Poetry

Respond to this Friday Faithfuls challenge by writing anything about poetry and if you write poetry, them please share one of your poems, I would like to know what you like about poetry, or you could write about whatever else you think might fit.  The word “poetry” comes from the Greek word poieo meaning “I create,” and create it does.  Poetry means to make ready, to prepare, to produce, bear, shoot forth, to acquire, to provide a thing for one’s self, to act rightly, do well, to celebrate, to execute, and it is used to convey love, lyrics, anger, hate, and it can create magic out of what would otherwise just be ordinary words.  Poetry is a method of creation and manifestation, a method of memory and preservation.  Researchers believe that the earliest forms of poetry were sung and passed on as an oral history.  These were often chants or prayers, but from the physical records left historical accounts, instructions for everyday activities, and fiction can be counted among the poems.  The majority of early oral histories were told in a poetic notation, likely because the repetition would make it easier to remember.  Poetry is old enough that we can’t determine when it began, not like we can with texts, though The Epic of Gilgamesh is cited as being one of the oldest examples of poetry along with the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Poetry is a type of literature, or artistic writing, that attempts to stir a reader’s imagination or emotions by creating a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language that is carefully chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.  Poetry is often used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.  It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotional ideas to the reader’s mind or listener’s ear.  A poem can contain many elements to give it structure.  Rhyme is perhaps the most common of these elements and it exists in limericks to epic poems to pop lyrics.  Poetry takes on many forms and it may use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects.  Poems frequently rely on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used for a desired effect.  The interactive layering of all these devices is used to generate meaning and that is what marks poetry.  Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm.  Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter.  Different types of meters played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry.  In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.

Poetic meter imposes specific length and emphasis on a given line in a poem.  Meter consists of two components, the number of syllables and a pattern of emphasis on those syllables.  A line of poetry can be broken into “feet,” which are individual units within a line of poetry.  A foot of poetry has a specific number of syllables and a specific pattern of emphasis.  A poetic foot is a basic repeated sequence of meter composed of two or more accented or unaccented syllables.  Line length and poetic feet are more common in formal verse.  In English poetry, the most common types of metrical feet are two syllables and three syllables long.  They’re characterized by their particular combination of stressed syllables and unstressed syllables.  These forms include Trochee, Iamb, Spondee, Dactyl and Anapest.  A trochee is a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, or a heavy syllable followed by a light one.  Iamb is a metrical foot consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable, or unaccented, accented.  Spondee is a metrical foot consisting of two long syllables.  Dactyl is a metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables or one long syllable followed by two short syllables.  Anapest is a metrical foot consisting of two short or unstressed syllables followed by one long or stressed syllable.  Anapestic poetry typically divides its stressed syllables across multiple words.

Shakespeare is famous for writing in iambic pentameter, and a pentameter is made up of five feet, thus each line in the poem would have 10 syllables.  Iambic pentameter was born out of a need to create a meter for the English language in the 16th century.  At that point, Latin was seen as bein a superior language expressing the perfection of the common civilization that formed the roots of all European nations.  Latin was the language of true literature, while English was for common folk.  Poets developed iambic pentameter as a way of enhancing English to make it worthy of literature and poetry as well.  The stressed unstressed, long short, unaccented, accented patterns created an effect that allowed poetry to be full of movement, imagery, and maintain a musical quality.  This can be seen in Romeo and Juliet.

“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
That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she.
Be not her maid since she is envious;
Her vestal livery is but sick and green,
And none but fools do wear it. Cast it off.”

Poetry can seem intimidating, especially since there are so many different types of poetry around like the haiku, free verse, sonnet, acrostic, villanelle, limerick, ode, elegy, ballad, epic, ghazal and many others.  Consonance presents poets with the possibility of playing around with the repetition of consonant sounds while assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds.  Alliteration is the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.  These poetic sound devices can be pleasing if the poet wants the reader to feel relaxed, abrasive if the reader should feel tense, or they can put the reader in another mood.

If you want a great Glossary of Forms, Poetic Terminology, and Literary Devices, there is one available on Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie, which can be found here.