Subjective Poetry

What is poetry

• Poetry is an art of rhythmical composition, both written or spoken. It is meant to elicit and feel pleasure through beautiful, imaginative, and elevated thoughts.
• Poetry is a form of writing which is vital to culture, art, and life of a society. It is an treat in language, and an experience through words.
• Poetry is a literary art that uses language to evoke meanings beyond literal or surface-level meanings.
• Poetry is an outpouring of emotions, ideas which are expressed through images, metaphors and expressions.

Subjective poetry

• The word “subjective” refers to a particular point of view. It is based on someone’s personal opinions and beliefs.
• Subjective writing is based on the writer’s personal view of the world. This means that a poet might cast events, people, ideas, and experiences in a certain light, intentionally or not.
• Subjective poetry is internally inspired form of literature in which the poet extracts his emotions which are triggered by any subject. In subjective writing, poets usually convey personal experiences and feelings.

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More about subjective poetry

• In subjective poetry, the poet’s thinking, likes, and dislikes, ideology, personal experience, and assumptions are expressed in one form or other.
• The subjective poetry enhances our attraction towards the work and creates curiosity about the subject as well as the poet’s emotion.

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Function of Subjective Poetry�

• Subjective approach of the poet is advantageous in that permits the readers to go into the deep of a writer and understand him/her thoroughly through the delineation his characters, opinions, and beliefs.
• It enhances the impact of the experience when the poet describes it through his emotional stance.
• The approach gives an opinion that every person interprets a thing from a different angle.

Four types of subjective poetry.

• Lyric
• Elegy
• Ode
• Sonnet

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Lyric

• The word “lyric’’ originated from ancient Greek literature, “the lyre” which means a musical instrument that accompanies a song sung.
• A lyric poem is short, highly musical verse that conveys powerful feelings. The poet may use rhyme, meter, or other literary devices to create a song-like quality.
• The Poet discusses his personal experience in his creative work.
• Writer’s including the famous Elizabethan poets and Romantic poets used this form of poetry in his work.

Example of a lyric

• The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) famously said that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." In "The World Is Too Much with Us," his passion is evident in blunt exclamatory statements such as "a sordid boon!" Wordsworth condemns materialism and alienation from nature, as this section of the poem illustrates.

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"The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"

Elegy

• It is derived from the Greek word “Elegia” which means lament. It is a 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, the classical elegiac metre adapted to the language, 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.

Form of an Elegy

• 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.

Example of Elegy

• Thomas Gray’s 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
• 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).

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Lord Tennyson’s Poem written on the death of his friend

Ode

• The Ode is an elaborately structured poem that glorifies some event or individual.
• In this form of Poetry, the Poet directly addresses someone or something or describes nature intellectually and emotionally.
• John Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a famous ode in literature.
• P.B. Shelley’s poem “Ode to the West Wind” is also a very famous ode

• William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’.
• Percy Shelley, ‘To a Skylark’. (opening lines)

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

• John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. (opening lines)

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

Sonnet�

• Originated from the Italian Word Sonnetto used from the 13th century.
• It has a strict rhyme scheme of fourteen lines having a specific structure, usually iambic pentameter, that expresses a thought or idea and utilizes an established rhyme scheme.
• As a poetic form, the sonnet was developed by an early thirteenth-century Italian poet, Giacomo da Lentini. However, it was the Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch that perfected and made this poetic literary device famous. Sonnets were adapted by Elizabethan English poets and William Shakespeare in particular.

Types of Sonnets

In English literature, there are two basic sonnet patterns:

• Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet: Named for the Italian Renaissance lyrical poet Francesco Petrarch, this sonnet pattern consists of an eight-line Octave with the rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA, followed by a six-line Sestet that follows one of two rhyme schemes, CDE CDE or CDC CDC.
• English or Shakespearean Sonnet: Named for William Shakespeare and a variation of the Italian sonnet, this sonnet pattern consists of three four-line Quatrains and a concluding couplet with the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Example of a Sonnet�Sonnet 116 (Shakespearean sonnet)�Let me not to the marriage of true minds�

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.