poem


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poem

1. a composition in verse, usually characterized by concentrated and heightened language in which words are chosen for their sound and suggestive power as well as for their sense, and using such techniques as metre, rhyme, and alliteration
2. a literary composition that is not in verse but exhibits the intensity of imagination and language common to it
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Poem

a relatively short literary composition in verse, organized according to rules governing the construction of poetic language within a particular rhyme scheme. In distinction to prose, the poem is regular in composition and rhythm and therefore assumes a relatively greater weight of meaning as à whole as well as in each of its elements.

Depending on content and structure, poems are divided into various types and genres, for example, the ode, elegy, and ballad. Poems generally depict a brief but crucial and meaningful event in the life of man or nature and convey a “concentrated inner state” (G. Hegel). In the 19th and 20th centuries, the poem has been perceived primarily as a form of the lyric and contrasted to other verse genres, such as the short story in verse and the narrative poem.

REFERENCES

Zhirmunskii, V. M. “Kompozitsiia liricheskikh stikhotvorenii.” In Teoriia stikha. Leningrad, 1975.
Ginzburg, L. O linke, 2nd ed. Leningrad, 1974.

V. A. SAPOOOV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in classic literature ?
Then read from the treasured volume The poem of thy choice, And lend to the rhyme of the poet The beauty of thy voice.
The poem on the whole, however, is chiefly to be admired for the graceful insouciance of its metre, so well in accordance with the character of the sentiments, and especially for the ease of the general manner.
The poem has always affected me in a remarkable manner.
The taint of which I speak is clearly perceptible even in a poem so full of brilliancy and spirit as "The Health" of Edward Coate Pinckney: --
The Hesiodic poems fall into two groups according as they are didactic (technical or gnomic) or genealogical: the first group centres round the "Works and Days", the second round the "Theogony".
Of the Hesiodic poems similar in character to the "Works and Days", only the scantiest fragments survive.
Several poems are ascribed to Hesiod, such as the "Epithalamium of Peleus and Thetis", the "Descent of Theseus into Hades", or the "Circuit of the Earth" (which must have been connected with the story of Phineus and the Harpies, and so with the Argonaut-legend), which yet seem to have belonged to the "Catalogues".
Next to the "Eoiae" and the poems which seemed to have been developed from it, it is natural to place the "Great Eoiae".
with the perfectly sincere poems of the Greek Theocritus, who gives genuine expression to the life of actual Sicilian shepherds.
Spenser, however, soon outgrew this folly and in 1579 published the collection of poems which, as we have already said, is commonly taken as marking the beginning of the great Elizabethan literary period, namely 'The Shepherd's Calendar.' This is a series of pastoral pieces (eclogues, Spenser calls them, by the classical name) twelve in number, artificially assigned one to each month in the year.
And Spenser, able all his life to take refuge in his art from the crass realities of life, now produced many poems, some of them short, but among the others the immortal 'Faerie Queene.' The first three books of this, his crowning achievement, Spenser, under enthusiastic encouragement from Ralegh, brought to London and published in 1590.
He read the poems and said that they were rubbish, such as any child could write, and that Macpherson had made them all up.
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