poetry

The sounds and syllables of language are combined by authors in distinctive, and often rhythmic, ways to form the literature called poetry. Language can be used in several ways to tell a story, marvel at the wonders of nature, explain the universe, give advice, or ponder the mysteries of life and death. Among these ways are the novel, short story, essay, and dramatic tragedy and comedy. All these can be defined rather easily, and each has qualities that separate it from the rest.

Poetry is much harder to define, though it is perhaps more recognizable than other literary forms. In print poetry has a markedly different appearance from other types of literature. This difference may help to define the characteristics that separate it from the other types. This article is written in prose, though portions of many poems are included in it. Prose fills a page, while poetry ordinarily does not. It is usually printed in stanza form, much as songs are. The contrast between poetry and prose can be seen by comparing the first stanza of Old Ironsides by Oliver Wendell Holmes with the text surrounding it. He wrote the poem in 1830 as a protest against the proposed demolition of the Constitution, a ship from the War of 1812.

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more!

Poetry is usually recognizable by its dependence on syllable, foot, line, and stanza—four of the technical terms that pertain to structure. It is unlikely that any other kind of literature has as many technical terms associated with it as does poetry—such terms as meter, rhyme, assonance, consonance, and alliteration. There are also terms to define specific kinds of poems—lyric, elegy, ode, epic, ballad, dramatic, narrative, and didactic.

Not all poems have the regular rhythm and rhyming of Old Ironsides. Some poems read almost like prose, though their printed appearance makes the difference evident. Another poem about a sea vessel, Walt Whitman’s The Dismantled Ship (1888), is a striking contrast to the stanza by Holmes:

In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay,
On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor’d near the shore,
An old, dismasted, gray and batter’d ship, disabled, done,
After free voyages to all the seas of earth,
haul’d up at last and hawser’d tight,
Lies rusting, mouldering.

The purposes of poetry are highly diverse. Some poems are meant to entertain, others to inform. Some teach a moral, while others serve as the basis of meditation. The Psalms in the Bible are poems that can be set to music for singing. Hymns used in Christian churches are also poems set to music. Other literary forms may serve similar purposes, but poetry does it in the fewest and best-chosen words for the occasion; or, as stated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “the best words in their best order,” instead of just words in their best order, as he described prose.

At its simplest level poetry consists of children’s rhymes (see nursery rhyme). At a deeper level poetry tries to address the human condition and to express some universal truth. Henry David Thoreau in his Journal remarked: “Poetry implies the whole truth, philosophy expresses a particle of it.” The American Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing made a similar statement in verse:

Most joyful let the Poet be;
It is through him that all men see.

The Latin writer Horace called poets “the first instructors of mankind.” The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was somewhat more eloquent on the matter of poetic truth in his Ode to the West Wind:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy!

To associate poetry with truth is not to imply that everything a poet says is an eternal truth. It only suggests that the poet, like every other writer, perceives his world in common with everyone else but sees perhaps better than others the meaning of events, nature, and life itself. The American poet Robert Frost believed that: “In literature it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, ‘Oh yes I know what you mean’. It is never to tell them something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying.”

When poets speak the truth to the best of their ability, they are trying to enlighten, teach, warn, or advise—sometimes all four at once. Examples abound—from the ancient world to the present—of poems that undertake these goals.

Homer’s Iliad presents what was for the Greeks their earliest history (see Homeric legend). A century or more later the poet Hesiod tells the stories of the gods in his Theogony and gives sound advice on how to live in Works and Days. During the 5th century bc the Greek dramatists wrote their masterpieces of tragedy and comedy in verse.

In the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) the writers of wisdom used poetic maxims to explore the nature of human relationships. The Book of Proverbs consists mostly of unrhymed couplets (two-line poetic statements) used to make a point:

A fool hath no delight in understanding,
But that his heart may discover itself.

Pride goeth before destruction,
And a haughty spirit before a fall.

In a similar manner the words of the great Hebrew prophets have come down to the present mostly in poetic form.

Early in the Renaissance the Italian poet Dante used his skills to compose the Divine Comedy, a literary landmark that captures the spirit of medieval Christianity. Three hundred years later William Shakespeare used dramatic poetry in his great tragedies such as Hamlet and Macbeth. In the 17th century John Milton composed the long, epic poem Paradise Lost to retell the Biblical creation narrative—itself a poem. In the next century Alexander Pope gave the Enlightenment view of the universe and humanity’s place in it in his Essay on Man, which contains the famous lines:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Some truths have been expressed in a much lighter, almost humorous way. In 1824 Lord Byron composed the following poem—as relevant to the present as to his own time:

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,
Let him combat for that of his neighbors;
Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,
And get knocked on his head for his labors.

To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,
And is always as nobly requited;
Then battle for freedom wherever you can,
And, if not shot or hanged, you’ll get knighted.

A poem is almost captive to the language in which it is written. Novels, essays, and reports can be translated—though sometimes with difficulty. It is more difficult, perhaps impossible, to translate a poem adequately. A poem is not just a compilation of words; it is words put together to create sound patterns and certain rhythms that together produce a specific effect. The sounds and rhythms are peculiar to the language, and each language has its special qualities. Poems are meant to be read aloud—that was their first use. To carry over the same, or even similar, sounds and rhythms into another language is very difficult.

The problem of translation becomes especially acute if a poet uses dialect or unusual sound effects. Dialects are unique to a language. In 1846 James Russell Lowell published a lengthy poem as one of the Biglow Papers, a series of papers that satirized the Mexican-American War. Lowell was a Northern abolitionist who was convinced that the territories won in the war would be used to extend the institution of slavery. The poem is written in a crude, but effective, frontier dialect.

They jest want this Californy
So’s to lug new slave-states in
To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,
An’ to plunder ye like sin.

Aint it cute to see a Yankee
Take sech everlastin’ pains,
All to get the Devil’s thankee
Helpin’ on ’em weld their chains?

Dialect such as this is nearly impossible to translate and still keep the effect of the original.

Equally challenging are the striking combinations of sound achieved by Edgar Allan Poe and Vachel Lindsay. Poe’s well-known poem The Raven tells a story, but the impact of the poem is its sound and rhythm—an effect that is heightened by the internal rhymes and ending rhymes, especially the words that rhyme with “nevermore” to give a sense of impending doom.

But the Raven still beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and
bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to
linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous
bird of yore— —
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous
bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

The amazing sound effects achieved by Vachel Lindsay in General William Booth Enters into Heaven and The Congo would be even more difficult to carry over into another language because the distinctive sounds would be lost in translation. (See also figure of speech, “Alliteration and Onomatopoeia.”)

Apart from dialect and sound devices, some experimental poetry uses words in such distinctive ways that translation is out of the question. The 20th-century U.S. poet E.E. Cummings was highly innovative in his word combinations as well as in his general refusal to use capital letters. It is hardly possible to think of the following lines in a language other than English:

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;

Meter—the Measure of a Line

Music has sound, but it also has rhythm. Lines of poetry too have rhythms in addition to the sound effects created by the words. The rhythms of poetry are evident when the lines are read aloud. As stated earlier, the basic components of many poems are syllable, foot, line, and stanza. It is the accenting of the syllables within a line that creates the rhythm, and the rhythm in a line is measured by the meter. Some meters are of a definite length; others are variable.

On a page, lines of poetry may appear quite similar. When read aloud, the accenting of the syllables indicates the varying meters. Just as words are composed of syllables, so too are lines of poems. A group of syllables constitutes a foot. The number of feet determines the measure of a line. Most poetry follows the syllable-foot-line structure, though accenting may vary according to the type of meter used. Nonmetrical poetry is covered at the end of this section.

Syllable-stress lines

To understand the terminology of syllables, feet, and meters, it is helpful to see lines of poetry.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.

are two lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Pronouncing them reveals that there are ten syllables making up five feet in each line. Each line is thus considered a pentameter, or five-foot, line. Other measures have similar names: monometer (one foot), dimeter (two feet), trimeter (three feet), tetrameter (four feet), hexameter (six feet), heptameter (seven feet), octometer (eight feet), and nonometer (nine feet).

The first two syllables in the first line are Once more, and the accent falls on the more. The stressed and unstressed syllables in a poetic foot are rather like the dots and dashes in the Morse code. In scanning poetry—analyzing it for its rhythm—the stressed and unstressed syllables are usually represented by the following signs:

Feet are made up of combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables.

If the Shakespeare lines are reprinted with the accent marks, it is easier to hear how the stressed and unstressed syllables make up a pentameter line.

The five-foot line with unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables is called iambic pentameter. This meter, when unrhymed as it is here, is called blank verse. Iambic is one of the seven most common syllable-stress meters. The others, with their signs representing stress or lack of it are: trochee ( ′ ˘ ), anapest ( ˘ ˘  ′ ), dactyl ( ′ ˘ ˘ ), spondee ( ′ ′ ), amphibrach ( ˘ ′ ˘ ), and amphimacer ( ′ ˘ ′ ). The iambic, trochee (or trochaic), and spondee are two-syllable feet, while the others have three syllables each. These meters were the norms for English-language poetry from the 16th through the late 19th century. To assist in remembering the different meters, Samuel Taylor Coleridge composed a verse:

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long—
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng;
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride;— —
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud highbred racer.

Coleridge has conveniently written every line to match the meter he is describing. Thus the rhythms of the first and fifth lines, for instance, are completely opposite.

The four principal feet found in English verse are the iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic. Examples of these four types, with accent marks, follow.

Iambic pentameter, from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man:

Trochaic tetrameter, from Longfellow’s Psalm of Life:

Dactylic tetrameter, from John Dryden’s An Evening’s Love:

Anapestic tetrameter, from Lord Byron’s The Destruction of Sennacherib:

It is possible, as many poets have done, to write a whole poem in the same meter. It is probably as common for poets to vary the meter within a poem—to alternate iambic pentameter with iambic tetrameter, for instance—or to use different types of meter entirely to avoid the monotonous sing-song effect so evident in Longfellow’s Psalm of Life.

Strong-stress meters

During the 19th century the traditional meters of English poetry were challenged by such writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins in England and Walt Whitman in the United States. They often used lines measured by the count of stresses alone. Thus the number of feet per line becomes irrelevant. The strong-stress line is actually much older than the syllable-stress meter. It was used in the Old English epic Beowulf (about ad 1000) and in William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman (14th century):

In a summer season when the sun was mild
I got myself up in garb as though I’d grown into a sheep;
In the habit of a hermit, unholy of works,
I went wide in the world, watching for wonders.

When these lines are read aloud, the stress falls naturally on certain syllables, and there are about the same number of stresses in each line. Hopkins used strong-stress meter in much of his poetry. The following lines are from Spring:

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

Whitman, in one of his well-known Civil War poems, uses a similar stress pattern:

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our
Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter
from thy dear son.

Poets of the 20th century—including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden—perpetuated the strong-stress meter in their works.

Other meters

Apart from nonmetrical poetry, which is discussed below, most English-language verse relies on syllable-stress or strong-stress meters. Other languages, because of differences in word accentuation or verb and noun endings, use purely syllabic meters. This is true especially of French, Italian, and Spanish verse. In some French poetry the 12-syllable line is the dominant form. It must be noted that French words themselves have no accented syllables. The following line from a stanza by the 17th-century writer Jean Racine contains 12 syllables:

O toi, qui vois la honte où je suis descendue,
(O you, who see the shame into which I have descended)

A comparable ten-syllable English line from a translation of the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch reads as follows:

The long love that in my thought doth harbor,

In such poems only the count of syllables is fixed; the stresses are variable.

Much of classical Greek and Latin poetry was written in hexameters—lines of six feet, usually in dactyls. The classical model can be adapted to German poetry more easily than to English because the German language still has many inflected words (changes in noun and verb endings). In the United States, Longfellow made use of classical hexameter in Evangeline:

Generally, however, it has proved quite difficult to adapt classical meter to English verse. Even Longfellow’s attempt, upon examination, appears to be a syllable-stress line of five dactyls ending in a final trochee.

Nonmetrical poetry

A literary style in French poetry called vers libre, or free verse, began in the 1880s. A number of English-speaking authors were influenced by it, and free verse became common among 20th-century poets—including Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens. Free verse has no regular metrical scheme. Its rhythms derive from the sounds, words, phrases, and stanzas. Some free verse is so like casual speech that it is difficult to recognize as poetry. Much of Whitman’s poetry is also characterized by free verse, though most of his poems were written before the movement arose. The following lines are from his There Was a Child Went Forth:

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day
or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

Sandburg was a master of free verse, as in the opening lines from I Am the People, the Mob:

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world
is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world’s food and clothes.

Sandburg, instead of using normal stanzas, often put his lines into paragraphs. One may occasionally find that a whole paragraph of Sandburg’s poetry consists of one very long punctuated line.

As literature, poetry can be put to many uses—from telling long stories to presenting some small insight by the author. The uses of poetry have led to the development of different literary types. Among them are the narrative, dramatic, and lyric.

Narrative poetry, like long fiction, tells a story. Best known among narrative works are the Greek epics—the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Bible’s Book of Job is also a narrative. The anonymous Song of Roland is a narrative from the Middle Ages. Later examples of the type are Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish, and Benét’s John Brown’s Body. Shorter narrative poems include Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Robert Frost’s The Death of the Hired Man.

Dramatic poetry is nearly as old as the narrative form. The Greek dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were outstanding tragedians whose works have never been surpassed. Aristophanes was the great writer of comedic drama. In English, Shakespeare is considered the most outstanding of dramatists. Such later poets as John Dryden, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Robert Browning wrote verse plays. In the 20th century Christopher Fry, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden produced verse dramas. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral has been staged frequently, and his Cocktail Party also appeared on Broadway. Auden wrote For the Time Being, called a Christmas oratorio. Fry’s most notable play was The Lady’s Not for Burning.

Lyric poems are so called because they were originally meant to be set to music accompanied by an instrument called the lyre. Lyric poems, the most common type in English, are shorter than narrative and dramatic works. They express the poet’s thoughts or feelings on a single subject. The sonnet is one of the best forms of lyric poetry, a field in which Shakespeare was an expert. Other great lyric writers were Petrarch, John Milton, and Edmund Spenser. Poets of the 18th and 19th centuries who excelled in this type were William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Victor Hugo, and Heinrich Heine.

Among other types of lyric poetry, two forms stand out: the ode and the elegy. Odes were originally meant to be sung or chanted like the choral odes in Greek drama. Odes are usually addressed to a person, thing, or quality. Examples include Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty, Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind.

Elegies are poems written about death or in memory of someone. Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, with death as its theme, is perhaps the best known of the type. In a similar vein is William Cullen Bryant’s Thanatopsis. Shelley’s Adonais was written in memory of Keats, and Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d mourns Abraham Lincoln’s death. Some 20th-century elegies included A.E. Housman’s To an Athlete Dying Young, Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats, and Dylan Thomas’ elegy for his father, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.

William Congreve, in his dedication to The Way of the World (1700), called poetry “the eldest sister of all art, and parent of most.” Congreve’s assessment is correct. Before language was written, it was spoken. The earliest religious songs and incantations were in poetic form. The same was true of stories telling the origin of the gods, of the Earth, and of a tribe. Verses of poetry are easier to remember and retell than is narrative prose. Thus the first great written literature was mostly poetic in form because it derived from a much older spoken tradition.

It was taken for granted that poetry, like all other creative human endeavors, is inspired—a gift of the gods. The books of the Hebrew Bible are considered to have been inspired by the God of Israel. For the Greeks the nine goddesses collectively referred to as the Muses were the sources of inspiration (see mythology, “Greek Mythology”). Erato was the Muse of lyric and love poetry; Melpomene inspired tragedy, Thalia comedy, and Calliope epic or heroic poetry.

The word poetry is derived from the Greek verb poiein, which means “to make” or “to create.” It implies doing something creative. The words poet and poetry came into English usage in about the 14th century.

From the written evidence that has survived, it seems clear that poetry was first used for religious and political purposes. Virgil’s Aeneid is an outstanding example. It tells the story of the founding of Rome. Two of Virgil’s goals were to paint as splendid a picture as possible of Rome’s beginnings and to predict the future greatness of the city under the emperor Augustus—the poet’s main intended reader.

Well before Virgil’s time, however, poetry had become partly detached from its religious and political functions. It gradually became free to develop as an entertainment form. Catullus, a Roman poet who lived a generation before Virgil, was a lyric poet who devoted many of his verses to the woman he loved. Juvenal composed powerful and humorous satires of Roman society.

During the Middle Ages, when Christianity dominated Europe, poetry largely served the interests of religion. With the Renaissance and the emergence of humanism in Italy, poetry again detached itself from a narrow use. Its subject matter became as varied as the world and the ideas of the poet would permit.

Throughout most of the centuries of poetry’s existence, it has been directed to the public at large. This was especially true of the Greek dramas and comedies. It was still true for the works of Shakespeare and for other writers of the Elizabethan period and later. Poetry was meant to have a public impact, to affect events and to change people’s minds. Since the end of the 18th century, there has been little poetry with a social influence. It has become significant for the solitary reader rather than for society as a whole. It is perhaps coincidental that the decline of poetry as a political influence began with the rise of the novel.

The loss of a wider audience did not mean a loss of quality in poetry or a reluctance of poets to speak out on sensitive issues. Matthew Arnold lamented the general loss of faith during the mid-19th century in his Dover Beach. Rudyard Kipling presented an ironic view of British and American imperialism in The White Man’s Burden (1899):

Take up the white man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

The tragedy of World War I, in which such promising writers as Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke were killed, brought forth its share of often agonizing poetry. These poems endured to become a protest against all such violence. In Anthem for Doomed Youth Owen queried:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Brooke seemed to predict his own fate in The Soldier:

If I should die, think only this of me,
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.

Hardly 20 years had passed before W.H. Auden could ponder the onset of the next conflagration in September 1, 1939—the date Germany invaded Poland and set off World War II:

The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Although poetry may have become a literature for private reading and selective tastes well before the 20th century, it has never lacked a readership. In the English-speaking world much of the credit for gaining and keeping readers was due to the appearance in October 1912 of the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. The magazine was founded and edited by Chicago-born Harriet Monroe.

Because the appearance of the magazine coincided with the cultural ferment known as the Chicago Renaissance, it was instrumental in promoting the works of such new poets as Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Sherwood Anderson. Ezra Pound served as foreign correspondent. Poetry presented to its readers all of the new styles and forms of modern verse, including Imagism, free verse, and Impressionism.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by the then unknown poet T.S. Eliot was printed in the magazine in 1915. Experimental writings by Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and others filled the magazine’s pages. The little journal survived both world wars to become a publication of international reputation. By 2002, Poetry had a circulation reaching all 50 states in the United States, as well as 45 other countries around the world.

The literature about poetry is vast. There are also numerous collections of works by individual authors and collections in every language. This selection is meant to be an introduction to the study of verse in English.

Abrams, M.H. and others, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2 vols. (Norton, 1979). Auden, W.H., ed. The Oxford Book of Light Verse (Oxford, 1979). Boulton, Marjorie. Anatomy of Poetry, rev. ed. (Methuen, 1983). Hall, Donald. The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (Oxford, 1985). Matthiessen, F.O. The Oxford Book of American Verse (Oxford, 1950). Perlutsky, Jack, ed. The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (Random, 1983). Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry (Paris, 1996). Stallworthy, Jon. The Oxford Book of War Poetry (Oxford, 1984). Williams, Miller. Patterns of Poetry (La. State Univ. Press, 1986).