My poetry lecture notes.

--Poetry--

Overview:

What is Poetry

Why do we study it?

Types of poetry

- Poetic forms

- Stanza

- Closed Form

# Italian Sonnet

# English Sonnet

- Villanelle

- Haiku

WHAT IS POETRY?

Is it the best words in the best order?

Or a place where thinking and feeling is one?

An opportunity to see something ordinary as extraordinary

A gift, - like "Different Kinds of sunlight" - D.H.Lawrence -

WHY DO WE STUDY IT?

For the pleasure

For the evocative role of language in converting feeling into form, like turning a rose into language

Because it requires a "new effort of attention and discovers a New World within the known world"

- D.H.Lawrence -

Poetry allows for the development of "the intelligence of feelings" - Robert Witkin -

TYPES OF POETRY:

Pop song lyrics (sounds of silence. Rap)

Humourous poems (Comic verse)

Narrative poems which tell a story (The man from snowy river)

Issues and Political poems (i.e.

About solitary confinment)

Classic poetry (Dillian Thomas - do not go gentle)

Form poems (e.g. Haiku)

POETIC FORMS

In a poem form is defined as a pattern/design of the poem as a whole, for example:

First line - 3 syllables

Second line - 4 syllables

Third line - 3 syllables, and so on...

There are various forms (stanza, closed form, sonnet, and villanelle...)

Free verse stanzas close forms and free verse

STANZA

The first pattern your most likely to notice is the Length Of The Stanza

Some Poems in couplets (2 lines per stanza)

Some Poems in tercets (3 lines per stanza)

Some Poems in quatrains (4 lines per stanza) and so on and so on

These stanzaic patterns are part of the FORM of a poem (as well as other things like syllables)

CLOSED FORMS

- Poems that follow...