What is a Poem? Definition. What is a poem Poem is one of the genres

Poem!

Poem ( Old Greek Ποίημα) Is a poetic genre. A large epic poetic work belonging to a specific author, a large poetic form. Can be heroic, romantic, critical, satirical, etc.

A poem is a work of narrative or lyrical content, written in verse. Also, a poem is called a work created on the basis of folk tales, legends, epic stories. The classic type of poem is considered to be an epic. Translated from Greek, the poem is a creation.

Having emerged in a primitive tribal society in the form of songs, the poem was firmly established and widely developed in subsequent eras. But soon the poem lost its significance as the leading genre.

Poems from different eras have some common features: the subject of the image in them is a certain era, judgments about which are given to the reader in the form of a story about significant events in the life of an individual (in epic and lyric-epic) or in the form of a description of the attitude (in lyrics).

Unlike poems, poems have a message because they proclaim or value social ideals. Poems are almost always plot-based, and even in lyric poems, individual fragments tend to turn into a single narrative.

Poems are the earliest surviving monuments of ancient writing. They were and are a kind of "encyclopedias" of the past.

Early examples of epic poems: in India - the folk epic "Mahabharata" (not earlier than the 4th century BC), in Greece - "Iliad" and "Odyssey" by Homer (not later than the 8th century BC), in Rome - Virgil's "Aeneid" (1st century BC) and others.

The poem received the greatest completeness in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, classic examples of this genre - epics. They reflected big events, and the integrity of the coverage of reality made it possible to dwell on trifles and create a complex system of characters. The epic poems affirmed a wide popular meaning, the struggle for the strength and significance of the people.

Since the conditions for the formation of ancient Greek poems could not be repeated, the poems in their original form could not reappear - the poem degrades, receiving a number of differences.

In ancient Europe, parody-satirical (the anonymous "Batrachomyomachia", not earlier than the 5th century BC) and didactic ("Works and Days" of Hesiod, 8th-7th centuries BC) appeared. They developed during the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance and later. The heroic epic poem turned into a heroic "song" with a minimum number of characters and plot lines ("Beowulf", "Song of Roland", "Song of the Nibelungs").

Its composition was reflected in imitative historical poems (in "Africa" ​​by F. Petrarch, in "Jerusalem Liberated" by T. Tasso). The plot of the mythological epic was replaced by the lightweight plot of the knightly poem (its influence is palpable in "Furious Orlando" by L. Ariosto and in "The Fairy Queen" by Spencer). The traditions of the didactic epic were preserved in allegorical poems (in Dante's Divine Comedy, in F. Petrarch's Triumphs). In modern times, the classicist poets were guided by the parody-satirical epic, creating the heroic poems ("Naloy" by N. Boileau).

Poem! The poem is often called a novel in verse.

The heyday of the genre of the poem occurs in the era of romanticism, when the greatest poets of various countries turn to the creation of a poem. The poems acquire a socio-philosophical or symbolic-philosophical character (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by J. Byron, The Bronze Horseman by A. Pushkin, The Demon by M. Yu. Lermontov, Germany, a Winter Tale by G. Heine).

In Russian literature at the beginning of the 20th century, there was a tendency for the transformation of a lyric-epic poem into a lyric one. The most intimate experiences correlate with historical upheavals ("A Cloud in Pants" by V. V. Mayakovsky, "Twelve" by A. A. Blok, "First Date" by A. Bely). In AA Akhmatova's poem Requiem, the epic plot is hidden behind the alternation of lyrical expressions.

In Soviet poetry, there were various genre varieties of the poem: reviving the heroic beginning ("Good!" A. Yesenin), philosophical, historical, etc.

The poem as a lyroepic and monumental genre that allows you to combine the epic of the heart and "music", the "element" of world upheavals, innermost feelings and historical events, remains a productive genre of world poetry, although there are few authors of this genre in the modern world.

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A poem (Greek, poiema - creation) is a large multi-part poetic work with a plot-narrative organization, a lyric-epic genre. The main genre properties of the poem: the breadth of the narrative, the presence of a detailed plot and the deep development of the image of the lyrical hero.

The origins of this genre are in ancient and medieval epics. The characteristic properties of antique epic poems: the breadth of coverage of reality, in the center of the author's attention is the most important socio-historical event, the attitude to the people's perception of the world, the presence of a large number of characters, the depiction of bright, versatile characters, the presence of a unity of action linking all compositional elements, the slowness of the narrative and a versatile display of life, the motivation of the events taking place by objective reasons and circumstances (regardless of the character's will), the author's self-removal, a high syllable, the smoothness and solemnity of the narrative.

During the Middle Ages, religious poems appear. The most famous monument of this period is Dante's Divine Comedy. The starting point in the poems of this period is the postulates of Christian morality. The characteristic features of Dante's poem are didacticism, allegorical character.

In addition to religious ones, there are also knightly poems ("Furious Roland" by Ariosto). Their theme is knightly and love adventures. In the XVII-XVIII centuries. heroic poems appeared (Paradise Lost, Paradise Returned by Milton, Henryad by Voltaire).

The heyday of the genre is associated with the era of romanticism ("Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" by J. Byron, southern poems by AS Pushkin, "The Demon" by M.Yu. Lermontov). Characteristic properties of a romantic poem: in the center of the image is a separately taken personality, with its moral principles and philosophical views on the world, the author's assertion of personal freedom, the theme is events of private life (love), the increasing role of the lyric-dramatic element.

The realistic poem already combines moral and heroic moments (NA Nekrasov "Frost, Red Nose", "Who Lives Well in Russia"). Thus, we can distinguish the following types of poem: religious, knightly, heroic, didactic, philosophical, historical, psychological, satirical, burlesque, a poem with a romantic plot. In addition, there are lyric-dramatic poems, where the epic principle prevails, while the lyrical principle appears through the system of images ("Pugachev" by SA Yesenin, "Rembrandt" by D. Kedrin).

In the XX century. historical poems ("Tobolsk Chronicler" by L. Martynov), heroic ("Good!" , philosophical (N. Zabolotsky "The Mad Wolf", "Trees", "The Triumph of Agriculture").

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A poem (Greek póiēma, from poieo - I do, I create) is a large poetic work with a narrative or lyrical plot. An ancient and medieval epic is also called a poem ("Mahabharata", "Ramayana", "Iliad", "Odyssey"). Many of its genre varieties are known: heroic, didactic, satirical, burlesque, romantic, lyric-dramatic. Works on a world-historical theme are also called poem ("Aeneid" by Virgil, "The Divine Comedy" by Dante, "Lusiads" by L. di Camoes, "Jerusalem Liberated" by T. Tasso, "Paradise Lost" by J. Milton, "Henriad" by Voltaire , "Messiada" by F. G. Klopstock, "Russia" by M. M. Kheraskov, and others). In the past, poems with a romantic plot were widely spread ("The Knight in the Panther's Skin" by Sh. Rustaveli, "Shahname" by Ferdowsi, "Furious Roland" by L. Aristo).

In the era of romanticism, poems acquire a socio-philosophical and symbolic-philosophical character ("Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" by J. Byron, "The Bronze Horseman" by A. Pushkin, "Dzyady" by A. Mitskevich, "The Demon" by M. Yu. Lermontov, " Germany, Winter's Tale "G. Heine). A romantic poem is characterized by the image of a hero with an unusual fate, but certainly reflecting some facets of the author's spiritual world. In the second half of the 19th century, despite the decline in the genre, some outstanding works appeared, for example, "The Song of Hiawatha" by G. Longfellow, translated by I. A. Bunin. The work is based on the legends of Indian tribes about the semi-legendary leader, the wise and beloved Hiawatha. He lived in the 15th century, before the first settlers appeared on American lands.

The poem sings about how

Hiawatha labored
so that his people are happy,
so that he goes to goodness and truth ...
“Your strength is only in agreement,
but powerlessness is in discord.
Make peace, O children!
Be brothers to one another. "

Poem is a complex genre, often difficult to comprehend. To be convinced of this, it is enough to read a few pages of Homer's Iliad, Dante's Divine Comedy or Faust by JV Goethe, try to answer the question about the essence of Alexander Pushkin's Bronze Horseman or A. A. Blok.

The poem requires knowledge of the historical context, makes one think about the meaning of human life, about the meaning of history. Without this, it is impossible to comprehend in its entirety such poems known to everyone from school as "Frost, Red Nose", "Who Lives Well in Russia" by N. A. Nekrasov, "Vasily Terkin" by A. T. Tvardovsky, etc.

What allows us to consider as poems many dissimilar works, sometimes with the author's subtitles, which do not correspond to this definition. Thus, "Faust" by I. V. Goethe is a tragedy, "The Bronze Horseman" by A. S. Pushkin is a Petersburg story, and "Vasily Terkin" by A. T. Tvardovsky is a book about a soldier. They are united by the breadth of coverage of the phenomena of reality, the significance of these phenomena and the scale of the problems. The developed narrative plan is combined in the poem with deep lyricism. A particularly complete interpenetration of the lyrical and epic principles is characteristic of the poem of the Soviet period (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by V. V. Mayakovsky, Vasily Terkin by A. T. Tvardovsky, etc.).

Intimate experiences in the poem are associated with great historical upheavals, private events are elevated to a cosmic scale. For example, in "The Bronze Horseman" the space of a particular city - St. Petersburg is transformed into the endless, boundless space of the worldwide flood, the "last cataclysm":

Siege! attack! angry waves,
They climb into windows like thieves. Chelny
With a running start, the glass is hit by the stern.
Trays under a wet blanket
Wreckage of huts, logs, roofs,
Thrifty trade commodity.
Remnants of pale poverty
Bridges demolished by a thunderstorm,
Coffins from a washed-out cemetery
Float through the streets!
People
Sees God's wrath and awaits execution.

The time and space of the poem is enormous and boundless.

In the Divine Comedy, first in the circles of Hell, and then in Purgatory, the author of the poem is accompanied by the great Roman poet Virgil, who lived thirteen centuries earlier than Dante. And this does not prevent Dante and his guide from communicating in the same time and space of the "Divine Comedy", to come into contact with sinners and righteous people of all times and peoples. The concrete, real time of Dante himself coexists in the poem with a completely different type of time and space of the grandiose afterlife kingdom.

The problems of the most common, eternal are touched upon in each poem: death and immortality, finite and eternal, their meeting and collision is the seed from which the poem arises.

The chapter "Death and the Warrior" is the central chapter in the poem "Vasily Terkin" by AT Tvardovsky. It is like a poem in a poem, just like the scene of the "collision" of Eugene and the monument to Peter I in "The Bronze Horseman" by Alexander Pushkin. The author of the poem looks at the world from a special point of view, which allows him, a person of a particular era, to look at the events of his time in such a way, in order to see in them what can help to highlight the essence of the era and formulate this essence artistically: Eugene and the galloping monument to Peter I, Vasily Terkin and Death.

Thus, unlike stories in verse, novels in verse, numerous imitation and preliminary and laboratory poems (for example, the early poems of Lermontov), ​​a poem is always an artistic interpretation of modernity in the context of a lasting time.

Multi-plot, often multi-character, compositional complexity, semantic richness of both the whole and individual episodes, symbolism, originality of language and rhythm, diversity - all this makes reading the poem as difficult as it is fascinating.

Poem is in the modern sense, any large or medium-sized poetic work. Initially, the term was applied to the mythological heroic and didactic epic (Homer, Hesiod), but antiquity already knew the heroic poem (The War of Mice and Frogs), from which the later burlesque and satirical poems originate. By analogy, the poem is often referred to as "The Lay of Igor's Campaign", which is not poetic and unique in terms of genre. Knightly novels, which arose as poetry, were not considered poems and were subsequently even opposed to them as works of insufficient seriousness. However, the related "The Knight in the Panther's Skin" (12th century) by Shota Rustaveli entered the history of world literature as a poem. Varieties of medieval poems had their own genre names. In France, heroic poetic works (about a hundred of them survived in the records of the 11-14 centuries, some of them exceed Homer's in volume) were called chansons de geste (see) - songs about deeds; the largest - late (13-14 centuries) were influenced by courtly literature. At the turn of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, arose poem with title, which at that time meant just a happy ending, was Dante's "Comedy", which his enthusiastic admirers called "Divine". However, from the Renaissance to classicism, an antique poem served as a model for poets - not so much the Iliad as Virgil's Aeneid (1st century BC), who allegedly streamlined and improved the poetics of Homer.

An indispensable requirement was the observance of the external structure of the poem up to the appeal to the muse and the declaration of the subject of chanting at the beginning. Renaissance poems based on violent fabulous fiction - "Roland in Love" (1506) by MM Boyardo and the continuation of this plot "Furious Roland" by L. Aristo (the turn of the 15th-16th centuries) - were referred to by contemporaries and later theorists as novels. In the 17th century, the most original poem - written in blank verse "Paradise Lost" (1667) by J. Milton. In the 18th century, a poem was created according to an ancient model, transformed according to the classicist understanding; innovation beyond a certain measure was often condemned. VK Trediakovsky appraised Voltaire's "Henriad" (1728) extremely harshly due to the improbable combination of the fictional actions of the famous historical figure, Henry IV (presented as a king-philosopher, an enlightened monarch), and documentary information about him. Russian poems of the 18th century, who considered the epic poem to be the highest genre (in the West, tragedy was often preferred to it), repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, tried to praise Peter I in this genre. M.M. Kheraskov was recognized as the creator of the national epic poem, who wrote several themes; the heavyweight "Rossiyaada" (1779), which contained allusions to the recent war with Turkey - about the capture of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible, was considered the reference. Unofficially, the heroic poem was also recognized ("Elisha, or the Irritated Bacchus" by V. I. Maikov, 1771). Many Russians were fond of Voltaire's Iroicomic frivolous poem "The Virgin of Orleans" (1735), published in 1755. Without her influence, Alexander Pushkin's "Gabrieliad" (1821) would not have appeared. Pushkin's poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila" (1820) was focused on several traditions, primarily on the tradition of Aristo.

The adherents of classicism did not agree to consider her a poem. The poet left his subsequent poems without a genre subtitle or called them stories. The widespread romantic poem, the founder of the curtain, J. Byron, became lyric-epic, the plot in it was sharply weakened, as in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1809-18). Partly on the model of Byron's Don Juan (1818-23), it began and is named a novel in verse by Eugene Onegin (1823-31). Such a genre definition was then an oxymoron, synthesizing the "low", almost unjustified novel and the highest genre of the poem; the novel was introduced into high literature. VG Belinsky preferred to call "Eugene Onegin" a poem. After M.Yu. Lermontov, the romantic poem was the lot of epigones. IS Turgenev in his early poems paid tribute to both romanticism and the "natural school". N. Nekrasov radically updated the poetic narration: he “prosaized” it, introduced folk peasant themes, and at the end of his life he wrote a unique peasant epic poem “Who Lives Well in Russia” (1863-77). He is also the creator of the first Russian lyric, plotless poems "Silence" (1857) and "Knight for an Hour" (1860). The lyricization of poems also took place in the West. ST Coleridge first included his "The Tale of the Old Sailor" in the collection "Lyric Ballads" (1798), but then refined it as a poem. In American literature, the lyricization of poems took place in the work of W. Whitman, although already "The Raven" (1845) by EA Po, in fact, is a small lyric poem. This genre flourishes in the Russian Silver Age, and is used later: "By the Right of Memory" (1969) by AT Tvardovsky, "Requiem" (1935-40) by AA Akhmatova consist of cycles of lyric poems that form epic poems the spirit of the poem.

The word "poem" has retained the shade of solemnity, "highness". When Nikolai Gogol applied it to satirical prose, it was partly irony, partly an indication of a majestic design. Fyodor Dostoevsky also loved this word, also using it both ironically and seriously (the poem about the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov). Soviet writers NF Pogodin, AS Makarenko and others included the word “Poem” in a non-genre meaning in the titles of their works for the sake of “enhancing” their sound.

The word poem comes from Greek poiema, from poieo, which means - I do, I create.

Instructions

Open the artwork book. Ask yourself in what form is the text written: in or? This will be useful because of all fiction for these two main varieties occurs not only on the basis of formal criteria, but also semantic ones. Prose most often contains a narrative about any events or events, while answering the questions what ?, where? and when? A poetic work seeks to convey the feelings, emotions, impressions of the lyric hero and, as a rule, has no plot.

Take into account that in this connection the term "literary genus" is used, and the above two types of works refer to the epic and lyrical genders, respectively.

Open the work of A. Pushkin "Ruslan and Lyudmila". Make sure it is written in verse and try to identify the feelings and emotions expressed by the lyric hero. There is no doubt that this caused you a problem. It is not surprising, because in the poem there is no lyrical hero with his feelings at all. But there is a plot, and it will not be difficult for you to retell in all the details the vicissitudes of Ruslan's fate on his way to Lyudmila's heart. It is obvious that in the poem two genders - lyric and epic - are combined together and form an intermediate, borderline genus, which is called the lyric-epic. Thus, we can conclude that the distinctive feature of the poem is the poetic form combined with an expanded storyline.

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In the history of literature, these lyric-epic works - poems - have been known for a long time and are encountered quite often. Even in Antiquity, the titans of the literary word Homer and Virgil wrote their epic poems - the well-known Iliad and Odyssey.

Poems were especially popular in the era of Romanticism, when writers sought to find new, synthetic genres that would allow not only telling, but also sensually describing life. Then J. Byron wrote his poem "Child Harold's Pilgrimage", S. Coleridge - "The Poem of the Old Sailor", W. Wordsworth - "Michael".

Poems are also such well-known works of Russian authors as "The Demon" by M. Lermontov, "Who Lives Well in Russia" by N. Nekrasov, "Requiem" by A. Akhmatova, "A Cloud in Pants" by V. Mayakovsky, "Anna Snegina" by S. Yesenin, "Vasily Terkin" by A. Tvardovsky.