Definition Of Poetry Essay

Language is a remarkable thing. It can convey every thought, feeling, and emotion with perfect accuracy. Almost exclusively, language has taken awkward, unfit animals out of nature and made them rulers over the earth and many of its elements. When used well, it has the power to change an individual's view of the world, make someone believe they have seen something they have not, and even more astonishingly, look inside one's self and see what exists. If language is mixed with the tempo of music, something new arises; poetry is born. When words and ideas are set to a beat, they can far more subtly convey concepts that would otherwise need to be explicitly stated and the poem can be appreciated more as a whole,

What is poetry? Is poetry about your feelings? Is poetry meant for you to deliberate or read between the lines? Elizabeth Alexander, a black educator that teaches poetry, believes that poetry is where you are your true self and finding yourself. In 2005, she published one of her poems called “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe.” She constructed the poem to speak to her students about her meaning of poetry. Poetry causes various emotions, various content, and based on various forms of realities.

In this essay I am going to compare and contrast ‘When we two parted’ a poem of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s written in 1815 and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s ‘Love’s last lesson’ written in c1838, both poets are British and of the romantic period.

The poem Mezzo Cammin by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow explains his regretful life and his reasoning at why he didn’t live it to its full potential and how he looks at his past. It then looks to his future as being near and bearing a huge weight down on him. The way Longfellow talks about his life is depressing. He doesn’t speak of the good accomplishments, only the things he hasn’t done until he looks back into the past and then forward at how the future may be.

Poetry is considered to be a representational text in which one explores ideas by using symbols. Poetry can be interpreted many different ways and is even harder to interpret when the original author has come and gone. Poetry is an incredible form of literature because the way it has the ability to use the reader as part of its own power. In other words, poetry uses the feelings and past experiences of the reader to interpret things differently from one to another, sometimes not even by choice of the author. Two famous poets come to mind to anybody who has ever been in an English class, Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings. Both of these poets have had numerous famous pieces due to the fact that they both

Once I was able to associate these words to emotions and issues present in everyday life, the poem started to make me feel sad. I began thinking about all of the emotions and feelings that everyone hides as they go about life. For example, how the waitress I see once a week may have an eating disorder, or how the singer I look up to just lost her son, or the businessman who got laid off today. Everyone has their own personal battle that they carry everywhere, at any given moment. This explains why the setting is so plain, since the internal struggles people face affect them even at a bus stop. While each person waits, the waitress may be thinking about how much skinnier the person next to her is. The singer could be remembering when she held her baby. And the business man could be planning how to break the news to his wife. No matter how small, everyone experiences a type of trauma or bad experience, and this poem seemed to show what happens when these emotions become bottled up. No one can help each other because they are so stuck within their own issues. The difficulty helping others reminded me of the idea of having to take care of yourself before being able to take care of others.

Prompt: Read the following two poems very carefully, noting that the second includes an allusion to the first. Then write a well-organized essay in which you discuss their similarities and differences. In your essay, be sure to consider both theme and style.

Reflections Within is a non-traditional stanzaic poem made up of five stanzas containing thirty-four lines that do not form a specific metrical pattern. Rather it is supported by its thematic structure. Each of the five stanzas vary in the amount of lines that each contain. The first stanza is a sestet containing six lines. The same can be observed of the second stanza. The third stanza contains eight lines or an octave. Stanzas four and five are oddly in that their number of lines which are five and nine.

This poem is about a teenage girl who is servilely depressed, because she is abused by her parents. She thinks she can escape what she is dealing with by doing drug, and is taking killing herself into consideration. She thinks by taking her own life she will finally be happy and never again have to deal with the pain her parents put her though. Her “dreams” are literal, but also are her thoughts when she is high on drugs “I sleep in the clouds, dream in the sky / I’ll keep dreaming as life passes me by / I think my dreams keep me sane” (See appendix). The drugs are keeping her sane, because they are stopping her from killing herself, because they are temporally taking the pain away “I dream of happiness, a life without pain” (4).

Poetry is a form of English that I like to call free. I say it is free because there are no boundaries to what you can say and there is no wrong way to write poetry. Poetry allows the act of expression to exist without the consistency of having to worry about punctuation, complete sentences, and length. Another aspect of poetry I enjoy is the interpretation one receives while reading. A poem can have many interpretations because no two people think alike or read things the same.

In Greek poetry means I create, but to some poetry has a deeper meaning to it therefore the question asked by many is what is poetry? According to the dictionary, poetry is literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature. Although many people believe that poetry is a way to escape, to escape from all the problems that might be occurring around them. It is said that poets write to enable readers to envision the places and events in the writer's mind, to get the reader thinking like the poets and also getting them to see things in the perspective of the poet. To write a side of a story that get people wondering and thinking.

Poetry is a varied art form. Poetry is expression with words, using aesthetics and definition. Word choice in poetry is the single most important thing. Devices such as assonance, alliteration and rhythm work in a poem to convey a certain image or to facilitate understanding. Similes and metaphors can take two unlike objects, such as a potato and cinderblock, and if done the correct way use them to describe how Abraham Lincoln dealt with scoundrels. Poetry is beautiful. One of the best genres in poetry, let alone a great literary movement is Romanticism or the post-enlightenment Romantics.

Poetry allows the writer, the reader and even those listening to get a deeper sense of being. It gives us the opportunity to break free from simple and boring routine. If done correctly a poem will done correctly a poem will be able to stir emotion, and create wonder. In order to this however all the part that make up a poem must be in sync. Its tone, diction, imaginary, rhythm, symbolism and subject matter are all critical areas. A good poem will draw an emotional reaction from its audience, whether those are light and upbeat or darker more serious feelings they will come away with a new experience, changed by what they just experienced. Two such poems that embody what a good poem should be are “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath and “Harlem”, also published as “Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes. These poems elevate the experience for reading, listening and writing poetry, and serve as an excellent reference for a poem should be.

Poetry is literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm, poems collectively or as a genre of literature. It is also a quality of beauty and intensity of emotion regarded as characteristic of poems. Poetry (poem) is something that follows a particular flow of rhythm and meter. Compare to prose, where there is no such restriction, and the content of the piece flows according to the story, a poem may or may not have a story, but definitely has structured method of writing.

Socratic moral philosophy is important in poetry because it engages poets in rational thinking when making poems. Poetry is mostly communicated through written texts; it can be used to expand one’s knowledge of himself or herself and the world. However, philosophers disparage poetry by its composition and senses such as imitation, representation, fiction, and expression. On this note, Socrates used philosophical explorations to criticize the role of poetry in the world. Many poets engage in imitation and imagination in their poetic works, which limits the chances of poetry enhancing knowledge in the society. The branch points between poets and Socrates are imitation versus and imagination versus reason.