
 Frequently employed as a means of
 recording oral history,
 storytelling (epic poetry),
 genealogy,
 law and
 other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose.
Examples: The Ramayana; the Norwegian sagas


 Easy 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 performance


 The 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.


 Different 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)


 In English, rhythm comes from the different stress we put on accented and unaccented syllables: try it with your name:
 Marie
 Oliver
 Lena


 Much 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 and slant rhyme in Neruda’s poetry, as well as assonance , repeated vowel sounds within the line


 Germanic and Old English poetry used patterns of alliteration
 Alliteration and rhyme help to emphasize and define a rhythmic pattern
 Biblical poetry in ancient Hebrew used parallelism , where successive lines reflected each other in grammatical structure, sound structure, notional content, or all three
 This lent itself to call- and-response performance.


 Sound plays a more subtle role in free verse poetry
 Free 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.


 Compared 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 stanza
 Lines 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.


 In English poetry, the most traditional line length is
10 stressed 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/idea


 With 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.