragraph
Often used by Shakespeare and other Renaissance dramatists!
verse paragraph
verse paraghraphs are separate sections in a blank-verse poem (in other poems we call them stanzas)
conceit
It is a far-fetched methapor in which a very unlikely connection between two things is established
e.g. lover’s souls as being like the two legs of a pair of compasses
conceit most common in what C?
most common in 17th C metaphysical poetry meant to strike us as ingenious = we are meant to feel that it takes invention and imagination to forge a connection
metaphysical poetry characteristics (4)
- conceits
- complicated arguments
- convoluted syntax
- rapid jumps from idea to idea
courtly-love poetry
Courtly-love poetry is generally concerned with an idealised view of love
courtly love poetry characteristics (2) + examples writers
- an idealised view of love in contrast with the complexity of real relationships
- reader often unsure on how to respond, both moved or amused
Chaucer’s narrative poems, but also common in Elzabethan sonnets (Shakespeare, Sidney)
dramatic monologue
- a poem in which an imaginary speaker addresses an audience
dramatic monologue characteristics
- the poem usually takes place at a critical moment in the speaker’s life
- offers an indirect revelation of his/her temperament and personality
- common in plays and longer poems
- represent one person’s response to life
- more specifically an imagined character’s interpretation of the world they encounter (not the poet’s direct view of life!)
dream poetry
a poem that tells of a dream (also called dream visions and dream allegories)
dream poetry characteristics
- popular in Middle Ages (Chaucer)
- contrast between the dream and the realities of everyday life
- something significant can be discovered, revealed or explored in the dream (there’s a value of what is revealed in the unconscious or semi-conscious mind)
- re-emerges in poetry in the romantic period (Keats, Coleridge)
18th Century poetry (+ 2 other names)
Generally social poetry concerned with manners and morals
Also called Augustan (1700-1745) and neoclassic (1660-end of 18th C)
18th C poetry characteristics (8)
- writer looks at corrupt society and offers corrective thinking
- emphasis on decorum and moderation (basic meaning of poem is transparent as they are against excess)
- heroic couplet as common verse form
- it suggests an idea of balance and order, writers look back at classical authors who had established enduring models
- topical references (but again meaning transparent)
- satiric, mocking the erant
- poet writes from ironic superiority
- balanced couplets suggesting a standard of behaviour and correctness against e.g. corrupt society
- increasing amount of women poets
elegy (definition and purpose, use, ending)
a poem written on the death of a friend of the poet
- purpose is to praise the friend
- death does ask the writer what the point is of living
- ending, writer comes to terms with his/her grief
- poet must explore poetic language, esp imagery, to discover if there’s a point in writing poetry/living
epic charateristics (5)
- An epic presents the great deeds of a heroic figure or group of figures (e.g. Homer’s Odyssey/Iliad)
- massive narrative poems
- focus on a crisis in hte history of a race or culture
- the scope is encyclopaedic - not just story as poet includes knowledge through imagery and allusion, classical references
- epic simile
epic simile
long digressions, comparing events in the story to events that we are familiar with or events in other stories or history
- part of the epic being all-inclusive of knowledge
- creates coherence suggesting that everything is part of a greater pattern)
epithalamion
a song or poem in honour of a marriage (traditionally sung outside the bride’s room on her wedding-night)
use of epithalamion (6)
- incorporated in many novels, plays, poems
- marriage often symbol of perfect order that can be established in society as well as being sactioned by God
- pattern:
- poem is about the events of the entire day
- central characters are bride and groom
- poet as public celebrator of private experience
- joyful, celebratory mode (no references to darker aspects of life)
- nature imagery (bride fresh and fertile)
- classical references (evoke innocence)
free verse (4)
- poetry written in irregular lines and without any regular metre (>< blank verse has the iambic pentameter!)
- abandons regular metrical pattern and usually also abandons rhyme
- free verse is a good medium for the poet to discuss thinking in all its complexity (as it doesn’t have a strict frame)
- repetition of word and phrase to introduce some organisation (irregularity of free verse - but still search towards some symmetry)
heroic couplet characteristics
- a pair of 10-syllable lines (i.e. two iambic pentameters) that rhyme
- entire poem can be written in a sequence of these couplets
- most popular verse form in 18th C poetry (Shakespeare, Chaucer, Browning, Dryden, Pope)
- difference between open couplets and closed couplets
- open couplets make us not conscious of the rhyme, allowing thought to run on, they become similar to blank verse
- closed couplets make us conscious of the ryme, creating idea of balance that is praised in society, which satire mocks (making it ideal verse form for satire)
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Imagery
imagery covers every concrete object, action and feeling in a poem (the key words in a poem), but also the use of metaphors and similes (figurative language)
(the effects of sounds in a sequence of words are alliteration and assonance)
figurative use of language (4)
- language used in a non-literal way (e.g. metaphor or a simile to extend significance of what he/she is saying)
- as poets try to create ordered verse in contrast to the disordered world, figurative imagery either adds to the sense of disorder or to the sense of oder/harmony
- association of something positive with positive images creates a forceful impression of the ideal
- association of something negative with negative images creates a forceful impression of the unpleasant disorder
- most common associations: objects with religious, cosmic, natural (flowers, animals, weather), daily life (money, war, business), body (sickness, disease, health, death) concepts
- creating opposites of good-bad, light-dark
- rather a way of creating force by associating ideas in the poem with other (un)pleasent things than creating a crypted meaning!
imagism (8)
- coined by Ezra Pound (‘In a station of the metro’; also important William Carlos Williams)
- ca 1914 start of economical poems that use a few, hard, clear images (very concentrated impression of scene), followed by a poetic (metaphoric) comparison
- no comment or development of an argument, every word counts
- free verse
- juxtaposition of figurtive image in second line as a response to the observed image in the first
- imagist poetry is a reaction against romantic poetry with its verbose expresion and personal fantasies
- imagist poetry is the start of modern poetry (formal innovation, small scale refers to only being able to understand reality in glimpses/fragments)
- new self-consciousness about poetry (trying to find a technique to adequatly describe the world makes us reconsider what reality is like and how language tries to represent it
Lyric poetry evolution (17th C lyric poetry - 20th C lyric poetry)
17th C lyric poetry (Ben Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare)
- theme mostly secular (perfect love - complexity of feelings and experience, disorder) or divine love (perfection of God - disorder in experience)
Lyric poetry not preferred in 18th C poetry (Pope e.g. preferred social poetry by using narrative verse or a social form such as the epistle)
Romantic period (Keats, Wordsworth), popular again, but shift in subject/approach
- rather than about secular/divine love, it talks about nature and how to construct order/harmony in that nature
Victorian period (Tennyson, Arnold)
- gap between an ideal order and the disorder of reality gets wider and search for stability becomes increasingly desperate
Same for 20th C (Yeats, Margaret Atwood)
- theme often about perception and reality leaving the reader unsure about what is real or imagined
lyrical ballad (Wordsworth, Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads)
- reaction against the social and intellectual interest of much 17th C and 18th C poetry
- instead turns to nature and thus marks start of romantic poetry
- ‘ballad’ suggests a desire to go back to the simple misfortunes of ordinary people >< urbane, witty style of 18th C poetry about morals and manners of the town = often simply writing
- ‘lyrical’ greater degree of authorial involvement than in a traditional balad, author responses to experience + it also breaks the distinction as it combines the narrative and lyric modes together
metaphysical poetry
- term used to refer to 17th C poets (Donne difficult, Vaughan, Marvell)
- poems are often written in knotted sentences, argument difficult to find, jumps from one to another idea
- imagery extraordinary
- conventional subjects, mostly secular/divine love
- greater emphasis on how difficult it is to make sense of experience (disorder) against the redeeming love
- witty and ingenious conceits by juxtaposing things that have not much in common (e.g. two lovers - pair of compasses = Donne)