POETRY

1. POETRY Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats

3. Four Main Types of Poetry Narrative Lyric Dramatic Didactic

4. Narrative Poetry • Narrative—a poem that tells a story. • Ex.: a ballad or an epic poem

5. Lyric Poetry • Lyric– a short poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker • Lyric poems are usually easy to recognize • Lyric poems are often written in first-person • Traditionally, lyric poems have a songlike immediacy and emotional force • Ex.: “The Red Wheelbarrow”

6. Dramatic Poetry • Dramatic—a poem that presents the voice of an imaginary character or characters speaking directly, without any additional narration by the author. • Strictly speaking, it describes any verse written for the stage, but generally it refers to a poem written as a speech made by a character • Ex: Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”

7. Didactic Poetry • Didactic—a kind of poetry written with the purpose of imparting knowledge or teaching a moral lesson. • Ex: “Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” ~Ben Franklin

8. What does good poetry do? • Engages the whole person through senses, emotion, imagination, or intellect. • Employs no excess words, but uses only those that bear their full weight in contributing to the total meaning of the poem.

9. More characteristics of good poetry • The diction, images, and figures of speech are fresh, not trite, except when irony is the purpose. • The “sound” doesn’t clash with its “sense,” or the form with its content. • Images and ideas are so effectively arranged (crafted) that any rearrangement would be harmful to the effectiveness of the poem.

10. Quotable Quote 2 Poetry is a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language. ~Author unknown

11. Quotable Quote The greatness of a poem is in proportion to the range and depth and intensity of experience that it brings to us: its amount of life. ~Author unknown