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The most commonly studied traditions of alliterative verse are those found in the oldest literature of the Germanic languages, where scholars use the term 'alliterative poetry' rather broadly to indicate a tradition which not only shares alliteration as its primary ornament but also certain metrical characteristics. [2] The Old English epic ...
Alliteration is used in the alliterative verse of Old English poems like Beowulf, Middle English poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Old Norse works like the Poetic Edda, and in Old High German, Old Saxon, and Old Irish. [3] It was also used as an ornament to suggest connections between ideas in classical Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit poetry.
Old English literature has had some influence on modern literature, and notable poets have translated and incorporated Old English poetry. [92] Well-known early translations include Alfred, Lord Tennyson 's translation of The Battle of Brunanburh , William Morris 's translation of Beowulf , and Ezra Pound 's translation of The Seafarer .
Old English metre is the conventional name given to the poetic metre in which English language poetry was composed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The best-known example of poetry composed in this verse form is Beowulf , but the vast majority of Old English poetry belongs to the same tradition.
Regardless of how successful a description of Old English metre Sievers's system is, it was most likely the theory of Anglo-Saxon prosody that Ezra Pound would have been familiar with, and influenced Pound's verse.
Alliteration and assonance played a key role in structuring early Germanic, Norse and Old English forms of poetry. The alliterative patterns of early Germanic poetry interweave meter and alliteration as a key part of their structure, so that the metrical pattern determines when the listener expects instances of alliteration to occur.
Layamon's Brut remains one of the best extant examples of early Middle English. [3] During an era in English history when most prose and poetry were composed in French, Layamon wrote for his illiterate, impoverished religious audience in Worcestershire. [4] In 1216, around the time Layamon wrote, King Henry III of England came to the throne.
This makes the caesura arguably more important to the Old English verse than it was to Latin or Greek poetry. In Latin or Greek poetry, the caesura could be suppressed for effect in any line. In the alliterative verse that is shared by most of the oldest Germanic languages, the caesura is an ever-present and necessary part of the verse form itself.