POETRY

Poetry is a word of Greek origin which means 'to make, to create'. A poem is 'something made or created':the poet is the creator and language is the material out of which the poetic text is created.

A poem is a complex text with a visual form, musical qualities and linguistic aspects.

The visual form the poem takes on the page is called lay-out. It follows a number of typographical conventions are peculiar to poetry. Here are the most frequent.

Lines don't  usually cover the whole page as in prose.

Lines are grouped together into stanzas.

Lines often begin with a capital letter.

Some lines may be idented.

As regards sound, lines in a poem can come close to the condition of music through several sound devices. The most common are rhyme and rhythm.

Two words rhyme perfectly when the sound of the last stressed vowel and all succeeding sounds are identical. As you can see, it is sound not spelling that determines rhyme.

Rhythm is another powerful device that generates musical effects in poetry. It work through stressed and unstressed syllables which alternate in a line in several combination: for example, the pattern-stress is called iambic and it is the most common pattern in english poetry.

Also language in poetry is carefully chosen and arranged so that words or phrases create connotations, that is, they arouse in the reader emotion and associations of ideas which are different from their primary meaning. Key words or concepts can be stressed through the ripetition of words and strustures. Poetic language is often rich in figures of speech like the simile which has the form of an explicit comparison indicated by 'like', 'as', 'as if', or the metaphor which omits the linking word, creating a total identification between the two things being compared or the symbol- a concrete item which represent an idea or feeling.