THE 13 CHARACTERISTICS OF A MOST IMPORTANT POEM - LITERATURE - 2024

Some of the characteristics of a poem are its irrational content, its structure in lines and stanzas, and its rhythm. To better understand these characteristics, you first have to know what poetry is.

The word comes from ancient Greek and means to create. It is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to or instead of its rational and semantic content.

Poetry can be used in a condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the mind or ear of the reader or listener. You can also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects.

Poems are often based on their effect on image, word association, and musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what defines poetry.

Due to its nature, it emphasizes linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content.

Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language to another - a possible exception to this could be the Hebrew Psalms, where beauty is found more in the balance of ideas than in specific vocabulary.

In most poetry, it is the connotations and the "baggage" that the words carry (the weight of the words) that are most important. These shades of meaning can be difficult to interpret and can cause different readers to interpret poems in different ways.

Fundamental characteristics of poems

1- They are usually rhythmic

The marked rhythm of poetry, superimposed on the "natural" rhythm of any language, seems to have taken its roots from two sources:

Make common declamation easier and emphasize the collective nature of poetry.

The body has certain natural periodicities (pulse, breath, etc.) that form a dividing line between the casual character of external events and the ego and make it appear that we subjectively experience time in a special and direct way.

The rhythm puts people in a collective festival in contact with each other in a particular, physiological and emotional way. This emotional introversion is itself a social act.

2- They are difficult to translate

It is recognized as one of the characteristics of poetry that translations convey little of the specific emotion aroused by that poetry in the original.

This can be confirmed by anyone who, after reading a translation, has learned the language of the original. What is called the "sense" can be translated exactly. But the specific poetic emotion evaporates.

3- Its content is usually irrational

This is not to say that poetry is incoherent or meaningless. Poetry obeys the rules of grammar and is generally capable of paraphrasing, that is, the series of propositions of which it consists can be expressed in different forms of prose in the same or other languages.

By "rational" is meant conforming to the orderings that men agree to see in the general environment of the world. The scientific argument is rational in this sense, poetry is not.

4- They are characterized by condensed effects

The condensed effects are the aesthetic effects. A telegram. "Your wife died yesterday" may impart extraordinarily condensed effects to the reader, but they are not, of course, aesthetic effects. Instead, in poems, language is used symbolically.

Non-aesthetic effects are individual, not collective, and depend on particular, non-social experiences.

Therefore, it is not enough for poetry to be charged with emotional meaning if this emotion results from a particular unrealizable personal experience. The emotion must be generated by the experience of men in society.

5- Language economy

One of the most definable characteristics of poetry is the economy of language. Poets are relentlessly critical of the way they distribute words on a page.

Careful selection of words for conciseness and clarity is basic even for prose writers, but poets go far beyond this, considering the emotive qualities of a word, its musical value, its spacing, and even its spatial relationship. with the page.

6- They are evocative

In general, the poems evoke in the reader an intense emotion: joy, sadness, anger, catharsis, love, etc. Also, poetry has the ability to surprise the reader with a revelation, insight, understanding of elemental truth and beauty.

7- Shape

Every time we look at a poem, the first thing we will notice is its shape. In other words, the poems have a given form.

One poem will look very different from another, and yet another poem will look very different from the second, and so on. Each poet uses the "form" that will most effectively express what he wants to convey to other human beings.

8- Lines

After looking at a poem and seeing that it has some kind of shape, we often notice that it is also made up of lines, which are the vehicle for the authors' thoughts and ideas.

They are building blocks with which a poem is created. The words in each line proceed as usual from left to right, but end where the poet wants them to stop.

9- Stanzas or stanzas

The lines in a poem are often divided into sections that look like a kind of paragraph. They are the stanzas.

There are also the stanzas, whose name comes from the Italian "stanza" and which refers to a stanza composed of six lines of 11 syllables and 7 syllables with consonant rhyme, which is repeated throughout the poem in a recurring way.

10- Rhyme

Rhyme is the sound imitation of the final syllables of words. There are basically two kinds of rhyme used in poetry. The first, the final rhyme, is the most typical and best known by young people.

The second type of rhyme is called internal rhyme. This type of rhyme is different from final rhyme in that the rhyme takes place within the line and not at the end.

11- Verses

Poems are made up of verses. These are about the union of a series of words placed in such a way that it maintains a rhythm and metric. There are the verses of minor art (up to 8 syllables) and those of minor art (between 9 and 14 syllables).

Although it is less frequent, it is also possible to find authors who write poems in prose, excluding rhyme and meter but maintaining the rhythm and resources such as the stanza.

12- Subjectivity

The poems are subjective, since they are the expression of the feelings of the author, but they can also change the vision according to the interpretation of the reader.

13- They evolve

All of the above characteristics have been taking shape and evolving to literary movements and social contexts. Like other literary genres, the poem has evolved and will always evolve.

References

1. Niko Silvester. Top 10 Key Elements of Poetry. (sf). Recovered from web.gccaz.edu.
2. Elements of Poetry. (sf). Recovered from learn.lexiconic.net.
3. Characteristics of A Poem. (2011). Recovered from thelitpath.wordpress.com.
4. Elements of Poetry - and Description of Quality Characteristics. (sf). Recovered from homeofbob.com.