On Poetry
Poetry is something that everyone is familiar with but not everyone is intimate with. Most people’s experience with it might have been from poetry writing assignments in high school. However poetry is a great form of expression and if you have even the most cursory impulse to try and write some, by all means go for it.
Poetry comes in all shapes and sizes, but personally my favorite form is the Shakespearean sonnet. I like it because it has a very intuitive rhyming structure that isn’t just rhyming one line to the next. It begins with an abab rhyming structure, but ends with the last two lines in a rhyme. Although such rules can be applied to help give structure to your poetry, they do not need to be followed.
I am particularly fond of rhyming poetry, but there is plenty of poetry that does not rhyme. If you are new and don’t know where to begin, free verse is a good place to start. Although it does not require any conventions, it is not entirely free. It is helpful to establish your own poetic conventions, which can give your poetry rhythm. Often poetry can be an outlet of expression that is more difficult to achieve through prose. In some ways, words become more important. Each word is endowed with more meaning, sometimes taking up multiple guises.
Writing Poetry can be just as difficult as writing prose. But the more you practice the better you will become.
Good analyzation. I think poetry is like art: it is known, but there is not one collective definition of it.
–JW
Very true. some pieces of poetry rival prose length, such as Paradise Lost.
Reblogged this on thevisionofme.