UNITE ONE

1. WHAT IS POETRY?

Literature, as you must have learnt in your previous studies, comprises some major types or
forms or genres. These major types, which could be further reduced to sub-types or categories,
are three and they are poetry, drama and novel or prose fiction. It is important for you to note
that these literary types are not defined or based on thematic focus, since all three types often
share common themes as literature. They are categorized strictly by their stylistic features. Thus
the best approach to the study or understanding of these major forms is by noting their elements
or defining characteristics which are as follows:

Brainstorming

1. What is poetry to you? How do you define it?

2. Do you think poetry is the same as prose? What makes them different?

3. Can you list some of the peculiar features of poetry?

Though the very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it
nearly impossible to define, it means a lot of things to several people.

To the ancient Greeks and Romance, poetry was the medium of spirituality and philosophical
expression. For instance, EPICS such as ILLIAD (Homer) and the AENEID (Virgil) are written
in verse, and so are dramas such as OEDIPUS THE KING and ANTIGONE. Passages of the
Bible, the Koran and the Hindu holy books are also written in poetry.

Today, throughout the world, poetry continues to delight and inspire. For many people, in many
places, poetry is the language of the emotions, the medium of expression they use when they
speak from their heart.

→ Despite the long standing place of poetry in our lives, however, many people – including
poets themselves – have difficulty defining what poetry is.

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There are as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. Wordsworth defined poetry as "the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings;" Dylan Thomas defined poetry this way:"Poetry is
what makes me laugh or cry or yawn, what makes my toenails twinkle, what makes me want to
do this or that or nothing." Poetry is a lot of things to a lot of people. As with art itself, the
definition of poetry is under constant debate. Below is a list of some definitions by few scholars.

• Poetry is the language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something
that cannot be said. All poetry, great or small, does this. - Edwin Arlington Robinson.

•I would define poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste.
With the intellect or with the conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it
has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth. – Edgar Allan Poe

•Poetry is the imaginative expression of strong feeling, usually rhythmical...the spontaneous

overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity. – William Wordsworth

•The proper and immediate object of Science is the acquirement or communication of truth; the
proper and immediate object of Poetry is the communication of pleasure. - Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

•Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds. – Percy
Bysshe Shelley

•An actual poem is the succession of experiences – sounds, images, thoughts, emotions – through
which we pass when we are reading as poetically as we can. - Andrew Bradley

•...the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision
– Dylan Thomas

• Poetry is an escape from personality. ----T.S. Eliot

• Poetry is a singing bird with honey in its beak. --- Keats

• Poetry is the commonsense of the soul. --- W.B. Yeats

→ Poetry is artistically rendering words in such a way as to evoke intense emotion or an ‘Ah
Ha!’ experience from the reader.

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→ The sound of human speech at those times when it comes closest to the speech of angels and
the speech of animals

→ The art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion of imagination, the art
of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors.

→ It is the most beautiful, the most impressive and the most effective mode of saying things.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold that no fire can ever warm me, I know that
it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. –
Emily Dickinson

From the above definitions or explanations of what poetry is, it is clear as we have said earlier on
that there cannot be a single definition that will be comprehensive enough to accommodate the
various shades of opinions and schools of thought regarding the exact nature of the genre. While
one cannot correctly adjudge one definition as superior, better or more comprehensive than
another, it is true that each of them has its point of emphasis which in turn places it in one or the
other of the great literary/creative debate over content, style and effect. It is thus clear that Edgar
Allan Poe’s conception of poetry as expressed above emphasises style or form over content and
effect while, on the other hand, both William Wordsworth and Edwin Arlington Robinson focus
more attention on content and effect in their definitions to reflect their English and American
Romantic pedigrees respectively. In this regard, you should take particular note of Emily
Dickinson’s own idea of poetry whose essential criterion is the effect it has on her and is capable
of having on a reader. In a final analysis, one cannot fault any one of these definitions given the
special interests and period fascinations that shape them.

Besides the individual emphases noted in the definitions we have used as samples above, we
should take note of the occurrence of some common words and phrases such as
emotions/feelings, rhythm/rhythmical, truth, pleasure, imaginative expression, language, etc
which underscore the protean nature of poetry and which make it susceptible to being conceived
of variously by definers the way the proverbial blind men saw and defined the elephant.

WHY DO YOU THINK IS POETRY HAVING SUCH A DIVERSIFIED DEFINITION?

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→ One way of defining poetry is to say that it uses language to condense experience into an
intensely concentrated package, with each sound, each word, each image, and each line carrying
great weight.

Why is it difficult to pin down what makes a particular arrangement of words or lines as poem?

The difficulty might arise because poetry has MANY GUISES (appearances)

A poetry may be short or long It may be accessible or obscure

It may express a mood or tell a story

It may conform to a familiar poetic FORM or follow NO conventional pattern It MAY or MAY
NOT have a regular, identifiable meter or a rhyme scheme.

It may depend heavily on elaborate imagery, figures of speech, irony, complex allusion or
symbols, or repeated sounds—OR it may include NONE of these features conventionally
associated with poetry

MUST poetry be written to DELIGHT or INSPIRE, or can a poem have a Political or Social
MESSAGE? And MUST these messages be conveyed SUBTLY, embellished with imaginatively
chosen sounds and words, OR can it be explicit and straight forward?

→ These questions have no EASY answers—and perhaps NO answer at all!

SO, DEFINING WHAT A POEM IS (AND IS NOT) IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE!

It is true that most poems, particularly, those divided into stanzas, look like poems, and it is also
true that poems tend to use compressed language. Beyond this, however, what makes a poem a
poem is more a matter of degree than question of whether or not it conforms to a strict set of
rules. A poem is likely to use more imagery, figurative language, rhyme, and so on that a prose
piece—but, then again, it may not.

SO WHAT?

Actually, you should bear in mind that there is not a single all-encompassing definition of poetry.
Poetry (ancient Greek: poieo = create) is an art form in which human language is used for its
aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists
largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and
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audience to differ from ordinary prose. It may use condensed or compressed form to convey
emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as
assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for
their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used.

The terms beg many questions, of course, but poetry today is commonly an amalgam of three
distinct viewpoints. Traditionalists 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
poems as collages of current idioms that are intriguing but self-contained — they employ,
challenge and/or mock preconceptions, but refer to nothing beyond themselves.

Nature/ Features of poetry

What makes poetry distinct from other genres of literature?

Even if we accept that poetry can be verse — verse simply having a strong metrical element —
poetry is surely distinguished by moving us deeply.

It is different from prose because prose conveys meaning in a more expansive and less
condensed way.

Poetry contains the features of both literature and music. It has the features of literature because
it highly depend on various figures of speech like metaphor – a literary technique used to
compare one thing to another (X is Y), Imagery – a literary element in poetry used to paint
picture in the mind of the reader or listener, and many other techniques. It has features of music
as it depends on Rhyme, rhythm, meter, tone pacing and other aural elements. It also appeals to
our ear and thus play a crucial role in establishing mood.

Poetry is the art of the unsayable – a good poem lies somewhere beyond mere words—it is
intangible, exultation in things vaguely apprehended.

Poems are acts of discovery- and require immense effort to write and to be understood.

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Poems are not created by recipe (formula) – or by pouring content into a currently acceptable
mould. Shape and content interact, in the final product and throughout the creation process, so
that the poems will be continually asking what you are writing and why.

Poems have meaning—poems can describe an interesting place or person, tell a story or explain
feelings.

Poems have sounds—poems are different from other types of writing in having peculiar sound.
Poems may have rhyming words, a regular rhythm like music, words with repeated sounds, or
even words that sound like their meaning.

Poems have Images—poems create pictures in our mind called IMAGES. Images often refer to
our sense of sight, smell sound, taste and touch. An image may describe something or, it may
compare one thing to another. Images help you see something as if it is really there.

Poems have lines—they have lines that may be long or short, and can be made up of whole
sentences or sentence fragments. Some poems have lines arranged in stanzas. A stanza is a group
of lines that are arranged in a definite pattern. In other poems, the lines make a picture or shape
to illustrate the topic.

Poems have Pattern— poems have patterns of letters, syllables and words. These patterns often
help you to hear the rhythm of a poem. Some types of poems have patterns with a particular
number of syllables in each line, and others have words repeated throughout the poem

Poetic truth and scientific truth

In order to understand the nature of poetry, it is good to contrast it with science. Poetry is an
interpretation of life in which the emotional and aesthetic elements predominate. Science also is
an interpretation of life, but in its interpretation the logical and rational elements predominate.
That means, both poetry and science interpret life, but while the former is subjective, the latter is
objective. Science is concerned with the objective aspects of nature and life. It observes nature
closely, collects as much data as possible and from the data it arrives at a general conclusion with
the help of reason and logic. Poetry on the contrary is, not concerned with the objective facts, but
with the emotional and aesthetic reactions of men to those facts. Let us take, for example, an
objective fact in nature, say a lily flower. The botanists study that flower objectively. After

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having studied it is physical and anatomical features, he calls it ‘hexandria monogynia’. The
poet, on the other hand, is not at all concerned with its scientific aspects; he is concerned with the
aesthetic appeal of the flower. In order to convey its beauty, he will poetically call it ‘the queen
of the garden’. To the scientist this description is a lie or at least an untruth. But aesthetically and
poetically it is a truth. Both the scientist and the poet have reached the truth in their own way.
Thus, poetic truth is different from scientific truth.

Schools of poetry

Didactic poetry

A poem, the chief object of which is to teach or instruct, is called a didactic poem. A poem
becomes didactic if the moral content or the philosophical content of the poem is greater than the
purely aesthetic or poetic qualities in it. Arnold says that excel in poetry comes out of powerful
application of moral ideas to life. It means that there must be some didacticism in poetry. This
view is supported by the opinion of other writers also. For example, Coleridge says, “No man
was ever yet a great poet without being at the sum a philosopher.” Wordsworth says, “Let me be
a teacher or let me be nothing.” It is clear from these statements that great poets like
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Arnold believed in the didacticism in poetry. But we are not to
confuse the functions of a poet with those of a preacher or moralist. The chief aim of the poet
must be to please, not to instruct. The philosophical or moral lesson must be conveyed
unobtrusively to the reader without spoiling the aesthetic and artistic qualities of the poem.
Arnold himself has said that the criticism of life in poetry must be subject to the conditions of
poetic truth and poetic beauty. Dryden also says that delight is the chief end of poetry;
instruction can be admitted, but only in the second place. We have no objection to a poet who
offers us philosophy in verse. We require only that his/her philosophy must be shaped into a
thing of beauty and presented indirectly wrapped in the bewitching garment of poetry.

Aesthetic poetry

There is a school of poetry which is exactly the opposite of didactic school. It is called the
aesthetic school of poetry. Poets who belong to this school have a horror of didacticism. Their
doctrine is ‘Art for Art’s sake’. Aestheticism is the theory that attaches importance to beauty as
the central principle in art. Beauty must be the sole object and consideration; every other

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consideration must give way to it. “Art for Art’s sake” insists on the perfection of the technical to
the exclusion of moral, political or other related ends. The movement of aestheticism began in
France and later in England. It developed in the hands of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. But this
doctrine of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ was brought into discredit by the rank of its advocates. They had
all been mediocre men. The really great poets of the world had taken no account of it. The
greatest poems of the world are those that contain criticism of life- criticism subject to poetic
truth and poetic beauty.

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 UNIT TWO

THE HISTORY OF POETRY

Throughout history, poets have been writing about their thoughts and feelings to reach people
with similar experiences. Poetry is one of the oldest mediums for expressing one’s emotions, and
there are many different eras to explore. For example, English poetry has its roots in ancient
times when poems were primarily about love or religion.

The historical timeline of poetry from ancient poetry in 5000 BC till the modern era dating from
1850 to the present. We will discover how the art form has evolved over the centuries both in
popularity and influence.

1. Ancient Poetry: 5000 BC

The evolution of poetry began over 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia with the invention of
cuneiform. These poems found on clay tablets detailed how the ancient kings would rule their
people.

Poetry is believed to have originated from ancient rituals and chants used for storytelling
purposes when performing religious ceremonies or rites of passage such as weddings or funerals.

Poets such as Homer and Virgil were revered during ancient times. These poets would often
recite their poems publicly, and they were considered entertainment for those who could afford
it.

Today, many people still use these spoken-word forms, such as in wedding ceremonies or
funerals and presidential inaugurations, which typically include hymns and poetry readings by
professional performers at these events.

The oldest known poem today, The Epic of Gilgamesh (2100-1200 BC), was created in
Mesopotamia, and it’s believed he copied them from earlier works that have been lost or never
found for future generations to enjoy.

2. Medieval Poetry: 400 AD

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The Medieval Period was a time of war and a time of change in the world and its people. This is
shown through poetry: new forms emerged, including rhyming couplets and ballads with
refrains.

For example, one such poem from the 12th century (or 1150) called “Beowulf” tells about a
great warrior who battles monsters to save his people. This poem is written much like ancient
sagas were composed—alliteration and other devices are used for effect rather than an orderly
scheme.

The era also saw the rise of the troubadours or travelling poets who sang of the beauty and power
of God. They spread their messages through song-writing as they journeyed from place to place,
searching for patrons—usually noblemen—who could support them financially.

Poetry also flourished because it was an essential part of education; many nobles were expected
to write poetry themselves! Poems would often be written about nature, love, religion and more
abstract topics addressing life’s big mysteries like death and war.

3. The Renaissance Era: 1500 AD

In the Renaissance era, poets had rediscovered many classical texts from ancient Greece and
Rome – which made them feel inspired again! They also wrote about love, nature and religion;
however, this time, there was an emphasis on writing poetry specifically for public performance.

The Renaissance period in Western history is often referred to as the “Golden Age” of literature.
The term originated from a 16th-century French scholar, Jean-Baptiste de la Croix du Maine and
was first published in 1547.

This period began with a shift from Medieval forms to Classical styles, which can be seen most
prominently in poetry. This shift took place around 1500 AD and marks the end of what is
known as the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern Period.

Poetry during this time became much more interested in classical themes such as mythology or
nature rather than Christian themes like those found in medieval writings, which had been
heavily influenced by religion.

4. Neo-Classical Poetry: 1660-1800

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The mid-17th century brought about a revival of classicism. There was now an interest in the
ancient world, specifically Greece and Rome. Writers like John Dryden and Ben Jonson began to
use this renewed interest as inspiration for their work.

In addition to that, poets wanted to explore writing poetry with integrity which led them back
towards more traditional forms like epics, odes and sonnets instead of experimenting with new
Styles such as rhyming couplets or free verse.

This return also meant that content became more serious once again while prose began exploring
topics not seen before within literature, including politics, philosophy, and medicine.

In 1660, England saw the publication of John Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis. This poem resulted
from the English Restoration and marked a crucial turning point in English literature as it shifted
away from Puritanism to more secular themes.

5. The Romantic Era: 1798- 1850 AD

The Romantic poetry movement originated in the late 18th century and lasted until 1850. It was
characterized by an emphasis on subjectivity, emotion, spontaneity and the natural world.

The poets of this era were considered to be more accessible than those before them because they
wrote about everyday life rather than lofty subjects or themes that were not relatable to most
readers.

The Romantics tended to focus on feelings and emotion rather than logic or reason. One of the
most famous poets from this era was William Wordsworth, who wrote about the natural world
and its connection.

He shared these thoughts with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a fellow poet in Britain at that time.
This led them to create what is now known as Lyrical Ballads, which emphasized sensory
description and narrative over formal rules or logic.

The Romantics also profoundly valued nature and human emotion when creating art. They
believed that artists should represent their own emotional experience or imaginative response
rather than communicate factual information about people or events outside themselves.

6. Modern Poetry: 1850- Present

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It’s hard to believe that the Modern poetry era has only been around for about a century. After
all, it is what we are living in now, and it seems like we’ve been reading this type of poetry ever
since the beginning of time. But its roots are not very deep, and it just started with one man: Walt
Whitman.

Walt’s works were some of the most innovative and influential poems ever written in America.
This includes “Song of Myself”, which has been called one of his best long poems because it
captured so much about human nature that nobody had yet expressed before him on paper, such
as democratic self-love and acceptance for all types of people, genders, races and sexualities.

The first Modernists came to be in the mid-1800s, and they set out to break with many of the
established traditions of poetry. The Modernist poets, such as T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Ezra
Pound (1885-1972), are some of the most prominent writers.

The Romanticists who preceded this era wrote about nature and their emotions, whereas the
Modernists were interested in exploring more complicated human psychology and society. As
subjects changed for poets, so did their methods of writing poetry.

Many would argue that modern poets write with free verse rather than formal rhyme or metered
rhythm. These poets sought to use a more conversational voice grounded in lived experience
rather than relying on traditional poetic forms or even form at all for their poems.

Modern poets also often use other media to present their work, such as in the case of Allen
Ginsberg (1926-1997), who published his poem “Howl” with drawings by William Blake.

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1.2. Typology of poetry

In abroad way, poetry can be classified under two heads: personal or subjective poetry and
impersonal or objective poetry. The -impersonal or objective poetry- the poet goes out of
himself, mingles with the actions and passions of the outside world and deals with what he
discovers there with little reference to his own individuality. The epic, ballad, dramatic
monologue and short narrative poems are coming under this section. The second category is
personal or subjective poetry; the poet gets deep down into himself and finds his inspiration and
themes in his own experiences, thoughts and feelings. The ode, sonnet, elegy and other
miscellaneous lyrics are belonging to this category. The term lyrical poetry is often loosely
applied to all kinds of subjective poetry.

1.2.1 Narrative poetry

1.2.1.1 The Epic

The epic is a poem composed or written on a grand scale, usually in many separate books or
volumes, concerned with the exploits of some great national, historical or legendary character or
hero. In other words, an epic celebrates in the form of a continuous narrative the feats of one or
more heroic characters of history or tradition. Accordingly, as a rule, the epic treats a theme of
lofty nature and consequently its characters are usually of high social standing or are very
powerful forces. As is to be expected, the narrative of an epic is presented in such a way that the
actions of the subject intimate and comment on the values and destiny of a particular people or
race in spite of its episodic nature.

There are two major types of the epic, namely: the primary (folk) and the secondary (art) epics.
A primary epic is the type that draws its sustenance mainly from the oral tradition of a people
hence the label ‘folk’, while the secondary epic is a modification and reorganized version by
identifiable or known authors. This latter type is, as a result of its very basis and nature, written
with much literary sophistication by poets who imitate the primary epic in both subject and
manner.

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1.2.1.1 Characteristics of an Epic

Whether folk or art, epics share a set of common general characteristics and conventions as
follows:

 The poet commences his narration by stating his theme and invokes the Muse to inspire
and instruct him in his task
 The story begins ‘in medias res’, that is in the middle of things and proceeds to recount
the great deeds of the heroes with objectivity.
 The action in which supernatural forces participate is one, great and entire
 Story is of great length and scope with the action taking place over a long period of time
and extending over several nations, the world of the poets’ day or the imagined universe.
 The hero who is a person of great stature and legendary and historical significance and
performs superhuman actions is more of the concern of the audience or reader because he
symbolizes the aspirations and destiny of his nation or race.
 Narrative style is grand and alternates between the sublime or sustained elevation and
grand simplicity.
 Story includes elaborate formal speeches by the main characters.
 The constituent episodes of narrative easily arise from the main story and, as a result,
there are no parts that could be detached from it without loss to the whole.
 Epic poet incorporates a long list of warriors, armies, war machines which necessitate
employment of the fitting vehicle of the epic simile or extended comparison.
Well known examples of the epic in English literature include the following:

Traditional/folk/primary – Homer’s Iliad, Odyssey; Anglo-Saxon

Beowulf; the Indian Mahabharata, the French Chanson de Roland and the Spanish El
Cid.Art/Literary/Secondary – Virgil’s Aeneid; Milton’s Paradise Lost.

1.2.2 Ballad

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The ballad, one of the earliest form of poetry, is a song that tells a story or conversely a story told
through song. Thus a ballad is a short narrative poem, adapted for singing, simple in plot and
metrical in structure, divided into stanzas of four lines (quatrains) rhyming alternately and
characterized by complete impersonality as far as the author or singer is concerned.

As in the epic, there are two main types of the ballad, namely: the folk ballad (also referred to as
the popular or traditional ballad) and the art or literary ballad. These terms equally intimate the
origins and nature of this type of poetry similar to the distinctions we have seen in the epic genre.
Accordingly, a folk ballad is anonymous but we can safely infer that there must have been a poet
since all poems are mostly composed by individual poets. According to Hugh Holman “debate
still rages as to whether the ballad originates with an individual composer or as a group or
communal activity” (52). Whether as individual or group composition, the personal emotions of
the composer or poet do not manifest in his work. There is no first person singular (I), but where
it strays in, it is always found in the context of the speech by identifiable characters in the poem
to whom it refers. In studying the folk ballad, we are studying the poetry of the traditional people
as different from the poetry of art as in the art ballad whose writer, who may modify and use folk
materials, is known. Thus, oral transmission is the medium of spreading the song of the folk
ballad.

1.2.2.1 Features of the Ballad

Some common characteristic features of the ballad as a form of poetry should be noted to enable
you identify, describe and critique when required, as follows:

 Impersonality and unsentimentally.

 Anonymity of authorship and consequent lack of authorial comments
 Simple repetition.
 Incremental repetition meant to slow down action and thus add to suspense and
emphasize the points in a dialogue.
 Focus on a single episode.
unnecessary descriptions and points.
 Absence or minimal utilization of figures of speech.

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  Use of refrains which aids musicality in the poem as well as perform the functions
of repetition noted above.
 Stereotype or stock epithets and concrete diction.
 Quatrain stanzas.
As a general rule, the ballad uses a common measure of a four line stanza rhyming abab ;abcb or
xaxa.

You should note that in this rhyming pattern the first and third lines could rhyme (represented as
‘a’ in abab), while the second and fourth lines (represented as ‘b’) must rhyme. In some ballads,
however, the first and third lines may not rhyme (as in abcb and xaxa, where ‘x’ represents ‘no
rhyme’ and this deviation does not disqualify such lines as ballad stanzas.

1.2.2. Lyric poetry

1.2.2.1 Elegy

An elegy is a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet’s meditations upon death or
another solemn theme (Holman 183). The meditation is often occasioned by the death of a
particular person, a painful loss or a general calamity that touches not just the poet as an
individual but a wider spectrum of persons in his community or man generally. Thus the poem
may also be a generalized observation or the expression of a solemn mood. Other poetic types
that are akin to the elegy and whose labels are often misused in reference to the elegy are (1) the
dirge, a short, less formal and usually in the form of a text to be sung, with sub-types such as
threnody which is mainly an equivalent to the dirge and monody which is an elegy presented as
an utterance by one person.

The following are popular examples of the elegy in English literature: John Milton’s “Lycidas”;
Alfred Tennyson’s “In Memoriam ”; WH Auden’s “In Memory of WB Yeats” and William
Gray’s “Elegy, Writ ten in a Country Churchyard”. You should find a suitable anthology of
English poetry and read these poems so as to be able to identify and discuss an elegy, no matter
the variant, that you come across one.

An ancient category of the elegy is the pastoral elegy in which the poet or mourner and the dead
or the one mourned, who is also a poet, are characterized as shepherds. The name pastoral is

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derived from the Greek word pastor, which means shepherd. MH Abrams, using one of the
notable examples of the pastoral elegy, has identified seven fundamental conventions that have
marked this poetic form from its earliest Greek form through the Renaissance as follows:

 The invocation of the muses and frequent references to other figures from classical
mythology.
 All of nature is implicated or joins in mourning the shepherd’s death.
 The mourner charges with negligence the nymphs or other guardians of the dead.
 There is a procession of mourners.
 The poet raises questions about the justice of divine providence and goes on to comments
on the decadence of his contemporary society in seeming digressions which are often
integral to the development of the mourner’s line of thought as in “Lycidas”.
 In Post-Renaissance elegies, flowers are brought in to deck the hearse in an elaborate
passage.
 There is a closing consolation, especially in Christian elegies, where the tone of the poem
changes from that of grief and despair to joy and assurance and an epiphany realization
that death is a necessary prelude to a higher life.
Bearing in mind the above general thematic and stylistic characteristics of the elegy as a poetic
form, we will now take a look at a local example to illustrate the universal application of these
features in the following Igbo (Nigeria) piece:

My brother, death has crushed my heart.

My brother has left me at crossroads

My brother has left me hanging over the fire like a parcel of meat to dry

But a parcel of meat over the fire will still have

Somebody to touch it.

Death has reaped me up like cocoyam and peeled off my tubers

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My left hand has turned to my back

Death has turned me into bitterness itself

My mirror is broken

My own is past (Egudu&Nwoga,)

1.2.2.2 Ode
An ode is a rhymed or rarely unrhymed lyric poem often in the form of an address, expressive of
exalted or enthusiastic emotion (usually of exalted style and enthusiastic tone), especially one of
varied or irregular meter. An ode is usually between 50 and 200 lines long and it was originally
intended to be sung or at least recited. It has been defined by Gosse as “any strain of enthusiastic
and exalted lyrical verse, directed to a fixed purpose, and dealing progressively with one
dignified them (Read the sample Ode).
1.2.2.3 Sonnet

The sonnet is a poem generally expressive of a single, complete thought, idea, or sentiment. It is
made up of 14 lines, usually five-foot iambic pentameters, with lines arranged according to one
of certain definite rhyme schemes. Holman defines this poetic form as “a lyric form of fourteen
lines, highly arbitrary inform, and following one or another of several rhyme schemes”. You
should take note of the section of this definition that I have highlighted; we shall have cause to
refer back to it as we study the various structural and prosodic manifestations of the sonnet.

There are three main types of the sonnet; these are the Petrarchan or Italian; the Miltonic; the
Shakespearean or Elizabethan. We should note that although the sonnet was originally an Italian
poetic form, hence the name of the prototypic form - Petrarchan/Italian, it had a very large
following in the English poetic tradition beginning from the sixteenth century. The earliest
English or Elizabethan sonneteers are Isaac Wyatt, Phillip Sidney (“Astrophel and Stella”
sequence), Edmund Spenser (“Amoretti” sequence) and they set the tone by deploying their
poems as vehicles for impassioned amorous, religious, and friendly adulation.

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