Remember when we thought poems for children had to be whimsical things about fairies and elves or saccharine things about swings and kites? Apparently, poets assumed that they should write about small things for small people and if they pretended that childhood was a time of gazing pensively at clouds, kids would do more of it. Adults (some of them) read those things aloud with a flutey tone that made our heads snap up the first time we heard it and made us glaze over after that. Often they made us memorize the stuff. This made other adults smile and most of us kids gag. Then along came Shel Silverstein (Shel Silverstein's website). He wrote poems about picking your nose and selling your baby sister and adults (some of them) winced and kids guffawed and kids' poetry was changed forever. Now we've got the gamut of emotions and subjects in kids poetry. There are many great anthologies and collections of works by single poets. Some are gorgeously illustrated and others just give a sketch or two for illustration and rely on the poems to carry the book. Poetry, of course, be it for child or adult (and the distinction is not always clear) is very much a matter of perception. Poems speak to the individual, even more than stories do, and some are not speaking to you -- at least not right now. The rules of poetry selection are the same as for the selection of any kind of literary material that you're going to use with your kids. It must speak to you as the living breathing adult you are before you can help it speak to kids. If it's supposed to be funny, it should make you laugh or at least smile. If it's supposed to be sad, it should choke you up a bit. If it's a description of a thing or a feeling, it should help you see it or feel it in a new way. Otherwise, it's not for you. Put it aside. Maybe later you will hear it but not now.
So, which of all the books of poetry will you choose for your classroom? Every one you can afford. Since that probably doesn't make for many. Let me tell you what my choices would be. I'll have to cheat a bit, of course, because it depends on what grade you teach. I'll try for some with the broadest levels of interest but you can be more choosy than I can. Here we go.
My first choice will surprise you because it's not a book for kids at all. Probably most of the poems in it will go right over their heads. It's Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1992 ISBN 0807068187. Hardcover, Paperback.). Oliver's poetry is simple and direct. Most of the poems are about nature but she uses an element of nature as a metaphor for the human condition. These poems speak to me. They may not be your cup of tea at all. The point is, make one of your choices a poet for yourself not for the kids. One of the reasons you use poetry with kids is to show them the wonders of that sparsity and choice of words and the beauty of the form. You've got to practice what you preach so, when you have sustained silent reading, sometimes you should select poetry for your reading pleasure. Have one book of poems you like to read.
Then I want some children's poets I like. Valerie Worth's poems remind me of slow motion film. The simple act of a dog lying down is described by Worth in such careful detail that, the next time you see Old Tray about to take a nap, you see it as beauty in motion. She writes about small things with small poems and they open your eyes. Most of her poems don't rhyme and they may give some kids courage to try to observe as carefully as she did and write about it. My choice for number two? All the Small Poems and Fourteen More by Valerie Worth with illustrations by Natalie Babbitt (Farrar, 1994 ISBN 0374302111. Hardcover, Paperback.).
Eve Merriam was a wonderful woman. I loved her poetry before I met her and then was so charmed by this articulate, worldly woman with the heart of a wise child that I regretted all the years I hadn't known her. She's no longer with us but her poetry is. I'd want a collection of her poems. My personal favorite is Fresh Paint (Macmillan, 1986 ISBN 0027668606. Order Online.). It's currently out of print but you can find it in many libraries.
David McCord was another favorite. He was a very proper Bostonian who lived at the Harvard Club, no less, but he treasured words and kids. Many of his poems are about nature and many involve word play and puzzles. His collected works are in One at a Time (Little Brown, 1986 ISBN 0316555169. Order Online.). Unfortunately, it's also out of print right now, but they'll bring it back in print soon. They have to. In the meantime, grab the library's copy.
I want a Shel Silverstein in my collection too, partly because of the way he revolutionized poetry but mostly because his work will keep reminding me that I mustn't wax too lyrically with kids or I'll lose their interest. Shel brings me back to the real world quickly. I'll take his first book of poems Where the Sidewalk Ends (HarperCollins, 1987 ISBN 0060256680. Paperback, Hardcover.) but you take your favorite.
My next choice is one of many wonderful anthologies of poetry compiled by Paul B. Janeczko, The Place My Words Are Looking For: What Poets Say About and Through Their Work (Atheneum, 1990 ISBN 0027476715. Library Binding.). Janeczko's selections tend to be for older kids and this one gives you both the poems and the words of the poets who try to explain what they were trying to do in a particular poem or what inspired them to write it. If you work with kids from 4th grade up, you need Janeczko.
My seventh choice is one you probably have on your desk already. It's the wonderful anthology done by Jack Prelutsky and Arnold Lobel, The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (Random House, 1983 ISBN 0394850106. Hardcover.). Here you will find your old favorites and some new ones, five hundred of them and they're categorized by subjects like seasons and home. That makes it easy to find related poems. You'll have Post-its sticking all over it.
Another anthology that should be right where you can lay your hands on it is Beatrice Shenk de Regniers' Sing a Song of Popcorn: Every Child's Book of Poems (Scholastic, 1988 ISBN 059043974X. Library Binding.). It's a dynamite collection of poems illustrated by illustrators like Maurice Sendak, Leo & Diane Dillon and Arnold Lobel. The multiple artists make each turn of the page an adventure in viewing as well as listening. These categories are less objective than in the Prelutsky collection: spooky poems, mostly nonsense, and the like. Biographical information is included about poets and illustrators. You'll like it.
My last choice is the hardest one of all to find. In fact it may not even exist yet, but it will and it must. You need your own hand-made, hand-chosen anthology of poetry. In it will be poems you found in a magazine, your favorites from your own childhood, and dozens and dozens from every other poetry source imaginable. No published anthology can hold a candle to the one you create yourself. If you're really smart, that anthology is in a notebook on your desk, but it's also on your computer. It's the sections, the grouping, you see, that makes it so useful. In your notebook you may have put "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" under winter but you need a poem about a horse and you'll never think to look for it there. On your computer, however, you can make a database that will let you type in "horse", or "sleigh", or "snow", or "death" and up will pop Frost -- just what you were looking for.
My next choice is not a single book but a whole series of anthologies that come from England. John Foster is the anthologist and the books have titles like Another First Poetry Book (Oxford, 1988 ISBN 019917119X. Paperback.), Another Fourth Poetry Book (Oxford 1989 ISBN 0199171254. Paperback, Hardcover.), Another Second Poetry Book (Oxford 1988 ISBN 0199162298. Paperback.) and on and on they go. They're thin volumes -- about 128 pages -- and the irreverence of some of the poems will remind you of Jack Prelutsky's work, but the beauty of these volumes is that, since most of the poets are English, the poems are not overly familiar to most of us. They're breezy and fun and, picking up a volume and browsing through it will almost certainly guarantee you of one delight you haven't heard before.
Those of you who've ever heard Ashley Bryan bring his exuberance and love of life to the reading of poetry will never forget it. Certainly I have not. I pick up any volume he has touched with his voice singing in my head. His latest effort Ashley Bryan's ABC of African-American Poetry (Atheneum, 1997 ISBN 0689812094. Library Binding.) is wonderful. He uses pieces of poems, verses and whole poems to speak the words and sounds of African American poets. The selections will make you want to hear more so alert the librarian to expect kids in search of more poems and more by Hughes, Brooks and their brother and sister poets after you've shared this volume. Add Ashley Bryan's vibrant art work and you've got a book that will sing its way off the bookshelf and into any open heart.
Look! There's a kid dragging his sister down the street. It's suddenly begun to rain! And I have just the poem for us right here in my hand.
Related Areas of Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site
Putting Poems to Music.
Ann Rinaldi's Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons. A biography of the African American Poet.
Lois Lowry's Stay: Keeper's Story concerns a canine poet.
Mel Glenn's Who Killed Mr. Chippendale? uses poetry to tell this murder mystery.
Diane Siebert and Wendell Minor's Sierra puts their poetry to beautiful photos.
Poetry about Cities and Towns.
Stories, Songs and Poetry to Teach Reading and Writing. Professional Book.
Bird Watch: A Book of Poetry by Jane Yolen
Monday, February 22, 2010
Literature In Our Modern World
Bookaholic BlogcommunityFor all the incurable book addicts out there who love to share what they are reading.
BooksANDBlogsA passion for books, book reviews and blogging about it all.....
Romance Reading CommunityRomance Reading Community is designed to link those homepages and websites which deal with the pleasures of reading (or writing) Romance Novels. Romance is by far the most popular of fiction genres with many millions of readers worldwide. Travel this community to visit sites that celebrate the love of reading Romance!
PEN-DRAGON Poetry and Fantasy SitesThis PEN-DRAGON Community is a collection of web sites dedicated to poetry, literature, writing, resources, art, and fantasy. Under new management** currently closed to new members. Check back later Sorry for any inconvience.
The Readers CommunityThis Community is designed for sites which include reviews of books, book collections, reading lists, sites about a favorite author or genre of literature (except pornography, obviously) Compulsive readers unite!
Poetry CafePoetry Cafe is a community for painters, poets, writers, sculptors, and other visionaries that create in the reflection of poetry and prose. Echoed in the beautiful words of the visual poet, Picasso, "A painting is a lie that tells the truth" is the Poetry Cafe's basic motto. We strive to seek the truth in our poetic expressions. We celebrate that passionate struggle by connecting and shacommunity our creations and exeriences with eachother.
The Good Book NetRing"The Good Book NetRing" is for any websites about books, including book writers, publishers, literary reviews, bibliographies and reading lists of books, and merchants catalogs and sales lists. If you have a webpage about books, join today. If you have more than one, you may add all of them.
Romance Readers and WritersRomance Readers and Writers is for those who love Romance Novels. Readers, writers, and publishers are welcome to join.
Lovers of RomanceThe Lovers of Romance Community was created to bcommunity together lovers of romance novels. Whether you're a READER, WRITER, AGENT, PUBLISHER or just an all around LOVER of the ROMANCE genre, you are invited to join!
The Ultimate Romance CommunityThis is the romance reader and writer community. Sites for readers and authors will be featured. If there is romance, it will be here!
Internet Writers' GuildThis community is for those who have web published art, literature and online series and to promote their work to the internet community at large. If you have this kind of website, you should join!
Bards of FortuneThis is a community for the Bards of Fortune Literature Sites.{;}If your site contains, Poetry, Short Stories, Diaries, Autobiography, Biographies, {;}Expressions on Books,Reports of Medical Problems with Family Members..... Tribute or Memorials{;}or anything that could be classed as Self Expression or Literature...{;}Please consider joining the competition....
For The Love Of Fae CommunityFor the Love of Fae Community was founded by wee fae whose love and respect for all beings should shine through immediately. Fairy, mythical, magikal, fantasy, legend/lore sites are welcome. (Wiccan sites are welcome.) No LIVE JOURNALS or message board submissions please. Your page does not have to be about fairies, but you MUST believe in them *S* No lover of the fae will be turned away as long as you follow the guidelines.
Fiction BloggersThe Community for people who Blog or run a Live Journal, and who write fiction (fan or original).
The Writings from The HeartThis community is for anyone who showcases their writings on their site. This can be in the form of poetry, short stories, journals, thoughts and anything in between. There is no age limit for this community and it will give you a chance to show off your awesome literary talent.
ParisBlogCommunauté des diaristes vivant à Paris ou en banlieue.
The Writers' BlockA community for sites devoted to literature, writing & publishing. Any site devoted to creative expression is welcome!
Fireflies & Lamplight Poetry CommunityA community for poetry writers and artists.
Web Writers UnionWeb Writers Union is an informal union of genre fiction writers on the web. Our aim is the exchange of ideas, work habits, resources mutual support for mutual advancement and good wishes. Membership is open to writers of genre fiction on the Internet, whether published or unpublished, professional or amateur. Please visit our home site.
Amateur Poets CommunityThis Community is by invitation only... Must be a Member of the Amateur Poets Group....
TBR CommunityUpdated for 2008 we will continue this challenge.
Poetry CommunityCommunity sponsored by CafePoetry.com, a well established poetry web site.
Harry Potter Fan CommunityA community for any and all fans of Harry Potter!
Author CommunityThe Author Community is exclusively for authors/books published in *ROYALTY-PAYING*, book-length fiction or non-fiction. Page may feature book and/or author. At this time the Author Community is not open to self- or vanity-press authors, blogs, or podcasts. In the future, time- and popular opinion-permitting, we may open a new Community exclusively for Author Community member's blogs, etc.
Platform Nine And Three Quartersa community for all who enjoy the true magic of Harry Potter.
The Harmony of SoulsWe believe in love, peace, and seeking imperturbability. No matter the color of our skin, whether we choose to call our Deity God or Goddess, or what Country we live in we all share the same goals. To live, to love, to be all that we can be.To be free to make our own choices.We each have a heart We each have a soul and though we certainly are different in many respects, inside, we are the same. Harmony
Zoetrope BloggersA community specifically for the writer bloggers from Zoetrope.com.
A Community of Ice and FireA community of fan sites devoted to George R. R. Martin's bestselling, award-winning fantasy series, "A Song of Ice and Fire".
The Community Of Fantasy WritersThis community connects fantasy, horror, and science fiction writers all over the net. Stop by and have a look!
book fetishbibliophiles welcome
Cottingley GlenCottingley Glen is a haven for fae folk. Containing information on art and artists, faerie types, faerie gardens, literature, essays, music composed by or about the fae, faerie, fairy, fey, sidhe tribes that inhabit this realm that we call earth. Join the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fairies (RSPCF). Join the Cottingley Glen Community. Learn about the real Cottingley Fairies. Keep Believing...
Potterific, the BEST Harry Potter sites on the WebDo you have a great Harry Potter fan site? Potterific! is about all the terrific Harry Potter fan sites on the web.
Kainee's Final Fantasy VII Fanfiction CommunityA Community devoted to fanfiction for Final Fantasy VII.
Potterfic AllianceShare the love, man.
The Writer's NookThe Writer's Nook is a huge site with tons of resources for writers of all stripes; this community connects many of those resources as well as site visitors and TWN Community Network members. Originally, this community was only open to the 12k+ members of The Writer's Nook Community Network with writing-related Web sites, but it is now open to any writing-related Web site.
Haiku By EveryOneA Community Community joining together all those wanting to share, teach and enjoy Haiku, Japanese Poetry and Poetry in general. How-To and Resources for the Beginner and Advanced Haiku-ist and Poet.
Time Travel, Paranormal, and Fantasy Romance CommunityA community for that person or author who loves time travel, paranormal, and fantasy story. A community that has authors, lovers, and avid readers alike.
harry potter weblogs!a community for harry potter lovers that blog! ^_^ if you have a weblog or online journal and love harry and his friends, please come join!
Alundain - Los seres de la LuzEste anillo agrupa a artistas,poetas,mitólogos,músicos,todos aquellos que poseen luz propia. Para sitios en español, sólo artistas se permiten en inglés. Mundo de hadas,leyendas veltas y griegas,poesías,relatos,ficción,galerías,etc. If you are an artist, are welcome althought your site is in english. Come to join
Boy's Love Original Fic CommunityThis is the Boy's Love Original Fiction Community! (Boy's Love, AKA shonenai, june, yaoi, slash, male/male stuff) This community is for any sites containing original fiction featucommunity a male/male relationship. A one-stop shop for lovers of original m/m fiction, art and other creative works!
National Novel Writing MonthThis is a community for blogs, web sites and journals who participate in National Novel Writing Month.
winged bookwormsa community for booklovers
PBS BookersThe words from a true bibliophile.
The Lover Boys CommunityThis community is designed to bcommunity together yaoi and slash fansites. Be it a site devoted to bishounen, shounen-ai, or hardcore yaoi, all are welcome. If you ever saw a movie, or played a videogame, and felt that two male characters in that storyline belonged together, then this community is for you. Sites that feature yuri, or hentai are allowed as long as a strong yaoi or bishounen content is found.
DreamscapesDreamscapes is a community for women writers who maintain a quality web page of original prose, poetry, short stories, free verse etc.
Fiction Glorious FictionWelcome to the realm of the author! If your site has fiction, then we want it!
Wild Poetry ForumWild Poetry is an interactive online community of poets and writers in all genre's. The Wild Poetry Community is an extension of Wild Poetry Forum. We offer a friendly atmosphere in which to post your own works and the ability to receive and give responses to others . This community is currently open to all web sites that house and encourage creative writing. All pages must carry at least a PG-13 rating to be included.{;}{;}The following types of sites will not be accepted in the Wild Poetry Community: {;}{;}sites containing adult material, {;}sites with links to adult material, {;}sites encou
A Tall Ship and a StarA community for Star Trek fan fiction. Each member site contains at least 4 gen or het stories from any Star Trek series or based on original ships/crews set in the Star Trek universe. Sites that contain slash in addition to gen and/or het are welcome, as long as slash stories are clearly marked as such.
Surrendecommunity To God Christian Poetry communityAn online community devoted to those who write Christian Poetry or have Christian Poetry on their site.
Between Two LoversThis is a group for people who are truly have been in love or is in love who writes poetry or stories about their feelings with all it's many facetts. {;}{;}At this time we are not accepting new members into the community.
Modern Day Literature
Literature is literally translated as being the written word which for us means books. Fiction and non fiction books, poetry, drama, factual, legal, prose and other types of literature books are available to you in a variety of places. Libraries where you can borrow them, stores where you can buy them and the internet where you can buy them but you can also read them online, this type of book is called an EBook.
EBooks are the latest craze to hit the internet and many of us through reading EBooks are learning to read again and be reminded how much we enjoy it! EBook is the short name for an Electronic Book which is the computer equivalent of a hard back or paperback book. You don’t have to read EBooks now on just your home computer many mobile phones now have the facilities for you to be able to download the EBooks and read them. Also other devices that are handheld are now on the market. EBooks in general are cheaper than buying a hardback or paperback book. The origins of EBooks can be found in the hardware and technical manuals that were created for specialty areas for a small audience. Most EBooks are supported by PDF and are only able to be read this way until 2008 when more programs were invented. Until 2008 EBooks were very much an underground market that was highly fractured into several types. EBooks are often written by novelists who cannot get accepted via the normal publishing routes. By publishing them themselves they are able to get their books viewed by millions of people all over the world. Internet sites all over the web have now sprung up with full catalogues of EBooks for every taste and within 2008 to 2009 big publishers themselves are now producing their books as EBooks as well. The market for EBooks has exploded and they are now the most read types of books in the world. The EBook market is currently worth over $11 Billion a year.
Some of the benefits of EBooks compared to the traditional print book are that they are able to be searched automatically via the program for certain words through hyperlinks, they also allow highlighting of certain sentences or paragraphs when studying enabling the student to highlight what they need without ruining the book. Each individual EBook reader hand held device can hold a multitude of EBooks which makes the carrying of them much, much lighter than carrying around say 10 or 15 paper printed books. People than have problems with reading can alter the size of the print and the font so that they can read the book easier than a traditional paper printed book. The last page that was read by the reader is automatically given when the reader re-opens the EBook saving time. Some EBook reader hand held devices have an audio program which reads out the text out loud so that those who are hard of sight can still enjoy their favorite stories.
BooksANDBlogsA passion for books, book reviews and blogging about it all.....
Romance Reading CommunityRomance Reading Community is designed to link those homepages and websites which deal with the pleasures of reading (or writing) Romance Novels. Romance is by far the most popular of fiction genres with many millions of readers worldwide. Travel this community to visit sites that celebrate the love of reading Romance!
PEN-DRAGON Poetry and Fantasy SitesThis PEN-DRAGON Community is a collection of web sites dedicated to poetry, literature, writing, resources, art, and fantasy. Under new management** currently closed to new members. Check back later Sorry for any inconvience.
The Readers CommunityThis Community is designed for sites which include reviews of books, book collections, reading lists, sites about a favorite author or genre of literature (except pornography, obviously) Compulsive readers unite!
Poetry CafePoetry Cafe is a community for painters, poets, writers, sculptors, and other visionaries that create in the reflection of poetry and prose. Echoed in the beautiful words of the visual poet, Picasso, "A painting is a lie that tells the truth" is the Poetry Cafe's basic motto. We strive to seek the truth in our poetic expressions. We celebrate that passionate struggle by connecting and shacommunity our creations and exeriences with eachother.
The Good Book NetRing"The Good Book NetRing" is for any websites about books, including book writers, publishers, literary reviews, bibliographies and reading lists of books, and merchants catalogs and sales lists. If you have a webpage about books, join today. If you have more than one, you may add all of them.
Romance Readers and WritersRomance Readers and Writers is for those who love Romance Novels. Readers, writers, and publishers are welcome to join.
Lovers of RomanceThe Lovers of Romance Community was created to bcommunity together lovers of romance novels. Whether you're a READER, WRITER, AGENT, PUBLISHER or just an all around LOVER of the ROMANCE genre, you are invited to join!
The Ultimate Romance CommunityThis is the romance reader and writer community. Sites for readers and authors will be featured. If there is romance, it will be here!
Internet Writers' GuildThis community is for those who have web published art, literature and online series and to promote their work to the internet community at large. If you have this kind of website, you should join!
Bards of FortuneThis is a community for the Bards of Fortune Literature Sites.{;}If your site contains, Poetry, Short Stories, Diaries, Autobiography, Biographies, {;}Expressions on Books,Reports of Medical Problems with Family Members..... Tribute or Memorials{;}or anything that could be classed as Self Expression or Literature...{;}Please consider joining the competition....
For The Love Of Fae CommunityFor the Love of Fae Community was founded by wee fae whose love and respect for all beings should shine through immediately. Fairy, mythical, magikal, fantasy, legend/lore sites are welcome. (Wiccan sites are welcome.) No LIVE JOURNALS or message board submissions please. Your page does not have to be about fairies, but you MUST believe in them *S* No lover of the fae will be turned away as long as you follow the guidelines.
Fiction BloggersThe Community for people who Blog or run a Live Journal, and who write fiction (fan or original).
The Writings from The HeartThis community is for anyone who showcases their writings on their site. This can be in the form of poetry, short stories, journals, thoughts and anything in between. There is no age limit for this community and it will give you a chance to show off your awesome literary talent.
ParisBlogCommunauté des diaristes vivant à Paris ou en banlieue.
The Writers' BlockA community for sites devoted to literature, writing & publishing. Any site devoted to creative expression is welcome!
Fireflies & Lamplight Poetry CommunityA community for poetry writers and artists.
Web Writers UnionWeb Writers Union is an informal union of genre fiction writers on the web. Our aim is the exchange of ideas, work habits, resources mutual support for mutual advancement and good wishes. Membership is open to writers of genre fiction on the Internet, whether published or unpublished, professional or amateur. Please visit our home site.
Amateur Poets CommunityThis Community is by invitation only... Must be a Member of the Amateur Poets Group....
TBR CommunityUpdated for 2008 we will continue this challenge.
Poetry CommunityCommunity sponsored by CafePoetry.com, a well established poetry web site.
Harry Potter Fan CommunityA community for any and all fans of Harry Potter!
Author CommunityThe Author Community is exclusively for authors/books published in *ROYALTY-PAYING*, book-length fiction or non-fiction. Page may feature book and/or author. At this time the Author Community is not open to self- or vanity-press authors, blogs, or podcasts. In the future, time- and popular opinion-permitting, we may open a new Community exclusively for Author Community member's blogs, etc.
Platform Nine And Three Quartersa community for all who enjoy the true magic of Harry Potter.
The Harmony of SoulsWe believe in love, peace, and seeking imperturbability. No matter the color of our skin, whether we choose to call our Deity God or Goddess, or what Country we live in we all share the same goals. To live, to love, to be all that we can be.To be free to make our own choices.We each have a heart We each have a soul and though we certainly are different in many respects, inside, we are the same. Harmony
Zoetrope BloggersA community specifically for the writer bloggers from Zoetrope.com.
A Community of Ice and FireA community of fan sites devoted to George R. R. Martin's bestselling, award-winning fantasy series, "A Song of Ice and Fire".
The Community Of Fantasy WritersThis community connects fantasy, horror, and science fiction writers all over the net. Stop by and have a look!
book fetishbibliophiles welcome
Cottingley GlenCottingley Glen is a haven for fae folk. Containing information on art and artists, faerie types, faerie gardens, literature, essays, music composed by or about the fae, faerie, fairy, fey, sidhe tribes that inhabit this realm that we call earth. Join the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fairies (RSPCF). Join the Cottingley Glen Community. Learn about the real Cottingley Fairies. Keep Believing...
Potterific, the BEST Harry Potter sites on the WebDo you have a great Harry Potter fan site? Potterific! is about all the terrific Harry Potter fan sites on the web.
Kainee's Final Fantasy VII Fanfiction CommunityA Community devoted to fanfiction for Final Fantasy VII.
Potterfic AllianceShare the love, man.
The Writer's NookThe Writer's Nook is a huge site with tons of resources for writers of all stripes; this community connects many of those resources as well as site visitors and TWN Community Network members. Originally, this community was only open to the 12k+ members of The Writer's Nook Community Network with writing-related Web sites, but it is now open to any writing-related Web site.
Haiku By EveryOneA Community Community joining together all those wanting to share, teach and enjoy Haiku, Japanese Poetry and Poetry in general. How-To and Resources for the Beginner and Advanced Haiku-ist and Poet.
Time Travel, Paranormal, and Fantasy Romance CommunityA community for that person or author who loves time travel, paranormal, and fantasy story. A community that has authors, lovers, and avid readers alike.
harry potter weblogs!a community for harry potter lovers that blog! ^_^ if you have a weblog or online journal and love harry and his friends, please come join!
Alundain - Los seres de la LuzEste anillo agrupa a artistas,poetas,mitólogos,músicos,todos aquellos que poseen luz propia. Para sitios en español, sólo artistas se permiten en inglés. Mundo de hadas,leyendas veltas y griegas,poesías,relatos,ficción,galerías,etc. If you are an artist, are welcome althought your site is in english. Come to join
Boy's Love Original Fic CommunityThis is the Boy's Love Original Fiction Community! (Boy's Love, AKA shonenai, june, yaoi, slash, male/male stuff) This community is for any sites containing original fiction featucommunity a male/male relationship. A one-stop shop for lovers of original m/m fiction, art and other creative works!
National Novel Writing MonthThis is a community for blogs, web sites and journals who participate in National Novel Writing Month.
winged bookwormsa community for booklovers
PBS BookersThe words from a true bibliophile.
The Lover Boys CommunityThis community is designed to bcommunity together yaoi and slash fansites. Be it a site devoted to bishounen, shounen-ai, or hardcore yaoi, all are welcome. If you ever saw a movie, or played a videogame, and felt that two male characters in that storyline belonged together, then this community is for you. Sites that feature yuri, or hentai are allowed as long as a strong yaoi or bishounen content is found.
DreamscapesDreamscapes is a community for women writers who maintain a quality web page of original prose, poetry, short stories, free verse etc.
Fiction Glorious FictionWelcome to the realm of the author! If your site has fiction, then we want it!
Wild Poetry ForumWild Poetry is an interactive online community of poets and writers in all genre's. The Wild Poetry Community is an extension of Wild Poetry Forum. We offer a friendly atmosphere in which to post your own works and the ability to receive and give responses to others . This community is currently open to all web sites that house and encourage creative writing. All pages must carry at least a PG-13 rating to be included.{;}{;}The following types of sites will not be accepted in the Wild Poetry Community: {;}{;}sites containing adult material, {;}sites with links to adult material, {;}sites encou
A Tall Ship and a StarA community for Star Trek fan fiction. Each member site contains at least 4 gen or het stories from any Star Trek series or based on original ships/crews set in the Star Trek universe. Sites that contain slash in addition to gen and/or het are welcome, as long as slash stories are clearly marked as such.
Surrendecommunity To God Christian Poetry communityAn online community devoted to those who write Christian Poetry or have Christian Poetry on their site.
Between Two LoversThis is a group for people who are truly have been in love or is in love who writes poetry or stories about their feelings with all it's many facetts. {;}{;}At this time we are not accepting new members into the community.
Modern Day Literature
Literature is literally translated as being the written word which for us means books. Fiction and non fiction books, poetry, drama, factual, legal, prose and other types of literature books are available to you in a variety of places. Libraries where you can borrow them, stores where you can buy them and the internet where you can buy them but you can also read them online, this type of book is called an EBook.
EBooks are the latest craze to hit the internet and many of us through reading EBooks are learning to read again and be reminded how much we enjoy it! EBook is the short name for an Electronic Book which is the computer equivalent of a hard back or paperback book. You don’t have to read EBooks now on just your home computer many mobile phones now have the facilities for you to be able to download the EBooks and read them. Also other devices that are handheld are now on the market. EBooks in general are cheaper than buying a hardback or paperback book. The origins of EBooks can be found in the hardware and technical manuals that were created for specialty areas for a small audience. Most EBooks are supported by PDF and are only able to be read this way until 2008 when more programs were invented. Until 2008 EBooks were very much an underground market that was highly fractured into several types. EBooks are often written by novelists who cannot get accepted via the normal publishing routes. By publishing them themselves they are able to get their books viewed by millions of people all over the world. Internet sites all over the web have now sprung up with full catalogues of EBooks for every taste and within 2008 to 2009 big publishers themselves are now producing their books as EBooks as well. The market for EBooks has exploded and they are now the most read types of books in the world. The EBook market is currently worth over $11 Billion a year.
Some of the benefits of EBooks compared to the traditional print book are that they are able to be searched automatically via the program for certain words through hyperlinks, they also allow highlighting of certain sentences or paragraphs when studying enabling the student to highlight what they need without ruining the book. Each individual EBook reader hand held device can hold a multitude of EBooks which makes the carrying of them much, much lighter than carrying around say 10 or 15 paper printed books. People than have problems with reading can alter the size of the print and the font so that they can read the book easier than a traditional paper printed book. The last page that was read by the reader is automatically given when the reader re-opens the EBook saving time. Some EBook reader hand held devices have an audio program which reads out the text out loud so that those who are hard of sight can still enjoy their favorite stories.
Dracula and "Gothic" Poetry
DescriptionStudents need to write a compare and contrast essay on Bram Stoker's Dracula and one of the following poems:"Annabel Lee" Edgar Allan Poe"The Grave" Robert Blair"The Fatal Sisters" Thomas Gray"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" Thomas Gray"The Conqueror Worm" Edgar Allan PoeNOTE: Each of these poems can be found in the Enotes Dracula lesson plan available for purchase at enotes.com
Glossary of Poetic Terms
AllegoryA symbolic narrative in which the surface details imply a secondary meaning. Allegory often takes the form of a story in which the characters represent moral qualities. The most famous example in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, in which the name of the central character, Pilgrim, epitomizes the book's allegorical nature. Kay Boyle's story "Astronomer's Wife" and Christina Rossetti's poem "Up-Hill" both contain allegorical elements.
AlliterationThe repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy."
Anapest Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. An anapestic meter rises to the accented beat as in Byron's lines from "The Destruction of Sennacherib": "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, / When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."
AntagonistA character or force against which another character struggles. Creon is Antigone's antagonist in Sophocles' play Antigone; Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King.
AssonanceThe repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines: "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."
AubadeA love lyric in which the speaker complains about the arrival of the dawn, when he must part from his lover. John Donne's "The Sun Rising" exemplifies this poetic genre.
BalladA narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style. The Anonymous medieval ballad, "Barbara Allan," exemplifies the genre.
Blank verseA line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches" include many lines of blank verse. Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches": When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
CaesuraA strong pause within a line of verse. The following stanza from Hardy's "The Man He Killed" contains caesuras in the middle two lines:
He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,Off-hand-like--just as I--Was out of work-had sold his traps--No other reason why.
CharacterAn imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change). In Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona is a major character, but one who is static, like the minor character Bianca. Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an ability to change.
CharacterizationThe means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions. Readers come to understand the character Miss Emily in Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" through what she says, how she lives, and what she does.
ClimaxThe turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work. The climax of John Updike's "A&P," for example, occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.
Closed formA type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" provides one of many examples. A single stanza illustrates some of the features of closed form:
Whose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village though.He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.
ComplicationAn intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work. Frank O'Connor's story "Guests of the Nation" provides a striking example, as does Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal."
ConflictA struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters. Lady Gregory's one-act play The Rising of the Moon exemplifies both types of conflict as the Policeman wrestles with his conscience in an inner conflict and confronts an antagonist in the person of the ballad singer.
ConnotationThe associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines: "Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
ConventionA customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.
CoupletA pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings."
DactylA stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry. The following playful lines illustrate double dactyls, two dactyls per line:
Higgledy, piggledy,Emily DickinsonGibbering, jabbering.
DenotationThe dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications. In the following lines from Peter Meinke's "Advice to My Son" the references to flowers and fruit, bread and wine denote specific things, but also suggest something beyond the literal, dictionary meanings of the words:
To be specific, between the peony and rosePlant squash and spinach, turnips and tomatoes;Beauty is nectar and nectar, in a desert, saves--...and always serve bread with your wine.But, son,always serve wine.
DenouementThe resolution of the plot of a literary work. The denouement of Hamlet takes place after the catastrophe, with the stage littered with corpses. During the denouement Fortinbras makes an entrance and a speech, and Horatio speaks his sweet lines in praise of Hamlet.
DialogueThe conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names.
DictionThe selection of words in a literary work. A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. We can speak of the diction particular to a character, as in Iago's and Desdemona's very different ways of speaking in Othello. We can also refer to a poet's diction as represented over the body of his or her work, as in Donne's or Hughes's diction.
ElegyA lyric poem that laments the dead. Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" is elegiac in tone. A more explicitly identified elegy is W.H. Auden's "In Memory of William Butler Yeats" and his "Funeral Blues."
ElisionThe omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry. Alexander uses elision in "Sound and Sense": "Flies o'er th' unbending corn...."
EnjambmentA run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line. In the opening lines of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," for example, the first line is end-stopped and the second enjambed:
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were alive. I callThat piece a wonder, now....
EpicA long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero. Epics typically chronicle the origins of a civilization and embody its central values. Examples from western literature include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Milton's Paradise Lost.
EpigramA brief witty poem, often satirical. Alexander Pope's "Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog" exemplifies the genre:
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
ExpositionThe first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided. Ibsen's A Doll's House, for instance, begins with a conversation between the two central characters, a dialogue that fills the audience in on events that occurred before the action of the play begins, but which are important in the development of its plot.
Falling actionIn the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it towards its denouement or resolution. The falling action of Othello begins after Othello realizes that Iago is responsible for plotting against him by spurring him on to murder his wife, Desdemona.
Falling meterPoetic meters such as trochaic and dactylic that move or fall from a stressed to an unstressed syllable. The nonsense line, "Higgledy, piggledy," is dactylic, with the accent on the first syllable and the two syllables following falling off from that accent in each word. Trochaic meter is represented by this line: "Hip-hop, be-bop, treetop--freedom."
FictionAn imagined story, whether in prose, poetry, or drama. Ibsen's Nora is fictional, a "make-believe" character in a play, as are Hamlet and Othello. Characters like Robert Browning's Duke and Duchess from his poem "My Last Duchess" are fictional as well, though they may be based on actual historical individuals. And, of course, characters in stories and novels are fictional, though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people. The important thing to remember is that writers embellish and embroider and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work. They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they "make things up."
Figurative languageA form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.
FlashbackAn interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time. Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" includes flashbacks.
FoilA character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story. Laertes, in Hamlet, is a foil for the main character; in Othello, Emilia and Bianca are foils for Desdemona.
FootA metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic foot.
ForeshadowingHints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story. Ibsen's A Doll's House includes foreshadowing as does Synge's Riders to the Sea. So, too, do Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" and Chopin's "Story of an Hour."
Free versePoetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad. Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often employ free verse. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is one of many examples.
HyperboleA figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star."
IambAn unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY. See Foot.
ImageA concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action. Some modern poets, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, write poems that lack discursive explanation entirely and include only images. Among the most famous examples is Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.
ImageryThe pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work. Imagery of light and darkness pervade James Joyce's stories "Araby," "The Boarding House," and "The Dead." So, too, does religious imagery.
IronyA contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters. Flannery O'Connor's short stories employ all these forms of irony, as does Poe's "Cask of Amontillado."
Literal languageA form of language in which writers and speakers mean exactly what their words denote. See Figurative language, Denotation, and Connotation.
Lyric poemA type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling. Most of the poems in this book are lyrics. The anonymous "Western Wind" epitomizes the genre:
Western wind, when will thou blow,The small rain down can rain?Christ, if my love were in my armsAnd I in my bed again!
MetaphorA comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose,"
From Burns's "A Red, Red Rose." Langston Hughes's "Dream Deferred" is built entirely of metaphors. Metaphor is one of the most important of literary uses of language. Shakespeare employs a wide range of metaphor in his sonnets and his plays, often in such density and profusion that readers are kept busy analyzing and interpreting and unraveling them. Compare Simile.
MeterThe measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems. See Foot and Iamb.
MetonymyA figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea. An example: "We have always remained loyal to the crown." See Synecdoche.
Narrative poemA poem that tells a story. See Ballad.
NarratorThe voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author. For example, the narrator of Joyce's "Araby" is not James Joyce himself, but a literary fictional character created expressly to tell the story. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" contains a communal narrator, identified only as "we." See Point of view.
OctaveAn eight-line unit, which may constitute a stanza; or a section of a poem, as in the octave of a sonnet.
Ode A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and form. Usually a serious poem on an exalted subject, such as Horace's "Eheu fugaces," but sometimes a more lighthearted work, such as Neruda's "Ode to My Socks."
OnomatopoeiaThe use of words to imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic. The following line from Pope's "Sound and Sense" onomatopoetically imitates in sound what it describes:
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,The line too labors, and the words move slow.
Most often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of words, such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of innumerable bees," which attempts to capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.
Open formA type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure. E.E. Cummings's "[Buffalo Bill's]" is one example. See also Free verse.
ParodyA humorous, mocking imitation of a literary work, sometimes sarcastic, but often playful and even respectful in its playful imitation. Examples include Bob McKenty's parody of Frost's "Dust of Snow" and Kenneth Koch's parody of Williams's "This is Just to Say."
PersonificationThe endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities. An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze." Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" includes personification.
PlotThe unified structure of incidents in a literary work. See Conflict, Climax, Denouement, andFlashback.
Point of viewThe angle of vision from which a story is narrated. See Narrator. A work's point of view can be: first person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively; objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader; omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the characters; and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some things about the characters but not everything.
ProtagonistThe main character of a literary work--Hamlet and Othello in the plays named after them, Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, Paul in Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner."
PyrrhicA metrical foot with two unstressed syllables ("of the").
QuatrainA four-line stanza in a poem, the first four lines and the second four lines in a Petrachan sonnet. A Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a couplet.
RecognitionThe point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is. Sophocles' Oedipus comes to this point near the end of Oedipus the King; Othello comes to a similar understanding of his situation in Act V of Othello.
ResolutionThe sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story. See Plot.
ReversalThe point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist. Oedipus's and Othello's recognitions are also reversals. They learn what they did not expect to learn. See Recognition and also Irony.
RhymeThe matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words. The following stanza of "Richard Cory" employs alternate rhyme, with the third line rhyming with the first and the fourth with the second:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him;He was a gentleman from sole to crownClean favored and imperially slim.
RhythmThe recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse. In the following lines from "Same in Blues" by Langston Hughes, the accented words and syllables are underlined:
I said to my baby,Baby take it slow....Lulu said to LeonardI want a diamond ring
Rising actionA set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a play's or story's plot leading up to the climax. See Climax, Denouement, and Plot.
Rising meterPoetic meters such as iambic and anapestic that move or ascend from an unstressed to a stressed syllable. See Anapest, Iamb, and Falling meter.
SatireA literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a famous example. Chekhov's Marriage Proposal and O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," have strong satirical elements.
SestetA six-line unit of verse constituting a stanza or section of a poem; the last six lines of an Italian sonnet. Examples: Petrarch's "If it is not love, then what is it that I feel," and Frost's "Design."
SestinaA poem of thirty-nine lines and written in iambic pentameter. Its six-line stanza repeat in an intricate and prescribed order the final word in each of the first six lines. After the sixth stanza, there is a three-line envoi, which uses the six repeating words, two per line.
SettingThe time and place of a literary work that establish its context. The stories of Sandra Cisneros are set in the American southwest in the mid to late 20th century, those of James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century.
SimileA figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."
SonnetA fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.
SpondeeA metricalfoot represented by two stressed syllables, such as KNICK-KNACK.
StanzaA division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form--either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter, or with variations from one stanza to another. The stanzas of Gertrude Schnackenberg's "Signs" are regular; those of Rita Dove's "Canary" are irregular.
StyleThe way an author chooses words, arranges them in sentences or in lines of dialogue or verse, and develops ideas and actions with description, imagery, and other literary techniques. See Connotation, Denotation, Diction, Figurative language, Image, Imagery, Irony, Metaphor, Narrator, Point of view, Syntax, and Tone.
SubjectWhat a story or play is about; to be distinguished from plot and theme. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is about the decline of a particular way of life endemic to the American south before the civil war. Its plot concerns how Faulkner describes and organizes the actions of the story's characters. Its theme is the overall meaning Faulkner conveys.
SubplotA subsidiary or subordinate or parallel plot in a play or story that coexists with the main plot. The story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern forms a subplot with the overall plot of Hamlet.
SymbolAn object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.
SynecdocheA figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. An example: "Lend me a hand." See Metonymy.
SyntaxThe grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue. In the following example, normal syntax (subject, verb, object order) is inverted:
"Whose woods these are I think I know."
TercetA three-line stanza, as the stanzas in Frost's "Acquainted With the Night" and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." The three-line stanzas or sections that together constitute the sestet of a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet.
ThemeThe idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization. See discussion of Dickinson's "Crumbling is not an instant's Act."
ToneThe implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work, as, for example, Flannery O'Connor's ironic tone in her "Good Country People." See Irony.
TrocheeAn accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, as in FOOT-ball.
UnderstatementA figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than what he or she means; the opposite of exaggeration. The last line of Frost's "Birches" illustrates this literary device: "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
VillanelleA nineteen-line lyric poem that relies heavily on repetition. The first and third lines alternate throughout the poem, which is structured in six stanzas --five tercets and a concluding quatrain. Examples include Bishop's "One Art," Roethke's "The Waking," and Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."
AlliterationThe repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the beginning of words. Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose, off some sweet wood." Hopkins, "In the Valley of the Elwy."
Anapest Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one, as in com-pre-HEND or in-ter-VENE. An anapestic meter rises to the accented beat as in Byron's lines from "The Destruction of Sennacherib": "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, / When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee."
AntagonistA character or force against which another character struggles. Creon is Antigone's antagonist in Sophocles' play Antigone; Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King.
AssonanceThe repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe." Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" contains assonantal "I's" in the following lines: "How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, / Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself."
AubadeA love lyric in which the speaker complains about the arrival of the dawn, when he must part from his lover. John Donne's "The Sun Rising" exemplifies this poetic genre.
BalladA narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style. The Anonymous medieval ballad, "Barbara Allan," exemplifies the genre.
Blank verseA line of poetry or prose in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare's sonnets, Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, and Robert Frost's meditative poems such as "Birches" include many lines of blank verse. Here are the opening blank verse lines of "Birches": When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
CaesuraA strong pause within a line of verse. The following stanza from Hardy's "The Man He Killed" contains caesuras in the middle two lines:
He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,Off-hand-like--just as I--Was out of work-had sold his traps--No other reason why.
CharacterAn imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change). In Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona is a major character, but one who is static, like the minor character Bianca. Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an ability to change.
CharacterizationThe means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions. Readers come to understand the character Miss Emily in Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" through what she says, how she lives, and what she does.
ClimaxThe turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work. The climax of John Updike's "A&P," for example, occurs when Sammy quits his job as a cashier.
Closed formA type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern. Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" provides one of many examples. A single stanza illustrates some of the features of closed form:
Whose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village though.He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.
ComplicationAn intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work. Frank O'Connor's story "Guests of the Nation" provides a striking example, as does Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal."
ConflictA struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters. Lady Gregory's one-act play The Rising of the Moon exemplifies both types of conflict as the Policeman wrestles with his conscience in an inner conflict and confronts an antagonist in the person of the ballad singer.
ConnotationThe associations called up by a word that goes beyond its dictionary meaning. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines: "Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
ConventionA customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.
CoupletA pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem. Shakespeare's sonnets end in rhymed couplets, as in "For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings."
DactylA stressed syllable followed by two unstressed ones, as in FLUT-ter-ing or BLUE-ber-ry. The following playful lines illustrate double dactyls, two dactyls per line:
Higgledy, piggledy,Emily DickinsonGibbering, jabbering.
DenotationThe dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications. In the following lines from Peter Meinke's "Advice to My Son" the references to flowers and fruit, bread and wine denote specific things, but also suggest something beyond the literal, dictionary meanings of the words:
To be specific, between the peony and rosePlant squash and spinach, turnips and tomatoes;Beauty is nectar and nectar, in a desert, saves--...and always serve bread with your wine.But, son,always serve wine.
DenouementThe resolution of the plot of a literary work. The denouement of Hamlet takes place after the catastrophe, with the stage littered with corpses. During the denouement Fortinbras makes an entrance and a speech, and Horatio speaks his sweet lines in praise of Hamlet.
DialogueThe conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, characters' speech is preceded by their names.
DictionThe selection of words in a literary work. A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. We can speak of the diction particular to a character, as in Iago's and Desdemona's very different ways of speaking in Othello. We can also refer to a poet's diction as represented over the body of his or her work, as in Donne's or Hughes's diction.
ElegyA lyric poem that laments the dead. Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" is elegiac in tone. A more explicitly identified elegy is W.H. Auden's "In Memory of William Butler Yeats" and his "Funeral Blues."
ElisionThe omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve the meter of a line of poetry. Alexander uses elision in "Sound and Sense": "Flies o'er th' unbending corn...."
EnjambmentA run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line into the next. An enjambed line differs from an end-stopped line in which the grammatical and logical sense is completed within the line. In the opening lines of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," for example, the first line is end-stopped and the second enjambed:
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were alive. I callThat piece a wonder, now....
EpicA long narrative poem that records the adventures of a hero. Epics typically chronicle the origins of a civilization and embody its central values. Examples from western literature include Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Milton's Paradise Lost.
EpigramA brief witty poem, often satirical. Alexander Pope's "Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog" exemplifies the genre:
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
ExpositionThe first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information is provided. Ibsen's A Doll's House, for instance, begins with a conversation between the two central characters, a dialogue that fills the audience in on events that occurred before the action of the play begins, but which are important in the development of its plot.
Falling actionIn the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it towards its denouement or resolution. The falling action of Othello begins after Othello realizes that Iago is responsible for plotting against him by spurring him on to murder his wife, Desdemona.
Falling meterPoetic meters such as trochaic and dactylic that move or fall from a stressed to an unstressed syllable. The nonsense line, "Higgledy, piggledy," is dactylic, with the accent on the first syllable and the two syllables following falling off from that accent in each word. Trochaic meter is represented by this line: "Hip-hop, be-bop, treetop--freedom."
FictionAn imagined story, whether in prose, poetry, or drama. Ibsen's Nora is fictional, a "make-believe" character in a play, as are Hamlet and Othello. Characters like Robert Browning's Duke and Duchess from his poem "My Last Duchess" are fictional as well, though they may be based on actual historical individuals. And, of course, characters in stories and novels are fictional, though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people. The important thing to remember is that writers embellish and embroider and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work. They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they "make things up."
Figurative languageA form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. Examples include hyperbole or exaggeration, litotes or understatement, simile and metaphor, which employ comparison, and synecdoche and metonymy, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole.
FlashbackAn interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time. Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" includes flashbacks.
FoilA character who contrasts and parallels the main character in a play or story. Laertes, in Hamlet, is a foil for the main character; in Othello, Emilia and Bianca are foils for Desdemona.
FootA metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one. Frost's line "Whose woods these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is thus an iambic foot.
ForeshadowingHints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story. Ibsen's A Doll's House includes foreshadowing as does Synge's Riders to the Sea. So, too, do Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" and Chopin's "Story of an Hour."
Free versePoetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme. The verse is "free" in not being bound by earlier poetic conventions requiring poems to adhere to an explicit and identifiable meter and rhyme scheme in a form such as the sonnet or ballad. Modern and contemporary poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries often employ free verse. Williams's "This Is Just to Say" is one of many examples.
HyperboleA figure of speech involving exaggeration. John Donne uses hyperbole in his poem: "Song: Go and Catch a Falling Star."
IambAn unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY. See Foot.
ImageA concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea. Imagery refers to the pattern of related details in a work. In some works one image predominates either by recurring throughout the work or by appearing at a critical point in the plot. Often writers use multiple images throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey implications of thought and action. Some modern poets, such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, write poems that lack discursive explanation entirely and include only images. Among the most famous examples is Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.
ImageryThe pattern of related comparative aspects of language, particularly of images, in a literary work. Imagery of light and darkness pervade James Joyce's stories "Araby," "The Boarding House," and "The Dead." So, too, does religious imagery.
IronyA contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters. Flannery O'Connor's short stories employ all these forms of irony, as does Poe's "Cask of Amontillado."
Literal languageA form of language in which writers and speakers mean exactly what their words denote. See Figurative language, Denotation, and Connotation.
Lyric poemA type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling. Most of the poems in this book are lyrics. The anonymous "Western Wind" epitomizes the genre:
Western wind, when will thou blow,The small rain down can rain?Christ, if my love were in my armsAnd I in my bed again!
MetaphorA comparison between essentially unlike things without an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. An example is "My love is a red, red rose,"
From Burns's "A Red, Red Rose." Langston Hughes's "Dream Deferred" is built entirely of metaphors. Metaphor is one of the most important of literary uses of language. Shakespeare employs a wide range of metaphor in his sonnets and his plays, often in such density and profusion that readers are kept busy analyzing and interpreting and unraveling them. Compare Simile.
MeterThe measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems. See Foot and Iamb.
MetonymyA figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea. An example: "We have always remained loyal to the crown." See Synecdoche.
Narrative poemA poem that tells a story. See Ballad.
NarratorThe voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author. For example, the narrator of Joyce's "Araby" is not James Joyce himself, but a literary fictional character created expressly to tell the story. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" contains a communal narrator, identified only as "we." See Point of view.
OctaveAn eight-line unit, which may constitute a stanza; or a section of a poem, as in the octave of a sonnet.
Ode A long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and form. Usually a serious poem on an exalted subject, such as Horace's "Eheu fugaces," but sometimes a more lighthearted work, such as Neruda's "Ode to My Socks."
OnomatopoeiaThe use of words to imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic. The following line from Pope's "Sound and Sense" onomatopoetically imitates in sound what it describes:
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,The line too labors, and the words move slow.
Most often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of words, such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of innumerable bees," which attempts to capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.
Open formA type of structure or form in poetry characterized by freedom from regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, metrical pattern, and overall poetic structure. E.E. Cummings's "[Buffalo Bill's]" is one example. See also Free verse.
ParodyA humorous, mocking imitation of a literary work, sometimes sarcastic, but often playful and even respectful in its playful imitation. Examples include Bob McKenty's parody of Frost's "Dust of Snow" and Kenneth Koch's parody of Williams's "This is Just to Say."
PersonificationThe endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with animate or living qualities. An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted their color gaily in the breeze." Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" includes personification.
PlotThe unified structure of incidents in a literary work. See Conflict, Climax, Denouement, andFlashback.
Point of viewThe angle of vision from which a story is narrated. See Narrator. A work's point of view can be: first person, in which the narrator is a character or an observer, respectively; objective, in which the narrator knows or appears to know no more than the reader; omniscient, in which the narrator knows everything about the characters; and limited omniscient, which allows the narrator to know some things about the characters but not everything.
ProtagonistThe main character of a literary work--Hamlet and Othello in the plays named after them, Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis, Paul in Lawrence's "Rocking-Horse Winner."
PyrrhicA metrical foot with two unstressed syllables ("of the").
QuatrainA four-line stanza in a poem, the first four lines and the second four lines in a Petrachan sonnet. A Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a couplet.
RecognitionThe point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is. Sophocles' Oedipus comes to this point near the end of Oedipus the King; Othello comes to a similar understanding of his situation in Act V of Othello.
ResolutionThe sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story. See Plot.
ReversalThe point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist. Oedipus's and Othello's recognitions are also reversals. They learn what they did not expect to learn. See Recognition and also Irony.
RhymeThe matching of final vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words. The following stanza of "Richard Cory" employs alternate rhyme, with the third line rhyming with the first and the fourth with the second:
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,We people on the pavement looked at him;He was a gentleman from sole to crownClean favored and imperially slim.
RhythmThe recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse. In the following lines from "Same in Blues" by Langston Hughes, the accented words and syllables are underlined:
I said to my baby,Baby take it slow....Lulu said to LeonardI want a diamond ring
Rising actionA set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a play's or story's plot leading up to the climax. See Climax, Denouement, and Plot.
Rising meterPoetic meters such as iambic and anapestic that move or ascend from an unstressed to a stressed syllable. See Anapest, Iamb, and Falling meter.
SatireA literary work that criticizes human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies. Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a famous example. Chekhov's Marriage Proposal and O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," have strong satirical elements.
SestetA six-line unit of verse constituting a stanza or section of a poem; the last six lines of an Italian sonnet. Examples: Petrarch's "If it is not love, then what is it that I feel," and Frost's "Design."
SestinaA poem of thirty-nine lines and written in iambic pentameter. Its six-line stanza repeat in an intricate and prescribed order the final word in each of the first six lines. After the sixth stanza, there is a three-line envoi, which uses the six repeating words, two per line.
SettingThe time and place of a literary work that establish its context. The stories of Sandra Cisneros are set in the American southwest in the mid to late 20th century, those of James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland in the early 20th century.
SimileA figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."
SonnetA fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The Shakespearean or English sonnet is arranged as three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into two parts: an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde or abba abba cd cd cd.
SpondeeA metricalfoot represented by two stressed syllables, such as KNICK-KNACK.
StanzaA division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form--either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter, or with variations from one stanza to another. The stanzas of Gertrude Schnackenberg's "Signs" are regular; those of Rita Dove's "Canary" are irregular.
StyleThe way an author chooses words, arranges them in sentences or in lines of dialogue or verse, and develops ideas and actions with description, imagery, and other literary techniques. See Connotation, Denotation, Diction, Figurative language, Image, Imagery, Irony, Metaphor, Narrator, Point of view, Syntax, and Tone.
SubjectWhat a story or play is about; to be distinguished from plot and theme. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is about the decline of a particular way of life endemic to the American south before the civil war. Its plot concerns how Faulkner describes and organizes the actions of the story's characters. Its theme is the overall meaning Faulkner conveys.
SubplotA subsidiary or subordinate or parallel plot in a play or story that coexists with the main plot. The story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern forms a subplot with the overall plot of Hamlet.
SymbolAn object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself. The glass unicorn in The Glass Menagerie, the rocking horse in "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the road in Frost's "The Road Not Taken"--all are symbols in this sense.
SynecdocheA figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. An example: "Lend me a hand." See Metonymy.
SyntaxThe grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue. The organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue. In the following example, normal syntax (subject, verb, object order) is inverted:
"Whose woods these are I think I know."
TercetA three-line stanza, as the stanzas in Frost's "Acquainted With the Night" and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." The three-line stanzas or sections that together constitute the sestet of a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet.
ThemeThe idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization. See discussion of Dickinson's "Crumbling is not an instant's Act."
ToneThe implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work, as, for example, Flannery O'Connor's ironic tone in her "Good Country People." See Irony.
TrocheeAn accented syllable followed by an unaccented one, as in FOOT-ball.
UnderstatementA figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than what he or she means; the opposite of exaggeration. The last line of Frost's "Birches" illustrates this literary device: "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
VillanelleA nineteen-line lyric poem that relies heavily on repetition. The first and third lines alternate throughout the poem, which is structured in six stanzas --five tercets and a concluding quatrain. Examples include Bishop's "One Art," Roethke's "The Waking," and Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night."
What is Poetry
Poetry is an art form in which language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose. It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. Because of its nature of emphasizing linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another.
Nature of poetry
Poetry can be differentiated most of the time from prose, which is language meant to convey meaning in a more expansive and less condensed way, frequently using more complete logical or narrative structures than poetry does. A further complication is that prose poetry combines the characteristics of poetry with the superficial appearance of prose. And there is, of course, narrative poetry, not to mention dramatic poetry, both of which are used to tell stories and so resemble novels and plays. However, both these forms of poetry use the specific features of verse composition to make these stories more memorable or to enhance them in some way.
The Greek verb poieo (I make or create), gave rise to 3 words: poietis (the one who creates), poiesis (the act of creation), and poiema (the thing created). From these we get three English words: poet (the creator), poesy (the creation) and poem (the created). A poet is therefore one who creates, and poetry is what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as maker or creator is not uncommon. For example, in Anglo-Saxon a poet is a scop (shaper or maker) and in Scots makar.
Sound in poetry
Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.
Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used it extensively.
Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called Alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry.
The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure which determines when the listener expects instances rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme when used in poetic structures help to emphasize and define a rhythmic pattern.
In addition to forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure poetry, sound plays a subtle role in even free verse poetry in creating pleasing, varied patterns and emphasizing or sometimes even illustrating semantic elements of the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are among the ways poets use sound.
Poetry and form
As it is created using language, poetry tends to use formal linguistic units like phrases, sentences and paragraphs. In addition, it uses units of organization that are purely poetic. The main units that are used are the line, the couplet, the strophe, the stanza, and the verse paragraph.
Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the famous To be, or not to be: that is the question. Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer. The linguistic unit is generally completed in the next line: The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.
Couplets, stanzas, and strophes are generally self-contained units of sense, although a kind of enjambment may also be used across these units. In blank verse, verse paragraphs are employed to indicate natural breaks in the flow of the poem.
In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of linguistic and formal units. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the visual presentation of their work. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.
Poetry and rhetoric
Rhetorical devices such as simile & metaphor are frequently used in poetry. Or, maybe more accurately, rhetorics has learned these powerful ways of forging connections outside logical reasoning from poetry. Indeed, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. However, particularly since the rise of Modernism, many poets have opted for reduced use of these devices, preferring rather to attempt the direct presentation of things and experiences.
The history of poetry
Poetry as an art form predates literacy. In pre-literate societies, poetry was frequently employed as a means of recording oral history, storytelling (epic poetry), genealogy, law and other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose. Poetry is also often closely identified with liturgy in these societies, as the formal nature of poetry makes it easier to remember priestly incantations or prophecies. The greater part of the world's sacred scriptures are made up of poetry rather than prose.
Some writers believe that poetry has its origins in song. Most of the characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of utterance - rhythm, rhyme, compression, intensity of feeling, the use of refrains - appear to have come from efforts to fit words to musical forms. However, in the European tradition the earliest surviving poems, the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, identify themselves as poems to be chanted to a musical accompaniment rather than as pure song. Another interpretation, developed from 20th century studies of living Montenegran epic reciters by Milman Parry and others, is that rhythm, refrains, and kennings are essentially paratactic devices that enable the reciter to reconstruct the poem from memory.
In preliterate societies, all these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. As such, there was a certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems, given this could change from one performance or performer to another. The introduction of writing tended to fix the content of a poem to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition also meant that poets began to compose not for an audience that was sitting in front of them but for an absent reader. Later, the invention of printing tended to accelerate these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.
The development of literacy gave rise to more personal, shorter poems intended to be sung. These are called lyrics, which derives from the Greek lura or lyre, the instrument that was used to accompany the performance of Greek lyrics from about the 7th century BC onward. The Greek's practice of singing hymns in large choruses gave rise, in the 6th century BC to dramatic verse, and to the practice of writing poetic plays for performance in their theatres.
In more recent times, the introduction of electronic media and the rise of the poetry reading have led to a resurgence of performance poetry and have resulted in a situation where poetry for the eye and poetry for the ear coexist, sometimes in the same poem.
Verse forms
Ballad
Ballade royal
Blank verse
Chant royal
Cinquain
Clerihew
Couplet
Double dactyl
Dramatic poetry
Elegy
Englyn
Envoi
Epic
Epigram
Epyllion
Free verse
Ghazal
Grook
Haiku
Haibun
Heroic couplets
Kimo
Kyrielle
Light Poetry
Limerick
Lyric
McWhirtle
Narrative poetry
Nonsense verse
Ode
Ottava rima
Paradelle
Pantun
Quatrain
Quatorzain
Renga
Rhyme royal
Rondeau
Rubaiyat
Sapphics
Senryu
Sestina
Sijo
Song
Sonnet
SymmyS
Tanka
Tercet
Terza rima
Villanelle
Virelai ancien
Virelai nouveau
Periods, styles and movements
Acrostic
Alliterative verse
Automatic poetry
British Poetry Revival
Chanson de geste
Concrete poetry
Digital poetry
Epitaph
Erasure poetry
Found poetry
Imagism
Medieval poetry
Minnesinger
Modernist
Modernist poetry
The Movement
Objectivist
Parnassian
Pastoral
Performance poetry
Post-modernist
San Francisco Renaissance
Sound poetry
Symbolism
Troubador
Trouvère
Technical means
Accent
Accentual verse
Aleatory methods
Alliteration
Anacrusis
Aposiopesis
Assonance
Cæsura
Chain rhyme
Consonance
Dissonance
Enjambment
Foot
Half rhyme
Eye rhyme
Kennings
Onomatopoeia
Rhyme
Rhyme scheme
Rhythm
Sprung Rhythm
Stichomythia
Syllabic verse
Nature of poetry
Poetry can be differentiated most of the time from prose, which is language meant to convey meaning in a more expansive and less condensed way, frequently using more complete logical or narrative structures than poetry does. A further complication is that prose poetry combines the characteristics of poetry with the superficial appearance of prose. And there is, of course, narrative poetry, not to mention dramatic poetry, both of which are used to tell stories and so resemble novels and plays. However, both these forms of poetry use the specific features of verse composition to make these stories more memorable or to enhance them in some way.
The Greek verb poieo (I make or create), gave rise to 3 words: poietis (the one who creates), poiesis (the act of creation), and poiema (the thing created). From these we get three English words: poet (the creator), poesy (the creation) and poem (the created). A poet is therefore one who creates, and poetry is what the poet creates. The underlying concept of the poet as maker or creator is not uncommon. For example, in Anglo-Saxon a poet is a scop (shaper or maker) and in Scots makar.
Sound in poetry
Perhaps the most vital element of sound in poetry is rhythm. Often the rhythm of each line is arranged in a particular meter. Different types of meter played key roles in Classical, Early European, Eastern and Modern poetry. In the case of free verse, the rhythm of lines is often organized into looser units of cadence.
Poetry in English and other modern European languages often uses rhyme. Rhyme at the end of lines is the basis of a number of common poetic forms such as ballads, sonnets and rhyming couplets. However, the use of rhyme is not universal. Much modern poetry, for example, avoids traditional rhyme schemes. Furthermore, Classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use rhyme. In fact, rhyme did not enter European poetry at all until the High Middle Ages, when it was adopted from the Arabic language. The Arabs have always used it extensively.
Alliteration played a key role in structuring early Germanic and English forms of poetry (called Alliterative verse), akin to the role of rhyme in later European poetry.
The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry and the rhyme schemes of Modern European poetry alike both include meter as a key part of their structure which determines when the listener expects instances rhyme or alliteration to occur. In this sense, both alliteration and rhyme when used in poetic structures help to emphasize and define a rhythmic pattern.
In addition to forms of rhyme, alliteration and rhythm that structure poetry, sound plays a subtle role in even free verse poetry in creating pleasing, varied patterns and emphasizing or sometimes even illustrating semantic elements of the poem. Devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, dissonance and internal rhyme are among the ways poets use sound.
Poetry and form
As it is created using language, poetry tends to use formal linguistic units like phrases, sentences and paragraphs. In addition, it uses units of organization that are purely poetic. The main units that are used are the line, the couplet, the strophe, the stanza, and the verse paragraph.
Lines may be self-contained units of sense, as in the famous To be, or not to be: that is the question. Alternatively a line may end in mid-phrase or sentence: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer. The linguistic unit is generally completed in the next line: The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. This technique is called enjambment, and is used to create a sense of expectation in the reader and/or to add a dynamic to the movement of the verse.
Couplets, stanzas, and strophes are generally self-contained units of sense, although a kind of enjambment may also be used across these units. In blank verse, verse paragraphs are employed to indicate natural breaks in the flow of the poem.
In many instances, the effectiveness of a poem derives from the tension between the use of linguistic and formal units. With the advent of printing, poets gained greater control over the visual presentation of their work. As a result, the use of these formal elements, and of the white space they help create, became an important part of the poet's toolbox. Modernist poetry tends to take this to an extreme, with the placement of individual lines or groups of lines on the page forming an integral part of the poem's composition. In its most extreme form, this leads to the writing of concrete poetry.
Poetry and rhetoric
Rhetorical devices such as simile & metaphor are frequently used in poetry. Or, maybe more accurately, rhetorics has learned these powerful ways of forging connections outside logical reasoning from poetry. Indeed, Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. However, particularly since the rise of Modernism, many poets have opted for reduced use of these devices, preferring rather to attempt the direct presentation of things and experiences.
The history of poetry
Poetry as an art form predates literacy. In pre-literate societies, poetry was frequently employed as a means of recording oral history, storytelling (epic poetry), genealogy, law and other forms of expression or knowledge that modern societies might expect to be handled in prose. Poetry is also often closely identified with liturgy in these societies, as the formal nature of poetry makes it easier to remember priestly incantations or prophecies. The greater part of the world's sacred scriptures are made up of poetry rather than prose.
Some writers believe that poetry has its origins in song. Most of the characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of utterance - rhythm, rhyme, compression, intensity of feeling, the use of refrains - appear to have come from efforts to fit words to musical forms. However, in the European tradition the earliest surviving poems, the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, identify themselves as poems to be chanted to a musical accompaniment rather than as pure song. Another interpretation, developed from 20th century studies of living Montenegran epic reciters by Milman Parry and others, is that rhythm, refrains, and kennings are essentially paratactic devices that enable the reciter to reconstruct the poem from memory.
In preliterate societies, all these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. As such, there was a certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems, given this could change from one performance or performer to another. The introduction of writing tended to fix the content of a poem to the version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition also meant that poets began to compose not for an audience that was sitting in front of them but for an absent reader. Later, the invention of printing tended to accelerate these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for the ear.
The development of literacy gave rise to more personal, shorter poems intended to be sung. These are called lyrics, which derives from the Greek lura or lyre, the instrument that was used to accompany the performance of Greek lyrics from about the 7th century BC onward. The Greek's practice of singing hymns in large choruses gave rise, in the 6th century BC to dramatic verse, and to the practice of writing poetic plays for performance in their theatres.
In more recent times, the introduction of electronic media and the rise of the poetry reading have led to a resurgence of performance poetry and have resulted in a situation where poetry for the eye and poetry for the ear coexist, sometimes in the same poem.
Verse forms
Ballad
Ballade royal
Blank verse
Chant royal
Cinquain
Clerihew
Couplet
Double dactyl
Dramatic poetry
Elegy
Englyn
Envoi
Epic
Epigram
Epyllion
Free verse
Ghazal
Grook
Haiku
Haibun
Heroic couplets
Kimo
Kyrielle
Light Poetry
Limerick
Lyric
McWhirtle
Narrative poetry
Nonsense verse
Ode
Ottava rima
Paradelle
Pantun
Quatrain
Quatorzain
Renga
Rhyme royal
Rondeau
Rubaiyat
Sapphics
Senryu
Sestina
Sijo
Song
Sonnet
SymmyS
Tanka
Tercet
Terza rima
Villanelle
Virelai ancien
Virelai nouveau
Periods, styles and movements
Acrostic
Alliterative verse
Automatic poetry
British Poetry Revival
Chanson de geste
Concrete poetry
Digital poetry
Epitaph
Erasure poetry
Found poetry
Imagism
Medieval poetry
Minnesinger
Modernist
Modernist poetry
The Movement
Objectivist
Parnassian
Pastoral
Performance poetry
Post-modernist
San Francisco Renaissance
Sound poetry
Symbolism
Troubador
Trouvère
Technical means
Accent
Accentual verse
Aleatory methods
Alliteration
Anacrusis
Aposiopesis
Assonance
Cæsura
Chain rhyme
Consonance
Dissonance
Enjambment
Foot
Half rhyme
Eye rhyme
Kennings
Onomatopoeia
Rhyme
Rhyme scheme
Rhythm
Sprung Rhythm
Stichomythia
Syllabic verse
Poetry around the World
Here is a list of sites that concentrate on the poetry of a particular country, region, etc. These sites are often indices to other internet resources. Other geographically specific sites, such as grant-making or cultural organizations are listed here as well. These sites do not generally present the work of one or a handful of poets, instead, they attempt to represent a cultural milieu.
This is an English-language website based in the United States, so my selections may be skewed . I have concentrated on, but not limited myself to, English-langauge web sites. Necessarily, this format produces a somewhat limited view of World literature. On the other hand, there is a kind of absurdity in having listings for the U.S. and England on this page, as most of the other links on this site are, by tacit assumption, links to American and British websites. For this reason, I have limited the American listings to ones that concentrate on a particular region of the United States; for the listings under England, I have confined myself to sites with a particularly strong sense of their own geography.
Many of these sites are also listed under other categories as appropriate.
U.S. Regions
Appalachia
- Appalachian Writers Association, information on conferences, contests and information about the organization.
- Emory & Henry College Literary Festival, celebrating writers with roots in the Appalachian region.
- A Harvest of Belief: Poetry of Jesse Stuart and Louise McNeill presents the work of these two important Appalachian writers.
- Jim Clark's Homepage contains many links related to Appalachian writing.
- Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative links to short bios and writings of its members.
Mid-West
- Poetry Menu, a site listing events in Nebraska
- Chicago Poetry features poems by published Chicago area writers, reviews and criticism, a calendar of events, a Chicago area email phonebook for local poets
North East
- The Bowery Poetry Club, a liteary performance space on New York City's Lower East Side. Events virutally daily.
- New York Foundation for the Arts, a large non-profit organization supporting the arts in New York State.
- New York State Council on the Arts , established in 1960. The Council's mission is "to preserve and expand the rich and diverse cultural resources that are the heritage of the people of the State" through the support of nonprofit arts organizations and artists in the State.
- The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, an epicenter of many literary movements in New York City. Their site has links, information on membership in the Project, and event listings.
- Spiral Bridge Writers Guild, a group of writers based in New Jersey supporting poetry through readings and communicty outreach.
- Teachers & Writers Online lists events at its T&W Center for Imaginative Writing and a broadcast schedule of its programs on WNYE 91.5 FM. A must-visit site for poets in the NYC area.
- Writers and Books has information about the writing scene in and around Rochester, NY.
South
- Writer's Way, a non-profit group that hosts workshops including ones aimed at community outreach. Based in Washington, D.C.
- Lonzie's Fried Chicken, a journal of Southern poetry and fiction.
South-West
- The Arizona State Poetry Society promotes poetry in the state of Arizona. Non-residents are welcome to join, too.
Canada
- BC Bookworld research tool listing info writers living in or otherwise connected to British Columbia.
- The Writers' Union of Canada, founded in 1921.
- Canadian Poets a comprehensive overview from the University of Toronto.
England
- Farrago Poetry promotes poetry and runs workshops and other activities.
- Lynx: Poetry from Bath, edited by Douglas Clark
- Martin Blyth posts his poems here and does considerable work to promote British Poetry.
- Poetry London guide to events in London, UK.
- The Poetry Society established in 1909 and now one of Britain's most dynamic arts organisations. Features poets and poetry in the news, extensive education resources, current activities by the Poetry Society and Poetry Cafe, excerpts from the latest Poetry Review. Many resources for writers.
- THE SOUTH is a not-for-profit group that aims to support writers, poets and communities in the south of England
- The Southend Poetry Group The Home Page of the The Southend Poetry Group, Essex,England. The Southend Poetry Group Activities include joint meetings with other poetry or writers' groups, occasional public readings, and publication of the annual "Southend Poetry" anthologies.
- Shadowork, a performance and collaboration project with venues in and around London. They also offer workshops.
Ireland
- Abbey Press, Irish Poetry and Prose published out of Newry. Information about the books and authors they publish.
- hardPressed poetry, publisher and distributor of Irish poetry.
- The Irish Poetry Page poems, links to Irish poets.
- Medieval Irish Poetry Page in original Gaelic with literal translation.
- The Strokestown Poetry Prize, awarded for poems in English and Irish. There site has past winners of both languages.
- Wake Forest Press, an American-based non-profit publisher focusing on Irish Poetry
Scotland
- Association for Scottish Literary Studies based at St. Andrews University, publishes annual volumes.
- History of Scottish Literature, edited by novelist and critic Andrew Crumey.
- The Northern Muse a collection of radio scripts by Sheila Douglas for Heartland Radio in Pitlochry
- Northwords On-line: fiction and poetry from the Scottish highlands
- Orkney Arts Review
- Scottish Arts Council funds the contemporary arts. They post a poem of the month.
- Scottish Indie Artspace, based in Glasgow: visual art gallery; issues and events; public art, essays and articles, poetry, theatre, with an emphasis on Scottish arts.
- Scottish Literature at the University of South Carolina, has links and information about exhibits.
Wales
- Annedd y Cynganeddwr, dedicated to the ancient art of cynghanedd. Entirely in Welsh.
- The Arts Council of Wales a grant-making organizations that promotes the arts in Wales.
- Bys A Bawd a bookstore specialising in Welsh and Welsh interest books and videos.
- The Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies is a major international Centre for research in Welsh and Celtic Studies.
- Chasing the Dragon, new writing in English from Wales.
- Cyfwe, a website for Welsh literature in translation.
- Cylch Llên Cymru: the Ring of Welsh Literature: a webring established to support the celebration, publication and promotion of the literature of Wales on the Web.
- llyfrau, in Welsh, reading recommendations.
- Gwenllian's Poetry Primer, an introduction to Welsh poetic forms. Recommended.
- National Year of Reading in Wales, a literacy promotion program.
- The Peter Finch Archive has a comprehensive collection of links. (The main page is here.)
- sampler: poetry now is a non-profit organisation based in Cardiff, South Wales, U.K. dedicated to promoting both experienced and established poets. Samples of work and upcoming events.
- Wales Arts International a collaboration between the British Council in Wales and the Arts Council of Wales to promote Welsh Arts internationally.
- Welsh Books Council in Welsh and English.
- Welsh Literature an introduction, with suggested reading list.
- Welsh Literature Abroad, in Welsh.
- Working Title Writers, a group of poets and artists in Cardiff.
- Yr Academi Gymreig - The Welsh Academy is the national society which exists to promote the writers and the literatures of Wales. In English and Welsh.
Australia & New Zealand
- The Animist, Australian Journal of the Arts.
- Auckland Poetry, an on-line guide to Auckland's live poetry scene.
- A Collective Effort of Australian Visual Poets was an important and dynamic alternative press in Australia during the late 70s and 80s, and still active on a smaller scale today.
- Mangrove a journal of The University of Queensland English Department.
- Car Rental Australia has a little information about Australian literature and very good links. Far and away the best literary page on any car rental site I've seen.
- Tasmanian Poetry Festival, an annual three-day event.
- New Zealand Writers' Website, writers' groups, message board, on-line chat and other services for poets and writers.
- New Zealand Society of Authors an association of writers working together to improve conditions for New Zealand writers.
- Poetry New Zealand, an international print journal of poetry and poetics. Their site offers information on submission and subscription, as well as links to writers' resources.
- Southern Ocean Review New Zealand's first on-line International Literary Magazine.
- Thylazine, Australian Arts and Literature on Landscape and Animals. Dr. Coral Hull, Executive Editor. Their Australian Poets Directory is a good starting point for information on contemporary Australian poets.
France
- Georges Brassens, the complete poems and songs (in French).
- Jean-Michel Maulpoix & Co., presents poetry and criticism in French (including his own). The English language section of his site provides an excellent introduction to the state of French poetry. Highly Recommended.
The Netherlands
- Aanbeelden, a literary magazine.
- De Brakke Hond, a Belgian literary magazine containing fiction, poetry and essays written in Dutch.
- Epiberen, Home-isle of the Dutch Poets from Epibreren. Poetry, audio- and video-recordings, reviews, photos and links. Mostly in Dutch, but with English, German and Danish information and translations.
- ReView_36, a site based in Belgium. Primarily in Flemish.
Italy
- Il Narratore, a site featuring audio recordings of important world literature, and contemporary poetry. The site is in Italian and English. Their links page is a good starting point for Italian literature on the web.
Scandanavia
- Splints & Co. Journal of Scandinavian Poetry on the Web/Tidsskrift med nordisk poesi på Nettet. Mostly in Danish with some English.
Eastern Europe
(includes Russia)
- Poetry of the Balkans. Includes classics and newer poets. Serbo-Croatian and English
- Belarusian Poetry offers Belarusian Poetry in the original language.
- A Workshop with Hungarian Visual Poets, presented by Kaldron and Light & Dust Poets.
- Romanian Voice has a section on poetry available in Romanian, German, Swedish, French, and English.
- The Kids' World, a poetry site by and for children. In English and Serbo-Croatian.
- Poets' Societ IRIS a site featuring links to Serbian poetry and poets. In English and Serbo-Croatian.
- South Slavic Litearture Library showcases work from the Balkan states in their original languages, with some English translations available.
- Selection of 20th century Russian poetry, in English and Russian, presents a few poems and short commentary on some major Russian literary figures
- Mayakovsky and His Circle
- Russian Literature Online
- Also of interest is this site, which presents Lorca's poems in Spanish and Russian.
- Zephyr Press An independent publisher of literary and travel titles focusing on contemporary works of and about Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe
Middle-East, North Africa
- http://www.anonymous-fish.com/, a monthly journal of Hebrew poetry.
- Azza El Wakeel, Egyptian author of two books of Arabic poetry.
- Arabesques International Literary and Cultural Review, in English, French and Arabic, essays on culture, includes a very good on-line journal, Arabesques
- Libyan Arts, Music and Literature, a survey of contemporary Libyan writing. Mostly in Arabic with some English translation.
Africa
South Africa
- Barefoot Press, a web site and press devoted to South African poetry.
- South Africa Online presents this index of poetry sites.
- Southern Rain Poetry, a collection of poetry from South Africa.
- UCT Poetry Web, a comprehensive index of poets and poetry of Capetown and the western Cape. Their index of poetry sites is here, and there index of South African poets is here.
India
- Asian Studies: India, links.
- 123 India Literaure, links, including many to individuals publishing their work on the web in various languages.
- Ee maaTa, an on-line literary magazine in Telegu.
- Gujarati Poetry, site on poets & and their works in Gujarati
- Gujarati Poetry from English poetry, translation of English poetry into Gujarati by Mohamed Rupani
- Indian Literary Resources, links.
- indialit, home of the Webring for Indian Literature.
- Indiaworld Poetry seeks and posts work by both new and established writers.
- IndiaStar Review of Books features book reviews, articles, short fiction, poems, and publishers' press releases
- INDOlink Poetry, poetry in Hindu, Urdu, and English. Also posts poems by Rabindrath Tagore and Swami Vivekananda.
- Kavavyaalaya - The House of Hindi Poetry, in English and Hindu, with downloadable fonts for the latter.
- The Little Magazine, the web version of a print magazine published out of New Delhi.
- The Poetry Scene in India, commentary on the state of contemporary poetry in India.
- Tamil Electronic Library, a valuable resource for studying the literature of this language.
- Urdu Poetry, ghazals and other forms, in the original, with and without translation.
Indian Subcontinent
- Some Great Personalities in the History of Bengali Literature, major litearary figures.
- Bengali Poems, collection of some Bengali poem in Bengali scripts.
- Boipara.com is a site showcasing bengali literature, with an open forum where you can post and critique work.
- Poetry from the Indian Subcontinent has a smattering of poetry spanning several centuries.
- Sawnet Bookshelf, books by South Asian women.
- Nepali Poems taken from a recent copy of Insight, published by the International Nepali Literature Society.
Literature: Poetry : Kazi Nazrul Islam
Kazi Nazrul Islam, popularly known asbidrohi kobi (Rebel poet) took the bengali literary world by storm by his poem, bidrohi or the Rebel. Probably no other single poem influenced the Bengali society and people so deeply, and this poem, alongwith many other patriotic poems and songs, inspired the freedom fighters during the struggle against the british, and also during the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971. Many regard him as the greatest poetic force in Bengali literature after world famous Rabindranath Tagore. Both Nazrul's poems and prose writing exuberate a certain force and energy, denouncing all social and religious bigotry and plurality, cultural differences and oppression as the principal reasons for national discord and disharmony. Many of his songs and poems were banned by the british administration in pre-partition India.
Nazrul also got equal prominence and popularity in writing songs, almost 3,000 of them, the largest by any Bengali poet and composing music. Many of his songs, particularly the love songs became instantly popular and are still revered. His songs are extremely romantic, lyric, appealing and rich in metaphors. All his works truthfully represent the life-style he led - the struggle of a poor childhood, his intense patriotism, and bohemian life as a poet.
Evolution of English Poetry and Literature
The evolution of British literature is a fascinating discovery of talentthat continues to impress us. Literature has been blessed with greatwriters that come from a relatively small country. Literature often tellsus much about society, the author, and ourselves. When we read Chaucer'sThe Canterbury Tales, we cannot help but be reminded of our quirky nature.When we read Hamlet or Othello, we are reminded of our frail humancondition. When we read Milton's "Paradise Lost," we become aware of thespiritual side of life. All of these writers influenced literature intheir time and continue to influence audiences today because of their When we consider the birth and expanse of literature, we first beginwith the Middle Ages, which covers approximately 1000 years to roughly1485. Earliest influences on literature stem from what is commonlyreferred to the Dark Ages. M. H. Abrams notes that this is a particularterm used to define the period, given that the time was only relativelydark" (Abrams Vol. II. 1). Literature from this time is varied but manystories and poems revolved around the idea of the heroic. Courtly life isa common theme as well as dying for a glorious purpose,
Abrams contends that Yeats'poetry represents the "history of English poetry from 1890 to 1939" (1731). Abrams notes the Beowulf is a poem about courage even though doom gets thebetter of him at the end of the story. WhileRomantic poets used regular language to express their notions of thebeautiful world, their poetry is still difficult because of its"conceptions and psychological states it explores" (41). We need only tolook at the poetry of William Blake to understand this point of view. To be more specific, Perkins notesthat Shelley appeals to us through "imagery, versification, tone, andrhetorical pattern" (953). Both of thesetechniques can be seen in his poem, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," in whichthe poet depicts a mysterious woman in a mysterious setting to which heprovides no answers. The poem is also unique in that it utilizes satire andromance to illustrate its points. Because he died at the age 25, we cannot know what he could haveaccomplished. Learning and the revival of classicalliterature created a time of growth, which is expressed in literature thatexplores humanity and all of the types of thought present at the time. This includingbreaking free from traditional forms and trying their hands at new metricalmethods. He was not afraid to approach difficult issuesand this can be seen in his great epic Paradise Lost. John Keats was the youngest of the Romanticwriters. Each period reflects anage and tone of mankind that helps us understand the past. Auden experienced popularity until World War II, whichushered in the era of the "New Apocalypse" (1732). Perkins also observes that most Romantic poets"believed in the reality or supersensousness or noumenal realm of being"(10).
Abrams contends that Yeats'poetry represents the "history of English poetry from 1890 to 1939" (1731). Abrams notes the Beowulf is a poem about courage even though doom gets thebetter of him at the end of the story. WhileRomantic poets used regular language to express their notions of thebeautiful world, their poetry is still difficult because of its"conceptions and psychological states it explores" (41). We need only tolook at the poetry of William Blake to understand this point of view. To be more specific, Perkins notesthat Shelley appeals to us through "imagery, versification, tone, andrhetorical pattern" (953). Both of thesetechniques can be seen in his poem, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," in whichthe poet depicts a mysterious woman in a mysterious setting to which heprovides no answers. The poem is also unique in that it utilizes satire andromance to illustrate its points. Because he died at the age 25, we cannot know what he could haveaccomplished. Learning and the revival of classicalliterature created a time of growth, which is expressed in literature thatexplores humanity and all of the types of thought present at the time. This includingbreaking free from traditional forms and trying their hands at new metricalmethods. He was not afraid to approach difficult issuesand this can be seen in his great epic Paradise Lost. John Keats was the youngest of the Romanticwriters. Each period reflects anage and tone of mankind that helps us understand the past. Auden experienced popularity until World War II, whichushered in the era of the "New Apocalypse" (1732). Perkins also observes that most Romantic poets"believed in the reality or supersensousness or noumenal realm of being"(10).
Archive of Recorded Poetry & Literature
Begun in 1943 when Allen Tate was Consultant in Poetry to the Library, the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature now contains recordings of over 2,000 poets reading their own work. It includes recordings of poetry readings and other literary events held at the Library, tapes of poets reading their poems in the Library's Recording Laboratory or elsewhere for the Archive, and recordings received through occasional gifts, exchanges, or purchases. Individuals interested in recordings by particular authors may search them in the Library of Congress Online Catalog.
Appointments to listen to audio recordings may be made by visiting the Library's Recorded Sound Reference Center or by telephoning ahead at (202)707-7833. Appointments to view video recordings may be made by visiting the Motion Picture and Television Reading Room or by telephoning ahead at (202)707-8572.
Nobel Lecture
Crediting Poetry
When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation. At the time I am thinking of, such an outcome was not just beyond expectation: it was simply beyond conception. In the nineteen forties, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural Co. Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other. We took in everything that was going on, of course - rain in the trees, mice on the ceiling, a steam train rumbling along the railway line one field back from the house - but we took it in as if we were in the doze of hibernation. Ahistorical, pre-sexual, in suspension between the archaic and the modern, we were as susceptible and impressionable as the drinking water that stood in a bucket in our scullery: every time a passing train made the earth shake, the surface of that water used to ripple delicately, concentrically, and in utter silence.
But it was not only the earth that shook for us: the air around and above us was alive and signalling too. When a wind stirred in the beeches, it also stirred an aerial wire attached to the topmost branch of the chestnut tree. Down it swept, in through a hole bored in the corner of the kitchen window, right on into the innards of our wireless set where a little pandemonium of burbles and squeaks would suddenly give way to the voice of a BBC newsreader speaking out of the unexpected like a deus ex machina. And that voice too we could hear in our bedroom, transmitting from beyond and behind the voices of the adults in the kitchen; just as we could often hear, behind and beyond every voice, the frantic, piercing signalling of morse code.
We could pick up the names of neighbours being spoken in the local accents of our parents, and in the resonant English tones of the newsreader the names of bombers and of cities bombed, of war fronts and army divisions, the numbers of planes lost and of prisoners taken, of casualties suffered and advances made; and always, of course, we would pick up too those other, solemn and oddly bracing words, "the enemy" and "the allies". But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror. If there was something ominous in the newscaster's tones, there was something torpid about our understanding of what was at stake; and if there was something culpable about such political ignorance in that time and place, there was something positive about the security I inhabited as a result of it.
The wartime, in other words, was pre-reflective time for me. Pre-literate too. Pre-historical in its way. Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker. But it was still not the news that interested me; what I was after was the thrill of story, such as a detective serial about a British special agent called Dick Barton or perhaps a radio adaptation of one of Capt. W.E. Johns's adventure tales about an RAF flying ace called Biggles. Now that the other children were older and there was so much going on in the kitchen, I had to get close to the actual radio set in order to concentrate my hearing, and in that intent proximity to the dial I grew familiar with the names of foreign stations, with Leipzig and Oslo and Stuttgart and Warsaw and, of course, with Stockholm.
I also got used to hearing short bursts of foreign languages as the dial hand swept round from BBC to Radio Eireann, from the intonations of London to those of Dublin, and even though I did not understand what was being said in those first encounters with the gutturals and sibilants of European speech, I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the world beyond. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language, a journey where each point of arrival - whether in one's poetry or one's life turned out to be a stepping stone rather than a destination, and it is that journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot. And yet the platform here feels more like a space station than a stepping stone, so that is why, for once in my life, I am permitting myself the luxury of walking on air.
I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. I credit it immediately because of a line I wrote fairly recently instructing myself (and whoever else might be listening) to "walk on air against your better judgement". But I credit it ultimately because poetry can make an order as true to the impact of external reality and as sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being as the ripples that rippled in and rippled out across the water in that scullery bucket fifty years ago. An order where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew. An order which satisfies all that is appetitive in the intelligence and prehensile in the affections. I credit poetry, in other words, both for being itself and for being a help, for making possible a fluid and restorative relationship between the mind's centre and its circumference, between the child gazing at the word "Stockholm" on the face of the radio dial and the man facing the faces that he meets in Stockholm at this most privileged moment. I credit it because credit is due to it, in our time and in all time, for its truth to life, in every sense of that phrase.
To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against. Even as a schoolboy, I loved John Keats's ode "To Autumn" for being an ark of the covenant between language and sensation; as an adolescent, I loved Gerard Manley Hopkins for the intensity of his exclamations which were also equations for a rapture and an ache I didn't fully know I knew until I read him; I loved Robert Frost for his farmer's accuracy and his wily down-to-earthness; and Chaucer too for much the same reasons. Later on I would find a different kind of accuracy, a moral down-to-earthness to which I responded deeply and always will, in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, a poetry where a New Testament sensibility suffers and absorbs the shock of the new century's barbarism. Then later again, in the pure consequence of Elizabeth Bishop's style, in the sheer obduracy of Robert Lowell's and in the barefaced confrontation of Patrick Kavanagh's, I encountered further reasons for believing in poetry's ability - and responsibility - to say what happens, to "pity the planet," to be "not concerned with Poetry."
This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century. No place in the world prides itself more on its vigilance and realism, no place considers itself more qualified to censure any flourish of rhetoric or extravagance of aspiration. So, partly as a result of having internalized these attitudes through growing up with them, and partly as a result of growing a skin to protect myself against them, I went for years half-avoiding and half- resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot. And these more or less costive attitudes were fortified by a refusal to grant the poet any more license than any other citizen; and they were further induced by having to conduct oneself as a poet in a situation of ongoing political violence and public expectation. A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
In such circumstances, the mind still longs to repose in what Samuel Johnson once called with superb confidence "the stability of truth", even as it recognizes the destabilizing nature of its own operations and enquiries. Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses. The child in the bedroom, listening simultaneously to the domestic idiom of his Irish home and the official idioms of the British broadcaster while picking up from behind both the signals of some other distress, that child was already being schooled for the complexities of his adult predicament, a future where he would have to adjudicate among promptings variously ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical, post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible. So it was that I found myself in the mid-nineteen seventies in another small house, this time in Co. Wicklow south of Dublin, with a young family of my own and a slightly less imposing radio set, listening to the rain in the trees and to the news of bombings closer to home-not only those by the Provisional IRA in Belfast but equally atrocious assaults in Dublin by loyalist paramilitaries from the north. Feeling puny in my predicaments as I read about the tragic logic of Osip Mandelstam's fate in the 1930s, feeling challenged yet steadfast in my noncombatant status when I heard, for example, that one particularly sweetnatured school friend had been interned without trial because he was suspected of having been involved in a political killing. What I was longing for was not quite stability but an active escape from the quicksand of relativism, a way of crediting poetry without anxiety or apology. In a poem called "Exposure" I wrote then:
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead, I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,
Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.
How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?
Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls
The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, a grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once in a lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.
(from North)
In one of the poems best known to students in my generation, a poem which could be said to have taken the nutrients of the symbolist movement and made them available in capsule form, the American poet Archibald MacLeish affirmed that "A poem should be equal to/not true." As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. And this is the want I too was experiencing in those far more protected circumstances in Co. Wicklow when I wrote the lines I have just quoted, a need for poetry that would merit the definition of it I gave a few moments ago, as an order "true to the impact of external reality and ... sensitive to the inner laws of the poet's being."
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change nevertheless, and for the minority living there, change had been long overdue. It should have come early, as the result of the ferment of protest on the streets in the late sixties, but that was not to be and the eggs of danger which were always incubating got hatched out very quickly. While the Christian moralist in oneself was impelled to deplore the atrocious nature of the IRA's campaign of bombings and killings, and the "mere Irish" in oneself was appalled by the ruthlessness of the British Army on occasions like Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972, the minority citizen in oneself, the one who had grown up conscious that his group was distrusted and discriminated against in all kinds of official and unofficial ways, this citizen's perception was at one with the poetic truth of the situation in recognizing that if life in Northern Ireland were ever really to flourish, change had to take place. But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.
Nevertheless, until the British government caved in to the strong-arm tactics of the Ulster loyalist workers after the Sunningdale Conference in 1974, a well-disposed mind could still hope to make sense of the circumstances, to balance what was promising with what was destructive and do what W.B. Yeats had tried to do half a century before, namely, "to hold in a single thought reality and justice." After 1974, however, for the twenty long years between then and the ceasefires of August 1994, such a hope proved impossible. The violence from below was then productive of nothing but a retaliatory violence from above, the dream of justice became subsumed into the callousness of reality, and people settled in to a quarter century of life-waste and spirit- waste, of hardening attitudes and narrowing possibilities that were the natural result of political solidarity, traumatic suffering and sheer emotional self-protectiveness.
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here". As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. I remember, for example, shocking myself with a thought I had about that friend who was imprisoned in the seventies upon suspicion of having been involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by thinking that even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be helping the future to be born, breaking the repressive forms and liberating new potential in the only way that worked, that is to say the violent way - which therefore became, by extension, the right way. It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. The very gunfire braces us and the atrocious confers a worth upon the effort which it calls forth to confront it. We are rightly in awe of the torsions in the poetry of Paul Celan and rightly enamoured of the suspiring voice in Samuel Beckett because these are evidence that art can rise to the occasion and somehow be the corollary of Celan's stricken destiny as Holocaust survivor and Beckett's demure heroism as a member of the French Resistance. Likewise, we are rightly suspicious of that which gives too much consolation in these circumstances; the very extremity of our late twentieth century knowledge puts much of our cultural heritage to an extreme test. Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote. And when this intellectual predisposition co-exists with the actualities of Ulster and Israel and Bosnia and Rwanda and a host of other wounded spots on the face of the earth, the inclination is not only not to credit human nature with much constructive potential but not to credit anything too positive in the work of art.
Which is why for years I was bowed to the desk like some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture. Blowing up sparks for meagre heat. Forgetting faith, straining towards good works. Attending insufficiently to the diamond absolutes, among which must be counted the sufficiency of that which is absolutely imagined. Then finally and happily, and not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in despite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous. And once again I shall try to represent the import of that changed orientation with a story out of Ireland.
This is a story about another monk holding himself up valiantly in the posture of endurance. It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough, a monastic site not too far from where we lived in Co. Wicklow, a place which to this day is one of the most wooded and watery retreats in the whole of the country. Anyhow, as Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love the life in all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledglings grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.
St. Kevin's story is, as I say, a story out of Ireland. But it strikes me that it could equally well come out of India or Africa or the Arctic or the Americas. By which I do not mean merely to consign it to a typology of folktales, or to dispute its value by questioning its culture bound status within a multi-cultural context. On the contrary, its trustworthiness and its travel-worthiness have to do with its local setting. I can, of course, imagine it being deconstructed nowadays as a paradigm of colonialism, with Kevin figuring as the benign imperialist (or the missionary in the wake of the imperialist), the one who intervenes and appropriates the indigenous life and interferes with its pristine ecology. And I have to admit that there is indeed an irony that it was such a one who recorded and preserved this instance of the true beauty of the Irish heritage: Kevin's story, after all, appears in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, one of the Normans who invaded Ireland in the twelfth century, one whom the Irish-language annalist Geoffrey Keating would call, five hundred years later, "the bull of the herd of those who wrote the false history of Ireland." But even so, I still cannot persuade myself that this manifestation of early Christian civilization should be construed all that simply as a way into whatever is exploitative or barbaric in our history, past and present. The whole conception strikes me rather as being another example of the kind of work I saw a few weeks ago in the small museum in Sparta, on the morning before the news of this year's Nobel Prize in literature was announced.
This was art which sprang from a cult very different from the faith espoused by St. Kevin. Yet in it there was a representation of a roosted bird and an entranced beast and a self-enrapturing man, except that this time the man was Orpheus and the rapture came from music rather than prayer. The work itself was a small carved relief and I could not help making a sketch of it; but neither could I help copying out the information typed on the card which accompanied and identified the exhibit. The image moved me because of its antiquity and durability, but the description on the card moved me also because it gave a name and credence to that which I see myself as having been engaged upon for the past three decades: "Votive panel", the identification card said, "possibly set up to Orpheus by local poet. Local work of the Hellenistic period."
Once again, I hope I am not being sentimental or simply fetishizing - as we have learnt to say - the local. I wish instead to suggest that images and stories of the kind I am invoking here do function as bearers of value. The century has witnessed the defeat of Nazism by force of arms; but the erosion of the Soviet regimes was caused, among other things, by the sheer persistence, beneath the imposed ideological conformity, of cultural values and psychic resistances of a kind that these stories and images enshrine. Even if we have learned to be rightly and deeply fearful of elevating the cultural forms and conservatisms of any nation into normative and exclusivist systems, even if we have terrible proof that pride in an ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade into the fascistic, our vigilance on that score should not displace our love and trust in the good of the indigenous per se. On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space. In spite of devastating and repeated acts of massacre, assassination and extirpation, the huge acts of faith which have marked the new relations between Palestinians and Israelis, Africans and Afrikaners, and the way in which walls have come down in Europe and iron curtains have opened, all this inspires a hope that new possibility can still open up in Ireland as well. The crux of that problem involves an ongoing partition of the island between British and Irish jurisdictions, and an equally persistent partition of the affections in Northern Ireland between the British and Irish heritages; but surely every dweller in the country must hope that the governments involved in its governance can devise institutions which will allow that partition to become a bit more like the net on a tennis court, a demarcation allowing for agile give-and-take, for encounter and contending, prefiguring a future where the vitality that flowed in the beginning from those bracing words "enemy" and "allies" might finally derive from a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary.
When the poet W.B. Yeats stood on this platform more than seventy years ago, Ireland was emerging from the throes of a traumatic civil war that had followed fast on the heels of a war of independence fought against the British. The struggle that ensued had been brief enough; it was over by May, 1923, some seven months before Yeats sailed to Stockholm, but it was bloody, savage and intimate, and for generations to come it would dictate the terms of politics within the twenty-six independent counties of Ireland, that part of the island known first of all as the Irish Free State and then subsequently as the Republic of Ireland.
Yeats barely alluded to the civil war or the war of independence in his Nobel speech. Nobody understood better than he the connection between the construction or destruction of state institutions and the founding or foundering of cultural life, but on this occasion he chose to talk instead about the Irish Dramatic Movement. His story was about the creative purpose of that movement and its historic good fortune in having not only his own genius to sponsor it, but also the genius of his friends John Millington Synge and Lady Augusta Gregory. He came to Sweden to tell the world that the local work of poets and dramatists had been as important to the transformation of his native place and times as the ambushes of guerrilla armies; and his boast in that elevated prose was essentially the same as the one he would make in verse more than a decade later in his poem "The Municipal Gallery Revisited". There Yeats presents himself amongst the portraits and heroic narrative paintings which celebrate the events and personalities of recent history and all of a sudden realizes that something truly epoch-making has occurred: " 'This is not', I say,/'The dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland/The poets have imagined, terrible and gay.' " And the poem concludes with two of the most quoted lines of his entire oeuvre:
Think where man's glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.
And yet, expansive and thrilling as these lines are, they are an instance of poetry flourishing itself rather than proving itself, they are the poet's lap of honour, and in this respect if in no other they resemble what I am doing in this lecture. In fact, I should quote here on my own behalf some other words from the poem: "You that would judge me, do not judge alone/This book or that." Instead, I ask you to do what Yeats asked his audience to do and think of the achievement of Irish poets and dramatists and novelists over the past forty years, among whom I am proud to count great friends. In literary matters, Ezra Pound advised against accepting the opinion of those "who haven't themselves produced notable work," and it is advice I have been privileged to follow, since it is the good opinion of notable workers and not just those in my own country-that has fortified my endeavour since I began to write in Belfast more than thirty years ago. The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
Yeats, however, was by no means all flourish. To the credit of poetry in our century there must surely be entered in any reckoning his two great sequences of poems entitled "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" and "Meditations in Time of Civil War", the latter of which contains the famous lyric about the bird's nest at his window, where a starling or stare had built in a crevice of the old wall. The poet was living then in a Norman tower which had been very much a part of the military history of the country in earlier and equally troubled times, and as his thoughts turned upon the irony of civilizations being consolidated by violent and powerful conquerors who end up commissioning the artists and the architects, he began to associate the sight of a mother bird feeding its young with the image of the honey bee, an image deeply lodged in poetic tradition and always suggestive of the ideal of an industrious, harmonious, nurturing commonwealth:
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
I have heard this poem repeated often, in whole and in part, by people in Ireland over the past twenty-five years, and no wonder, for it is as tender minded towards life itself as St. Kevin was and as tough-minded about what happens in and to life as Homer. It knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust.
It is a proof that poetry can be equal to and true at the same time, an example of that completely adequate poetry which the Russian woman sought from Anna Akhmatova and which William Wordsworth produced at a corresponding moment of historical crisis and personal dismay almost exactly two hundred years ago.
When the bard Demodocus sings of the fall of Troy and of the slaughter that accompanied it, Odysseus weeps and Homer says that his tears were like the tears of a wife on a battlefield weeping for the death of a fallen husband. His epic simile continues:
At the sight of the man panting and dying there,
she slips down to enfold him, crying out;
then feels the spears, prodding her back and shoulders,
and goes bound into slavery and grief.
Piteous weeping wears away her cheeks:
but no more piteous than Odysseus' tears,
cloaked as they were, now, from the company.
Even to-day, three thousand years later, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and the gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable.
But there is another kind of adequacy which is specific to lyric poetry. This has to do with the "temple inside our hearing" which the passage of the poem calls into being. It is an adequacy deriving from what Mandelstam called "the steadfastness of speech articulation," from the resolution and independence which the entirely realized poem sponsors. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness. In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself. And it is the unappeasable pursuit of this note, a note tuned to its most extreme in Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan and orchestrated to its most opulent in John Keats, it is this which keeps the poet's ear straining to hear the totally persuasive voice behind all the other informing voices.
Which is a way of saying that I have never quite climbed down from the arm of that sofa. I may have grown more attentive to the news and more alive to the world history and world-sorrow behind it. But the thing uttered by the speaker I strain towards is still not quite the story of what is going on; it is more reflexive than that, because as a poet I am in fact straining towards a strain, seeking repose in the stability conferred by a musically satisfying order of sounds. As if the ripple at its widest desired to be verified by a reformation of itself, to be drawn in and drawn out through its point of origin.
I also strain towards this in the poetry I read. And I find it, for example, in the repetition of that refrain of Yeats's, "Come build in the empty house of the stare," with its tone of supplication, its pivots of strength in the words "build" and "house" and its acknowledgement of dissolution in the word "empty". I find it also in the triangle of forces held in equilibrium by the triple rhyme of "fantasies" and "enmities" and "honey-bees", and in the sheer in-placeness of the whole poem as a given form within the language. Poetic form is both the ship and the anchor. It is at once a buoyancy and a steadying, allowing for the simultaneous gratification of whatever is centrifugal and whatever is centripetal in mind and body. And it is by such means that Yeats's work does what the necessary poetry always does, which is to touch the base of our sympathetic nature while taking in at the same time the unsympathetic nature of the world to which that nature is constantly exposed. The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.
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