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Formal poetry typically includes the following features line-breaks - Most forms specify where these need to be. Making a virtue of necessity, poets discovered ways to exploit them, using enjambment, surprise, and varieties of end-rhyme. Rectangular stanzas - Most forms produce lines of near-equal length in stanzas of near-equal length, resulting in poems that are a series of blocks. Initial capitals - Early verse took from prose (especially religious texts) the idea of a complete thought per line, and with it, perhaps, the capitalizing convention. Also the capitals help to counter-balance the weight of the end-rhymes. The rise of free verse made the line-break a more flexible device. Numerous experimenters explored the potential of layout. Some poets used ragged-left as well as ragged-right formats - not as the Alexandrians, Herbert or Lewis Carroll did (making a shape on the page), nor to emphasise the rhyming pattern, but to guide meaning and control rhythm. At the same time ee...

Literary Order The idea that in a masterpiece everything contributes to the whole can be traced back through Hegel's principle of 'organic unity' to Aristotle's theory of tragedy. For Coleridge, "organic unity" was the manifestation of a poet's powers of synthesising. It was Baumgarten (1714-62, his Aesthetica was written in Latin) who coined the term 'perfectible beauty' according to which the beauty of an artwork or natural object corresponds to the degree of its organization or integration. In the ideal case no elements of an object should appear arbitrary, accidental, or irrational - it's a microcosm of the greater 'totality'. With order and harmony comes unity and a way to distinguish what "belongs" from what doesn't. Workshop criticism of short stories and poetry is often harsh on the apparently inconsequential - anything not contributing to the main theme is easily dismissed as not belonging. But the need for ...

It sounds better Sound has a strong, innate effect. Artists need a restriction to fight against. "Poetry without rhyme is like tennis without a net" - Frost Rhyme can be built into a poem without detrimentally affecting other aspects of the poem. It can be used to emphasise words or connections. It binds a poem together. Disadvantages It sounds worse - sing-song, jangly, childish. J. Jerome in a writers' guide says that "much of your effort in rhyming is to subdue it" by spreading the rhymes out, avoiding rare words, using enjambment, etc. Why bother in the first place? Even the experts can't please everyone: Kay Ryan's poetry has been described as "too rhyme-driven"; Frederick Seidel "even makes his admirers nervous ... unexpected, bathetic, clanging end-rhymes that critics have compared to those of Dr Seuss" Rhyme is the most superficial of sound effects. The English language isn't well suited to rhyme. Poetry writi...

A look at some of the issues that confront poetry readers when they search for meaning Meaning They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what about a poem's meaning? One school of thought assumes that poets have a clear vision in their heads which they should translate as clearly as possible into words so that the reader can share this vision. This is the "Signal Processing" idea of communication, where writers aim to give the reader no freedom and ideally the medium should be transparent. Contrast the "Signal Processing" idea with what happens when composing music. I suspect that Mahler didn't have feelings which he translated into sound so that listeners could translate them back - he thought directly in music. I'm sure many poets think directly in words too. Further along the scale are Rorschach ink-blots. What people see in these shapes might well have nothing to do with what (if anything) was in the mind of the creator. So where in ...

Roman Ingarden [Ing73] developed Aristotle's concept that a literary work of art has at least 4 layers sound sense (meaning of propositions) schematized aspects (which occur in a definite sequence correlated with sentences) represented objectivities (based, unlike real world things, on limited verifiable information) Furthermore he thought the work composed of an infinite number of Unbestimmtheiststellen (indetermination spots). Individual concretizations (readings) only partly remove these places of indeterminacy, so that different concretizations remained possible. Ingarden's work was phenomenologically based, with few poetry examples. He assumed [Ing73, p.40] that "the literary work is conceived as a purely intentional product of the subjective, creative processes of its author." Since then other literary approaches have found favour and experimental psychologists have studied the reading process more deeply. Although they seldom use poetry texts, much of...

First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is. An academic criticised this as being at best nonsense. In fact it's a reference to an old Chinese text (by Lao Tzu?), pointing out that if you analyse something, you may lose sight of the original object, but later, the object returns richer than before. However, what the text doesn't point out is that before you study a piece you need to realise it is difficult and that it's worth the effort. The critic found these words from a Donovan song difficult because they're deceptive - neither the context nor the content give the readers any hint that work is required. This demonstrates one of the many types of difficulty prevalent today, but not the most difficult to deal with. It's just a matter of finding the "missing key". Reasons Why are there more difficult poems around nowadays? There are many legitimate reasons There's an increasing use of irony, collage and fragmentation, not just i...

One of the more challenging problems that a workshop has to face is how to deal with poets who repeatedly present bad poems. The usual guideline is to be tactful. The benefit of this to the group is that it creates a more socially relaxed atmosphere, giving people a chance to learn in a supportive environment. The democratic, non-elitist mix of poets guarantees variety in the group. Tactfulness and honesty need not be at odds and after all, individuals can ask for honest comments either privately or to the whole group if they want. Moreover, newcomers to the group won't be scared away by fears of being adversely criticised. The guideline also makes it easier to stamp out gratuitous insults. However, there are disadvantages as well, for the group and the individuals. To accurately express one's opinions is never easy, but to express them tactfully is harder still. In some groups even calling a poem bad constitutes a tactless insult. Tact too easily leads to bad poems being welco...