Appearance
9.2 — Poets, Poetry and the Prizes
Poetry is the oldest literary form and the one most people abandon at school. What follows is how it works mechanically, which is usually the missing piece.
How poetry works
Why did poetry come before prose?
Because it is memorable, and for most of human history there was no other way to store anything.
Rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and fixed metre are error-correcting mechanisms. If a line has a required number of beats and a required rhyme, a reciter who forgets a word cannot substitute any word — only one that fits the pattern. The form constrains the possible errors, which is exactly how a checksum works.
That is why epics, laws, genealogies, medical texts and religious material were all in verse in oral cultures. The Vedas were transmitted orally for centuries with extraordinary fidelity, using elaborate recitation schemes — reciting the words in multiple permuted orders, which makes an omission immediately detectable.
Prose is a technology of writing. It becomes practical once the text is stored outside the head.
What is metre, in a way that is actually usable?
The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line.
English is a stress-timed language: some syllables are naturally emphasised. Say "become" and the stress is on the second syllable; say "table" and it is on the first. Metre is what happens when you arrange those regularly.
The commonest English metre is iambic pentameter: five pairs, each an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Read aloud, it sounds like da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
The reason it dominates English poetry is that it is close to the natural rhythm of English speech, so it can carry ordinary sentences without sounding sing-song. Shakespeare's plays are largely in it, and characters dropping out of it into prose is a signal — commoners, madness, or comedy.
The variations are where the art is. A line that follows the pattern exactly for ten syllables is dull; a great poet breaks it at the moment the meaning demands. Hamlet's "To be, or not to be, that is the question" has an extra unstressed syllable at the end, which leaves the line hanging unresolved.
Other traditions count differently. Sanskrit and classical Greek metre count syllable length rather than stress — long and short vowels. Classical Arabic and Persian poetry likewise. Japanese haiku counts mora, a unit of sound, which is why the 5-7-5 rule taught in English schools does not actually correspond to the Japanese form.
What are the main forms worth recognising?
The sonnet: fourteen lines. The Italian or Petrarchan form splits 8 and 6, with the ninth line turning the argument — the volta. The English or Shakespearean form is three groups of four plus a closing couplet, which gives the ending a snap. It is a machine for stating a problem and resolving it in fourteen lines, which is why it has survived seven centuries.
Blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. Milton's Paradise Lost, most of Shakespeare's dialogue.
Free verse: no fixed metre or rhyme, which is not the same as no form. Whitman and most twentieth-century poetry. The difficulty of free verse is that it has to generate its own structure, which is harder rather than easier.
The ghazal: a form from Arabic and Persian, hugely developed in Urdu — a series of independent couplets, each self-contained, sharing a rhyme and a repeated refrain. Each couplet must work alone, which is why individual lines of Ghalib or Faiz circulate as quotations.
The haiku: seventeen sound units, traditionally with a seasonal reference and a cutting word that juxtaposes two images.
The limerick: five lines with a fixed rhythm, and the only form most people can produce on demand.
The poets
Which English-language poets come up most?
Chaucer (about 1343–1400), whose Canterbury Tales is the first major literary work in English rather than French or Latin, and is funnier and dirtier than its reputation.
Milton (1608–1674), Paradise Lost, written after he went completely blind, dictated to his daughters and secretaries. Its Satan is so compelling that Blake said Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it.
The Romantics — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron — reacting against industrial and rational eighteenth-century culture with nature, feeling and the individual imagination. Keats died at 25, having written his major work in about eighteen months, and asked for his gravestone to read "Here lies one whose name was writ in water".
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime, largely anonymously, and left nearly 1,800 in her drawer. Her editors initially regularised her punctuation and the dashes were restored only in the twentieth century.
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), which was cut roughly in half by Ezra Pound before publication and is a much better poem for it — the draft with Pound's annotations survives and is studied as an editing lesson.
W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen — whose war poems were mostly published after he was killed a week before the armistice — Auden, Larkin, Plath, Heaney, Walcott and Angelou.
Which poets should you know from other languages?
Rumi (1207–1273), Persian, and by many measures the best-selling poet in the United States — though the popular English versions are loose reworkings rather than translations, and generally remove the explicitly Islamic content.
Hafez and Omar Khayyam in Persian, the latter known in English through Edward FitzGerald's very free Victorian version, which is arguably a different poem.
Ghalib (1797–1869) in Urdu and Persian, writing in Delhi through the collapse of the Mughal world and the events of 1857.
Kabir (fifteenth century), whose couplets are claimed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and who attacked the ritual and hypocrisy of all of them. Some of his verses are in the Guru Granth Sahib.
Mirabai, Tulsidas, Surdas and the bhakti poets, who wrote devotional verse in spoken languages rather than Sanskrit — which is a political act as much as a literary one, since it took religious expression out of the hands of a priestly class.
Thiruvalluvar, whose Tirukkural in Tamil is 1,330 couplets of ethical and practical advice, probably from the early centuries CE, and is the most widely translated Tamil work.
Pablo Neruda in Spanish, Wisława Szymborska in Polish, Anna Akhmatova in Russian — whose Requiem, about the terror of the 1930s, was for years not written down at all but memorised in fragments by trusted friends, each holding a piece.
Prizes
What are the major literary prizes?
The Nobel Prize in Literature for a body of work, discussed in 7.5.
The Booker Prize for a single novel published in English in the UK and Ireland, opened to any English-language novel in 2014 — a change that remains contentious, on the argument that it allowed American publishing to dominate a prize that had supported Commonwealth writing. The International Booker is for translated fiction and splits the money equally between author and translator, which is a genuinely consequential decision about how translation is valued.
The Pulitzer Prizes in the United States, across journalism and letters. The Prix Goncourt in France, whose prize money is a token ten euros and whose commercial effect is enormous.
The Jnanpith Award is India's highest literary honour, given for a body of work in any of the recognised Indian languages, and it rotates across languages in practice. The Sahitya Akademi Awards are given annually in each of 24 languages, which is a structure no other country has and which exists because no other country needs it.
Which Indian writers have won internationally?
Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913, the first non-European to win it in literature.
The circumstances are worth knowing. He had translated a selection of his own Bengali poems into English prose, in a notebook, on a sea voyage, largely to occupy himself while ill. The manuscript circulated in London, W. B. Yeats championed it, and it was published as Gitanjali. The Nobel was awarded substantially on the basis of that English version, which Tagore himself regarded as a thin rendering of the Bengali.
He wrote around 2,000 songs, which form a genre of their own — Rabindrasangeet — plus novels, plays, essays and a substantial body of work on education. He founded a university at Santiniketan on the principle that classes should be held outdoors. He renounced his knighthood in 1919 after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Since: V. S. Naipaul (Nobel 2001, born in Trinidad of Indian descent), Salman Rushdie (Booker 1981 for Midnight's Children, and subsequently the Booker of Bookers), Arundhati Roy (Booker 1997), Aravind Adiga (2008), Geetanjali Shree (International Booker 2022 for Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell — the first Hindi work to win).
Why is translation such a problem?
Because two languages do not carve the world the same way, and every choice loses something.
The standard dilemma is whether to translate faithfully to the source, producing something that reads as foreign, or to translate into idiomatic target language, producing something that reads well and is further from the original. There is no correct answer, and the fashion has swung repeatedly.
Poetry is worst affected, because form and sound carry meaning and cannot be transferred. A translator must decide whether to keep the rhyme scheme, the metre, the literal sense or the tone, and cannot keep all four.
The famous demonstration is untranslatable words — but the real problem is not exotic vocabulary, it is grammar. A language that marks evidentiality forces every sentence to state how the speaker knows the fact. A language with formal and informal address forces a decision about the relationship in every line of dialogue. English can approximate both and cannot carry them.
Translators have historically been badly credited and badly paid, which is why the International Booker's equal split matters, and why the practice of naming the translator on the cover has become a campaign.
Why poetry persists
Does poetry still do anything?
Yes, and the evidence is in where it appears rather than in book sales.
It survives wherever language has to be memorable and portable: song lyrics, which are the most-consumed poetry by an enormous margin; advertising slogans; protest chants; and the material people actually memorise, which is almost never prose.
It also survives at the moments prose fails. Funerals, weddings, national trauma. The reason a poem is read at a funeral is that ordinary language is inadequate to the occasion and everybody present knows it, and a form that is visibly not ordinary language acknowledges that.
And it is the form that survives translation into memory. Ask someone to quote a novel and they cannot. Ask them to quote a poem, a hymn or a song and most people can produce several, decades after last encountering them — which returns to the first question on this page.
What comes next
The next page is India's own literary history in more detail — the oldest continuously read literature in the world, and the languages that carry it.