Orr's Four Part Analysis of Poetry

Orr, Gregory. “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry.” Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World. Ed. Gregory Orr, Ellen Voigt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 269 – 278. Print.

            In “Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry,” Gregory Orr lays out a way of breaking down poetry that consists of two categories with two parts each. The “intensive” elements of poetry are story and structure; the “extensive” elements are music and imagination (Orr 269-70). According to Orr, good poetry arises from the dialectic nature of this structure. In other words, story and structure provide ways to form the shape of the poem, while music and imagination fill it.

In poetry, story can be “the mere presence of two discrete pronouns” that can suggest the slightest outline of story that gives the rest of the poem the shape that helps it make sense (271-2). Structure, the other “limiting impulse” (270), is the use of form, meter, or patterns to give structure to a poem. Music is simply the way that language sounds and the effects that poets can achieve using those sounds. Imagination is the use of images or thoughts.

Orr’s four-part analysis of how poetry works is particularly useful in its idea of poetry as a tension between a force to constrain and a force that stretches constraints to the limit. His explanation of the function and use of story in poetry is clear and insightful, as he recognizes that story is not restricted to explicit narrative, but arises even in the ambiguities of undefined pronouns.