Editing Poetry analysis (section)

===Poetic forms===
Poems can have many forms. Some forms are strictly defined, with required line counts and rhyming patterns, such as the [[sonnet]] (mostly made of a 14-line poem with a defined rhyme scheme) or [[limerick (poetry)|limerick]] (usually a 5-line free rhyme poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme). Such poems exhibit closed form, meaning they have strict rules regarding their structure and length.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Closed Form |url=https://poemanalysis.com/poetic-form/closed-form/ |access-date=2024-03-26 |website=Poem Analysis |language=en-US}}</ref> Others (which exhibit [[Open Form|open form]]) have less structure or, indeed, almost no apparent structure at all. This appearance, though, is deceptive: successful open form poems are informed throughout by organic structure which may resist formal description but is nonetheless a crucial element of the poem's effect on the reading mind.<ref>Free Verse - Definition and Examples | LitCharts</ref>

====Closed forms====
A poet writing in closed form follows a specific pattern, a specific design. Some designs have proven so durable and so suited to the [[English language]] that they survive for centuries and are renewed with each generation of poets ([[sonnet]]s, [[sestina]]s, [[limerick (poetry)|limericks]], and so forth), while others come into being for the expression of one poem and are then set aside ([[Robert Frost|Frost's]] "[[Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening]]" is a good example).<ref>{{Cite web |last=Frost |first=Robert |title=Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening |url=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening}} from ''The Poetry of Robert Frost'', edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951, by Robert Frost</ref>

Of all closed forms in English prosody, none has demonstrated greater durability and range of expression than '''[[blank verse]]''', which is [[Verse (poetry)|verse]] that follows a regular meter but does not rhyme. In English, iambic pentameter is by far the most frequently employed meter. Among the many exemplary works of blank verse in English are [[John Milton|Milton's]] ''[[Paradise Lost]]'' and most of the verse passages from [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare's]] plays, such as this portion of a famous [[soliloquy]] from [[Hamlet]]:

:To be, or not to be—that is the question.
:Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
:The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
:Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
:And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep —
:No more, and by a sleep to say we end
:The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
:That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
:Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
:To sleep—perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub.

Note that Shakespeare does not rigidly follow a pattern of five iambs per line. Rather, most lines have five strong syllables, and most are preceded by a weak syllable. The meter provides a rhythm that informs the line: it is not an invariable formula.{{Citation needed|date=April 2016}}

Rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines form the '''[[heroic couplet]]'''. Two masters of the form are [[Alexander Pope]] and [[John Dryden]]. The form has proven especially suited to conveying wit and sardonic humor, as in the opening of Pope's ''An Essay on Criticism''.

:’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill
:Appear in writing or in judging ill;
:But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offence,
:To tire our patience, than mislead our sense.
:Some few in that, but numbers err in this,
:Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss;
:A fool might once himself alone expose,
:Now one in verse makes many more in prose.

Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter arranged in a more elaborate rhyme scheme form a '''[[sonnet]]'''. There are two major variants. The form originated in [[Italy]], and the word derives from "sonetto", which is [[Italian language|Italian]] for "little song". The [[Italian sonnet]] or [[Petrarchan sonnet]] follows a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, ABBA ABBA CD CD CD, ABBA ABBA CCE DDE, or ABBA ABBA CDD CEE. In each of these, a group of eight lines (the [[Octave (poetry)|octave]]) is followed by a group of six (the [[sextet]]). Typically, the octave introduces a situation, idea, or problem to which the sestet provides a response or resolution. For example, consider [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]]'s "The Sound of the Sea":

:The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
:And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
:I heard the first wave of the rising tide
:Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
:A voice out of the silence of the deep,
:A sound mysteriously multiplied
:As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
:Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
:So comes to us at times, from the unknown
:And inaccessible solitudes of being,
:The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
:And inspirations, that we deem our own,
:Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
:Of things beyond our reason or control.

The octave presents the speaker's experience of the sound of the sea, coming to him from some distance. In the sestet, this experience mutates into a meditation on the nature of inspiration and man's connection to creation and his experience of the numinous.

English has (proportionally) far fewer rhyming words than Italian.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2024 |title=Poetic Forms |url=https://www.studocu.com/en-us/document/university-of-houston-victoria/poetry-and-poetics/poetry-an-introduction-ch-9-poetic-forms-235-264/52422086}}</ref> Recognizing this, Shakespeare adapted the sonnet form to English by creating an alternate rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The poet using this, the [[English sonnet]] or [[Shakespearean sonnet]] form, may use the fourteen lines as single unit of thought (as in "The Silken Tent" above), or treat the groups of four rhyming lines (the [[quatrains]]) as organizational units, as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73:

:That time of year thou mayst in me behold
:When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
:Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
:Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
:In me thou seest the twilight of such day
:As after sunset fadeth in the west,
:Which by and by black night doth steal away,
:Death's second self, which seals up all in rest.
:In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
:That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
:As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
:Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
:This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
:To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

In lines 1–4, the speaker compares his time of life to autumn. In lines 5–8, the comparison is to twilight; in lines 9–12, the comparison is to the last moments of a dying fire. Each quatrain presents a shorter unit of time, creating a sense of time accelerating toward an inevitable end, the death implied in the final couplet.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Abella |first=Julieta |date=2017-11-03 |title=Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare |url=https://poemanalysis.com/william-shakespeare/sonnet-73/ |access-date=2024-03-26 |website=Poem Analysis |language=en-US}}</ref>

At the "high end" of closed forms are the '''[[sestina]]''' and '''[[villanelle]]'''. At the "low end" are forms such as the '''[[Limerick (poetry)|limerick]]''', which follows a metrical pattern of two lines of anapestic trimeter (three anapests per line), followed by two lines of anapestic dimeter (two anapests per line), followed by one line of anapestic trimeter. (The beginning of the metrical foot does not have to coincide with the beginning of the line.) Any poem following this metrical pattern would generally be considered a limerick, however most also follow an AABBA rhyme scheme. Most limericks are humorous, and many are ribald, or outright obscene (possible rhymes that could follow an opening like "[[There once was a man from Nantucket]]" are left as an exercise for the reader). Nonetheless, the form is capable of sophisticated and playful expression:

:Titian was mixing rose madder.
:His model posed nude on a ladder.
::Her position to Titian
::Suggested coition
:So he nipped up the ladder and had her.

==== Open forms ====
In contrast, a poet using '''[[free verse]]''' (sometimes called "[[Open Form|open form]]")<ref>{{Cite web |title=Open Form |url=https://poemanalysis.com/poetic-form/open-form/ |access-date=2024-03-26 |website=Poem Analysis |language=en-US}}</ref> seeks to find fresh and uniquely appropriate forms for each poem, letting the structure grow out of the poem's subject matter or inspiration. A common perception is that open form is easier and less rigorous than closed form ([[Robert Frost|Frost]] likened it to "playing tennis with the net down",<ref>Address at Milton Academy, Massachusetts (17 May 1935){{Full citation needed|date=April 2016}}<!--I must have missed that event--is it published somewhere?--></ref> but such is not necessarily the case (skeptics should ''try'' playing tennis without a net): success with the open form requires great sensitivity to language and a particular type of adaptable understanding. In the best open form poems, the poet achieves something that is inaccessible through closed form. As X. J. Kennedy has said, "Should the poet succeed, then the discovered arrangement will seem exactly right for what the poem is saying" (582). The metre of ‘classical’ poetry is replaced in open verse by [[Cadence (poetry)|cadence]] in rhythm, line indentation, with pauses implied by the syntax, thus the limiting factor of one human breath was naturally incorporated in the poetry, essential to an oral art form, composed to be read aloud.<ref>Sounds Aloud http://soundsaloud.blogspot.co.uk</ref>

[[Walt Whitman]] was an important innovator of open form, and he demonstrates its merits in "[[A Noiseless Patient Spider]]."

:A noiseless patient spider,
:I marked where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
:Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
:It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
:Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

:And you O my soul where you stand,
:Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
:Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
:Till the bridge you will need to be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,
:Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

The long, rolling lines—unified, held together like strong cords, by [[alliteration]] and [[assonance]]—partake of the same nature as the spider's filaments and the soul's threads. Two balanced stanzas, one describing a spider, the other the speaker's soul, perfectly frame the implicit comparison, with neither being privileged over the other. Just as the spider and the soul quest outward for significance, the two stanzas throw links to each other with subtly paired words: isolated/detached, launched/fling, tirelessly/ceaselessly, surrounding/surrounded.

In this poem, Whitman uses synonyms and antonyms to give structural integrity to a poem comprising two yoked stanzas, much like (but not exactly like) the way poets working within closed forms use meter and rhyme to give structural integrity to their poems. The poem has form, but the form was not imposed by previous conventions. It has open form.<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YoAdAQAAIAAJ&q=A+Noiseless+Patient+Spider%22.+open+form|title=Literature and the Writing Process|last1=McMahan|first1=Elizabeth|last2=Day|first2=Susan|last3=Funk|first3=Robert|date=December 2006|publisher=Pearson/Prentice Hall|isbn=9780132248020}}</ref>