One of the most popular poetry forms, because of its brevity, is the haiku. Consisting of three lines, this form is broken down into the number of syllables per line: By the ancient pond [5] When a frog leaps into it [7] The sound of water [5] This poem by Matsuo Basho focuses on the external. […]
Hi guys! I wanted to explain one of poetry’s most common metered forms, ballad verse. It was very popular with music. Ballad verse is usually in in quatrains, meaning that each stanza is four line. The meter is a line of iambic tetrameter followed by a line of iambic trimeter (4 units, then 3). Let’s […]
In order for a poet to be successful at his craft, let us first consider the contemporary poet. Other than the obvious existence of spoken word poets, who use musicality and rhyme, poets of our era cannot be defined, except for the occasional Flarf poet. Why is this? Poets are exposed to a very broad […]
The primary feet used in poetry are: (NOTE: v = unaccented, ^ = accented) Iambic: v^ Anapestic: vv^ Trochaic: ^v Dactylic: ^vv The substitutive feet are: Spondaic: ^^ Pyrrhic: vv The different line lengths are: One foot: Monometer Two feet: Dimeter Three feet: Trimeter Four feet: Tetrameter Five feet: Pentameter Six feet: Hexameter Seven feet: Heptameter Eight feet: Octameter For example: v ^ […]
William Carlos Williams discusses the break from meter or set verse in his essay “A New Measure”, found in Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. As he states in the essay, the count has gotten “rid of the words, which held it down, and returned to the music.” Instead of meter, he […]
Olson is an objectivist. He does not want to focus on the inner subjective ego but reactions to the outside world. He also focuses more on the breath rather than meter or traditional form. In a way, he is a non-traditionalist for his use of field composition, but also a traditionalist in his objectivism. In […]
William Wordsworth says in his “Advertisement” to Lyrical Ballads that poetry must be diverse in its subject matter. This must not be evident due to the writing of critics, but in the poetry itself. The poems, he says, are experiments, applying lower/middle class conversational language rather than superior language often used in classical and formal […]
