What is Poetry?

1. What is Poetry?

2. I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-bye; And further still at an unearthly height, O luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.

3. The man for wisdom's various arts renown'd, Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound; Who, when his arms had wrought the destined fall Of sacred Troy, and razed her heaven-built wall, Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray'd, Their manners noted, and their states survey'd, On stormy seas unnumber'd toils he bore, Safe with his friends to gain his natal shore: Vain toils! their impious folly dared to prey On herds devoted to the god of day; The god vindictive doom'd them never more (Ah, men unbless'd!) to touch that natal shore. Oh, snatch some portion of these acts from fate, Celestial Muse! and to our world relate.

4. Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε· πολλῶν δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω, πολλὰ δ’ ὅ γ’ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν, ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων. ἀλλ’ οὐδ’ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ· αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο, νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος ᾽Ηελίοιο ἤσθιον· αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ. τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

6. Τον άντρα, Μούσα, τον πολύτροπο τραγούδα μου, που πλήθος διάβηκε τόπους, αφού πάτησε της Τροίας το κάστρο το άγιο, και πολιτείες πολλές εγνώρισε, πολλών βουλές ανθρώπων, κι αρίφνητα τυράννια ετράβηξε στα πέλαγα η καρδιά του, για να σωθεί κι αυτός παλεύοντας και πίσω τους συντρόφους να φέρει' κι όμως δεν τους γλίτωσε, κι ας το ποθούσε τόσο' τι από τις ίδιες τους εχάθηκαν τις ανομιές εκείνοι — οι ανέμυαλοι, που τ' ουρανόδρομου τα βόδια έφαγαν Ήλιου, κι αυτός τη μέρα τους αρνήστηκε του γυρισμού. Για τούτα και μας για λέγε, κάπου αρχίζοντας, κόρη θεϊκιά του Δία.

7. Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Hark! now I hear them-Ding-dong bell.

8. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!'

9. Buffalo Bill 's defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what i want to know is how do you like your blueeyed boy Mister Death

12. Definitions: • Poetry: “literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.” (Brittanica) • Literature: “a body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution.” (Brittanica) • C. Poetry: “A form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns or lyrics.” (Wikipedia)

13. “It is a kind of literature that calls attention to the process of how it is made (ποιώ). It is about the act of making. Poems say what they say by how they say things. Also the line is very important. Poetry even when it is prose-poetry is aware of the power of the line, how it could have once been a breath ie how it connects to sound, but also how it breaks our vision, creates huge chasms of suspension, makes us wait. In all cases the poem is deeply concerned with the sense of sound and visual form. It is the balance that counts; that balance is what is poetry. ” (Karen Van Dyck)

14. When Oscar Wilde argued that a "poet can survive everything but a misprint" he had not foreseen the formation of the Queen's English Society. Members of the group, set up to defend the "beauty and precision" of the English language, have turned their attention to contemporary poetry and poets, arguing that too often strings of words are being labelled as poems despite the fact they have no rhyme or metre. The campaigners say that there should be a new definition of poetry, outlining the characteristics needed before a piece of work can be called a poem. "A lot of people high up in poetry circles look down on rhyme and metre and think it is old-fashioned," said Bernard Lamb, president of the QES and an academic at Imperial College London. "But what is the definition of poetry? I would say, if it doesn't have rhyme or metre, then it is not poetry, it is just prose. You can have prose that is full of imagery, but it is still prose." The campaign is being spearheaded by Michael George Gibson, who said it was "disgraceful" that the Poetry Society had failed to respond properly to his demands for a definition. "For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure and, second, alliteration and rhyme," said Gibson. "Word-things not made according to those principles are not poems." Gibson praised the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Donne, Robert Graves and even Queen Elizabeth I, all of whom he thought followed the rules of poetry. But he was critical of current writers, including Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate.

15. Poetry does not need a meaning or definition. Poetry is how the reader reads it, Poetry is how the poet writes it. Poetry is real, Poetry is fake, Poetry is everything, Poetry is fate. Poetry is rhythm. Poetry can rhyme. Poetry is anything, I make it mine.

16. The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death. Housman offered a secondary test of true poetry: whether it matches a phrase of Keats's, 'everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear'. This is equally pertinent to the Theme.

17. The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and titles are innumerable. In ghost stories she often figures as 'The White Lady', and in ancient religions, from the British Isles to the Caucasus, as the 'White Goddess'. I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her. The test of a poet's vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess

18. The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God's losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.

19. So, on the one hand we have Meter, Verse, Sound, Shape(?) On the other hand we have Music, Religion, Paralogical

20. In our sleep as we speak Listen to the drums beat As we speak In our sleep where we meet *** Snow in my shoe Abandoned Sparrow’s nest. *** An eye twists weddings. Blue heaven wakes and joy sings. Good giggly truth plays .

21. One of these poems is computer generated … Which One? • Is computer generated poetry poetry? • Is it poetry, is it bad poetry, is it non-poetry? • Which of the following poems do you like better?

22. She’s crazy like a fool, What about it daddy cool? I’m crazy like a fool. What about it daddy cool? Daddy, daddy cool, Daddy, daddy cool, Daddy, daddy cool, Daddy, daddy cool. She’s crazy about her daddy, Oh she believes in him. She loves her daddy.

23. Jungles break hard clouds. Falsely hunting, towers melt. Heat offers prospects.

24. Here is the machine:

25. // Sentence Generating Functions // Each function returns a string containing // a sentence component. //The functions take an argument, which is the target number of syllables function Sentence(s) { // <sentence>= // <single sentence>[<conjunction><single sentence>] var a = new Fragment('',0) var b = new Fragment('',0) var r var m = 0 while ((a.syl != s) && (m < maxcount)) { m++ a=SingSent(s) r = s - a.syl if (r > 1) { a.let=a.let+" " b=RandWord(parent.vocab.con) r=r-b.syl a=Fragment.add(a,b) a.let=a.let+" " a=Fragment.add(a,SingSent(r)) } } return a

26. function SingSent(s) { // <single sentence>= // [<gerund phrase>]<simple sentence> var a = new Fragment('',0) var b = new Fragment('',0) var r var m=0 while ((a.syl == 0) || ((a.syl > s) && (m < maxcount))) { m++ a=SimpSent() r = s - a.syl if ((r > 2) && (rnd() < lowprob)) { b=GerundPhrase(r) b.let=b.let+", " a=Fragment.add(b,a) } } return a }

27. Where is the soul in the machine … ?

28. “And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels--with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child's spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. “

29. Politics?

30. The workers councils will one day become the essence of all humanity on earth. As when the power of brightest sunlight is perceived in a great sheaf of flowers. They are the highest form of together being, they are the overthrowing of all alone-being. In them alone each man, woman and gentle child can find the single aim of ages, humanity's spirit itself. The Workers' Councils, then, are as the light. They are peace, tranquility and a balm for all, they are the truth and the fountainhead of truth. They are the foundation-rock in the great universe of humanity, the nerve-centre of all labour, they mean joy for humanity - they are the light.

31. Several interesting web links • My website. http://users.auth.gr/~kehagiat/ • Poets.org. http://www.poets.org/ • Poetry Magic. http://www.poetrymagic.co.uk/index.html • Poetry Resources. http://www.wisdomportal.com/CPITS/PoetryResources-1.html • Text Etc. http://www.wisdomportal.com/CPITS/PoetryResources-1.html • UbuWeb. http://ubu.com/ • Haiku in English. http://raysweb.net/haibun/ • The Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

34. Frost Analysis 2, Frost uses the following literary devices in this poem: Irony - in urban setting (were lots of people live)however the main theme is loneliness, another theme is the speakers Sadness, however it was written in 1928 (right before the depression) when there was extreme prosparity and happiness Paradox - "the time was neither wrong nor right" Symbols – night (dark, sad), rain(sadness, bad times, depression), light(goodness, hope) Syntax - Frost uses a common syntax (word order) in most of his lines: I have _(verb) Themes - Loneliness, sadness, guilt Tone - sad, apathetic Imagery - entire poem sets up a picture in the readers mind of the city the speaker is in Rhyme - Frost uses the rhyme scheme "aba bcb cdc dad aa" this scheme is otherwise known as "terza rima" Form - this poem is a sonnet

35. Frost Analysis 1, This poem is not literally about leaving and returning to a city - Frost simply uses it as an allusion to represent his SOUL. He uses the night to describe his soul; his lonliness, depression, isolation, etc. There are some Inferno connections: Frost uses Terza Rima rhyme scheme just like Dante. He also mentions that he has "outwalked the furthest city light", meaning he has gone astray which is similar to Dante's first Canto, talking about leaving the right path. The repetition of the words "I have" represent the author's flat matter-of-factness (Michael Meyer - Poetry: An Introduction). There is a somber, sad tone. He also uses his title, aquainted with the night, to start and end the poem. When passing the watchman, Frost says he drops his eyes and is "unwilling to explain". This could represent guilt of doing something wrong, or it could simply mean he wants to be alone and ponder about his sadness. We know he is alone because when he stands still in the next line and "stopped the sound of feet" there is silence. Then he hears an interrupted cry."but not to call me back or say goodbye". This shows that there is nobody there for him and emphasizes his lonliness.