Contents Page Introduction 1 Types of Poetry 2 Rhyme 3 Rhythm 5 The Critical Plan: Part I 10 The Critical Plan: Part II 13 The Critical Plan: Part III 17 The Critical Plan: Part VI 29 Selected Poems 37 Glossary of Literary Terms 63 1 1. Poetry 1. What is poetry? According to Douglas Bush“ Poetry is the distillation of man’s experience in society and solitude, of his joys and visions, his suffering and despair, his wisdom and fortitude, his efforts to grasp the ‘burthen of mystery’. It is because poetry is all these things in every age some people must write and read it and that while its spirit is always changing with changing experience in changing world, great poetry always remains alive and always true”. Poetry communicates feelings not facts, emotions not information; the poet conveys to us some feelings or ideas which we, at once, recognize either actually or potentially as part of our experience. It’s the quality of the experience, its strength and its vitality from which good poetry comes. Poetry as a literary genre can be distinguished from other works of art by shape (form) and intensity of meaning, a concentration of literal meaning i.e. dictionary meaning and other contextual meanings. The language of poetry is different from ordinary language; it has a spell, which holds the reader from all walks of life. Accordingly, form, concentration and intensity of meaning are the three qualities that distinguish the poetic treatment of a subject from its treatment in other genres. Definition of poetry would remain incomplete without quoting Wordsworth: “poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility”. 1.2. Poetic language Poetic language has its specificity. Poets usually use language in a very measured way. Poetic language is patterned in a certain manner in order arouse the feelings of the reader. Poets use few words but meanings incurred are dense. Consider the following example: The apparition of these faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bough Ezra Pound It is clear that the poet has intensely transformed a personal moment into an impersonal and communicable image which does not merely suggests the transient beauty of the faces Pound saw at the La Concorde, a metro station in Paris, but it might have more complex ramifications of meanings. Poetry makes use of certain poetic rules such as rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, etc. This, however, does not mean that there is no poetry breaking rules. 2 2. Types of poetry 2.1 Lyric poetry According to (Oxford Dictionary), lyric is the common name given for a short poem, usually divided into stanzas and directly expressing the poet’s own thoughts and emotions. In ordinary language, the word often means a song: the sort of song which was sung in ancient Greece to the music of the lyre and which was sung in the modern world to the music of guitar, but there are many lyrical poems which would be unsuitable for singing. The typical subject matter of lyrical poetry is love for a mistress or deity. The mood of the speaker is usually related to this love. However, lyric in its widest sense encompasses a large number of more specialized kinds of poetry including the sonnet, elegy, ode and the hymn. A. The Sonnet It was Sir Thomas Wyatt who first introduced the sonnet to English literature. The sonnet is a lyrical poem of fixed form consisting of fourteen lines that can be divided into two parts: an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines) or three quatrains of four lines each and a couplet. In English poetry there are three patterns of sonnets: 1- The Petrarchan sonnet The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave and a sestet rhyming abba abba cdecde (or cdcdcd). 2- The Spenserian sonnet: It consists of three quatrains and a couplet rhyming abab, bcbc, and ee. 3-The Shakespearean sonnet It is like the Spenserian sonnet, which falls into three quatrains and a couplet but has a different rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, and gg B. Ode It was Ben Johnson who established the Pindaric ode in English literature. Pindar was a Greek poet of the fifth century BC who wrote poetic form called the “Ode,” i.e. a long lyrical poem having a serious subject and is elevated in style; Ben Johnson modeled this form on the songs sung by the chorus in drama. So, the chorus moved in a dance rhythm to the left and sang the strophe, then moved to the right singing the antistrophe and finally stood still – the epode. Pindar’s odes were encomiastic, i.e. they were poetry of praise. Pindar wrote them in praise of the winners of the Olympic games. Cowley and Dryden liked to write odes in the Pindaric manner. Cowley introduced the irregular ode in 1656. 3 Some examples of the ode include Thomas Gray’s “The Progress of Poesy”, Wordsworth’s Intimations of immortality of Early Childhood” and “ode to Duty”, Collins’ Ode to Evening”, and Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. C. Elegy Elegy is a poem written to commemorate somebody who is dead. An example of this is Milton’s “lycidas”. The term is often extended to include any poem written in a melancholic, meditative strain, such as Gray’s “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard”. D. Hymn A hymn is a religious song praising God. Poets and ecclesiastics have written many examples in Latin and from the sixteenth Century onwards in English. John Donne, a seventeenth English Metaphysical poet wrote many hymns including “Hymn to My God on My Sickness”. 2.2 Pastoral Poetry: Pastoral Poetry deals with an imaginary world of simple countryside life in which shepherds and shepherdesses fall in love with each other. In this ideal word the lovers sing songs and enjoy the uncorrupted world. The greatest example of this kind is Spenser’s”Shepherd’s Calendar” and a famous poem written by Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd.” 2.3 Narrative Poetry Narrative poetry is a type of poetry which tells a story. The epic and ballad are two narrative poetry genres. Coleridge’s ballad, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Milton’s Paradise Lost are two examples 1-Epic An epic is a long poem dealing with great events or heroic adventures. It is often written in a lofty style. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is the one of great epic in Modern English literature. It is written in blank verse. 2. Ballad A ballad is a popular poem, which tells a story and is handed down by tradition: accordingly, it is often modified in the course of time. When printed books became comparatively cheap, the true ballad ceased to be composed, but imitations were written at the end of 15th century and later. 4 The true ballads have a complete anonymity and a kind of impersonality. They have a story and a lyrical feeling. They are also full of dialogue and drama. They are generally marked by naivety of expression and sentiment, by conventional epithets, e.g. “red gold”, and by certain repetition and parallelism in structure, as in: He had not been a way a week. A week but barely three. The most well known ballads are “Sir Patrick Spens”, “Edward, Edward”, and “Binnorie”. The ballad meter, which embodies most ballad themes, is a quatrain (4- line stanza) of alternate iambic tetrameters and trimeters, rhyming only in the trimeters. “Sir Patrick Spens” is the most famous example of the ballad: The king sits in Dunfermline town, Drinking the blood-red wine. O where will I get a good sailor, To sail this ship o’ mine? O up and spake an elder knight, Sat at the king’s right knee: ‘Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor That ever sailed the sea’. 2.4 Didactic Poetry Poetry that is written with the deliberate purpose of instructing, such as Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”. It flourished during the 18th century, and the heroic couplet was generally used as its medium. It does not include narrative poems from which a moral can be drawn. 2.5. Dramatic Poetry Dramatic poetry which is intended for acting upon the stage. An example of this kind of poetry is Shakespeare’s plays, which are written in blank verse, i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter. 1 3. RHYME Rhyme is one of the poetic devices used by poets in order to secure a poetic effect. It is the repetition of the same sound or sounds at the end of a line in a poem. Rhyme was not used in classical poetry; it was unknown to the Greeks. It was first used in the Latin Church of North Africa around 200 AD. By the fourth century, rhymed poetry had been written, and the churches had come to use it. Fourteenth century Europe used rhyme. Spain was the only country which did not use it. Rhyme has a poetic function. Besides the fact that it delights the ear with the music it produces, it creates an emotional connection that intensifies the logical connection of the poem. There are different kinds of rhyme: 1. Perfect rhyme. 2. Imperfect rhyme. 3. Masculine rhyme (or single rhyme). 4. Feminine rhyme (or double rhyme). 5. Eye rhyme. 6. Pararhyme. (1) Perfect rhyme: When the poet ends the lines of his poem with words which perfectly accord with each other in sound, the rhyme is called perfect rhyme. Spenser for example writes: Help me to blaze Her worthy praise And also: I saw Phoebus thrust out his golden head, Upon her to gaze But when he saw, how broad her beams did spread In "Epithalamion", Spenser writes: To help to deck her and to help to sing, That all the woods may answer and your echo ring In the lines above the words blaze and praise rhyme perfectly and so do the words “head” and “spread”, “gaze” and “amaze,” “sing” and “sing”.