What is poetry?
Developed by Vivion Smith, adapted from work by Susan Giansanti, Jules NelsonHill & Ellen Beck red bar Basic definition of poetry • traditional • modern • types of poems • epithalamium • elegy • pastoral • love Parts of a poem • speaker • persona • dramatic monologue • audience • subject • tone • theme • diction • denotation • connotation • syntax • imagery • olfactory (smell) • tactile (touch) • visual (sight) • auditory (hearing) • gustatory (taste) • kinesthesia (feeling of action) • synaesthesia (sensory) • figures of speech • simile • metaphor • personification • anthropomorphism • synecdoche • metonymy • allusion • symbolism • verbal irony • overstatement • understatement • paradox • oxymoron • sound • rhyme • rhyme scheme • rhythm • meter • organization • couplets • tercets • quatrains • blank verse • free verse Basic Definition Poetry is the most compressed form of literature. Poetry is composed of carefully chosen words expressing great depth of meaning. Poetry uses specific d
A short piece of imaginative writing, of a personal nature and laid out in lines is the usual answer. Will that do? Poetry definitions are difficult, as is aesthetics generally. What is distinctive and important tends to evade the qualified language in which we attempt to cover all considerations. Perhaps we could say that poetry was a responsible attempt to understand the world in human terms through literary composition. The terms beg many questions, of course, but poetry today is commonly an amalgam of three distinct viewpoints. Traditionalist argue that a poem is an expression of a vision that is rendered in a form intelligible and pleasurable to others and so likely to arouse kindred emotions. For Modernists, a poem is an autonomous object that may or may not represent the real world but is created in language made distinctive by its complex web of references. Postmodernists look on on poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-contained they employ, challeng
