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Historical poetry is a subgenre of poetry that has its roots in history. Its aim is to delineate events of the past by incorporating elements of artful composition and poetic diction.
- Overview
- Attempts to define poetry
poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Howard Nemerov.)
Poetry is the other way of using language. Perhaps in some hypothetical beginning of things it was the only way of using language or simply was language tout court, prose being the derivative and younger rival. Both poetry and language are fashionably thought to have belonged to ritual in early agricultural societies; and poetry in particular, it has been claimed, arose at first in the form of magical spells recited to ensure a good harvest. Whatever the truth of this hypothesis, it blurs a useful distinction: by the time there begins to be a separate class of objects called poems, recognizable as such, these objects are no longer much regarded for their possible yam-growing properties, and such magic as they may be thought capable of has retired to do its business upon the human spirit and not directly upon the natural world outside.
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Famous Poets and Poetic Form
Formally, poetry is recognizable by its greater dependence on at least one more parameter, the line, than appears in prose composition. This changes its appearance on the page; and it seems clear that people take their cue from this changed appearance, reading poetry aloud in a very different voice from their habitual voice, possibly because, as Ben Jonson said, poetry “speaketh somewhat above a mortal mouth.” If, as a test of this description, people are shown poems printed as prose, it most often turns out that they will read the result as prose simply because it looks that way; which is to say that they are no longer guided in their reading by the balance and shift of the line in relation to the breath as well as the syntax.
That is a minimal definition but perhaps not altogether uninformative. It may be all that ought to be attempted in the way of a definition: Poetry is the way it is because it looks that way, and it looks that way because it sounds that way and vice versa.
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Feb 8, 2024 · The typical themes of historical poetry focus on significant historical events, often involving the violence, death, struggle and nobility associated with these events. War, for example, was a popular theme for historical poets such as Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon.
Through the generations, these verbal poetic records evolved into written masterpieces, enduring in the pages of history books and anthologies. Examples of Historical Poems. Let us explore three remarkable historical poems that have touched the hearts and minds of readers throughout the ages: 1. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord ...
Below, we select and introduce ten of the greatest poems about the past and history that played out before the poets themselves were alive. Some of them are more general meditations on ‘the past’ and what we mean by ‘history’, but some engage with particular events, buildings, or historical figures. 1.
We coined the term historical poetics for our group, which emerged from a conference organized at Rutgers University in 2002 by Meredith McGill and leading to the publication of The Traf c in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poems and Trans-atlantic Exchange (2008).
Historical poetics is a way of working through various ideas about poetry: what it is, how to read it, and how these ideas have changed over time. These are theoretical as well as historical questions, especially in the nineteenth century, a period of rapid development of historicisms, prosodic systems, and the global spread of English.
