L3 The Elements of poetry上课课件ts.pptVIP

The Elements of Poetry A Very Basic Introduction to Poetic Diction and Form Poetry In Western Literature, poetry is the oldest of written art forms. Poetry has its roots in the oral tradition of our distant ancestors. Poetry is an integral part of the human condition. Written or oral, every culture on earth has a poetic tradition. Poetry, continued Epic poems are the earliest recorded literary art form. These epic poems were a continuation of an even older oral storytelling tradition, and the earliest epic poems contain vestiges of the earlier oral form. An epic poem is a long narrative poem, told in a formal, elevated style, that focuses on a serious subject and chronicles heroic deeds and events important to a culture. The first extant example of an epic poem is The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in cuneiform by an unknown Sumerian poet. The first Western poems were Greek—Hesiod’s Theogony and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Homer’s epic poems were written in dactylic hexameter, a poetic form which was uniquely suited to the subject matter and style of the works Homer wrote. Poetry, continued It was in these early epic poems, and the oral tradition they sprang from, that Western Literature was born. For centuries, poetry was the only real literary art form. Like Homer’s epics, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were written in verse. During the Classical period, poetry was written almost exclusively in strict closed forms (a closed form is one that has rigid rules for line length and structure). Lines had to be of a certain length, and contain a certain pattern of stressed syllables. During the Renaissance, poetry was also written in closed forms. For example, in the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare made unrhymed iambic pentameter (or blank verse) the basic unit with which he constructed his plays. Poetry, continued Another example of a closed form is the sonnet, a 14-line lyric poem with either an Elizabethan or an Italian stanza and rh