Prose poetry is prose that breaks some of the normal rules of prose discourse for heightened imagery or emotional effect.

As a specific poetic form, prose poetry originated in the 19th century in France. French prose was governed by laws so strict that by breaking them, it was possible to create prose that was seen to be intended as poetry. Poets such as Aloysius Bertrand, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmé were among the founders of the form. The form continued to be practiced in France and found profound expression in the prose poems of Francis Ponge in the mid twentieth century.

It used to be said that prose poetry was impossible in English, because the English language was not so strictly governed by rules as the French was. In the twentieth century, when English prose has become more and more governed by the iron laws of Strunk and White, this may no longer be the case. Rapturous, rhythmical, and image-laden prose from previous centuries, such as is found in Jeremy Taylor or Thomas de Quincey, strikes 21st century readers as having something of a poetic quality.

Links

• Prose Poetry
• Ogdenian Prose Poetry
• Dark Prose Poetry
• "prose-poetry"?
• Prose Poetry
• pith
• Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Where verse is set to music, the distinction between poem and song may become artificial — to the point of being untenable. This is perhaps recognised in the way popular songs have lyrics:. The verse, however, may precede in time the tune (in the way that "Rule Britannia" was set to music, and "And did those feet in ancient time" has become the hymn "Jerusalem"); the tune may be lost over time but the words survive; a number of alternate tunes may fit (this is particularly common with hymns and ballads).

Possible classifications proliferate (under anthem, ballad, blues, carol, folk song, hymn, libretto, lied, lullaby, march, praise song, round, spiritual). Nursery rhymes may be songs, or doggerel: the term doesn't imply a distinction. The ghazal is a sung form that is considered primarily poetic. See rapping, roots of hip hop music also, on the boundaries: verse+music against verse against verse set to music.

Analogously, verse drama might normally be judged (at its best) as poetry, but not consisting of poems. Again there are genres as far apart as masque and pantomime.

Poesybeat is an online collaborative artform whereby participants combine music and poetry together into a new musical style. The authors of the music and the poetry often have never met one another. The premiere site for this style is poesybeat.org, a not-for-profit site that promotes the poesybeat artform.

Link

• 
  poesybeat.org

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Confessionalism is a label formally applied to a style of American poetry that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The label continues to be applied, though usually in a derogatory sense, to poetry about personal experience, particularly when that poetry is written carelessly or thoughtlessly.

Confessionalist poets draw on personal history for their inspiration. Often well schooled in verse traditions, they choose to mine their own lives for subject matter, often using personal trauma as fuel for literary or dramatic effect. Of the poets emerging in the late 1950s, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are most commonly identified as Confessionalists. Much of John Berryman's work is considered Confessionalist, and Robert Lowell is widely regarded as the most accomplished in the Confessionalist movement. There are strong Confessionalist elements in the work of the Beat poets in the 1950s and 1960s, notably in Allen Ginsberg.

Many Confessionalist writers explore themes of madness in their poetry. Although most Confessionalist poets of the 1950s and 1960s met and knew each other, they did not seek to identify themselves as part of a distinct literary movement. The label was developed and applied to the movement in the 1970s.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Need an webmaster? Click HERE

Walt Whitman, 1856

The poetry of the United States began as a literary art during the colonial era. Unsurprisingly, most of the early poetry written in the colonies and fledgling republic used contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, American poets had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde. This position was sustained into the 20th century to the extent that Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential English-language poets in the period around World War I. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write.

Toward the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African Americans, hispanics and other subcultural groupings. Poetry, and creative writing in general, also tended to become more professionalized with the growth of Creative Writing programs on campuses across the country.

References

• Baym, Nina, et al (eds.): The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Shorter sixth edition, 2003). ISBN 0-393-97969-5
• Hoover, Paul (ed): Postmodern American Poetry - A Norton Anthology (1994). ISBN 0-393-31090-6
• Moore, Geoffrey (ed): The Penguin Book of American Verse (Revised edition 1983) ISBN 0-140-42313-3

External links

• Cary Nelson, Ed. (1999-2002) Poet biographies at Modern American Poetry.
• Poet biographies at the Academy of American Poets
• Poet biographies at the Electronic Poetry Centre
• Various anthologies of American verse at Bartleby.com

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Need an webmaster? Click HERE

Video: Best American Poetry 2006: Billy Collins' Introduction

Arabic poetry is poetry composed and written down in the Arabic language either by Arab people or non-Arabs. Knowledge of poetry in Arabic dates from the 6th century but oral poetry is believed to predate that. The amount of Arabic poetry composed has, at times, been greatly reduced with Persian poetry and Poetry of the Ottoman Empire becoming dominant in the region. While there has been a resurgence of the language for literature, particularly in the 20th century, the poets are usually classified into separate national literatures as their work is often written in a local dialect of Arabic.

Poetic forms

Poetry in Arabic is traditionally grouped in a diwan or collection of poems. These can be arranged by poet, tribe, topic or the name of the compiler such as the Asma'iyyat of al-Asma'i. Most poems did not have titles and they were usually named from their first lines. Sometimes they were arranged alphabetically by their rhymes. The role of the poet in Arabic developed in a similar way to poets elsewhere. The safe and easy patronage in royal courts was no longer available but a successful poet such as Nizar Qabbani was able to set up his own publishing house.

A large proportion of all Arabic poetry is written using the monorhyme. This is simply the same rhyme used on every line of a poem. While this may seem a poor rhyme scheme for people used to English literature it makes sense in a language like Arabic which has only three vowels which can be either long or short.

Mu'rabbah: literary Arabic

• Qarid
  • Qit'ah, an elegy or short poem about an event
  • Qasidah, an ode, designed to convey a message. A longer version of qit'ah
• Muwashshah, meaning "girdled", courtly love poetry

• Dubayt or Ruba'i, a quatrain
• Rajaz, a discourse in rhyme, used to push the limits of lexicography

Malhunah: informal poetry

Kan wa-kin, meaning "once upon a time"
Quma,
Zajal, meaning "shout", a strophic poem usually an attack
Mawwal or Mawaliya, folk poetry in four rhyming lines

Poetic themes

Madih, an eulogy or panegyric
Hija, a lampoon
Ritha', an elegy
Wasf, a descriptive poem
Ghazal, a love poem, sometimes expressing love of home
Khamriyyah, wine poetry
Tardiyyah, hunt poetry
Zuhdiyyah, homiletic poetry

Selected poets & anthologists

Labid
Zuhayr
Tarafa
Antara Ibn Shaddad
Buhturi
Abu Tammam (9th Century)
Abu Nuwas (9th Century)
al-Mutanabbi (10th Century)
Ahmad al-Tifashi
Bashar ibn Burd
Muti’ ibn Iyas
Ibn Quzman
Nizar Qabbani, (1923–1998)

Further reading

• E.G. Browne. Literary History of Persia. (Four volumes, 2,256 pages, and twenty-five years in the writing)
• Philip F. Kennedy. The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition.. Open University Press, 1997.
• Khaled El-Rouayheb. The Love of Boys in Arabic Poetry of the Early Ottoman Period, 1500 - 1800. Middle Eastern Literatures, January 2005, vol.8, no.1.

Links

• Arabic Poets at Poet Seers

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

British poetry is poetry written by British poets. It may refer to British literature written in the British Isles, the United Kingdom, or Great Britain. It may include poetry written in any of the languages in the United Kingdom or in other languages of the British Isles, or written elsewhere by British poets.

It may include:

• English poetry
• Welsh poetry
• Irish poetry

"Quatrain on Heavenly Mountain" by Emperor Gaozong

Chinese poetry can be divided into three main periods: the early period, characterised by folk songs in simple, repetitive forms; the classical period from the Han dynasty to the fall of the Qing dynasty, in which a number of different forms were developed; and the modern period of Westernised free verse.

Early poetry

The Shi Jing (literally "Classic of Poetry", also called "Book of Songs") was the first major collection of Chinese poems, collecting both aristocratic poems (Odes) and more rustic poetry, probably derived from folksongs (Songs).

A second, more lyrical and romantic anthology was the Chuci (楚辭 Songs of Chu), made up primarily of poems ascribed to the semilegendary Qu Yuan (ca. 340-278 B.C.) and his follower Song Yu (fourth century B.C.).

Classical poetry

During the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), the Chu lyrics evolved into the fu (賦), a poem usually in rhymed verse except for introductory and concluding passages that are in prose, often in the form of questions and answers.

From the Han dynasty onwards, a process similar to the origins of the Shi Jing produced the yue fu poems. Again, these were song lyrics, including original folk songs, court imitations and versions by known poets (the best known of the latter being those of Li Bai).

From the second century AD, the yue fu began to develop into shi or classical poetry- the form which was to dominate Chinese poetry until the modern era. These poems have five or seven character lines, with a caesura before the last three characters of each line. They are divided into the original gushi (old poems) and jintishi, a stricter form developed in the Tang dynasty with rules governing tone patterns and the structure of the content. The greatest writers of gushi and jintishi are often held to be Li Bai and Du Fu respectively.

Towards the end of the Tang dynasty, the ci lyric became more popular. Most closely associated with the Song dynasty, ci most often expressed feelings of desire, often in an adopted persona, but the greatest exponents of the form (such as Li Houzhu and Su Shi) used it to address a wide range of topics.

As the ci gradually became more literary and artificial after Song times, the san qu, a freer form, based on new popular songs, developed. The use of san qu songs in drama marked an important step in the development of vernacular literature.

Later classical poetry

After the Song dynasty, both shi poems and lyrics continued to be composed until the end of the imperial period, and to a lesser extent to this day. However, for a number of reasons, these works have always been less highly regarded than those of the Tang dynasty in particular. Firstly, Chinese literary culture remained in awe of its predecessors: in a self-fulfilling prophecy, writers and readers both expected that new works would not bear comparison with the earlier masters. Secondly, the most common response of these later poets to the tradition which they had inherited was to produce work which was ever more refined and allusive; the resulting poems tend to seem precious or just obscure to modern readers. Thirdly, the increase in population, expansion of literacy, wider dissemination of works through printing and more complete archiving vastly increased the volume of work to consider and made it difficult to identify and properly evaluate those good pieces which were produced. Finally, this period saw the rise of vernacular literature, particularly drama and novels, which increasingly became the main means of cultural expression.

Modern poetry

Modern Chinese poems (新詩, vers libre) usually do not follow any prescribed pattern. Poetry was revolutionized after the May Fourth Movement when writers try to use vernacular styles closer to what was being spoken rather than previously prescribed forms. Early twentieth-century poets like Xu Zhimo, Guo Moruo and Wen Yiduo sought to break Chinese poetry from past conventions by adopting Western models; for example Xu consciously follows the style of the Romantic poets with end-rhymes.

In the post-revolutionary Communist era, poets like Ai Qing used more liberal running lines and direct diction, which were vastly popular and widely imitated.

In the contemporary poetic scene, the most important and influential poets are the group known as Misty Poets, who use allusion and hermetic references. The most important Misty Poets include Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Duo Duo, and Yang Lian were all exiled after the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

References

• An Anthology of Chinese Literature by Stephen Owen
• Chinese Poetry by Wai-lim Yip

Further reading

• The Art of Chinese Poetry by James J.Y. Liu

Links

• "A T'ang Canon" by Gilbert Wesley Purdy. A book review/essay which includes considerable information on Classical and T'ang poetry.
• Chinese Poetry Including: Lao Tzu, Li Po and Tu Fu
• 300 Tang poems in Chinese with English translation.
• The Shi Jing, or Book of Odes in Chinese with English translation.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Charles Baudelaire, Portrait by Emile Deroy

French poetry is a category of French literature. It may include Francophone poetry composed outside France and poetry written in other languages of France.

Poetry is the earliest French literature. The anonymous Song of Roland is regarded by some as the national epic of France, and during the Middle Ages, the chanson de geste became an identifiable literary genre. These "songs of exploits" often took their subjects from the reign of Charlemagne (742-814) and the legend of King Arthur, developed well beyond its origins by Chrétien de Troyes.

As well as narrative poetry, lyric poetry began to evolve, as "troubadours" and "trouvères" peddled their work from place to place. La Pléiade was a group of 16th century poets whose principal members were Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf.

French classical drama was conventionally written in rhyming couplets. The most notable exponents were Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. Jean de La Fontaine's fables are among the most quoted works of French literature.

Important French poets

Important French poets of the 19th century :

Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885) is generally recognised as the greatest figure in French Romanticism in the 19th century.

Gérard de Nerval (1808 - 1855)

Théophile Gautier (1811 - 1872)

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) The originator of the Symbolist movement in France. His Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard was one of the first to use typography in poetry to create different trains of thought existing simultaneously.

Frederic Mistral (1830-1914) Provençal language poet and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate in 1904. He created the Félibrige movement on May 21 1854, with Théodore Aubanel, Jean Brunet, Anselme Mathieu, Paul Piera, his teacher Joseph Roumanille, and Alphonse Tavan. He was noted for his promotion of Provençal literature and founded the annual journal Armana Prouvençau. Also founder of a museum of ethnography in Arles.

Theodore Aubanel (1829-1882) Born into a publishing family (the museum for the publishing house still exists), he is the author of three collections of poetry written in the troubadour tradition, as well as three plays.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was one of the precursors of the Surrealist movement. He wrote many remarkable works, among The Sonnet of the Vowels in which each vowel is assigned a colour.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) With Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, the founder of the Decadents. He also founded the journal Le Salut Public, translated Edgar Allan Poe, and was prosecuted along with the publisher and printer for blasphemy associated with Les fleurs du mal. He held salons to encourage such painters as Delacroix. Among other poetic forms, he used the pantoum.

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) Regarded in his day as the premier poet in France, he published, in addition to his poems, Les poètes maudits, biographies of poets. See Poète maudit.

Paul Valéry (1871-1945) Author not only of poetry, but the Introduction de la méthode de Léonard da Vinci (1894), and Cahiers. Inspired by da Vinci, he kept a series of notebooks in order to maximise his intellect, and held a law degree from the University of Montpellier. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1925.

In the 20th century, Paul Éluard was a leading exponent of Surrealism. Guillaume Apollinaire's (1880 – 1918) first collection of poetry was L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909), but it was Alcools (1913) which established his reputation. These poems, influenced in part by the symbolists, juxtapose the old and the new, using traditional forms and modern imagery. Jacques Prévert's works move between Surrealism and the popular songs of Parisian café culture.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Italian poetry

Grave of the Japanese poet Yosa Buson

The best-known forms of Japanese poetry (outside Japan) are haiku and senryu. The classic traditional form is in fact waka. Much poetry in Japan was written in the Chinese language, so it is more accurate to speak of Japanese-language poetry. For example, in the Tale of Genji both kinds of poetry are frequently mentioned. When Japanese poets first encountered Chinese poetry, it was at its peak in the Tang dynasty and Japanese poets were totally fascinated. It took them several hundred years to digest the foreign impact, make it a part of their culture and merge it with their literary tradition in their mother tongue, and begin to develop the diversity of their native poetry. Waka and Kanshi, Chinese poetry including Japanese works written in (sometimes corrupted) Chinese, were the two greatest pillars of Japanese poetry. From them many other forms, such as renga, haiku or senryu, arose.

A new trend came in the middle of the 19th Century. Since then the major forms of Japanese poetry have been tanka (new name for waka), haiku and shi.

Nowadays the main forms of Japanese poetry can be divided into experimental poetry and poetry that seeks to revive traditional ways. Poets writing in tanka, haiku and shi move in separate planes and seldom write poetry other than in their specific chosen form, although some active poets are eager to collaborate with poets in other genres.

Important collections are the Man'yōshu, Kokin-wakashu and Shin-kokin-wakashu.

Important Poets (premodern)

Ariwara no Narihira
Ono no Komachi
Saigyo
Basho Matsuo
Kobayashi Issa

Important poets (Modern)

Yosano Akiko
Masaoka Shiki
Santoka
Takamura Kotaro
Ishikawa Takuboku
Hagiwara Sakataro
Miyazawa Kenji
Noguchi Yonejiro
Tanikawa Shuntaro

Important collections and works

For haiku in Japanese, the largest anthology is the 12 volume Bunruihaiku-zenshū (Classified Collection of Haiku) compiled by Masaoka Shiki, but completed after his death, which collects haiku not only by seasonal theme but also by sub-theme. It includes work going back to the 15th century, which is to say a century or two further than is common for contemporary collections.

The largest collection of haiku translated into English on any single subject is "Rise, Ye Sea Slugs" by Robin D. Gill, which contains 900 or so poems, all about the sea cucumber (namako), going back to the 17th century. It is an original work, not a translated piece of Japanese literature, but reading it will give you a grasp of the scope of Japanese poetry and more insight into the problems of translation than may be found in less transparent books.

Acest articol conţine materiale traduse şi adaptate din Wikipedia de Nicolae Sfetcu sub licenţă gratuită GNU.

Ancient poetry

Triple Acrostic by Thomas Browne

An acrostic (from the late Greek akróstichon, from ákros, "extreme", and stíchos, "verse") is a poem or other text written in an alphabetic script, in which the first letter, syllable or word of each verse, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out another message.

Acrostics may simply spell out the letters of the alphabet in order; these acrostics occur in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and in certain of the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible. Two notable acrostic Psalms are the long Psalm 119, which typically is printed in subsections named after the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, each of which is featured in that section; and Psalm 145 (commonly referred to as "Ashrei"), which is recited three times a day in the Jewish services. Or, the acrostic may spell out a name or some other message, such as the acrostic contained in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, where the letters of the acrostic are embellished with ornate capital letters. Or, the acrostic may be used as a form of steganography, seeking to conceal the message rather than to proclaim it.

Here is an example in English, an Edgar Allan Poe poem titled simply An Acrostic:

Elizabeth it is in vain you say

"Love not" — thou sayest it in so sweet a way:

In vain those words from thee or L.E.L.

Zantippe's talents had enforced so well:

Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,

Breath it less gently forth — and veil thine eyes.

Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried

To cure his love — was cured of all beside —

His folly — pride — and passion — for he died.

Link

• An unflattering gravestone acrostic poem in a Montreal cemetery

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Henry Oliver Walker, Lyric Poetry (1896). Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

Lyric poetry is a form of poetry that does not attempt to tell a story, as do epic poetry and dramatic poetry, but is of a more personal nature instead. Rather than portraying characters and actions, the lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feelings, states of mind, and perceptions.

Although its name, from the word lyre, implies that it is meant to be sung, this is not always the case. It certainly had its beginnings in song, but since the advent of mass literacy and the printing press, much lyric poetry is purely meant to be read.

History

The earliest surviving lyric poems in the Western tradition are arguably the Song of Solomon and the Psalms, but there are many fine examples in classical literature. Some of the best ancient lyric poets are Sappho, Catullus, and Horace.

During the Middle Ages, lyric poetry is dominated by the courtly love tradition in most European languages. This is upper-class poetry meant for the courts of the nobility, whether the poet is himself a prince, such as William IX of Aquitaine, or a lower-class troubador in the service of one prince or wandering from court to court.

Some non-courtly love lyric poetry has survived from the medieval period. Many of the poets who wrote in the courtly love tradition also produced other lyric poetry, and a few poets of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, such as François Villon, wrote outside the courtly milieu.

The turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance is best exemplified in the person of Francesco Petrarca, whose sonnets celebrating his love for Laura took Europe by storm and gave his name to one form of the sonnet, one of the most perennially popular forms of lyric poetry. The Renaissance, and particularly Elizabethan England, saw a great flowering of lyric poetry. With the new emphasis on the individual, rather than the community, the lyric poet, who addresses the reader directly in the first person, became a prominent figure on the literary scene.

Much of the lyric poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is little read today because of its dependence on classical mythology and standard forms. Notable exceptions are John Milton, who wrote lyric poetry in addition to his great epic poems, and the Metaphysical poets, such as Andrew Marvell and John Donne.

It is not until the end of the eighteenth century, with such poets as Goethe and Wordsworth, that another flowering of great lyric poetry began. Poetry of the Romantic period has retained its freshness and popularity.

The nineteenth century also brought a rise in darker, more realistic poetry with such poets as Baudelaire. The set forms of lyric poetry also begin to be dissolved and broken, so that much twentieth-century lyric poetry is not dependent on rhyme or regular meter.

Themes

Although lyric poetry has a long and close association with love, and European lyric poetry in the vernacular arose with the courtly love tradition, it is not exclusively love poetry. Many of the courtly love poets (whether troubadors, trouvères, or Minnesänger) also wrote lyric poems about war and peace, nature and nostalgia, grief and loss. Notable among these are Christine de Pisan and Charles, Duke of Orléans, two of the great French lyric poets of the fifteenth century.

Spiritual themes are also prominent in lyric poetry. Some of the best medieval poets wrote exclusively religious poetry. Prominant among these are such poets as St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. Note that it is sometimes hard to distinguish love poetry and religious poetry, since God and especially the Virgin Mary are often addressed in much the same terms as an earthly lover, and particularly like the noble lady in the courtly love tradition. Such modern poets as John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot have continued the tradition of fine literary poetry based on spiritual or noumenous experience.

Nature is also a common theme of lyrical poetry, often being portrayed as a reflection of (or contrast to) the poet's state of mind.

Forms

Although arguably the most popular form of lyric poetry in the Western tradition is the 14-line sonnet, either in its Petrarchan or its Shakespearean form, lyric poetry appears in a bewildering variety of forms.

Ancient Hebrew poetry relied on repetition and chiasmus for many of its effects. Although much Greek and Roman classical poetry was written in forms with set meters and strophes, Pindar's odes seem as formless to the ear accustomed to rhyme and meter as such modern poetry as Rilke's Duino Elegies.

In some cases, the form and theme are wed, as in the courtly love aubade or dawn song in which lovers are forced to part after a night of love, often with the watchman's refrain telling them it is time to go. In other cases, the theme and form are at odds, and part of the interest of the poetry is in how and whether the poet can bring a successful union between two apparent opposites.

A common feature of lyric forms is the refrain, whether just one line or several, that ends or follows each strophe. The refrain is repeated throughout the poem, either exactly or with slight variation.

Metrics

Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on number of syllables or on stress. The most common meters are as follows:

• Iambic - two syllables, with the long or stressed syllable following the short or unstressed syllable.
• Trochaic - two syllables, with the short or unstressed syllable following the long or stressed syllable.
• Anapestic - three syllables, with the first two short or unstressed and the last long or stressed.
• Dactylic - three syllables, with the first one long or stressed and the other two short or unstressed.

Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain.

Each meter can have any number of elements, called feet. The most common meter in English is iambic pentameter, with five iambs per line. The most common in French is the alexandrin, with twelve syllables. In English, the alexandrine is iambic hexameter.

Rhyme and alliteration

These two elements are common to structuring lyric poetry in the Western tradition and make poetry difficult to translate effectively. Old Norse poetry depended heavily on alliteration. Continental Europe and England developed complex rhyme schemes and used alliteration as an auxiliary device.

Although to the lay ear, rhyme is the hallmark of poetry, it has become less and less common in poetry in European languages in the twentieth century.

Principal lyric poets by period and language

This list includes the important lyric poets of each period, grouped together by language.

Classical

Chinese poets

Bai Juyi
Cao Cao
Cao Pi
Cao Zhi
Cui Hao
Du Fu
Du Mu
Fenggan
Han Yu
Hanshan
Jia Dao
Li Bai also known as Li Po
Li Houzhu
Li Qiao
Li Qingzhao
Li Shangyin
Lu You
Luo Binwang
Mei Yaochen
Meng Haoran
Ouyang Xiu
Pi Rixiu
Su Shi
Su Xiaoxiao
Tao Qian
Wang Wei
Xie Lingyun

Greek poets

Alcaeus
Anacreon
Archilochus
Bacchylides
Ibycus
Mimnermus
Pindar
Sappho
Stesichorus
Theognis
Xenophanes

Japanese poets

Ono no Komachi
Ariwara no Narihira
Saigyo

Latin poets

Catullus
Horace
Ovid

Persian poets

Anvari
Attar
Ferdowsi
Omar Khayyam
Nezami
Rudaki
Asadi Tusi

Middle Ages and Renaissance

Hebrew poets

Yehuda Alharizi
Menachem Ben Saruk
Dunash Ben Labrat
Yehuda Halevi
Shmuel Hanagid
Solomon Ibn Gabirol
Abraham ibn Ezra
Moshe Ibn Ezra
Itzhak Ibn Khalfon

Chinese poets

Gao Qi

English poets

Geoffrey Chaucer

French poets

William IX of Aquitaine
Bertran de Born
Arnaut Daniel
Charles, Duke of Orléans
Christine de Pisan
Jaufre Rudel
Bernart de Ventadorn
François Villon

German poets

Walther von der Vogelweide
Wolfram von Eschenbach

Hindu poets

Kabir
Amir Khusro
Surdas
Tulsidas

Italian poets

Dante Alighieri
Guido Cavalcanti
Francesco Petrarca

Persian poets

Hafez
Amir Khusro
Auhadi of Maragheh
Alisher Navoi
Mahmud Shabistari
Khaqani Shirvani
Obeid e zakani

Sixteenth century

English poets

Thomas Campion
Walter Raleigh
William Shakespeare
Philip Sidney
Edmund Spenser

French poets

Joachim Du Bellay
Pierre de Ronsard

Spanish poets

Teresa of Avila
Saint John of the Cross
Garcilaso de la Vega
Lope de Vega

Seventeenth century

Dutch poets

Joost van den Vondel

English poets

John Donne
John Dryden
George Herbert
Robert Herrick
Ben Jonson
Andrew Marvell
John Milton
Henry Vaughan

German poets

Martin Opitz

Japanese poets

Matsuo Bashō

Spanish poets

Luis de Góngora

Eighteenth century

English poets

Robert Burns
William Cowper
Thomas Gray
Oliver Goldsmith

German poets

Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Novalis
Friedrich Schiller
Johann Heinrich Voß

Hebrew poets

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto

Japanese poets

Kobayashi Issa

Nineteenth century

English poets

Matthew Arnold
William Blake
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert Browning
George Gordon, Lord Byron
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Emily Dickinson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thomas Hardy
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Gerard Manley Hopkins
John Keats
Rudyard Kipling
D. H. Lawrence
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
George Meredith
Edgar Allan Poe
Christina Rossetti
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Walt Whitman
John Greenleaf Whittier
William Wordsworth

French poets

Charles Baudelaire
Tristan Corbière
Théophile Gautier
Victor Hugo
Jules Laforgue
Stéphane Mallarmé
Alfred de Musset
Gerard de Nerval
Arthur Rimbaud
Paul Verlaine
Alfred de Vigny

German poets

Achim von Arnim
Clemens Brentano
Joseph von Eichendorff
Hoffmann von Fallersleben
Heinrich Heine
Friedrich Hölderlin
Gottfried Keller
Eduard Mörike
Ludwig Tieck
Ludwig Uhland

Italian poets

Gabriele D'Annunzio
Giacomo Leopardi

Japanese poets

Taneda Santoka
Masaoka Shiki
Ishikawa Takuboku

Russian poets

Mikhail Lermontov
Aleksandr Pushkin
Ivan Turgenev

Twentieth century

Chinese poets

Guo Moruo
Mu Dan
Xu Zhimo

Dutch poets

François Haverschmidt
Hendrik Marsman
J. Slauerhoff

English poets

W. H. Auden
Hart Crane
E. E. Cummings
T. S. Eliot
Robert Frost
Allen Ginsberg
Robert Graves
Geoffrey Hill
A. E. Housman
Langston Hughes
Ted Hughes
C. Day Lewis
Robert Lowell
Archibald MacLeish
Louis MacNeice
Marianne Moore
Wilfred Owen
Sylvia Plath
Ezra Pound
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Theodore Roethke
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Carl Sandburg
Siegfried Sassoon
Edith Sitwell
Stephen Spender
Wallace Stevens
Sara Teasdale
Dylan Thomas
Robert Penn Warren
William Carlos Williams
William Butler Yeats
Shel Silverstein

Flemish poets

Hugo Claus
Jotie T'Hooft

French poets

Guillaume Apollinaire
Louis Aragon
André Breton
Paul Eluard
Max Jacob
Saint-John Perse
Paul Valéry

German poets

Gottfried Benn
Bertolt Brecht
Paul Celan
Stefan George
Rainer Maria Rilke

Hebrew poets

Yehuda Amichai
Hayyim Nahman Bialik
Leah Goldberg
Rachel
Avraham Shlonsky
Shaul Tchernichovsky

Italian poets

Grazyna Miller
Eugenio Montale

Japanese poets

Yosano Akiko
Wakayama Bokusui
Miyazawa Kenji
Noguchi Yonejiro

Polish poets

Czesław Miłosz

Russian poets

Osip Mandelstam
Vladimir Nabokov
Boris Pasternak

Spanish poets

Vicente Aleixandre
Luis Cernuda
Rubén Dario
Federico García Lorca
Antonio Machado
Gabriela Mistral
Pablo Neruda
Octavio Paz

Twenty-first century

Persian poets

Shahyar Ghanbari
Iraj Janatie Ataie
Ardalan Sarfaraz
Zoya Zakarian

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Accent in poetry refers to the stressed portion of a word. For example:

"Let Us make man in Our image,

according to Our likeness;

let them have dominion over the fish of the sea,

over the birds of the air, and over the cattle,

over all the earth and over every creeping thing

that creeps on the earth"

Genesis 26-27

Now depending on where you place the stress in this poem you will get a different meaning. For example, place the stress or accent on 'Our' and suddenly we have more than one God. Place it on 'them' then, there would appear to be a lot of men already there ready to receive planetary rights. Place it strategically on 'fish', 'birds', 'cattle' then you've got a really nice wrap up with accenting the last 'earth' for emphasis. Of course, where to accent in poetry can be of hot debate.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Meter (non-American spelling: metre) describes the linguistic sound patterns of verse. Scansion is the analysis of poetry's metrical and rhythmic patterns. Prosody is sometimes used to describe poetic meter, and indicates the analysis of similar aspects of language in linguistics. Meter is part of many formal verse forms.

Fundamentals

The precise units of poetic meter, like rhyme, vary from language to language and between poetic traditions. Often it involves precise arrangements of syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. In English verse the pattern of syllable stress differentiates feet, so English meter is founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. In Latin verse, on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, not syllable stresses but vowel lengths are the component parts of meter. Old English poetry used alliterative verse, a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line. Meters in English verse, and in the classical Western poetic tradition on which it is founded, are named by the characteristic foot and the number of feet per line. Thus, for example, blank verse is unrhymed "iambic pentameter," a meter composed of five feet per line in which the kind of feet called iambs predominate. The origin of this tradition of metrics is ancient Greek poetry from Homer, Pindar, Hesiod, Sappho, and the great tragedians of Athens.

Technical Terms

• caesura: (literally, a cut or cutting) refers to a particular kind of break within a poetic line. In Latin and Greek meter, caesura refers to a break within a foot caused by the end of a word. In English poetry, a caesura refers to a sense of a break within a line. Caesurae play a particularly important role in Old English poetry.
• Inversion: when a foot of poetry is reversed with respect to the general meter of a poem.
• Headless: a meter where the first foot is missing its first syllable.

Dissent

Not all poets accept the idea that meter is a fundamental part of poetry. Twentieth Century American poets Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Robinson Jeffers, were poets who believed that meter was imposed into poetry by man, not a fundamental part of its nature. In an essay titled "Robinson Jeffers, & The Metric Fallacy"^[1], poet/critic Dan Schneider echoes Jeffers' sentiments: "What if someone actually said to you that all music was composed of just 2 notes? Or if someone claimed that there were just 2 colors in creation? Now, ponder if such a thing were true. Imagine the clunkiness & mechanicality of such music. Think of the visual arts devoid of not just color, but sepia tones, & even shades of gray." Jeffers called his technique "rolling stresses".

Moore went even further than Jeffers, openly declaring her poetry was written in syllabic form, and wholly denying meter. These syllabic lines from her famous poem "Poetry" illustrate her contempt for meter, and other poetic tools (however, even the syllabic pattern of this poem does not remain perfectly consistent):

nor is it valid

to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books": all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry

Williams tried to form poetry whose subject matter was centered on the lives of common people. He came up with the concept of the variable foot. Williams spurned traditional meter in most of his poems, preferring what he called "colloquial idioms." Another poet that turned his back on traditional concepts of meter was Britain's Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins' major innovation was what he called "sprung rhythm". Hopkins claimed most poetry was written in a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of the English literary heritage, based on repeating groups of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure running rhythm. He became fascinated with older rhythmic structures in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which he called sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot. All these poets made good arguments against the naturalness of traditional meter.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.