The Elements of Poetry

What is poetry? How do we know?

What do poets have to say about poetry?

Poetry by Eleanor Farjeon

A Word by Emily Dickinson

Poetry by Eleanor Farjeon

What is Poetry? Who knows? Not a rose, but the scent of the rose; Not the sky, but the light in the sky; Not the fly, but the gleam of the fly; Not the sea, but the sound of the sea; Not myself, but what makes me See, hear, and feel something that prose Cannot: and what it is, who knows?

A Word By Emily Dickinson A word is dead When it is said, Some say.

I say it just Begins to live that day.

So, What is Poetry?

Poetry is hard to define. Even poets argue among themselves about what makes a poem a poem. Generally, Poetry is a type of literature in which the sound and meaning of language are combined to create ideas and feelings. However, There are some common characteristics, however, that we can use to help us differentiate between poetry and prose.

These Characteristics are:

(1)It should look like a poem, meaning that lines dont run to the margins. Some lines are not even sentences.

(2)There are usually some musical devices that give the poem a song-like, lyrical quality.
(3)Images are conveyed through sensory details and figurative language. (4)The poem has some form to hold it together. Some poems actually have a prescribed form like haikus and sonnets.

(5) The poem has some meaning, image or emotion it wants to share with the reader. These three things are shown by the above four. That makes a poem!

There are three broad categories of poetry:

1. Narrative 2. Dramatic 3. Lyric

 Lyric poems paint a picture and include most short poems. Narrative poems tell a story. Epics (long poems) and ballads are two types of narrative poetry. In dramatic poetry the storys characters act out the story. Many plays are written as dramatic poetry.

NOTE:
To critically analyze a poem, we must look at its elements and see what they are doing to the poem. Then we can infer a meaning to it.

Imagery
Imagery is the senses the poem evokes in the reader. Imagery puts the reader in the poem. It helps the reader to see the poem. The tools of imagery are
1. Senses : sound, sight, touch, smell, taste, and emotion. 2. Figurative language : metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, etc. 3. Contrast

1- Sensory details
Sensory details touch the five senses. They make the poem vivid to the reader. Lets look at the sensory details in the poem Those Winter Sundays.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. Id wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, hed call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of loves austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

2- Figurative Language
Figurative language is words not meant to be taken literally. The words are symbolic. We know these images as metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, and others. Because the poet is comparing a less familiar object to a common one, the comparison makes the familiar image stronger.

A- Metaphor/Simile
Metaphors and similes compare something in the poem to something familiar outside the poem. Making the connection requires background knowledge for the metaphor/simile to be meaningful to the reader. Metaphor: The man is a horse. Simile: After the fast run, she was as limp as a rag doll.

 Metaphors and similes, along with idioms, are called figures of speech. In a figure of speech, the meaning is different from the literal meaning of the words. idiom: she has a skeleton in the closet

B- Personification
When an author uses personification, he gives human characteristics to a non-human object. The trees whispered their secrets to the wind. Look at the human characteristics used by Howard Nemerov in his poem The Vacuum. Also notice how personification reveals the speakers attitude toward housekeeping.

The Vacuum
The house is quiet now The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet, Its bag limp as a stopped lung, its mouth Grinning into the floor, maybe at my Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth.

Ive lived this way long enough, But when my old woman died her soul Went into that vacuum cleaner, and I cant bear To see the bag swell like a belly, eating the dust And the woolen mice, and begin to howl

Because there is old filth everywhere She used to crawl, in corner and under the stair. I know now how life is cheap as dirt, And still the hungry, angry heart Hangs on and howls, biting at air.

C- Hyperbole/ Exaggeration
To make a point a poet may exaggerate. When this exaggeration is beyond belief it is called hyperbole.
The poet uses hyperbole to overstate something to reveal the truth.

3- Contrast
Poets use contrast to further show images. Antithesis strengthens the differences of the image. Fire and Ice Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Robert Frost

Music
The poet uses musical devices to make the poem song-like. In fact, some poems are/were songs. The musical devices we will discuss, and be responsible for, are onomatopoeia, rhythm, rhyme, letters, repetition, pause, and others.

1- Onomatopoeia
We are familiar with onomatopoeia even if we dont understand the word. When two cars collide, what sound do they make? Crash! That is onomatopoeia words that make the sound they are imitating. The buzz of a bee. The cat meows.

2- Rhythm
Rhythm in poetry means the flow of sound. This pattern of rhythm in a poem is called meter. Rhythm is the beat of a poem. It is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. It is the control of sounds in a poem.

3- Rhyme
Exact rhyme are words that have the exact samesounding ending, like cat and hat Slant rhyme words sound similar, but arent exact, like one and down.

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming words.

Rhythm and Rhyme in an excerpt from ALICE by Shel Silverstein

She drank from a bottle called DRINK ME And up she grew so tall, She ate from a plate called TASTE ME And down she shrank so small. And so she changed, while other folks Never tried nothin at all.

Free verse doesnt rhyme or necessarily have rhythm.

Zebra By Judith Thurman white sun black fire escape morning grazing like a zebra outside my window.

4- Letters
Poets also achieve effects by using words that have similar sounds but do not rhyme. Repetitive initial consonant sounds in a poem are called alliteration. Repetition of other consonant sounds is called consonance. Repetitive vowel sounds are called assonance.

Four Seasons Anonymous

Spring is showery, flowery, bowery, Summer: hoppy, choppy, poppy. Autumn: wheesy, sneezy, freezy. Winter: slippy, drippy, nippy.

5- Repetition
Poems also create music through the repetition of words and lines.
Look at the poem One Perfect Rose by Dorothy Parker. One line is repeated three times. Notice how the meaning of the line changes by the third repetition.

One Perfect Rose

by Dorothy Parker A single flowr he sent me, since we met. All tenderly his messenger he chose; Deep-hearted, pure with scented dew still wet One perfect rose. I knew the language of the flowerlet; My fragile leaves, it said, his heart enclose. Love long has taken for his amulet One perfect rose. Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, its always just my luck to get One perfect rose.

6- Pause
When we read poetry, we must be careful to read it with the punctuation the author provided. Our tendency is to pause at the end of each line when we should pause at the punctuation marks.

We Real Cool
by Gwendolyn Brooks
We real cool. We Left school. We

Lurk late. We Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We die soon.

Meaning
Poets can deliver meaning through by using: 1. Allegory: a descriptive story that has a second meaning beneath the surface one. The characters in the story are taken from another story at a different level of meaning; e.g. Adam & Eve.

2. connotation: overtones or suggestions of additional meaning of a word. e.g. The word fire could suggest the meaning of war and hatred. 3. Denotation: the dictionary meaning of a word.

Form
Form is the structure of the poem. Any type of writing must have something to hold it together. The structure can be created through many means: meter, stanza, rhyme scheme, or set patterns of poetry.

1.Meter is the set pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry. 2.A stanza in poetry is like a paragraph in prose. The author divides the poem by grouping words into stanzas. We can often see the structure of the poem by the authors use of stanza. (e.g. each two lines form a Couplet, whereas four lines form a Quatrain) 3. rhyme scheme: having a certain rhyme scheme also is a way to give structure to poetry.

4- Pattern
Some poems are written in a set form like sonnets, haikus, pantoums, limericks, concrete, etc. These patterns sometimes require a regular rhyme scheme or meter; or number of syllables or lines. Other poems sometimes have a free verse form. They do not rhyme or necessarily have
rhythm.

Making Meaning
Consider:
1. Point of view the speaker- (the narrative perspective; who is telling the story or expressing the feeling) 2. Voice (authors style or expression of self) 3. Mood or Tone (authors attitude toward the subject) 4. Theme: the central idea expressed in the poem.