Poetry

The word "poetry" entered the English language in the fourteenth century from the French poetrie and Latin poetria. Many definitions of the term refer to the Latin word for poem, poēma, meaning a "made thing" and emphasize the craft of poetry. Other definitions emphasize poetry’s emotional or imaginative components. English Romantic poet William Wordsworth famously called poetry "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling." American modernist Marianne Moore in her celebrated poem "Poetry" (1924) defined it metaphorically as "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." American poet and critic Edward Hirsch declared that poetry is "an inexpressible (though not incomprehensible) event in language." Although the art form takes on different meanings for different artists and readers, a long and varied history of poetry can be found in most cultures.

Brief History

Poetry probably predates literacy and is found in every known culture. The oldest surviving manuscripts, including The Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2100 BCE) and the Vedas (as early as 1700–1100 BCE), are poems, but the ancient Greeks were the first poets in Western culture to leave a substantial body of work. The Greek epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, traditionally attributed to Homer and written in about the eighth century BCE, are the basis of the conventions of the epic, a book-length narrative poem centered on a hero. Some of the greatest poetry of ancient Greece can be found in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The poems of Homer and the tragedians along with the didactic and pastoral poems of Hesiod, the innovative lyrics of Sappho, and the odes of Pindar helped to lay the foundation for Western poetry.

The Greeks had several divisions within poetry; the major divisions were epic, lyric, and dramatic verse. Greek poets also introduced prosody and the forms of metrical composition: meter, rhythm, and sound. Meter, derived from the Greek word metron, meaning measure, refers to the pattern of rhythm in a poem. Pure accentual meter counts only the stressed syllables in a line. The earliest English poems such as Beowulf used this meter. It is also the meter of the nursery rhymes that often serve as the earliest introduction to poetry. Accentual syllabic meter measures both stressed and unstressed syllables. For more than four hundred years, the most common meter in English poetry was iambic pentameter. An iamb is a metrical foot that consists of one unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. Five iambic feet in a line makes it pentameter. By some estimates as much as 75 percent of poetry in English written from the time of Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1340–1400) to Robert Frost (1874–1963) was written in rhymed or unrhymed iambic pentameter.

The history of Western poetry also owes a great debt to the troubadours who spread spoken or sung poetry at a time when literacy was not widespread. From the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries, these poet-musicians in southern France, northern Italy, and northern Spain wrote their lyric poetry in a language referred to in medieval times as langue d’oc, and today known as or Provençal. The troubadours’ vernacular poetry was the first in a modern European language. Although these poets, who ranged from servants to monarchs, wrote on a broad range of topics, they are most closely associated with love poetry. This love poetry specifically dealt with relationships between ladies of the court and their lovers and was a major source for the practices of courtly love or chivalry. The troubadours influenced fourteenth-century poets such as Petrarch, whose 366 poems to Laura, his idealized beloved were seminal in the development of the Renaissance lyric, and Dante, whose Divine Comedy (c. 1307–1320) is among the finest and most enduring works of world literature. These Italian poets in turn influenced Chaucer who is often referred to as the father of English literature.

The troubadours were also among the first to use rhyme, the similarity of sound in words. Rhyme was not formally introduced into Western poetry until the twelfth to fourteenth century when it was used in lyric poetry and song, perhaps first as a pneumonic device and later for its musicality. Rhyme may be exact (also called true or perfect rhyme) as in sound and ground, or it may be slant rhyme (also known as half rhyme or imperfect rhyme) as in eye and see. Rhyme may also be defined by its position in the line: end rhyme at the end of lines, the most common; head rhyme at the beginning of lines; internal rhyme within the line. A one-syllable rhyme is termed masculine ("time" and "crime"); a two-syllable rhyme is termed feminine ("moister" and "oyster"). Other types of rhyme include mosaic (rhymes made of more than one word such as "you sit" and "unfit"), eye rhyme (words that depend on spelling rather than sound for similarity such as "love" and "prove"), and intermittent rhyme (rhyming every other line).

Patterns of rhyme define the sonnet, the fourteen-line poem that takes its name from the Italian sonetto, meaning "a little sound or song." The sonnet was another product of the Italian Renaissance. Sir Thomas Wyatt is credited with introducing the form into England in the early sixteenth century through his translations of Petrarch’s sonnets. Wyatt’s contemporary, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, altered the structure of the Petrarchan sonnet to produce the first poems in the form that became known as the Shakespearean sonnet once William Shakespeare wrote and released a great number of famous poems using the form. Another sixteenth-century poet, Edmund Spenser, modified the rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet to create the Spenserian sonnet. John Milton and other seventeenth-century poets continued to modify the sonnet, in single sonnets and in sonnet sequences, helping to ensure that the sonnet became one of the most enduring of poetic forms in English language poetry. Into the twenty-first century, poets continue to employ the sonnet in its traditional forms and in variations.

Milton, with his epic Paradise Lost, and the metaphysical poets, particularly John Donne, were among the most influential figures of seventeenth century poetry, but Romanticism was the next great movement in the history of Western poetry. The movement is often dated from 1798, the year the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was published to 1832, the year of Sir Walter Scott’s death, though some works included in the Romantic canon predate Lyrical Ballads. American Romanticism began later than the English movement and lasted through the Civil War era. With an emphasis on the emotions, the imagination, and the individual, the Romantic poets made lyric poetry the dominant poetic form. The Romantics defined a turning point in literary history and influenced both high and popular culture in the generations that followed them. The major English Romantic poets include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, commonly considered the progenitors of modern American poetry, are also Romantics.

The influence of Romanticism remained strong into the early twentieth century. Irish poet and Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats is a transitional figure, a bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. His Romantic roots can be detected in the inspiration he drew from Irish mythology, and the idealized view of nature in early poems such as "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1893). After 1913, in part due to the influence of Ezra Pound, Yeats’s experiments with traditional forms and sparer diction linked him to Modernism. If Yeats marked the transition to Modernism, Pound was the herald of the movement. His dictum "Make it new" was its watchword, and his insistence that poetry should be concrete, concise, and organic in form became its tenets. Pound’s greatest contribution to modernist poetry came through his encouragement of other poets including Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and particularly T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s The Waste Land(1922) was significantly shaped by Pound’s editorial comments and is often cited as the most important modernist poem.

The Waste Land and other contemporary works broke away from the use of traditional forms and reflected the disillusionment of a post–World War I generation that had lost faith in prewar values. American poet William Carlos Williams sought to go further and called for a distinctively American voice, the use of local materials, and, most famously, a focus on actual things rather than ideas about them. Williams and fellow American Wallace Stevens with his exaltation of the imagination proved to be a significant influence on younger poets as Modernism was overtaken by new voices. The 1920s also saw the beginning of a flowering of African American arts known as the Harlem Renaissance. The movement produced some of the most celebrated African American poetry by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Arna Bontemps. They paved the way for later African American poets such as Robert Hayden, the first African American consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress, and Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.

By the second half of the twentieth century, the great literary movements of the past that had defined a generation or more of poets were replaced by smaller groups with various degrees of influence. After the breaking up of the British Empire, the variety of voices in English-language poetry grew more diverse and included voices from India, Africa, and the Caribbean, among others. In America, groups were defining themselves through reaction against Modernism. In the 1940s and 1950s, poets associated with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina—including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan—supported Olson’s rejection of traditional prosody and his idea that breath should govern the composition of poetry. In 1956 Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, a sprawling, sexually and emotionally explicit poem exploded onto the literary stage. The following year Howl was the subject of an obscenity trial that ended with a victory for self-expression and affirmed Ginsberg’s status as a radical poet and the Beat movement, a group that revolted against canonical poetry and liberally used free verse.

Confessional poetry of the late 1950s and early 1960s was self-revelatory in a revolutionary style. Written in the first person and typically autobiographical, the poems of poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass explored formerly taboo subjects, including fraught family relationships, sexuality, and mental illness. The 1960s also saw the beginning of the New York School of poetry. Characterized by a certain playfulness, the poems of this group also experimented with unconventional syntax and language and bizarre connections in ways that suggested the abstract art that inspired poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara. The following decade, the language school of poetry, linked to leftist ideology, focused on language itself, arguing that it determined meaning. These poets frustrated reader expectations of language to push readers to interact with poems in ways other than the traditional. Major language poets include Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Bernstein.

Topic Today

Regardless of the school with which they affiliated, the first generation of postmodern poets were influenced by Modernism. Their efforts to disassociate themselves from their modernist forebears served to reveal continuities as well as breaks. Critical opinion varies as to which of the mid-twentieth-century schools proved most influential on later poets. For example, Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes’s 1998 collection of poems about his relationship with Sylvia Plath, is confessional in its intimate explorations of their life together. More common are the poets designated as "post-confessionals," a group that includes poets as diverse in origin, experience, and style as Lisel Mueller, Charles Wright, Edward Hirsch, and Rita Dove, who aim for the riskiness of confessional revelation but with a greater sense of self as participant in the larger world.

Poetry in the twenty-first century has been eclipsed by other literary forms. Some scholars go so far as to predict a future when poetry will be written by machines to be read by machines. At the same time, small presses that publish poetry are numerous, open-mike nights (opportunities to read a few poems for free or for a small cover charge) and poetry slams (competitive poetry readings) remain popular, and poets connect with their audience through social media.

Bibliography

Cushman, Stephen. Fictions of Form in American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016. Print.

Evans, Robert C. Perspectives on Renaissance Poetry. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print.

Greene, Roland, et al., eds. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.

Grethlein, Jonas. The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory, and History in the Fifth Century BCE. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print.

Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. Boston: Houghton, 2014. Print.

Maxwell, Glyn. On Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013. Print.

O’Neill, Michael, ed. Cambridge History of English Poetry. New York: Cambridge UP, 2015. Print.

Yakich, Mark. Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Print.