Posts Tagged ‘poems’
The sonnet as a poetic form is surprisingly slippery to define. Any human unlucky enough to have witnessed my interminable sonnet-definition revisions can, I think at bare minimum, attest to this. Normally, of course, the sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhyming in some alternating fashion. This is all well — right up […]
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“There is no work of art without a subject,” said Ortega — and with him here I do not demur. Subject matter isn’t the only component of art, nor is it the most complicated, but it is the most fundamental. It is the component toward which all others are geared. Subject is what the artist presents. It […]
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Poems, unique among all literature, were for many centuries specifically meant to be learned by heart. They were meant to be memorized and then recited aloud. This is called the oral tradition of poetry, which in essence means holding literature in the mind and heart to then recite it. Thus we find in the oral […]
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The Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) did not invent the Petrarchan sonnet, which is also known as the Italian sonnet. It was first used by Dante (1265-1321) and then later by many of Dante’s contemporaries. Petrarch’s excellence with the form, however, especially when celebrating his beloved Laura, made the Italian sonnet more widely known, so that even […]
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Lyrics without music are like a clam without a shell. Songs lyrics are called melic — a word that means the lyrics are intended to be sung. The word melic comes from the Greek word melos, meaning “song.” It’s no surprise, therefore, that no matter how much one might enjoy a song, the overwhelming majority […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011