POETRY
Poetry is a genre of literature. The different intellectual giants have defined it differently.
Some of the definitions are mentioned below:
Johnson:
“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help
of reason”.
Carlyle:
“Poetry is musical thought”.
Shelly:
“Poetry is expression of imagination”.
Coleridge:
“Poetry is antithesis of science having for its immediate object pleasure not truth”.
Wordsworth:
“Poetry is spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.
Arnold:
“Poetry is the criticism of life”.
General Definition:
“Poetry is an imaginative and emotional interpretation of life”.
A Comprehensive Definition (On My Part): Poetry is a language of soul, which
emerges from the inner vistas of soul and appeals to the same. Emotions and thoughts are
its contents, imagination its medium and meter its dress. Its immediate purpose is to teach
and delight us. It is an autobiography of the life, for the life and by the life.
2. THE ESSENTIALS OF POETRY
1. Thought: It is product of mind.
2. Emotion: It is product of heart.
3. Imagination: The capacity to envisage things or a faculty to see the things which
are physically absent.
4. Meter: The selection of rhythm and rhyme for music. (words having same sound
is called rhyme such as ‘run’ and ‘fun’. Ups and down of sound is called rhythm.
5. Diction: The Choice and arrangements of words.
6. Philosophy of the writer:
3. KINDS OF POETRY
The genre of poetry mainly can be divided into two kinds viz. subjective and
objective poetry. The both kinds can also further be divided into different forms.
(I) SUBJECTIVE POETRY
1. Lyrical Poetry:
The poetry embracing the common universal emotions, which is to be sung and
danced for merriment and enjoyment.
2. The Elegy:
A kind of poetry written at the eve of somebody’s death or at a sorrowful
occasion.
3. The Ode:
It is written to an object but not for it. In this kind of poetry, a poet shares his
feelings with an object selected by the poet.
4. Sonnet:
It is also an expression of a poet’s feelings, but it is always a fourteen-lined poem.
(II) OBJECTIVE POETRY
1. The Ballad: A short story of national interest in poetry. (Abbot of Canterbury,
Spider and King Bruce, Cassabianca, Abu Ben Adhem, Mill of the Dee)
2. The Epic: A long-narrative story in verse to pay homage to the national hero or
encompassing a grand theme. (Homers’ Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Anied,
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Ramayana and Mahabharata)
(12 books)
3. Metrical Romance: A fictitious story in poetry. It may harbour supernatural and
metaphysical elements to make the reader standstill, amazed and gasping.
PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE
Literary Periods Dates Historical Periods
1. Pre- Chaucerian Period 500-1340AC Anglo-Saxon Period.
Medievalism
(Dark Ages)
2. The Age of Chaucer 1340-1400 --------
3. Barren Period 1400-1557 --------
4. The Age of Shakespeare1557-1624 Elizabethan Period
(Renaissance Movement.)
5. The Age of Milton. 1625-1660 Protestantism/Reformation
6. The Age of Dryden 1660-1700 Restoration
7. The Age of Pope 1700-1745 Period
8. The Age of Johnson 1745-1798 Neo-classicism
9. The Age of Wordsworth 1798-1832 The period of Romanticism.
10. The Age Of Tennyson 1832-1887 The Victorian
11. The Age of Hardy 1887-1928 Period.
12. The Present Age 1928-1955
4. THE LANGUAGE OF LITERARY CRITICISM
Figurative Language: Imagery is language that produces pictures in the mind. The term
can be used to discuss the various stylistic devices listed below, especially figures of
speech (= ways of using language to convey or suggest a meaning beyond the literal
meaning of the words).
Metaphor: It is the imaginative use of a word or phrase to describe something else, to
show that the two have the same qualities:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
(William Shakespeare, As You Like It)
Simile: It is the comparison between the two things which is made explicit by the use of
the words ‘as’ or ‘like’:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
(William Wordsworth, Daffodils)
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end.
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 60)
Metonymy: It is the fact of referring to something by the name of something else closely
connected with it, used especially as a form of shorthand for something familiar or
obvious, as in ‘I’ve been reading Shakespeare’ instead of ‘I’ve been reading the plays of
Shakespeare’.
Allegory: It is a style of writing in which each character or event is a symbol
representing a particular quality. In John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” Christian
escapes from the City of Destruction, travels through the Slough of Despond, visits
Vanity Fair and finally arrives at the Celestial City. He meets characters such as the Giant
Despair and Mr. Worldly Wiseman and is accompanied by Faithful and Hopeful.
Personification: It is the act of representing objects or qualities as human beings:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
(George Herbert, Love)
Pathetic fallacy: It is the effect produced when animals and things are shown as having
human feelings. For example, in John Milton’s poem, Lycidas, the flowers are shown as
weeping for the dead shepherd, Lycidas.
PATTERNS OF SOUND
Alliteration: It is the use of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words that are
close together. It was used systematically in Old English poetry but in modern English
poetry is generally only used for a particular effect:
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam)
Assonance: It is the effect created when two syllables in words that are close together
have the same vowel sound but different consonants, or the same consonants but different
vowels:
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel long since scooped…
(Wilfred Owen, Strange Meeting)
Onomatopoeia: It is the effect produced when the words used contain similar sounds to
the noises they describe:
Murmuring of innumerable bees
(Tennyson, The Princess)
Irony: It is the use of words that say the opposite of what you really mean, often in order
to make a critical comment.
Here, under leave of Brutus, and the rest,
(For Brutus is an honourable man}
I come to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
Here the use of the word, “honourable” is ironical.
Hyperbole: It is the use of exaggeration:
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze
(Andrew Marvell. To His Coy Mistress)
Oxymoron: It is a phrase that combines two words that seem to be the opposite of each
other:
Parting is such sweet sorrow
(Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
Paradox: Is a statement that contains two opposite ideas or seems to be impossible:
The child is father of the Man.
(Wordsworth. ‘My Heart leaps up.’)
It can also be considered as Epigram.
POETRY
Lyric poetry is usually fairly short and expresses thoughts and feelings. Examples are
Wordsworth’s Daffodils and Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill.
Epic poetry can be much longer and deals with the actions of great men and women or
the history of nations. Examples are Homer’s “Iliad” and Virgil’s “Aeneid.”
Narrative poetry tells a story, like Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”, or Coleridge’s “Rime
of the Ancient Mariner.”
Dramatic poetry takes the form of a play, and includes the plays of Shakespeare (which
also contain scenes in prose).
A ballad is a traditional type of narrative poem with short verses or stanzas and a simple
rhyme scheme (= pattern of rhymes).
An elegy is a type of lyric poem that expresses sadness for someone who has died
Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard mourns all who lived and died
quietly and never had the chance to be great.
An ode is a lyric poem that addresses a person or thing or celebrates an event. John Keats
wrote five great odes, including “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and
“Ode To Autumn.”
Metre is the rhythm of poetry determined by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed,
or long and short, syllables in each line of the poem.
Prosody is the theory and study of metre.
Iambic pentameter is the most common metre in English poetry; each line consists of
five feet (pentameter), each containing an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed
syllable (iambic):
/ / / / /
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
(Gray’s Elegy)
Most lines of iambic pentameter, however, are not absolutely regular in their pattern of
stresses:
/ / / /
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)
A couplet is a pair of lines of poetry with the same metre, especially ones that rhyme:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
(Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)
A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines, in English written in iambic pentameter, and with a fixed
pattern of rhyme, often ending with a rhyming couplet.
Blank verse is poetry written in iambic pentameters that do not rhyme. A lot of
Shakespeare’s dramatic verse is in blank verse, as is Milton’s epic Paradise Lost.
Free verse is poetry without a regular metre or rhyme scheme. Much twentieth century
poetry is written in free verse, for example T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land.
DRAMA
The different genres of drama include Comedy, tragedy and farce.
Catharsis is the process of releasing and providing relief from strong emotions such as
pity and fear by watching the same emotions being played out on stage.
A deus ex machina is an unexpected power or event that suddenly appears to resolve a
situation that seems hopeless. It is often used to talk about a character in a play or story
that only appears at the end.
Dramatic irony is when a character’s words carry an extra meaning, especially because
of what is going to happen that the character does not know about. For example, King
Duncan in Shakespeare’s Macbeth is pleased to accept Macbeth’s hospitality, not
knowing that Macbeth is going to murder him that night.
Hubris is too much pride or self-confidence, especially when shown by a tragic hero or
heroine who tries to defy the gods or fate.
Nemesis is what happens when the hero or heroine’s past mistakes or sins finally cause
his or her downfall and death.
A soliloquy is a speech in a play for one character that is alone on the stage and speaks
his or her thoughts aloud. The most famous soliloquy in English drama is Hamlet’s
beginning ‘To be or not to be…’
NARRATIVE
A novel is a narrative (= a story) long enough to fill a complete book. The story may be
told by a first-person narrator, who is a character in the story and relates what happens
to himself or herself, or there may be an omniscient narrator who relates what happens
to all the characters in the third person.
A short story is a story that is short enough to be read from beginning to end without
stopping.
The denouement is the end of a book or play in which everything is explained or settled.
It is often used to talk about mystery or detective stories.
Stream of consciousness is a style of writing used in novels that shows the continuous
flow of a character’s thoughts and feelings without using the usual methods of
description or conversation. It was used particularly in he twentieth century by writers
such ads James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PROSE AND POETRY
The essential difference between poetry and prose is the meter. The poetry bears
meter whereas the prose is wanting in it. It is meter, which brings or produces music in
the poetry. Rhythm is the ups and down of the sound; the way these ups and down are
organized is called meter. Rhyme also adds much in the enhancement of music. The
ending syllable in the lines of poetry having same sound is called rhyme.
