Poetry

It is generally agreed that a poem is a cultural artifact of some sort; beyond that, however, there is little agreement.  A poem may not be in words at all, and a poem can exist without being written down.  Even so, it is commonly accepted that most poems are literary compositions typically characterized by imagination, emotion, significant meaning, sense impressions, and concrete language that invites attention to its own physical features (such as sound and appearance on the page).  Most poems have an orderly arrangement of parts subsumed under some principle of unity, and they seem to have been composed with the dominant purpose of giving aesthetic or emotional pleasure.

Poetry is a term applied to the many forms in which human beings have given rhythmic expression to their most intense perceptions about the world, themselves, and the relation of the two.  Poetry is imaginative, a quality Shakespeare described in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

. . . imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.

Poetry has significance; it adds to our store of knowledge or experience.  This is what Matthew Arnold meant when he wrote of it as a “criticism of life”; what Watts-Dunton meant when he called it an “artistic expression of the human mind.”  The existence of an idea, a significance, a meaning, an attitude, or a feeling distinguishes poetry from doggerel.  However, the fact that poetry is concerned with meaning does not make it didactic.  Great didactic poetry exists, but it is not great because it is didactic.

The first characteristic of poetry, from the standpoint of form, is rhythm.  True, good prose has a more or less conscious rhythm, but the rhythm of poetry is marked by a regularity far surpassing that of prose.  In fact, one of the chief rewards of reading poetry is the satisfaction that comes from finding “variety in uniformity,” a shifting of rhythms that, nevertheless, return to the basic pattern.  The ear recognizes the existence of recurring accents at stated intervals and recognizes, too, variations from these patterns.  Whatever the pattern, there is, even in free verse, a recurrence more regular than in prose.  Frequent rhyme affords an obvious difference by which one may distinguish poetry from prose.  Inversion is rather more justified in poetry than in prose.  Because most poetry is relatively short, it is likely to be characterized by compactness, intense unity, and a climactic order.  A vital element of poetry is its concreteness.  Poetry insists on the specific, the concrete, and the bodily.  The point may be made more obvious by citing Shakespeare:

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Here almost every line presents a concrete image.  The lines are alive with specific language.  In a passage on the imagination Shakespeare has written imaginatively.

To Milton the language of poetry was “simple, sensuous, and impassioned.”  Because one function of poetry is to present images concretely, it is the responsibility of the poet to select language that succeeds in making those images concrete.  Modern poetry tends to dispense with the special vocabulary that was once thought of as the language of poetry (see poetic diction).  Poetry is not fundamentally a kind of language or a kind of use of language.  With poetry, the chief purpose is to please.  The various senses of sight, sound, and color may be appealed to, the various emotions of love, fear, and appreciation of beauty may be called forth, but, whatever the immediate appeal, the ultimate effect of poetry is the giving of pleasure.

The art of poetic composition has undergone a long process of change.  From its original collective interest it has become intensely individualistic; from the ceremonial recounting of tribal and group movements it has become the vehicle for drama, history, and personal emotion.  It is, however, still common today to classify poetry into three great type-divisions: epic, dramatic, and lyric.  These three types are, in turn, broken into further classifications.  Further subdivisions have been made on the basis of mood and purpose, such as the pastoral and didactic poetry.  Most of these types and manners are discussed in their own entries in this Handbook.

[taken from Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 7th edition, 1996, pp. 395, 398-399]

Analyzing Poetry:

• What is your reaction to the poem?  Jot it down.
• Who is the speaker--not the author, but the one who tells the story?
• What is the setting?
• What is the mood?
• Can you put the poem into your own words--paraphrase it?
• What is striking about the language of the poem?  Identify any unusual words or words used in an unusual sense.  Look for archaic words (words no longer commonly used) and repetition of words.  Consider the connotations of important words (the suggestions conjured by the words -- “house” has a different connotation from “home,” although both may refer to the same place).  Is the level of language colloquial or formal?  What kind of figurative language is used: imagery, metaphor, simile, irony, sarcasm?
• Is the poem lyric (expressing emotion) or narrative (telling a story)?
• What is the structure of the poem?  How is it divided?  Does it consist of couplets (two consecutive rhyming lines) or quatrains (units of four lines)?  Notice especially how the beginning and the end relate to each other and to the poem as a whole.
• Does the poem use rhyme (words that sound alike--through assonance or alliteration)?  If so, how does the rhyme contribute to the meaning?
• Does the poem have rhythm (regular meter or beat, patterns of accented and unaccented syllables)?  How does the rhythm contribute to the meaning?
• What does the title of the poem mean?
• What is the major theme of the poem?  How does this underlying idea unify the poem?  How is it related to your own life?
• What other literary works or experiences from life does the poem make you think of?  Jot them down.