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POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (ORIGINS)

Origins of Modern Poetry
The history of poetry begins where the history of all literature begins: with the oral tradition.
Extended narratives were delivered orally until they became transcribed as epics which include The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad Gita, and Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the English Renaissance, Shakespeare wrote sonnets based on Petrarch.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the movement known as Romanticism began.
Romantic poetry was marked by heightened emotion and sentiment; a strong sense of individualism; a fascination with nature, the Middle Ages, and mysticism; a rebellion against social and political norms; and a return to first-person lyric poems.

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POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (ORIGINS)

Early British Romantics include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and William Blake.
American Romantics include Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman (also called “transcendentalists”).
The nineteenth century was marked by yet another shift in poetic consciousness. This time, poets moved away from the contemplation of the self within nature that characterized Romanticism and returned to a more elevated sense of rhetoric and subject matter.

Notable British poets of this era include Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Tennyson.
American poets of this period include Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson and Phillis Wheatley (a slave who became the first Black poet).

POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (ORIGINS)

The twentieth century had perhaps the largest number of literary movements to date, with each one reflecting its predecessors and influencing future generations of poets.
In the early twentieth century, a literary movement that became known as modernism developed.
As writers responded to the increasing complexity of a changing world, the overarching sentiment of modernism was that the “old ways” would no longer suffice in a world that had changed almost overnight as a result of the rise of industrialization and urbanization, as well as the devastation of World War I.
Key modernist poets include W. H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, whose epic poem The Waste Land expressed the fragmentation of consciousness in the modern world.

POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (ORIGINS)

After World War I, poets began to challenge the prevailing ideas of subject matter and form.
Ezra Pound, along with Amy Lowell and other poets, founded imagism, a poetic movement that emphasized free verse and the writer’s response to a visual scene or an object.
William Carlos Williams wrote poems that were often deceptively simple, while poetry of Wallace Stevens was often opaque and difficult to grasp.
Dylan Thomas and E. E. Cummings also experimented with form, with Cummings intentionally manipulating the accepted constructs of grammar, syntax, and punctuation.

POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (ORIGINS)

1920s (America) the Harlem Renaissance exploded and gave rise to jazz and the freedom to experiment with untapped forms of expression.
1930s (America) a group of poets gathered in Black Mountain, North Carolina with the aim of teaching and writing about poetry in a new way. The Black Mountain poets, as they were called, stressed process over product.
1940s (America) disillusioned poets turned to eastern mysticism and newly available hallucinogenic drugs to create poetry and became known as Beat poets.
1950s (America) poetry shifted from symbols, ideas and politics and toward highly personal, confessional poems, that included themes of mental illness and suicide.
1960s (America) saw the rise of Black poets who focused on sociopolitical and cultural issues that Black people faced.

POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (ORIGINS)

1970s (America) female poets brought forth themes of love, loss, and the cultural/sociopolitical differences between the sexes.
1980s (America) Slam poetry, influenced primarily by the Beat poets, stressed live performance of their poetry.
Slam poetry is concerned with current events and social/political themes. Slam poetry is often held in judged formats with the winner being the one who combines the greatest enthusiasm, presentation, and attitude with their subject matter.

POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (DEFINING)

Today, throughout the world, poetry continues to delight and to inspire.
For many people in countless places, poetry is the language of the emotions, the medium of expression they use when they speak from the heart.
But what exactly is poetry? Is it, as Adam Zagajewski says, “the kingly road that leads us farthest” as it “searches for radiance”? Or is a poem simply what Marianne Moore calls “all this fiddle”?
One way of defining poetry is to examine how it is different from other forms of literature, such as fiction or drama.

POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (DEFINING)

The first and most important element of poetry that distinguishes it from other genres is its form.
Unlike prose, which is written from margin to margin, poetry is made up of individual lines.

A poetic line begins and ends where the poet chooses: it can start at the left margin or halfway across the page, and it can end at the right margin or after only a word or two.
A poet chooses when to stop, or break, the line according to their sense of rhythm and meter.

Poets also use the sound of the words themselves, alone and in conjunction with the other words of the poem, to create a sense of rhythm and melody:

Alliteration: repetition of initial consonant sounds in consecutive or neighboring words.
Assonance: repetition of vowel sounds
Consonance: repetition of consonant sounds within words
Rhyme: often used at the ends of lines or within the lines themselves.

POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (DEFINING)

In addition, poets are more likely than writers of other kinds of literature to rely on imagery, words or phrases that describe the sense.
Poets also make extensive use of figurative language, including metaphors and similes, to convey their ideas and to help their readers access these ideas.
Another way of defining poetry is to examine our assumptions about it.
Different readers, different poets, different generations of readers and poets, and different cultures often have different expectations about poetry.
As a result, they have varying assumptions about what poetry should be, and these assumptions raise questions.
Must poetry be written to delight or inspire, or can a poem have a political or social message?
Must a poem’s theme be conveyed subtly, embellished with imaginatively chosen sounds and words, or can it be explicit and straightforward?

POETRY: AN OVERVIEW (EXAMPLE)

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