Introduction to Poetry

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Introduction to Poetry

• 9th Pre-AP English

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Poetry A Definition

• Length
• Visual impressions
• Concentrated, intense language that makes
  deliberate sound effects which can involve
  rhythm, rhyme, or other sounds
• Written in lines and stanzas rather than
  sentences or paragraphs
• Meaning is gleaned from understanding the use of
  metaphor, symbol, imagery, etc.

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Poetry A Definition

• Subject matter can cover the intellectually safe
  or the profane the marginal or society
• Fixed or free form
• Fixed form is a poem that may be categorized by
  the pattern of its lines, meter, rhythm, or
  stanzas a style of poetry that has set rules.
  Ex sonnet, villanelle, limerick
• Free Form is a poem that has neither regular
  rhyme nor regular meter. Free verse often uses
  cadences rather than uniform metrical feet.

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Subject Matter of Poems

• Love Poem, Political Poem, Metaphysical Poem,
  Confessional Poem
• Elegy (poem that reflects on death or solemn
  themes)
• Epithalamion (poem that praises a wedding)
• Proverb (a poem that imparts wisdom, learning,
  and aid memory)
• Found poem (poems that are discovered in everyday
  life)
• Pun (word play, humor, or cleverness--Pasteurize
  Too far to see.)
• Epigram (short, witty, concise sayingcan be
  sarcastic or parodic, about a person or an idea
  Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing
  / should certain people die before they sing!)

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How do you read a poem?from pg. 489 in your text

• Read the poem slowly and out loud to help hear
  the musicality of the poem.
• Be patient, for poems can be ambiguous or
  confusing. Talk about it with others who have
  read it, when possible.
• Read the poem several times.

• Look for punctuation in the poem telling you
  where sentences being and end.
• Do not make a full stop at the end of a line if
  there is no period, comma, colon, semicolon, or
  dash there.
• If a passage of a poem is difficult to
  understand, look for the subject, verb, and
  complement of each sentence.
• Be alert for comparisonsfor figures of speech.

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Looking at a Poem

• Hearing the Words
• Rhyme (end, internal, approximate)
• Rhyme scheme (Roses are red. . .abcb)
• Neologism (a new word or expression)
  http//www.wordspy.com/diversions/neologisms.asp
• Oxymoron
• Microsoft Works , Bitter Sweet, Anarchy
  Rules!http//www.oxymoronlist.com/

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Looking at a Poem

• Hearing the Words, cont
• Inversion - Beautiful is she.
• Assonance - how now brown cow
• Consonance - Whose woods these are I think I
  know.
• Alliteration - She sells seashells by the
  seashore
• Onomatopoeia - snap, crackle, pop

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A few words on diction. . .

• Connotation
  Denotation
• Snake

any of numerous scaly, legless, sometimes
venomous reptiles having a long, tapering,
cylindrical body and found in most tropical and
temperate regions
evil or danger
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Looking at a Poem

• Lines
• End-stopped
• My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.
• Coral is far more red than her lips red.
  Shakespeare
• Enjambment
• Let me not to the marriage of true minds
• Admit impediments. Love is not love
• Which alters when it alteration finds Or
  bends with the remover to remove. Shakespeare
• Flow of language and the Sound of the Poem
• cadence -- the drum beat of words
• caesura-- E.B. Browning How do I love
  thee?//Let me count the ways.
• dissonance - Are you lamenting because your
  enjambment is not working in your couplet?
• Meter
• Fixed form
• Iambic pentameter (blank verse with 5 feet of
  iambsdaDUM daDUM daDUM daDUM daDUMBut soft,
  what light through yonder window breaks?)
• Free verse (aka Free form)
• NOTE see page 740 741 in your book

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Looking at a Poem

• Refrain
• Quoth the raven, "Nevermore.
• Synaesthesia / Synesthesia
• a deafening yellow sunburnt mirth
• Epithet
• swift-footed Achilles rosy-fingered dawn Ivan
  the Terrible

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Looking at a Poem

• Lines - a single line of poetry.
• Stanzas - a group of lines set off from the other
  lines in a poem the poetic equivalent of a
  paragraph in prose. In traditional poems, the
  stanza usually contains a unit of thought, much
  like a paragraph.
• Tercet
• The winged seeds, where they lie cold and
  low,Each like a corpse within its grave,
  untilThine azure sister of the Spring shall
  blow
• Punctuation used for emphasis
• Structure of images / symbols within the poem
• Watch for colors, patterns, figurative language

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Types of Poems

• FIXED FORM POEMS
• Sonnet
• 14-line poem with specific rhyme scheme
• English (a.k.a. Shakespearean)
• ababcdcdefefgg (three quartrains and a couplet)
• Italian (a.k.a. Petrarchan)
• abbaabbacdecde (octet, sestet, volta is between
  lines 8 and 9)

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Example of Sonnet

• Shakespeares Sonnet 116 Let me not to the
  marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is
  not loveWhich alters when it alteration
  finds,Or bends with the remover to removeO no!
  it is an ever-fixed markThat looks on tempests
  and is never shakenIt is the star to every
  wandering bark,Whose worth's unknown, although
  his height be taken.Love's not Time's fool,
  though rosy lips and cheeksWithin his bending
  sickle's compass comeLove alters not with his
  brief hours and weeks,But bears it out even to
  the edge of doom.If this be error and upon me
  proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

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Types of Poems

• FIXED FORM POEMS
• Haiku Japanese poem with 17 syllables -- first
  line has 5, second has 7, last line has 5.
• It combines form, content, and language in a
  meaningful, yet compact form
• Haiku doesn't rhyme. A Haiku must "paint" a
  mental image in the reader's mind.

A Rainbow by Donna Brock Curving up, then
down. Meeting blue sky and green earth Melding
sun and rain.
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Types of Poems

• FIXED FORM POEMS
• Cinquain a poem with five lines
• Line 1 is one word (the title)Line 2 is two
  words that describe the title.Line 3 is three
  words that tell the actionLine 4 is four words
  that express the feelingLine 5 is one word that
  recalls the title

TreeStrong, TallSwaying, swinging,
sighingMemories of summerOak
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Types of Poems

• FIXED FORM POEMS
• Villanelle - 19 lines long, but only uses two
  rhymes, while also repeating two lines throughout
  the poem. The first five stanzas are triplets,
  and the last stanza is a quatrain such that the
  rhyme scheme is as follows "aba aba aba aba aba
  abaa." The tricky part is that the 1st and 3rd
  lines from the first stanza are alternately
  repeated such that the 1st line becomes the last
  line in the second stanza, and the 3rd line
  becomes the last line in the third stanza. The
  last two lines of the poem are lines 1 and 3
  respectively, making a rhymed couplet. Confused?
  A villanelle needs no particular meter or line
  length. It is terribly obsessive and can bring
  out the emotions of any neurotic writer.

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Example of a Villanelle

• Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age
  should burn and rave at close of dayRage, rage
  against the dying of the light.
• Though wise men at their end know dark is
  right,Because their words had forked no
  lightning theyDo not go gentle into that good
  night,
• Good men, the last wave by, crying how
  brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a
  green bay,Rage, rage against the dying of the
  light.
• Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
  Do not go gentle into that good night,
• Grave men, near death, who see with blinding
  sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be
  gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
• And you, my father, there on the sad
  height,Curse, bless, me now with your fierce
  tears, I pray.Do not go gentle into that good
  night,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night By Dylan
Thomas
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Types of Poems

• Dramatic Monologue a poem in which a single
  speaker who is not the poet utters the entire
  poem at a critical moment. The speaker has a
  listener within the poem, but we too are his/her
  listener, and we learn about the speaker's
  character from what the speaker says. In fact,
  the speaker may reveal unintentionally certain
  aspects of his/her character. Robert Browning
  perfected this form.

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Example of Dramatic Monologue

• My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
• Aint I a Woman? by Sojourner Truth
• See page 611 in your textbook
• Lucinda Matlock by Edgar Lee Masters
• See page 607 in your textbook

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Types of Poems

• Ode usually a lyric poem of moderate length,
  with a serious subject, an elevated style, and an
  elaborate stanza pattern. There are various kinds
  of odes. The ode often praises people, the arts
  of music and poetry, natural scenes, or abstract
  concepts.

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Types of Poems

• Elegy a sad and thoughtful poem lamenting the
  death of a person.
• Limerick short sometimes bawdy, humorous poems
  consisting of five anapestic lines. Lines 1, 2,
  and 5 of a limerick have seven to ten syllables
  and rhyme with one another. Lines 3 and 4 have
  five to seven syllables and also rhyme with each
  other.

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Example of Limerick

• There was an Old Person whose habits,Induced
  him to feed upon rabbitsWhen he'd eaten
  eighteen,He turned perfectly green,Upon which
  he relinquished those habits.

http//www.types-of-poetry.org.uk/examples-of-lime
ricks.htm
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Types of Poems

• Ballad (folk and literary) Randalls The Ballad
  of Birmingham
• Epic Homers Illiad and Odyssey
• Diamante
• Concrete Poem

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Example of Concrete Poem

• Bird 3   by Don J. Carlson
•                     Poe's                  raven
  told            him nothing nevermore           
         and Vincent's circling                   
  crows were a threat to destroy                   
     sunlight. Now I saw a bird, black with a
  yellow                        beak, orange
  rubber legs                           pecking to
  kill the                             lawn, storm
  bird                              hates with
  claw,                                  evil
  beak,                                       
  s                                       
  u                                       
  n                                    and eye

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Figures of Speech

• Simile Shes as big as a house.
• Metaphor
• Direct Shes a brick house.
• Implied The man brayed his refusal to leave.
  (because the subject--the man--is never overtly
  identified as a mule)
• Extended See the next slide Catch
• Dead tying up loose ends, a submarine sandwich,
  a branch of government, and most clichés
• MixedThe movie struck a spark that massaged the
  audience's conscience.
• Personification The house creaked with old age.

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Example of an extended metaphor

• Catch by Robert FrancisTwo boys uncoached are
  tossing a poem together,Overhand, underhand,
  backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,Teasing
  with attitudes, latitudes, interludes,
  altitudes,High, make him fly off the ground for
  it, low, make him stoop,Make him scoop it up,
  make him as-almost-as possible miss it,Fast, let
  him sting from it, now, now fool him
  slowly,Anything, everything tricky, risky,
  nonchalant,Anything under the sun to outwit the
  prosy,Over the tree and the long sweet cadence
  down,Over his head, make him scramble to pick up
  the meaning,And now, like a posy, a pretty one
  plump in his hands.
• Robert Francis' poem "Catch" relies on an
  extended metaphor that compares poetry to playing
  catch. A controlling metaphor runs through an
  entire work and determines the form or nature of
  that work.'

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Examples of Language

• Metonymy (one term for another with which it is
  commonly associated or closely related.)
• the pen is mightier than the sword
• the crown (referring to a Queen or King)
• all hands on deck
• Synecdoche (part for the whole)
• give us this day our daily bread
• The U.S. won three gold medals. (Instead of The
  members of the U.S. boxing team won three gold
  medals.)

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Irony, doncha think?

• Irony involves a contradiction.  "In general,
  irony is the perception of a clash between
  appearance and reality, between seems and is, or
  between ought and is.
•   
• Verbal irony--Saying something contrary to what
  it means. In daily language, being ironic means
  that you say something but mean the opposite to
  what you say.  "Oh, how lucky we are to have SO
  MANY AP classes to choose from!" Depending on how
  you say it, there is a contradiction between your
  literal meaning and your actual meaning--and this
  is what we call verbal (rhetoric) irony. 
• Dramatic irony -- Saying or doing something
  while unaware of its ironic contrast with the
  whole truth verbal irony with the speaker's
  awareness erased" -- so that the irony is on the
  speaker him/herself, but not what s/he talks
  about.
•    Situational irony-- Events turning to the
  opposite of what is expected or what should be.  
  The ironic situation --the "ought" upended by the
  is -- is integral to dramatic irony.  In Alanis
  Morissete's Ironic" we can see a lot of
  situational ironies -- or ironies of fate.
• Cool article explaining the song "Ironic"

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Watch Your Tone!

• "The word tone in literary discussion is borrowed
  from the expression tone of voice. Tone is the
  manner in which a poet makes his statement it
  reflects his attitude toward his subject. Since
  printed poems lack the intonations of spoken
  words, the reader must learn to "hear" their
  tones with his mind's ear. Tone cannot be heard
  in one particular place since it reflects a
  general attitude, it pervades the whole poem."
  (Poems Wadsworth Handbook and Anthology by C. F.
  Main Peter J. Seng)

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Hey, DIDLS diddle. . .

• Use DIDLS to consider the tone of a poem.
• Dictionthe connotation of the word choice
• Consider the following when discussing diction
•          monosyllabic/polysyllabic
•          colloquial/informal/formal
•          denotative/connotative
•          euphonious/cacophonous
• Imagesvivid appeals to understanding through the
  senses
• DetailsFacts that are included or omitted
• LanguageThe overall use of language, formal,
  colloquial, clinical, jargon, etc...
• Sentence StructureHow structure affects the
  readers attitude

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TPCASTT

• Well save this for another powerpoint )
• One last note. . .
• SPEAKER
• The speaker of the poem IS NOT necessarily the
  poet. It is a persona (a character) used to
  voice the poem. The speaker addresses an
  audience or another character. Identify and
  describe the speaking voice or voices, the
  conflicts or ideas, and the language used in the
  poem.