Poetry, literature that evokes an intense imaginative understanding of experience or a specific emotional reaction through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
Poetry vs. Prose: Poetry may be distinguished from prose literature in terms of form by its compression, by its frequent (though not prescribed) use of the conventions of meter and rhyme, by its dependence upon the line as a formal unit, by its powerful vocabulary, and by its freedom of syntax. The characteristic emotional content of poetry shows itself through a variety of techniques, from direct description to highly personalized symbolism. In literary texts, what is referred to as poetry indicates the poetic language, i.e., the poetic content. Therefore, in these texts, poetry refers to good poetry.
Prosody, the rhythmic aspect of language; in literary criticism, the term chiefly refers to the metrical structure of poetry and the study of such structure.
Nursery rhyme, verse traditionally told or sung to small children. The oral tradition of nursery rhymes is ancient, but new verses have also entered the stream which can be safely called poems of childhood .
Example, "Hush-a-bye baby on the tree top":
Hush-a-by baby on the tree top.
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
Down will come baby, cradle and all.
Ballad, form of short narrative folk song the distinctive style of which formed in Europe during the late Middle Ages. The ballad has been preserved as a musical and literary form up to modern times.
Typically, the folk ballad (or standard ballad) tells a compact tale in a style that achieves bold, sensational effects through deliberate starkness and abruptness. Despite a strict economy of narrative, it employs a variety of devices to prolong highly charged moments in the story and to thicken the emotional atmosphere, the most common being a frequent repetition of some key word, line, or phrase. Any consequent bareness of texture finds ample compensation in this dramatic rhetoric.
Because ballads have developed among illiterate people, and are freshly created from memory at each performance, they are subject to constant change in both text and tune; tradition has preserved them by re-creation, not by inscription. They exhibit attraction to supernatural happenings; with the fate of lovers (usually, though not always, tragic); with crime and its punishment; with apocryphal legends (the chief stuff of religious balladry); with historical disasters (usually matters of regional rather than national importance); with sensational acts of God and man; with the deeds of outlaws and badmen; and with the hazards of such occupations as seafaring and railroading.
Metre, also spelled METER, in poetry, the rhythmic pattern of a poetic line. Metre (q.v.), although often equated with rhythm, is perhaps more accurately described as one method of organizing a poem's rhythm. Unlike rhythm, metre is not a requisite of poetry; it is, rather, an abstract organization of elements of stress, duration, or number of syllables per line into a specific formal pattern. The interaction of a given metrical pattern with any other aspect of sound in a poem produces a tension, or counterpoint, that creates the rhythm of metrically based poetry.
Scansion, the analysis and visual representation of a poem's metrical pattern. Adapted from the classical method of analyzing ancient Greek and Roman quantitative verse, scansion in English prosody employs a system of symbols to reveal the mechanics of a poem--i.e., the predominant type of foot (the smallest metrical unit of stressed and unstressed syllables); the number of feet per line; and the rhyme scheme. The purpose of scansion is to enhance the reader's sensitivity to the ways in which rhythmic elements in a poem convey meaning. Deviations in a poem's metrical pattern are often significant to its meaning.
Sprung rhythm, an irregular system of prosody developed by the 19th-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and permits an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. In sprung rhythm, a foot may be composed of from one to four syllables. (In regular English metres, a foot consists of two or three syllables.) Because stressed syllables often occur sequentially in this patterning rather than in alternation with unstressed syllables, the rhythm is said to be "sprung." Hopkins claimed to be only the theoretician, not the inventor, of sprung rhythm. He saw it as the rhythm of common English speech and the basis of such early English poems as Langland's Piers Plowman and nursery rhymes such as:
Díng, dóng, béll; (3 stresses)
Pússĕy's ín thĕ wéll. (3 stresses)
Sprung rhythm is a bridge between regular metre and free verse. An example of Hopkins' use of it is:
Márgărĕt ăre yŏu gríevĭng (2 stresses)
Ŏvĕr góldĕn grŏve ŭnléavĭng (2 stresses)
From "Spring and fall to a Young Child"
Stanza, unit of a poem that consists of two or more lines of verse organized according to content and form and usually repeated as a recurring pattern in the poem. The structure of a stanza (also called a strophe, or a stave) is determined by the number of lines, the dominant metre, and the rhyme scheme. Thus, a stanza of four lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming abab, could be described as a quatrain.
Verse, a single line of metrical composition; more broadly, the metrical composition itself or the poetic technique of a particular poem.
Couplet, a pair of end-rhymed lines of verse that are self-contained in grammatical structure and meaning. Examples are:
Then share thy pain, allow that sad relief;
Ah, more than share it, give me all thy grief.
(Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard")
Think what you will, we seize into our hands
His plate, his goods, his money, and his lands.
(Shakespeare, Richard II)
Diction, choice of words, especially with regard to correctness, clearness, or effectiveness. Any of the four generally accepted levels of diction--formal, informal, colloquial, or slang--may be correct in a particular context but incorrect in another or when mixed unintentionally. Most ideas have a number of alternate words that the writer can select to suit his purposes. "Children," "kids," "youngsters," "youths," and "brats," for example, all have different evocative values, i.e., connotations.
Foot, plural FEET, in verse, the smallest metrical unit of measurement. The dominant kind and number of feet, revealed by scansion, determines the metre of a poem.
If a single line of the poem contains only one foot, it is called monometer; two feet, dimeter; three feet, trimeter; four feet, tetrameter; five feet, pentameter; six feet, hexameter; seven feet, heptameter; eight feet, octameter. More than six, however, is rare. The metre of a poem (e.g., iambic pentameter, dactylic hexameter) is the kind plus the number of feet in each line.
Iamb, metrical foot consisting of one short syllable (as in classical verse) or one unstressed syllable (as in English verse) followed by one long or stressed syllable, as in the word be|caúse.
Trochee, metrical foot consisting of one long syllable (as in classical verse) or stressed syllable (as in English verse) followed by one short or unstressed syllable, as in the word háp| py.
Rhythm, in poetry, the patterned recurrence, within a certain range of regularity, of specific language features, usually features of sound. Although difficult to define, rhythm is readily discriminated by the ear and the mind, having as it does a physiological basis. It is universally agreed to involve qualities of movement, repetition, and pattern and to arise from the poem's nature as a temporal structure. Rhythm, by any definition, is essential to poetry; prose may be said to exhibit rhythm but in a much less highly organized sense. The presence of rhythmic patterns heightens emotional response and often affords the reader a sense of balance.
Rhyme, also spelled RIME, phenomenon that occurs when two or more words with similarly sounding final syllables are so placed as to echo one another.
Figure of Speech, any intentional deviation from literal statement or common usage that emphasizes, clarifies, or embellishes both written and spoken language. Forming an integral part of language, figures of speech are found in primitive oral literatures, as well as in polished poetry and prose and in everyday speech. Greeting-card rhymes, advertising slogans, newspaper headlines, the captions of cartoons, and the mottoes of families and institutions often use figures of speech, generally for humorous, mnemonic, or eye-catching purposes. The argots of sports, jazz, business, politics, or any specialized groups abound in figurative language.
Most figures in everyday speech are formed by extending the vocabulary of what is already familiar and better known to what is less well known. Thus metaphors (implied resemblances) derived from human physiology are commonly extended to nature or inanimate objects as in the expressions "the mouth of a river," "the snout of a glacier," "the bowels of the earth," or "the eye of a needle." Conversely, resemblances to natural phenomena are frequently applied to other areas, as in the expressions "a wave of enthusiasm," "a ripple of excitement," or "a storm of abuse." Use of simile (a comparison, usually indicated by "like" or "as") is exemplified in "We were packed in the room like sardines." Personification (speaking of an abstract quality or inanimate object as if it were a person) is exemplified in "Money talks"; metonymy (using the name of one thing for another closely related to it), in "How would the Pentagon react?"; synecdoche (use of a part to imply the whole), in expressions such as "brass" for high-ranking military officers or "hard hats" for construction workers.
Other common forms of figurative speech are hyperbole (deliberate exaggeration for the sake of effect), as in "I'm so mad I could chew nails"; the rhetorical question (asked for effect, with no answer expected), as in "How can I express my thanks to you?"; litotes (an emphasis by negation), as in "It's no fun to be sick"; and onomatopoeia (imitation of natural sounds by words), in such words as "crunch," "gurgle," "plunk," and "splash."
Alliteration, in prosody, the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or stressed syllables. Sometimes the repetition of initial vowel sounds (head rhyme) is also referred to as alliteration. As a poetic device, it is often discussed with assonance and consonance. In languages (such as Chinese) that emphasize tonality, the use of alliteration is rare or absent.
Alliteration is found in many common phrases, such as "pretty as a picture" and "dead as a doornail," and is a common poetic device in almost all languages. In its simplest form, it reinforces one or two consonantal sounds, as in William Shakespeare's line:
When I do count the clock that tells the time
(Sonnet XII)
A more complex pattern of alliteration is created when consonants both at the beginning of words and at the beginning of stressed syllables within words are repeated, as in Percy Bysshe Shelley's line:
The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's
("Stanzas Written inDejection Near Naples")
Hyperbole, (overstatement) a figure of speech that is an intentional exaggeration for emphasis or comic effect. Hyperbole is common in love poetry, in which it is used to convey the lover's intense admiration for his beloved.
Irony, language device, either in spoken or written form (verbal irony), in which the real meaning is concealed or contradicted by the literal meanings of the words, or in a theatrical situation (dramatic irony) in which there is an incongruity between what is expected and what occurs. Verbal irony arises from a sophisticated or resigned awareness of contrast between what is and what ought to be and expresses a controlled pathos without sentimentality. It is a form of indirection that avoids overt praise or censure as in the casual irony of the statement "That was a smart thing to do!" (meaning "very foolish").
Litotes, a figure of speech, conscious understatement in which emphasis is achieved by negation; examples are the common expressions "not bad!" and "no mean feat." Litotes is a stylistic feature of Old English poetry and of the Icelandic sagas, and it is responsible for much of their characteristic stoical restraint. The term meiosis means understatement generally, and litotes is considered a form of meiosis.
Metaphor, figure of speech that implies comparison between two unlike entities, as distinguished from simile, an explicit comparison signalled by the words "like" or "as." The familiar metaphor "Iron Horse," for train, becomes the elaborate central concept of one of Emily Dickinson's poems, which begins
I like to see it lap the Miles,
And lick the Valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at Tanks;
And then prodigious step . . .
Metonymy (Greek: "change of name," or "misnomer"), figure of speech in which the name of an object or concept is replaced with a word closely related to or suggested by the original, as "crown" for "king" ("The power of the crown was mortally weakened") or an author for his works ("I'm studying Shakespeare"). A familiar Shakespearean example is Mark Antony's speech in Julius Caesar in which he asks of his audience: "Lend me your ears." Metonymy is closely related to synecdoche, the naming of a part for the whole or a whole for the part, and is a common poetic device. Metonymy has the effect of creating concrete and vivid images in place of generalities, as in the substitution of a specific "grave" for the abstraction "death." Metonymy is standard journalistic and headline practice as in the use of "city hall" for "municipal government," the "White House" for the "President of the United States," or "Kremlin" for the government of the Soviet Union.
Paradox, apparently self-contradictory statement, the underlying meaning of which is revealed only by careful scrutiny. The purpose of a paradox is to arrest attention and provoke fresh thought. The statement "Less is more" is an example. When a paradox is compressed into two words as in "loud silence," "lonely crowd," or "living death," it is called an oxymoron.
Parody (Greek paroidía, "a song sung alongside another"), in literature, a form of satirical criticism or comic mockery that imitates the style and manner of a particular writer or school of writers so as to emphasize the weakness of the writer or the overused conventions of the school.
Personification, figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object. A
Synecdoche, figure of speech in which a part represents the whole, as in the expression "hired hands" for workmen or, less commonly, the whole represents a part, as in the use of the word "society" to mean high society. Closely related to metonymy--the replacement of a word by one closely related to the original--synecdoche is an important poetic device for creating vivid imagery. An example is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's line in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "The western wave was all aflame," in which "wave" substitutes for "sea." See also metonymy .
