Elements of Poetry

1. Elements of Poetry Key Concepts and Examples

2. What is poetry? • No single definition • Most concentrated and condensed form of literature • Intense focus on each word and line and how they operate together to communicate experiences • Focus on communicating experiences • No lesson or moral required • Not always beautiful

3. Where do we begin? • Denotation vs. Connotation • Literal meaning vs. Figurative meaning • Figures of speech and figurative language • Sound devices and musicality • Rhythm and meter • Tone and Theme

4. What do words mean? • Denotation • Dictionary definition of a word; literal meaning • Connotation • Implied or suggested meaning of a word • Depends upon implication or shared emotional association • Example: • “Greasy” has a negative connotation, independent of dictionary definition

5. Literal meaning vs.figurative meaning • Literal Meaning • The simplest, most obvious meaning • Tied to denotation of words • “The sky is gray” tells the color of the sky. • Figurative Meaning • Associational or connotative meaning • Tied to representations, symbolic meaning • “The sky is gray” suggests an ominous, foreboding atmosphere.

6. Why areconnotation and figurative meaning important? • Poems do not have only a literal meaning, but they have deeper meanings tied to their connotative or figurative meaning • Poets use connotations to develop or complicate a poem’s meaning • William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” • Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

7. What is figurative language? • Language that cannot be taken literally or only literally • Language that employs figures of speech • Figures of speech – ways of saying something other than the ordinary way, where you say one thing and mean another • Examples: “It’s raining cats and dogs” or “I could eat a horse”

8. Types of figurative language • Simile • A comparison of two essentially unlike things using “like” or “as” • Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” • Metaphor • A comparison of two essentially unlike things without using words; application of a name or description to something to which it is not literally applicable • Literal and figurative terms may be named or implied • Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”

9. Types of Figurative Language • Personification • Giving the attributes of a person to an animal, object, or concept • Tennyson, “The Eagle” • Apostrophe • Addressing someone absent or dead or something nonhuman as if that person or thing were present and alive • Angelou, “Woman Work”

10. Types of Figurative Language • Hyperbole • Overstatement, exaggeration in the service of truth • Tennyson, “The Eagle”; Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” • Understatement • Saying less than one means • Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”; Hardy, “The Man He Killed”

11. Types of Figurative Language • Symbol • Something that means, suggests more than what it is • Functions both literally (what the symbol is) and figuratively (what the symbol represents) • Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” • Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” • Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”

12. What is the relationship between symbols and similes/metaphors? • Similes and metaphors compare two seemingly unlike things • “Some dirty dog stole my wallet” • Symbols associate two things using literal and figurative meaning • “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”

13. Types of Figurative Language • Paradox • A seeming contradiction that is somehow true • Valuable for shock effect, attracts attention • Example: “Poetry is a language that tells us, through a more or less emotional reaction, something that cannot be said.” Edwin Robinson • Example: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.” Shakespeare

14. Types of Figurative Language • Irony • When you say or get the opposite of what you mean or expect • Verbal irony – discrepancy between what the speaker says and what the speaker means • Dramatic irony – discrepancy between what the speaker says and what the poem means • Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” • Brooks, “We Real Cool”

15. Types of Figurative Language • Pun • A play on words; a humorous use of a single word or sound with two or more implied meanings • Oxymoron • A compact paradox in which two successive words seemingly contradict one another • Examples: bittersweet, wild civility, cold heat

16. Types of Figurative Language • Metonymy • The use of something closely related for the thing actually meant • Example: “The pen is mightier than the sword” • Synecdoche • A part substituted for the whole • Yeats “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

17. What poetic elements exist? • Imagery • Words or sequence of words that represent a sensory experience (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch) • Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” and nearly all poems

18. What poetic elements exist? • Allusion • A reference to something in history or previous literature • Hopkins, “Spring” • Yeats, “No Second Coming”

19. What sound devices exist? • Alliteration – repetition of initial consonant sounds • Assonance – repetition of vowel sounds • Consonance – repetition of final consonant sounds • Onomatopoeia – use of words to imitate the sounds they describe

20. What sound devices exist • Rhyme – repetition of accented vowel sounds and any succeeding consonant sounds • Internal rhyme – one or more rhyming words within single line • End rhyme – rhyming words at end of line • Approximate rhyme – slant rhyme, words with any kind of sound similarity (alliteration, assonance, and consonance at end of lines)

21. What sound devices exist? • Elision – omission of unstressed vowel or syllable to preserve meter • Anaphora – repetition of opening word of phrase in a series of lines (Angelou, “Woman Work”) • Refrain – repetition of whole words, phrases, lines, or groups of lines according to fixed pattern (Shakespeare, “Winter”)

22. What is meter? • Meter – measured pattern of rhythmic accents in a line of verse • Foot – basic unit of meter, consisting of one accented syllable plus one or two unaccented syllables • Iambic (iamb) – metrical foot containing two syllables, first unstressed, second stressed • Iambic pentameter – five iambic feet

23. What is rhythm? • Rhythm – natural rise and fall of language • Corresponds to alternation between accented (stressed) and unaccented (unstressed) syllables • End-stopped line – end of the line corresponds with natural speech pause • Run-on line – no natural pause at end of the line; enjambment • Caesura – a pause for a beat in the rhythm of the verse (within a line)

24. What poetic forms exist? • Open vs. Closed • Open – free from regularity and consistency • Closed – follows fixed structure and pattern (rhyme, length, meter) • Blank verse vs. Free verse • Blank verse – unrhymed iambic pentameter (Shakespeare’s plays) • Free verse – no prescribed pattern or structure

25. What poetic forms exist? • Stanza – unit of poetic lines, verse paragraph • Couplet – a pair of lines, usually rhymed • Heroic couplet – pair of rhymed lines in iambic pentameter • Sonnet • 14 lines, iambic pentameter, prescribed rhyme • English (Shakespearean) sonnet: ababcdcdefefgg • Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet: abbaabbacdecde OR cdcdcd

26. Tone and Subject • Tone • The writer’s or speaker’s attitude toward the subject, the reader, or herself of himself • Subject • What is the poem about?

27. Meaning vs. Theme • Poem’s meaning – the experience it expresses • What experience does the poem communicate, and how well does it do so? • Poem’s theme • The central idea or unifying generalizations implied or stated by a literary work • Ascertain from the poem itself • Not simply the subject of the poem, but what does the poem suggest about a subject

28. How do we approach poems? • Six Steps • Read aloud twice – define unknown words – initial impressions, responses, observations – TP-CASTT analysis – return to initial impressions, responses, observations – evaluate the poem • TP-CASTT • Title – Paraphrase – Connotations – Attitude – Shifts– Title – Theme