Sound as a Primary Mode of Desire in Poetry

The prime objective of this article is to familiarize the readers with the basic sound devices exploited in English poetry. A number of poetic lines from diverse poems composed by varied poets have been presented as a sample to discern the diverse sound devices in English poetry. Demonstration and analysis of poetic lines that hint at the sound devices in poetry are executed as a method for the study in which sound devices are the major variables which contribute to the senses in poetry. The research design employed in this study is qualitative descriptive in nature. This article is considered to be useful to those who are engrossed in studying English poetry. It is concluded that better understanding of the sound devices in English poetry directs the readers to the better comprehending of poetry. Sound devices, which are poetic elements, produce a flow of mellifluous sounds that are pleasing to hear, nice to recite and easy to memorize. The implication of this article lies in identifying the sound devices that generate senses and meanings in English poems.

2006

Recognizing that poetic methodology and artistic practice inflect each other in many ways, we invited three artists to discuss the mutual implications of their linguistic and performative work:

1. Three other elements of poetry are rhyme scheme, meter (ie. regularrhythm) and word sounds (like alliteration). These are sometimes collectively called sound play because they take advantage of the performative, spoken nature of poetry. Rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds. Poetry has perhaps always lay in some men's hearts. Perhaps, as seen from some of the evidence we have discovered in our times, even primitive man held close to him the origins of poetry. He had, for example, the pristine sky above him filled at night with such marvelous stars, such supernumerary lanterns and sparkling bits of sky, all suspended by who knew what, right in the middle of the overwhelming darkness and space of the night-yes, right in the middle of that stunning vacuum and depth which seemed to go out deeper and deeper and forever. These sensational ideas and thoughts perhaps ran through the inexpert mind of the primordial being hundreds of thousands of years ago, when man was not even man yet, and when man was just on the evolutionary machinery and path of becoming what he has been since about ten or twenty thousand years ago. These were surely the wonderments which captivated his mind and attention when outdoors at night. They must have been truly marvelous sights to look at in those times. Things have changed since then, and yet if we just take time when we are away from the city, or maybe even when we are in our own back yard, if we just look above us in total

2001

Versification studies have been enjoying something of a minor renaissance for the past decade, though very little has penetrated academic literary criticism, which is still -especially in the English-speaking world -dominated by postmodem theory. Theory has a well-documented habit of reducing all literature, poetry and prose alike, to a textual stream that can be interrogated by stick to see what patriarchal, logocentric, repressive, or misogynist mud will float to the surface. The result in poetry has been disastrous because it treats versification, arguably the single most important aspect of verse, as a mere excrescence that can be safely ignored in the critical process.

This report analyzes poetic structure and its effect on meaning to the reader or listener. Utilizing Cognitive Poetic methods, this report seeks to examine the effects of structure elements such as line length, syllabic form, and word count on the reader/listener. While elements of common historical notions about different genres of poetry are confirmed by these methods, this study is limited by small sample sizes. Inferences can be drawn about the effect of reading, as opposed to listening to given poetic structures, but additional studies are needed to fully establish statistical significance.

Lexical Density and Sentence Complexity as Stylistic Devices in Poetry - A Comparative Study of A. K. Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel, 2019

Poetry, like our experiences, is intrinsically abstract and intricate with its oblique language and inventive structure. Sanctioning the fact that human experiences and emotions are inherently so complex that a plain and direct language will fail to articulate, the poet's use of a language flexible and inventive enough to capture the complexity and abstraction of those experiences becomes highly significant. Furthermore, the chief apparatus of creating meaning in a language is its lexicon. Poetry, as contrasted to prosaic expressions, acquires its distinctiveness and lucidity by the choice of unique lexical patterns by the poet. A text acquires a prosaic or a conversational tone according to the ratio between the lexical elements and the functional elements. Writers bank on the syntax and diction to build up the desired tone, temperament and background in a text as also to rouse the interest of the readers in the poetry. This paper makes a comparative study of the use of lexical density and sentence complexity as stylistic devices in the poetry of A. K. Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel.

2005

Since Romanticism, the dominant movement of poetry has consisted of a continual thrust to transcend the defining physical limitations of the art, from Wordsworth's jettisoning of "poetic" diction in favor of a language like that of a "man speaking to men," through the transcendence of meter in the free verse revolution and of the line in projective verse. The most recent stages of the process have been the transcendence of voice in collage poetics and of syntax in fractal or disjunctive poetics, which now includes its own space for transcendence within repeated breaks in the language plane itself.

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2001

An extended parallel is developed between musical and prosodic structures, using the author's cognitively oriented music theory and recent work in generative phonology. For illustration, the sounds of a short poem by Robert Frost are treated entirely in musical terms. The poem is assigned a phonological stress grid and then musical grouping and meter. These structures enable a durational realization. Phonological stress also helps assign the poem's normative melodic contour. Finally, the similarities and differences in sound repetition are given hierarchical structure by means of musical prolongational theory. These formal parallels suggest a corresponding realization in brain localization and function. Evidence from the neuropsychological literature is cited in support of this view. The picture emerges that grouping, meter, duration, contour, and timbral similarity are mind/brain systems shared by music and language, whereas linguistic syntax and semantics and musical pitch relations are systems not shared by the two domains.