LITERARY TERMS There are some definitions of poetry.

these definitions are given as under Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. William Hazlitt Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. Christopher Fry Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. Carl Sandburg Poetry is what gets lost in translation. Robert Frost Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822) Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. Thomas Gray Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads. Marianne Moore Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. Kahlil Gibran Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. Plato (427 BC 347 BC) Poetry is the deification of reality. Edith Sitwell (1887 1964), Life magazine, 01-04-63 KINDS OF PETRY Elegy: An Elegy is a sad and thoughtful poem lamenting the death of a person. Example: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray Epigram: An Epigram is a very short, satirical and witty poem usually written as a brief couplet or quatrain. The term epigram is derived from the Greek word 'epigramma' meaning inscription. The epigram was cultivated in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by poets like Ben Jonson and John Donne who wrote twenty-one English epigrams Example: A Lame Begger by John Donne

Ballad:
It tells a story similar to a folk tale or legend and often has a repeated refrain. A ballad is often about love and often sung. A ballad is a story in poetic form. A collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, were collected by Francis James Child in the late 19th century Example: The Mermaid Free Verse: It is a form of Poetry composed of either rhymed or unrhymed lines that have no set fixed metrical pattern. The early 20th-century poets were the first to write what they called "free verse" which allowed them to break from the formula and rigidity of traditional poetry. The poetry of Walt Whitman provides many illustrations of Free Verse including his poem "Song of Myself Example:

Song of Myself by Walt Whitman Sonnets: Sonnets are lyric poems that are 14 lines long falling into three coordinate quatrains and a concluding couplet. Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnets are divided into two quatrains and a six-line sestet Example: O thou my lovely boy by William Shakespeare Epic: Long, serious poems that tells the story of a heroic figure. Some of the most famous epic poems are the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer and the epic poem of The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ( 1807 - 1882 ) . Examples: Hiawatha's Departure from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Paradise lost by John Milton Odes: Odes are long poems which are serious in nature and written to a set structure. John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode To A Nightingale" are probably the most famous examples of this type of poem Examples: Ode To A Nightingale by John Keats There some English poet.
1.Geoffrey Chaucer 2. John Donne

3. Ben Jonson
4. Christopher Marlowe

5. John Milton 6. Shakespeare

7. Dante Alighieri 8. Anne Bradstreet
9. Catullus

10. Lao Tzu 11. Andrew Marvell 12. Mawlawi Rumi

Charctristics of poetry

Figures of Speech

Figures of speech, or figurative language, are ways of describing or explaining things in a non-literal or non-traditional way. For example, a metaphor describes something by likening it to something else: "His touch was a lightning strike." The author doesn't mean that the touch was literally a lightning strike, but rather that it produced feelings of heightened excitement and charged emotions. Other figures of speech may include hyperbole, which is a frequently humorous exaggeration that hints at a larger truth. The quote "I ran faster than a cheetah" is an example of hyperbole. The mention of object to symbolize or represent something else is also hyperbole.

Imagery

Imagery is something concrete, like a sight, smell or taste. Imagery describes what the poet sees, hears or otherwise senses, be it a literal image or one that exists in his mind. Visual imagery, which describes what the poet sees, is the most common type of image in poetry. It creates a picture that the reader or listener can see in his min

Punctuation and Format

The punctuation and format of the poem deal with how it is arranged on the page and how the author intends for you to read it. For example, if a poem has frequent line breaks and short stanzas, it forces you to read it in a different rhythm than if it were arranged in longer stanzas with fewer breaks. To better understand this concept, read poetry aloud instead of in your head; when you read poetry, or listen to the poet read his own work, you see the impact of the format.

Sounds

Poets utilize different sounds and tones throughout poetry to change the way it sounds. For example, the poet may use alliteration, which is when multiple consecutive words start with the same letter. For example, he may write, "Pretty pugs playfully prance on the promenade." The poet may choose his letters to give the poem a soft or sharp sound, as well. For example, choosing words that use "soft" consonants like f, m, and w produces a different sound than words with "hard" consonants like d, k, t and z.

Meter

The meter of a poem is the rhythm or pattern of speech with which you read it, and it doesn't happen by accident. Poets utilize different meters to give their poetry different rhythms, which have technical names like iambic pentameter or spondaic heptameter. These names function like measurements for poetry -- a poem's rhythm and meter can be broken down and analyzed according to measurements like these.

Meter
The basic structure of a poem is better known as meter. This poetry structures form comes in after the symbolism and theme of the poem has been finalized. This basic structure of a poem is important in every line. A piece of poetry comprises of sub units and the each unit conveys a thought successfully.

Theme
The theme of the poem talks about the central idea, the thought behind what the poet wants to convey. A theme can be anything from a description about a person or thing, a thought or even a story. In short a theme stands for whatever the poem is about.

Symbolism
A poem often conveys feelings, thoughts and ideas using symbols, this technique is known as symbolism. A symbol in poetry can stand for anything and makes the reader take a systematic approach which helps him/her look at things in a different light. A symbol is a poetry style that is usually thought of in the beginning.

Rhythm
Rhythm is important for a piece of poetry to flow freely. This element of poetry refers to the music that the statements of a poem make. To better understand this resonation of words along with the sounds and music produced it is important to read a poem out loud.

Rhyme
A poem may either have this poetry structure form or it may not. A poem that rhymes has in its structure the last words of the line matching each other in some form. For instance the last words of the first and second lines would rhyme or the first and third or the second and forth. Similar sounding words are what constitute rhyme for example cat and mat, house and mouse. This poetry style is not present in free verse prose.

Alliteration
Usually used for sound effect, this element of poetry is made up of several words in a line that begin with the same word. To understand this better we can take the example of M where the line goes "musical melody of the music minstrels."

Simile
A simile is used to add to the beauty of a piece of poetry. This is done with the use of "as" or "like" to make comparisons as to make the lines more understandable and expressive. Let us take for instance a line which goes "her laughter was like a babbling brook," here the poet compares her laughter to a brook which makes the idea clear and interesting. The simile is an optional and yet an important element of poetry

Metaphor
This term is used to describe another way of making comparisons in poetry. Using this poetry structure form the comparisons are more complex. This element may or may not be used by a poet in his poetry

Theme and Tone

Like most writers, Emily Dickinson wrote about what she knew and about what intrigued her. A keen observer, she used images from nature, religion, law, music, commerce, medicine, fashion, and domestic activities to probe universal themes: the wonders of nature, the identity of the self, death and immortality, and love. In this poem she probes nature's mysteries through the lens of the rising and setting sun.

Sometimes with humor, sometimes with pathos, Dickinson writes about her subjects. Remembering that she had a strong wit often helps to discern the tone behind her words.

Form and Style

Dickinsons poems are lyrics, generally defined as short poems with a single speaker (not necessarily the poet) who expresses thought and feeling. As in most lyric poetry, the speaker in

Dickinson's poems is often identified in the first person, "I." Dickinson reminded a reader that the I in her poetry does not necessarily speak for the poet herself: When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse it does not mean me but a supposed person (L268). In this poem the "I" addresses the reader as "you."

Like just about all of Dickinsons' poems, this poem has no title. Emily Dickinson titled fewer than 10 of her almost 1800 poems. Her poems are now generally known by their first lines or by the numbers assigned to them by posthumous editors (click here for more information).

For some of Dickinson's poems, more than one manuscript version exists. "I'll tell you how the Sun rose" exists in two manuscripts. In one, the poem is broken into four stanzas of four lines each; in the other, as you see here, there are no stanza breaks.

The poem describes the natural phenomena of sunrise and sunset, but it also describes the difficulties of perceiving the world around us. Initially, "I" exhibits confidence in describing a sunrise. As the poem, like the day, continues, "I" becomes less certain about what it knows: "But how he [the sun] set I know not / There seemed a purple stile."

One of Dickinsons special gifts as a poet is her ability to describe abstract concepts with concrete images. In many Dickinson poems, abstract ideas and material things are used to explain each other, but the relation between them remains complex and unpredictable. Here the sunrise is described in terms of a small village, with church steeples, town news, and ladies' bonnets. The sunset is characterized as the gathering home of a flock. The shifting tone between the beginning and the end of the poem, the speakers more confident telling of the suns rise than of how its sets, suggests that more abstract questions about the mystery of death lurk within these images.

Meter and Rhyme

The meter, or the rhythm of the poem, is usually determined not just by the number of syllables in a line but by how the syllables are accented. Dickinsons verse is often associated with common meter, which is defined by alternating lines of eight syllables and six syllables (8686). In common meter, the syllables usually alternate between unstressed (indicated by a over the syllable) and stressed (). This pattern--one of several types of metrical "feet"--is known as an "iamb." Common meter is often used in sung music, especially hymns (think "Amazing Grace").

Below is an example of common meter from "I'll tell you how the Sun rose."

However, as Cristanne Miller writes in Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson and the Nineteenth Century, Emily Dickinson experimented with a variety of metrical and stanzaic forms, including

short meter (6686) and the ballad stanza, which depends more on beats per line (usually 4 alternating with 3) than on exact syllable counts. Even in common meter, she was not always strict about the number of syllables per line, as the first line in Ill tell you how the Sun rose demonstrates.

As with meter, Dickinsons employment of rhyme is experimental and often not exact. Rhyme that is not perfect is called slant rhyme or approximate rhyme. Slant rhyme, or no rhyme at all, is quite common in modern poetry, but it was less often used in poetry written by Dickinsons contemporaries. In this poem, for example, we would expect "time" to rhyme with "ran."

Punctuation and Syntax

Dickinson most often punctuated her poems with dashes, rather than the more expected array of periods, commas, and other punctuation marks. She also capitalized interior words, not just words at the beginning of a line. Her reasons are not entirely clear.

Both the use of dashes and the use of capitals to stress and personify common nouns were condoned by the grammar text (William Harvey Wells' Grammar of the English Language) that Mount Holyoke Female Seminary adopted and that Dickinson undoubtedly studied to prepare herself for entrance to that school. In addition, the dash was liberally used by many writers, as correspondence from the mid-nineteenth-century demonstrates. While Dickinson was far from the only person to employ it, she may have been the only poet to depend upon it.

While Dickinson's dashes often stand in for more varied punctuation, at other times they serve as bridges between sections of the poembridges that are not otherwise readily apparent. Dickinson may also have intended for the dashes to indicate pauses when reading the poem aloud.

Diction
Dickinsons editing process often focused on word choice rather than on experiments with form or structure. She recorded variant wordings with a + footnote on her manuscript. Sometimes words with radically different meanings are suggested as possible alternatives. Dickinson changed no words between the two versions of "I'll tell you how the Sun rose." For more on Dickinson's process of composition, click here.

Because Dickinson did not publish her poems, she did not have to choose among the different versions of her poems, or among her variant words, to create a "finished" poem. This lack of final authorial choices posed a major challenge to Dickinsons subsequent editors.

stanza

1. One of the divisions of a poem, composed of two or more lines usually characterized by a
common pattern of meter, rhyme, and number of lines. 2. fixed number of verse lines arranged in a definite metrical pattern, forming a unit of a poem 3. Stanza of a poem equals to a paragraph of an essay, without the indentation.

4. A stanza consists of a grouping of two or more lines, set off by a space, that usually has a set
pattern of meter and rhyme. The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph that is seen in prose, related thoughts are grouped into units.

5. In traditional English-language poems, stanzas can be identified and grouped together because
they share a rhyme scheme or a fixed number of lines (as in distich/couplet, tercet, quatrain, cinquain/quintain, sestet). In much modern poetry, stanzas may be arbitrarily presented on the printed page because of publishing conventions that employ such features as white space or punctuation.

6. a division of a poem consisting of a series of lines arranged together in a usually

recurring pattern of meter and rhyme Canto A subdivision of an epic poem. Each of the three books of Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" is divided into cantos. For example, in each of the cantos of "The Inferno," Dante meets the souls of people who were once alive and who have been condemned to punishment for sin. Return to Menu The canto is a principal form of division in a long poem, especially the epic. The word comes from Italian, meaning "song" or singing.Famous poems that employ the canto division are Lus de Cames's Os Lusadas (10 cantos), Lord Byron's Don Juan, Valmiki'sRamayana (500 [1] [2] cantos ), Dante's The Divine Comedy (100 cantos ), and Ezra Pound's The Cantos Ottava rima :is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio.The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c pattern. The form is similar to the older Sicilian octave, but evolved separately and is unrelated. The Sicilian octave is derived from the medieval strambotto and was a crucial step in the development of the sonnet, whereas the ottava rima is related to the canzone, a stanza form. e.g Some examples of this form of writing are the Teseide (1340) and the Filostrato (1347) by Boccaccio. John Hookham Frere (1817 poem Whistlecraft) Quatrain: A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines. Existing in various forms, the quatrain appears in poems from the poetic traditions of various ancient civilizations including Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and China; and, continues into the 21st century, where it is seen in works published in many languages. During Europe's Dark Ages, in the Middle East and especially Iran, polymath poets such as Omar Khayyam continued to popularize this form of poetry, also known as Ruba'i, well beyond their borders and time. There are twelve possible rhyme schemes, but the most traditional and common are: AAAA, AABB, and ABAB. For example: Summer Day by Gorelick, Barbara Rhyme royal: The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. In practice, the stanza can be constructed either as a tercet and two couplets (ab-a, b-b, c-c) or a quatrain and a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c). This allows for variety, especially when the form is used for longer narrative poems. Along with the couplet, it was the standard narrative metre in the late Middle Ages.examples. For example poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Spenserian:

The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc."examples Terza rima: The literal translation of terza rima from Italian is 'third rhyme'. Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet. The two possible endings for the example above are d-e-d, e or d-e-d, e-e. There is no set rhythm for terza rima, but in English, iambic pentameter is generally preferred. For example: Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost Verse paragraphs : are stanzas with no regular number of lines or groups of lines that make up units of sense. They are usually separated by blank lines.Verse paragraphs are frequently used in blank verse and in free verse. Examples: Milton's Paradise Lost is an example of a poem written in verse paragraphs.