This document defines and discusses various elements of poetry, including its earliest forms, distinguishing features from prose, and poetic devices. It covers meter, rhyme, types of poetry like objective and subjective, and poetic elements such as figures of speech, stanza forms, and verse types. Poetry is defined as a creative interpretation of life through imagination and feeling, intended to give the reader pleasure.

1. POETRY
Lt. Dr. B. Ajantha Parthasarathi

2. POETRY
 Earliest literary form
 Existed in the oral form long
before the invention of writing
 Ancient Sumerian poem Epic of
Gilgamesh – 1800BCE
 Ancient Indian Vedas – 1700-
1100BCE

3. POETRY
 Distinct from prose in that it is literature in
metrical form
 Metre, rhythm and rhyme – distinguishes poetry
from prose
 Metre lifts us from the ordinary world of everyday
experience
 Rhyme and metre contribute greatly to the
aesthetic pleasure that we derive from poetry
 Rhythm, rhyme & metre – an important part in
preserving ancient poetry – helped ancestors to
remember the lines

4. POETRY - DEFINITION
 ‘an interpretation of life through imagination
and feeling’ – William Henry Hudson
 ‘musical thought’ – Thomas Carlyle
 ‘the rhymic creation of beauty’ – Edgar Allan
Poe
 Poetry – Greek Word ‘poietes’ – ‘creator’
 A Poet – a creator who through his
imagination, interprets life and arouses
feelings of delight, sorrow, amusement or
introspection in the reader
 Poetry – Ultimate aim – give pleasure

5. SCIENCE VS POETRY

6. POETIC TRUTH
The poet’s feelings are genuine
and sincere, and he looks
beyond the surface level of truth
such as scientific or historical
fact in order to reveal important
patterns and connections, and
thus to interpret life.

7. POETIC LICENCE
In its most narrow sense,
1. it is the freedom taken by a
poet to bend the conventions of
diction.
2. It is the liberty given to poets to
manipulate language, distort
syntax and use archaisms to
suit his needs.

8. CLASSIFICATION OF
POETRY
 Objective Poetry – the poet is detached
from what he is writing
 Describes in an impersonal manner
 The actions and passions of other people with little
reference to his own self and personal feelings
 Subjective Poetry – a reflection of the
poet’s own personal feelings and
experiences

9. OBJECTIVE POETRY
 Much older than subjective poetry
 Believed to have originated among the
primitive people of prehistoric times, when
mankind had not yet learnt to read and write
 More interested in the physical world around
them, and in the deeds and objects that were a
part of their lives
 A little room for deep thinking, emotions and
feelings
 Poetry – more of a communal affair than a
personal one

10. SUBJECTIVE POETRY
 People began to give importance
to their thoughts, feelings and
emotions, and to the growing
need to share them

11. POETRY –
CLASSIFICATION
Objective Poetry
Ballad (narrate a story)
Epic (great heroes – grand & elevated
style)
Metrical Romance (resembles epic –
chivalry, knight-errantry, fighting,
adventure, magic and love)
Dramatic Monologue (a single person
narrates his experiences or shares his
inner-most feelings)
Limerick (short and humorous)
Subjective Poetry
Lyric (non-narrative poem – a brief
expression of mood/feelings)
Ode (addressed to
someone/something – kind of letter)
Elegy(lamentations for the dead)
Idyll (short poem describes a
beautiful, rural scene/incident)
Sonnet (14 lines)
Epistle (a letter in verse that is
addressed to a friend/ a patron)

12. POETRY – ELEMENTS
Rhyme
 The sameness of sound esp., in the endings
of verse lines
 Melodic pattern
 Pleasing to the human ear
 Mnemonic device can help people learn and
remember things easily

13. RHYME – KINDS
 Masculine rhyme – single stressed
syllable that bears the rhyme
Once upon a midnight dreary
while I pondered, weak and weary,
(The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe)

14. RHYME - KINDS
 Feminine rhyme –stressed syllable
followed by an unstressed syllable,
with the latter bearing the rhyming
sound.
Jack and Jill went up a hill,
To fetch a pail of wa/ter.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling af/ter.

15. RHYME - KINDS
 End rhyme – occurs when the rhyming
words are placed at the ends of lines
Jack and Jill went up a hill,
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

16. RHYME - KINDS
 Internal rhyme – occurs when the
rhyming words fall within a line.
Jack and Jill went up a hill,
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

17. RHYME - KINDS
 Exact rhyme – the use of identical
rhyming sounds
Jack and Jill went up a hill,
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.

18. RHYME - KINDS
 Approximate/Slant rhyme – the use
of sounds that are similar but not
identical
"I never saw a moor; I never saw the sea;
Yet I know how the heather looks; And what a
billow be." Emily Dickinson

19. RHYME - KINDS
 Eye/Visual/Sight rhymes – appeal to the
eye, not the ear. They are word that are
spelt similarly but pronounced differently.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?(a)
Thou art more lovely and more temperate. (b)
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of
May, (a)
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”
(b)
(William Wordsworth Sonnet 18)

20. METRE
 Refers to the pattern of stresses in a
line of verse
 In English, every syllable in a word is
either stressed or unstressed
 Metrical foot – a combination of a
strong stress and an associated
weak stress or stresses

21. METRICAL FEET
Foot
Iamb
Anapaest
Trochee
Dactyl
Spondee
Adjective
Iambic
Anapaestic
Trachaic
Dactylic
Spondaic
Stress Pattern
Unstressed-stressed
Unstressed-unstressed- stressed
Stressed-unstressed
Stressed-unstressed-unstressed
Stressed-stressed

22. METRICAL FEET
Foot Examples
Iamb - I wand|ered lone|ly as |a cloud
Anapest - I am mon|arch of all| I survey
Trochee - Tyger, |Tyger, |burning |bright
Dactyl - Cannon to |right of them
Spondee - Break, break, | break

23. METRICAL FEET
 A metrical line is named after the number of feet in it
monometer – 1 foot
dimeter – 2 feet
trimeter – 3 feet
tetrameter – 4 feet
pentameter – 5 feet
hexameter – 6 feet
heptameter – 7 feet
octameter - 8 feet

24. METRICAL FEET
 Iambic pentameter – five feet & an iamb
The cur|few tolls |the Knell | of par|ting day
 Alexandrine – iambic hexameter
• Edmund Spenser – concluding line of each stanza of The
Faerie Queene
• Illustrates its potential to slow down the flow of a poem
That like|a woun|ded snake, |drags its| slow
length| along.

25. STANZA FORMS
 A group of lines that form a unit in
verse/poem
 Stanza in a poem is similar to a
paragraph in prose
 Various types of stanzas – number
of lines, the number of feet in each
line/metrical pattern

26. STANZA FORMS
 Couplet – a stanza of two lines
 Heroic couplet – a stanza of two iambic pentameter lines that rhyme together (heroic literature)
 Tercet – a stanza of three lines
• (Terza rima – a series of interlocking tercets with the rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc
• Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind
 Quatrain – a stanza of four lines
• Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a County Churchyard, Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
 Pentastich – a stanza of five lines
 Sestet – a stanza of six lines (2nd part of Petrarchan Sonnet)
 Septet – a stanza of seven lines (rhyme royal – Chaucerian stanza – Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
– ababbcc
 Octastich – a stanza of eight lines (Ottava rima – an eight-line iambic pentameter – abababcc)
 Spenserian stanza – a stanza of nine iambic lines (first 8 are pentameters & the last is a
hexameter)
• Edmund Spenser – The Faerie Queene - ababbcbcc

27. VERSE - TYPES
 Blank verse – unrhymed iambic
pentameter
• Used often in drama
• William Wordsworth, Robert Browning &
W.H. Auden
 Free Verse – not written in a regular
metrical pattern
• Popular in the 20th century
• Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg