POETIC FORM AND MEANING

Poetic Form and Meaning

Using Form in Analysis

The Ode and The Elegy

The Long Poem

• “Ode” comes from the Greek aeidein, meaning to sing or chant, and belongs to the long and varied tradition of lyric poetry. Originally accompanied by music and dance, and later reserved by the Romantic poets to convey their strongest sentiments, the ode can be generalized as a formal address to an event, a person, or a thing not present.
• There are three typical types of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and Irregular. The Pindaric is named for the ancient Greek poet Pindar, who is credited with inventing the ode. Pindaric odes were performed with a chorus and dancers, and often composed to celebrate athletic victories. They contain a formal opening, or strophe, of complex metrical structure, followed by an antistrophe, which mirrors the opening, and an epode, the final closing section of a different length and composed with a different metrical structure. The Horatian ode, named for the Roman poet Horace, is generally more tranquil and contemplative than the Pindaric ode. Less formal, less ceremonious, and better suited to quiet reading than theatrical production, the Horatian ode typically uses a regular, recurrent stanza pattern.

• Identify who is being addressed: Odes are often a form of apostrophe.
• What is the rhetorical structure: ("on" or "to").
• Is something being asked for: what and from whom?
• What is the structure of the verses ? Does the poet use meter/rhyme to set up divisions? To what effect?

In classical Greco-Roman literature, "elegy" refers to any poem written in elegiac meter (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines). Initialy such poems were written to mourn a death. More broadly, elegy came to mean any reflective poem don a serious subject. Typically, elegies are marked by several conventions of genre:

(1) The elegy, much like the classical epic, typically begins with an invocation of the muse, and then continues with allusions to classical mythology.

(2) The poem usually contains a poetic speaker who uses the first person.

(3) The speaker raises questions about justice, fate, or providence.

(4) The poet digresses about the conditions of his own time or his own situation.

(5) The digression allows the speaker to move beyond his original emotion or thinking to a higher level of understanding.

(6) The conclusion of the poem provides consolation or insight into the speaker's situation. In Christian elegies, the lyric reversal often moves from despair and grief to joy when the speaker realizes that death or misfortune is but a temporary barrier separating one from the bliss of eternity.

(7) The poem tends to be longer than a lyric but not as long as an epic.

(8) The poem is not plot-driven.

http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_e.html

Narrative vs Lyric

• Who/ what is invoked?
• How does the poet work within/modify classical tradition?
• What questions are raised by speaker and how are they resolved/understood?
• How are the particular and the general, the emotional and the intellectual intermingled?
• What is the structure of the verses ? Does the poet use meter/rhyme to set up divisions? To what effect?

• Epic, verse novel, verse narrative, lyric sequence, lyric series, and collage/montage
• Because harder to define could become a place of experimentation and inclusion for under-represented groups
• Movement between lyric and narrative
• Multivocality

Poetry had its origins in song, and many ancient epics, including those of Homer, and ancient Greek lyrics, as well as many medieval ballads and modern forms were originally sung or recited to musical accompaniment.

• What category does the long poem fall into? What might its goals be?
• What voices can you identify in the long poem? How do they/ don;t they interact?
• How does the form interlap with other forms and to what effects?
• Look for and analyze the competing narrative and lyric elements of the long poem
• Comment on how meter and rhyme are used, if they are, and how they contribute to the long poem's meaning.

Shaping form: if meter and rhyme are the architecture of poetry, the ode and the elegy, can be seen as environments. They serve, respectively, to address the living and celebrate the dead.

• Lyric poems typically express personal (often emotional) feelings and are traditionally spoken in the present tense. Modern examples often have specific rhyming schemes. [Wikipedia]
• “A type of poem characterized by brevity, compression, and the expression of feeling” [McGraw Hill]
• “In the most common use of the term, a lyric is any fairly short poem, consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought and feeling. Many lyric speakers are represented as musing in solitude.” (Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms 146)
• Emotion
• First Person Narrator
• Internal

COMMON FORMS: Sonnet, Elegy, Ode, Dramatic Monolgue

• Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.
• Predates literacy: formal meter and rhyme scheme made it easier to memorize than prose.
• Narrative poetry contains many of the same literary conventions found in novels and short stories including plot, characterization, setting, conflict, tone, symbolism, dialogue, etc.
• In narrative poetry, the poet is neither the narrator nor a character in the story. The narrative is told from the point of view of a main character, a witness to the events in the story, or a person who is retelling a story he or she heard from another person.
• The main purpose of narrative poetry is to entertain, not to express the poet's thoughts or feelings.
• Like other forms of poetry, narrative poetry makes use of imagery, figurative language, and sound patterns.
• With the exception of epic poems, narrative poetry tells a story in a more condensed manner than prose.

COMMON FORMS: Ballads (set form, repetition), Epics (long), "Other"

(http://facultyweb.cortland.edu/kennedym/genre%20studies/poetrynarrative.htm)

The Sonnet

The Stanza

• Think about the sonnet's rhetorical structure and relate that to its place in poetic history.
• Look for and analyze the competing narrative and lyric elements of the sonnet
• comment on how meter and rhyme contribute to the sonnet's meaning.

• A poem of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter
• Petrarchan: abbaabba cdecde (sestet varies) Shakespearean: ababcdcdefef gg
• Octave (usually situation/response) and Sestet (Volta) (resolution) vs. 3 Quatrains (some times turn between 2 and 3) and a final Couplet (Turn)
• Initially romantic/erotic and often in sequence: Donne (17th cent) religious: Milton (later 17th cent) Political/Occasional: Romantic Renaissance reclaimed the private/ internal/ naturalness (vs heroic couplet)
• Tension between narrative and lyric

• Any unit of recurring meter and rhyme--or variants of them--used in an established pattern of repetition and separation in a single poem
• Isometric or Heterometric
• The effect: accumulating sense, from stanza to stanza, combined with repeated sound through the repetition of lineation and rhyming.
• Stanza is Italian for "room"

• Think about the different ways discrete groups of lines can be piled up to make meaning. Sometimes we have question/development/answer. Sometimes we have a dialogue alternating among voices. We might see a series of questions followed by repetition instead of an answer. There could be a first/then/conclusion. The possibilities are endless.
• Look at a poem written in stanzas and give a possible explanation of what the stanzas give to the poem.