Major Literary Genre: An Introduction to Poetry

Major Literary
Genre:
Poetry
CHARILIE F. GUTIERREZ
PhD-English Student

Topics
02
01
04
Introduction to
poetry
Sound and Meter
The Poetic
Functions of
Sound and Meter
03
Stress and Metrical
Patterning

POETRY
A type of literature that expresses
ideas, feelings, or tells a story in a specific
form (usually using lines and stanzas)

Poetry is an expression and it’s
purpose is to communicate an idea, a
sentiment, a concept. Often it takes
the form of verse, but not all poetry
has this structure. Poetry is a creative
use of words which, like all art, is
intended to stir an emotion in the
audience.

Poetry is closely related to the
term “lyric,” which derives
etymologically from the Greek musical
instrument “lyra” (“lyre” or “harp”) and
points to an origin in the sphere of
music.

In classical antiquity as well
as in the Middle Ages, minstrels
recited poetry, accompanied by
the lyre or other musical
instruments

The term “poetry,” however,
goes back to the Greek word
“poieo” (“to make,” “to produce”),
indicating that the poet is the
person who “makes” verse

The genre of poetry is often
subdivided into the two major
categories of narrative and lyric
poetry.

a. Narrative poetry includes genres
such as the epic long poem, the
romance, and the ballad, which tell
stories with clearly developed,
structured plots

b. The shorter lyric poetry is mainly
concerned with one event,
impression, or idea.

Some of the precursors of modern poetry
can be found in Old English riddles and charms.
These cultic and magic texts, for example the
following charm “Against a Wen”, which is
supposed to help to get rid of boils, seem
strange today, but were common in that period.

e.g.
Wen, wen, little wen,
here you must not build, here have no abode,
but you must go north to the nearby hill
where, poor wretch, you have a brother.
He will lay a leaf at your head.
Under the paw of the wolf, under the eagle’s wing,
under the claw of the eagle, may you ever decline!
Shrink like coal on the hearth!
Wizen like filth on the wall!
Become as small as a grain of linseed,
and far smaller than a hand-worm’s hip-bone and so very small
that you are at last nothing at all.

The next step in poetic expression
abandons these overtly cultic
origins and uses music as a
medium, as for example the Middle
English anonymous “Cuckoo Song”
(c. 1250), which could be
accompanied by an instrument.

Cuccu Cuckoo
Summer is icumen in, (Summer has come,)
Lhude sing, cuccu! (Sing loud, cuckoo!)
Groweth sed and (The seed grows and the
bloweth med meadow blossoms,)
And springth the (And the wood springs; )
wode nu
Sing cuccu! (Sing, cuckoo!)

In this Middle English example, the
onomatopoeia (verbal imitation of natural
sounds) of the cuckoo’s calling is clearly
audible. The acoustic dimension is a typical
feature of poetry, one which continues in
modern pop songs. Singers like Bob Dylan
(1941–) are often counted among the poets of
the late 1950s and 1960s because the lyrics of
their songs are comparable with poems.

The first aspect of poetry we will be concerned
with is sound patterning. This includes rhyme, which
most people are familiar with, and also other kinds of
sound patterning such as alliteration, assonance,
reverse rhyme and consonant patterning.
These are features of language which poets
and prose writers exploit to create effects such as
beauty or emphasis in their writing.

In order to analyse some of these
features linguistically, we will look at
phonology which is the study of sounds in a
language.

Most people are familiar with the
idea of rhyme in poetry—indeed for
some, this is what defines poetry. End
rhyme (i.e. rhyme at the end of lines) is
very common in some poetic styles, and
particularly in children’s poems:

Mrs. White Had a fright
In the middle of the night
Saw a ghost Eating toast
Half way up a lamppost

Little Bo-peep
has lost her sheep
And doesn’t know where to find them
Leave them alone
And they will come home
Waggling their tails behind them

These are all examples of end rhyme,
where the last word of a line has the same
final sounds as the last word of another line,
sometimes immediately above or below,
sometimes one or more lines away.

Not all poetry by any means has to have end
rhyme; these lines by Marge Piercy for
example do not:
Long burned hair brushes
across my face its spider silk.
I smell lavender,
cinnamon: my mother’s clothes.

Many poets do use rhyme, and other
kinds of sound patterning as well, some
of which are far less widely recognized. A
completely different tradition of sound
patterning is used by William Barnes in
his poem ‘Linden Lea’, where sounds are
arranged in a way very rarely seen in
English poetry:

To where for me the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea

As well as having end rhyme (tree
and Lea), there is an intricate
arrangement of sounds in the last line:
Do lean down low in Linden Lea
(D) L N D NL/ (N) LNDN L

There are only three consonants
used in the whole line of seven words
which are D, N and L, and they are
arranged into two clusters of LNDNL,
with an extra (D) and an extra (N).

CREDITS: This presentation template was
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and infographics & images from Freepik
Let’s do this!
The lines of poetry on the next
slide come from ‘The
Passionate Shepherd to His
Love’ by Christopher Marlowe.
Read these lines aloud, listening
for sounds that are repeated.

Let’s do this!
Try to identify any word which: (a)
start with the same sound as another
word (b) end with the same sound as
another word (c) start and end with the
same sound as another word (d) have
different sounds at the beginning or the
end, but the same sound in the middle
as another word
Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove

Answers
(a) with and will begin with the same
two sounds
(b) will and all end with the same
sound; so do prove and love
(c) live and love start and end with the
same sound
(d) come has the same middle sound
as love

By repeating sounds in words like
this, poets can build up very intricate
patterns

If you look up prove in the dictionary, you will
see next to it /pruv/, or something similar, and this is
to tell you that the sound in the middle of prove is
pronounced nowadays the same as the sound in
zoo or you, and not like the sound in love, but or
tough. Love appears in the dictionary as /l v/. The
two symbols, /u/ and / / represent the two different
sounds or phonemes.

For someone who understands phonemic
notation, the symbols specify quite clearly how the
two words are usually pronounced.
Every phoneme used in English has its own
symbol, which is unique to that sound.
Phonemes are represented between two
oblique lines: for example /t/, /h/, /s/, or /g/.

There are two categories of
phonemes:
vowels and consonants.

Broadly speaking, consonants are
sounds you make by blocking the flow of
air from your lungs with a closure
somewhere in your mouth or throat.

Vowels are sounds made
without any closure—you alter the
shape of your lips and change the
position of your tongue to make the
sounds oo and ee, but you don’t
block the air coming out of your
mouth.

There are problems with this definition—
for example, sounds such as w as in the word
wait, for which the phonetic symbol is /w/, are
usually classed as consonants while in fact
they have at least as much in common
acoustically with vowels, because the air flow
is not really blocked when you say them.

List of the basic sound symbols for English
pronunciation

This is because, as we said, there is not a
one-to-one correspondence between the
spelling system and the sounds we use to
communicate orally.

Consonants
Most people find consonants easier to transcribe
into phonemic notation than vowels, as they often
share their phonetic symbol with the letter of the
alphabet usually associated with that sound in
spelling (e.g. /g/, /h/, /m/, /p/, and so on).

However, there are some consonants that
people do find more difficult.
e.g. /ŋ/
This sound is the sound at the end of fang
/fæŋ/, and also occurs before the sound /k/
in words like link, represented
phonemically as /l ŋk/.

Vowels
The phonetic symbols for vowels tend to be
less familiar-looking to the untrained eye than the
ones used for consonants.
For example, despite the differences in
spelling, the vowel sounds in I, eye, aye, try, and
height are all the same, and are represented by
the symbol /a/

Stress and
Metrical
Patterning
03

Meter-
in poetry is the basic rhythmic structure of the
poem.
A Metrical Foot -
is a single unit of measurement that is repeated
within a line of poetry.
A metrical feet are made up of stressed and
unstressed syllables.

The smallest elements of meter are
syllables, which can be either stressed or
unstressed.

All words have stressed and/or
unstressed syllables, which creates
a natural rhythm in language.

In English words of two syllables, one
is usually said slightly louder, slightly
higher, held for slightly longer, or
otherwise said slightly more forcefully
than the other syllable in the same
word, when the word is said in normal
circumstances. This syllable is called
the stressed syllable.

When noting this pattern, the marks
are placed above the words they
refer to.

Analyzing a line of poetry to
determine its rhythm of stressed and
unstressed syllables is called
scansion.

To work out the metre of a poem,
first of all you need to work out the
number of syllables in a line, as in
this example from the play Romeo
and Juliet, by Shakespeare:

A ten-syllable line like this, with
stress on alternate syllables and
which starts with an unstressed
syllable, is a very specific and
popular form in English poetry
known as iambic pentametre.

Iambic refers to the pattern of
unstressed and stressed syllables: an
unstressed syllable followed by a
stressed one is an iamb.

List of Metrical Feet (for two syllables)
Iamb = one unstressed syllable followed by one
stressed syllable (exACT, reLEASE, unKNOWN)
Trochee = one stressed syllable followed by one
unstressed syllable (CARing, ZESTful, HELPless)
Spondee = two stressed syllables (AIRCRAFT,
DEADLOCK)
Pyrrhic = two unstressed syllables (to a, in a, and the)

List of Metrical Feet (for three syllables)
Dactyl = one stressed syllable followed by two
unstressed syllables (CRIMinal, VISitor)
Anapest = two unstressed syllables followed by one
stressed syllable (incomPLETE, misinFORMED)

Let’s do this!
Identify the meter (iamb, trochee, and
spondee) of the following :
1. Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea
2. “But soft, what light through yonder window
breaks?”
3. Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart.

Let’s do this!
1. Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, O Sea (spondee=
stressed + stressed)
2. “But soft, what light through yonder window
breaks?” (iamb= unstressed + stressed)
3. Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart. (trochee= stressed +
unstressed)

Conventional
forms of
meter and
sound

At different times, different
patterns of metre and sound have
developed and become accepted
as ways of structuring poems.

Four types of poems based on line number:
Couplet: Consists of two lines, usually
connected by a rhyme.
Her eyes are wild, her head is bare,
The sun has burnt her coal-black hair

Quatrain: Consists of four lines, and are very
common in English poetry.
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom—is to die.

Blank Verse: Consists of lines in iambic
pentameter which do not rhyme, and are
very common in English literature.
But do not let us quarrel any more,
No my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your
heart?

Sonnet: basic form is fourteen lines, each of
ten syllables, and usually in iambic
pentameter.

Free Verse- This is a form of verse
(also called vers libre) that uses little
or no conventional rhyme or metre

Limericks=
are five-line verses in which
generally the first, second and fifth
lines rhyme, and the second and
third lines rhyme

There was a young lady named Wright
Who could travel much faster than light
She started one day
In the ordinary way
And came back the previous night

Sestet: Consists of six lines.
Octave: Consists of eight lines.

The Poetic Functions of
Sound and Meter
04

Reasons for poets using sound and
metrical patterning include:
1. for aesthetic pleasure

2. to conform to a convention /style/
poetic form

3. to experiment or innovate with a
form

4. to demonstrate technical skill, and
for intellectual pleasure

Thank you
for
listening!

Major Literary Genre: An Introduction to Poetry

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