Guide to Poetic Form

 In this course, we will encounter a number of different poetic forms. You should be on the lookout for information about form in the Reading Questions and as Glossary entries linked through the volume. In addition, I will continue revising and developing this section as our work together this semester progresses.

Poetic Categories

Broadly speaking, we have three different categories of poetry that we encounter in English: the narrative (or epic), dramatic, and lyric.

Lyric

One of the oldest poetic forms in existence, lyrics will constitute the bulk of the poetry we read this semester, for lyrics are by far the most common and popular form in Victorian Britain.

M.H. Abrams’s defines the lyric as

• “any fairly short poem, consisting of utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, feeling.”

The lyric’s distinguishing feature, the thing that differentiates it from narrative and dramatic poetry, is that lyric poetry can be said to retain most prominently the elements which evidence its origin in musical expression: singing, chanting, recitation to musical accompaniment

• best known prescriptions: the lyric must be

1. brief (Poe),
2. “be one, the parts of which mutually support each other, all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influence of metrical arrangement” (Coleridge)
3. be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads)
4. be an intensely subjective and personal expression (Hegel)
5. be an “inverted action of mind upon will” (Schopenhauer)
6. be “the utterance that is overhead” (John Stuart Mill).

• Irreducible denominator: though lyric poetry is not music, it is representative of music in its sound patterns: meter and rhyme based on regular linear measure of song

20th century definitions:

• R.P. Blackmur: “Words build into their poetic meaning by building into sound . . . sound in composition: music”
• Lascelles Abercrombie: “A poet does not compose in order to make of language delightful and exciting music; he composes a delightful and exciting music in language in order to make what he has to say peculiarly efficacious in our minds.”
• James Joyce: Lyrical poetry is “the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself.”
• Northrop Frye: “an internal mimesis of sound and imagery.”=

Three types of modern lyrics: 1) lyric vision or emblem, 2) lyric of thought or idea, 3) lyric of emotion or feeling

• Lyric of Emotion: most subjective or “internal” strain of modern lyric poetry, comprised of 3 groups: 1) sensual lyric, 2) “imaginative” lyric (intellectualizes emotional states), 3) mystical lyric (opposite of lyric of emblem)

1. 1. Sensual lyric: unbroken continuity from 16th to 20th century; e.g. Elizabethan love poetry; erotica of Restoration and 18th century; synaesthetic images of Keats and Romantics; symbolist glorification of self and its peculiar sensations; existentialists; Ranges in theme from carpe diem to memento mori
   2. Imaginative lyric: also known as “intellectualized lyric of emotion”; e.g. “verbalized feelings” of Romantics
   3. Mystical lyric: perhaps an attempt to find substitute for Greek myths which provoked the classical lyric or Christian mythography which stimulated medieval lyric; e.g. Blake, Hopkins, Yeats

Ode

• single, unified strain of exalted lyrical verse
• directed to a single purpose
• dealing with one theme
• ode is elaborate, dignified, and imaginative
• more complicated than most lyric types

Three types of odes in English:

1. Pindaric (regular): three-strophe division; strophe and antistrophe alike in form, the epode different (ex. Gray’s “The Bard”)
2. Horatian (homostrophic): consists of only one stanza type, which may be almost infinitely varied w/in it pattern (ex. Coleridge’s “Ode to France”)
3. Irregular: much more flexible than the other two; affords greatest freedom of expression and greatest license as well (ex. Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”)

Keats’s odes:

• devised a number of regular or irregular stanzas, the basic being ten iambic lines mostly pentameter with rhyme scheme combining the heroic quatrain (or the first quatrain of the English sonnet) and the sestet of an Italian sonnet: ABABCDECDE

fragment: (ex. “Kubla Khan”)

• fragment forces the reader to read actively; we must piece together the narrative
• anxiety: we’re immersed in individual point of view of story
• influence on Browning’s dramatic monologue

Dramatic lyric

A monologue uttered in an identifiable situation at a dramatic moment, ex. Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”