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POETRY PROMPT
REVIEW
Poetry Review
• Pay close attention to the Title
• Consider Structure
• Form
• Stanza Breaks
• Line Breaks
• Shifts in tone indicated by breaks
• Read twice – the poetry essay will take you longer than
the others
Poetry Review
• Maintain separation between Poet and Speaker
• Don’t just say that the poet uses the techniques to
achieve meaning in the thesis, state what that meaning is
• Don’t say he/she uses diction – duh, of course he/she
does – say what TYPE of diction is used (abstract,
emotional, romantic, sentimental, patriotic, brusque,
technical…etc.)
Poetry Review
• Focus on technique AND meaning – HOW does the
author communicate his/her MESSAGE
• Avoid speaking of “the reader”
• “Because of the tone, the readers have a changed view of love,
feeling its harmful and somewhat damaging effects.” SHOULD
BE….
• “The tone communicates a changed view of love, emphasizing its
harmful and damaging effects.”
Poetry Review
• Always be on the lookout for:
• Irony: indicated by diction
• Ambiguity
Aubade
• An aubade is a poem or song of or about lovers
separating at dawn.
• Aubades were in the repertory of Troubadors in Europe in
the Middle Ages. An early English example is in Book III of
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. The love poetry of the
16th century dealt mostly with unsatisfied love, so the
aubade was not a major genre in Elizabethan lyric. This
changed with the advent of Metaphysical Poetry; Donne 's
poem "The Sunne Rising" is one of the finest examples of
the aubade in English. Aubades were written from time to
time in the 18th and 19thcentury, none of them quite up to
the Metaphysical standards.
Ballad
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It is a short narrative, which is usually—but not always—
arranged in four-line stanzas with a distinctive and memorable meter.
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The usual ballad meter is a first and third line with four
stresses—iambic tetrameter—and then a second and fourth with
three stresses—iambic trimeter.
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The rhyme scheme is abab or abcb
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The subject matter is distinctive: almost always communal
stories of lost love, supernatural happenings, or recent events.
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The ballad maker uses popular and local speech and dialogue
often and vividly to convey the story. This is especially a feature of
early ballads.
It seems obvious that the ballad came to poetry from song. It is a form
found in every language, every country, every culture. Its shape,
structure, and rhetoric are all defined by its roots in the oral tradition.
As a form it is simple, direct—almost always a short narrative—and
subtly left open for the next user, so that details, names and events
can be added on if necessary.
Elegy
• A Greek or Latin form in alternating dactylic hexameter and dactylic
pentameter lines;
• And/or a melancholy poem lamenting its subject's death but ending in
consolation.
• Examples in English include John Milton's "Lycidas," Thomas Gray's
"Elegy," Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais," Alfred lord Tennyson's "In
Memoriam," Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis," Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Wreck of
the Deutschland," and Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard
Bloomed." Ambrose Pierce parodies Gray's poem in "Elegy."
Ode
• A poem of high seriousness with irregular stanzaic forms.
• A relatively lengthy lyric poem that often expresses lofty emotions in a
dignified style. Odes are characterized by a serious topic, such as truth, art,
freedom, justice, or the meaning of life; their tone tends to be formal. There is
no prescribed pattern that defines an ode; some odes repeat the same
pattern in each stanza, while others introduce a new pattern in each stanza.
Some of the oldest odes are probably those written by the Greek poet, Pindar
(Victory Odes).
Ode
• The regular Pindaric or Greek ode imitates the passionate manner of Pindar (ca.
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552-442 B.C.) and consists of a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode.
-"Strophe" and "antistrophe" are ways of referring to the metrical or
rhythmical pattern of a text which was originally sung. Basically, the antistrophe
picks up the pattern of the strophe, more or less as the melody and rhythm of
the first "verse" of a modern song is picked up in the second "verse", and then in
the third "verse", etc.
In English the Pindaric odes are termed irregular, Cowleyan, or just English. In
1706 William Congreve wrote that "The Character of these late Pindariques, is a
Bundle of rambling incoherent Thoughts, express'd in a like parcel of irregular
Stanza's." Examples include Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy" and "The
Bard," and William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality."
Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (65-8 B.C.), were written in quatrains
in a more philosophical, civil manner. Examples include Andrew Marvell's
"Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" and William Collins' "Ode
to Evening."
The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11-syllable lines, and a final 5syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict meter. For example, Swinburne's
"Sapphics" and Ezra Pound's "Apparuit."
Pastoral
1. A literary or other artistic work that portrays or evokes rural life, usually in
an idealized way. Music. A pastorale.
2. Pastoral, adj. Of or relating to the shepherd's life
The Appeal of Pastoral
What's with all the shepherds? From ancient Greece and Rome in the Idylls of
Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, through the Bible, Renaissance European
poetry, drama, and painting, neoclassical satires, Romantic poetry and symphonic
music, back-to-nature communes of the 1960s-70s in America, much contemporary
country music, and films including Fantasia, Lost Horizon, and Local Hero, the
pastoral has enabled cultures to imagine the superior values of some better, simpler
time and place within or against which they can define themselves. The pastoral's
foundation in the purportedly pleasant and virtuous lives of shepherds has been built
into a fascinating and highly adaptable range of responses to moral and religious
ideas about innocence and virtue, political ideas about corruption and the location of
power, and aesthetic ideas about the sources and ends of good art.
Sestina
The sestina is a tightly structured French verse form consisting of six sestets (six-line stanzas) and a
three-line envoy. Widely acknowledged to be one of the most complicated of verse forms, the sestina
originated in medieval Provence. The six terminal words of the first stanza (1-2-3-4-5-6) are repeated
in a specific and complex pattern as the terminal words in each of the succeeding stanzas:
• 6-1-5-2-4-3
• 3-6-4-1-2-5
• 5-3-2-6-1-4
• 4-5-1-3-6-2
• 2-4-6-5-3-1
• 5-3-1
• 2-4-6
The envoy’s terminal words follow the pattern 5-3-1 (and to make the form even more difficult, the
other three terminal words from the preceding stanzas must appear in the middle of each of the three
envoy lines in a 2-4-6 pattern). Despite the complexity of this form, poets representing diverse artistic
movements and styles from different historical epochs have used it successfully. Practitioners include
Sir Philip Sidney, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, and W. H. Auden.
Villanelle
1. It is a poem of nineteen lines.
2. It has five stanzas, each of three lines, with a final one of four lines (5
tercets and a quatrain).
3. The first line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the second
and fourth stanzas.
4. The third line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third
and fifth stanzas.
5. These two refrain lines follow each other to become the second-to-last
and last lines of the poem.
6. The rhyme scheme is aba. The rhymes are repeated according to the
refrains.