WHAT IS POETRY?

Poetry is...the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.

William Wordsworth

...if it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that it is poetry, if I feel physically, as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry.

Emily Dickinson

Poetry is....the distilled, imaginative expression of feeling.

T. S. Eliot

What is poetry? Who knows?

Not a rose, but the scent of a rose;

Not the sky, but the light in the sky;

Not the fly; but the gleam of the fly;

Not the sea; but the sound of the sea;

Not myself; but what makes me

See, hear, and feel something that prose

Cannot, and what it is, who knows?

Eleanor Farjean

Poetry is a poet’s intuition of truth. It combines richness of meaning with the sound of language arranged in its most beautiful form. Poetry is filled with carefully selected words that are arranged to call attention to experiences we have not known or fully recognized. Poetry can make us chuckle...it can startle us with insight or surprise us with clarity. It can also bring a peacefulness and sense of repose. Some poems express feeling that we did not even know we had until we read them; then we say, “Yes, that’s just as it is.” Poetry deals with truth—the essence of life and experience.

Bernice Cullinan

Poets are the athletes of language. What we call poetic skill is the ability to get the most out of certain capacities of language that we all use in less interesting ways—just as athletic skill in baseball, dancing, swimming, or tennis is the ability to get the most out of certain bodily capacities we all use everyday, but not so powerfully or gracefully. The secret of both kinds of skill, the poet’s and the athlete’s, is coordination.

Robert W. Boynton

When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. John F. Kennedy Amherst, Honoring Robert Frost

A poem . . . begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. . . . It finds the thought and the thought finds the words Robert Frost\

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato, Ion

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ~Stephen Mallarme

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry

Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. ~Thomas Gray

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. ~Paul Engle, New York Times, 17 February 1957

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. ~Rita Dove

Poetry should be like fireworks, packed carefully and artfully, ready to explode with unpredictable effects." -Lilian Moore

"If there would be a recipe for a poem, these would be the ingredients: word sounds, rhythm, description, feeling, memory, rhyme, and imagination. They can be put together a thousand different ways, a thousand, thousand... more." - Karla Kuskin

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." - T. S. Eliot

"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech." – Simonides

One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-madeverbal object that does honorto the language in which it is written.Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poetsays has never been said before, but, once he has said it, hisreaders recognize its validity for themselves.- W. H. Auden

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world,and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.- Edgar Allan Poe

The art which uses words as both speech and song to reveal the realities that the senses record, the feelings salute, themind perceives, and the shaping imagination orders.- Babettes Deutsch

Poetry is important because:

1. It makes us laugh, it’s pleasurable.

2. It creates images.

3. It expresses feelings and provokes feelings.

4. It promotes language learning---because it

a. Contains highly charged words

b. Uses only a few words to say a great deal

c. Is melodic---sings as it says

d. Contains rhythm, repetition, and rhyme

e. Captures the essence of a concept

f. Says more than it says

g. Has layers of meaning

h. Uses words as sound (rhyme, alliteration, assonance), rhythm, and

meaning

Criteria for Selecting Poetry:

1. Can children understand it? Can they understand it with help from adults?

2. Does the poem stir emotions like delight, sadness, nostalgia?

3. Does it create images of sight, touch, smell, taste?

4. Does it play with the sounds of language? Does the sound echo the sense?

5. Does the rhythm reinforce the meaning?

6. Is the form appropriate for the content of the poem?

Children’s Poetry Preferences:

1. Contemporary poems

2. Poems they can understand

3. Narrative poems

4. Poems with rhyme, rhythm, and sound

5. Humorous poems

6. Poems that relate to their personal experiences

ELEMENTS OF POETRY

1. Descriptive, Sensory Words

2. Figurative Language

a. Metaphor/Simile

b. Personification

c. Hyperbole

3. Sound Patterns

a. Rhyme

b. Alliteration

c. Assonance

d. Onomatopoeia

4. Rhythm Patterns

a. Phrasing

b. Beat/Accent

c. Length of Words

d. Meter

e. Flow

5. Emotional Intensity

6. Compactness

The poet uses rhythm to enhance the feeling that the poet’s words express. When we are happy we speak quickly, when we are sad, or serious, or matter of fact, our words come more slowly. In the same way the poet uses a quickly moving line with many unaccented syllables and short vowels to express lightheartedness in lines that move as quickly. When serious the rhythm moves more slowly with longer vowels and a higher proportion of accented syllables.

The best poetry uses rhythm to add meaning to words.

Luke

POETIC FORMS

1. Narrative poetry which tells a story

2. Lyric poetry that is about a mood or feeling, more

song-like

3. Free verse; unrhymed with no regular pattern or

meter

4. Haiku – pattern of syllables; about nature

5. Cinquain -pattern

6. Diamante/Clerihew – pattern; shows change

7. Limerick – has distinctive rhyme and rhythm

pattern; humorous

8. Ballad

9. Sonnet

10. Concrete poetry

POETRY AND VERSE...

...SAME OR DIFFERENT???

Some consider verse to be just pleasant rhyming words, not real poetry, because it does not have the depth, truth, and emotion that many use in their definition of poetry. Others consider anything in a poetic form to be poetry.

Verse is pleasant and entertaining, but....while feeling and imaginative power are found in real poetry, verse is merely a matter of structure, formal metrical order and rhyme pattern----a superior amusement.

T.S. Eliot