Search results
People also ask
What is a poem example?
What is an example of a language used in a poem?
How do you describe a poem?
What does poetry mean?
What is a poem based on?
What are the different types of poetry?
May 23, 2024 · Def poetry is a form of poetry typically based on urban culture and themes, often with an expressed focus on the African American experience.
- Overview
- Attempts to define poetry
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.
(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.)
Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to ensure a good harvest. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, it blurs a useful distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class of objects called poems, recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much regarded for their possible yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may be thought capable of has retired to do its business upon the human spirit and not directly upon the natural world outside.
Britannica Quiz
Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance on the page; and it seems clear that people take their cue from this changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual voice, possibly because, as Ben Jonson said, poetry “speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth.” If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax.
That is a minimal definition but perhaps not altogether uninformative. It may be all that ought to be attempted in the way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it looks that way, and it looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.
Exclusive academic rate for students! Save 67% on Britannica Premium.
Clear definition and great examples of Poetry. This article will show you the importance of Poetry and how to use it. Poetry is a type of literature based on the interplay of words and rhythm.
- 5 min
Definition of a Poem A poem is a piece of writing, usually using some kind of rhyme scheme or metrical pattern, that expresses a writer’s feelings (or the feelings of a persona). They can tell stories, record memories, express desire, and share information.
Dec 10, 2019 · Free verse – poetry that has no regular metre or line lengths, and is often unrhymed – has been a feature of poetry since at least the nineteenth century, although earlier examples can also be found.
See the top 10 types of poems and learn about popular forms of poetry like acrostic, haiku, lyric, narrative, and rhyme and more. Learn rhyme schemes, structure, form, stanzas, style, rhythm, and meter, etc. for all forms of poetry.
The term “poetic diction” refers to the language used in poetry. Commonly, this term is used to describe the most abstract examples of poetic language. For example, poems in which authors seek to use a wide range of vocabulary words, complicated syntax, and archaic words related to detailed concepts that many readers are not going to ...