How literate are you in poetry?

Question

In promotion of ACTUAL knowledge of established poetic tradition to counterbalance the overabundance of questions from would-be poets seeking needy validation for their personal poems, I'll give best answer status to the person who FIRST answers all 5 questions below SATISFACTORILY.

I already know the answer to the first four, so it's #5 that's make or break as your subjective response. Make it cogent and articulate!

1) What are the three basic types or modes of poetry? Provide names and definitions.

2) Name one Elizabethan poet, one romantic poet, and one modernist poet.

3) What is "prosody?"

4) Who is the current poet laureate for the US?

5) How is poetry relevant to you in a 21st century society?

Obviously #2 can have several answers. Just make sure you match the poet's name to the appropriate era.

Thank you to those who gave such thorough responses, even those with dissenting viewpoints. My point in promoting this Q&A session is to promote a foray into the grand tradition of poetry which seems all too infrequent in the Poetry Yahoo! Answers section.

For those of you who suspect me of pedantry or pretentiousness, I find myself slightly amused for two reasons. First, some of those same people seem to have no qualms establishing their own poetic credentials to assume a position of authority. This leads me to my second point. Engaging poetry at a certain caliber DOES often require people esoteric knowledge. Poetry writers and readers alike should take the time to know the tradition from which the art form derives. Just because someone learns to play four or five chords on a guitar doesn't make him or her an accomplished musician, sorry to say.

And as far as my particular Q&A session being the litmus test for who'd be a good reader or writer of poetry, I never claimed nor would ever claim such a foolish thing. I wanted to engage people with like-minded background knowledge of the poetic tradition and maybe encourage those who weren't as familiar into a little research.

And as to my stance on free verse, some seem to interpret my insistence on a knowledge of poetic tradition to be a condemnation of free verse. Untrue. However, "free" verse can be a very dangerous thing to a young poet who naively assumes it means writing whatever lines he or she wants. Well-written free verse must follow its own internal structural demands or risk succumbing to prose writing with arbitrary line breaks.

And last but not least, a confession: I had thought that Donald Hall was still poet laureate, not Charles Simic. Egads. As Socrates would indicate, knowledge starts with admitting that one knows nothing.

Answer 1

1) What are the three basic types or modes of poetry? Provide names and definitions.

I may be off on this, I’m mostly self-taught picking up most of my training from books. My guess: Lyric, Dramatic, and Narrative (or epic).

Lyric poetry has song-like musical qualities. It tends to focus on emotions. Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Dylan Thomas with Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night would be examples of lyric poetry.

Dramatic poetry would be verse written in a play. Shakespeare and Jonson would both be examples of poets using this form.

Narrative (epic) poetry came from oral tradition. It tells what happened rather than what is felt. Milton’s Paradise Lost for example.


2) Name one Elizabethan poet, one romantic poet, and one modernist poet.

Elizabethan: Chistopher Marlowe

Romantic: William Blake

Modernist: Wallace Stevens

3) What is "prosody?"

Prosody is when you look at both meter and rhythm (sonics) in a poem. I guess you could say it’s the study of meter and rhythm. Some people use this as a substitute word for scansion—though I don’t. I’ve read long articles on Prosody so I know my definition is very basic here.

4) Who is the current poet laureate for the US?

Charles Simic

5) How is poetry relevant to you in a 21st century society?

It is relevant to me in the same way it has been relevant to people living in other times. Poetry steps beyond the practical language of life, and gives you a transcendent view of a subject. It helps you not just record life, but recognize what matters in life. Poetry and literature for that matter will have a hard time remaining relevant in a culture that is largely aliterate—meaning that they can read, but choose not to. In general society has not trained its mind to read anything more complicated than a newspaper. For me though, poetry remains relevant for the reasons I discussed.

Answer 2

I will give these answers a shot. I do think knowing, understanding, and respecting poetic traditions is important to form a base for a would-be poet. That said, knowing the current poet laureate is Charles Simic hardly qualifies someone as a poet, and someone who believed it was still Donald Hall, Billy Collins, or even Robert Frost would not necessarily be unqualified to be a poet.

1) There are so many possible interpretations of this question - and I suspect many potential answers. An epic (a long, storytelling poem) might well be considered a "mode" or "type" of poetry, as could a sonnet (14-line poem, varying slightly in structure depending on whether you mean Shakespearean, Patrarchan, etc.). One could call romantic poetry (characterized by emotional intensity, focus on individual experience) a "mode" or "type," or lyrical poetry (characterized by musicality), or modernist poetry (poetry moving from meaning to being, from individual focus to meta-focus). A former professor of mine has recently expressed a joy in ekphrastic poetry (poetry responding to some other form of art), and would probably classify that as a "mode" or "type." In short, I don't know what you want here.

2) Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser were Elizabethans. Keats is considered a romantic poet in most circles, and my favorite modernist was T.S. Eliot.

3) Prosody is the study of poetry's rhythm, meter, and intonation.

4) The current U.S. poet laureate is Charles Simic. I was sure it would be me, but apparently one is expected to first publish a poem.

Poetry's relevence in a 21st century society is closely related to its departure from established tradition. The world is changing rapidly, in profound ways, and poetry will certainly continue to evolve in attempting to describe that world, and the place of individuals or societies in it.

Answer 3

Most of these are not very interesting and are far too easy for someone to google to feel better about themselves. All though, I'm sure there must be hope that it will eat at the googlers, but I'm not sure it does.

I ask the last question often to a lot of people (I've spoken to a lot of poets over the years, some of them previous US poet laureates) -- I never get the same answer twice. I think that's a really good thing, too. Poetry lives outside of the norms and the pat answers. Poetry is something you make a space for within yourself and if you love poetry, then you share it with others (and I don't mean your own work). Pinsky said it best (paraphrasing): poetry is the music written for the body to perform. Everybody is a different instrument.

Answer 4

I will leave the facts to the more qualified. In #5, you ask for an opinion. I'm always ready with one of those...

Poetry will be at the forefront of 21st Century Renaissance. The rebirth of language and culture that will follow will bring the next enlightenment. The streets will be teaming with artists, craftsmen and poets. I only wish I could stick around to see it. What a glorious time it will be...

Answer 5

LOL - I think you question is funny.
Many people who are like you tend to put poetry in a box. You think it is a science or history - something that is learned and diginified and organized.

It's not always the case. I won't answer the 5 questions you put up there because it's pointless. If people want to know that they can take an elementary poetry class at a local college or university.

Poetry is much more than rules, types, prose or anything of that other mumble jumble - I'm a well-established poet and could answer your questions 'satisfactorily' as you put it but poetry is a beautiful thing now because you don't have to use words - I can put "ain't" in a poem or use colloquialism and it's just a grand as a 'perfect' one.

Free verse is my speciality and a favorite of most people now-a-days. Get off your high horse and learn to at least accept the new generation of poetry.

(However, I must agree with you on one thing - I'm sick and tired of people using Y! Answers to get advice/comments on poetry).

I'm not trying to be critical or rude - I just think that you should accept there's more to poetry than what you learn in English class :)

Answer 6

It pretty pretentous to say you "know" the answer to anything, so you might want to be careful there. Especially the answer to question number 1. Modes? do you know what that word means? The fashion or way of doing something, so poetry is a "mode" in and of itself. Also, do you mean "classification"? narrative, lyric and dramatic? or "style", as in free verse, rhymed or unrhymed (e.g. formal structured unrhymed verse such as haiku)? If you're refering to the former, then a narrative is a poem that tells us a story in verse form; a lyric is a poem that is either sung or read to music, usually touching on personal feelings or emotional subjects; a dramatic is one where the speaker is directly speaking to the audience or reader, as in "who died and left you the authority on poetry?"
2. Elizabethan poets (16th century) include Shakespeare, Bacon, Sidney, amongst many others.
Romantic poets (18th and early 19th century) include Blake, Clare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Goethe, Whitman and Tennyson, again, amongst others.
Modernist poets (early 20th century) included Pound, Bishop, Crane, T.S. Eliot, Frost, Stevens, and Williams.
3. Prosody, as applied to poetry, is the study of the metrical structure of verse; tone, intonation, rhythm, phonetic device and lexical stress; the nuances of language and how it affects the reader/listener and ultimately the perception of what is being communicated.
4. The current poet laureate in the US is Charles Simic, who replaced Donald Hall, who replaced Ted Kooser...also, in case you're interested, there is no current "state" poet laureate for Washington state...and technically, the title is "poet laureate consultant".
5. How is poetry relavant to me in the 21st century? It is as relevant today as it was in the time of Sappho and Sophocles. Poetry is the essence of a society, not its description. Poetry shows us "how they thought", not "what they did"; it shows us how they saw their world and the people in it, not what they did with it. "Civilizations are measured not by the world
in which they live, but how they perceive the
world in which they live" (1). In an age where global communication between cultures and individuals is ubiquitous, where the details of "what" is happening is known around the world within seconds of it happening, poetry is probably our best method of ever understanding "why" it was happening and how it was "perceived" by those who made it happen. We know other civilizations by their poetry...I'm sure the same will be true for future generations who look back on our "modern" world.

Hope I get an "A"

Answer 7

@ Poetic harvest....

Free verse is fine, assuming you actually know how to write other types of poetry... honestly. I'd rather not accept the new generation since almost none of them possess any poetic talent of any kind. Not to say that there aren't a few shining stars.

Answer 8

i agree with the point you are trying to make....as in people using Y!A as a forum to receive critiques of their work, however, i'm not going to sit here and answer your Q about poetry. anyone with a brain could do that by Googling each item.

i studied literature in college and my favorite class was my senior seminar "victorian poetry". the best part about it? that's easy....my professor didn't sit there and tell us what it was about. it was open disucussion and each of us had our own opinions and he never said "right" or "wrong". just "interesting" and perhaps countered our idea with a point or comment.

so, please don't squelch others' creativity, instead, choose to ignore it or embrace it, but don't poo-poo someone else just b/c they don't see the world from your eyes.

take care:)

Answer 9

Tell me again why poets have to know these to be a poet? What if the poet was 12?

Answer 10

you made a very interesting page here