ABOUTREADCHAT ARTICLES ABOUTREADCHAT ARTICLES Definition of Poetry. There is no concrete definition for poetry. It means many different things to different people.
âPoetryâ as a word is sometimes used to mean any work of art written in verse. Poetry is any imaginative writing in lines of a certain length. It is the oldest genre of literature. It is a form of literary expression that creates effects by the sound and imagery of its language.
Poetry is the spontaneous outflow of powerful feelings. It takes it origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 1802.
Poetry is texts in rhythmic form, often employing rhyme and usually shorter, more concentrated in language and ideas than either prose or drama.
www.longman.co.uk/tt-seceng/resourses.glasauth.htm.
Poems are written in lines and stanzas while prose is made up of sentences and paragraphs, without any metrical ( or rhyming) structure. Drama is a piece of writing that tells a story , it is perform on a stage and uses dialogue.
There are different types of poetry from cultures all over the world. In our next lesson, we will be looking at the categories of poetry.
Topic: kinds of Poetry
There are many types of poetry. These can be grouped into three main genres namely: i. Narrative poetry ii. Lyric poetry iii. Dramatic poetry
1. NARRATIVE POETRY
Narrative poetry tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator and characters, the entire story is usually written in metered verse. The poet combines elements of storytelling like plot, setting and characters with element of poetry, such as form, meter, rhyme and poetic devices. Narrative poem often have exposition, rising action, conflict, climax, falling action and resolution.
TYPES OF NARRATIVE POEM
i) Ballad: Ballads are the earliest forms of narrative poetry. It tells a story set to music, it were created by poets and passed down orally. The word ballad comes medieval French âChanson balladeeâ which means âdancing songsâ.There are two types of ballads: - âLiterary balladsâ and traditional or folk ballad. The author of the traditional or folk ballad is anonymous. The literary ballads are known, a good example of the literary ballad is âThe Rhyme of the Ancient Marinerâ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The popular ballads narrated tales of heroes, love, tragedy and challenges, all typically set to music.
ii) Epic: An epic is a long narrative poem which tells the deeds of mighty warrior or hero/heroine. Epic can be text and they can be exclusively passed down orally. Epics characteristics are that they involve myths, heroic legends and moral tales. âEpicâ the word comes from the ancient Greek word âeposâ meaning story word âpoemâ. Examples of epic are the Homeric Epic, the most well-known ones are âthe lliadâ and âthe Odysseyâ (eighth century B.C).
iii) Tales: These are short stories told in verse, chiefly of domestic or personal interest. The outstanding example in English Literature is Chaucerâs Canterbury Tales.
iv) Arthurian Romances: This type of narrative poetry has its origin in twelfth-century France. Arthurian Romances are about the adventures and romances in King Arthurâs court during his reign in the fifth and sixth centuries. An example of Arthurian Romances is Thomas Maloryâs âLe Morte Dâ Authurâ (1485).
2. LYRIC POEM
A lyric (lih-rik) is a type of personal rhythmic poetry. A lyric poem is concerned with the often intense or complicated feelings of the narrator who may or may not be the poet themselves; it addresses personal emotions of the poem. A lyric was originally a poem written to be sung or chanted to the musical accompaniment of the lyre. Lyric poetry include simple songs, elegy, ode and sonnets.
i) Elegy: An elegy is a poem written to remember a sad event. A good example is Keatâs âShellyâs Adonaisâ written to commemorate the death of a fellow poet. It is therefore a poem of lamentation.
ii) Dirge: Dirge is also a poem inspired by a poetâs grief, sorrow or lamentation at the death of a loved one. The difference between an elegy and dirge is that a dirge can be sung while an elegy cannot be sung. Other forms of elegy and dirge are threnody and monody.
Threnody is a poem performed as a memorial to a dead person while monody refers to a poem in which one person lament another personâs death. It is a lyrical poem that is sung by a single, performer rather than a chorus.
iii) Sonnet: Sonnet is a fourteen lines poem with a definite rhyme scheme, which was introduced from Italy to English by Sir Thomas Wyatt. There are two major types of sonnet â Petrarchan or Italian or Miltonian sonnet and Shakespearean sonnet.
The Petrarchan sonnet named after 14th century Italian poet. Petrarch is distinguished by its structure. Is has two parts: the âOctaveâ made up of eight lines and the âSestetâ made up of six lines. The octave rhyming scheme is (abbaabba) and the âsestetâ has a rhyming scheme of (cdecde) or (cdccde). The âoctaveâ states the theme of the poem while the âsestetâ concludes.
The second sonnet is the Shakespearean sonnet which is named after William Shakespearean. This type of sonnet is made up of three âquatrainsâ and âcoupletâ with the rhyme scheme of (abab/cdcd/efef/gg).
DRAMATIC POEM
Dramatic poem is a poem written in dramatic form, consisting of dialogue between characters, monologues and soliloquies, conveying a story or dramatic action rather than description or narrative exposition. A notable example is Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Robert Browningâs âMy Last Duchessâ and Wole Soyinkaâs Telephone Conversationâ.The following are examples of dramatic poems :
⢠Lullaby: A poem composed to be sung to children with the aim to make them sleep.
Didactic poem: This is a poem that teaches moral examples are satire and allegory poem.
⢠Humorous poem: it is a poem written with the aim to make the reader laugh. There are two types :
a). Burlesque: poems that treats unimportant issues or simple subjects in very elevated styles . It mocks personâs ideas or thing. âSir Thopasâ is an example.
b). The parody is a form of burlesque in which the style of serious poem are imitated. Parody : It is a mocking poem of imitation designed to ridicule a person, institutions or issues. It imitates the style of another poet with the intention to make fun of him.
⢠Panegyric poem: It is a poem that eulogies or praises somebody or a thing e.g âIdotoâ by Christopher Okigbo.
⢠Epithlamion- A poem written in celebration of marriage.⢠Pastoral poem: A poem that centers on Shepherd. The poem describes the life of shepherd rural background.
⢠Epitaph: It is a poem which commiserate a dead person. The poem is inscribed on the personâs tomb. An example is Thomas Grayâs â Elegy written in a country churchyard â
⢠Limerick: Limerick is an unserious poem. It is short and Humorous, made up of five lines with the rhyme scheme aabba. Its language is usually indecent but character used with. It is also called a nonsense poem.
⢠Hagiology: A poem which is written to describe the life of a Saint.
⢠Satire: A poem with a serious intension. It attacks the vice if the individual or the society. It laughs at human ills and calls for a change.
⢠Allegory poem: An allegory poem is a poem that has two levels of meanings. The surface level and the deeper level in allegory poem, the actions, characters and image represent other things.
⢠Idyll: Idyll refers to a short poem which presents the picture of a happy country life. It is often in celebration of praise of a rustic and rural life.
⢠Concrete poetry: This is a poem which is arranged so that it physical arrangement resembles a concrete object. An author may write a poem on love and decide to arrange it so that it resembles an apple or a heart .
⢠Haiku: This is a Japanese poem in three lines of five , seven and five syllables respectively. Haiku employs a great deal of imagery so that it creates a clear picture in the mind . Below is an example of Haiku:
The falling flower
I see drift back to the branch
Was a butterfly
⢠Madrigal: This refers to a short love poem or a song divided into parts for two or more singers.
ELEMENTS OF POETRY
Poetry is the compressed or condensed, elevated and symbolic use of language and it's use of imagery, distinctively, distinguished poetry from other genres of literature There are devices and techniques with which the poet renders his verse.Some of these form the basic aesthetics of poetry and they are often sought for during appreciation. Some of them will be discussed below as elements of poetry.
1. Verse: A line of poetry is known as verse. Verse may also refer to an entire poem or any literary work outside prose (and drama).The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English defines verse as:(form of)writing arranged in lines each conforming to a pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. âin poetry however, Verse is another name for poetry. There are two types of verse:
a. Free Verse: A poem is said to be in free verse if it contains lines of varying lengths that have no uniform rhyme and metre. The free verse allows the poet to express himself freely without regards for rhymes metre or stanza.
b. Blank Verse: This refers to an unrhymed poem written in iambic pentameter. iambic pentameter refers to a verse consisting of five feet, each foot consisting an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
2. Stanza: stanza is the major sub-division of a poem. Stanza is a group of line containing one main idea. The stanza enables the poet to organize his work logically.
Stanza are of different length based on the number of lines, the following are types of stanzas:
i. Couplet: This refers to stanza of two lines, often of the same rhyme and metre. Example
What is this life if full of care -a
We have no time to stand and stare?-a
ii. Tercet: a stanza of three lines
iii. Quatrain: a stanza of four lines
iv. Quintet: a stanza of of five lines
v. Sextet: This is a stanza of six lines sextet also refers to the last six lines of a sonnet
vi. Septet: A stanza of seven lines
vii. Octave:A stanza of eight lines, it also refers to the first eight lines of the sonnet
2. Canto: Canto is the major division. A canto comprises of indifferent numbers of stanzas or one single long stanza it is like the chapter in a novel which contains different paragraphs
4. Rhymes: Rhymes is the repetition of the same sound in a line or lines of poetry in the following stanza the first and the line rhymes while the second and the last line rhymes :
Beyond the dark wild sea lies the enchanted
Beyond the long horizon a music calls to me
I see it in the sadness and smiling of
I hear it in the far of rustling of
There are different types of rhyme
a. End Rhyme: end rhyme occurs when there is a repetition of the same sound at the end of a line of poetry example
This is the day - a.
Which the Lord has made - a.b.
Internal Rhyme: Internal rhyme is the rhyme that occurs within closely placed lines in a poetry.
The following illustrates internal lines
The thin weary lines of carriers
with tattered dirty rags to cover their backs
The battered bulky chests
That kept on falling off their shaven heads.
c. Eye rhyme:In eye rhyme the appearance or similarity in spelling is given consideration rather than sameness in sound example:
Thou earth are tough
Fate bids man does plough
His head and cow
And gloom in him to sow
d. Half Rhyme: Half rhyme occurs if the final consonants of the rhyming words rhymes and the vowels do not. e.g pull-full
Strictly the example below:
He prayeth well. who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast
He prayeth. Who loveth best
All things both great and small.
Another classification of rhyme is based on the basis of the number of rhyming syllables in a rhyming words. In this regard, we have male and female rhymes.
e. A male rhyme involves only one syllable in each of the rhyming words, for example 'cape' and 'tape'.
f. A female rhyme involves two or more rhyming syllables in each of the rhyming words examples 'importunate' and 'unfortunate', 'impurity' and 'insecurity'.
d. Alternate rhyme: Alternate rhyme refers to two different rhymes (ab) coming in turn or taking turn to appear. Example
Thou still unravished bride of quietiness- a
Thou foster child of silence and slow time - b
Sylvan historian who canst express â a
A flower tale more sweetly than our rhyme - b
(John keats -Ode to Grecian Urn).
h. Rhyme Scheme: This refers to the pattern of end rhyme of a poem. In the following example, two stanzas have the same rhyme scheme which is abab-abab
Example:
The night has a thousand eyes
And the day but one:
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes;
And the heart but one
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.
The study of Poetry of Poetry by Romanus Egude. Pg54.
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