poetry

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Imaginative literary form, particularly suitable for describing emotions and thoughts. Poetry is highly ‘compressed’ writing, often using figures of speech to talk about one thing in terms of another, such as metaphor and simile, that allows the reader to ‘unpack’ the poem's meaning for itself. This leads to people interpreting poems differently in different times and places, which is part of the fascination of the medium. Poetry does not have to follow the strict grammatical rules of prose (ordinary written language) – although the writer may choose to do so – and often uses richer language to appeal to the reader's senses and intellect. The use of comparative language and elevated or uncommon word choice or diction contributes to poetry's ability to make a familiar world seem strange and new again.

Traditionally poems are distinguished from prose by the arrangement of words, which often rhyme or are arranged rhythmically in a structure known as the poem's metre. A poem is written in lines, whereas prose is not. In modern times the distinction between poetry and prose is not so clear-cut. If prose displays rhythm and other features associated with poetry, it is sometimes termed ‘prose poetry’. Much of English novelist Virginia Woolf's work, for example, could be placed in this category.

The vast genre of poetry can be subdivided in a variety of ways. A large body of poetry is metrical. Another distinction can be made between lyric poems (sonnet, ode, elegy, and pastoral are examples of lyrical poetry), and narrative, or story-telling, poetry (ballad, lay, and epic are examples of narrative verse). Narrative verse is often less complex in its imagery and language than the more heightened lyric poem.

There have been experiments with ‘free’ poetic forms, known as free verse, unconstrained by rules of metre and rhyme. Sometimes, the actual arrangement of words on the printed page is used to make shapes, or to emphasize particular words or phrases and their relationship to one another. Even in metrical verse, the precise position of words on a line can have a similar effect.

The bison's head, star, rose, and crescent are traditional symbols of Moldavia. The colours are based on the Romanian flag. Effective date: 3 November 1990. >>