A Brief History of Poetry

Frequently employed as a means of

recording oral history storytelling (epic poetry) genealogy law other forms of expression or knowledge

that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose.

Examples: The Ramayana; the Odyssey & Iliad

Predates literacy

Easy to remember because of its formal

nature: rhythm, rhyme, refrains, etc. Today we have the alphabet song and

Grammar Rock that help us remember cultural information in the same way

Poems were composed for, or during, performance in preliterate societies…this meant there was some fluidity of wording, things could change from performance to performance

Why Poetry?

The content of poems became fixed to the

version that happened to be written down and survive.

Poets began to compose not for an audience that was sitting in front of them but for an absent reader.

With the invention of printing, poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.

With literacy…

Different types of meter played key roles in

Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry.

Free verse broke away from the rules of meter and defined structure – English poetry was especially breaking away from iambic pentameter and blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter)

In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence (the rise and fall of sounds of voice)

Poetry and Rhythm

In English, rhythm comes from

the different stress we put on accented and unaccented syllables: try it with your name…

English Poetry & Rhythm

Much modern poetry avoids traditional

rhyme schemes. Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use

rhyme. Rhyme did not enter European poetry at all

until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language.

Watch for internal rhyme in Neruda’s poetry, as well as assonance, repeated vowel sounds within the line

Poetry and Rhyme

Germanic and Old English poetry used

patterns of alliteration Alliteration and rhyme help to emphasize and

define a rhythmic pattern Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew used

parallelism, where successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three This lent itself to call- and-response performance.

Alliteration and Parallelism

Sound plays a more subtle role in free verse poetry Free verse poets use it to create pleasing, varied

patterns and emphasize or sometimes even illustrate semantic elements of the poem.

Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are among the ways free verse poets use sound.

Euphony refers to the musical, flowing quality of words arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Free Verse and Sound

Compared with prose, poetry depends less on

the linguistic units of sentences and paragraphs, and more on units of organization that are purely poetic.

Typical structural elements: the line, couplet, and stanza

Lines may be end-stopped (ends in a period) or enjambed (runs on to the next line)

Poets use enjambment to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.

Poetry and Form

In English poetry, the most traditional line

length is 10 syllables (iambic pentameter) Mary Oliver argues that lines longer than

10 syllables (like Walt Whitman’s) communicate expanse, and super-human capacity

Oliver says that lines shorter than 10 syllables communicate intensity and a smaller than human focus/idea

Line Length

With the advent of printing, poets gained

greater control over the visual presentation of their work.

The use of lines, couplets, stanzas, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox.

Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. 

How it looks on the page