Download poetry

poetry
Central to existence
Without which we are spiritually
impoverished
• Poetry says more and says it more
intensely than ordinary language
• Language is employed on different
occasions to say quite different kinds of
things
We all have a need to live more deeply and
fully with greater awareness, to know the
experience of others, and to understand
our own experience better. Poets, from
their own store of felt, observed, or
imagined experiences, select, combine,
and reorganize.
Literature
- can be used as a gear for stepping up the
intensity and increasing the range of our
experience and as a glass for clarifying it.
- is a means of living
- exists to communicate significant
experience – it is concentrated and
organized – not to tell about experience
but to allow us to imaginatively participate
in that experience
Literature II
• Allows us through imagination to live more
deeply, richly, and with greater awareness
• BROADENS our experience – makes us
acquainted with a variety of experiences
which we may otherwise have no contact
with
• DEEPENS our experience – by making us
feel more of the daily experiences we
already have
Literature III
• Enlarges our perspectives and breaks
down some of the limits we may feel
• If we keep all the things that literature
does in mind we can avoid two limiting
approaches to poetry
Limiting approaches
• Always look for a lesson or a moral – if we
limit ourselves to this we are bound to be
disappointed
• Always expect to find poetry beautiful –
sometimes poetry is meant to be ugly
Sometimes beauty and philosophical truth
appear in the poem because they are an
essential part of experience and poetry
deals with experience
BUT
Poetry
• Is concerned with all kinds of experience
– Beautiful
– Ugly
– Strange
– Common
– Noble
– Ignoble
– Imaginary
– actual
Encountered in real life pain and death are
not pleasurable but we may read and
reread poems about these subjects
because of their ability to enlighten and
move us – our humanity affirmed
• Poetry is a more condensed form of
literature – the words have a higher
voltage
• It is a communication – the completeness
depending on the power and clarity of the
transmitter and the sensitivity and tuning
of the receiver
Poetry has four dimensions
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Intellectual dimension
Sensuous dimension
Emotional dimension
Imaginative dimension
Achieves dimensions by the use
drawing on language resources
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Connotation
Imagery
Metaphor
Symbol
Paradox
Irony
Allusion
Sound repetition
Pattern
Rhythm
• Poet uses language cunningly – efficiently
organizing it
• Page 641 in Perrine – Questions to
understand and evaluate poetry
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Who is the speaker? What kind of person is the speaker?
Is there an identifiable audience for the speaker? What can we know about it?
What is the occasion?
What is the setting in time – hour, season, century, etc
What is the setting in place – indoors or out, city or country, land or sea, region,
nation, hemisphere
What is the central purpose of the poem?
State the central theme or idea in one sentence?
Outline the poem to show its structure and development – summarize the events of
the poem
Paraphrase the poem
Discuss the diction of the poem. Point out words that are particularly well chosen and
explain why
Discuss the imagery. What kinds? Structure?
Point out examples of metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy – explain
appropriateness
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Point out and explain any symbols. If the poem is allegorical, explain the allegory
Point out and explain examples of paradox, overstatement, understatement, and
irony. What is their function?
Point out and explain any illusions. What is their function?
What is the tone of the poem? How is this achieved?
Point out significant examples of sound repetition and explain their function
What is the meter of the poem?
Discuss the adaptation of sound to sense
Describe the form or pattern
Criticize and evaluate the poem
Allusion
• A reference to another work or famous
figure assumed to be well known enough
to be recognized by the reader
apostrophe
• Usually in poetry – the device of calling out
to an imaginary, dead, or absent person,
or to a place, thing, or personified
abstraction either to begin a poem or to
make a dramatic break in thought
somewhere in the poem
assonance
• The repetition of vowel sounds between
different consonants
ballad
A long narrative poem that presents a single
dramatic episode which is often tragic or violent
– the two types of ballads are
Folk Ballad – usually sung and passed down
orally, author unknown, form and melody often
changed depending on the singer’s preferences
Literary Ballad – art ballad – imitates fold ballad
but is more polished and uses a higher level of
poetic diction
Blank verse
• Poetry written in unrhymed iambic
pentameter – favorite of Shakespeare
Cacophony
• Harsh, awkward, or dissonant sounds
used deliberately in poetry or prose –
opposite of euphony
colloquialism
• A word or phrase used in everyday
conversation and informal writing that is
sometimes inappropriate in formal writing
conceit
• An elaborate figure of speech in which two
seemingly dissimilar things or situations
are compared
consonance
• The repetition of identical consonant
sounds before and after different vowel
sounds