Frequently employed as a means of recording oral history storytelling epic poetry genealogy law other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose ID: 782934
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Slide1
A Brief History of Poetry
Slide2Frequently employed
as a means of
recording oral historystorytelling (epic poetry)genealogylawother forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose. Examples: The Ramayana; the Odyssey & Iliad
Predates literacy
Slide3Easy to remember because of its formal nature: rhythm, rhyme, refrains, etc.
Today we have the alphabet song and Grammar Rock that help us remember cultural information in the same way
Poems were composed for, or during, performance in preliterate societies…this meant there was some fluidity of wording, things could change from performance to performanceWhy Poetry?
Slide4The content
of
poems became fixed to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Poets began to compose not for an audience that was sitting in front of them but for an absent reader. With the invention of printing, poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.With literacy…
Slide5Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry.
Free verse
broke away from the rules of meter and defined structure – English poetry was especially breaking away from iambic pentameter and blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter)In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence (the rise and fall of sounds of voice)Poetry and Rhythm
Slide6In English, rhythm comes from the different stress we put on
accented
and unaccented syllables: try it with your name…English Poetry & Rhythm
Slide7Much modern
poetry avoids
traditional rhyme schemes. Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. Rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. Watch for internal rhyme in Neruda’s poetry, as well as assonance, repeated vowel sounds within the linePoetry and Rhyme
Slide8Germanic and Old English poetry used patterns of
alliteration
Alliteration and rhyme help to emphasize and define a rhythmic patternBiblical poetry in ancient Hebrew used parallelism, where successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all threeThis lent itself to
call-
and-response performance.
Alliteration and Parallelism
Slide9S
ound
plays a more subtle role in free verse poetryFree verse poets use it to create pleasing, varied patterns and emphasize or sometimes even illustrate semantic elements of the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance
and
internal rhyme
are among the ways
free verse poets
use sound.
Euphony
refers to the musical, flowing quality of words arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way.
Free Verse and Sound
Slide10Compared with prose, poetry depends less on the linguistic units of sentences and paragraphs, and more on units of
organization
that are purely poetic. Typical structural elements: the line, couplet, and stanzaLines may be end-stopped (ends in a period) or enjambed (runs on to the next line)
Poets use enjambment to
create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.
Poetry and Form
Slide11In English poetry, the most traditional line length is 10 syllables (iambic pentameter)
Mary Oliver argues that lines longer than 10 syllables (like Walt Whitman’s) communicate expanse, and super-human capacity
Oliver says that lines shorter than 10 syllables communicate intensity and a smaller than human focus/ideaLine Length
Slide12With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the visual presentation of their work.
The use
of lines, couplets, stanzas, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. How it looks on the page