英语诗歌基础知识.doc

. Definition of PoetryPoetry, form of literature, spoken or written, that emphasizes rhythm, other intricate patterns of sound and imagery, and the many possible ways that words can suggest meaning. The word itself derives from a Greek word, poesis, meaning “making” or “creating.” Whereas ordinary speech and writing, called prose, are organized in sentences and paragraphs, poetry in its simplest definition is organized in units called lines as well as in sentences, and often in stanzas, which are the paragraphs of poetry. It is important to keep in mind the distinction between verse and a poem . The word verse has two meanings: one, to refer to a line as a unit of poetry; the other, to refer to any work that uses rhythm and rhyme. Working from the second meaning, one can distinguish between verse and a poem. Those works that fall into a category containing limericks, jingles, and the like , we call verse; works of high and lasting quality we can call poems.For centuries people have tried to define and characterize poetry in many different ways. The following quotations may suggest part of the features of poetry, which are presented by some established poets and critics. “ Poetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reactions, something that cannot be said.”- Edwin Arlington Robinson“ Poetry provides the one possible way of saying one thing and meaning another .”- Robert Frost“ The art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.”- Samuel Johnson“ The imaginative expression of strong feelings usually rhythmical the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings collected in tranquility.”- William Wordsworth“ The best words in the best order.”- Samuel Taylor Coleridge“ Musical thought.”- Thomas CarlylePoetry uses language and it uses language in a different manner. The practical use of language is to communicate information and to keep the communication channels open, while poetry uses language to communicate experience that is much wider than mere information and knowledge. The very difference between poetry and other literature is that poetry is the most condensed and compacted form of literature , saying most in the fewest number of words. Besides, the language of poetry is multi-dimensional. Practical language which aims to communicate information is only directed at the listeners understanding, but poetry, which is used to communicate experience, has at least four dimensions. It involves the readers whole faculties: his intelligence, his senses, his emotions and his imagination, not merely his understanding. Therefore, poetry is a literary genre that communicate experience in the most condensed form. Development of PoetryIt is impossible to date the first poem or poet in the world, since poetry originated in a time before written languages were born. The origins of poetry can be found in the communal expression, probably originally taking the form of dance, of religious spirit. This can be proved by the fact that the dance rhythm could be marked not only by clapping, stamping, or rhythmic cries, but also by chanting or otherwise intoning or singing words. Songs ( work songs, lullabies, and play songs ) are the progenitor of poetry. Religious songs also play a very important role in the development of poetry. Narrative verse might have originated in the religious impulse. The earliest narrative songs, or epics tell the stories of the creation of mankind and the myths of the gods. Epics of later times relate the lives of godlike heroes; and still later ones deal with the lives of historical heroes. Among the earliest epics are the Greek Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, and the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf. While much early poetry dealt with the lives of heroes and gods in an elevated style, poets have also turned to the flawed lives of ordinary people, in particular bawdy or sexual scenes, since very early times. The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer recorded the lusty adventures of less-than-pious pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales.One change in composition of poetry should be mentioned. At first, poetry grew out of music, so sound effect was much emphasized and spelling did not count. For example, in English “ poet” and “know it” were considered to rhyme. But when poetry began to appear in the written form, spelling took over the precedence. The examples above were considered nonstandard. Words like “word” and “lord” , “mer” and “aimer” were considered as rhymed. Poetry in the last few centuries has turned increasingly to ordinary, dayto-day concerns, with a corresponding interest in bringing literary language closer to natural speech. English poet William Wordsworth, in his 1802 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, railed against artificial poetic diction and declared his intention to write “in a selection of language really used by men.” In part, he was reacting against the excessively stylized poems of 18th-century Augustan writers such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope. Similarly, in the 20th century, the celebration of the ordinary came in part from a reaction against outdated forms of expression. Early in the century, poets of the movement known as imagismincluding Americans Ezra Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williamsturned from ideas to things, and the impersonal description of objects in the world, a style which could actually produce a profound emotional response in the reader. Williams went so far as to declare, “No ideas but in things.” Deeply influenced by Chinese and Japanese poets, he wrote poems in which the presence of an object took central place.Open form is a concept developed by American poet Charles Olson in 1950. Opposing it to such so-called “closed forms” as the sonnet, Olson proposed a new poetry that gave itself over to momentary sensations and associations, in which the process of the poems composition, rather than being concealed beneath an ordered, finished surface, made itself felt through shifts, leaps, hesitations, and fragmentation. The Components of PoetryUsually, a poem has a title, yet it doesnt mean that each poem must have a title. The title often suggests the central meaning ( theme ) of the poem. Poetry is written in sentences just as prose is, and the punctuation indicate all grammatical pauses. The lines in a poem end in two ways: END STOPPED and RUN ON. An end-stopped line is one in which the grammatical unit, a clause or sentence, is finished in the line: O, my luve is like a red red rose,That is newly sprung in June,O, my luve is like the melodie,Thats sweetly played in tune.( Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose )A run-on line ( sometimes called an enjambed line ), on the other hand, is a line in which the grammer, and thus the sense, is left unfinished at the end of the line. The clause or sentence may run on one or two more lines, as in Brownings My Star:All that I knowOf a certain starIs, it can throwLike the angled spar.Run-on lines generally create pleasurable feelings of expectation as the reader has to look further for the full sense of what is being said; and in the end-stopped lines, he acquires satisfaction in finding the line and the sense end together. A STANZA is a group of lines of verse forming one of the units or divisions of a poem. It is usually recurrent, characterized by a regular pattern, with respect to the number of lines, and the arrangement of meter of rhyme ( rhyme scheme ). Rhyme is the repetition of sounds in two or more words or phrases that appear close to each other in a poem, which are usually labeled with letters alphabetically, like A, B, C or D. Common stanza forms include the couplet, the triplet, and the quatrain.A. Couplet: two successive rhyming lines. The couplet is one of the main verse units in Western literature. The couplet composed of two iambic pentameter lines is commonly known as the heroic couplet.B. Triplet: a stanza of three lines or an individual poem of three lines. There are specific triplet forms, with specific names: tercet, terza rima. Terza rima is a series of interlocking triplets in which the second line of each one rhymes with the first and the third lines of the one succeeding, thus: ABA, BCB, CDC, Terza rima was adopted first by Dante, then used by Petrarch and Boccaccio.C. Quatrain: a stanza or an individual poem of four lines rhymed or unrhymed. It occurs as the commonest of all stanzaic forms in Eastern and Western poetries, and lends itself to wide variation in meter and rhyme. . Basic Elements of PoetryA. RhymeRhyme scheme is the most obvious characteristic of a poem. Rhyme is the repetition of the stressed vowel sound and all succeeding sounds: gay, day, play, may; or wall, fall. 1. Numeral Types of Rhymea. Single rhyme, or Masculine Rhyme is the repetition of one vowel, either a single vowel or a diphthong:A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowedOne too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.( P. B. Shelley, Ode to the West Wind )b. Double Rhyme, or Feminine Rhyme is the repetition of two vowels:Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,In sleep, a king: but waking, no such matter.( W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 87 )c. Triple Rhyme, or Multiple Rhyme is the repetition of three or more than three vowels in words, or in phrases.2. Positional Types of RhymeOn the basis of the position, the rhyme falls into several types.a. End RhymeIf the rhyming words occur at the ends of lines, it is called end rhyme. Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you wereWhen you had changed from one who was all to me,But as at first, when our day was fair.( Thomas Hardy, The Voice )End rhyme is the commonest and most consciously sought-after sound repetition in English poetry.b. Internal RhymeInternal rhyme occurs within the verse line, very often in the middle, splitting the line into two halves.Spring, the sweet spring, is the years pleasant king,Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing.( T. Nash, Spring, the Sweet Spring )c. Beginning RhymeBeginning Rhyme occurs in the first syllable or syllables of successive lines.Why should I have returned?My knowledge would not fit into theirs.I found untouched the desert of the unknown.( W.S. Merwin, Noahs Raven )3. Near RhymeAll the examples above are exact rhymes, because they share the same stressed vowel sounds as well as any sounds that follow the vowel. In near rhyme ( also called approximate rhyme ), the sounds are almost but not exactly alike. There are several kinds of near rhyme.Alliteration is the repetition of consonants, especially at the beginning of words or stressed syllables. For example, “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.” Consonance is the repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after different vowels. For example, “tit” and “tat”, “home” and “same”. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in a line of poetry as in “free and easy”. Eye rhyme is formed by words that look like a rhymed unit but do not have the same sounds. For example, “home” and “some”, “hear” and “bear”. Onomatopoeia is a word or phrase that imitates the sound of the thing which describes, like the words “buzz”, “clash”, “sizzle” and “hizz”.B. RhythmA more complex aspect than the rhyme is rhythm communicated by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables. Meter refers to the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The word is derived from the Greek word “metron”, meaning “measure”. Usually, a stressed syllable is marked with /, and an unstressed syllable is marked with . A unit of poetic meter of stressed and unstressed syllables is called foot. A foot usually consists of one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables. A vertical line is used to separate the feet: “The clock struck one” consists of two feet. A foot of poetry can be arranged in a variety of patterns; here are some of the chief ones.Foot Pattern Exampleiamb ( iambic ) / /awaytrochee ( trochaic ) / / lovelyanapest ( anapestic ) / /understanddactyl ( dactylic ) / / desperatespondee ( spondaic ) / / / /dead setThe most common lines in English poetry contain meters based on iambic feet. Other important patterns include trochaic, anapestic, and dactylic feet. The spondee is not a sustained meter but occurs for variety or emphasis.There are also names for the number of feet in a line. Here are the names used:Monometer: one foot Pentameter: five feetDiameter: two feet Hexameter: six feetTrimeter: three feet Heptameter: seven feetTetrameter: four feet Octameter: eight feetBy combining the name for the number of feet in a line with the name of a foot, we can describe the metrical qualities of a line concisely. Consider, for example, the metrical rhythm of the following lines. / / / / / Shall I compare thee to a summers day? / / / / / Thou art more lovely and more temperate. / / / / / Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / / / / / And summers lease hath all too short a date:As shown above, the syllables are arranged in the pattern of the unstressed and stressed , so the meter is iambic. And each of the lines contains five iambic unit, so the lines are written in pentameter. The metrical rhythm of these lines are iambic pentameter. Blank Verse and Free VerseBlank Verse is referred to as unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is a very specific meter in English. The word “blank” implies that the end of the line is “blank” i.e., bare of rhyme, hence the name. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey introduced blank verse into the English language when he translated Vergils Aeneid. Ever since the mid-16th century, blank verse had been the dominant verse form of English dramatic and narrative poetry, because it was one closest to the rhythm of everyday English speech and provided more freedom for the poet. Blank verse continued to prevail in the 19th and 20th centuries. English poets such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and American poets such as Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost achieved poetical excellence in blank verse.Free verse is the translation of the French term “vers libre”. In the 19th century, a group of French poets intended to free French poetry of restrictions of formal metrical pattern and therefore composed vers libre. Free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry free from conventional rules of meter. The aesthetic and musical effect of free verse is achieved through rhythms and cadence of natural speech. Poets famous for their works composed in free verse include Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Amy Lowell, and Carl Sandburg. C. ToneTone is the writers attitude toward the subject, the mood created by all the elements in the poem. Writing, like speech, may be characterized as serious or light, sad or happy, private or public, angry or affectionate, bitter or nostalgic, or any other attitudes and feelings that human beings experience. Tone is decided by synthetic analysis of all the elements involved in the poem, especially its diction and sentence patterns. Most poems deal with human emotions, and tone is the emotional coloring of a poem. To recognize the tone is to adjust the readers relation with the poem and / or with the poet. D. ImageryPoetry is aimed at conveying and enriching human experience. Experience is formed through sense impressions. The poets business is to evoke sense impressions in the readers mind. To achieve this end, the poet uses imagery, language that evokes a physical sensation produced by on of the five senses-sight, hearing, taste, touch, or smell. Imagery covers verbal, and, or, non-verbal description or representation of objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, states of mind, and any sensory and extra-sensory experience. Each is a word picture. Obviously, imagery is the soul of poetry as language is the body of poetry. Imagery often serves in three ways: to create the atmosphere, to provide an internal pattern, and to focus the theme of the poem. By choosing an image carefully, poets can not only help to create pictures in a readers mind, but also suggest a great number of imaginative associations. These associations help poets to establish the atmosphere or mood of the poem. The falling snow in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, for example, creates a quiet, almost mystical atmosphere.Imagery, to some extent, is capable of organizing a poem or serving as a starting point for interpreting the structure of a poem. In Emily Dickinsons poem Because I Could Not Stop for Death, the image of death appears at the very beginning, driving a carriage. This image foretells that the poem is going to be a “journey poem”, and since death is the driver, the “journey” is going to be a “time travel”. The images governed by the image of “Death” constitute the internal pattern of the poem and largely determine the interpretation of the whole poem.Imagery can function more strongly and directly in terms of conveying the poetic theme. It can be used as a central symbol that carries the theme. The image of the two roads in Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken performs just such a task.One advantage of images is their extreme economy. Just a few words enable poets to evoke specific emotions in readers and to approximate the experience the poet wishes to create. Another advantage of images is that they enable poets to move beyond certain limitations of language. In fact, images present abstract ideas that would be difficult or almost imp