'The Rhapsodic Fallacy' is an essay by United States poet Mary Kinzie in which she defines and attacks a "rhapsodic" conception of poetry. It was first published in Salmagundi of Fall 1984 [1] and was collected in The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling, and a somewhat shorter version of the essay was later anthologized in Twentieth-Century American Poetics [2] The essay was one of several of the mid-1980s that sparked a heated discussion over the role of form in American poetry, and was thus implicated in the formation of the New Formalism movement.[ citation needed ]
Kinzie begins the essay by identifying two contradictory strands in the critical writing and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe which she perceives as "begetting" the "rhapsodic" conception of poetry. These strands are:
She moves on to lament the loss of many forms or genres of poetry that were widely used in earlier times, including satire, the epistle, georgic, pastoral, allegory, philosophical poem, epic, verse drama, and tragedy, and quotes an essay by Australian poet A. D. Hope: "One after another the great forms disappear". [3]
Kinzie sees free verse as the "great equalizer" and ushering in an age of reduced scope and ambition. "When poems not only set themselves at a uniform pitch, but also contract themselves to recurrent, predictable five- or ten-line climaxes, pretty soon the surprises do not surprise us any more. The new prosaic-lyrical effusion is organized to get us into and out of the poem with extraordinary rapidity and no lasting effects."
Kinzie proceeds to identify three main contemporary "substyles" of the prosaic-rhapsodic:
Kinzie describes the Objective Style as gaining its effects from "the cumulative effect of a string of brief, bland declarative sentences". She lists the tools of the style as being: juxtaposition, portent, non sequitur, and passivity. The last of these, she notes, claims "a kind of reportorial honesty" for the poem.
In the Mixed Ironic Style the poet injects into the work a "stylistic agitation that at first feel rich, sensitive, conscious, attentive to response". Kinzie regards John Ashbery as a prime example of a poet of this style.
In the third style described by Kinzie, the Innocuous Surreal Style, the poet whimsically and abruptly "violates" the "realistic surface" of the poem. Kinzie describes variants of this style: the Muted Innocuous Surreal and the Comic Surreal.
Mary Kinzie (1993). "The Rhapsodic Fallacy". The cure of poetry in an age of prose. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-43736-1.
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Free verse is an open form of poetry, which in its modern form arose through the French vers libre form. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech.
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Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".
Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form, while preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery, parataxis, and emotional effects.
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Carlos Drummond de Andrade was a Brazilian poet and writer, considered by some as the greatest Brazilian poet of all time. He has become something of a national cultural symbol in Brazil, where his widely influential poem "Canção Amiga" has been featured on the 50-cruzado novo bill.
New Formalism is a literary movement in late 20th- and 21st-century American poetry that promotes a return to rhymed, metrical, and narrative poetry. New Formalism and the New Narrative are far the most controversial responses within American poetry to the dominant position of free verse and confessional poetry.
Icelandic literature refers to literature written in Iceland or by Icelandic people. It is best known for the sagas written in medieval times, starting in the 13th century. As Icelandic and Old Norse are almost the same, and because Icelandic works constitute most of Old Norse literature, Old Norse literature is often wrongly considered a subset of Icelandic literature. However, works by Norwegians are present in the standard reader Sýnisbók íslenzkra bókmennta til miðrar átjándu aldar, compiled by Sigurður Nordal on the grounds that the language was the same.
This glossary of literary terms is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in the discussion, classification, analysis, and criticism of all types of literature, such as poetry, novels, and picture books, as well as of grammar, syntax, and language techniques. For a more complete glossary of terms relating to poetry in particular, see Glossary of poetry terms.
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Mary Kinzie is an American poet.
In poetry, the volta, or turn, is a rhetorical shift or dramatic change in thought and/or emotion. Turns are seen in all types of written poetry.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The long poem is a literary genre including all poetry of considerable length. Though the definition of a long poem is vague and broad, the genre includes some of the most important poetry ever written.
The poetry in The Lord of the Rings consists of the poems and songs written by J. R. R. Tolkien, interspersed with the prose of his high fantasy novel of Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings. The book contains over 60 pieces of verse of many kinds; some poems related to the book were published separately. Seven of Tolkien's songs, all but one from The Lord of the Rings, were made into a song-cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, set to music by Donald Swann. All the poems in The Lord of the Rings were set to music and published on CDs by The Tolkien Ensemble.
The difficulty of translating Beowulf from its compact, metrical, alliterative form in a single surviving but damaged Old English manuscript into any modern language is considerable, matched by the large number of attempts to make the poem approachable, and the scholarly attention given to the problem.
