Introduction to Poetry
Based on the Broadview Introduction to Literature, Concise Edition,
With material from Jack Lynch’s Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms
Oct. 2, 2015 Meter
• When rhythm is regular, it is often called meter. Each line is made up of a number of metrical feet. A pair of terms is used to describe a line of verse: first the type of foot, then the number of feet per line.
• Typical feet include iambs (the most common in English poetry), trochees, and spondees. Less common are dactyls, anapests, and amphibrachs. • The second term numbers the feet in each line. The most common in English are pentameter (five beats per verse) and tetrameter (four beats per verse); other possibilities are monometer, dimeter, trimeter, and hexameter.
Meter, cont’d
• No meter is perfectly regular. • Apart from the theoretical problem that no two syllables will receive precisely the same stress, most poets (even the most apparently regular) try to vary their verse by introducing occasional metrical substitutions. Foot
• A foot is the basis of meter: that is, the regular unit of rhythm which, when repeated, makes up a verse. • Although the basis of meter in the classical languages was "quantitative" — i.e., "long" and "short" syllables were based on the actual amount of time it took to speak the syllables — virtually all English feet are based on a pattern of stressed and unstressed
syllables. • Each common foot comprises two or three syllables: either one or two stressed syllables, and zero, one, or two unstressed syllables. • * Terms are often imported from Greek and Latin versification, and you may hear "long" and "short" where "stressed" and "unstressed" are meant.
Interruption:
Syllable: Def’ns on this slide from Wikipedia.org
• A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).
• Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter and its stress patterns.
• Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing”. ()
• A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.
Foot, cont’d
• The common feet in English: • Disyllables: • Unstressed, stressed: iamb • E.g. New York
• Stressed, unstressed: trochee • E.g. Newark
• Stressed, stressed: spondee • E.g. Pittsburgh
• Triyllables: • Stressed, unstressed, unstressed: dactyl
• E.g. mannequin • Unstressed, unstressed, stressed: anapest • E.g. interrupt
• Unstressed, stressed, unstressed: amphibrach
• E.g. Nantucket Meter and Foot • Meter is usually described by giving the dominant kind of feet and number in each verse. The basic meters are: • One foot: monometer
• Two feet: dimeter
• Three feet: trimeter
• Four feet: tetrameter
• Five feet: pentameter
• Six feet: hexameter
• Although in most kinds of English verse one type of foot predominates in each line, substitutions are possible.
More, useful concepts:
• Blank verse: lines in iambic pentameter that do not rhyme
• End stopped: a line or lines that end with punctuation, thereby inducing a pause
• Enjambment: when sense and grammatical construction are carried past the end of the line
• Caesura: a pause in the middle of a line of poetry
Rhyme
• Rhyme is the similarity in sound of (typically) the ends of words: the last stressed syllable and the following unstressed syllables (if any). • Rhyme is usually a structuring device in verse. • Not all poetry rhymes. • When rhyming lines are arranged into stanzas, we can identify the rhyme scheme by assigning letters to each rhyme, beginning with a
and proceeding through the alphabet.
Rhyme, cont’d
• Couplets, for instance — such as Pope's
'Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
(a)
Appear in writing, or in judging ill;
(a)
But of the two, much greater is th' offence (b)
To tire the patience, than mislead the sense (b)
—rhyme aa bb, and so on -­‐-­‐ a represents the ill sound, b represents the ence
sound. • A quatrain such as Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife, (a)
Their sober wishes never learned to stray; (b)
Along the cool sequestered vale of life
(a)
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way (b)
is said to rhyme abab, where a represents ife, and b represents ay. Rhyme, cont’d
• More complicated patterns can be described the same way: the sonnet, for instance, can be abab cdcd efef gg or abba abba cdecde; • The Spenserian stanza rhymes ababbcbcc. • Most rhymes appear at the end of lines, but internal rhyme is the appearance of similar sounds somewhere in the middle of a verse. Words in the middle can rhyme with other words in the middle or words at the end of lines. • [Such an arrangement is referred to as slant rhymes in the BIL (470).]
Image
• A representation of a sensory experience or of an object that can be known via the senses.
Imagery
• The range of images in a given work
• E.g. when images form a pattern in a literary work (E.g. the following images budding trees, singing birds, rain, fresh grass come together to form imagery of spring.)
Simile
Up in the morning, work like a dog
It’s better than sitting like a bump on a log.
Mind all your manners; be as quiet as a mouse
Someday you’ll own a home that’s as big as a house.
Well, I know a fella, he eats like a horse
Knocks his old balls round the old golf course.
You oughta see his wife; she’s a cute little dish
She smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish.
• Lyrics to John Prine’s “It’s a Big Old Goofy World”
Metaphor
• An implicit, implied or hidden comparison between two things
• E.g. Love is a drug
• Life is pain
• “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players upon it.” –
William Shakespeare
• “Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.” –George Orwell
• An elaborate or sustained metaphor is called a conceit
Symbol
• Something that represents itself but goes beyond this in suggesting other meanings
• E.g. a forest can represent nature while also representing itself
• A tiger can represent itself and the idea of being wild, untamed, dangerous, and / or beautiful all at the same time
• A rose can represent love, affection, transience, softness or thorniness while still being seen as a rose
Metonymy and synecdoche
• Metonymy is the rhetorical or metaphorical substitution of a one thing for another based on their association or proximity.
• E.g. “Ottawa” for the federal government
• “the crown” for the British monarchy
• Synecdoche is the rhetorical or metaphorical substitution of a part for the whole, or vice versa.
• E.g. How many head are in the field? [of cattle]
• All hands on deck.
Meaning
• “In the medieval period and through the Renaissance the accepted view was that poetry should have a clear meaning and a clear moral purpose” (BIL 478).
• About the middle of the c19th that idea was challenged (notably by Rimbaud, LaForgue, and Mallarmé)
• In the early c20th, notable Modernist poets had rejected that idea, to focus more on the sounds of poetry or the creation of specific images
Point of View
• Do NOT assume the poet and the speaking voice of the poem are the same thing
• Look for – especially personal – pronouns
• Look for evidence of gender, but remember that women can love women and men can love men
• Consider the possibility that you, as reader, are expected to share the speaker’s point of view
• Consider the possibility that you, as reader, are expected to find yourself outside the speaker’s point of view
Form
• Stanza: lines of verse grouped together in a poem, usually separated by space from the rest of the poem
• Couplet: two lines that rhyme; aa, bb, etc.
• Tercet: group, or stanza, of three lines, often rhyming; aaa, bbb, or abc, abc.
• Quatrain: a four line stanza
• Sonnet (see next slide)
• Syntax: the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language.
• Semantics: the study of meaning.
• Hermeneutics: is the theory and methodology of text interpretation,
• Poetics: the theory of literary forms and literary discourse.
• Poetics: is distinguished from hermeneutics by its focus not on the meaning of a text, but rather its understanding of how a text's different elements come together and produce certain effects on the reader
• Def’ns on this slide from
Wikipedia.org