Epic Poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation.  Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form. Nonetheless, epics have been written down at least since Homer, and the works of Vyasa, Virgil, Dante Alighieri and John Milton would be unlikely to have survived without being written down. The first epics are known as primary, or original, epics. Epics that attempt to imitate these like Virgil’s Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost are known as literary, or secondary, epics. One such epic is the Anglo-Saxon story Beowulf.  Another type of epic poetry is epyllion which is a brief narrative poem with a romantic or mythological theme. The term, which means ‘little epic’, came in use in the nineteenth century. It refers primarily to the type of erotic and mythological long elegy of which Ovid remains the master; to a lesser degree, the term includes some poems of the English Renaissance, particularly those influenced by Ovid. One suggested example of classical epyllion may be seen in the story of Nisus and Euryalus in Book IX of Aeneid.

Source: Wikipedia

Narrative Poetry

Narrative poetry is poetry that has a plot. The poems may be short or long, and the story it relates to may be simple or complex. It is usually nondramatic, with objective verse and regular rhyme scheme and meter.  Narrative poems include epics, ballads, idylls and lays.

Narrative poems are a form of art. Narrative poetry is among the oldest, and perhaps the oldest, genre of poetry. Much of the earliest literary works we have from many literatures, from the epic of Gilgamesh to those of Homer, in Old English poetry and Old Norse poetry, or the Sanskrit poem the Mahabarata, consist of narrative poems. Many scholars of Homer, from Quintus Smyrnaeus forward, have concluded that his tales of the Iliad and Odyssey were composed from compilations of shorter narrative poems that related individual episodes, and which were more suitable for an evening’s entertainment.

Some narrative poetry takes the form of a novel in verse. An example of this is The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning. In terms of narrative poetry, a romance is a narrative poem that tells a story of chivalry. Examples include the Romance of the Rose or Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Although these examples use medieval and Arthurian materials, romances may also tell stories from classical mythology.

Shorter narrative poems are often similar in style to the short story. Sometimes these short narratives are collected into interrelated groups, as with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Some literatures contain prose narratives that includes poems and poetic interludes; much Old Irish poetry is contained within prose narratives, and the Old Norse sagas include both incidental poetry and the biographies of poets. An example is The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service.

Source: Wikipedia

Meter

In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. Thus, “iambic pentameter” is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the “iamb.” This metric system originated in ancient Greek poetry, and was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho, and by the great tragedians of Athens. Similarly, “dactylic hexameter,” comprises six feet per line, of which the dominant kind of foot is the “dactyl.” Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer and Hesiod. More recently, iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter have been used by William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, respectively.

Meter is often scanned based on the arrangement of “poetic feet” into lines.  In English, each foot usually includes one syllable with a stress and one or two without a stress. In other languages, it may be a combination of the number of syllables and the length of the vowel that determines how the foot is parsed, where one syllable with a long vowel may be treated as the equivalent of two syllables with short vowels. For example, in ancient Greek poetry, meter is based solely on syllable duration rather than stress. In some languages, such as English, stressed syllables are typically pronounced with greater volume, greater length, and higher pitch, and are the basis for poetic meter. In ancient Greek, these attributes were independent of each other; long vowels and syllables including a vowel plus more than one consonant actually had longer duration, approximately double that of a short vowel, while pitch and stress (dictated by the accent) were not associated with duration and played no role in the meter. Thus, a dactylic hexameter line could be envisioned as a musical phrase with six measures, each of which contained either a half note followed by two quarter notes (i.e. a long syllable followed by two short syllables), or two half notes (i.e. two long syllables); thus, the substitution of two short syllables for one long syllable resulted in a measure of the same length. Such substitution in a stress language, such as English, would not result in the same rhythmic regularity. In Anglo-Saxon meter, the unit on which lines are built is a half-line containing two stresses rather than a foot.  Scanning meter can often show the basic or fundamental pattern underlying a verse, but does not show the varying degrees of stress, as well as the differing pitches and lengths of syllables.

As an example of how a line of meter is defined, in English-language iambic pentameter, each line has five metrical feet, and each foot is an iamb, or an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. When a particular line is scanned, there may be variations upon the basic pattern of the meter; for example, the first foot of English iambic pentameters is quite often inverted, meaning that the stress falls on the first syllable.  The generally accepted names for some of the most commonly used kinds of feet include:

iamb – one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable

trochee – one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable

dactyl – one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables

anapest – two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable

spondee – two stressed syllables together

pyrrhic – two unstressed syllables together (rare, usually used to end dactylic hexameter)

The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows:

dimeter – two feet

trimeter – three feet

tetrameter – four feet

pentameter – five feet

hexameter – six feet

heptameter – seven feet

octameter – eight feet

There are a wide range of names for other types of feet, right up to a choriamb of four syllable metric foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables and closing with a stressed syllable. The choriamb is derived from some ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Languages which utilize vowel length or intonation rather than or in addition to syllabic accents in determining meter, such as Ottoman Turkish or Vedic, often have concepts similar to the iamb and dactyl to describe common combinations of long and short sounds.

Each of these types of feet has a certain “feel,” whether alone or in combination with other feet. The iamb, for example, is the most natural form of rhythm in the English language, and generally produces a subtle but stable verse.  The dactyl, on the other hand, almost gallops along. And, as readers of The Night Before Christmas or Dr. Seuss realize, the anapest is perfect for a light-hearted, comic feel.

There is debate over how useful a multiplicity of different “feet” is in describing meter. For example, Robert Pinsky has argued that while dactyls are important in classical verse, English dactylic verse uses dactyls very irregularly and can be better described based on patterns of iambs and anapests, feet which he considers natural to the language.  Actual rhythm is significantly more complex than the basic scanned meter described above, and many scholars have sought to develop systems that would scan such complexity. Vladimir Nabokov noted that overlaid on top of the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of verse was a separate pattern of accents resulting from the natural pitch of the spoken words, and suggested that the term “scud” be used to distinguish an unaccented stress from an accented stress.

Source: Wikipedia

Ode

Ode (from the Ancient Greek ὠδή) is a lyrical verse. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist.

It is most likely that the Greek odes gradually lost their musical character; they were accompanied on the flute, and then declaimed without any music at all. The ode, as it was practiced by the Romans, returned to the personally lyrical form of the Lesbian lyrists. This was exemplified, in the most exquisite way, by Horace and Catullus; the former imitated, and even translated, Alcaeus and Anacreon, the latter was directly inspired by Sappho.

The initial model for English odes was Horace, who used the form to write meditative lyrics on various themes. The earliest odes in the English language, using the word in its strict form, were the magnificent Epithalamium and Prothalamium of Edmund Spenser.

In the 17th century, the most important original odes in English are those of Abraham Cowley and Andrew Marvell. Marvell, in his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland uses a regular form (two four-foot lines followed by two three-foot lines) modelled on Horace, while Cowley wrote “Pindarick” odes which had irregular patterns of line lengths and rhyme schemes, though they were iambic. The principle of Cowley’s Pindaricks was based on a misunderstanding of Pindar’s metrical practice, but was widely imitated, with notable success by John Dryden.

With Pindar’s metre being better understood in the 18th century, the fashion for Pindaric odes faded, though there are notable “actual” Pindaric odes by Thomas Gray, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard.

The Pindarick of Cowley was revived around 1800 by Wordsworth for one of his very finest poems, the Intimations of Immortality ode; irregular odes were also written by Coleridge. Keats and Shelley wrote odes with regular stanza patterns. Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, written in fourteen line terza rima stanzas, is a major poem in the form, but perhaps the greatest odes of the 19th century were Keats’s Five Great Odes of 1819 which included Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on Melancholy, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, and Ode to Autumn. After Keats, there have been comparatively few major odes in English. One major exception is the fourth verse of the poem For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon which is often known as “The ode to the fallen” or more simply as “The Ode”.

The English ode’s most common rhyme scheme is ABABCDECDE.

In the Spanish-speaking world, the Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda revived the ode; composing odes to simple and common things that had never been the subject matter of poets before. Many of Neruda’s odes were published in three books, Odas elementales (Elemental Odes) (1954), Nuevas Odas Elementales (New Elemental Odes) (1956) and Navegaciones y regresos (Voyages and Homecomings) (1959). Neruda’s odes have been widely translated and have greatly contributed to the popularity of the ode among students and young poets. Some subjects of his odes included a tomato, a cat, wine, rum, and so on.

A musical setting of a poetic ode is also known as an ode.

Horatian odes were frequently set to music in the 16th century, notably by Ludwig Senfl and Claude Goudimel. In the 17th century Nicholas Brady’s Ode to St. Cecilia was set by Purcell. The Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day written by Dryden was set twice to music by Handel, as was his Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music which was also in praise of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians. One of many settings of Schiller’s Ode to Joy (An die Freude) forms the crowning choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, completed in 1824. Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, dating from 1887, is a setting of John Milton’s ode At a Solemn Musick, and Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s well-known Ode was set by Elgar in his The Music Makers, first performed in 1912. Gerald Finzi’s Intimations of Immortality is a setting for tenor, chorus, and orchestra of Wordsworth’s ode of the same title.

Odes to dignitaries were also often set, such as the Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne by Handel. Byron’s Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte was set by Arnold Schoenberg.

Source: Wikipedia

Elegy

An elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead.

The term “elegy” originally denoted a type of poetic meter (elegiac meter). It commonly describes a poem of mourning, from the Greek elegeia (ἐλεγεία) derived from elegos (ἔλεγος)—a reflection on the death of someone or on a sorrow generally. As such, it may be classified as a form of lyric poetry. An elegy can also reflect on something that seems strange or mysterious. Additionally, “elegy” (sometimes spelled elégie) may denote a type of musical work, usually of a sad or somber nature. The term “elegy” is not to be confused with “eulogy.”

Source: Wikipedia

Ottava Rima

Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio.

The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three alternate rhymes and one double rhyme, following the a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c pattern. The form is similar to the older Sicilian octave, but evolved separately and is unrelated. The Sicilian octave is derived from the medieval strambotto and was a crucial step in the development of the sonnet, whereas the ottava rima is related to the canzone, a stanza form.

Boccaccio used ottava rima for a number of minor poems and, most significantly, for two of his major works, the Teseide (1340) and the Filostrato (1347). These two poems defined the form as the main one to be used for epic poetry in Italian for the next two centuries. For instance, ottava rima was used by Poliziano and by Boiardo in his 1486 masterpiece Orlando Innamorato . The following year, Luigi Pulci published his Morgante Maggiore in which the mock-heroic, half-serious, half-burlesque use of the form that is most familiar to modern English-language readers first appeared. However, poets such as Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso continued to use ottava rima for serious epic poetry. It was later used in Italian libretti; perhaps the most famous example ends with the title of the comic opera Così fan tutte (1789).

In English, ottava rima first appeared in Elizabethan translations of Tasso and Ariosto. However, the form did not become popular for original works, and a section of William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals is the only known original work in the form that survives. The first English poet to write mock-heroic ottava rima was John Hookham Frere, whose 1817-8 poem Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Work used the form to considerable effect. Byron read Frere’s work and saw the potential of the form. He quickly produced Beppo, his first poem to use the form. Shortly after this, Byron began working on his Don Juan (1819-1824), probably the best-known English poem in ottava rima. Byron also used the form for his Vision of Judgment (1822). Shelley translated the Homeric Hymns into English in ottava rima. In the 20th century, William Butler Yeats used the form, with half rhyme, in several of his best later poems, including “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children”.

Outside of Italian and English, ottava rima has not been widely used, although the Spanish poets Boscan, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga and Lope de Vega all experimented with it at one time or another. It is also the meter of several medieval Yiddish epic poems, such as the Bovo-Bukh (1507-1508), which were adaptations of Italian epics. In Russia, Pavel Katenin instigated a high-profile dispute on the proper way of translating Italian epics, which resulted in Alexander Pushkin’s ottava rima poem “The Little House in Kolomna” (1830), which took its cue from Lord Byron’s Beppo. Pushkin’s poem opens with a lengthy tongue-in-cheek discussion of the merits of ottava rima.

Source: Wikipedia

Sestina

A sestina (also, sextina, sestine, or sextain) is a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time; if we number the first stanza’s lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza’s lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531. This organization is referred to as retrogradatio cruciata (“retrograde cross”). These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet’s first line usually containing 1 and 2, its second 3 and 4, and its third 5 and 6 (but other versions exist, described below). English sestinas are usually written in iambic pentameter or another decasyllabic meter.

An alternate form exists using a couplet, instead of a tercet, with the word orders 123 and 456 or 135 and 246. An even rarer form exists using a haiku, instead of a tercet, in the traditional 575 structure.

The sestina was invented in the late 12th century by the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel. Elements of it were quickly imitated by other troubadours, such as Guilhem Peire Cazals de Caortz.

The oldest British example of the form is a pair of sestinas (frequently referred to as a double sestina), “Ye Goat-Herd Gods”, written by Philip Sidney. Writers such as Dante, Petrarca, A. C. Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Joan Brossa, Miller Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Muldoon and Joe Haldeman are all noted for having written sestinas of some fame.

What some consider a “double sestina” is similar in structure to a sestina, but uses a pattern of twelve repeating end-words, reordered through twelve stanzas, with a six-line envoi.

Source: Wikipedia

The sonnet is one of the poetic forms that can be found in lyric poetry from Europe. The term “sonnet” derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning “little song”. By the thirteenth century, it had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. The conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. The writers of sonnets are sometimes referred to as “sonneteers,” although the term can be used derisively. One of the best-known sonnet writers is William Shakespeare, who wrote 154 of them. A Shakespearean, or English sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line contains ten syllables, and each line is written in iambic pentameter in which a pattern of an unemphasized syllable followed by an emphasized syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ababcdcdefef gg in which the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.

Traditionally, English poets employ iambic pentameter when writing sonnets. In the Romance languages, the hendecasyllable and Alexandrine are the most widely used metres.

Source: Wikipedia

Haiku – part one

Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 moras respectively. Haiku typically contain a kigo, or seasonal reference, and a kireji or verbal caesura. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to parallel the three metrical phrases of Japanese haiku. Previously called hokku, haiku was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki at the end of the 19th century.

In Japanese haiku a kireji, or cutting word, typically appears at the end of one of the verse’s three metrical phrases. While difficult to precisely define its function, a kireji lends the verse structural support, effectively allowing it to stand as an independent poem. Depending on which cutting word is chosen, and its position within the verse, it may briefly cut the stream of thought, suggesting a parallel between the preceding and following phrases, or it may provide a dignified ending, concluding the verse with a heightened sense of closure.

In English, since kireji has no direct equivalent, poets sometimes use punctuation such as a dash or ellipsis, or an implied break, to divide a haiku into two grammatical and imagistic parts. The purpose is to create a juxtaposition, prompting the reader to reflect on the relationship between the two parts.

A haiku traditionally contains a kigo, a defined word or phrase which symbolizes or implies the season of the poem.

Among traditionalist Japanese haiku writers, kireji and kigo are considered requirements. Kigo are not always included by modern writers of Japanese “free-form” haiku and some non-Japanese haiku.

In contrast to English verse which is typically characterized by meter, Japanese verse counts sound units (moras), known as “on”. The word on is often translated as “syllable”, but there are subtle differences between an “on” and an English-language “syllable”. Traditional haiku consist of 17 on, in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively.

The word onji is sometimes used in referring to Japanese sound units in English although this word is archaic and no longer current in Japanese.  In Japanese, the on corresponds very closely to the kana character count (closely enough that moji (or “character symbol”) is also sometimes used[6] as the count unit).

One on is counted for a short syllable, an additional one for an elongated vowel, diphthong, or doubled consonant, and one for an “n” at the end of a syllable. Thus, the word “haibun”, though counted as two syllables in English, is counted as four on in Japanese (ha-i-bu-n).

Most writers of literary haiku in English use about ten to fourteen syllables, with no formal pattern.

Source: Wikipedia

Terza Rima

Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.  Recently it was used by Jonas Hyde in Lament for Lady Beth.

Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet. The two possible endings for the example above are d-e-d, e or d-e-d, e-e. There is no set rhythm for terza rima, but in English, iambic pentameter is generally preferred.

The first known use of terza rima is in Dante’s Divina Commedia. In creating the form, Dante may have been influenced by the sirventes, a lyric form used by the Provencal troubadours. The three-line pattern may have been intended to suggest the Holy Trinity. Inspired by Dante, other Italian poets, including Petrarch and Boccaccio, began using the form.

The first English poet to write in terza rima was Geoffrey Chaucer, who used it for his Complaint to His Lady. Although a difficult form to use in English because of the relative paucity of rhyme words available in what has, in comparison with Italian, a more complex phonology, terza rima has been used by Milton, Byron (in his Prophecy of Dante) and Shelley (in his Ode to the West Wind and The Triumph of Life). A number of 20th century poets also employed the form. These include Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, Andrew Cannon, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, Clark Ashton Smith, and James Merrill. Thomas Hardy also used the form of meter in ‘Friends Beyond’ to interlink the characters and continue the flow of the poem. It is well known that Hardy admired Shelley’s work and Shelley was also a keen user of terza rima.

Source: Wikipedia