1.
Poetry
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Poetry has a long history, dating back to the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Ancient attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotles Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on such as repetition, verse form and rhyme. From the mid-20th century, poetry has sometimes been more generally regarded as a creative act employing language. Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words, devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or incantatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly figures of such as metaphor, simile and metonymy create a resonance between otherwise disparate images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Kindred forms of resonance may exist, between verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm. Some poetry types are specific to cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, playing with and testing, among other things, in todays increasingly globalized world, poets often adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages. Some scholars believe that the art of poetry may predate literacy, others, however, suggest that poetry did not necessarily predate writing. The oldest surviving poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes from the 3rd millennium BCE in Sumer. An example of Egyptian epic poetry is The Story of Sinuhe, other forms of poetry developed directly from folk songs. The earliest entries in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry, the efforts of ancient thinkers to determine what makes poetry distinctive as a form, and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulted in poetics—the study of the aesthetics of poetry. Some ancient societies, such as Chinas through her Shijing, developed canons of poetic works that had ritual as well as aesthetic importance, Classical thinkers employed classification as a way to define and assess the quality of poetry. Later aestheticians identified three major genres, epic poetry, lyric poetry, and dramatic poetry, treating comedy and tragedy as subgenres of dramatic poetry, Aristotles work was influential throughout the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, as well as in Europe during the Renaissance. English Romantic poet John Keats termed this escape from logic Negative Capability and this romantic approach views form as a key element of successful poetry because form is abstract and distinct from the underlying notional logic
2.
Emily Dickinson
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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, although part of a prominent family with strong ties to its community, Dickinson lived much of her life in reclusive isolation. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a noted penchant for white clothing and became known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence, Dickinson was a recluse for the later years of her life. While Dickinson was a private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime. The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional rules of the time. Dickinsons poems are unique for the era in which she wrote, they contain short lines, typically lack titles, many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, a complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at the homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, on December 10,1830, into a prominent. Her father, Edward Dickinson was a prominent lawyer in Amherst, two hundred years earlier, her patrilineal ancestors had arrived in the New World—in the Puritan Great Migration—where they prospered. Emily Dickinsons paternal grandfather, Samuel Dickinson, had almost single-handedly founded Amherst College, in 1813, he built the homestead, a large mansion on the towns Main Street, that became the focus of Dickinson family life for the better part of a century. On May 6,1828, he married Emily Norcross from Monson and they had three children, William Austin, known as Austin, Aust or Awe Emily Elizabeth Lavinia Norcross, known as Lavinia or Vinnie By all accounts, young Emily was a well-behaved girl. On an extended visit to Monson when she was two, Emilys Aunt Lavinia described Emily as perfectly well & contented—She is a good child &. Emilys aunt also noted the affinity for music and her particular talent for the piano. Dickinson attended primary school in a building on Pleasant Street. Her education was ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl and her father wanted his children well-educated and he followed their progress even while away on business. When Emily was seven, he wrote home, reminding his children to school, and learn, so as to tell me. While Emily consistently described her father in a manner, her correspondence suggests that her mother was regularly cold
3.
Sonnet
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A sonnet is a poem in a specific form which originated in Italy, Giacomo da Lentini is credited with its invention. The term sonnet is derived from the Italian word sonetto, by the thirteenth century it signified a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history, writers of sonnets are sometimes called sonneteers, although the term can be used derisively. The sonnet was created by Giacomo da Lentini, head of the Sicilian School under Emperor Frederick II, guittone dArezzo rediscovered it and brought it to Tuscany where he adapted it to his language when he founded the Siculo-Tuscan School, or Guittonian school of poetry. Other Italian poets of the time, including Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti, wrote sonnets, other fine examples were written by Michelangelo. The structure of a typical Italian sonnet of the included two parts that together formed a compact form of argument. First, the octave, forms the proposition, which describes a problem, or question, followed by a sestet, typically, the ninth line initiates what is called the turn, or volta, which signals the move from proposition to resolution. Even in sonnets that dont strictly follow the structure, the ninth line still often marks a turn by signaling a change in the tone, mood. Later, the abba, abba pattern became the standard for Italian sonnets, for the sestet there were two different possibilities, cde, cde and cdc, cdc. In time, other variants on this scheme were introduced. Petrarch typically used an abba, abba pattern for the octave, in English, both the English or Shakespearean sonnet, and the Italian Petrarchan sonnet are traditionally written in iambic pentameter. Early twentieth-century American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay also wrote mostly Petrarchan sonnets, on His Blindness by Milton, gives a sense of the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, Most Sonnets in Dantes La Vita Nuova are Petrarchan. Chapter VII gives sonnet O voi che per la via, with two sestets and two quatrains, and Ch. VIII, Morte villana, with two sestets and two quatrains and it was written by Paolo Lanfranchi da Pistoia and is addressed to Peter III of Aragon. It employs the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b, a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d-c-d and this poem is historically interesting for its information on north Italian perspectives concerning the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the conflict between the Angevins and Aragonese for Sicily. It congratulates Robert of Naples on his recent victory, there are also two poorly regarded sonnets by the Italian Dante de Maiano. By the late 17th century poets on increasingly relied on stanza forms incorporating rhymed couplets, and by the 18th century fixed-form poems – and, in particular, the resulting versification – less constrained by meter and rhyme patterns than Renaissance poetry – more closely mirrored prose. The Romantics were responsible for a return to many of the poems used during the 15th and 16th centuries. The sonnet however was used until the Parnassians brought it back into favor
4.
Andrew Young (poet)
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Andrew John Young was a Scottish poet and clergyman although recognition of his poetry was slow to develop. Andrew Young was born to the stationmaster of Elgin in Scotland in 1885, two years later his father moved to Edinburgh, where young Andrew attended the Royal High School and later took an arts degree at the University of Edinburgh. Thereafter she devoted her energies to looking after their two children, Anthony and Alison, and making it possible for her husband to pursue his literary career. After the hiatus of war service, Young’s next appointment took him to Sussex where in 1920 he became the minister of the Presbyterian Church at Hove, in that year too Boaz and Ruth, his next collection was published, shortly followed by several more. The style was now that of the Georgian poets, among whom he had many friends, in 1939 he applied for admission to the Anglican ministry and in 1941 became Vicar of the rural parish of Stonegate in East Sussex. In 1959 he was enabled to retire and moved to Yapton, Young came to reject his former style upon achieving the honed and focused nature poetry of Winter Harvest and the four later collections that he called his canon. Earlier poems were now ‘quarried’ and rewritten in his new style and his new manner was characterised by sharp observation and the movement of the poetry towards a striking final image, as in the short Essex Salt-Marsh. Now the tide’s task is done, Marsh runnels turn and chuckling run Or come to a standstill, and as they run or faint Through mud that takes the sunset’s paint, The gullies they have worn Shine as with purple grapes and golden corn. There were several musical settings of his poetry, including the music composed by Imogen Holst for his play Nicodemus. “Christmas Day” from his collection Speak to the Earth also proved popular with composers and was set by Mervyn Roberts, Robin Milford, Neil Butterworth, and Elizabeth Poston. The work of his later years included the two religious poems of Out of the World and Back, highly regarded at the time, and several prose works dealing with botany. His literary reputation was being fostered in these years by Leonard Clark, thereafter his daughter, who had married the poet Edward Lowbury, continued the work. Recognition of Youngs writing came slowly, the Royal Society of Literature awarded him the Benson Medal in 1939 and gave him an honorary fellowship in 1951. In that year too he received a degree from the University of Edinburgh and
5.
Sestina
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A sestina is a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas and it remains a popular poetic form, and many continue to be written by contemporary poets. The oldest-known sestina is Lo ferm voler quel cor mintra, written around 1200 by Arnaut Daniel, hence, Daniel is generally considered the forms inventor, though it has been suggested that he may only have innovated an already existing form. These early sestinas were written in Old Occitan, the form started spilling into Italian with Dante in the 13th century, by the 15th, the result was that the sestina was re-imported into France from Italy in the 16th century. Pontus de Tyard was the first poet to attempt the form in French, the first appearance of the sestina in English print is Ye wastefull woodes, comprising lines 151–89 of the August Æglogue in Edmund Spensers Shepherds Calendar, published in 1579. This scheme was set by the Spaniard Gutierre de Cetina, although they appeared in print later, Philip Sidneys three sestinas may have been written earlier, and are often credited as the first in English. The first published is the double sestina Ye Goatherd Gods, in this variant the standard end-word pattern is repeated for twelve stanzas, ending with a three-line envoi, resulting in a poem of 75 lines. Two others were published in subsequent editions of the Arcadia, the second, Since wailing is a bud of causeful sorrow, is in the standard form. Like Ye Goatherd Gods it is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter and uses exclusively feminine endings, sidney uses the same envoi structure as Spenser. William Drummond of Hawthornden published two sestinas in 1616, which copy the form of Sidneys rhyming sestina, after this, there is an absence of notable sestinas for over 250 years, with John Frederick Nims noting that. There is not a single sestina in the three volumes of the Oxford anthologies that cover the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the 1870s, there was a revival of interest in French forms, led by Andrew Lang, Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley, John Payne, the earliest sestina of this period is Algernon Charles Swinburnes Sestina. In the same volume Swinburne introduces a double sestina that is unlike Sidneys, it comprises 12 stanzas of 12 iambic pentameter lines each, similar to his Sestina, each stanza first repeats end-words 12 then 1 of the previous stanza, the rest are ad lib. The envoi is 10 /9 /4 /6 /1 /5. From the 1930s, a revival of the form took place across the English-speaking world, led by such as W. H. Auden. Sestina, Altaforte by Ezra Pound and Paysage moralisé by W. H. Auden are distinguished modern examples of the sestina, although the sestina has been subject to many revisions throughout its development, there remain several features that define the form. The sestina is composed of six stanzas of six lines, followed by a stanza of three lines, there is no rhyme within the stanzas, instead the sestina is structured through a recurrent pattern of the words that end each line, a technique known as lexical repetition. In the original composed by Daniel, each line is of ten syllables
6.
Quatrain
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A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines. Michel de Nostredame used the form to deliver his famous prophecies in the 16th century. There are fifteen possible rhyme schemes, but the most traditional and common are, AAAA, ABAB, the Rubai form of rhymed quatrain was favored by Omar Khayyám, among others. This work was an inspiration for Edward FitzGeralds Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The rubai was a particularly widespread form, the form rubaiyat reflects the plural. The Midnight Songs poetry form is from Fourth Century China, consisting of regular five-character lines, the person matter involves the personal thoughts and feelings of a courtesan during the four seasons, into which the quatrains are individually assigned. Shairi is an AAAA rhyming form used mainly in The Knight in the Panthers Skin, the Shichigon-zekku form used on Classical Chinese poetry and Japanese poetry. This type of quatrain uses a seven characters length of line, both rhyme and rhythm are key elements, although the former is not restricted to falling at the end of the phrase. The thirty syllable, Celtic verse form Englyn from the Welsh language is another interesting variation of the quatrain, bell number Combination Enclosed rhyme Rhyme scheme http, //www. uni. edu/~gotera/CraftOfPoetry/quatrain. html
7.
Paragraph
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A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences, though not required by the syntax of any language, paragraphs are usually an expected part of formal writing, used to organize longer prose. The oldest classical Greek and Latin writing had little or no space between words and could be written in boustrophedon, over time, text direction became standardized, and word dividers and terminal punctuation became common. The first way to divide sentences into groups was the original paragraphos, the Greek paragraphos evolved into the pilcrow, which in English manuscripts in the Middle Ages can be seen inserted inline between sentences. The hedera leaf has also used in the same way. In ancient manuscripts, another means to divide sentences into paragraphs was a line followed by an initial at the beginning of the next paragraph. An initial is a capital letter, sometimes outdented beyond the margin of the text. This style can be seen, for example, in the original Old English manuscript of Beowulf, outdenting is still used in English typography, though not commonly. Modern English typography usually indicates a new paragraph by indenting the first line and this style can be seen in the United States Constitution from 1787. For additional ornamentation, a leaf or other symbol can be added to the inter-paragraph whitespace. A second common modern English style is to use no indenting, on a typewriter, a double carriage return produces a blank line for this purpose, professional typesetters may put in an arbitrary vertical space by adjusting leading. This style is common in electronic formats, such as on the World Wide Web. Widows and orphans occur when the first line of a paragraph is the last line in a column or page, a recent trendy idea in English is not to indent the first paragraph, but indent those that follow. For example, Robert Bringhurst states that we should Set opening paragraphs flush left, Bringhurst explains as follows, The function of a paragraph is to mark a pause, setting the paragraph apart from what precedes it. If a paragraph is preceded by a title or subhead, the indent is superfluous, the Elements of Typographic Style states that at least one en should be used to indent paragraphs after the first, noting that that is the practical minimum. An em space is the most commonly used paragraph indent, miles Tinker, in his book Legibility of Print, concluded that indenting the first line of paragraphs increases readability by 7%, on the average. In word processing and desktop publishing, a return or paragraph break indicates a new paragraph. This distinction allows word wrap to automatically re-flow text as it is edited, the software may apply vertical whitespace or indenting at paragraph breaks, depending on the selected style
8.
Quintain (poetry)
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A quintain is any poetic form containing five lines. Examples include the tanka, the cinquain, and the limerick
9.
Ghazal
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The ghazal is a poetic form with rhyming couplets and a refrain, each line sharing the same meter. A ghazal may be understood as an expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain. The form is ancient, originating in Arabic poetry in Arabia long before the birth of Islam and it is derived from the Arabian panegyric qasida. The structural requirements of the ghazal are similar in stringency to those of the Petrarchan sonnet, in style and content, it is a genre that has proved capable of an extraordinary variety of expression around its central themes of love and separation. The ghazal spread into South Asia in the 12th century by the influence of Sufi mystics, although the ghazal is most prominently a form of Dari poetry and Urdu poetry, it is now found in the poetry of many languages on the Indian Subcontinent. Ghazals were written by Rumi and Hafiz of Persia, the Azeri poet Fuzûlî in the Ottoman Empire, Mirza Ghalib and Muhammad Iqbal of North India, and Kazi Nazrul Islam of Bengal. Through the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the ghazal became very popular in Germany during the 19th century, the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali was a proponent of the form, both in English and in other languages, he edited a volume of real Ghazals in English. Ghazals were written by Moti Ram Bhatta, the pioneer for Ghazal writing in Nepali language and it is common in ghazals for the poets name to be featured in the last verse. The Arabic word غزل ġazal is pronounced, roughly like the English word guzzle, in English, the word is pronounced /ˈɡʌzəl/ or /ˈɡæzæl/. The most prominent subject of ghazal even after the end of era of Urdu literature has been love, specifically an unconditional. Ghazals from the Indian subcontinent have an influence of Islamic mysticism, Love is always viewed as something that will complete a human being, and if attained will lift him or her into the ranks of the wise, or will bring satisfaction to the soul of the poet. Traditional ghazal law may or may not have an element of sexual desire in it. The love may be directed to either a man or a woman, the ghazal is always written from the point of view of the unrequited lover whose beloved is portrayed as unattainable. Most often, either the beloved has not returned the love or returns it without sincerity or else the societal circumstances do not allow it. The lover is aware and resigned to this fate but continues loving nonetheless, representations of the lovers powerlessness to resist his feelings often include lyrically exaggerated violence. The beloveds power to captivate the speaker may be represented in extended metaphors about the arrows of his eyes, most ghazals can be viewed in a spiritual context, with the Beloved being a metaphor for God or the poets spiritual master. It is the intense Divine Love of Sufism that serves as a model for all the forms of love found in ghazal poetry, most ghazal scholars today recognize that some ghazal couplets are exclusively about Divine Love. Others are about love, but many of them can be interpreted in either context
10.
Villanelle
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A villanelle is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, the villanelle is an example of a fixed verse form. The word derives from Latin, then Italian, and is related to the subject of the form being the pastoral. The form started as a simple song with no fixed form. From this point, its evolution into the form used in the present day is debated. Despite its French origins, the majority of villanelles have been written in English, the word villanelle derives from the Italian villanella, referring to a rustic song or dance, and which comes from villano, meaning peasant or villein. Villano derives from the Medieval Latin villanus, meaning a farmhand, the etymology of the word relates to the fact that the forms initial distinguishing feature was the pastoral subject. The villanelle originated as a simple ballad-like song—in imitation of peasant songs of an oral tradition—with no fixed poetic form and these poems were often of a rustic or pastoral subject matter and contained refrains. Prior to the century, the term would have simply meant country song. The fixed-form villanelle, containing the nineteen-line dual-refrain, derives from Jean Passerats poem Villanelle, the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics suggests that this became the standard villanelle when prosodists such as César-Pierre Richelet based their definitions of the form on that poem. Would lead Wilhelm Ténint and others to think that the villanelle was an antique form, despite its classification and origin as a French poetic form, by far the majority of villanelles have been written in English. Subsequent to the publication of Théodore de Banvilles treatise on prosody Petit traité de poésie française, selected, which contained thirty-two English-language villanelles composed by nineteen poets. Most modernists disdained the villanelle, which associated with the overwrought formal aestheticism of the 1890s. In his 1914 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, william Empson revived the villanelle more seriously in the 1930s, and his contemporaries and friends W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas also picked up the form. Dylan Thomass Do not go gentle into that night is perhaps the most renowned villanelle of all. Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath wrote villanelles in the 1950s and 1960s, the villanelle reached an unprecedented level of popularity in the 1980s and 1990s with the rise of the New Formalism. The villanelle consists of five stanzas of three followed by a single stanza of four lines for a total of nineteen lines. Slight alteration of the line is permissible
11.
Alliteration
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Alliteration is from the Latin word littera, meaning letter of the alphabet, and the first known use of the word to refer to a literary device occurred around 1624. Alliteration narrowly refers to the repetition of a letter in any syllables that, according to the meter, are stressed. Another example is Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Consonance is a broader literary device identified by the repetition of consonant sounds at any point in a word. Alliteration is a case of consonance where the repeated consonant sound is in the stressed syllable. There is one specialised form of alliteration called Symmetrical Alliteration, for example, rust brown blazers rule, purely and fundamentally for analytical purposes or fluoro colour co-ordination forever. Symmetrical alliteration is similar to palindromes in its use of symmetry, the Raven by Edgar Allan Poe has many examples of alliteration including the following line, And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain. Samuel Taylor Coleridges Rime of the Ancient Mariner has the lines of alliteration, For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky. Robert Frosts poem Acquainted with the Night has the line of alliteration, I have stood still. In Walter Abishs novel Alphabetical Africa the first chapter consists solely of words beginning with A, chapter two also permits words beginning with B, and so on, until in chapter 26, Abish allows himself to use words beginning with any letter at all. In the next 25 chapters, he reverses the process, in the nursery rhyme Three Grey Geese by Mother Goose, alliteration can be found in the following lines, Three grey geese in a green field grazing. Grey were the geese and green was the grazing, another commonly recited tongue-twister rhyme illustrating alliteration is Peter Piper, Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, wheres the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked, Alliteration is used in the alliterative verse of Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Irish. It was an important ingredient of the Sanskrit shlokas, Alliteration was used in Old English given names. This is evidenced by the series of 9th century kings of Wessex named Æthelwulf, Æthelbald, Æthelberht. These were followed in the 10th century by their direct descendants Æthelstan and Æthelred II, the Anglo-Saxon saints Tancred, Torhtred and Tova provide a similar example, among siblings. In relation to English poetry, poets can call attention to words in a line of poetry by using alliteration. They can also use alliteration to create a pleasant, rhythmic effect, in the following poetic lines, notice how alliteration is used to emphasize words and to create rhythm, Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Bernard ODonoghue Some papers like writers, are you a writer or a wrapper
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Stanza". Encyclopædia Britannica. 25 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 784.
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "
