What is your favorite poetic style?

[ajvenigalla]

Guys, what is your favorite poetic style and form?

There's dactylic hexameter of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. There's the iambic pentameters of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, and of most of the English poetic tradition; the iambic pentameter is often mixed with blank verse. And then there's free verse, and then there's the rhyming poetry of Blake, Shelley, and the great poets of the sonnet.

I find myself attracted to the sonnet as written by Shakespeare and Milton, and I love the free verse of Whitman (his free verse is unmatched, and it works especially for his elaborate catalogues). But if I had to pick, I'd probably go with Whitmanian free-verse and Shakespearean/Miltonic blank verse, the former for its free energy and the latter for its expansive grandeur and suitability for theatricality and epic grandeur. I'd also say I love the sonnet.

[YesNo]

I like metrical poetry provided the content makes sense, that is, doesn't lose me when it drops off the deep end.

[desiresjab]

Guys, what is your favorite poetic style and form?

There's dactylic hexameter of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. There's the iambic pentameters of Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser, and of most of the English poetic tradition; the iambic pentameter is often mixed with blank verse. And then there's free verse, and then there's the rhyming poetry of Blake, Shelley, and the great poets of the sonnet.

I find myself attracted to the sonnet as written by Shakespeare and Milton, and I love the free verse of Whitman (his free verse is unmatched, and it works especially for his elaborate catalogues). But if I had to pick, I'd probably go with Whitmanian free-verse and Shakespearean/Miltonic blank verse, the former for its free energy and the latter for its expansive grandeur and suitability for theatricality and epic grandeur. I'd also say I love the sonnet.

Style is hard to define. It isn't meter. You listed meters and a couple of forms, I believe. There are many poems of various forms I adore, as well. Attraction has more to do with content and general prowess of the writer than form for me.

In general I prefer rhyme, but there is plenty of free verse I like.

Rhyme or free verse are styles, but only superficialially. Limerick is often mistakenly identified as a style when it is actually a form. The limerick style is a misnomer, to me. The limerick form.

Style to me is the personalized approach of an author to writing. In prose, Hemingway's choppy sentences were part of his style. Using few adjectives was part of his style. An author can use a style for just one book, as Camus seemed to use Hemingway's for The Stranger. He didn't lift it. He came to the same artistic conclusion. It was not the normal style of Camus.

A hallmark of Mark Twain's syle was humor. You won't find much of that in Camus or Hemingway.

Tone may be the most important expression of style. Epic tone, satiric tone--these things exist. Tone is what comes of it, the voice that truly sets apart one author from another. Forms cannot do that. Meter has a better chance of pulling it off.

Everything pulls into making a style otherwise known as tone, so the forms and techniques a poet uses are critical to his tone, his style, otherwise known as his voice.

[New Secret]

what is your favorite poetic style and form?


Rhymes. I can't stand poetry that doesn't have rhymes. It's like, okay, this person certainly had a sense of space between lines one and two, but how am I suppose to know how long they mentally waited to phrase that next line? Non-rhythmic poetry comes off awkward and usually miss. You have to hear them actually speak it to understand it and even then poetry readings are usually a big fail. Why you think "the raven" was such a big hit? Rhythm and rhyme. It knocked over all that competition.

[stlukesguild]

Rhyme is but a single element of poetry... and not an essential. If you eliminate poetry without rhyme you lose a majority of the poetry of Greece (Homer) and Rome, a lot of the poetry of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, William Blake's epic poems, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, etc...

There are endless marvelous poems that employ rhyme... but just as many... if not more... that don't use rhyme.

The Raven? I personally like it... but honestly Poe was a better writer of short stories than of poetry and The Raven is far from being a major poetic work or one that blows away all the "competition".

[desiresjab]

Rhyme is but a single element of poetry... and not an essential. If you eliminate poetry without rhyme you lose a majority of the poetry of Greece (Homer) and Rome, a lot of the poetry of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, William Blake's epic poems, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, etc...

There are endless marvelous poems that employ rhyme... but just as many... if not more... that don't use rhyme.

The Raven? I personally like it... but honestly Poe was a better writer of short stories than of poetry and The Raven is far from being a major poetic work or one that blows away all the "competition".

The Raven will last, though, because of its sonic dimensions and its irresistible mood. Quite frankly, a genre piece, but a great one.

Do you know if tintinabulation is a reference to or an origin of the term tintinitis?

[North Star]

The Raven will last, though, because of its sonic dimensions and its irresistible mood. Quite frankly, a genre piece, but a great one.

Do you know if tintinabulation is a reference to or an origin of the term tintinitis?

I think you're thinking of tinnitus. Tintinitis sounds like something Hergé may have suffered from. Tinnitus and tintinnabulation both derive from tinnire (lat., to ring), though.

[Dreamwoven]

Tinnitus is a horrible condition, I've experienced it close at hand.

[bounty]

yes I know rhyming is just one element of poetry, and obviously not an essential one, but on the whole with little exception, im with newsecret; if it doesn't rhyme, I probably wont like. I suppose I am a poetry troglodyte in that regard.

[Danik 2016]

A meaningfull content expressed in an original poetical form. That is a very general statement, but I think good portry is a kind of craftmanship, like jewelry. I encompasses many styles, moods, periods and countries.

[Dreamwoven]

I agree with both Danik and bounty on this, and, like bounty, would probably class myself as a poetry troglodyte.

[stlukesguild]

Poetry is probably the literary genre I read and have read the most. I enjoy everything from ancient Greek (Homer, Sappho, etc...) and earlier (Biblical poetry, Gilgamesh) through contemporary poets such as Anne Carson, Adam Zagajewski, Yves Bonnefoy, and Geoffrey Hill. There are brilliant works of poetry by non-Western poets that I have greatly admired (Ferdowsi, Wang Wei, Omar Khayyam, Nizami, Hafez, Matsuo Bashō, Akiko Yosano, etc...) but I probably read more poetry from the Romantic/Post-Romantic and early Modern period (1800-1950) by British, French, German, American, and Spanish poets than anything else... with Italian, Russian, and Latin-American falling not too far behind. I can't say this amounts to a favorite style because even within this limited range there are examples of epic poetry, long and short lyric poetry, poetry that rhymes and poetry that doesn't, sensuous lush poetry, and poetry of crystalline simplicity. There are also works of poetry that fall well outside of this range that I count among my absolute favorite including Dante's Comedia, Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalimion, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, etc...

[Danik 2016]

I think I have favorite poems more than favorite styles.
I also love the poetical prose from authors as different as the Brasilian Guimarães Rosa, James Joyce and the great urban novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by the German author Alfred Döblin.

[Ecurb]

Who is the "author" of translated poetry? We discussed Ezra pound's loose translations of Chinese poems in another thread. Is Pound or Li Po the author? Here's Keats' take:



On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
By John Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

So my question to stluke: do you read your favorites (like Dante, Homer, et. al.) in their original languages? Or do you read translations? Since poetry (even more than prose) is dependent on sound, the translation is necessarily very different from the original, and I (at least) would not think myself competent to judge the specifically "poetic" qualities of a poem written in a language other than English. Of course I like Homer -- the stories are great, and the translations are well told -- but their specifically "poetic" qualities are, I assume, very different from the original Epic Greek.

p.s., to John Keats: It was "Balboa", not Cortez, who discovered the Pacific Ocean. However, if Keats could not appreciate Homer's rule over his demesne before reading Chapman's translation, it seems that the poet Keats loved is not Homer, but some combination of Homer and Chapman. Perhaps some multilingual litnetters can chip in.

[desiresjab]

I think you're thinking of tinnitus. Tintinitis sounds like something Hergé may have suffered from. Tinnitus and tintinnabulation both derive from tinnire (lat., to ring), though.

Very good. Thank you.

[DavidH1]

I have been reading the introduction to David Hamilton's very original King Alfred's Jewel and was interested in his advocacy of depth in poetry rather than surface word patterning. Anyone agree with this?

What a disgusting forum! I have just been prevented from posting because I posted a link to support my point.

[stlukesguild]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a talented translator and poet admired for his translations of Dante's La Vita Nuova and a collection of early Italian (Renaissance) poems wrote of the translation of poetry:

The life-blood of... translation is this: that a good poem shall not be turned into a bad one. The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation, as much as possible, with one more possession of beauty. Poetry not being an exact science, literality of rendering is altogether secondary to this aim. I say literality;- not fidelity, which is by no means the same thing.

I wholly agree. I wholly literal word to word translation of poetry does not result in poetry... and is not always even possible as not every word in one language can be simply translated into a single word in another language. We also need to remember that even poetry in our own native language needs to be translated (to an extent) after a passage of time as not only certain words, but phrases, references and allusions etc... become archaic and forgotten.

The French poet, Paul Valery spoke of translation of poetry from one language to another as akin to the transcription of music from one instrument to another. The sensuous, fluid, rubato of the violin he compared to French and admitted that while a transcription to the piano... closer to English with its breadth... would not be the same... if done well, the music would remain.

Ideally, poetry should be read in its native language... but how many of us are able to master all the languages from which we wish to read? The best we can do is seek out those translations that have been acknowledged as remaining true to the original "music" and bring a new work of beauty to our native tongue.

[YesNo]

I have been reading the introduction to David Hamilton's very original King Alfred's Jewel and was interested in his advocacy of depth in poetry rather than surface word patterning. Anyone agree with this?


I read some of the introduction to the book on Amazon. The introduction seemed focused on Eliot.

What do you mean by "depth in poetry"? I assume the "surface word patterning" is the rhyme, alliteration, meter or lack thereof.

For my part I assume poetry has two components: (1) sound and (2) meaning. The meaning is the most important, but without the sound one might as well forget whatever meaning was intended. In this I assume meaning is the "depth in poetry" and sound is the "surface word patterning".

[Danik 2016]

Who is the "author" of translated poetry? We discussed Ezra pound's loose translations of Chinese poems in another thread. Is Pound or Li Po the author? Here's Keats' take:



So my question to stluke: do you read your favorites (like Dante, Homer, et. al.) in their original languages? Or do you read translations? Since poetry (even more than prose) is dependent on sound, the translation is necessarily very different from the original, and I (at least) would not think myself competent to judge the specifically "poetic" qualities of a poem written in a language other than English. Of course I like Homer -- the stories are great, and the translations are well told -- but their specifically "poetic" qualities are, I assume, very different from the original Epic Greek.

p.s., to John Keats: It was "Balboa", not Cortez, who discovered the Pacific Ocean. However, if Keats could not appreciate Homer's rule over his demesne before reading Chapman's translation, it seems that the poet Keats loved is not Homer, but some combination of Homer and Chapman. Perhaps some multilingual litnetters can chip in.
I can only give a very intuitive answer to that, Ecurb. My first reading of Shakespeare was in German, for I didn´t know enough English by then to read the original. I got so used to the beautiful translation of the German romantics Schlegel and Tieck, that when I at last read the original Shakespeare I was disapointed. The priginal verses didn´t sound as rich and colourful to me as those from his German translators. So I think the literary translation is a creative process based on the original text but not identical with it, because one has to look for solutions who work specifically in the target language.

[Michael Kajuan]

I'd have to say my favorite type of poetry is the epic. The Illiad, The Odyssey, Metamorphoses, Beowulf, Paradise Lost, and The Aenid are some of the epic poems I have read and enjoyed.

[ajvenigalla]

Poetry is probably the literary genre I read and have read the most. I enjoy everything from ancient Greek (Homer, Sappho, etc...) and earlier (Biblical poetry, Gilgamesh) through contemporary poets such as Anne Carson, Adam Zagajewski, Yves Bonnefoy, and Geoffrey Hill. There are brilliant works of poetry by non-Western poets that I have greatly admired (Ferdowsi, Wang Wei, Omar Khayyam, Nizami, Hafez, Matsuo Bashō, Akiko Yosano, etc...) but I probably read more poetry from the Romantic/Post-Romantic and early Modern period (1800-1950) by British, French, German, American, and Spanish poets than anything else... with Italian, Russian, and Latin-American falling not too far behind. I can't say this amounts to a favorite style because even within this limited range there are examples of epic poetry, long and short lyric poetry, poetry that rhymes and poetry that doesn't, sensuous lush poetry, and poetry of crystalline simplicity. There are also works of poetry that fall well outside of this range that I count among my absolute favorite including Dante's Comedia, Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalimion, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, etc...


Thanks.

I would like to ask stlukesguild: what do you think of the late epic poems of Victor Hugo - La Legende des Siecles, La Fin de Satan, and Dieu - and of the late prophetic masterpieces of William Blake?

[Adonais]

Terza rima, when the poet can pull it off in English, is spectacular. Shelley rolls the form out at the height of his powers and it's pure virtuoso stuff, the opening to the Triumph of Life is as good as anything in English verse.

I can only imagine what Dante is like in the original Italian.

[New Secret]

Rhyme is but a single element of poetry... and not an essential. If you eliminate poetry without rhyme you lose a majority of the poetry of Greece (Homer) and Rome, a lot of the poetry of Shakespeare's plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, William Blake's epic poems, T.S. Eliot's Wasteland, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, etc...

There are endless marvelous poems that employ rhyme... but just as many... if not more... that don't use rhyme.

The Raven? I personally like it... but honestly Poe was a better writer of short stories than of poetry and The Raven is far from being a major poetic work or one that blows away all the "competition".

Rhyme is not essential. Ancient poems and sonnets and psalms and whatever they called them in their period of history were usually sung with a pre-determined melody and phrasing. It was like, we sing like these 4 different ways and that's it, fill in the words with any of these 1000 lyrics, whatever you'd like. The Irish in tradition were much the same way, as a recent example. They were simpler then and their songs and poems reflect that. Much of the time and in the oldest of times all songs and poems hadn't rhymed. There was a pre-loaded way to sing the 100 songs on any one scroll and rhyming wasn't an element. It hadn't even occurred to them in those days that they should pair lines with identical phrasing to make them stand out. When they listened to someone sing they got lost in every note with their minds and ears intent through each melodic line, beginning to end. These days we listen half-attentive through each line, rhymes breaking through to our consciousness wherever the artists may emphasize them. It's not as intense as it use to be.