REPUBLIQUE ALGERIENNE DEMOCRATIQUE ET POPULAIRE

Ministère de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche scientifique

Université Abderrahmane MIRA -Béjaïa-

Département d’Anglais

COURSE:

INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY TEXTS

LESSON: Poetry

LEVEL: L1

GROUP: 3

2020 / 2021

TEACHER

Mrs. IDRES O.
 POETRY

1. Definition:

Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetics and rhythmic qualities of a language.
Poetry has a long history; early poems evolved from folk songs. It uses forms and
conventions to suggest differential interpretation to words or to evoke emotive responses.
Some poetry types are specific to particular cultures and respond to characteristics of the
language in which the poet writes. However, in today’s increasingly globalised world, poets
adapt forms, styles and techniques from diverse cultures and languages.

2. Form:

A poem is written in lines or verses based on metrical feet and / or rhyming pattern. The
verses are organised in stanzas or verse paragraphs, which are dominated by the number of
lines they contain. Thus, a collection of two lines is a couplet or distich /’distik/, three lines a
triplet or tercet, four lines a quatrain, five lines a quintain, six lines a sestet. These lines are
related to each other by rhyme and / or rhythm. In some types of poetry, a refrain is
repeated between stanzas to separate thematic parts of a poem.

3. Genres

In addition to the forms of poems, poetry is often thought in terms of genres and subgenres
that is a classification based on the subject matter, style, or other literary characteristics.
Here are some examples:

 Narrative poetry is a genre that tells a story. It may be the oldest type of poetry as it
roots up to preliterate oral tradition.
 Epics / Epic poetry is a major form of narrative. It is usually along poem with a high
style of language telling in a continuous narrative, the life and works of heroic or
mythological persons. Examples of epic poems are Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and
Virgil’s Aeneid. Although this genre has become less common in modern time, some
poets have continued adopting it such as Sir Derek Walcott (1930-2017) who wrote
Omeros (1990) on the basis of which he got the 1992 Nobel Prize for literature.
 Ballads. A ballad is a song originally transmitted orally, which tells a story. Folk (or
traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with
emphasis on a central dramatic event; examples include Barbara Allen. Beginning in
the Renaissance, poets have adapted the conventions of the folk ballad for their own
original compositions. Examples of this “literary” ballad form include Thomas
Hardy’s During Wind and Rain, and Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabel Lee.
 Lyric poetry (from Greek, lyric: a song accompanied with a lure) is generally short,
non narrative presenting a state of mind, an emotional state, feelings, perceptions.
 Elegy: a mournful, melancholy or plaintive poem, a lament for a dead person or a
funeral song. Examples:
  In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred Lord Tennyson

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it when I sorrow most;

Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

 Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman

Here Captain! dear father!

This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on deck,
You've fallen cold and dead.
 The Sonnet. It was originally a love poem. It started in Italy and was introduced in
England in the Renaissance when the English Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) translated and
imitated the sonnets written by the Italian Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374). Later it was
used for other topics such as religion, war, and art. Among the most famous sonnets
writers, Spencer, Shakespeare, Drayton. The sonnet has been standardized as a 14 lines
poem. The Petrarchan sonnet follows the rhyme scheme abba, abba, cdecde; the English
or Shakespearean sonnet follows the rhyme scheme abab, cdcd, efef, gg, introducing
some changes compared to the original Italian form.
 Poetry can also be descriptive when dealing with the description of people, objects,
nature. It can also be didactic when it is meant to teach something, or satirical used for
political purposes…

4. Elements Of Poetry:
Though poems come in all shapes and sizes, they share certain characteristics or figures of
speech and sound features.
A. FIGURES OF SPEECH
A figure of speech is the use of language in a different way than the common usage in order
to convey a special meaning. Here are the mostly used ones:
 Anaphora: the use of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or
verses.
e.g: Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition! (Shakespeare).
 Antithesis: the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
e.g: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Neil Armstrong)
 Apostrophe: breaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract
quality, an object, or a nonexistent character.
 Hyperbole: the use of exaggerated terms in order to give a heightened effect, to make things
seem bigger or more important.
e.g: I have a million things to do!
I am dying of shame.
  Irony: to say something and mean the opposite. There are different types of irony. The
following figures can be used ironically.
 Metaphor: a comparison two different things that actually have something in common.
e.g: “My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill.”
A metaphor is made up of three elements:
- The tenor: the subject under discussion.
- The vehicle: what the subject is compared to.
- The ground: what the poet believes the tenor and the vehicle have in common.

In this example, the tenor is: my heart; the vehicle: hunter; the ground: the loneliness.

 Metonymy (Greek: change of name): to use a word or a phrase in the place of another to
convey the same idea.
e.g: ‘the crown’ for ‘the King’ or for ‘Royalty’/ ‘White collars’ for ‘office workers’.
 Oxymoron: opposite terms are used side by side.
e.g: ‘Little big man’ / ‘civil war’ /’silent yel’
 Paradox: a statement that contradicts itself.
e.g: Beyond the walls, I can see the mountain.
 Personification: to give human qualities or abilities to inanimate objects, or to animals.
e.g: The lion is supreme in his kingdom. / Freedom smiled to us.
 Simile: a comparison of two dissimilar things, using ‘like’ or ‘as’.
e.g: Her eyes are like two stars.
Like the metaphor, the simile is made up of three elements. In this example, the tenor is ‘her
eyes’; the vehicle ‘stars’; the ground ‘the fact of shining’.
 Synecdoche: (Greek: taking together): a part is used to represent the whole. e.g: ABC for
alphabet. / the 9/11 for the events that happened in the USA on Sept. 11 th,2001.
Or the whole is used for a part. e.g: Algeria will participate in the world Cup. (it is only a
team, not all the country)

B. SOUND DEVICES IN A POEM

Skillful sounds are the tools poets use to create an emotional response within the reader. The order
in which the words are delivered should evoke images and the words themselves have sounds, which
clarify or reinforce the images.

 Accent: the rhythmic stress that makes some syllables higher than others. Connective one-
syllable words (and, but, or, to…) are generally unstressed. The words in a line of poetry are
usually arranged so the accents occur at regular intervals with the meter defined by the
placement of the accents within the foot.
 Alliteration: the use of words that begin with the same sound. It is also called head rhyme or
initial rhyme.
e.g: She sells sea shells by the sea shore.
Or : “From somewhere far beyond, the flag of fate’s caprice unfurled”, (from the poem,
Darkness Lost)
 Assonance: similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighbouring words.
 e.g: Try to light the fire.
 Consonance: The repetition of the same end consonants of words.
e.g: ‘boat’ and ‘night’; ‘cool’ and ‘soul’
 Meter: regular organized succession of groups of syllables in a line of poetry. The unit of
meter is the foot (unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). Metrical lines are
named according to the number of feet in the line: monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimester (3),
tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7) and octameter (8). So, a line
containing five iambic feet is an iambic pentameter. In modern free verse, meter has become
either irregular or non-existent.
 Onomatopoeia: the use of words which imitate sounds like ‘whispering’, ‘clang’, ‘ding dong’
 Rhyme: close similarity of sound at regular positions. It includes the agreement of vowel
sounds in assonance and the repetition of consonant sounds in consonance and alliteration.
Terms like near rhyme, half rhyme, and perfect rhyme are used to distinguish between the
types of rhyme.
 Rhythm: the regular pattern of recurrent accents in the flow of a poem, i.e., the rise and fall
of stress. The measure of rhythmic quantity is the meter.