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Essay on Versification from the Norton Anthology of PoetryClassification of Poetry

The oldest classification of poetry into three broad categories still holds:

Epic

1. Epic: a long narrative poem, frequently extending to several "books" (sections of several hundred lines), on a great and serious subject. See, for example, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Milton's Paradise Lost, Wordsworth's The Prelude, and Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. With one notable exception, James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, the few poems of comparable length to have been written in the twentieth century - for example, Williams' Paterson and Pound's Cantos - have a freer, less formal structure.

Dramatic

2. Dramatic: poetry, monologue or dialogue, written in the voice of a character assumed by the poet. Space does not permit the inclusion in this anthology of speeches from the many great verse dramas of English literature, but see such dramatic monologues as Tennyson's "Ulysses," Browning's "My Last Duchess," and Richard Howard's response to that poem, "Nikolaus Mardruz to his Master Ferdinand, Count of Tyrol, 1565."

L yric

3. Lyric: originally, a song performed in ancient Greece to the accompaniment of a small harplike instrument called a lyre. The term is now used for any fairly short poem in the voice of a single speaker, although that speaker may sometimes quote others. The reader should be wary of identifying the lyric speaker with the poet, since the "I" of a poem will frequently be that of a fictional character invented by the poet. The principal types of lyric will be found set out under "Forms."

Rhythm

Poetry is the most compressed form of language, and rhythm is an essential component of language. When we speak, we hear a sequence of syllables. These, the basic units of pronunciation, can consist of a vowel sound alone or a vowel with attendant consonants: oh; syl-la-ble. Sometimes m, n, and l are counted as vowel sounds, as in riddle (rid-dl) and prism (pri-zm). In words of two of more syllables, one is almost always given more emphasis or, as we say, is more heavily stressed than the others, so that what we hear in ordinary speech is a sequence of such units, variously stressed and unstressed as, for example:

A poem is a composition written for performance by the human voice.

We call such an analysis of stressed and unstressed syllables scansion (the action or art of scanning a line to determine its division into metrical feet); and a simple system of signs has been evolved to denote stressed and unstressed syllables and any significant pause between them. Adding such scansion marks will produce the following:

The double bar known as a caesura (from the Latin word for "cut"), indicates a natural pause in the speaking voice, which may be short (as here) or long (as between sentences); the U sign indicates an unstressed syllable, and the / sign indicates one that is stressed. The pattern of emphasis, stress, or accent can vary from speaker to speaker and situation to situation. If someone were to contradict my definition of a poem, I might reply: with a heavier stress on is than on any other syllable in the sentence. The signs U and / make no distinction between varying levels of stress and unstress- it being left to the reader to supply such variations- but some analysts use a third sign \ to indicate a stress falling between heavy and light.

Most people pay little or no attention to the sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables in their speaking and writing, but to a poet there is no more important element of a poem.

Meter

If a poem's rhythm is structured into a recurrence of regular- that is, approximately equal- units, we call it meter (from the Greek word for "measure"). There are four metrical systems in English poetry:

accentual, accentual-syllabic, syllabic, and quantitative

Of these, the second accounts for more poems in the English language- and in this anthology- than do the other three together.

Accentual meter, sometimes called "strong-stress meter," is the oldest. The earliest recorded poem in the language- that is, the oldest of Old English or Anglo-Saxon poems, Caedmon's seventh-century "Hymn"- employs a line divided in two by a heavy caesura, each half dominated by the two strongly stressed syllables: Here, as in most Old English poetry, each line is organized by stress and by alliteration (the repetition of speech sounds- vowels or, more usually, consonants- in a sequence of nearby words). One and generally both of the stressed syllables in the first half-line alliterate with the first stressed syllable in the second half-line.

Accentual meter continued to be used into the late fourteenth century, as in Langland's Piers Plowman, which begins: However, following the Saxons' conquest by the Normans in 1066, Saxon native meter was increasingly supplanted by the metrical patterns of Old French poetry brought to England in the wake of William the Conqueror, although the nonalliterative four-stress line would have a long and lively continuing life; structuring, for example, section 2 of Eliot's "The Dry Salvages." The Old English metrical system has been occasionally revived in more recent times, as for Heaney's translation of "The Seafarer," Morgan's translation of Beowulf, or the four-stress lines of Coleridge's "Christabel" and Wilbur's "Junk"; and many English poets from Spenser onward have used alliteration in ways that recall the character of Old and Middle English verse.

Accentual-syllabic meter provided the metrical structure of the new poetry to emerge in the fourteenth century, and its basic unit was the foot, a combination of two or three stressed and/or unstressed syllables. The four most common metrical feet in English poetry are:

iambic,

trochaic,

anapestic, and

dactylic.

Iambs and anapests, which have a strong stress on the last syllable, are said to constitute a rising meter, whereas trochees and dactyls, ending with an unstressed syllable, constitute a falling meter. In addition to these four standard metrical units, there are two other (two-syllable) feet that occur only as occasional variants of the others:

5. spondaic, and 6. pyrrhic.

Metrical Feet

1. Iambic (the noun is "iamb"): an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable, as in "New York." Between the Renaissance and the rise of free verse in this century, iambic meter was the dominant rhythm of English poetry, considered by many English as well as classical Latin writers the meter closest to that of ordinary speech. For this reason, iambic meter is also to be found occasionally in the work of prose writers. Dickens' novel A Tale of Two Cities, for example, begins: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

2. Trochaic (the noun is "trochee"): a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable, as in the word "London" or the line from the nursery rhyme, This is not to say that "London" can appear only in a trochaic line. Provided its natural stress is preserved, it can take its place comfortably in an iambic line, like that from Eliot's The Waste Land:

Whereas iambic meter has a certain gravity, making it a natural choice for poems on solemn subjects, the trochaic foot has a lighter, quicker, more buoyant movement. Hence, for example, its use in Milton's "L'Allegro" (lines 25-29,) and Blake's "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence.

3. Anapestic (the noun is "anapest"): two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable, as in "Tennessee" or the opening of Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib." The last three letters of the word "Assyrian" should be heard as one syllable, a form of contraction known as elision.

4. Dactylic (the noun is "dactyl"): a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, as in "Leningrad." This, like the previous "triple" (three-syllable) foot, the anapest, has a naturally energetic movement, making it suitable for poems with vigorous subjects, though not these only. See Hardy's "The Voice," which begins:

5. Spondaic (the noun is "spondee"): two successive syllables with approximately equal strong stresses, as on the words "draw back" in the second of these lines from Arnold's "Dover Beach":

6. Pyrrhic (the noun is also "pyrrhic"): two successive unstressed or lightly stressed syllables, as in the second foot of the second line above, where the succession of light syllables seems to mimic the rattle of light pebbles that the heavy wave slowly draws back.

Line Lengths

Poets, who consciously or instinctively will select a meter to suit their subject, have also a variety of line lengths from which to choose:

1. monometer 2. dimeter 3. trimeter 4. tetrameter 5. pentameter 6. hexameter 7. heptameter 8. octameter

1. Monometer (one foot): see the fifth and sixth lines of each stanza of Herbert's "Easter Wings," which reflect, in turn, the poverty and thinness of the speaker. Herrick's "Upon His Departure Hence" is a rare example of a complete poem in iambic monometer. The fact that each line is a solitary foot (u /) suggests to the eye the narrow inscription of a gravestone, and to the ear the brevity and loneliness of life.

Thus I Pass by And die, As one, Unknown, And gone: I'm made A shade, And laid I'th grave, There have My cave. Where tell I dwell, Farewell.

2. Dimeter (two feet): iambic dimeter alternates with iambic pentameter in Donne's "A Valediction of Weeping"; and dactylic dimeter (/ u u | / u u) gives Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" its galloping momentum:

Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volleyed and thundered; Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of hell Rode the six hundred.

Lines 4 and 9 each lack a final unstressed syllable- in technical terms such lines are catalectic. This shortening, which gives prominence to the stressed syllable necessary for rhyme, is a common feature of rhyming lines in trochaic and dactylic poems.

3. Trimeter (three feet): Ralegh's "The Lie" and Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" are written in iambic trimeter; and all but the last line of each stanza of Shelley's "To a Skylark" in trochaic trimeter.

4. Tetrameter (four feet): Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is written in iambic tetrameter; and Shakespeare's "Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun" in trochaic tetrameter.

5. Pentameter (five feet): the most popular metrical line in English poetry, the iambic pentameter provides the basic rhythmical framework, or base rhythm, of countless poems from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, from Chaucer's "Prologue" and Shakespeare's sonnets to Hill's "Lachrimae" and Dunn's "In the Grounds." It even contributes to the stately prose of the Declaration of Independence:

Anapestic pentameter is to be found in Browning's "Saul": A missing syllable in the first foot of the second line gives emphasis to the important word "power."

6. Hexameter (six feet): The opening sonnet of Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" and Dowson's "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae" are written in iambic hexameter, a line sometimes known as an alexandrine (probably after a twelfth-century French poem, the Roman d'Alexandre). A single alexandrine is often used to provide a resonant termination to a stanza of shorter lines as, for example, the Spenserian stanza or Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain," in which the shape of the stanza suggests the iceberg that is the poem's subject. Swinburne's "The Last Oracle" is written in trochaic hexameter:

7. Heptameter (seven feet): Kipling's "Tommy" is written in iambic heptameter (or fourteeners, as they are often called, from the number of their syllables), with an added initial syllable in three of the four lines that make up the second half of each stanza.

8. Octameter (eight feet): Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's" is the most famous example of the rare trochaic octameter.

Poets who write in strict conformity to a single metrical pattern will achieve the music of a metronome and soon drive their listeners away. Variation, surprise, is the very essence of every artist's trade; and one of the most important sources of metrical power and pleasure is the perpetual tension between the regular and the irregular, between the expected and the unexpected, the base rhythm and the variation. John Hollander has spoken of the "metrical contract" that poets enter into with their readers from the first few words of a poem. When Frost begins "The Gift Outright"- -we expect what follows to have an iambic base rhythm, but the irregularity or variation in the fourth foot tells us that we are hearing not robot speech but human speech. The stress on "we" makes it, appropriately, one of the two most important words in the line, "we" being the most important presence in the "land."

Frost's poem will serve as an example of ways in which skillful poets will vary their base rhythm. The iambic pentameter gives the poem a stately movement appropriate to the unfolding history of the United States. In the trochaic "reversed feet" at the start of lines 2, 10, 12, and 16, the stress is advanced to lend emphasis to a key word or, in the case of line 8, an important syllable. Spondees in lines 2 ("our land") and 3 ("her people") bring into equal balance the two partners whose union is the theme of the poem.

Such additional heavy stresses are counterbalanced by the light pyrrhic feet at the end of lines 4 and 5, in the middle of line 10, or toward the end of line 14. The multiple irregularities of that line give a wonderful impression of the land stretching westward into space, just as the variations of line 16 give a sense of the nation surging toward its destiny in time. It must be added, however, that scansion is to some extent a matter of interpretation, in which the rhetorical emphasis a particular reader prefers alters the stress pattern. Another reader might prefer - no less correctly - to begin line 9, for example:

An important factor in varying the pattern of a poem is the placing of its pauses or caesurae. One falling in the middle of a line- as in line 4 above- is known as a medial caesura; one falling near the start of a line, an initial caesura; and one falling near or at the end of a line, a terminal caesura. When a caesura occurs as in lines 13 and 14 above, those lines are said to be end-stopped. Lines 3 and 9, however, are called run-on lines (or, to use a French term, they exhibit enjambment- "a striding over"), because the thrust of the incomplete sentence carries on over the end of the verse line. Such transitions tend to increase the pace of the poem, as the end-stopping of lines 10 through 16 slows it down.

A strikingly original and influential blending of the Old English accentual and more modern accentual- syllabic metrical systems was sprung rhythm, conceived and pioneered by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Finding the cadences of his Victorian contemporaries- what he called their "common rhythm"- too measured and mellifluous for his liking, he sought for a stronger, more muscular verse movement. Strength he equated with stress, arguing that "even one stressed syllable may make a foot, and consequently two or more stresses may come running [one after the other], which in common rhythm can, regularly speaking, never happen." In his system of sprung rhythm, each foot began with a stress and could consist of a single stressed syllable (/), a trochee (/ u), a dactyl (/ u u), or what he called a first paeon (/ u u u). His lines will, on occasion, admit other unstressed syllables, as in the sonnet "Felix Randal":

A poetry structured on the principle that strength is stress is particularly well suited to stressful subjects, and the sprung rhythm of what Hopkins called his "terrible sonnets," for example, gives them a dramatic urgency, a sense of anguished struggle that few poets have equalled in accentual-syllabic meter.

A number of other poets have experimented with two other metrical systems:

Syllabic meter measures only the number of syllables in a line, without regard to their stress. Being an inescapable feature of the English language, stress will of course appear in lines composed on syllabic principles, but will fall variously, and usually for rhetorical emphasis, rather than in any formal metrical pattern. When Marianne Moore wished to attack the pretentiousness of much formal "Poetry," she shrewdly chose to do so in syllabics, as lines in syllabic meter are called. The effect is carefully informal and prosaic, and few unalerted readers will notice that there are 19 syllables in the first line of each stanza; 22 in the second; 11 in the third (except for the third line of the third stanza, which has 7); 5 in the fourth; 8 in the fifth; and 13 in the sixth. That the poem succeeds in deflating Poetry (with a capital P) while at once celebrating poetry and creating it is not to be explained by Moore's talent for arithmetic so much as by her unobtrusive skill in modulating the stresses and pauses of colloquial speech. The result is a music like that of good free verse.

Because stress plays a less important role in such Romance languages as French and Italian and in Japanese, their poetry tends to be syllabic in construction, and Pound brilliantly adapts the form of three- line, seventeen-syllable Japanese haiku in a poem whose title is an integral part of the whole:

In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

The syllable count (8, 12, 7) bears only a token relation to that of the strict Japanese pattern (5, 7, 5), but the poem succeeds largely because its internal rhymes- Station /apparition; Metro/petals/wet; crowd/bough- point up a series of distinct stressed syllables that suggest, in an impressionist fashion, a series of distinct white faces.

A number of other modern poets- among them Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Gunn- have written notable poems in syllabics; their efforts to capture the spirit- if not the letter- of a foreign linguistic and poetic tradition may be compared with those of many poets since the Renaissance who have attempted to render Greek and Latin meters into English verse, using the fourth metrical system to be considered here.

Quantitative meter, which structures most Greek, Sanskrit, and later Roman poetry, is based on notions of a syllable's duration in time or its length. This is determined by various conventions of spelling as well as by the type of vowel sound it contains. Complexities arise because Latin has more word-stress than does ancient Greek, and hence there is often an alignment of stress and quantity in foot-patterns of later Roman verse. This is ironic in light of the efforts, on the part of some Renaissance English poets, to "ennoble" the vernacular tradition by following classical metrical models. Although poets like Spenser and Sidney devised elaborate rules for determining the "length" of English syllables according to ancient rules, the theoretical prescriptions often generated poems in which "long" syllables are in fact stressed syllables. Indeed, one defender of quantitative meter in English, Thomas Campion, explicitly recommended a metrical system aligning stress with quantity; he illustrated his theory with some highly successful poems such as "Rose-cheeked Laura." Although some Renaissance experiments in quantitative meter produced poems distinctly less pleasing to the ear than to the (highly educated) eye, others such as those in Sidney's Arcadia, work well and can be compared to the elegant and beautiful "alcaics" that Tennyson addressed to Milton. (An alcaic is a four-line stanza of considerable metrical complexity, named after the ancient Greek poet Alcaeus.) In that poem, Tennyson reminds us that experiments in cultural translation- some more successful than others- have been an enduring part of the English poetic tradition from the Anglo-Saxon era to the present.

Rhyme

Ever since the poetry of Chaucer sprang from the fortunate marriage of Old French and Old English, rhyme (the concurrence, in two or more lines, of the last stressed vowel and of all speech sounds following that vowel) has been closely associated with rhythm in English poetry. It is to be found in the early poems and songs of many languages. Most English speakers meet it first in nursery rhymes, many of which involve numbers ("One, two,/Buckle my shoe"), a fact supporting the theory that rhyme may have had its origin in primitive religious rites and magical spells. From such beginnings poetry has been inextricably linked with music- Caedmon's "Hymn" and the earliest popular ballads were all composed to be sung - and rhyme has been a crucial element in the music of poetry. More than any other factor, it has been responsible for making poetry memorable. Its function is a good deal more complicated than it may at first appear, in that by associating one rhyme-word with another, poets may introduce a remote constellation of associations that may confirm, question, or on occasion deny the literal meaning of their words. Consider, for example, the opening eight lines, or "octet," of Hopkins's sonnet "God's Grandeur":

1. The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

The grand statement of the first line is illustrated, not by the grand examples that the opening of lines 2 and 3 seem to promise, but by the surprising similes of shaken tin foil and olive oil oozing from its press. The down-to-earthiness that these objects have in common is stressed by the foil / oil rhyme that will be confirmed by the toil / soil of lines 6 and 7. At the other end of the cosmic scale, "The grandeur of God" no less appropriately rhymes with "his rod." But what of the implicit coupling of grand God and industrial man in the ensuing trod / shod rhymes of lines 5 and 8? These rhymes remind Hopkins's reader that Christ, too, was a worker, a walker of hard roads, and that "the grandeur of God" is manifest in the world through which the weary generations tread.

Rhymes appearing like these at the end of a line are known as end rhymes, but poets frequently make use of such internal rhyme as the then / men of Hopkins' line 4, the seared / bleared/ smeared of line 6, or the wears / shares of line 7. Assonance (the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds) is present in the not/rod of line 4. This sonnet also contains two examples of a related sound effect, onomatopoeia, sometimes called "echoism," a combination of words whose sound seems to resemble the sound it denotes. So, in lines 3 and 4, the long, slow, alliterative vowels- "ooze of oil"- seem squeezed out by the crushing pressure of the heavily stressed verb that follows. So, too, the triple repetition of "have trod" in line 5 seems to echo the thudding boots of the laboring generations.

All the rhymes so far discussed have been what is known as masculine rhymes in that they consist of a single stressed syllable. Rhyme words in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable- chiming / rhyming- are known as feminine rhymes. Single (one-syllable) and double (two-syllable) rhymes are the most common, but triple and even quadruple rhymes are also to be found, usually in a comic context like that of Gilbert's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" or Byron's Don Juan:

But- Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all?

If the correspondence of rhyming sounds is exact, it is called perfect rhyme or else "full" or "true rhyme." For many centuries almost all English writers of serious poems confined themselves to rhymes of this sort, except for an occasional poetic license (or violation of the rules of versification) such as eye rhymes, words whose endings are spelled alike, and in most instances were pronounced alike, but have in the course of time acquired a different pronunciation: prove / love, daughter / laughter. Since the nineteenth century, however, an increasing number of poets have felt the confident chimes of perfect rhymes inappropriate for poems of doubt, frustration, and grief, and have used various forms of imperfect rhyme:

Off-rhyme (also known as half rhyme, near rhyme, or slant rhyme) differs from perfect rhyme in changing the vowel sound and/or the concluding consonants expected of perfect rhyme. See Byron's gone / alone rhyme in the second stanza of "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-sixth Year," or Dickinson's rhyming of Room / Storm, firm / Room, and be / Fly in "I heard a Fly buzz- when I died-."

Vowel rhyme goes beyond off-rhyme to the point at which rhyme words have only their vowel sound in common. See, for example, the muted but musically effective rhymes of Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill": boughs / towns, green / leaves, starry / barley, climb / eyes / light.

Pararhyme, in which the stressed vowel sounds differ but are flanked by identical or similar consonants, is a term coined by Edmund Blunden to describe Owen's pioneering use of such rhymes. Although they had occurred on occasion before- see trod / trade in lines 5 and 6 of "God's Grandeur"- Owen was the first to employ pararhyme consistently. In such a poem as "Strange Meeting" the second rhyme is usually lower in pitch (has a deeper vowel sound) than the first, producing effects of dissonance, failure, and unfulfillment that subtly reinforce Owen's theme. The last stanza of his "Miners" shows a further refinement:

The centuries will burn rich loads With which we groaned,

Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids, While songs are crooned.

But they will not dream of us poor lads, Left in the ground.

Here, the pitch of the pararhyme rises to reflect the dream of a happier future- loads / lids- before plunging to the desolate reality of lads, a rise and fall repeated in groaned / crooned / ground.

The effect of rhyming- whether the chime is loud or muted- is to a large extent dictated by one rhyme's distance from another, a factor frequently dictated by the rhyme scheme of the poet's chosen stanza form. At one extreme stands Dylan Thomas' "Author's Prologue," a poem of 102 lines, in which line 1 rhymes with line 102, line 2 with 101, and so on down to the central couplet of lines 51-52. Rhyme schemes, however, are seldom so taxing for poets (or their readers) and, as with their choice of meter, are likely to be determined consciously or subconsciously by their knowledge of earlier poems written in this or that form.

Forms

Basic Forms

Having looked at - and listened to - the ways in which metrical feet combine in a poetic line, one can

10. Sestina

11. Limerick l. Blank verse. At one end of the scale, consists of unrhymed (hence "blank") iambic pentameters. Introduced to England by Surrey in his translations from The Aeneid (1554), it soon became the standard meter for Elizabethan poetic drama. No verse form is closer to the natural rhythms of spoken English or more adaptive to different levels of speech. Following the example of Shakespeare, whose kings, clowns, and countryfolk have each their own voice when speaking blank verse, it has been used by dramatists from Marlowe to Eliot. Milton chose it for his religious epic Paradise Lost, Wordsworth for his autobiographical epic The Prelude, and Coleridge for his meditative lyric "Frost at Midnight." During the nineteenth century it became a favorite form of such dramatic monologues as Tennyson's "Ulysses" and Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi," in which a single speaker (who is not the poet himself) addresses a dramatically defined listener in a specific situation and at a critical moment. All of these poems are divided into verse paragraphs of varying length, as distinct from the stanzas of equal length that make up Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears" or Stevens's "Sunday Morning."

2. The couplet, two lines of verse, usually coupled by rhyme, has been a principal unit of English poetry since rhyme entered the language. The first of the anonymous thirteenth- and fourteenth-century lyrics in this anthology is in couplets, but the first poet to use the form consistently was Chaucer, whose "Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales exhibits great flexibility. His narrative momentum tends to overrun line endings, and his pentameter couplets are seldom the self-contained syntactic units one finds in Jonson's "On My First Son." The sustained use of such closed couplets attained its ultimate sophistication in what came to be known as heroic couplets ("heroic" because of their use in epic poems or plays), pioneered by Denham in the seventeenth century and perfected by Dryden and Pope in the eighteenth. The Chaucerian energies of the iambic pentameter were reined in, and each couplet made a balanced whole within the greater balanced whole of its poem, "Mac Flecknoe," for example, or "The Rape of the Lock." As if in reaction against the elevated ("heroic" or "mock heroic") diction and syntactic formality of the heroic couplet, more recent users of the couplet have tended to veer toward the other extreme of informality. Colloquialisms, frequent enjambment, and variable placing of the caesura mask the formal rhyming of Browning's "My Last Duchess," as the speaker of that dramatic monologue seeks to mask its diabolical organization. Owen, with the pararhymes of "Strange Meeting," and Yeats, with the off-rhymed tetrameters of "Under Ben Bulben," achieve similarly informal effects.

3. The tercet is a stanza of three lines usually linked with a single rhyme, although Williams's "Poem" is unrhymed. It may also be a three-line section of a larger poetic structure, as, for example, the sestet of a sonnet. Tercets can be composed of lines of equal length- iambic tetrameter in Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes," trochaic octameter in Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's"- or of different length, as in Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain." An important variant of this form is the linked tercet, or terza rima, in which the second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third lines of the next. A group of such stanzas is commonly concluded with a final line supplying the missing rhyme, as in Wilbur's "First Snow in Alsace," although Shelley expanded the conclusion to a couplet in his "Ode to the West Wind." No verse form in English poetry is more closely identified with its inventor than is terza rima with Dante, who used it for his Divine Comedy. Shelley invokes the inspiration of his great predecessor in choosing the form for his "Ode" written on the outskirts of Dante's Florence, and T. S. Eliot similarly calls the Divine Comedy to mind with the tercets- unrhymed, but aligned on the page like Dante's- of a passage in part 2 of "Little Gidding" that ends:

"From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer."

move as the

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

on to see - and hear - how such lines combine in the larger patterns of the dance, what are known forms of poetry.

Blank verse Couplets Tercet Quatrain Rhyme royal Ottava rima Spenserian stanza Sonnet

Villanelle

The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn.

4. The quatrain, a stanza of four lines, rhymed or unrhymed, is the most common of all English stanzaic forms. And the most common type of quatrain is the ballad stanza, in which lines of iambic tetrameter alternate with iambic trimeter, rhyming abcb (lines 1 and 3 being unrhymed) or, less commonly, abab. This, the stanza of such popular ballads as "Sir Patrick Spens," Coleridge's literary ballad "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," also occurs in many hymns and is there called common meter. The expansion of lines 2 and 4 to tetrameters produces a quatrain known (particularly in hymnbooks) as long meter, the form of Hardy's "Channel Firing." When, on the other hand, the first line is shortened to a trimeter, matching lines 2 and 4, the stanza is called short meter. Gascoigne uses it for "And If I Did What Then?" and Hardy uses it for "I Look into My Glass." Stanzas of iambic pentameter rhyming abab, as in Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," are known as heroic quatrains. The pentameter stanzas of Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur" are rhymed aaba, a rhyme scheme that Frost elaborates in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," where the third line (unrhymed in the "Rubaiyat") rhymes with lines 1, 2, and 4 of the following stanza, producing an effect like that of terza rima. Quatrains can also be in monorhyme, as in Rossetti's "The Woodspurge"; composed of two couplets, as in "Now Go'th Sun Under Wood"; or rhymed abba, as in Tennyson's "In Memoriam A. H. H."

5. Rhyme royal, a seven-line iambic-pentameter stanza rhyming ababbcc, was introduced by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseide, but its name is thought to come from its later use by King James I of Scotland in "The Kingis Quair." Later examples include Wyatt's "They Flee from Me" and those somber stanzas in Auden's "The Shield of Achilles" that describe the present century, as a contrast to the eight-line stanzas with a ballad rhythm that describe a mythic past.

6. Ottava rima is an eight-line stanza, as its Italian name indicates, and it rhymes abababcc. Like terza rima and the sonnet (below), it was introduced to English literature by Sir Thomas Wyatt. Byron put it to brilliant use in Don Juan, frequently undercutting with a comic couplet the seeming seriousness of the six preceding lines. Yeats used ottava rima more gravely in "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Among School Children."

7. The Spenserian stanza has nine lines, the first eight being iambic pentameter and the last an iambic hexameter (an alexandrine), rhyming ababbcbcc. Chaucer had used two such quatrains, linked by three rhymes, as the stanza form of "The Monk's Tale," but Spenser's addition of a concluding alexandrine gave the stanza he devised for The Faerie Queene an inequality in its final couplet, a variation reducing the risk of monotony that can overtake a long series of iambic pentameters. Keats and Hopkins wrote their earliest known poems in this form, and Keats went on to achieve perhaps the fullest expression of its intricate harmonies in "The Eve of St. Agnes." Partly, no doubt, in tribute to that poem, Shelley used the Spenserian stanza in his great elegy on Keats, Adonais; later, the form was a natural choice for the narcotic narrative of Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters." Ottava rima and the Spenserian stanza each open with a quatrain and close with a couplet. These and other of the shorter stanzaic units similarly recur as component parts of certain lyrics with a fixed form.

8. The sonnet, traditionally a poem of fourteen iambic pentameters linked by an intricate rhyme scheme, is one of the oldest verse forms in English. Used by almost every poet in the language, it is the best example of how rhyme and meter can provide the imagination not with a prison but with a theater. The sonnet originated in Italy and, since being introduced to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt (see his "Whoso

List To Hunt") in the early sixteenth century, has been the stage for the soliloquies of countless lovers and for dramatic action ranging from a dinner party to the rape of Leda and the fall of Troy. There are two basic types of sonnet- the Italian or Petrarchan (named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch) and the English or Shakespearean- and a number of variant types, of which the most important is the Spenserian. They differ in their rhyme schemes, and consequently their structure, as follows:

The Italian sonnet, with its distinctive division into octave (an eight-line unit) and sestet (a six-line unit), is structurally suited to a statement followed by a counterstatement, as in Milton's "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent." The blind poet's questioning of divine justice is checked by the voice of Patience, whose haste "to prevent That murmur" is conveyed by the accelerated turn (change in direction of argument or narrative) on the word "but" in the last line of the octave, rather than the first of the sestet. Shelley's "Ozymandias" follows the same pattern of statement and counterstatement, except that its turn comes in the traditional position. Another pattern common to the Italian sonnet- observation (octave)

and amplifying conclusion (sestet)- underlies Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" and Hill's "The Laurel Axe." Of these, only Milton's has a sestet conforming to the conventional rhyme scheme: others, such as Donne's "Holy Sonnets," end with a couplet, sometimes causing them to be mistaken for sonnets of the other type.

The English sonnet falls into three quatrains, with a turn at the end of line 12 and a concluding couplet often of a summary or epigrammatic character. M. H. Abrams has well described the unfolding of Drayton's "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part": "The lover brusquely declares in the first two quatrains that he is glad the affair is cleanly broken off, pauses in the third quatrain as though at the threshold, and in the last two rhymed lines suddenly drops his swagger to make one last plea." Spenser, in the variant form that bears his name, reintroduced to the English sonnet the couplets characteristic of the Italian sonnet. This interweaving of the quatrains, as in sonnet 75 of his "Amoretti," makes possible a more musical and closely developed argument, and tends to reduce the sometimes excessive assertiveness of the final couplet. That last feature of the English sonnet is satirized by Brooke in his "Sonnet Reversed," which turns romantic convention upside down by beginning with the couplet:

Hand trembling towards hand; the amazing lights

Of heart and eye. They stood on supreme heights. The three quatrains that follow record the ensuing anticlimax of suburban married life. Meredith in "Modern Love" stretched the sonnet to sixteen lines; Hopkins cut it short in what he termed his curtal (a curtailed form of "curtailed") sonnet "Pied Beauty"; while Shakespeare concealed a sonnet in Romeo and Juliet (1.5.95 ff.).

Shakespeare's 154 better-known sonnets form a carefully organized progression or sonnet sequence, following the precedent of such earlier sonneteers as Sidney with his "Astrophil and Stella" and Spenser with his "Amoretti." In the nineteenth century Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese" continued a tradition in which the author of "Berryman's Sonnets" has since, with that title, audaciously challenged the author of Shakespeare's sonnets.

9. The villanelle. A French verse form derived from an earlier Italian folk song, retains the circular pattern of a peasant dance. It consists of five tercets rhyming aba followed by a quatrain rhyming abaa, with the first line of the initial tercet recurring as the last line of the second and fourth tercets and the third line of the initial tercet recurring as the last line of the third and fifth tercets, these two refrains (lines of regular recurrence) being again repeated as the last two lines of the poem. If A1 and A2 may be said to represent the first and third lines of the initial tercet the rhyme scheme of the villanelle will look like this:

tercet 1: A1 B A2 2: A1 B A1 3: A1 B A2 4: A1 B A1

5: A1 B A2 quatrain: A1 B A1 A2

The art of writing complicated forms like the villanelle and sestina (see below) is to give them the graceful momentum of good dancing, and the vitality of the dance informs such triumphant examples as Roethke's "The Waking," Bishop's "One Art," and Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."

10. The sestina, the most complicated of the verse forms initiated by the twelfth-century wandering singers known as troubadours, is composed of six stanzas of six lines each, followed by an envoy, or concluding stanza, that incorporates lines or words used before: in this case the words (instead of rhymes) end each line in the following pattern:

stanza1: A B C D E F 2: F A E B D C 3: C F D A B E 4: E C B F A D

5: D E A C F B 6: B D F E C A envoy: E C A or A C E [these lines should contain the remaining three end words]

The earliest example is, in fact a double sestina: Sidney's "Ye Goatherd Gods." Perhaps daunted by the intricate brilliance of this, few poets attempted the form for the next three centuries. It was reintroduced by Swinburne and Pound, who prepared the way for such notable contemporary examples as Bishop's "Sestina," Hecht's "The Book of Yolek," and Ashbery's "The Painter."

11. The limerick (to end this section on a lighter note) is a five-line stanza thought to take its name from an old custom at convivial parties whereby each person was required to sing an extemporized "nonsense verse," which was followed by a chorus containing the words "Will you come up to Limerick?" The acknowledged Old Master of the limerick is Edward Lear, who required that the first and fifth lines end with the same word (usually a place name), a restriction abandoned by many Modern Masters, though triumphantly retained by the anonymous author of this:

There once was a man from Nantucket Who kept all his cash in a bucket;

But his daughter named Nan

Ran away with a man, And as for the bucket, Nantucket.

Composite Forms

Just as good poets have always varied their base rhythm, there have always been those ready to bend, stretch, or in some way modify a fixed form to suit the demands of a particular subject. The earliest systematic and successful pioneer of such variation was John Skelton, who gave his name to what has come to be called "Skeltonic verse." His poems typically- and see, for example, the extract from "Colin Clout"- have short lines of anything from three to seven syllables containing two or three stresses (though more of both are not uncommon), and exploit a single rhyme until inspiration and the resources of the language run out. The breathless urgency of this form has intrigued and influenced such modern poets as Graves and Auden.

Another early composite form employed longer lines: iambic hexameter (twelve syllables) alternating with iambic hexameter (fourteen syllables). This form, known as "poulter's measure"- from the poultryman's practice of giving twelve eggs for the first dozen and fourteen for the second- was used by such sixteenth-century poets as Wyatt, Queen Elizabeth, and Sidney, but has not proved popular since.

The element of the unexpected often accounts for much of the success of poems in such a composite form as Donne's "The Sun Rising." His stanza might be described as a combination of two quatrains (the first rhyming abba, the second cdcd), and a couplet (ee). That description would be accurate but inadequate in that it takes no account of the variation in line length, which is a crucial feature of the poem's structure. It opens explosively with the outrage of the interrupted lover:

Busy old fool, unruly sun,

Why dost thou thus Through windows and through curtains call on us?

Short lines, tetrameter followed by dimeter, suggest the speaker's initial shock and give place, as he begins to recover his composure, to the steadier pentameters that complete the first quatrain. Continuing irritation propels the brisk tetrameters that form the first half of the second quatrain. This, again, is completed by calmer pentameters, and the stanza rounded off like an English sonnet, with a summary pentameter couplet:

Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

This variation in line length achieves a different effect in the third stanza, where the brief trimeter suggests an absence contrasting with the royal presences in the preceding tetrameter:

She's all states, and all princes, I, Nothing else is.

And these lines prepare, both rhetorically and visually, for the contraction and expansion so brilliantly developed in the poem's triumphant close. Similar structural considerations account for the composite stanza forms of scheme between the six-line stanzas of Lowell's poem bring it close to the line that divides composite form from the next category. Arnold's "The Scholar-Gypsy" and Lowell's "Skunk Hour," though variations of line length and rhyme.

Irregular Forms

A poet writing in irregular form will use rhyme and meter but follow no fixed pattern. A classic example is Milton's "Lycidas," which is written in iambic pentameters interspersed with an occasional trimeter, probably modeled on the occasional half-lines that intersperse the hexameters of Virgil's Aeneid. Milton's rhyming in this elegy (a formal lament for a dead person) is similarly varied, and a few lines are unrhymed. The most extensive use of irregular form is to be found in one of the three types of ode.

Long lyric poems of elevated style and elaborate stanzaic structure, the original odes of the Greek poet Pindar were modeled on songs sung by the chorus in Greek drama. The three-part structure of the regular Pindaric ode has been attempted once or twice in English, but more common and more successful has been the irregular Pindaric ode, which has no three-part structure but sections of varying length, varying line length, and varying rhyme scheme. Each of Pindar's odes was written to celebrate someone, and celebration has been the theme of many English Pindaric odes, among them Dryden's "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day," Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," and Lowell's "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket." The desire to celebrate someone or something has also prompted most English odes of the third type, those modeled on the subject matter, tone, and form of the Roman poet Horace. More meditative and restrained than the boldly irregular Pindaric ode, the Horatian ode is usually written in a repeated stanza form- Marvell's "An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" in quatrains, for example, and Keats's "To Autumn" in a composite eleven-line stanza.

Open Forms or Free Verse

At the opposite end of the formal scale from the fixed forms (or, as they are sometimes called, closed forms) of sonnet, villanelle, and sestina, we come to what was long known as free verse, poetry that makes little or no use of traditional rhyme and meter. The term is misleading, however, suggesting to some less thoughtful champions of open forms (as free-verse structures are now increasingly called) a false analogy with political freedom as opposed to slavery, and suggesting to traditionalist opponents the disorder or anarchy implied by Frost's in/famous remark that "writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." There has been much unprofitable debate in this century over the relative merits and "relevance" of closed and open forms, unprofitable because, as will be clear to any reader of this anthology, good poems continue to be written in both. It would be foolish to wish that Larkin wrote like Whitman, or Atwood like Dickinson. Poets must find forms and rhythms appropriate to their voices. When, around 1760, Smart chose an open form for "Jubilate Agno," that incantatory catalogue of the attributes of his cat Jeoffry proclaimed its descent from the King James translation of the Old Testament and, specifically, such parallel cadences as those of Psalm 150:

Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power. Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.

Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp.

These rhythms and rhetorical repetitions, audible also in Blake's Prophetic Books, resurfaced in the work of the nineteenth-century founder of American poetry, as we know it today. Whitman's elegy for an unknown soldier, "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night," may end with a traditional image of the rising sun, like Milton's "Lycidas," but its cadences are those of the Old Testament he read as a boy:

And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,

Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,

Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)

Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten'd.

I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,

And buried him where he fell.

Whitman's breakaway from the prevailing poetic forms of his time was truly revolutionary, but certain traditional techniques he would use for special effect: the concealed well / fell rhyme that gives his elegy its closing chord, for example, or the bounding anapests of an earlier line: The poetic revolution that Whitman initiated was continued by Pound, who wrote of his predecessor:

It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving.

Pound, the carver, unlike Whitman, the pioneer, came to open forms by way of closed forms, a progression reflected in the first four sections of Pound's partly autobiographical portrait of the artist, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley." Each section is less "literary," less formal than the last, quatrains with two rhymes yielding to quatrains with one rhyme and, in section IV, to Whitmanian free verse. A similar progression from the mastery of closed forms to the mastery of open forms can be seen in the development of such other poets as Lawrence, Eliot, Lowell, and Rich.

Pound may have called himself a carver, but he, too, proved a pioneer, opening up terrain that has been more profitably mined by his successors than the highlands, the rolling cadences explored by Smart, Blake, and Whitman. Pound recovered for poets territory then inhabited only by novelists, the low ground of everyday speech, a private rather than a public language. He was aided by Williams, who, in such a poem as "The Red Wheelbarrow," used the simplest cadences of common speech to reveal the extraordinary nature of "ordinary" things:

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Each line depends upon the next to complete it, indicating the interdependence of things in the poem and, by extension, in the world. "The Red Wheelbarrow" bears out the truth of Auden's statement that in free verse "you need an infallible ear to determine where the lines should end."

Some poets have ventured even further into the no man's land between prose and poetry with prose poems. Hill's "Mercian Hymns" may look like prose, but the poet insists that his lines are to be printed exactly as they were; and the reader's ear will detect musical cadences no less linked and flowing than in good free verse. Eye and ear together - to return to the opening of this essay - are never more dramatically engaged than in the reading of such shaped poems as Herbert's "Easter Wings" and Hollander's "Swan and Shadow."

Further Reading

Poets have been making poems for as long as composers have been making music or carpenters furniture, and, just as it would be unreasonable to expect to find the lore and language of music or carpentry distilled into one short essay, so there is more to be said about the making and appreciating of poems than is said here. The fullest treatment of the subject is to be found in A History of English Prosody from the Twelfth Century to the Present Day by George Saintsbury (3 vols., New York, 1906- 1910) and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Alex Preminger, Frank J. Warnke, and O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Princeton, 1965; enl. ed., 1974). More suitable for students are Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Paul Fussell (New York, 1965; rev. ed. 1979), The Structure of Verse, edited by Harvey Gross (New York, 1966; rev. ed. 1979), Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse (New Haven, 1981; enl. ed., 1989), and the appropriate entries in A Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams (New York, 1957; 6th ed., 1990). Each of these has its own more detailed suggestions for further reading.

JON STALLWORTHY

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literally-studying · 7 years

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Literally Studying’s Guide to Metre and Verse

Metre and verse are the bread and butter of poetry, but they can be really damn hard to get your head around! Here is my - hopefully! - handy breakdown of the different styles of metre and verse.

METRIC FEET

Metric Foot: One stressed syllable paired with one or two unstressed syllables, that repeat in a regular pattern.

Iamb: a combination of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (dah dum). Most common in pentameter (five metric feet per line).

Trochee: the opposite of an iamb. A stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable (dum dah). Most common in tetrameter (four metric feet per line). Example: ‘Gall of goat, and slips of yew.’

Dactyll: one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables (dum dah dah) Example: ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’

Anapest: two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (dah dah dum). Most common in trimeter (three feet per line), tetrameter (four feet per line) or hexameter (six feet per line). Doctor Seuss’ favourite metre: ‘And today the Great Yertle, that marvellous he.’

Spondee: two stressed syllables next to one another, with no gap between them. Example: the word ‘football’ is a spondee.

TYPES OF METRE

We can have varying different amounts of these feet per line:

Dimeter: Two metrical feet per line.

Trimeter: Three metrical feet per line.

Tetrameter: Four metrical feet per line.

Pentameter: Five metrical feet per line. The most common verse form.

Hexameter: Six metrical feet per line.

Septameter: Seven metrical feet per line.

Octameter: Eight metrical feet per line.

OTHER HELPFUL TERMS

Iambic Pentameter: The most famous verse form, popularised by Shakespeare, made up of five iambs per line. Example: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ or ‘But soft, what light from yonder window breaks?’

Blank Verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Often thought of as the meter most reflective of everyday speech.

Trochaic Substitution: When an iamb is swapped out for a trochee in a line of otherwise perfect iambic feet. Example: “Now is the winter of our discontent”. The first foot of the line is a trochee, where the rest is made up of iambs. Usually used for emphasis.

Feminine Endings: A line ending in an unstressed syllable, that adds an extra half-foot to the line. Example: “To be, or not to be; that is the question.” Usually used to show confusion or indecision. The opposite of a feminine ending is a masculine ending, a line ending in a stressed syllable, that adds an extra half-foot to the line.

Trochaic Tetrameter: Made up of four trochees per line. Used by Shakespeare for his magical characters, such as the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the Witches in Macbeth. Example: “Double double toil and trouble”. Gives the line a fast pace, and chant-like feel.

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britneyshakespeare · 5 years

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there’s something to me very offputting about alexandrines. iambic hexameter. maybe it’s just my english-speaking brain because they’re so typical in french, but not in english. but i think it’s not just alexandrines, even; it’s any hexameter. i NEVER write in it; not a lot of english poets do. it had its hey-day as a manner of closing tercets in pentameter for poets like pope. it’s mostly a sixteenth-seventeenth century thing in our language, when english poetry was still in a kind of anguished state because no one knew what would be the longevity and spread of the language. i mean, if beowulf, the first english poem, is old english, and no one knows who wrote it, and chaucer was the first english poet, then that period was kind of a middle school phase for english poetry (at least, in comparison to all the progress and different movements since; i think that makes the most sense chronologically). iambic pentameter was still the standard as set by chaucer. but learned poets still would borrow from other languages like french and italian and greek and latin. and it’s french whence we get the alexandrine.

sometimes i think i might just not be used to alexandrines because they’re so infrequent in my native tongue. actually, when i was quite new to poetry, i had trouble getting the hand of iambic pentameter. when i first read shakespeare i had no sense of the rhythm, like a lot of other high school freshman made to go over romeo and juliet. but now, of course i’m comfortable with iambic pentameter! it’s like a second heartbeat. it flows quite naturally. i think some of my initial unease was from the fact that i hadn’t read that much poetry for myself at that point; i was much more comfortable with song lyrics. and a lot of song lyrics in english don’t use pentameter; they use some form of (often imperfect and perhaps unintentional) iambic (or trochaic) heptameter (14 syllables, or 7 feet), at least in pop songs, broken up into two separate lines like the ballad of reading goal by oscar wilde, or most emily dickinson poems. 8 syllables in one line, 6 syllables in the next, another 8-syllable line which may or may not rhyme with the first, and another 6-syllable line that does rhyme (or nearly rhyme) with the second line. an interwoven quatrain. and that works out especially well, and is so common, because a lot of songs use a standard 4/4 beat. 8-syllable lines fill up one measure, and the 6-syllable lines fill up most of a measure, and there’s room for a held-out note or some kind of instrumental riff to fill up the end of the measure. an especially fast-paced pop song may just use iambic tetrameter the whole time and have no pause between lines or held notes (which means, each measure is 8/8/8/8 syllables). or there can be a bunch of different ways to alter it with this meter with alternative lengths of notes, but the general gist is, if you’re filling up a song and each measure is 4 beats, a system of meter where there’s 4 stressed syllables is ideal. four stresses in the lyrics, to match four beats in the music, and unstressed syllables to take up the eighth-notes. and in the matching line of six syllables, one beat, usually at the end, gets to be emphasized by a pause of the vocal to allow the singer to take a breath.

but i’m not giving a long music lesson for nothing. pentameter is very unpopular in music because it exceeds a 4/4 beat measure (unless you get into sixteenth notes or something, or have unusually long pauses for a pop song, or an unusual number of held notes, or an unusually-long held note) (again, a lot of reasons not to use pentameter in your pop song, and why it’s usually used most often in choruses, which tend to be the most unique part of a song so an unusual lyrical meter is less jarring). but i still am now very used to pentameter! some part of me thinks it’s just repetition and practice, and seeing it everywhere since getting into poetry. but i’d also propose that there’s just something pleasing about certain numbers, to the ear. and i don’t know if that has to do with the way we all grow up listening to 4/4 beats in music, or if 4/4 beats in music are particularly common because 4 is just one of those inherently pleasing numbers.

and this is where it matters more how many stresses are in a line, than how many syllables. because my observation applies to any kind of meters, whether they’re iambic (unstressed syllable followed by a stress), trochaic (stressed followed by an unstressed), anapestic (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed), amphibrachic (three syllables, the one in the middle is stressed and the two around it are unstressed), or dactylic feet (a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed). i think 4 is the most pleasing number, thus, tetrameter (4 stresses per measure, regardless of what kind of foot you use) is so common. and this also explains the commonality of iambs and trochees, as disyllabic feet. two disyllabic feet make four overall syllables, and twice as many make four stressed syllables and four feet.

but wait, what about the trisyllabic feet: the anapests, the amphibrachs, the dactyls? well, yes: trisyllabic feet are still not inherently jarring, even if they’re less common in english than the iamb. they’re usually the lyrical meter for waltzes, and that makes sense, what with a 3/4 timestamp. that’s one syllable per beat, and one stressed syllable per measure. but waltzes still often have a pattern that occurs every 4 or 8 measures (or even 2), to make the song sound more rounded and pleasing to the ear.

so 4 is a pleasing number, because it’s twice as many as 2, and half as many as 8; by extension, 2 and 8 are pleasing, because of their relation to 4. i should also say, 1 is a pleasing number, not only because it’s the first whole number that stands alone, but it is half of 2, and one-fourth of four. then why is heptameter (7 feet) so common? how can seven be a pleasing number? it’s prime, for fuck’s sake! you can’t divide it by 2, you can’t divide it by 4. i think that would be because of the pause at the end of a 4/4 measure i mentioned up above. when you read a line (or a 4-foot/3-foot couplet) of heptameter, your brain reads a longer pause at the end, before beginning the next line, than the pause between multiple consecutive lines of tetrameter. when you read lines like “he did not wear his scarlet coat,/for blood and wine are red,/and blood and wine were on his hands/when they found him with the dead” there’s a longer natural pause between the words “red,/and” than “hands/when” because the tetrameter completed by “hands” is heard as a whole mental 4/4 measure, and the longer pause between “red,/and” is your brain finishing the beat before going onto the next line. therefore, 3 counts as a pleasing number because of its allowance of a pause of one beat before getting to a fourth, and 7 is a pleasing number because it is the sum of 4 and 3, two pleasing numbers.

pentameter is still somewhat problematic by this line of thinking because by having 5 stresses it violates the rule of a 4/4 mental measure, and that’s probably why pentameter is so rarely accompanied by other meters. it doesn’t mix well like dimeter/trimeter/tetrameter/heptameter where the amount of pauses and line-breaks played around with during a stanza. but there is often, within a line of pentameter, what is referred to as a “turn”: this was something i learned from geoffrey tillotson while reading his book on alexander pope, in the section about correct versification. around the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllable of a ten-syllable line. so, by the time of the second or third stress, and 2 and 3 are, of course, pleasing numbers. in the turn of pentameter, there is a felt change within the phrase. just in “shall i compare thee to a summer’s day?” the turn would be between the words thee and to. “shall i compare thee...” is an independent clause and “...to a summer’s day?” is a dependent. turns aren’t always so logical and definite as to have to be made up of an independent and dependent clauses; they can be made up of a change in tone, a change of subject, or any number of parts that break up a sentence or phrase. but, traditionally, there is a turn in pentameter (at least by the theory of correctness which poets like pope would follow, and enforce when looking at the works of shakespeare). and the turn happens around stresses 2/3 in most instances. and even if it didn’t happen there, it would happen around stresses 1/4 or 4/1. 2 and 3 are pleasing numbers; 1 and 4 are pleasing numbers. as a consequence, this turn, which joins two micrometers of 2 and 3 feet (or 1 and 4 feet) is pleasing. 5 is the sum of only pleasing numbers, in any instance.

this is why hexameter is so sucky. 6 is not a pleasing number. it should be, seeing as it’s twice 3, but remember, 3 is only pleasing because of the mental pause which completes 4. two 3s making 6 is still two less than a pleasing 8, and two more than a pleasing 4. therefore a mental pause must be twice as long as it is in trimeter, which feels unnatural. it’s an unpleasant pause between lines. it sounds in the brain as if it’s too long to be correctly in any correct relation to 4 or 5, and still short of an expected and acceptable 7 or 8. can you believe it?! 6 is a less pleasing number than 3, 5, or 7: all of them odd numbers, all of them prime numbers. it just sounds ridiculous! and oh, it is. it is.

so that’s why i don’t like alexandrines. they are unnatural, and displeasing, from what i have made out in my own head to be the ultimate mathematical guide for writing pleasant-sounding poetry, at least in english, in a culture of people accustomed to hearing 4/4 music from birth. syllables all mean something different in different languages, and hold different types of weights and tones. i’m sure to the french who innovated it, and the later early-modern english poets who imitated it, that it made sense by the kinds of music they were positioned to compare all metrical poetry to. but alas, in my modern english brain, i cannot make sense of the alexandrine.

#this took so long to write and i don't care if absolutely zero people reply to it because this proto-theory has been floating around my head #for so long #pleasing numbers #that's what i call them at least #4 is probably the most pleasant number #of all the pleasing numbers i named i think 5 would be the least pleasing number because its reasons for being pleasing #are the most technical #i'm still not quite sure i thoroughly explained it as it seems #also it is just one stress over the pleasing 4 #text post #rant #metrical poetry #poetic theory #pentameter was not initially pleasing to me because i was so used to comparing it to tetrameter i think #i of course didn't have the poetic jargon in my language at the time to understand that #i didn't know the word for tetrameter and hadn't been introduced to the concept #but i remember i didn't like it because it felt just a *little* too long #like... exactly one foot too long perhaps?#yeah. yeah it did #also i could make a whole different rant on how i dont *actually* think iambic pentameter is 'the most natural' meter in english #i think that's largely a holdover and since english has become a wider and more diversified language in its sources #other meters are at least equally natural if not more natural #i might make an argument for iambs still needing to be the standard of english meter #but even then i might disagree in that anapests are quite acceptable as well #i have so much more to say on these related subjects i should just teach a class on the history of english form poetry

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jsyart-onlinesketchbook · 5 years

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Learning about writing - Poetry (to create text-based narrative or use writing within my work)

Also sourced information from: https://www.aresearchguide.com/poetry-structure.html

Sonnet - 14 line poem with a specific rhyme scheme... usually end with two lines different from the rest, emphasising their content and giving more importance.

Rhythm - beat of the poem, measured in meters (the number of feet that are in a line of a poem. Monometer, Dimeter, Trimeter, Tetrameter).

Stress or Accent - Each line of a poem contains syllables, whenever emphasis is placed on a specific syllable, it’s referred to as a stressed syllable. Stress refers to the emphasis that is given to that syllable.

Foot - A foot is the term used to describe a combination or certain number of both stressed and unstressed syllables in a single line of a poem, forming a distinct unit. There are several possible combinations, however, some are more popular than the rest.

Rhyme Scheme - a pattern of repeated final sounds in the last words of each rhyme

Dactyl - Metrical foot of 3 syllables, with first stressed and the second/third unstressed. Can create lines that move swiftly and gather force.

Two-Syllable long trochee - A stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable

Iamb - Two syllable foot. First Syllable is unstressed, second is stressed

Iambic Pentameter - Each line of verse is made up of five two-syllable iams, iambs cut across both punctuation and word separation.

Meter all about sound, not spelling.

One line of a verse is usually made up of several feet.

Form:

Stanza - Group of lines similar to a paragraph

Quatrain - Stanza with four lines

Couplet - Stanza with two lines

Ballad - Poetry that tells a story similar to a folktale, often including quatrains and lines that are iambic trimeter

Elegy - Sad and emotional, often written about death

Epic - narrative poem

Lyric - Poetry used to express emotions

Narrative - Poem that tells a story

Sonnet - Typically has 14 lines, however there are multiple variations

Structure:

Line - Is not the same as a sentence, just because words are place in single line does not mean thought’s complete.

#writing

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wordmakingpoets · 7 years

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Poetry Analysis: “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams

I told myself I’d avoid poems I looked at in school with professors, but here I am anyway. Let’s hope this doesn’t turn out to be a complete copy of a lecture I attended two years ago.

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox

and which you were probably saving for breakfast

Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

Here’s the gist of the poem: the speaker ate plums that the addressee was saving. Some think this was an actual note Williams wrote for his wife as an apology that he later turned into a found poem. The shape resembles a receipt or grocery list or maybe a napkin, a simple note a spouse might scratch out before leaving the house for work in the morning. If it is just a scrap of paper, why call it poetry? Why is it worth reading? Personally, as a married woman who often lives a very domestic life, I like the idea that there is beauty in our everyday language. I like all of the things we can communicate without realizing.The text says what the text says.

I’d like to start with some observations that are not mine but are necessary for further discussion: what does the text reveal about the speaker and the addressee? Who are the I and the you? The first word is “I,” a bit of an aggressive start. The speaker is openly selfish and in a comfortable enough relationship with the addressee that the speaker does not even say, “I’m sorry.” Even without the knowledge that this poem is a note from William Carlos Williams to his wife, we can see their relationship on the page. The plums were in the icebox for the addressee’s breakfast, but she didn’t get to eat them yet. The speaker either left early in the morning before the addressee woke up for breakfast, or he arrive home late at night and saw tasty plums for the taking while the addressee is likely sleeping. The speaker knows he will be forgiven. To me, the last two lines aren’t so much gloating as, “btw babe, they were good. you can be happy that I enjoyed them.” It’s this kind of assertiveness and trust that leads me (and a bunch of other readers) to refer to the speaker as “he” and the addressee as “she.” As a married woman, I can vouch that this little note is an accurate glimpse of domestic life.

And now, the formal analysis:

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox

and which you were probably saving for breakfast

Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

Line 1 is trochaic dimeter followed by the iambic line 2. “the plums” is a metrical surprise, that little drop in your stomach when you peek into the fridge and see your leftovers are eaten. Line 3 is maybe an anapest, maybe cretic. Cretic would make the entire poem so far more or less trochaic: – u – u / u – / – u – / u – – this reading makes “the plums” and “box” the only irregularities. The trochees may be broken up but the pulse is still there. Line 4 is the rarely-seen bacchius, u – – , extra stress on “icebox” that already demands a slow-down to account for the c and x with the labial b in between. Line 5 is maybe pyrrhic? Iambic? Line 6 is trochee + dactyl IMO it’s basically two trochees, just with that little “bub” thrown in. We say “probly” most of the time anyway. Line 7, another trochee, supports my trochaic pulse theory. Line 8 and 9 are mirrors, amphibrachs that look similar, too. Line 10 is trochee + amphibrach OR dactyl + trochee. Line 11 is a spondee. Line 12 is another bacchius, cute symmetry with the coldness of “the icebox.”

Stanza 1 has a triple “th” in the first words of lines 2-4. The “I” becomes that much more apparent. Stanza 2 has “which” and “were,” “probably” and “breakfast,” “for” and “breakfast.” Stanza 3 has “s” consonance going on, “delicious,” “so sweet,” “so.” Is it hissing? It ties back to “plums,” “icebox,” and “saving.” The title, too, is full of s’s. For assonance, there’s “eaten,” “sweet,” and “me,” three very key words to the poem. Of these elements, I think the “s” consonance will prove to be the most meaningful as it continues through the whole poem.

The word “were” shows up three times, the only word to do so. The repetition fills me with a sense of past-ness, of haunting, of something lost than cannot be regained.

The first line uses the perfect tense, as in “I have eaten.” Perfect tense describes an action that happened in the past but has continuing effects up to the relative present. For more information on perfect tense, click HERE. The speaker acknowledges the effects of his actions, that because he ate the plums, he gets to reap the benefits of tastiness, and his wife is left in plumlessness.

What is there to say about this poem that has not been said?

Plums are fruit. Fruit carries a lot of connotations in literature--life, youth, Eden, sexual organs. They look a bit like apples, only smaller and much deeper in color. I won’t pretend I’m being original in bringing up Eden alongside this poem--in fact, it was not among my first instincts at all--but it probably needs to be said. These are fruits that are forbidden to the speaker, yet he eats them anyway. Rather than blame anyone for his actions or hide behind fig leaves, he owns up to his actions and admits the fruit was too tempting. Or maybe this note functions as a kind of fig leaf, avoiding having to make that face-to-face confrontation. The speaker can hide behind the note and put off facing the consequences of his actions. (If we imagine this poem as a physical note, it might even be called a “leaf” of paper.) The “s” consonance from earlier comes to mind with the Eden motif, perhaps the hissing of a serpent teasing the temptation of delicious fruit, “so sweet, so cold.”

I think I’ve said about as much as I can about this poem for the time being. The next time you write a note to your roommate about eating the leftovers or not cleaning the kitchen, just think--it could get published and analyzed by nerds like me.

#poetry anaylsis #william carlos williams #paging doctor poet #this is just to say #at last after memes and teasing with the tense thing #here is the analysis

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envirolizard-blog · 5 years

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The Amazon Rainforest. Even the words have a certain magic around them, something that rolls off your tongue and makes you feel peaceful and at home. Maybe because it’s home to more species than anywhere else on the planet, or maybe it’s because its name forms a soothing dactylic dimeter. Alright, maybe I’m a poetry nerd, don’t judge. Anyways, the Amazon is an incredibly diverse and unique place on earth, and it is facing some major challenges going into the next couple of decades. The World Wildlife Fund estimated that by 2030, 27% of the entire rainforest will have been cut down. This is up 7% from current numbers. Though this may not seem huge, it is. It is easy to forget how massive this forest is. I was lucky enough to take a trip into the edge of the Ecuadoran Amazon this past year, and it really put its size into perspective. Once the bus we were on descended from the Andes into the outer limits of the Amazon, I thought we would be relatively close to our destination, Tena, which appeared to be nearby on the Ecuadoran map. I was wrong. We drove for three more hours non-stop, and when we reached the city we had hardly made a dent into the Ecuadoran portion of the forest. The next day, we got on a different bus that went out of the city and a little deeper into the rainforest, to a small town called Misahuallí. From there, we got on a canoe and went down a powerful river -which was a tributary of a tributary of the Amazon river - and arrived at our final destination, an indigenous tribal community where we learned about their culture and way of life. While talking to the canoe driver, I asked him how far it was to reach the Amazon river. He told me that if we were to go downstream for seven days we would reach Coca, the next river. I later looked at the map and realized that that is still very close, even just within the Ecuadoran Amazon. And here’s the thing - Ecuador has one of the smallest sections of rainforest in South America, and the forest spans 9 different countries. I’m just saying, cutting down 7% of the Amazon in little over a decade is no small feat.

Deforestation in the Amazon. http://wwf.panda.org/our_work/forests/deforestation_fronts/deforestation_in_the_amazon/ (accessed Nov 12, 2018).

Photo credit:

Paolo Whitaker. Amazon Soybean Border. https://www.bricsbusinesscouncil.co.za/brazil-news/brazil-curbs-soy-farming-deforestation-in-amazon/ (accessed Nov 12, 2018)

#amazon #rainforest #ecuador #tena #misahuallí

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creatediana · 7 months

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"Glamorous Life of the Substitute Teacher" - a poem written 9/21/2023

#2023 #poem #dactylic meter #dactylic dimeter #rhyme scheme #form poetry #poetry #poets on tumblr #gif #transparent #i was in kindergarten today and it was a very kindergarten day #ill be doing kindergarten tomorrow #it sure as fuck beats subbing high schoolers

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inkingaboutwords-blog · 6 years

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Lesson 2: Editing

1) Foreword

Hey there crew! A couple changes this month: I reordered devices before forms, because it makes more sense that way. I won’t be taking submissions to workshop from here on out, because I just don’t have time to (this platform also isn’t great for interactivity, and that’s really showing, but I’m going to continue to press on with this approach to get the content done so that I can transfer it to something better next year and hopefully that experience will be more interactive and more digestible for people.)

This lesson is pretty heavy (will probably be the heaviest one) because it’s focused on identifying different formats, and there’s a LOT of technical terms to cover regarding that. Two things I want to make clear in regard to that:

I use the words ‘form’ and ‘format’ interchangeably. Just want to make sure that doesn’t confuse anyone. Form is the more correct term, if you’re wondering.

You really, really don’t have to perfectly memorize the correct term for everything to be a poet (this applies to devices as well). It will help you a lot when discussing poetry, and a little when analyzing poetry, but what’s really important is just that you understand the concepts even if you can’t put a name to them. I’m not doing this to make your work more academic, just to give you tools to improve the way you want to.

Anyway, that’s me for the month. Hope you enjoy the lesson.

Mostly sincerely, Vex

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2) Index

1. Foreword

2. Index

3. Lore

3.1 Syllables

3.2 Words

3.3 Rhyme

3.4 Stress

3.5 Foot

3.6 Meter

3.7 Stanza

4. Devices

4.1 Substitution

4.2 Triple construction

5. Forms

5.1 Kelly Lune

5.2 Collom Lune

5.3 Gwawdodyn

5.4 Rispetto

5.5 Descort

6. Skills

6.1 Editing

7. Suggestions

7.1 DIY

7.2 Edit Some Poems

7.3 Edit Backwards

7.4 Write Scansion

7.5 Try New Formats

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3) Lore

3.1) Syllables

In English, a syllable is a set of letters that form a single sound in a word. Meter uses syllables to measure the rhythm of a line. A few poetic forms, such as the Kelly Lune, constrain the number of syllables on each line, and though poetry sites tend to explain forms in terms of syllables, it's rare that this is the intent of the form (if a site gives you a range ie "this line should be 10-13 syllables", then this is a misreading/misexplaining of the form's meter)

It's worth noting that you've probably been taught that a haiku counts syllables per line, but that's incorrect. More on that when we cover haiku.

Rarely, a word may vary in how many syllables you pronounce it with due to divergence between how it was originally said, and how it's commonly said. This is true for words such as "". Technically, this is only really true if you're pronouncing words wrong, but do what you want cause a pirate is free. (Also get used to breaking rules! You need to be comfortable with this to be a poet)

3.2) Words

Similarly, some forms may describe the number of words on a line. The Collum Line is one such example. Many of the forms not measured in meter are designed to be accessible to new poets.

3.3) Rhyme

Rhyme is a repetition of sounds. There are many types of rhyme that we will cover in a later lesson. The most basic form, where two lines end with the same sound, is used to define many formats. We're covering this now because this lesson is about being able to understand formats.

3.4) Stress

Stress is a measure of which sounds in a word are more emphasized. Stress is important because we use it to build rhythm in our works, which affect their flow when performed or read. To denote the stress of a line, people commonly use a notation called scansion. In the simplest form, a stressed syllable is marked as ‘x’ and an unstressed syllable is marked as ‘/’.

e.g. x / / Syl la ble

Further reading: The wikipedia page covers more complex versions.

3.5) Foot

A metric foot is a single measure of a pattern of stresses in a line. Sometimes scansion will have lines broken into feet using ‘|’ (this can also denote a pause in the reading if two are used ‘||’)

e.g.

x / / x / / x / / x / x / Syl la bles | and such sounds, || Will not know | what rhyme | a bounds.

The first three feet in this line are known as dactyls, while the last two are trochees. Here’s a list of what feet are named: Trochee: stressed - unstressed Iamb: unstressed - stressed Spondee: stressed - stressed Pyrrhic: unstressed - unstressed Dactyl: stressed - unstressed - unstressed Anapest: unstressed - unstressed - stressed Amphibrach: unstressed - stressed - unstressed To determine the name of a meter using these feet, just add ‘ic’ to the end. (trochaic, iambic, spondaic, pyrrhic, dactylic, anapestic, amphibrachic)

3.4) Meter (or Metre)

Meter is a way to describe the flow of a line being spoken, written, or read, and create an intentionally concordant (or rarely, discordant) rhythm in how it is delivered. A “base meter” describes the most common meter in the line, verse, or poem you’re talking about. A “mixed meter”, like in the example above, contains different feet in the same line - these are often used at the end of a stanza to break an established pattern for impact. Sometimes a mixed meter line is simply the result of a poet needing to use a particular word (meter is less often the most important factor in word choice). When a metrical foot repeats in a line, a prefix is used to signify how many times the foot has repeated. 1 = meter 2 = dimeter 3 = trimeter 4 = tetrameter 5 = pentameter 6 = hexameter etc. (It's not common to go over 6, since that's a loooong line, but if you feel like fucking shit up, go ahead)

3.7) Stanza

A stanza is a grouping of lines. Stanzas are further categorized according to how many lines are in them. 2 = couplet 3 = tercet 4 = quatrain 5 = quintain 6 = sestet 7 = septet 8 = octave

Most formats group lines for rhythmic structure, but stanzas often are written in a way that gives the stanza structure in other senses. This is an emergent property of the format. Consider a narrative poem in a format with four quatrains followed by a couplet. It would be unusual to split the sections of the narrative in a way that didn't relate to the stanzas of the format. It makes sense to use the first stanza as a setting, the middle two as the conflict, the last quatrain as a climax, and the couplet as an anticlimax. Thus the rhythmic structure informs the narrative structure.

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4) Devices 4.1) Substitution (or Inversion)

Substitution is where an unusual foot appears within an otherwise normal meter. This is described above as ‘mixed meter’ in the section about meter. (When speaking of the device, it would be proper to call it substitution, but in describing the meter of a line ‘mixed meter’ makes more sense.)

A great example comes from a Shakespeare line you’re probably familiar with:

x / x / x / x / / x / To be, | or not | to be, || that is | the ques | tion

In this we see ‘the ques’ is an iambic foot within a trochaic meter.

4.2) Triple construction

Now commonly known as ‘The rule of three’, triple construction involves using three of something. It doesn’t sound like much of a literary device, but it has a big impact in writing. Supposedly this is because three is the smallest number of things required to form an identifiable pattern, making it easy for readers to recognize, and allowing the most people to get the pleasant feeling of seeing where an intentional poetic device was used.

Examples of triple construction that we’ve already discussed today include tercets, dactyls, anapests, amphibrachs, and trimeter. It also occurs very often in parallelism, which we covered in the last lesson (in fact, the example I used, “I came, I saw, I conquered”, is probably the most famous instance of triple construction ever). ---

5) Forms

5.1) Kelly Lune

The Kelly lune is a format created by Robert Kelly in an attempt to make an English version of the haiku that was more conceptually consistent with the original form of haiku than the commonly accepted 5-7-5 format. The form still lacks some of the constraint of an original haiku. The Kelly lune is defined as a tercet of 5-3-5 syllables. It has no other restrictions.

5.2) Collom Lune

A variant of the Kelly lune reportedly created through a misremembering of the constraints defines the format by words instead of syllables. It’s still a tercet, but the Collom lune has 3-5-3 words.

5.3) Gwawdodyn

This form is an example of formats described by rhyme. The area where the Gwawdodyn originated has many quatrain-based formats, and you’ll note the similarity they have to the Limerick. It involves a quatrain that has three 9 syllable lines (the 1st, 2nd, and 4th) that all rhyme, and a 3rd line of 10 syllables with an internal rhyme that either rhymes with the end of the 3rd line, or the middle of the 4th.

So either --------A --------A ----B----B --------A or --------A --------A ----B----C ----B---A (worth noting C could also rhyme with A)

5.4) Rispetto

A rispetto is a form that is defined primarily by its meter. It involves two quatrains of iambic tetrameter. It also has a rhyme scheme of abab ccdd.

5.5) Descort

This is both the strangest and hardest of the forms we’ll cover this lesson. It is not defined by its meter, syllables, words, or rhyme, but rather by its inconsistency in all those things. In a descort, each stanza must have a different number of lines, and each line must have a different number of syllables. A rhyme must not occur in multiple stanzas. Some sources I’ve seen report that each line also must have a different meter from each other line. I’m not sure this is following the original definition, but it certainly is in the spirit of the format. One poet from the time and place the format was created is known to have written descort poems where each stanza is in a different language. ---

6) Skills

6.1) Editing

Following up on last month’s lesson in drafting and analysis, now we’re going to get into the hard work. For my 2nd draft, I like to start by ensuring every stanza is in the correct order. Usually a beginning and an ending stand out evidently (though I find I often have multiple suitable endings and have to choose one - the others will be later reworked to suit another space in the narrative). If you don’t have obvious contenders for the beginning or ending, or if you feel what you do have isn’t strong enough, make a note to come up with something better.

The ending is typically the most evocative or contemplative line. If you plan on performing the piece, it’s a good idea to ensure an audience will recognize it as an ending or you’ll get scattered applause (more about this later when we cover performing). Usually the reason an audience might not recognize an ending is because the piece doesn’t contain a strong narrative for it to conclude, so they are unsure if more is coming. We could go deeper into this, but for brevity, let’s just say if you have this problem just test the piece with friends until you get it right.

The beginning is more versatile, so whatever suits the piece or your preference is likely fine. Strong beginnings tend to set up a context for the narrative, or an unusual perspective on a well-known topic.

Once you have two locations, the rest of the poem can be constructed as a journey from one to the other. Start by placing the best work in your draft between the beginning and ending in whatever order suits it, then go through and mark spots where it is difficult for a reader to jump from one thought to another. These will most often be between stanzas, but consider carefully where this also might occur between lines. Once the gaps are identified, you can fill them in with things that will make that transition easier (in a later lesson, we’ll look at how this relates to memorizing). Throughout this process, you’ll likely find lines that sound janky, or ones that speak about things a bit removed from the overarching narrative. I mark all of these lines, and occasionally stanzas, to be deleted (though not all of them will be, some will just be improved).

The sad truth is that to allow your poem to reach its potential, you often have to cut out something you really want to say about the topic because it doesn’t fit the narrative well enough. Don’t be scared to cut those - the narrative will deliver your message so don’t cheapen it with clutter. Cutting lines isn’t forfeiting your right to say them, you can still put those thoughts into a draft for a separate poem.

Once you have a poem with a solid narrative, you can start digging into the finer details to polish them up:

Check your syllable counts and stanza sizes. Even when writing open verse, consistency benefits a piece by introducing intentional repetition to the rhythm. It will also set you up for the next step.

Work out the meter of each line, and use that to decide where the impact will be. Meter is a mechanic you can use to emphasize anything you wish. The more consistent an existing pattern (in this case, the base meter of your work and how often you apply it to a line) is, the more powerful it is to break it using mixed meter or an unexpected change.

Consider adding more devices. Your first draft will have devices you came up with and thought were clever, but it will also have lines you wrote just to support those devices. Often these lines can be adjusted to contain more devices. For emphasis, it pays to pick the devices already used in the best lines of the poem, and try to use those particular devices elsewhere.

Consider removing devices. Sometimes they can be too heavy-handed in one area (I see this most often with assonance), or they overshadow or obscure the actual messages in the words (and this with metaphor). If you feel you have those problems, try to distribute the devices more evenly throughout the piece (it’s worth noting that this may not necessarily mean removing devices. It’s possible to achieve the same effect by spreading that heavy-handed use of devices throughout the whole work. If you can manage this, it will REALLY pay off.)

Further watching: Paper People by Harry Baker for an example of said pay off for using assonance heavily but consistently.

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7) Suggestions

7.1) DIY

Have a try at making your own format. Remember that the rules around meter, syllable, and rhyme are only the mechanical side of a format. Most poetic forms were created in a particular context with a particular purpose, such as to entertain, to tell oral history, to court, etc. The context you write your form for may give it narrative or syntactic rules as well.

7.2) Edit Some Drafts

Take something you wrote for lesson one and try the editing steps above. Make a checklist to ensure you try each step. Note down additional steps your own process requires.

7.3) Edit Backwards

Take the same first draft and swap the beginning with the ending, and see how this changes the end result and also the editing process.

7.4) Write Scansion

Find a poem you like and determine the meter of each of its lines. Identify the base meter, and name all of its stanzas and meters. Write down the rhyme scheme if it has one. It’s much easier to read meta-information about poems if you practice identifying it in existing pieces. Don’t just do this for a classic poem, try some songs you like too.

7.5) Try New Formats

Try out the formats we covered today. They’re all pretty easy and interesting forms to write.

#Poetry #Learning #Education #Wellington #Wellington NZ #Aotearoa #Poetry in Motion Wellington

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1. What is theory? - Theory is interdisciplinary discourse (debate) with effects outside an original discipline. - Theory is analytical and speculative - Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural. 2. What is Literature? - Elusive term (always changing) - modern sense of literature is 200 years old - prior to 1800 literature was ‘'memorized'' not INTERPRETED - in fiction, the relation of what speakers say to what authors think is always a matter of interpretation - lit-er-a-ture n. Abbr. lit. 1. A body of writings in prose or verse 2. Imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value. 3. The art or occupation of a literary writer. 4. The body of written work produced by scholars or researchers in a given field. 5. Printed material. 3. ‘Literariness' of nonliterary phenomena. - Qualities often thought to be literary turn out to be crucial to non-literary discourses and practices as well — For instance HISTORY or historical NARRATIVE — Everyday language (we use FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE) — Advertisements, newspapers, magazines, leaflets 4. Literature = Imaginative writing - The term literature seems best if we limit it to the art of literature, that is, to imaginative literature. (from Wellek and Warren, 1973, pp.20-23) 5. Imaginative vs. non-imaginative - non-imaginative writing employs logical abstractions - imaginative writing employs artistic images 6. Criteria for literature - content, considering aesthetic principles and semantic characteristics of language.

7. Literature as the ‘foregrounding' of language Literature is a speech act or textual event that elicits certain kinds of attention 8. Functions of literature - Mimetic, Aesthetic, Didactic, Entertaining, Social, Ideological, etc. 9. So what is literature then? - Imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value foregrounding aesthetic principles and semantic characteristics of language - In order to call a text literary, it should fulfill certain function: Mimetic, Aesthetic, Didactic, Entertaining, Social, Ideological, etc. 10. Genre - The term genre usually refers to one of the three classical literary forms of: — fiction / prose / prose fiction (old-fashioned term epic) — drama — poetry 11. Text type - Beside the genres which describe general areas of traditional literature, the term text type has been introduced, under the influence of linguistics. - The term text type refers to highly conventional written documents such as instruction manuals, sermons, obituaries, advertising texts, catalogues, and scientific or scholarly writing 12. Discourse — usually a learned discussion, spoken or written, on a philosophical, political, literary or religious topic. It is closely related to a treatise and a dissertation. — is the broadest term, referring to a variety of written and oral manifestations which share common thematic or structural features. The boundaries of these terms are not fixed and vary depending on the context in which they appear. 13. Literary scholarship — Literary history follows the historical development of literature from the earliest times to the present (DEVELOPMENT). — Literary criticism analyses the content and form of creative literature, making use of the knowledge of literary theory and literary history. It addresses both, readers and writers. It employs aesthetic and formal criteria in the evaluation of literary works (INTERPRETATION) — Literary theory studies the forms, categories, criteria, techniques, literary types, genres, language, composition, style and other relevant aspects of creative writing (METHODS) 14. 4 major approach to text — text — author — reader — context 15. TEXT — Philology — Rhetoric — Formalism and Structuralism — New Criticism — Semiotics and Deconstruction 16. AUTHOR — Biographical Criticism — Psychoanalytic Criticism — Phenomenology 17. CONTEXT — Literary History — Marxist Literary Theory — Feminist Literary Theory — New Historicism and Cultural Studies 18. READER — Reception Theory — Reception History — Reader-Response Criticism 19. Literary canon - term originally used for holy→texts. It now refers to the entirety of those literary texts which are considered to be the most important in literary history. 20. Intertextuality - A term coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966 to denote the interdependence of literary texts, the interdependence of any one literary text with all those that have gone before it. - literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the 'absorption and transformation of another'. (Cuddon, 424). 21. Connotation vs denotation — Connotation: the suggesting of a meaning by a word apart from the thing it explicitly names or describes (implied/associated meaning) — Denotation: a direct specific meaning as distinct from an implied or associated idea 22. Specifications of poetry - The oldest genre in literary history - Origins in music (‘'lyre'' / ''harp’') - ,,poieo’' (greek) - to make, to produce) - Traditional attempts to define poetry juxtapose poetry with prose (limited) - Verse, rhyme, meter - Modern poetry/experimental poetry/free verse/prose poems 23. Major categories — Narrative poetry — Lyric poetry 24. Poetic language? - Lexical-thematic dimension: DICTION, RHETORICAL FIGUES, THEME - Visual dimension: STANZAS, FORM - Rhythmic-acoustic dimension: RHYME, METER, ONOMATOPOEIA 25. Traditional classification - Lyric poetry - plotlessness, subjectivity, reflexive, meditative — Ode (a song) — Ballad (a tragedy narrated in from of a song) — Elegy (a funeral song)

— Epitaph (life of a dead person, inscription on grave) — Pastoral poem (bucolics) — Psalm — Romance (similar to ballad, love story) - Epic poetry - composition of a story in verse — Epic (long narrative poem) — Chronicle (historical event in verse) — Historical song — Ballad (both lyric and epic) 26. Meter - Meter is the rhythm established by a poem, and it is usually dependent not only on the number of syllables in a line but also on the way those syllables are accented.

- This rhythm is often described as a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.

- The rhythmic unit is often described as a foot; patterns of feet can be identified and labeled.

- A foot may be iambic, which follows a pattern of unstressed/stressed syllables.

- For example, "The DOG went WALKing DOWN the ROAD and BARKED."

- Because there are five iambs, or feet, this line follows the conventions of iambic pentameter (pent = five), the common form in Shakespeare's time. Stressed syllables are conventionally labeled with a „/" mark and unstressed syllables with a "U" mark. 27. Basic feet UX – iamb (iambic)

XU – trochee (trochaic)

XX – spondee (spondaic)

UU – pyrrhic

UUX- anapaest (anapaestic)

XUU – dactyl, dactylic 28. Line-lengths One foot per line: monometer

Two feet per line: dimeter

Three feet per line: trimeter

Four feet per line: tetrameter

five feet per line: pentameter

Six feet per line: hexameter

Seven feet per line: heptameter

Eight feet per line: octameter 29. Rhyme - The basic definition of rhyme is two words that sound alike.

- the most recognizable convention of poetry,

- Rhyme helps to unify a poem; it also repeats a sound that links one concept to another, thus helping to determine the structure of a poem.

- When two subsequent lines rhyme, it is likely that they are thematically linked, or that the next set of rhymed lines signifies a slight departure.

- Especially in modern poetry, for which conventions aren't as rigidly determined as they were during the English Renaissance or in the eighteenth century, rhyme can indicate a poetic theme or the willingness to structure a subject that seems otherwise chaotic.

- Rhyme works closely with meter in this regard. 30. Varieties of rhyme - internal rhyme functions within a line of poetry, for example alliteration, assonance

- end rhyme occurs at the end of the line and at the end of some other line, usually within the same stanza if not in subsequent lines

- Eye rhyme 31. Rhyme - There are also a number of predetermined rhyme schemes associated with different forms of poetry. Once you have identified a rhyme scheme, examine it closely to determine

(1) how rigid it is,

(2) how closely it conforms to a predetermined rhyme scheme)

(3) what function it serves 32. Figurative language SIMILE = rhetorical figure which „compares“ two different things by connecting them with „like“, „than“, „as“ (e.g. cold as ice, my love is like a red, red rose)

METAPHOR = rhetorical figure which „equates“ one thing with another without actually „comparing“ the two (e.g. my love is a red, red rose)

PERSONIFICATION = a type of metaphor, comparing something to a human being (e.g. the wind sighed gloomily)

ALLITERATION = words starting with the same sound (burning bright)

ASSONANCE = repeated vowel sound (e.g. dark arms)

ONOMATOPOEIA = words that sound like what they mean (e.g. bubble, bang) 33. Synecdoche, metonymy, oxymoron - Synecdoche (substitution): is the rhetorical or metaphorical substitution of a part for the whole, or vice versa (when you refer to workers as "hands," you allow a part (the hand) to stand in for the whole (the person)

- Metonymy: (association) the rhetorical or metaphorical substitution of a one thing for another based on their association or proximity („Crown“, Oval office, )

- Oxymoron: The juxtaposition of two contradictory ideas is oxymoron in order to create striking effects (such as Milton's "darkness visible"). 34. Personification, simili, metaphor - Personification: when something other than a human being (often an abstract quality) is treated as a human being — as when we speak of blind Justice — it is said to be personified.

- Simili: An explicit comparison of two things, usually with the word "as" or "like

- Metaphor: A metaphor is an implied comparison of two things 35. Blank verse vs. Free verse - Blank verse is the technical name for unrhymed iambic pentameter — i.e., verse of five feet per line, with the stress on the second beat of each foot. It's one of the most common kinds of verse in English: many passages of Shakespeare's plays are in blank verse, as is Milton's Paradise Lost and Wordsworth's Prelude.

- Free verse — most common in the twentieth century, but by no means unique to it — has no fixed metrical foot, and often no fixed number of feet per verse. Free verse is sometimes called by its French name, verse libre. 36. Caesure - Caesura is a pause somewhere in the middle of a verse. Some lines have strong (easily recognizable) caesurae, which usually coincide with punctuation in the line, while others have weak ones. It's conventional to mark them with a double bar;

Alas how changed! || What sudden horrors rise! 37. Verse forms and Stanza forms - Couplet: two rhyming lines of verse following immediately after each other

- Heroic couplet: Rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter

- Tercet (triplet) – is a stanza with three lines of the same rhyme ( -baker-forsake her-Quaker)

- Terza rima – a variant of the tercet used by Dante. It uses a chain rhyme: the second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and the third line of the next stanza (aba, bcb cdc etc. ) Quatrain – stanza comprising of four lines of verse with various rhyme patterns. When written in iambic pentameter and rhyming abab it is called heroic quatrain

Rhyme royal – 7 line stanza in iambic pentameter ababbcc

Ottava rima – stanza with 8 lines abababcc 38. Enjambment Enjambment: When the units of sense in a passage of poetry don't coincide with the verses, and the sense runs on from one verse to another, the lines are said to be enjambed

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; 39. Sonnet - Sonnet: A lyric poem of fourteen lines. There are two common species of sonnet, distinguished by their rhyme scheme: the Italian and the Shakespearean.

- The Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet can be broken into two parts, the octave (eight lines) and the sestet (six lines)

- he Shakespearean (or English) sonnet is instead three quatrains and a couplet: 40. Irony - verbal irony (sometimes called rhetorical irony), probably the most straightforward kind of irony, the speaker says something different from what he or she really believes

- In its crudest form it's called sarcasm, where the speaker intentionally says the opposite of what he or she believes,

- Understatement (figure of speech employed by writers or speakers to intentionally make a situation seem less important than it really is

- Hyperbole (exaggeration)(it cost a fortune)

- Euphemism is used to express a mild, indirect, or vague term to substitute for a harsh, blunt, or offensive term (pass away, fade away) 41. Satire vs. Parody — Satire: is the ridicule of some vice or imperfection — an attack on someone or something by making it look ridiculous or worthy of scorn.

— Parody — not to be confused with satire — is the imitation of either formal or thematic elements of one work in another for humorous purposes 42. Chiasmus Chiasmus: a rhetorical device in which two or more clauses are balanced against each other by the reversal of their structures in order to produce an artistic effect

“Never let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You.” 43. Objectives of lecture Elements of Fiction

- Style

- Tone

- Language

- Symbolism

- Allegory

- Image

- Classification of intermediate and minor fiction

- Classification of genres between fiction and fact 44. Style - refers to the language conventions used to construct the story

- A fiction writer can manipulate diction (choice of words), sentence structure, phrasing, dialogue, and other aspects of language to create style

- Formal? Informal? Minimalistic? Richly detailed? Descriptive? Flowing?

- The communicative effect created by the author's style can be referred to as the story's voice - TONE 45. Tone - refers to the attitude that the story creates toward its subject matter:

- Dramatic? Humorous? Imperative? 46. Image - is a sensory impression used to create meaning in a story.

— visual imagery: Imagery of sight — aural imagery: Imagery of sound (e.g., the soft hiss of skis) — olfactory imagery: Imagery of smell (e.g., the smell of spilled beer) — tactile imagery: Imagery of touch (e.g., bare feet on a hot sidewalk) — gustatory imagery: Imagery of taste (e.g., the bland taste of starchy bananas) 47. Symbolism - If an image in a story is used repeatedly and begins to carry multiple layers of meaning

- Symbol indicates rather than explicates

- It is an indirect suggestion

- Symbol is a term for „objects“ in a literary text which transcend their material meaning (Klarer, p. 153)

- Symbol is one of the most characteristic means of artistic expression and is material for the construction of a myth

- Symbols can be universal or culturally based - Symbol is a word or a group of words which stands for a meaning other than the literal or purely denonative

- Origins in Greek symballein – „to compare by throwing together“

- Generally undestood symbols are CONVENTIONAL/ARBITRARY/TRADITIONAL symbols

- As opposed to PRIVATE SYMBOLISM

(Franko, p. 22-23) 48. Allegory - An allegory is a work of fiction in which the symbols, characters, and events come to represent, in a somewhat point-by-point fashion, a different metaphysical, political, or social situation

- Greek allégorein – „to talk differently, in images“

- Political allegory (J.Swift´s Gulliver´s Travels, G. Orwell´s Animal Farm)

- Moral allegory (N.Hawthorne´s The Scarlet Letter) 49. Fiction Term to differentiate the literary prose genres of short story, novella, and novel from drama and poetry; in older secondary sources it is often used synonymously with epic (Klarer, 139) 50. Fiction genres - development Epic (7th century BC) – Homer -Iliad, Odyssey

Romance (14th century)(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)

Novel (17th c. Don Quixote, 18th c. Robinson Crusoe 51. Novel Picaresque novel

Bildungsroman

Epistolary novel

Historical novel

Satirical novel

Utopian novel

Gothic novel

Detective novel 52. Intermediate fiction — Fabliau (predecessor of a short story)

-narrative in verse

- Often comic

- Implies criticism of the manners and morals

- Based on folklore 53. Short story Simple plot

Short time span

Number of character limited

Limited setting 54. Intermediate fiction - Exemplum (Moral anecdote)

- Legend (medieval epic genre with religious theme, in verse or prose, contains motifs of fantasy and miracle

- Idyll (epic poem with a pastoral theme) 55. Minor fiction - Fable

- Parable

- Bestiary (compendium of animals)

- Fairy tale (set in imaginary world, supernatural elements, fictitious nature, stereotyped characters, moral lesson

- Anecdote (short narrative depicting a real or imaginary event, humorous, witty, brief narration

56. Between fiction and fact — Essay

- Emphasis on the individuality

- Primary concern is to report a fact however it employs devices of fiction, poetry or drama

- Subjective tone

- Highly individualized statements 57. Drama - Draó (Greek) – to act, to perform

- Drama as a genre: all works written for the theatre

- A single play

- A serious play

- Any event charged with conflict and tension (Franko, p. 162)

- A drama or play is a form of storytelling in which actors make the characters come alive through speech (dialogue) and action (stage directions). 58. Drama Combines aspects of all three Literary Genres - Literature

— fictional or factual

— common literary elements like plot, setting, characterization, and dialog

- Poetry

— Many plays are written in verse (for example, “Oedipus Rex” and “Othello”)

- Drama

— Its unique characteristic is that it is written to be performed 59. Play is to be performed in front of the audience - Playwright

- Script

- Dialogue

- Staging: stage directions (Acts, Scenes, set, props) — the history of western drama is rooted in ancient Greece 60. Greek Theatre - Ancient Greek theatre developed as part of religious festivals

- A “choric hymn” called the dithyramb was composed in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility

- The hymn was sung by a chorus of 50 men

- Over time, Thespis, the first actor, added dialog between one actor and the chorus 61. Thespis - Added the first actor to interact with the dithyramb chorus

- Called the actor the “protagonist”

- Is said to have performed in Athens in 534 B.C.

- The term “thespian,” (having to do with drama or theater) comes from his name.

- When the Dionysian festivals changed to drama competitions, Thespis was the first winner 62. Aristotle’s Rules for Ancient Drama - Classical Unities

— Unity of time (action must occur within 24 hours)

— Unity of place (action takes place in one location)

— Unity of action (single plot)

- Catharsis

— Socially acceptable purging of emotions such as anger, fear, or grief 63. Dramatic structure — Plot: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denoument

— Character

- Dialogue: conversations of characters onstage

- Monologue: long speech given by one character to others

- Soliloquy: speech by a character alone onstage to himself or herself or to the audience

- Asides: remarks made to the audience or to one character; the other characters onstage do not hear an aside

— Setting (realistic and detailed?) or (abstract and minimal?) 64. Classification according to genre - Tragedy: obligatory composition (resolution is tragic)

- Protagonist vs antagonist

- Prologue (exposition)

- Chorus (ode)

- Epilogue (summary of the play) 65. Comedy - Comedy of manners

- Satiric comedy (employs hyperbole and burlesque)

- Romantic comedy

- Picaresque comedy

- Comedy of situation (situational humor and comicality)

- Masque (allegoric play based on mythology) 66. Drama - Serious but not necessarily tragic

- Genre between tragedy and comedy

Lyric drama (reflexive mood, widely employed metaphors, psychological motivation)

Realistic drama (serious moral and social issues)

Drama of the absurd (anxiety, breaks the established requirements imposed on play, violates principles of communication, disturbs the unified model of the world - Melodrama: sentimental, pathetic, emotional

- Monodrama: one character play

- Burlesque: high mixed with low (Cyrano de Bergerac)

- Farce: exaggeration and caricature of situation

- Grotesque: hyperbolization of reality, fantastic elements are used, presence of disharmony

- Variety show: purely in order to amuse

- Cabaret: satirical performance accompanied by music

- Vaudeville: theatrical genre of variety entertainment 67. Musical genres - Opera - Operetta - Musical 68. Critical Approaches - reveal how or why a particular work is constructed and what its social and cultural implications are

- to see and appreciate a literary work as a multilayered construct of meaning

- reread, rethink, and respond

- recent theory can be seen as an attempt to sort out the paradoxes that often inform the treatment of identity in literature 69. Link between literary explorations and critical/theoretical claims - Literary works characteristically represent individuals, so struggles about identity are struggles within the individual and between individual and group: characters struggle against or comply with social norms and expectations. In theoretical writings, arguments about social identity tend to focus, though, on group identities: what is it to be a woman? to be black? To be colonized? To be gay? To be „other“?

- Literature plays an important role in construction of identity 70. Meaning of Theory - Theory offers not a set of solutions but the prospect of further thought

- Theory is a DISCURSIVE practice

- Linked with education and institutions 71. Russian Formalism FORM and TECHNIQUE

The Russian Formalists of the early years of the twentieth century stressed that critics should concern themselves with the literariness of literature: the verbal strategies that make it literary,

- Roman Jakobson, Boris Eichenbaum, and Victor

Shklovsky (Culler, 122) 72. New Criticism - 30s , 40s in the United States

- the unity or integration of literary works

- Shift from understanding literature as a historical document towards aesthetic perception (from memorizing to interpretation)

- How each element in literature contributes to meaning (Culler, 122) 73. Feminist Literary Criticism - Simone de Beauvoir, Second Sex (1949)

- Emerged in the 70s

- Identity of women

- Position of women in the society

- Opposition between man/woman

- Discussion of the patriarchal perception of history/literature 74. Psychoanalytic literary criticism - Based on Freud´s psychoanalysis

- Explores the nature of the unconscious mind

- Analysis literary work through symbolism, myth, taboo, association, sexual relations

- Looks at the unconscious meaning of work 75. Marxist literary theory - Based on German philosopher, Karl Marx

- The role of class, ideology, social order

- Literature as a means of manipulation

- Literary works are seen as products of work (reflection of economy)

- New perception of the canon (middle class?) 76. Postcolonial criticism - Based on Edward Said´s work Orientalism (1978)

- involves the analysis of literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their history

- Reevaluation of the stereotypes, myths associated with marginalized groups 77. Reader-Response Criticism - The reader is active

- “Reading is . . . something you do.„

- the intended reader vs. implied reader

- For the reader, the work is what is given to consciousness; the work is not something objective, existing independently of any experience of it, but is the experience of the reader

- form of a description of the reader’s progressive movement through a text, analysing how readers produce meaning by making connections, 78. Structuralism Structuralism is a theory of humankind in which all elements of human culture, including literature, are thought to be parts of a system of signs.

In structuralism literary texts are linked to a larger structure, which may be a particular genre, a range of intertextuality connections, a model of a universal narrative structure, or a system of recurrent patterns or motifs. 79. Post-structuralism - Theory that rejects the certainty of meaning.

- It demonstrates that the meaning of a text is undeterminable by showing readers that the connection between the text and real world is

- unstable and has endless meanings. 80. Deconstruction - Deconstruction is most simply defined as a critique of the hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical, speech/writing, presence/absence, nature/culture, form/meaning.

- Based on Jacques Derrida

- A postmodern approach to exploring meaning by taking apart and examining taken-for-granted categories and assumptions, making possible newer and sounder constructions of meaning. 81. New Historicism New historicists acknowledge the importance of the literary text, but they also analyze the text with an eye to history

— history as a social science like anthropology and sociology, whereas older historicists tended to view history as literature's "background" and the social sciences as being properly historical.

— New historicists remind us that it is treacherous to reconstruct the past as it really was—rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was. 82. Introductory paragraph what/how/when/why? - outlines topic,

- Methodology

- structure of your paper

- What” is the paper all about?

- “How," i.e., with what method, do I approach the topic?

- “When" in the course of the paper am I dealing with which issues?

- Why? Possible contribution 83. MAIN Part - Subsequent paragraphs should be self-contained argument developing one particular aspect of the overall topic.

- every paragraph has a topic sentence which highlights the main idea of the paragraph and establishes a connection to the overall topic of the paper (i.e., the thesis statement). 84. Transition tips End of each paragraph should connect to the next one

(Subsequently, Furthermore, Arguably, Comparably, On the other side, However.......) 85. Concluding paragraph - briefly and concisely summarize the most important results of your discussion

- This is your final opportunity to remind the reader once more of your overall line of argumentation by repeating the thesis statement and by giving a short summary of your results.

- Contribution (wider implications of your paper?) 86. Critical apparatus - conventions that are concerned with the documentation of sources, a feature of scholarly writing

- Modern Language Association (MLA)

- Footnotes

- Bibliography

- Primary sources

- Secondary sources 87. Bibliography and footnes

- Last Name, First Name. Title of the Text. Place of Publication: Name of Publisher, Year of Publication.

- Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

- First Name Last Name, Title of the Text (Place of Publication: Name of Publisher, Year of Publication) Page Number.

- 1 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957) 52.

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