Poetry

Deborah Cruz Alemán

842-06-1644
EDPE4078
February 27, 2007
 Poetry is a form of verbal art in which
language is used for its artistic and evocative
qualities in addition to, or instead of, its
external meaning.

 Poetry may be written independently, as

discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction
with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns or
lyrics.
History of Poetry
 Poetry was employed as a means of
recording oral history, storytelling (epic
poetry), genealogy, and law.

 Many of the scriptures currently held to be

sacred by contemporary religious traditions
with their roots in antiquity were composed as
poetry rather than prose to aid memorization
and help guarantee the accuracy of oral
transmission in pre-literate societies.
 Poetry appears among the earliest records of
most literate cultures, with poetic fragments
found on early monoliths, rune stones and
stelae.

 Classical thinkers employed classification as

a way to define and assess the quality of
poetry. Notably, the existing fragments of
Aristotle's Poetics describe three genres of
poetry: the epic, the comic, and the tragic.
Basic elements
Prosody

 Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm,

and intonation of a poem.

 Prosody also may be used more specifically

to refer to the scanning of poetic lines to
show meter.
Rhythm

 Rhythm is the actual sound that results from

a line of poetry.

 The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary

across languages and between poetic
traditions.
Meter
 Meter is the definitive pattern established for
a verse, such as iambic pentameter.

 Meter is often scanned based on the

arrangement of "poetic feet" into lines.

 In the Western poetic tradition, meters are

customarily grouped according to a
characteristic metrical foot and the number of
feet per line.
 The most commonly used
kinds of feet include:
 Trochee: one stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed syllable
 Iamb: unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed syllable
 Dactyl: one stressed syllable followed by two
unstressed syllables
 Anapest: two unstressed syllables followed
by one stressed syllable
 Spondee: two stressed syllables together
Metrical Feet
 Dimeter: two feet
 Trimeter: three feet

 Tetrameter: four feet

 Pentameter: five feet

 Hexameter: six feet

 Heptameter: seven feet

 Octameter: eight feet

Rhyme, alliteration, assonance
 Rhyme, alliteration, assonance and
consonance are ways of creating repetitive
patterns of sound.
 They may be used as an independent
structural element in a poem, to reinforce
rhythmic patterns, or as an ornamental
element.
Rhyming schemes
 In many languages, including modern
European languages and Arabic, poets use
rhyme in set patterns as a structural element
for specific poet forms, such as ballads,
sonnets and rhyming couplets.
 Most rhyme schemes are described using
letters that correspond to sets of rhymes, so if
the first, second and fourth lines of a quatrain
rhyme with each other and the third line does
not rhyme, the quatrain is said to have an "a-
a-b-a" rhyme scheme.
Visual presentation
 Even before the advent of printing, the
appearance of written poetry often added
significant meaning or depth. Acrostic poems
included clues or meanings in the letters
beginning lines or in other specific places in a
poem.
 InArabic, Hebrew, and Chinese poetry, the
presentation of the poems in fine calligraphy
has always been an important part of the
overall artistic and poetic effect for many
poems.
Poetic forms
 Specific poetic forms have been developed
by many cultures. In more developed, closed
or "received" poetic forms, the rhyming
scheme, meter and other elements of a poem
are based on sets of rules, ranging from the
relatively loose rules that govern the
construction of an elegy to the highly
formalized structure of the ghazal or
villanelle.
Sonnets
 Among the most common form of poetry
through the ages is the sonnet, which, by the
thirteenth century, was a poem of fourteen
lines following a set rhyme scheme and
logical structure.
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