Poetry

Before discussing Poetry and Prose, I had the class read a short story by Ray Bradbury, "The Day it Rained Forever."  Like most of Bradbury's stories, even though it is written without verse, rhyme, or rhythm, it only connects on a poetic level.  One cannot say with words what it is about, but one can feel it without words.  This story served as an excellent point to start discussing the differences between poetry and prose, and we also discussed the symbolism and other aspects of the story to help us understand it better.

• Poetry does not require verse, rhyme, or rhythm.
• How does it manage to connect on an emotional level?
• What poetic devices are used in the story?
• The rain in the story is clearly symbolic. What else is symbolic?

Links to favorite poems

Poetry Devices

Written

Rhyme - repeated ending sounds, "no pain, no gain"

Alliteration - repeated consonants, "test, trials, and traps"

Assonance - repeated vowel sounds,

Rhythm/Meter - regularity of syllables or accents, "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary"

Repetition - using same word again and again, "I have a dream... I have a dream..."

Verse, Stanza - repeated units of words, following a pattern

Refrain - returning to the same thematic verse, "Quoth the Raven, Nevermore!"

Parallelism - repeating the same thought with different words (Isaiah)

Chiasmus - ideas proceed in sequence from beginning to center, then in reverse sequence to the end.

Capitalization, Punctuation, deliberately breaking such rules - can provide subtle cues (t.s.eliot)

Recapitulation - Return to beginning at the end to give a sense of closure and wholeness

Lofty Language - using elevated forms, syntax, and diction, "What dire Offence from am'rous Causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things."

Meanings

Contrast - past/present, black/white

Imagery - pictures and descriptions

Simile - simple comparisons (like or as), "I am as constant as the northern star"

Metaphor - comparing one thing with another often stating equivalence, "All the world's a stage"

Allegory - extended metaphor

Personification - giving sentient qualities and personality to objects, ideas, and animals

Allusion - references to history or literature to evoke more meaning, "millihelen: the amount of beauty is takes to launch a single ship"

Hyperbole - extreme exaggeration for effect, "Late at night, it got so frigid that all spoken words froze solid afore they could be heard. People had to wait until sunup to find out what folks were talking about the night before..."

Symbolism - something which represents something else besides itself, "albatross around one's neck"

Ambiguity - deliberately not being clear, "I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

Mood - emotional effect of the work (often via imagery, but many other factors can affect it)

Rhetorical Question - A question which does not expect an answer. "Am I my brother's keeper?"

Prose Devices (non-poetic)

Logic, quotations, footnotes, paragraphs, statistics, evidence, facts

Poetry Forms

Haiku

    Out of the torrent
an excited voice describes
    the passing wonders.

Limerick

Aphorism

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana

Grook

THE ROAD TO WISDOM?

Well, it's plain

and simple to express.

Err and err and err again,

but less and less and less.

— Piet Hein.

Sonnet

So What?

But when the Greeks spoke of poetry, they meant not so much a graceful polish of style, an artful use of language, as an entire cast of mind. Poiesis was considered to be a making process governed by mimesis, the envisioning, or imagining, of fictional analogies, a kind of knowing different from philosophy or history and yet occupying an irreplaceable position in the quest for wisdom. "Poetry is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history," Aristotle tells us in his Poetics. "For poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular." Hence, "it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what ought to happen."
-- Louise Cowan, "Necessity of the Classics"