The Poet as a Cultural Ambassador and Social Critic

The paper reconceptualises poetry as a multimodal genre, explicates this reconceptualisation through two frameworks - multimodal social semiotics and oral studies. It discusses how both curriculum and pedagogy can be shifted and expanded through the reconceptualisation, to include spoken word poetry, with positive outcomes for education. An analysis of exciting contemporary spoken word poem is provided as an example.

Neohelicon, 2021

The following proposal for research begins with the observation that in specific contexts of performance poetic language appears to allow for varying degrees of access across language boundaries. This cross-language access, if it can be verified empirically, might be attributed to distinguishing features that differentiate poetic from prosaic discourse, on the one hand, and from musical structure on the other, an important problem in its own right. To approach this research question it is recommended to begin with poetic works as they are performed for a listening audience and to prioritize, at the beginning of the research project, composition and performance from the popular culture, broadly defined, and from the traditional genres of the oral tradition. Another point of reference for this discussion, which follows from the above recommended approach, is the Lerdahl-Jackendoff proposal of analyzing poetry as a kind of musical form.

Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, 2024

Poetry does not have a history; it has many histories. By tracing the history of poetry in the West, in conjunction with genre studies and research on concept formation, it is evident that the genre "poetry" is contingent on the various rhetorical situations of its production. Such an approach reveals that the concept "poetry," like all concepts, is always in flux. Yet, despite the fact that "poetry" means different things to different people in different times and places, studies of oral poetry have yielded insights into traits that might be considered universal to poetry, such as its performativity and categorization as ritual language. Other common aspects include the use of parallelism, analogy and metaphor, musicality, and how poems function as metapragmatic symbols that reflect the values of their cultural production. This functionalist approach to poetry reveals that the evolution of poetry is at once historically contingent and culturally universal, and recognizes that poetry's multiplicity and continual becoming operate with the primary goals of generating and sharing culturally relative meaning.

Poetry And Imagined Worlds

Ibercampus , 2021

Some notes on the definition of poetry, taking into account not just the formal features of poetic genres, but also the social and artistic contexts in which poetry is written, read, circulated, invoked or used. Keywords: Poetry, Literary theory, Discourse analysis, Criticism, Poetics

Journal of Literary Education, 2019

What is poetry? The definitions are countless. As many as the people in this world. It might be argued that the most decisive aspect of poetry is its resistance to be defined, labeled, or pinned down. We all know how poetry sounds and feels, and we can recognize a poem when we hear, recite or read one. However, it may be difficult for us to explain, or offer a detailed account of what exactly is poetry and what its meaning might be, its effect, or significance in our lives. Very often, poetry is defined as a special kind of language which does innovative things with words, sound, rhythm and pattern; features which consist a constant source of our pleasure and understanding of the poem. We may even understand a poem not only by feeling its rhythms but also by hearing its sounds as well as by grasping its clusters of meanings, yet we may not be able to express our understanding of it to others.

P C K PREM

Himachal, he joined civil services and thereafter, he retired from IAS, and joined as Member Himachal Public Service Commission, Shimla and served until 2007. Associated with several social/literary organizations, he has brought out eleven volumes of poetry besides six books on criticism, four books on ancient literature, two on folk tales, six novels and three collections of short fiction. In Hindi, he authored twenty novels, nine books on short fiction and a collection of poems besides nearly hundred critical articles, reviews and critiques published in various national and international journals and anthologies.

Concepts and Clarifications 1. Poetry is the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse. (Sidney) 2. Philosophers appear to the world but under the masks of poets. 3. Great passport of poetry to beauty and judgement. 4. Hard dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delights of poetry. 5. A poet is a diviner, foreseer, or prophet. 6. Poetry is heart-ravishing knowledge. 7. A poet is a maker. 8. World is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. 9. Poesy is a speaking picture, to teach and delight. 10. Poesy is the lute, the light. 11. Peerless poets perform by precept and example. 12. Poesy deals with universal consideration. 13. The end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. (Johnson) 14. All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. (Wordsworth) 15. Poesy is outcome of lively sensibility. 16. Poetry is the most philosophical of all writings; it is so; its object is truth, and individual and local, but general, and operative. 17. Poetry is the image of man and nature. 18. Poetry is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe. 19. Poetry looks at the world in the spirit of love. 20. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge. 21. The poet binds together by passion and knowledge. 22. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge. 23. The poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration. 24. The poet is chiefly distinguished from other men by a greater promptness to think and feel. 25. Good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole. (S. T. Coleridge) 26. Poetry is expression of imagination. (Shelley) 27. To be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful. 28. The poets are the authors of language and of music…they are the institutors of laws…the founders of civil society…the inventors of the arts of life…the teachers. 29. The poets are legislators and prophets. 30. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one. 31. The poets are the authors of revolutions. 32. Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. 33. A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. 34. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet known not whence and why. 35. Beauty of conceptions in its naked truth and splendour. 36. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world. 37. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight. 38. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. 39. Poems contribute to the happiness and perfection of man. 40. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. 41. Poetry is ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time. 42. The world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors. 43. Creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art. 44. Poetry is a burning atom of inextinguishable thought. 45. All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially. 46. A great poem is a fountain of ever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight.