Systems of versification Prose Prose is

Systems of versification

Prose • Prose is considered one of the two major literary structures, with the other being poetry. The word 'prose' is derived from the Latin prōsa, which literally translates as 'straight-forward or direct, speech. ' In literature, prose is the usual mode of expression in such forms as the novel, short story, essay, letter (epistle), history, biography, sermon, and oration. •

Prose • Prose lacks the more formal metrical structure of verse that is almost always found in traditional poetry. Poems often involve a meter and/or rhyme scheme. Prose, instead, comprises full, grammatical sentences, which then constitute paragraphs and overlook aesthetic appeal. •

Prose • Prose is ordinary speech or writing, without metrical structure. Prose is the most typical form of language. The earliest writers of Greek prose appear to have been the chroniclers and philosophers of Ionia in the sixth century BC. From this time onward the development of prose was rapid. Heracleitus in about 500 BC was already writing prose of subtlety and style. By the middle of the fifth century BC a technical prose had been developed which was able to express all that was needed for a scientific or philosophical treatise.

Prose • Shortly, prose is an ordinary language people use in speaking or writing, distinguished from the language of poetry primarily in that the line is not treated as a formal unit and it has no repetitive pattern of rhythm or meter.

Poetry • (from the Latin poeta, a poet) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and expressive qualities in addition to its apparent meaning. Poetry may be written independently, as discrete poems, or may occur in conjunction with other arts, as in poetic drama, hymns, lyrics, or prose poetry. It is published in poetic collections and wider anthologies.

Poetry • Poetry, and discussions of it, have a long history. Early attempts to define poetry, such as Aristotle's Poetics, focused on the uses of speech in rhetoric, drama, song, and comedy. Later attempts concentrated on features such as repetition, verse form and rhyme, and emphasized the aesthetics which distinguish poetry from more objectively informative, prosaic forms of writing, From the mid-20 th century, poetry has sometimes been more loosely defined as a fundamental creative act using language.

Poetry • often uses particular forms and conventions to suggest alternative meanings in the words, or to evoke emotional or sensual responses. Devices such as assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and rhythm are sometimes used to achieve musical or declamatory effects. The use of ambiguity, symbolism, irony, and other stylistic elements of poetic diction often leaves a poem open to multiple interpretations. Similarly, metaphor, simile, and metonymy create a resonance between different images—a layering of meanings, forming connections previously not perceived. Some forms of poetry are specific to particular cultures and genres, responding to the characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. While readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Dante, Goethe, Rumi may think of it as being written in lines based upon rhyme and regular meter, there are traditions, such as Biblical poetry, that use other approaches to achieve rhythm and euphonyблагозвучность. In today's globalized world poets often borrow styles, techniques and forms from diverse cultures and languages.

Poetry • All cultures have their own poetry, using it for various purposes from sacred ritual to obscene insult, but it is generally employed in those utterances and writings that call for heightened intensity of emotion, dignity of expression, or subtlety of meditation. Poetry is valued for combining pleasures of sound with freshness of ideas, whether these be solemn or comical. Some critics make an evaluative distinction between poetry, which is elevated or inspired, and verse, which is merely clever or mechanical. The three major categories of poetry are narrative, dramatic, and lyric, the last being the most extensive.

Prosody • Prosody is the study of the meter, rhythm, and intonation of a poem. Rhythm and meter, although closely related, should be distinguished. [28] Meter is the definitive pattern established for a verse (such as iambic pentameter), while rhythm is the actual sound that results from a line of poetry. Thus, the meter of a line may be described as being "iambic", but a full description of the rhythm would require noting where the language causes one to pause or accelerate and how the meter interacts with other elements of the language.

Rhythm • The methods for creating poetic rhythm vary across languages and between poetic traditions. Languages are often described as having timing set primarily by accents, syllables, depending on how rhythm is established, though a language can be influenced by multiple approaches. Syllable-timed languages include Latin, Catalan, French, Spanish. English, Russian and, generally, German are stress-timed languages. Varying intonation also affects how rhythm is perceived. Languages also can rely on tone. Tonal languages include Chinese, Vietnamese, Lithuanian.

Rhythm • Metrical rhythm generally involves precise arrangements of stresses or syllables into repeated patterns called feet within a line. In Modern English verse the pattern of stresses primarily differentiate feet, so rhythm based on meter in Modern English is most often founded on the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. In the classical languages, on the other hand, while the metrical units are similar, vowel length rather than stresses define the meter. Old English poetry used a metrical pattern involving varied numbers of syllables but a fixed number of strong stresses in each line. In the case of free verse, rhythm is often based on looser units of cadence rather than a regular meter.

Meter • In the Western poetic tradition, meters are customarily grouped according to a characteristic metrical foot and the number of feet per line. Thus, "iambic pentameter" is a meter comprising five feet per line, in which the predominant kind of foot is the "iamb". This metric system originated in ancient Greek poetry, and was used by poets such as Pindar and Sappho, and by the great tragedians of Athens. Similarly, "dactylic hexameter", comprises six feet per line, of which the dominant kind of foot is the "dactyl". Dactylic hexameter was the traditional meter of Greek epic poetry, the earliest extant examples of which are the works of Homer. More recently, iambic pentameter and dactylic hexameter have been used by William Shakespeare. Meter is often scanned based on the arrangement of "poetic feet" into lines.

In English • In English, each foot usually includes one syllable with a stress and one or two without a stress. In other languages, it may be a combination of the number of syllables and the length of the vowel that determines how the foot is parsed, where one syllable with a long vowel may be treated as the equivalent of two syllables with short vowels. For example, in ancient Greek poetry, meter is based solely on syllable duration rather than stress. In some languages, such as English, stressed syllables are typically pronounced with greater volume, greater length, and higher pitch, and are the basis for poetic meter.

In ancient Greek • these attributes were independent of each other; long vowels and syllables including a vowel plus more than one consonant actually had longer duration, approximately double that of a short vowel, while pitch and stress (dictated by the accent) were not associated with duration and played no role in the meter. Thus, a dactylic hexameter line could be envisioned as a musical phrase with six measures, each of which contained either a half note followed by two quarter notes (i. e. a long syllable followed by two short syllables), or two half notes (i. e. two long syllables); thus, the substitution of two short syllables for one long syllable resulted in a measure of the same length. Such substitution in a stress language, such as English, would not result in the same rhythmic regularity.

The generally accepted names for some of the most commonly used kinds of feet include: • iamb – one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable • trochee – one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable • dactyl – one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables • anapest – two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable • spondee – two stressed syllables together • pyrrhic – two unstressed syllables together (rare, usually used to end dactylic hexameter)

The number of metrical feet in a line are described in Greek terminology as follows: • • monometer - one foot dimeter – two feet trimeter – three feet tetrameter – four feet pentameter – five feet hexameter – six feet heptameter – seven feet octameter – eight feet

Some common metrical patterns, with notable examples of poets and poems who use them, include: • Iambic pentameter (John Milton, Paradise Lost) • Dactylic hexameter (Homer, Iliad; [Virgil, Aeneid; Ovid, Metamorphoses) • Iambic tetrameter (Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"; Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin) • Trochaic octameter (Edgar Allan Poe, "The Raven") • Anapestic tetrameter (Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"; Lord Byron, Don Juan) • Alexandrine (Jean Racine, Phèdre) • Alliteration: The repetition of sounds in initial stressed syllables (see. Figures of Speech, above). • Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds (see Figures of Speech, above). • Refrain: A phrase or group of lines that is repeated at significant moments within a poem, usually at the end of a stanza.