DISCUSSION: Some scholars believe media and arts that do not show the audience things (such as a play or a movie) are more powerful and thought provoking.

·       What do you think? -Insert answer here-

IMAGERY

The language of poetry is often visual and pictorial.

·       Although the subject of a poem may be an abstract idea, they are typically handled in a manner that makes that abstract idea seem concrete, specific, and visual.

o   EX: A poem may not just say the speaker loves someone. Instead, it may compare the object of their affections to a rose to give their romantic feelings a physical image.

The visual quality of a poem is called imagery.

This element results mostly from two aspects of poetic language:

1.     The precision of individual word choice

a.     Jungle VS woods

2.     And precision’s opposite—ambiguity

These two opposing forces come together to form the visual richness associated with strong poetry.

 

SITUATION, SETTING, WORD ORDER & PLACEMENT

 

At the surface level, the situation of a poem is the plot. It entails:

·       What?

·       Where?

·       When?

·       Why?

But it also includes details about the speaker, such as:

·       To whom are they speaking?

·       Is there an auditor in the poem?

·       Is anyone else present or referred to in the poem?

·       What is happening?

·       Why is this event/communication occurring?

·       Why is it significant?

All of these details help to form the setting of a poem. As we learned, setting is the place + time an event takes place.

·       In poetry, setting can be particularly powerful because it is often symbolic, meaning it helps add a layer of complexity and meaning to the poem.

·       See “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold p. 530

o   What is the setting? Nighttime by the sea shore

o   How is this setting used? -Insert answer-

o   What tone does it evoke? -Insert answer-

A poem’s setting can also help create irony. For example, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” is set in a monastery. How does this help create irony, considering the situation the poem is describing? -Insert answer-

Read “Daystar” by Rita Dove and “To a Daughter Leaving Home” by Linda Pastan (525 & 526) and answer the questions.

·       What is the situation in each?

·       What feelings are conveyed in these poems?

·       In these two poems, word choice is powerful in conveying the tone and mood.

o   Focusing particularly on “Daystar,” what words are used to convey the mother’s weariness? Give three examples.

How words are ordered and put together matters in poetry, because meaning can often evolve through how words are placed within the stanza, or how they relate to the words around them.

“Lies” by Martha Collins p. 567

·       What word evolves here? Lie/lay/lies

o   How does it evolve? Through sound and meaning

·       Make note of every use of lie/lay/lies/laid

·       How does the evolution of this word change the poem? Adds ambiguity

A particular word choice can also help convey the plot of the poem.

“My Papa’s Waltz” p. 569

·       In this poem, the word “unfrown” stands out because it isn’t a real word.

·       At this point in the poem, Mom enters and ruins their evening

Thus: odd or unconventional word choices merit special attention

An example of these are nonsense poems, wherein so many odd word choices—some entirely made up—obscure the linguistic integrity of the poem, and we need to discern what is being said based on context, sounds, etc.

“The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll (can be found via Google)

·       This way of writing can force engagement from the reader.

Furthermore: specific words can be given more weight depending on the syntax of the poem.

“Blandeur” by Kay Ryan p. 575

·       Note that the impactful words are at the end of each line

Certain word choices can also be used to establish a poet’s style

For the following poems, answer the questions.

“This Is Just to Say” and “The Red Wheelbarrow” p 574

·       How would we describe these word choices?

·       How did Williams deal with the beautiful in these poems?

·       How might these poems comment on human nature?

FIGURES OF SPEECH

Continuing from the lesson on word choice, another important aspect that helps inform the visual quality in a poem is how the language is used. Earlier in this unit, when discussing “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins, one of the key components to poetry we determined was how they read. Poems sound funny.

These sophisticated, rhetorical and literary devices that make poetry so distinct are figures of speech. They often help us relate to and visualize the content of a poem, even if it is mostly abstract.

However, most often, the visualization process starts with the simple naming of an object

·       What do you picture when I say dog? -Insert answer here-

·       From here, a poet must decide to provide more details to describe the dog or provide details of what the dog does not look like to make the image more specific.

·       Images can be either expanded, or reduced

Read “The Beautiful Changes” and “Kind of Blue” and answer the questions

“The Beautiful Changes” by Richard Wilbur pg 578

·       Which strategy does Wilbur use to make his image precise?

·       What details does he give to make this image specific?

“Kind of Blue” by Lynn Powell pg 579

·       What strategy does Powell use?

·       What details does she take away?

However, describing something is not always able rattling off facts and descriptors. Another way of describing something is through metaphor.

A metaphor is…

A comparison without using like or as.

Love is a rose—what can this mean?

·       Love is beautiful

·       Love is temporary

·       Love is deceptive

None of these statements are as interesting as the metaphor.

What can make a metaphor more powerful than just visual details?

1.     Allows the audience to imagine the thing through their own experiences and expectations.

2.     Allows the audience to reflect on their own values and expectations.

3.     Involves the audience in the process of extracting meaning

4.     Provides intimacy with the poem

“At the Hospital” by David Ferry

She was the sentence the cancer spoke at last,

It’s blurred grammar finally clarified.

What’s being compared here? A girl to a sentence, cancer to grammar

What’s happened here? A loved one died of cancer

What clarified the “blurred grammar”? The certainty of death

What is “the sentence”? The death sentence of grammar

Similar to the metaphor is the simile: a comparison using like/as

·       The difference between metaphor and simile is that similes are usually brief

·       They assume we already feel the same way as the narrator about the thing being compared to

“A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns pg 584

He compares his love to a rose, then moves on.

What is he assuming about us, the audience? -Insert answer here-

 

Symbolism is another way of creating images, though in this case, one thing is being used in place of something else.

·       With symbolism, all words go beyond themselves and signify more than their basic sounds and letters.

o   Often signify actions, ideas, a world in which things occur, acts have implications, and events have meaning.

o   EX: Rocks may symbolize solidarity. Or clouds may symbolize dreams.

·       A symbol’s significance depends upon context.

o   EX: A star means something different between different religious groups, and even further something different to a sailor or an actor.

There are two types of symbols we discussed previously:

1.     Invented symbols: Symbols made for something with no agreed upon cultural significance, where the symbolic meaning is created by the poem itself.

Read “The Leap” by James Dickey (pg 593) and answer the questions below:

·       What main action/event is being made into a symbol?

·       What did the leap symbolize?

·       The leap is used two different ways. What are they?

·       How is the first leap different from the second?

·       How does the difference between the two leaps affect the meaning of them to the narrator?

·       What is the second, less obvious symbol?

·       What does it symbolize?

2.     Traditional symbols: Unlike invented symbols, other objects have built-in significance because of past usage in literature or tradition. Such things have cultivated an agreed upon meaning and stand for something before the poet even cites them. Poets who use these sorts of symbols operate under the assumption the audience will recognize the traditional meaning of these symbols.

Read the following poems and write a brief analysis of how the rose is used in each

“Song” by Edmund Waller pg 596

“One Perfect Rose” Dorothy Parker pg 597

“The Sick Rose” William Blake pg 598

Personification

In poetry, personification can be especially useful because of the abstract nature of poetry itself.

For the following poem, answer the questions.

“[Because I could not stop for Death]” pg 585

·       How is death described? What type of character is he?

·       What does this characterization say about the speaker?

Allusion

An allusion is a reference to something outside of the text, and usually requires extra research to understand the depth of the allusion.

For the following poems, answer the questions.

“Dothead” pg 586

·       What are the allusions in this poem?

·       What do they contribute to the poem’s affect?

“What is the Zoo for What?” pg 587

·       What are the allusions?

·       What do they allusions add?

·       What does the speaker’s mindset seem to be?

External form and structure

Another element of poetry discussed in “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins is structure. “Poem’s look funny”

While tone, word choice, speaker, situation, setting, cadence, and figurative language all help form the internal structure of a poem, the external structure is quite different.

·       Refers to the arrangement on the page, both verbally and visually

·       Works to make the poem recognizable at a glance

Stanzas: groups of lines divided by white space

·       Sometimes the divisions can add meaning to the poem and have the physical appearance match the thoughts and scene changes

·       Historically, stanzas are divided by rhyme scheme and meter

·       A famous type of stanza is the terza rima, where the rhyming sounds from a stanza are picked up in the next stanza

o   “Ode to the West Wind” on pg 656

o   Also uses iambic pentameter

·       Another type is the Spenserian stanza which uses three rhyme sounds in nine lines

o   “The Eve of St Agenes” pg 657

·       We also have the ballad stanza. These have one set of rhymes in four lines. These types of stanza can be used across various other genres of poetry.

o   “To his Coy Mistress” pg 658

·       The heroic couplet is a type of stanza consisting of rhyming pairs of lines written in iambic pentameter.

·       Last of the more traditional poetic stanza types is blank verse, which is a stanza written with regular meter, usually iambic pentameter, but no discernable rhyme scheme.

·       And finally, we have free verse, a type of verse lacking regular rhyme and meter.

Entire subgenres of poems are defined by their form, most famously, the sonnet.

·       A sonnet is a poem written in fourteen lines. The rhyme scheme differs depending on the type of sonnet, of which there are six main categories

o   Italian sonnet

o   Shakespearean sonnet

o   Spenserian sonnet

o   Miltonic sonnet

o   Terza Rima sonnet

o   Curtal sonnet

Other popular form-based subgenres are:

·       Villanelle: nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets (stanzas with three lines) followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains (repeated lines) and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.

·       Palindromes: Also known as mirrored poetry. A poem that reads the same forward as it does backward. SEE “MYTH” PG 661

·       Sestina: a poem with six stanzas of six lines and a final triplet, all stanzas having the same six words at the line-ends in six different sequences that follow a fixed pattern, and with all six words appearing in the closing three-line envoi.

Like stanza breaks, other elements such as spacing, font, punctuation, and line length can be used to create meaning in a poem.

Some poems are meant to be seen, not heard.

 See “[l(a]” by E.E. Cummings pg 663

Then, other poems use spacing and punctuation to convey the speaker’s emotions.

See [Buffalo Bills] pg 663

And, occasionally, some poems take on the shape of their subject. Such instances are called concrete poetry, or shaped verse.

See “Easter Wings” pg 664

A tool some poet’s use to create complexity and meaning through line breaks is enjambment, or the running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next without end punctuation. When enjambment is used, it’s meant to indicate that the message, action, etc. of that line goes on forever.

For the following poem, answer the questions.

 “Marks” by Linda Pastan pg 582

·       What lines are enjambed?

·       What is the significance of that enjambment?

There is a difference between enjambment and an idea broken between two lines. It depends on the context of the line within the entire poem.

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