POETRY Literary composition in verse form. It is often the case that to discuss a piece of work as poetry implies evaluating its quality, while to discuss it as verse relates to technique used in creating it. The terms, however, are blurred: the phrase bad poetry may refer to technique and the phrase superb verse may imply poetic excellence. In general, however, verse is the basis that supports a structure of sufficient quality to be called a poem.

The poetic medium

Poetry need not be written: early poetry was oral, transmitted and preserved through the mnemonic and performative skills of bards with no awareness of script or print. The written code accommodates poetry and adds the aesthetic effect of lines grouped on a page, or even of poems shaped in a visual pattern, like George Herbert's ‘Easter Wings’. Other phonic features are added to the basic metrical pattern of verse, with or without rhyme. Thus, the sound of words may be directly onomatopoeic or may give a less overt effect of sound symbolism. Both are heard in Tennyson's ‘Come Down, O Maid’ (1847):
The moan of doves in immemorial elms And murmuring of innumerable bees.

Slow or rapid movement can be suggested by a deliberate pattern of sounds and syllables as in Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711):When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Files o'er th'unbending corn, and skims along the main.


Alliteration is not a part of most modern verse structure, but has a tradition dating back to Old English. Many poets have made it a feature for rhetoric or emphasis. Imagery in poetry conveys ideas obliquely, drawing from almost any area of human experience to create a response more effective than direct exposition. SHAKESPEARE makes frequent references to disease and corruption in Hamlet to suggest evil in the state of Denmark. In ‘Dover Beach’, Matthew Arnold likens his uncertainty and loss of faith to an ebbing tide. Images are often presented through figures of speech like simile and metaphor. These are also found in PROSE and to a lesser extent in everyday discourse. They are especially distinctive of poetry, however, because of their frequency and the stronger focus of attention given by verse forms.

The poetic message

The appeal of poetry is semantic as well as phonic. The poet has something to convey in language, which may range from the half-concealed situation in many of Shakespeare's sonnets, through Wordsworth's specific description and reflection of experience in ‘The Daffodils’, to the overt message of the ‘Song of the Shirt’ by Thomas Hood. In general, the poem gains by not being too explicit in its personal statement. The meanings and associations of a word may not be in harmony with its sound: although paraffin contains a pleasing phonemic sequence, it would not usually be regarded as a ‘poetic’ word; equilibrium refers to a good state of being but has not a traditional poetic sound. Polysemy, abundant in English, enriches poetic language, as when T. S. Eliot uses the theological and linguistic meanings of word to write of Christ in his nativity as:
The word within a word, unable to speak a word.

(‘ Gerontion’, 1920)

The pun is not currently in fashion for serious writing, but could once be used with telling effect:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

( Shakespeare, Sonnet 138)

The language of poetry

Concentration of special linguistic effects in a regular pattern tends to produce artificial diction. Rigid conventions about poetic usage have been less powerful in English than in some languages, but there have been times when poets have moved away from the familiar and everyday: particularly so in the 18c, with circumlocutions like the finny tribe for fish and the bleating kind for sheep. New generations of poets often demand a return to ‘ordinary’ language, as Wordsworth led the Romantic reaction against 18c POETIC DICTION with a call for ‘a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’. In the 1930s, the ‘New Country’ poets, such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis, wanted to write language that was accessible to ordinary people.

In the 20c, language has been accepted in poetry that would once have been considered too colloquial, commonplace, or even obscene, but this too can become mannered and removed from common usage. Poetry will always be to some extent artificial; selection and compression within the chosen form, even of free verse, distances the poem from daily usage. True poetry, however, is never entirely severed from the speaking voice; a certain latitude, however, sometimes called poetic licence, allows the poet to take liberties with language. In the classical set of genres, poetry was epic or lyric according to the degree in which the poet's direct voice was heard. Later theory has absorbed both genres under the general heading of poetry and added forms for specific purposes, such as elegy and pastoral. The frontier between poetry and prose is not always closely guarded or easy to delineate. If prose has a markedly high proportion of rhythm and other features associated with poetry, it is poetic prose or even prose poetry. An extended SIMILE with imagery and careful choice of words can give poetic quality to a passage in a novel, as:
Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pours over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hill-sides soften and fall in.

( Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, 1925)

Some of the highest literary uses of English have been in poetry. Poets have wanted not only to create beauty but also to express themselves memorably; the attitudes, fashions, and beliefs of many periods are made permanent in poetry. It appeals to the senses as well as the intellect. Of the two, sensory attraction is the more important; without emotive beauty, versified philosophy has little to recommend it. Although a relatively objective metalanguage can be devised to describe and discuss poetry, individual response to it is necessarily subjective. See ALLITERATION, ASSONANCE, BIBLE, BURNS, ENGLISH LITERATURE, LITERATURE, NONSENSE, RHYTHM, STRESS.

poetry ‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (William Wordsworth, 1801).

The distinction in modern literature between prose and poetry is difficult to apply to the Bible, but there is a tradition that regards certain OT books—the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Lamentations, the Song of Solomon (or Song of Songs)—as poetry; and modern translations commonly print them in verse form. But many other examples of poetry are claimed by modern scholarship. Not having the same recognizable characteristics intrinsic to much Western poetry, of metre and rhyme, Hebrew poetry requires other criteria for recognizing it. There is a terseness of style; there is sometimes an ambiguity of meaning when a strictly literal description is replaced by figurative language; and the words used demand a response from the listener. The order of words may be unusual or they may be repeated as a kind of refrain (Isa. 5: 25; 9: 12, 17, 21; 10: 4). There are to be sure some instances of rhyming, by the use of suffixes; Jer. 12: 7 is cited as an example. And the relationship between Hebrew poetry and music indicates that it had a kind of metre which was fluid and flexible, not unlike the free rhythm of Gregorian plainsong of the Latin Church. (Some modern responsorial chants for the psalms developed in France using the rhythm of ordinary speech, stylized to some extent, may convey the flavour of Hebrew recitation.) When Jerome (342–420 CE) was working on his Vulgate, he thought that Hebrew poetry was usually composed in hexameters, like Greek and Latin verses, but modern scholars are inclined to hold that Hebrew poetry had no system of regular metre, as did Greek or Latin poetry; yet the music must have required some conventions of rhythmic stress.

The frequently (and perhaps misleadingly) mentioned use of ‘parallelism’ is a convention about the ordering of words in Hebrew poetry. In some cases there is a second line which extends or echoes the theme of the first (e.g. Ps. 104: 28). In Job 10: 12 two masculine nouns in the first line are paired with two feminine nouns in the second. Elsewhere a second idea is brought in by way of contrast with the first, but not always in strict line-by-line parallelism, e.g. in the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5: 4–5; 26–7). It was water that Sisera requested: she gave him milk. She brought him curds on a plate; but in her hands she held a tent-peg and a mallet; the parallelism and the terseness seem to be there, but they are not clearly marked out. It is present also in the book of Job, though with complex variations (e.g. 28: 12, 20).

Poetry is found in connection with worship in all eras of Israelite history. There are sayings uttered by priests in the Temple, e.g. the threefold blessing of Num. 6: 24–6, and there are hymns sung at Passover, e.g. the celebration of victory over the Egyptians and the rule of God as king in Zion in Exod. 15, which must derive from Temple worship rather than from any historical exodus when Zion (Jerusalem) was unknown. Other fragments of war poems were woven into liturgical forms (e.g. Hab. 3). Funeral dirges and laments have an additional force from the parallelism, as in Jer. 9: 1 and 12: 8, 10; and liturgical poems of thanksgiving, though the rhythm and parallelisms are less clear, have been adapted by editors to fit into pieces of narrative, e.g. Jonah 2: 2–9, where appropriate references to the sea are followed by a promise to make vows in the Temple, so affirming a theological point relevant to the editor's own time. As the God of Jonah could rescue him from the deep, so also he could rescue the people of Nineveh from unbelief into repentance.

There is very little poetry in the NT (though the Prologue of John 1 is similar to the poetic parallelism of passages in the Wisdom literature, e.g. Prov. 8: 22–36 and Wisd. 7: 22–8: 1). But a number of Jesus' aphorisms contain parallelisms, e.g. Matt. 11: 30, Luke 16: 10. In some cases, the second line makes a contrast with the first, as in Matt. 8: 20 (‘Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’). The canticles of the Lucan infancy narratives (the Benl's, Magnificat, and Nunc Dimittis) resemble Hebrew poetry. The Greek poet Aratus is quoted by Paul in his speech at Athens (Acts 17: 28) and Menander in 1 Cor. 15: 33, though the latter quotation rather looks as if Paul had not actually read the lost play Thais from which the words are taken; the Cretan poet Epimenides (or, another suggestion, Callimachus' Hymn to Zeus) is quoted by Titus 1: 12.

poetry, see culture section of major powers.