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    What Is A Poem

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    Rose Razo
    The document discusses what defines poetry and its purpose. It states that while poetry is difficult to precisely define, there are some common characteristics, such as using imagery, form or structure, and musical elements like rhyme and rhythm. The purpose of poetry is to help readers understand the world in new ways and from different perspectives by seeing familiar things anew.

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    What Is A Poem

    Uploaded by

    Rose Razo
    250 views2 pages
    The document discusses what defines poetry and its purpose. It states that while poetry is difficult to precisely define, there are some common characteristics, such as using imagery, form or structure, and musical elements like rhyme and rhythm. The purpose of poetry is to help readers understand the world in new ways and from different perspectives by seeing familiar things anew.

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    WHAT IS A POEM

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    The document discusses what defines poetry and its purpose. It states that while poetry is difficult to precisely define, there are some common characteristics, such as using imagery, form or structure, and musical elements like rhyme and rhythm. The purpose of poetry is to help readers understand the world in new ways and from different perspectives by seeing familiar things anew.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    250 views2 pages

    What Is A Poem

    Uploaded by

    Rose Razo
    The document discusses what defines poetry and its purpose. It states that while poetry is difficult to precisely define, there are some common characteristics, such as using imagery, form or structure, and musical elements like rhyme and rhythm. The purpose of poetry is to help readers understand the world in new ways and from different perspectives by seeing familiar things anew.

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    WHAT IS A POEM?

    Before we take a look at some specific elements of poetry, it’d be useful to make a brief
    attempt at defining just what a poem is.

    What exactly is it that makes a poem different, for example, to a piece of prose? Or song
    lyrics, even?

    The truth is that when we get down to it poetry isn’t all that easy to pin down. Even poets
    themselves disagree about what constitutes a poem. What chance then do our struggling
    students have?

    Luckily, there are some broad, general characteristics that can be agreed upon. In this article
    we will look at these common features of poetry and how we can best instill an understanding
    of these in our students.

    COMMON FEATURES OF POETRY

    ●      It looks like a poem - if it looks like a poem and it reads like a poem, then the chances
    are pretty good that it is, indeed, a poem. Poetry comes in lines, some of which are full
    sentences, but many of which are not. Also, usually these lines don’t run out to the margins
    consistently, like in, say, a novel. All this gives poetry a distinctive and recognisable look on
    the page.

    ●      It often has some underlying form holding things together - while this isn’t always true
    (in some free verse, for example) a lot of poetry conforms to a prescribed structure such as in
    a sonnet, a haiku etc.

    ●      It uses imagery - if the poet is worth his or her salt, they’ll endeavour to create images in
    the reader’s mind using lots of sensory details and figurative language.
    ●      It has a certain musicality - we could be forgiven for thinking that poetry’s natural
    incarnation is the written word and its habitat the page, but the printed word is not where
    poetry’s origins lie. The earliest poems were composed orally and committed to memory. We
    can still see the importance the sound of language plays when we read poems out loud. We
    can see it too in the attention paid to musical devices that are incorporated into the poem.
    Devices such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, for example. We will look at many of
    these later in this article.

    THE PURPOSE OF POETRY: WHAT IS POETRY FOR?

    Of all the forms professional writers can take, it is the professional poet who most often finds
    themself struggling to make ends meet financially. Poetry can be difficult to understand and
    require a lot of effort on the part of the reader. Students can be forgiven for wondering what
    exactly is the point of this difficult to write and difficult to read genre that is apparently used
    to torture the less literary minded during their school years.

    It may be a hard sell to some of our more reluctant students, but there is a point behind all this
    word-smithery.

    Poetry’s purpose is essentially to help us understand the world around us. It endeavors to
    show us things anew that we may have previously taken for granted. It offers us new
    perspectives on the familiar.

    Poetry’s purpose is to enable us to see the world with fresh eyes again, like those of a child. In
    doing this, it helps us understand our world in a deeper way.

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