Introduction to English Literature 2024
 

1. A Definition of Poetry from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms

 

 

Language sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some

pattern of recurrence that emphasizes the relationships between words

on the basis of sound as well as sense: this pattern is almost always a

rhythm or *METRE, which maybe supplemented by *RHYME or

*ALLITERATION or both. The demands of verbal patterning usually make

poetry a more condensed medium than *PROSE or everyday speech,

often involving variations in *SYNTAX, the use of special words and

phrases (*POETIC DICTION) peculiar to poets, and a more frequent and

more elaborate use of *FIGURES OF SPEECH, principally *METAPHOR and

*SIMILE. All cultures have their poetry, using it for various purposes from

sacred ritual to obscene insult, but it is generally employed in those

utterances and writings that call for heightened intensity of emotion,

dignity of expression, or subtlety of meditation. Poetry is valued for

combining pleasures of sound with freshness of ideas, whether these be

solemn or comical. Some critics make an evaluative distinction between

poetry, which is elevated or inspired, and *VERSE, which is merely clever

or mechanical. The three major categories of poetry are *NARRATIVE,

dramatic, and *LYRIC, the last being the most extensive.

 

2. Poetic Diction from The Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams

 

 

The term diction signifies the types of words, phrases, and

sentence structures, and sometimes also of figurative language, that constitute

any work of literature. A writer's diction can be analyzed under a great variety

of categories, such as the degree to which the vocabulary and phrasing is

abstract or concrete, Latin or Anglo-Saxon in origin, colloquial or formal,

technical or common. See style and poetic license.

 

Many poets in all ages have used a distinctive language, a "poetic diction,"

which includes words, phrasing, and figures not current in the ordinary

discourse of the time. In modern discussion, however, the term poetic

diction is applied especially to poets who, like Edmund Spenser in the Elizabethan

age or G. M. Hopkins in the Victorian age, deliberately employed a

diction that deviated markedly not only from common speech, but even

from the writings of other poets of their era. And in a frequent use, "poetic

diction" denotes the special style developed by neoclassic writers of the eighteenth

century who, like Thomas Gray, believed that "the language of the

age is never the language of poetry" (letter to Richard West, 1742). This neoclassic

poetic diction was in large part derived from the characteristic usage

of admired earlier poets such as the Roman Virgil, Edmund Spenser, and

John Milton, and was based on the reigning principle of decorum, according

to which a poet must adapt the "level" and type of his diction to the mode

and status of a particular genre (see style). Formal satire, such as Alexander

Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), because it represented a poet's direct

commentary on everyday matters, permitted—-indeed required—-the use of

language really spoken by urbane and cultivated people of the time. But

what were ranked as the higher genres, such as epic, tragedy, and ode, required

a refined and elevated poetic diction to raise the style to the level of

the form, while pastoral and descriptive poems, which necessitated reference

to what were considered lowly materials, used a special diction to invest

these materials with a dignity and elegance appropriate to poetry.

Prominent characteristics of eighteenth-century poetic diction were its

archaism and its use of recurrent epithets; its preference for resounding words

derived from Latin ("refulgent," "irriguous," "umbrageous"); the frequent invocations to, and personifications of, abstractions and inanimate objects; and

the persistent use of periphrasis (a roundabout, elaborate way of saying

something) to avoid what were perceived as low, technical, or commonplace

terms by means of a substitute phrase that was thought to be of higher dignity

and decorum. 

 

In William Wordsworth's famed attack on the neoclassic doctrine of a special

language for poetry, in his preface of 1800 to Lyrical Ballads, he claimed

that there is no "essential difference between the language of prose and metrical

composition"; decried the poetic diction of eighteenth-century writers as

"artificial," "vicious," and "unnatural"; set up as the criterion for a valid poetic

language that it be, not a matter of artful contrivance, but the "spontaneous

overflow of powerful feelings"; and, by a drastic reversal of the class-hierarchy

of linguistic decorum, claimed that the best model for the natural expression

of feeling is not upper-class speech, but the speech of "humble and rustic life."

 

 

 

 

   Related Keyword : Poetry Poetic Diction
 

 

 
 
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