ASSIGNMENT

ON

READINGS IN LITERATURE

Submitted to:Neenu Mary Francis Submitted by : Lincy Francis

Department of languages 4 th semester

 B.A.English and
communicative english

DIFFERENT POETIC GENERS

-SONNET

-LYRIC

-ELEGY

-MOCK EPIC

-CONFESSIONAL POETRY

-NARRATIVE POETRY
SONNET

The sonnet is unique among poetic forms in Western literature in that it has retained its appeal for
major poets for five centuries. The form seems to have originated in the 13th century among
the Sicilian school of court poets, who were influenced by the love poetry of Provençal troubadours.
From there it spread to Tuscany, where it reached its highest expression in the 14th century in the
poems of Petrarch. His Canzoniere—a sequence of poems including 317 sonnets, addressed to his
idealized beloved, Laura—established and perfected the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, which remains
one of the two principal sonnet forms, as well as the one most widely used. The other major form is
the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet.

The Petrarchan sonnet characteristically treats its theme in two parts. The first eight lines, the octave,
state a problem, ask a question, or express an emotional tension. The last six lines, the sestet, resolve
the problem, answer the question, or relieve the tension. The octave is rhymed abbaabba. The rhyme
scheme of the sestet varies; it may be cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The Petrarchan sonnet became a
major influence on European poetry. It soon became naturalized in Spain, Portugal, and France and
was introduced to Poland, whence it spread to other Slavic literatures. In most cases the form was
adapted to the staple metre of the language—e.g., the alexandrine (12-syllable iambic line) in France
and iambic pentameter in English.

The sonnet was introduced to England, along with other Italian verse forms, by Sir Thomas
Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in the 16th century. The new forms precipitated the great
Elizabethan flowering of lyric poetry, and the period marks the peak of the sonnet’s English popularity.
In the course of adapting the Italian form to a language less rich in rhymes, the Elizabethans gradually
arrived at the distinctive English sonnet, which is composed of three quatrains, each having an
independent rhyme scheme, and is ended with a rhymed couplet.The rhyme scheme of the English
sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. Its greater number of rhymes makes it a less demanding form than the
Petrarchan sonnet, but this is offset by the difficulty presented by the couplet, which must summarize
the impact of the preceding quatrains with the compressed force of a Greek epigram.

The typical Elizabethan use of the sonnet was in a sequence of love poems in the manner of Petrarch.
Although each sonnet was an independent poem, partly conventional in content and partly self-
revelatory, the sequence had the added interest of providing something of a narrative development.
Among the notable Elizabethan sequences are Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (1591), Samuel
Daniel’s Delia (1592), Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirrour (1594), and Edmund
Spenser’s Amoretti (1591). The last-named work uses a common variant of the sonnet (known
as Spenserian) that follows the English quatrain and couplet pattern but resembles the Italian in using a
linked rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee. Perhaps the greatest of all sonnet sequences is Shakespeare’s,
addressed to a young man and a “dark lady.” In these sonnets the supposed love story is of less interest
than the underlying reflections on time and art, growth and decay, and fame and fortune.

In its subsequent development the sonnet was to depart even further from themes of love. By the
time John Donne wrote his religious sonnets (c. 1610) and Milton wrote sonnets on political and
religious subjects or on personal themes such as his blindness, the sonnet had been extended to
embrace nearly all the subjects of poetry.

It is the virtue of this short form that it can range from “light conceits of lovers” to considerations of
life, time, death, and eternity, without doing injustice to any of them. Even during the Romantic era, in
spite of the emphasis on freedom and spontaneity, the sonnet forms continued to challenge major poets.
Many English writers—including William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—
continued to write Petrarchan sonnets. One of the best-known examples of this in English is
Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us”.
In the later 19th century the love sonnet sequence was revived by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
in Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) and by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in The House of Life (1876). The
most distinguished 20th-century work of the kind is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnette an Orpheus (1922).

LYRIC

Lyric, a verse or poem that is, or supposedly is, susceptible of being sung to the accompaniment of
a musical instrument (in ancient times, usually a lyre) or that expresses intense personal emotion in a
manner suggestive of a song. Lyric poetry expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet and is
sometimes contrasted with narrative poetry and verse drama, which relate events in the form of a story.
Elegies, odes, and sonnets are all important kinds of lyric poetry.

In ancient Greece an early distinction was made between the poetry chanted by a choir of singers
(choral lyrics) and the song that expressed the sentiments of a single poet. The latter, the melos, or song
proper, had reached a height of technical perfection in “the Isles of Greece, where
burning Sappho loved and sung,” as early as the 7th century BC. That poetess, together with her
contemporary Alcaeus, were the chief Doric poets of the pure Greek song. By their side, and later,
flourished the great poets who set words to music for choirs, Alcman, Arion, Stesichorus, Simonides,
and Ibycus, who were followed at the close of the 5th century by Bacchylides and Pindar, in whom the
tradition of the dithyrambic odes reached its highest development.

Latin lyrics were written by Catullus and Horace in the 1st century BC; and in medieval Europe the
lyric form can be found in the songs of the troubadours, in Christian hymns, and in various ballads. In
the Renaissance the most finished form of lyric, the sonnet, was brilliantly developed by Petrarch,
Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton. Especially identified with the lyrical forms of poetry
in the late 18th and 19th centuries were the Romantic poets, including such diverse figures as Robert
Burns, William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lamartine, Victor
Hugo, Goethe, and Heinrich Heine. With the exception of some dramatic verse, most Western poetry in
the late 19th and the 20th century may be classified as lyrical.
In the earlier years of the 20th century rhymed lyric poetry, usually expressing the feelings of the poet,
was the dominant poetic form in the United States, Europe, and the British colonies. The
English Georgian poets and their contemporaries such as A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare,
and Edmund Blunden used the lyric form. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was praised
by William Butler Yeats for his lyric poetry; Yeats compared him to the troubadour poets when the two
met in 1912.The relevance and acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into
question by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and William Carlos Williams, who
rejected the English lyric form of the 19th century, feeling that it relied too heavily on melodious
language, rather than complexity of thought.After World War II, the American New Criticism returned
to the lyric, advocating a poetry that made conventional use of rhyme, meter and stanzas, and was
modestly personal in the lyric tradition. Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex and domestic life
constituted the new mainstream of American poetry in the late 20th century following the confessional
poets of the 1950s and ’60s such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

ELEGY

Elegy, meditative lyric poem lamenting the death of a public personage or of a friend or loved one; by
extension, any reflective lyric on the broader theme of human mortality. In classical literature an elegy
was simply any poem written in the elegiac metre (alternating lines of dactylic hexameter and
pentameter) and was not restricted as to subject. Though some classical elegies were laments, many
others were love poems. In some modern literatures, such as German, in which the classical elegiac
metre has been adapted to the language, the term elegy refers to this metre, rather than to the poem’s
content. Thus, Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) are not laments; they
deal with the poet’s search for spiritual values in an alien universe. But in English literature since the
16th century, an elegy has come to mean a poem of lamentation. It may be written in any metre the
poet chooses.

A distinct kind of elegy is the pastoral elegy, which borrows the classical convention of representing its
subject as an idealized shepherd in an idealized pastoral background and follows a rather formal
pattern. It begins with an expression of grief and an invocation to the Muse to aid the poet in
expressing his suffering. It usually contains a funeral procession, a description of sympathetic
mourning throughout nature, and musings on the unkindness of death. It ends with acceptance, often a
very affirmative justification, of nature’s law. The outstanding example of the English pastoral elegy
is John Milton’s “Lycidas” (1638), written on the death of Edward King, a college friend. Other
notable pastoral elegies are Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Adonais” (1821), on the death of the poet John
Keats, and Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” (1867), on the death of the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.

Other elegies observe no set patterns or conventions. In the 18th century the English “graveyard
school” of poets wrote generalized reflections on death and immortality, combining gloomy,
sometimes ghoulish imagery of human impermanence with philosophical speculation.Representative
works are Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–45) and Robert Blair’s Grave (1743), but the best
known of these poems is Thomas Gray’s more tastefully subdued creation “An Elegy Written in a
Country Church Yard” (1751), which pays tribute to the generations of humble and unknown villagers
buried in a church cemetery. In the United States, a counterpart to the graveyard mode is found
in William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” (1817). A wholly new treatment of the conventional pathetic
fallacy of attributing grief to nature is achieved in Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloom’d” (1865–66).

In modern poetry the elegy remains a frequent and important poetic statement. Its range and variation
can be seen in such poems as A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young,” W.H. Auden’s “In
Memory of W.B. Yeats,” E.E. Cummings’s “my father moved through dooms of love,” John Peale
Bishop’s “Hours”, and Robert Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’.

MOCK EPIC

Mock-epic, also called mock-heroic, form of satire that adapts the elevated heroic style of the
classical epic poem to a trivial subject. The tradition, which originated in classical times with an
anonymous burlesque of Homer, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and the Mice), was
honed to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Neoclassical period. A double-edged
satirical weapon, the mock-epic was sometimes used by the “moderns” of this period to ridicule
contemporary “ancients” (classicists). More often it was used by “ancients” to point up the unheroic
character of the modern age by subjecting thinly disguised contemporary events to a heroic treatment.
The classic example of this is Nicolas Boileau’s Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”), which begins
with a quarrel between two ecclesiastical dignitaries about where to place a lectern in a chapel and ends
with a battle in a bookstore in which champions of either side hurl their favourite “ancient” or
“modern” authors at each other. Jonathan Swift’s “Battle of the Books” (1704) is a variation of this
theme in mock-heroic prose. The outstanding English mock-epic is Alexander Pope’s brilliant tour de
force The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), which concerns a society beau’s theft of a lock of hair from a
society belle; Pope treated the incident as if it were comparable to events that sparked the Trojan War.

Most mock-epics begin with an invocation to the muse and use the familiar epic devices of set
speeches, supernatural interventions, and descents to the underworld, as well as infinitely detailed
descriptions of the protagonist’s activities. Thus, they provide much scope for display of the author’s
ingenuity and inventiveness. An American mock-epic, Joel Barlow’s The Hasty Pudding (1793),
celebrates in three 400-line cantos his favourite New England dish, cornmeal mush.
CONFESSIONAL POETRY

As the name implies, confessional poetry is poetry of self-revelation. Brought to light in the 1950s and
‘60s by poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and W.D. Snodgrass, confessional poetry serves to reveal
an author’s repressed anguish or deepest emotions through verses about the most personal of subjects.
Although feelings and emotions have long been considered a core thematic element of poetry, the
risqué content conveyed in confessional poetry sets it far apart from more traditional genres.

By nature, confessional poems are autobiographical, meant to record the sometimes sordid and often
dismal personal lives of their authors, a now-common practice found in countless autobiographies,
memoirs and essays. However, unlike other “I” poems, in confessional poems, the speaker doesn’t just
represent the poet; rather, the poet and the speaker are one in the same and interchangeable, and the
speaker draws upon his or her own life as the sole form of reference.

The confessional poets of 1950s and 1960s pioneered a type of writing that forever changed the
landscape of American poetry. The tradition of confessional poetry has been a major influence on
generations of writers and continues to this day. Marie Howe and Sharon Olds are two contemporary
poets.

NARRATIVE POETRY

Narrative poetry tells stories through verse. Like a novel or a short story, a narrative poem has plot,
characters, and setting. Using a range of poetic techniques such as rhyme and meter, narrative poetry
presents a series of events, often including action and dialogue.

Narrative is one of three major categories of poetry, and each type of poetry has distinct characteristics
and functions. While lyric poems emphasize self-expression, narrative poems emphasize plot. Dramatic
poetry, like Shakespeare's blank verse plays, is an extended stage production, usually with many
different speakers.Narrative poetry is perhaps the oldest known form of literature. It dates back to pre-
literate societies that relied on oral tradition to pass on stories and history. Most ancient epics,
including Beowulf and The Odyssey, are narrative poems which were likely recited or sung from
memory before eventually being written down and recorded. For centuries, during which most of the
human population remained illiterate, narrative poetry maintained its appeal as a method of sharing
information in an easy-to-memorize format. Medieval ballads and lais, for example, used rhyme and
repeated refrains to conserve and pass on stories, history, and local news. Renaissance poets continued
this style in works like The Canterbury Tales and Dante’s Inferno. In fact, respected poets continued to
use the narrative form well into the 18th century, until the Romantic movement inspired a shift to lyric
poetry.