Lit 2: Versification

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Lit 2 Versification

• Week 10 Lecture 2

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What is a poem?

• Mary Oliver A Poetry Handbook
• Poetry is a river many voices travel in it
  poem after poem moves along in the exciting
  crests and falls of the river waves. None is
  timeless each arrives in an historical context
  almost everything, in the end, passes. But the
  desire to make a poem, and the worlds
  willingness to receive it indeed the worlds
  need of it these never pass.

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• William Caros Williams From Williams's
  introduction to The Wedge, in Selected Essays of
  William Carlos Williams (NY New Directions,
  1969), p. 256.
• To make two bold statements There's nothing
  sentimental about a machine, and A poem is a
  small (or large) machine made out of words. When
  I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem, I
  mean that there can be no part that is redundant.
• Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like
  a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it,
  pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines,
  its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical
  more than a literary character.

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• The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th ed)
• A poem is a composition written for performance
  by the human voice.

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What is versification?

• The Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th ed)
• What your eye sees on the page is the composers
  verbal score, waiting for your voice to bring it
  alive as you read it aloud or hear it in your
  minds ear. Unlike our reading of a newspaper,
  the best reading that is to say, the most
  satisfying reading of a poem involves a
  simultaneous engagement of eye and ear. the eye
  attentive not only to the meaning of words, but
  to their grouping and spacing as lines on a page
  the ear attuned to the grouping and spacing of
  sounds.

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Rhythm, meter and rhyme

• http//server.riverdale.k12.or.us/bblack/meter.ht
  ml

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Rhyme

• The agreement of two metrically accented
  syllables and their terminal consonants. (Mary
  Kinzie, A Poets Guide to Poetry)
• End rhyme at ends of lines
• Internal rhymes within lines and between lines
• Assonance repetition of vowel sounds
• Onomatopoeia the word/s sound like what they
  denote the caw of the crow, harsh as hessian
• Masculine rhyme one syllable
• Feminine rhyme two syllables or more

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No hard and fast rules for us!

• All sorts of variations other than perfect rhyme
  bend/mend so the consonants can equate, the
  vowels can equate etc its about the sound.
• Love rhymes with of - article from Project
  Muse by Anne Ferry says that the general
  acceptance of a looser rhyme marks the twentieth
  century.

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Form

• The shape or pattern or genre of the poem.
• For example the sonnet, or the villanelle.

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(No Transcript)
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Williams Collins Ode Written in the Begniing of
the Year 1746

• How sleep the brave who sink to restBy all their
  countrys wishes blest!When Spring, with dewy
  fingers cold,Returns to deck their hallowed
  mold,She there shall dress a sweeter sodThan
  Fancys feet have ever trod.

• By fairy hands their knell is rung,By forms
  unseen their dirge is sungThere Honor comes, a
  pilgrim gray,To bless the turf that wraps their
  clay,And Freedom shall awhile repair,To dwell a
  weeping hermit there!

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Free verse
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Free verse

• so much dependsupon
• a red wheelbarrow
• glazed with rainwater
• beside the whitechickens