History of Poetry

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Poetry, from the Greek

“poesis” meaning 'making'
or 'creating', has a long
history. As an art, poetry
may out date literacy itself.
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In prehistoric and ancient

societies, poetry was used as a
way to record cultural events
or tell stories.
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Poetry is among the earliest records

of most cultures with poetic
fragments found on monoliths, rune
stones, and stelae.
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The telling of stories about

history have been used up
until the 20th century, and
in some cases, it is still in use
today.
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During the Middle Ages, Ballads

were a common way of doing just
this, and it was also a way to pass
along news throughout the
kingdoms.
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Today, Ballads are not used in the

same way. However, Odes, for
example, have been and will always
be a way to tell stories about history’s
greatest feats.
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Some writers believe

that poetry has its origins
in song. Most of the
characteristics that
distinguish it from other
forms of utterance
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—rhythm, rhyme, compression,

intensity of feeling, the use of
refrains— appear to have come
about from efforts to fit words to
musical forms.
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Poetry is as universal as
language is, and almost as
ancient. The most
primitive peoples have
used it and the most
civilized have cultivated.
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In all ages and in all countries,
poetry has been written and read or
listened to all kinds of conditions of
people by soldiers, statement,
farmers, lawyers, doctors, scientists,
clergymen, philosophers, kings and
queens.
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Initially, poetry may be defined as

the kind of language that says
MORE, and it says it MORE
INTENSELY than ordinary language
does.
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Their concern is with EXPERIENCE.

We all have an inner need to live
more deeply and fully, to know
experience of others and to know
better our experience.
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Poetry takes all life as its province. Its

primary concern is with EXPERIENCE. All
kind of experience

Beauty=/=ugly, strange=/=common,
noble=/=ignoble, actual=/=imaginary
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One of the paradoxes of human

existence is that all experience, when
transmitted through the medium of art,
is, for the good reader enjoyable even
painful experience. In real life death,
pain and suffering are not pleasurable
but in poetry they may be.
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Poetry is the most condensed and

concentrated form of literature. It
says the most in the fewest number
of words.
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Poetry, finally is a kind of

multidimensional language = the
whole man, not only his
understanding
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Intellectual dimension, sensuous

dimension, emotional dimension,
imaginative dimension.
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Language is one dimensional man’s
understanding (its one dimension is
intellectual). Poetry achieves its extra
dimensions – by drawing more fully
and more consistently than ordinary
language on a number or language
resources.
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Among these language resources

are connotation, imagery, metaphor,
symbol, paradox, irony, allusion,
sound repetition, rhythm and
pattern.
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Using these resources and

the materials of life, the
poet shapes and makes his
poems.
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The elements of a poem include a

SPEAKER whose voice we hear in it;

its DICTION or selection of words;

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its SYNTAX or order of words;

its IMAGERY or details of sight, sound,

taste, smell and touch;
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its FIGURE OF SPEECH or nonliteral

ways of expressing one thing in terms of
another, such symbol and metaphor;

its SOUND EFFECTS, especially

rhyme, assonance and alliteration;
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its RHYTHM AND METER or

pattern of accents we hear in the
poem’s words, phrases, lines and
sentences; and

its STRUCTURE or formal pattern

of organization.
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When we hear or read a

poem, we hear the
speaker’s voice. It is this
voice that conveys the
poem’s tone, its implied
attitude toward its
subject.
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TONE is an abstraction we
make from the details of a poem
language; the use of meter and
rhyme (or lack of them).
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At their most successful, poems include

“the best words in the best order”, as
Samuel Taylor Coleridge has said. In
reading any poem, it is necessary to know
what the words mean, but it is equally
important what the words imply or
suggest.
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An image is a concrete

representation of a sense impression,
a feeling or and idea. Images appeal
to one or more of our senses or more
precisely.
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Images may be visual (something seen),

aural (something heard), tactile
(something felt), olfactory ( something
smelled) or gustatory (something tasted).
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Poetry characteriscally is grounded in

the concrete and the specific (in details
that appeal to our senses), for it is
through our senses that we perceive the
world.
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Language can be conveniently classified as

either literal or figurative. When we speak
literally, we mean exactly what each word
conveys.
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Establishes the comparison
explicitly with the words LIKE
or AS.

Employs no such explicit verbal clue. The

comparison is IMPLIED in such a way that the
figurative term is substituted for or identified
with the literal one. “My daughter dances like
an angel.” Is a simile; “My daughter is an angel.”
is a metaphor
 SYMBOLISM AND ALLEGORY
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It is any object or action that means

more than itself, any object or action
that represents something beyond
itself.
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It is a form of narrative in which people, places

and happenings have hidden or symbolic
meaning; allegory is especially suitable as a
vehicle for teaching. In allegorical, work there
are most often two levels of meaning, the literal
and the symbolic.
 SOUND: RHYME,
ALLITERATION, ASSONANCE
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Which can be defined as the matching of final

vowel and consonant sounds in two or more
words. When the corresponding sounds occur at
the end of lines we have END RHYME; when
they occur within lines we have INTERNAL
RHYME. The opening stanza of Edgar Allan Poe’s
“The Raven” illustrates both:
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Once upon a midnight dreary , while I pondered

weak and weary ,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of
forgotten lore
While I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there
came a tapping,
“‘Tis some visitor”, I muttered, “tapping at my
chamber door only this and nothing more”.
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ALLITERATION
The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the
beginning of words, and

ASSONANCE
The repetition of vowel sounds.
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Read the poem more than once.

Keep a dictionary by you and use it.
Its meanings are conveyed through sounds.
Always pay careful attention to what the poem is
saying.
Practice occasionally reading a poem aloud.