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PoetryTermsFall2020-2.pptx1
LITERATURE
THE NORTON INTRODUCTION TO
Kelly J. Mays
Poetry
POETRY: Understanding the Text
13th Shorter Edition
Before You Start
This section introduces you to the elements of poetry and provides you with tips for analyzing and interpreting them.
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Subject, Topic
Categories of poetry, such as “the love poem,” can indicate the subject of a poem—the topic it engages—but poems about the same subject can be very different in their attitudes, ideas, and approaches.
A poem’s theme is the statement it makes about its subject.
Tone is closely related to style and diction.
denotation, connotation
syntax
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Poems often have more than one theme and simply locating a theme or themes cannot do justice to or fully explain the experience of reading a poem.
Tone involves the way a poem uses language to convey an attitude toward its subject and theme. Diction, the poet’s word choice, determines not only meaning but just about every effect a poem produces. Denotation is a word’s unambiguous “dictionary” meaning. Connotations are a word’s emotional implications and the associations it evokes. Precision of denotation may be just as impressive and productive of special effects as the resonance or ambiguous suggestiveness of connotation. Syntax is the way the sentences are put together.
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Speaker
The speaker of a poem is the voice offering the poem’s words to the reader. That voice may be the poet’s or it may be that of a created character who expresses ideas or feelings very different from the poet’s own.
In some poems we are meant to dislike or distrust the speaker rather than take his or her words at face value.
dramatic monologue
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A dramatic monologue is a poem spoken entirely by one fictional speaker in a specific time, place, and situation.
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Setting, Situation
Sometimes identifying the poem’s setting is important to understanding the speaker, as when a speaker reflects on events that are long past.
The setting is the time and place in which a poem is situated. Sometimes the setting of a poem is vague or unspecified.
spatial setting, temporal setting
situation
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The situation of a poem takes into account the kinds of events or actions represented, the location of these occurrences in time and place, the identity of the speaker and of other figures represented or implied, and the reasons for these occurrences.
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Allusion, Occasional Poem, Referential Poem
An allusion is a reference to something outside the poem that carries a history of meaning and strong emotional associations.
A poem written about a specific occasion is called an occasional poem, and such a poem is referential; that is, it refers to a certain historical time or event.
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Some poems invoke specific historical events or situations. To understand and respond to such poems, the reader must be acquainted with their historical contexts.
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Sensory Elements
Instead of depending on abstract ideas, the language of poetry is most often concretely visual and pictorial.
Words are not simply sounds; they represent or signify things, actions, ideas, or feelings. Poets provide vivid verbal representations to convey what they have seen or imagined to readers.
Description can involve narrowing terms by category, expanding through detail, or comparing two things or ideas.
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Figurative Speech, Language
A figure of speech pictures something in terms of something else familiar to us, asking us to think of the one thing as if it were the other.
Poets frequently rely on figures of speech, or figurative language, to clarify and make their ideas precise as well as to suggest a range of feelings.
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Metaphor, Simile
In a metaphor, something is implicitly compared to something else, or represented as if it is that thing.
When metaphors extend over long sections of a poem, they are called extended metaphors.
A controlling metaphor extends over an entire poem.
In a simile, one thing is directly compared to something else, usually with the word like or as. Similes usually make quick comparisons that are not elaborated.
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Analogy, Symbol, Personification
When a simile develops a very elaborate comparison and extends through long sections of a poem, it is called an analogy.
A symbol, defined at the most basic level, is something that stands for something else. Symbols in poetry are words and phrases that have a range of reference beyond their literal signification or denotation.
Personification involves treating an abstraction, such as death or justice or beauty, or an inanimate object, as if it were a person.
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Sounds of Poetry
Poets choose words for their sounds as well as for their meanings, using sound effects to create a mood or establish a tone. Sometimes the sounds in poems provide special effects, but often sound is intertwined with meaning.
To get the full effect of a poem, it is important to read it aloud and attend to its vocal rhythms and sounds.
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Sounds of Poetry
When a word captures or approximates the sound of what it describes (such as “splash” or “squish”), it is called onomatopoeia.
Poets can use pacing, rhythm, and pauses as well as sounds to imitate the subject being described.
Meter is the basic rhythmic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem.
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Meter
A foot is a unit of measure of poetry. Meter is determined by the kind of foot, or the regular pattern of accents and number of syllables per line. Line lengths are usually described in terms of the number of feet: pentameter uses five feet per line, octameter uses eight, tetrameter uses four, etc.
In English, the most common metrical pattern is iambic, in which each foot contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable; iambic pentameter, one of the most common meters used in poetry written in English, consists of lines containing five iambic feet.
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Meter
A trochee is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.
An anapest is made up of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable.
A dactyl is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.
A spondee is a pair of unstressed syllables.
A caesura is a short pause within a line, often (though not always) signaled by a mark of punctuation such as a comma.
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Meter cont’d
Poets may adhere to traditional metrical forms or experiment with new patterns. Poetry that has no governing pattern of stresses or line lengths is called free verse.
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Rhyme
Rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes in a poem, usually at the end of the lines. Rhymes are indicated by using a different letter of the alphabet to represent each distinct rhyme sound, e.g., abab.
Old English poetry (such as the epic poem Beowulf) used alliteration, the repetition of sounds, instead of rhyme.
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Rhyme can serve as a mnemonic, or memory, device, because its pattern is often helpful when people try to memorize poetry. This quality would have been especially important in earlier ages, when poetry was a more oral art and was not always written down.
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Rhyme cont’d
Blank verse is poetry that does not rhyme but that adheres to strict metrical requirements.
Consonance is the repetition of initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words. Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds through a sequence of words.
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The prevalence of rhyme or other repetitions of sound in the poetry of earlier eras probably reflects a desire to imitate what poets of those periods perceived as the symmetry, order, and harmony of the universe.
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Stanzas
Most poems of more than a few lines are divided into stanzas, groups of lines divided from other groups by white space on the page.
Stanza breaks often mark turns of thought, changes of scene or image, or other shifts in structure or direction.
terza rima, Spenserian stanza
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Traditionally, stanzas have most often been organized by patterns of rhyme, and thus stanza divisions have served as visual indicators of patterns of sound.
Usually, metrical patterns stay constant from stanza to stanza. Terza rima is a stanza form in which the stanzas (made up of lines of iambic pentameter) are linked to each other by a common sound: One rhyme sound from each stanza is picked up in the next stanza and so on throughout the poem.
Spenserian stanzas link lines of iambic pentameter in a rhyme scheme of ababbcbcc. The final line of a Spenserian stanza has an extra foot, making it iambic hexameter.
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Stanzas cont’d
The ballad stanza alternates unrhymed lines of iambic tetrameter with rhymed lines of iambic trimeter.
A sestina, written in blank verse, relies on an elaborate structure of repeated words at the ends of the lines.
A villanelle depends on the patterned repetition of whole lines.
Other stanza or verse forms you might encounter include the heroic couplet, the tetrameter couplet, the limerick, and free verse.
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Scansion
Scansion is the process of scanning a poem—tracking its meter line by line to chart its metrical pattern. Scansion involves reading aloud, listening carefully, marking the stressed and unstressed syllables, counting the syllables and feet, and tracking the rhyme patterns.
Scanning is an imprecise craft, so readers may plausibly disagree about whether to stress certain syllables.
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Types of Structures
The term lyric, as it is used in poetry, usually refers to a short poem in which the speaker expresses personal emotion. Lyric poetry is often harmonious or romantic.
A poem has a narrative structure if it tells a story—that is, if its organization involves the passing of time as well as action moving forward.
A poem has a dramatic structure when it consists of a series of scenes, presented vividly, as if on stage.
A poem has a discursive structure if it is organized like a treatise, an argument, or an essay.
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A poem may have one or more shifts in tone, subject, or structure.
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Structure cont’d
Poems with descriptive structures strive to be almost purely descriptive of someone or something.
Some poems use imitative structures, mirroring as closely as possible the structure of something that already exists as an object and can be seen.
Poems with reflective or meditative structures ponder a subject, theme, or event, moving (logically or not) from one sound to another or to related thoughts or objects.
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Some of the genre categories into which many long poems fall include the ballad, the dramatic monologue, the elegy, the epic, and verse drama.
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Sonnet
A sonnet consists of fourteen lines, usually written in iambic pentameter and printed as if it were a single stanza.
The Shakespearean sonnet, or English sonnet, is divided into three quatrains (units of four lines each) and a final couplet (unit of two lines), for a pattern of 4-4-4-2. Its traditional rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg, but there are variations. Shakespearean sonnets lend themselves to three-step arguments or to setting up brief, cumulative images.
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Sonnet cont’d
The Petrarchan sonnet, or Italian sonnet, is divided into two parts: an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). Its traditional rhyme scheme is abbaabbacdecde, but there are variations. Petrarchan sonnets work well for poems that make two points or for poems that make one point and then illustrate it.
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Visual Formatting
Technopaegnia is the construction of poems with visual appeal.
Poems composed in a specific shape to resemble physical objects are called concrete poems or shaped verse.
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Credits
This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for POETRY: Understanding the Text
For more resources, please visit https://digital.wwnorton.com/lit13
Copyright © 2018 W. W. Norton & Company
