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What is Poetry?

What is poetry? Poetry can’t really be defined. The best one can do is to describe some of its incarnations. Historically, poetry has been described as a mode of discourse that is set apart from everyday speech by its metre (measured rhythm), rhyme, compression, imagery, or some combination of those elements. Much English poetry is written in the metre called iambic pentameter. Each line consists of five units (called “feet”) of two syllables each. Most of the units will follow a pattern of unstressed/stressed. This line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a perfect example of iambic pentametre. The first syllable of each foot is unstressed, the second is stressed (feet are marked off by a slash): The cur / few tolls / the knell / of par / ting day.

Iambic is the metre that most closely resembles the natural speech rhythms of English. When iambic pentametre is unrhymed, it is called “blank verse.” Most of us read it in high school. Shakespeare used it to write his plays; Milton used it to write Paradise Lost; the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and others) used it to write “conversation poems” and odes which were quiet and meditative. Other metres—like anapestic, dactylic, or spondaic—create quite specific effects.

Two major modes of poetry are narrative (poetry that tells a story) and lyric (poetry that explores a situation, scene, emotion, or intellectual problem). Epic poetry is a good example of narrative (e.g., the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf), as is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and, in our own day and our own city, Alice Major’s The Office Tower Tales. Lyric poetry is generally shorter, often contained in an ode, a conversation poem, or a sonnet. Consider the love sonnets of Shakespeare, or the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, or the “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats.

Poetic forms are limitless. You can use an established form that requires a certain metre and a certain rhyme scheme. Some of these are extremely complex, like the villanelle. The sonnet is fairly simple but requires great discipline. Or you can invent your own form. For decades now, “free verse” has been the dominant “form,” whether the content is narrative, lyric, or something else. Free verse means there is no set metre and no necessary rhyme, though free verse might employ both for effect. Each poet creates the form he or she needs for a particular poetic utterance.

However, even free verse is not as free as it sounds. Most writers and readers of poetry agree that even if a poem does not use rhyme or recognizable metre, it still must exhibit intentional and crafted language and very focused perception, thought, and insight to be called poetry (rather than prose). The best poetry today is still characterized by clever compression of thought (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they called this “wit”), vivid imagery (American modernists pioneered an “imagist” movement early in the twentieth century, sometimes writing extremely short poems that focused on one concrete thing, like haiku), a sharp insight concerning an experience or natural phenomenon, or challenging word play.

But if this all sounds rather alarming, don’t worry about it. If you write poetry simply to express yourself, no one is going to stop you. Words are wonderful things; just mucking around with words can provide hours of absorbing work. And how will you ever write a poem if you don’t pick up that pencil and start mucking about? Verse is, after all, free.

Dr. Karen Simons is a McCauley resident, a writer, and an academic in the study of English. Currently, she is writer-in-residence for the Anglican Diocese of Edmonton and has recently written and co-produced (with director Caroline Howarth) a full-length play on the poet John Donne.

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