How to Read a Poem

1. How to Read a Poem

2. Poetry is Art • If you look up the word poem in various dictionaries, you will find many different definitions, but most of the time you will find something like “a highly developed and imaginative expression of emotion.” And a poet is often defined as a writer who “has a gift of artistic sensitivity. • Basically, poetry is a compressed form of writing that conveys emotion or ideas to a reader.

3. If you really want to understand poetry, it’s good idea to start a poetry-reading group. Most book groups concentrate on prose fiction reading only. Why not break away and join a poetry club? If you can’t find one, start your own. It will definitely help with your understanding of poetry to see what others get from their own readings.

4. To some people, poetry is like abstract art. Some people feel that poetry too subjective to the artist for the reader to be able to fully understand it. • How can you make sense of words that don’t necessarily tell a story? To appreciate art, you must first appreciate your own sensibilities, then you must appreciate form and texture. • With poetry, you start with an appreciation of and trust for your own feelings, and then you examine your appreciation of words and the magic they make when they’re used together.

5. Coming to Terms with Poetry • Here are some terms commonly used in the study of poetry and a few examples to help you along: • Alliteration. Repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words: “flags flapping ferociously in the wind” (note the three f’s). • Assonance. Repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or within a line of poetry or prose: “I took a look at a book that I found in the nook.” • Couplet. A pair of rhyming lines that often separate one stanza from another (but there is no rule that they have to).

6. Meter. A pattern of rhythm syllabic accents in the lines, verses, and stanzas of poems. • Foot. A unit of poetic meter consisting of both stressed and unstressed syllables—usually one unstressed syllable is followed by one stressed syllable. • Read this example aloud from Robert’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and as you do, notice the syllabic emphasis: Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

7. Lamb. A metrical foot—one unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable. The adjective is “iambic.” • Lambic Pentameter. Because one iambic foot consists of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, iambic pentameter is a poetic measurement consisting of five iambic feet per line (the unstressed syllables are in bold): Was this the face that launch’da thousand ships And burnt the topless towersof Ilium? --Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus (sixteenth century)

8. Closed form. A form of poetry where structure is characterized consistently wrote in closed form. • Free verse (open form). We live in an era of free verse, where poetry does not necessarily contain any patterns of meter or rhyme. It is free in that it is not bound by any traditional poetic rules. • Verse. One line of poetry • Stanza. A poetic paragraph. Note that not all poems are necessarily broken into stanzas. You don’t have to memorize these terms, just be aware that poetry doesn’t consist of word thrown together; it’s an art form, with guidelines and rules.

9. Types of Poems

10. Ballad • A ballad is a story told as a narrative, rhythmic saga of something that happened in the past. Sometimes the themes are heroic, sometimes satirical, and other times romantic. The ballad almost always has an unhappy ending. • Ballad and ballade are two different types of poetry. The ballade is a fourteenth-and fifteenth-century French poem written in verse form consisting of three stanzas written in a particular rhythmic format. • It’s important to find good translation if you are reading poetry written in a language other than your own. Much of the beauty of the words and meaning of the poem can be lost in the translation if it is not done accurately.

11. Cinquain Influenced by Japanese poetry, the cinquain was developed by American poet Adelaide Crapsey. It is a short, non rhyming poem that consists of 22 syllables with a certain number of syllables per line.

12. Elegy • An elegy is a poem that is written to mourn the death of someone. It is a reflection either upon death or some other great sadness.

13. Epic • This type of poetry has a very broad definition. An epic is a continuous narrative of the life or lives of a heroic person or persons. • These heroes can be fictional, historical, or mythical. • The first known epic poem is the Sumerian poem Epic of Gilgamesh. The longest is the great Indian mythical poem Mahabbarata, which contains more than 100,000 verses—making it four times the size of the Bible.

14. Haiku • One of the most important Japanese poetic forms is the haiku. This is a short poem that consists of no more that three lines, with the first line consisting of five syllables, the second line consisting of seven syllables, and the third line consisting again of five syllables. • While the