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Poetry Is A Genre of Literature
Poetry Is A Genre of Literature
3. KINDS OF POETRY
1. Lyrical Poetry:
The poetry embracing the common universal
emotions, which is to be sung and danced for merriment
and enjoyment.
2. The Elegy:
A kind of poetry written at the eve of somebody’s
death or at a sorrowful occasion.
3. The Ode:
It is written to an object but not for it. In this kind of
poetry, a poet shares his feelings with an object selected
by the poet.
4. Sonnet:
It is also an expression of a poet’s feelings, but it is
always a fourteen-lined poem.
PATTERNS OF SOUND
POETRY
Lyric poetry is usually fairly short and expresses thoughts
and feelings. Examples are Wordsworth’s Daffodils and
Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill.
Epic poetry can be much longer and deals with the
actions of great men and women or the history of nations.
Examples are Homer’s “Iliad” and Virgil’s “Aeneid.”
Narrative poetry tells a story, like Chaucer’s “Canterbury
Tales”, or Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Dramatic poetry takes the form of a play, and includes
the plays of Shakespeare (which also contain scenes in
prose).
A ballad is a traditional type of narrative poem with short
verses or stanzas and a simple rhyme scheme (=
pattern of rhymes).
An elegy is a type of lyric poem that expresses sadness
for someone who has died Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard mourns all who lived and died
quietly and never had the chance to be great.
An ode is a lyric poem that addresses a person or thing or
celebrates an event. John Keats wrote five great odes,
including “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” and “Ode To Autumn.”
Metre is the rhythm of poetry determined by the
arrangement of stressed and unstressed, or long and short,
syllables in each line of the poem.
Prosody is the theory and study of metre.
Iambic pentameter is the most common metre in English
poetry; each line consists of five feet (pentameter), each
containing an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
syllable (iambic):
/ / / / /
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
(Gray’s Elegy)
Most lines of iambic pentameter, however, are not
absolutely regular in their pattern of stresses:
/ / / /
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
A couplet is a pair of lines of poetry with the same metre,
especially ones that rhyme:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
(Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines, in English written in
iambic pentameter, and with a fixed pattern of rhyme,
often ending with a rhyming couplet.
Blank verse is poetry written in iambic pentameters that
do not rhyme. A lot of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse is in
blank verse, as is Milton’s epic Paradise Lost.
Free verse is poetry without a regular metre or rhyme
scheme. Much twentieth century poetry is written in free
verse, for example T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land.
SONNET COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air
(abbaabba cdcdcd)
Sonnet has always 14 lines. Each line having ten syllables with five beats. Usually, the
first eight lines (the octave) are marked off from the last six (the sestet) by a change in rhyme
and a shift in the poet’s thought.