INTRODUCTION TO
POETRY
• What is poetry?
• What makes poetry different from any prose work?
• What is conveyed through poetry?
The 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh is
considered the world's first truly great work of literature. It has been discovered in a British Museum storeroom. It is a poem on which the story of Noah and the Flood was probably based.
Scholars have been able to reconstruct the first four lines as follows:
He who saw all, who was the foundation of the land, Who knew (everything), was wise in all matters.
Gilgamesh, who saw all, who was the foundation of the land, Who knew (everything), was wise in all matters.
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star by Jane TAYLOR
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky.
OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO by Dr. Seuss
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.
William Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Wordsworth further explains this effect stating, “the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”
Matthew Arnold, a Victorian poet once claimed, “The crown of literature is poetry.”
To D.H. Lawrence, poetry is, as a rule, either the voice of the far future, exquisite and ethereal, or it is the voice of the past, rich, magnificent.
When the Greeks heard the Iliad and the Odyssey, they heard their own past calling in their hearts, as men far inland sometimes hear the sea and fall weak with powerful, wonderful regret, nostalgia; or else their own future rippled its time-beats through their blood.
But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand:
the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon.
«Poetry might be defined as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language».
Poetry does not aim to communicate information. If you seek information, you do research. In poetry, however, you find a subtle, sometimes sensual, sometimes playful representation of an experience.
Poetry does not aim to give a moral instruction.
Do not expect poetry to be always beautiful.
Poetry aims to appeal to «our essential humanity» regardless of its content which can be pleasurable or undesirable.
Poetry is a concentrated form of literature, therefore the words are carefully picked and used to give a certain effect.
Poetry has four dimensions:
• Intellectual
• Sensuous
• Emotional
• Imaginative
