poetry

Imaginative literary form, particularly suitable for describing emotions and thoughts. Poetry is highly ‘compressed’ writing, often using figures of speech to talk about one thing in terms of another, such as metaphor and simile, that allows the reader to ‘unpack’ the poem's meaning for itself. This leads to people interpreting poems differently in different times and places, which is part of the fascination of the medium. Poetry does not have to follow the strict grammatical rules of prose (ordinary written language) - although the writer may choose to do so - and often uses richer language to appeal to the reader's senses and intellect. The use of comparative language and elevated or uncommon word choice or diction contributes to poetry's ability to make a familiar world seem strange and new again.

Traditionally poems are distinguished from prose by the arrangement of words, which often rhyme or are arranged rhythmically in a structure known as the poem's metre. A poem is written in lines, whereas prose is not. In modern times the distinction between poetry and prose is not so clear-cut. If prose displays rhythm and other features associated with poetry, it is sometimes termed ‘prose poetry’. Much of English novelist Virginia Woolf's work, for example, could be placed in this category.

The vast genre of poetry can be subdivided in a variety of ways. A large body of poetry is metrical. Another distinction can be made between lyric poems (sonnet, ode, elegy, and pastoral are examples of lyrical poetry), and narrative, or story-telling, poetry (ballad, lay, and epic are examples of narrative verse). Narrative verse is often less complex in its imagery and language than the more heightened lyric poem.

There have been experiments with ‘free’ poetic forms, known as free verse, unconstrained by rules of metre and rhyme. Sometimes, the actual arrangement of words on the printed page is used to make shapes, or to emphasize particular words or phrases and their relationship to one another. Even in metrical verse, the precise position of words on a line can have a similar effect.

Originally an oral tradition, poetry was a method of story-telling and communication in non-literate societies and held much cultural significance as a method of spreading mythologies and religions. In this form poetry was structured by alliteration rather than rhyme. This is the form of poetry in most Old English literature.

As the literary form developed, formal structures became more important than alliteration in giving rhythm to the work. English poetry after Old English can be seen to have adopted the structures of classical Greek and Roman poetry, which include the use of strict metre, concentrating upon the number of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line. The English poet and dramatist William Shakespeare, for example, wrote much of his dialogue in the poetical form of iambic pentameter (a five-foot metrical line, containing five unstressed and five stressed alternate syllables). He also used the sonnet form for much of his love poetry, which involves a strict metrical pattern. Other metrical forms include heroic verse and ballad form. Such forms are conventionally put to different uses; for example, a sonnet for a declaration of love, heroic verse for the narration of a battle or something similar, and a ballad for the narration of a social event. Other poetical conventions involve imagery; for example pastoral poetry is concerned with images of nature and the countryside.

Later poetry, particularly that of modernism, became more fluid and less constrained by traditional rules of structure and grammar. This means that a work need not follow a strict metrical pattern or rhyme in order to be a poem. In such ‘free’ verse, poetry becomes something reliant more upon imagery and emotive language, and odd and unexpected line breaks (enjambment), than upon alliteration, numbers of syllables, or rhymes. These poems are often said to be written in ‘open form’, while more traditional poems are said to be written in ‘fixed’ or ‘closed’ form. Rhythmic prose which is poetical in terms of its imagery and figures of speech is sometimes called ‘prose poetry’; this too is a term associated with modernism.