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Time: 12 hours
Level: Introductory
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 Introduction Resource- This unit introduces common techniques underlying free verse and traditional forms of poetry, and how it is necessary to use these techniques in order to harness what T.S. Eliot called the ‘logic of the...
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| | 1 What is poetry?: an introduction
- 1 What is poetry?: an introduction Resource
- Poems, unlike crosswords, don't have a straightforward solution. In fact, a careful examination of the clues laid by the poet may lead to more questions than answers. Let's start this unit, then, with...
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- 2 Forming the form Resource
- By and large, readers tend to agree whether a poem ‘works’ or not, even if it's not clear how or why it works. The best poems retain a certain mystery, but subsequent analysis invariably reveals various...
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- 3 What is poetry? Resource
- We can possibly best define what poetry is by saying what it isn't. For one thing, poetry, unlike prose, cannot be paraphrased. If you could sum it up succinctly in any other fashion you wouldn't write...
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| | 4 Impersonation and imagination
- 4 Impersonation and imagination Resource
- Listen to Track 3, where Jackie Kay, Paul Muldoon and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze talk about the importance of autobiography to their poems as well as the importance of using the imagination to harness other people's...
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- 5.1 Lines and line-breaks Resource
- Poets are skilled at noticing things, and one of the things we should learn to notice is how other poets employ the various devices at their disposal. All poems, even those which don't conform to a pre-existing...
- 5.2 Free verse Resource
- Although we can't make rules about what constitutes a poem, we can see that even when writing free verse, where lines and line-breaks may be irregular, form is still important. Free verse still makes use...
- 5.3 Stanzas and verse Resource
- The poem ‘The literal and the metaphor’, which you read in Section 5.1, was divided into two sections. We call these verses or stanzas, and they are the poetic equivalent of paragraphs, but with more shape,...
- 5.4 Tercets Resource
- The following poem is written in tercets.
- 5.5 Quatrains Resource
- The following poem is comprised of four quatrains.
- 5.6 Other stanza lengths Resource
- Other stanza lengths include the sestet, and the octave.
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- 6 Rhyme Resource
- Now listen to Track 4, on which Jackie Kay and Paul Muldoon talk about rhyme.
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| | 7 Other rhyming techniques
- 7 Other rhyming techniques Resource
- Near- or half rhymes are words or combinations of words that achieve only a partial rhyme. Half rhymes can be between words with just one syllable, or between parts of words, for example where...
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- 8 Stress and rhythm Resource
- All words are comprised of stressed and unstressed syllables. Any line of poetry (or, indeed, any text) can be marked to show which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed. The act of mapping out...
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- 9 Metre Resource
- As we have seen, scansion is the act of mapping out stress patterns in order to ascertain the metre (rhythm). In the accentual-syllabic system, the dominant tradition in English, both accents (stresses)...
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- 10 Hold that space! Resource
- The caesura is the stress which falls at a moment of silence. It's the equivalent of a musical rest and is usually delineated by punctuation. Composers and poets recognise the importance of the space between...
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- Glossary Resource
- Now you have completed this unit, you might like to:
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| | References and Acknowledgements | |
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