PLAN
Poetry has always served many purposes, and (unless you listen to Plato) in ancient times it was treated as a species of rhetoric. Pindar writes in praise of the early Olympic sporting competitions, Theocritus complains about pastoral love and life in his Idylls, and so forth. Aside from lyric verse, which we'll discuss in a moment, there is of course narrative verse, which tells a story, such as ballads and lays. Epic is the grandest kind of narrative – it takes on a big cultural task like bringing Greece out of the Dark Ages, or sharpening Rome's self-understanding, or simultaneously "justify{ing} the ways of God to men" and explaining why the Puritans lost the English Civil War. And there's dramatic verse, which directly represents actions and the characters that engage in those actions; its early Greek history suggests that it emerges from a felt connection to the divine, the sacred, and involves a collective surrender of individual identity in the interests of honoring that connection. Then there's lyric verse, more on which below.
But what exactly makes poetry poetry, of whatever sort it may be? That's a vexed issue – most critics have attacked the notion that poetry is easily reducible to a combination of rhythm and meter and structural schemes involving rhyme and stanza-patterning. Shelley said elegantly that in early times, any bold, sensitive person whose language "marks the before unapprehended relations of things" was a poet, a founder or maker of civilization itself. Milton, who wrote fine Italian sonnets but clearly preferred unrhymed blank verse, said famously in a little preface to PL that rhyme was "no necessary Adjunct or true ornament poem or good verse . . . but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame meter." That is, he thought the constraint unnecessary.
Wordsworth writes almost comically about the struggle to define poetry when he refers to a silly sample poem served up by Dr. Johnson:
Long as I have detained my Reader, I hope he will permit me to caution him against a mode of false criticism which has been applied to Poetry in which the language closely resembles that of life and nature. Such verses have been triumphed over in parodies of which Dr. Johnson's Stanza is a fair specimen.
"I put my hat upon my head,
And walk'd into the Strand,
And there I met another man
Whose hat was in his hand."
Immediately under these lines I will place one of the most justly admired stanzas of the
"Babes in the Wood."
"These pretty Babes with hand in hand
Went wandering up and down;
But never more they saw the Man
Approaching from the Town."
In both of these stanzas the words, and the order of the words, in no respect differ from the most unimpassioned conversation. There are words in both, for example, "the Strand," and "the Town," connected with none but the most familiar ideas; yet the one stanza we admit as admirable, and the other as a fair example of the superlatively contemptible. Whence arises this difference? Not from the metre, not from the language, not from the order of the words; but the matter expressed in Dr. Johnson's stanza is contemptible. The proper method of treating trivial and simple verses to which Dr. Johnson's stanza would be a fair parallelism is not to say this is a bad kind of poetry, or this is not poetry, but this wants sense; it is neither interesting in itself, nor can lead to any thing interesting; the images neither originate in that sane state of feeling which arises out of thought, nor can excite thought or feeling in the Reader. This is the only sensible manner of dealing with such verses: Why trouble yourself about the species till you have previously decided upon the genus? Why take pains to prove that an Ape is not a Newton when it is self-evident that he is not a man. (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802)
I suppose the only clear thing you can say about poetry is that it's consistently rhythmic and that it entails a foregrounding of the nature and resources of the medium itself. Poetry is where language goes to be itself. But that's obviously not a satisfactory definition – you could find some prose that might fit the bill, and there's always the so-called "prose-poems" of Baudelaire or others. With the advent of free verse over the last hundred and fifty years or so – think Whitman -- it may seem as if the structural delights and incantatory quality of older "poesy" has been badly compromised, but I think that's an overstatement. Most poets still know how to structure their verse, and they do not make a travesty of the medium.
A few simple points about scanning verse: it's easy in English; most verse is iambic U/ unstressed stressed. Read the poetry intelligentlly a couple of times, and it shouldn't be too difficult to mark its stress patterns, which will either be U/ or substitutions for that basic pattern: UU/ is an anapest, /UU is a trochee, etc. Much verse has five "feet" or U/ units: U/ U/ U/ U/ U/. Ancient Greek and Roman verse wasn't accentual like this – it was song-based and went by vowel/syllable length; here is the first line of The Odyssey in Greek:
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
andra moi ennepe moosa, polytropon, hos mala polla
Begin with Sappho's lyric fragments: voice, expression. Lyric is a fairy broad definition – lyric is non-narrative or at least minimalist in any story it may tell; it's brief poetry based on personal expression (often emotional, but not necessarily – what about perceptions and thoughts?) and involves direct address to a reader or some other figure, such as a beloved person. It is in fact startlin in its variety, but it makes sense to start with one of its most prominent subjects, love: erotic experience and desire. Sappho of Lesbos is the grandame of love lyric, so it makes sense to use her fragments as a starting point. Her love poetry, like any other good love verse, challenges our romanticism-influenced understanding of poetry as solitary, wild or wistful expression or "utterance." But the word poieo from which the modern term derives implies craft, poiesis is "a making." The very subject of love seems to cry out at the same time both for intense expression and for reflection, form, structure – both are services, we might say, that language offers our deepest passions. It is a resource at their disposal, at times at their mercy, but it isn't helpless and can provide clarification, perspective. And Sappho's poetry about love isn't solipsistic – it is surprisingly social in its attitudes and address.
Ezra Pound, "The River-Merchant's Wife"
The poem chronicles the development of a relationship that only over time blossomed into love. The final stanza is bost wistful and indicative of great steadiness, maturity. The very indirectness of the speech tends in another and more intimate direction.
Wystan Hugh Auden, Funeral Blues or "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone"
A protest against the normal order of things, ordinary processes of life. Of course, the poem began as a parody of a political eulogy.
Shakespeare, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"
The terms are mostly Platonist, but the intimacy goes beyond that framework, I think.
Sharon Olds, "Last Night"
Terms of affection – in fact language itsef – aren't adequate to express the kind of "love" the speaker is evoking. Violent symmetry about the actions described – purely natural. Still, contrast with Shakespeare, who tends to describe bold sexuality in terms of shame: "the expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action."
Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach" (704-05)
Fine example of belated Romantic approach to intersubjectivity – the speaker puts little hope in anything but direct relations, but the surroundings, the historical context, all but overwhelms this hope.
Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd"
Subject is in a sense "love" and is even cast in erotic terms, but of course it's really an elegy about Lincoln, and the poet's own attempt to bring symbolic order from emotional chaos. He laments and celebrates Death.
