Language of poetry.

The first substyle is verse. Its first differentiating property is its orderly form, which is based mainly on the rhythmic and phonetic arrangement of the utterances. The rhythmic aspect calls forth syntactical and semantic peculiarities which also fall into a more or less strict orderly arrangement. Both the syntactical and semantic aspects of the poetic substyle may be defined as compact, for they are held in check by rhythmic patterns. Syntactically this brevity is shown in elliptical and fragmentary sentences, in detached constructions, in inversion, asyndeton and other syntactical peculiarities.
Rhythm and rhyme are immediately distinguishable properties of the poetic substyle provided they are wrought into compositional patterns. The various compositional forms of rhyme and rhythm are generally studied under the terms versification or prosody.
The poetical language remains and will always remain a specific mode of communication differing from prose. The poetic words and phrases, peculiar syntactical arrangement, orderly phonetic and rhythmical patterns have long been the signals of poetic language. But the most important of all is the power of the words used in poetry to express more than they usually signify in ordinary language.

Lexical and syntactical peculiarities, together with those just analysed, will present the substyle as a stylistic entity.

Among the lexical peculiarities of verse the first to be mentioned is imagery, which being the generic feature of the belles-lettres style assumes in poetry a compressed form: it is rich in associative power, frequent in occurrence and varied in methods and devices of materiali­zation.

We here define imagery as a use of language media which will create a sensory perception of an abstract notion by arousing certain associa­tions between the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete, the conventional and the factual. It is hardly possible to under-estimate the significance of imagery in the belles-lettres style of language.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1955