Composition of Poetry: Meaningful Soul Poem

Identifying poem Dylan Thomas said, "A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."

The function of poetry can be described as two pages covering book of new life of literature.

First, it gives birth to knowledge and pleasure.
Second it lets a desire in mind to reproduce this material of knowledge according to the rhythm of beauty.

If knowledge is the body, poetry is the soul. Virtue, love, patriotism, beautiful natural scenery will be all repel if poetry did not beautify. When knowledge increase literature body too much that it becomes too difficult to animate it.

According to ‘Shelley’ we have too much moral, political and historical wisdom. There is no want of knowledge but what we lake is the creative faculty to imagine that which we know. We want tie poetry of life, without which the cultivation of sciences remains circumscribed.

Marge Piercy said "One of the functions of poetry has always been to articulate for people, to give dignity to people's experiences, their sufferings, their pleasures, the dramas of their lives."

According to Steven Ratiner, poetry is built upon a communal voice. Reaching beyond the purely subjective, you seem to be speaking both to and for your audience. There are even a few of the poems in the new collection that start out with "I" but wind up speaking "we."

Composing Poetry

"A poem . . .
begins as a lump in the throat,
a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. . . .
It finds the thought
and the thought finds the words."
- Robert Frost

Samuel Taylor Coleridge says "Poetry is the best words in the best order." There are certain considerations to be made, both technical and stylistic, when writing poetry. Technical consideration include poetic meter and structure. Stylistic considerations tend to be harder to define, but can include poetic devices such as kennings.

"Poetry is the record of the best and the happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." Poets are the emotional state more sensitive to feelings, emotions and ideals and they can color all of them with the divine colors of imagination. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most gorgeous in the world. It catches the vanishing moments of the beauty.

Robert Frost said "Poetry is about the grief." The poetry is a result of dying emotions of poet rather hot or creative imaginations. Poetry turns all things to loveliness. It makes the beautiful more beautiful thus all familiar things are shown with a touch of better beauty than they hold.

Rollo May outlines poems "Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem."

Poets

"To be a poet
is a condition,
not a profession."
- Robert Frost

The poets amaze us with electric life which burns within their words. Poets are the most responsive of souls and they represent the sprit of their age. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Thus by giving the highest and divine place to poetry and poets. "A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music..." described Soren Kierkegaard.

Patterns of Poetry

Blank Verse
Introduced to England in the 16th century, blank verse consists of unrhymed lines of ten syllables each; with the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables bearing the accents. Blank verse is especially well-adapted to dramatic verse. Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and John Milton are masters of blank verse.

Rhymed Couplet
A rhymed couplet consists of two successive lines of verse with similar end-rhymes. Both the grammatical structure and the idea of the rhymed couplet convey a sense of completion.

Rhymed Stanza
A rhymed stanza is a division of a poem that consists of two or more lines arranged together as a unit. A stanza's group of lines is usually arranged around a recurring pattern of metrical length and sequence of rhyme. This structure is determined by the number of lines, the dominant meter, and the rhyme scheme.

Types of Poetry

Narrative Poem
A narrative poem is a non-dramatic poem that tells a story or presents a narrative. A narrative poem may be long or short, complex or simple. Types of Narrative Poems are Epics, Ballads and Metrical Romances. A ballad is a story song that often has a refrain or chorus as in the example below.

Dramatic Poem
A dramatic poem is a poem that employs dramatic form or technique.

Satiric Poem
A satiric poem is a poem that treats its subject with irony and/or ridicule.

Didactic Poem
A didactic poem is a poem that is intended primarily to teach a lesson.

Sonnet
A sonnet is a lyrical poem of fourteen lines, highly arbitrary in form and following one of several rhyme conventions.

Ode
An ode is a ceremonious lyrical poem marked by exaltation or feeling and style. An ode has varying line length and complex stanzas.

Elegy
An elegy is a sustained and formal poem setting forth the poet's meditations upon a grave theme (usually death).

Haiku
The haiku is a three lined Japanese poem about nature. This particular type of poetry has a limit on the amount of syllables you can have for each line. The first line always has five syllables. The second line has seven syllables. The third line has the same amount as the first line.

Limerick
The limerick is humorous nonsense verse consisting of a triplet and couplet, making it a five line poem. Lines one, two, and five are the triplet and rhyme. Lines three and four form a rhyming couplet.

Acrostic
A poem where the first letter of each line spells a word that can be read vertically.

Cinquain
A type of poetry in which the first line has one word, the second has two words describing the first line, the third line shows action with three words, the fourth line has four words that convey feeling, and the fifth line refers to line one.

Free Verse
The poetry that is written material freed from paragraph form and has rhythm but no rhyme

Finally, there is only one best way i see to understand poet or poetry as Anne Sexton suggested.

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Further Readings

Critical Approaches to Literature - Short analysis By P.P Mehra & P.N.Bhatt
A Critical Study By David Daiches