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Magoun thought that formulaic poetry was necessarily oral in origin. That sparked a major and ongoing debate over the extent to which Old English poetry, which survives only in written form, should be seen as, in some sense, oral poetry. The oral-formulaic theory of composition has now been applied to a wide variety of languages and works.
Larry Benson introduced the concept of "written-formulaic" to describe the status of some Anglo-Saxon poetry which, while demonstrably written, contains evidence of oral influences, including heavy reliance on formulas and themes [1] Frequent oral-formulaic themes in Old English poetry include "Beasts of Battle" [2] and the "Cliff of Death". [3]
Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. [3] Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle ...
The 13th-century poem "Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt" ('Where are those who were before us?') is a Middle English example following the medieval tradition: [7] Uuere beþ þey biforen vs weren, Houndes ladden and hauekes beren And hadden feld and wode? Þe riche leuedies in hoere bour, Þat wereden gold in hoere tressour Wiþ hoere briȝtte ...
A characteristic of Homer's style is the use of epithets, as in "rosy-fingered" Dawn or "swift-footed" Achilles.Epithets are used because of the constraints of the dactylic hexameter (i.e., it is convenient to have a stockpile of metrically fitting phrases to add to a name) and because of the oral transmission of the poems; they are mnemonic aids to the singer and the audience alike.
Hokku is the opening stanza of an orthodox collaborative linked poem, or renga, and of its later derivative, renku (or haikai no renga). By the time of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694), the hokku had begun to appear as an independent poem, and was also incorporated in haibun (a combination of prose and hokku), and haiga (a combination of painting ...
An illustration of the fable of Hercules and the Wagoner by Walter Crane in the limerick collection "Baby's Own Aesop" (1887). The standard form of a limerick is a stanza of five lines, with the first, second and fifth rhyming with one another and having three feet of three syllables each; and the shorter third and fourth lines also rhyming with each other, but having only two feet of three ...
An 1850 acrostic by Nathaniel Dearborn, the first letter of each line spelling the name "JENNY LIND". An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the first letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet. [1]