How to analyze a poem

• Look at the title (significance)• Paraphrase/summarize the poem• Identify general topic [ any historical,

theological, generic, or mythological allusions?]

• Identify the poem’s theme• Speaker? [characterize voice]• Purpose of the poem

Analyzing Poetry Continued

• What are some of the dominant chains of metaphor? How are they linked? What is this chain being used to represent?

• Is there a setting? If so, what aspects of time, place, season are emphasized?

• Structure**• Rhetorical schemes: does the word order suggest

something about the narrator’s thinking? Are certain words emphasized by placement in a sentence or in a stanza? Is there a predominant sentence structure?

Analyzing Poetry Continued

• Imagery: What are the central images? How are they developed? Allusions? How are they developed?

• Diction and Tone:Overall tone? [emotional/intellectual] Is the tone appropriate to the subject/imagery? Diction: formal/colloquial? Words: common/obscure? Puns?

• Note instances of assonance, alliteration, consonance. How do they affect the overall “feel” of the poem? What kinds of connections do they make between words/images?

Analyzing Poetry Continued

• What is the rhyme scheme and how is it working to support/complicate theme?

• Meter?

Elizabethan and Shakespearean eras 16th-17th C

• The end of the Italian Renaissance found its greatest poetic exports–the ballad and the sonnet–on their way to England through Sir Thomas Wyatt. He introduced the forms to a countryside attuned to lyrical and narrative poetry by the great Geoffrey Chaucer, whose experiences with latter Provencal poets influenced the style credited with modernizing English literature.

• Sonnets swept through late 16th and early 17th century England, primarily through the works of Wyatt, Sir Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Spenser and Shakespeare took the Petrarchan form that Wyatt introduced to the literary landscape and added their individual touches, forming the three principal sonnet styles: Petrarchan, Spenserian, and Shakespearean.

• The socially open Elizabethan era enabled poets to write about humanistic as well as religious subjects. The dramatic rise in academic study and literacy during the late 16th century created large audiences for the new poetry, which was also introduced into the educational system. In many ways, the Elizabethan era closely resembled the expressionism of the Ancient Greeks.

Metaphysical Poets 18th C• A century after the height of the Elizabethan era, a subtler, provocative lyric

poetry movement crept through an English literary countryside that sought greater depth in its verse. The metaphysical poets defined and compared their subjects through nature, philosophy, love, and musings about the hereafter – a great departure from the primarily religious poetry that had immediately followed the wane of the Elizabethan era. Poets shared an interest in metaphysical subjects and practiced similar means of investigating them.

• Beginning with John Dryden, the metaphysical movement was a loosely woven string of poetic works that continued through the often-bellicose 18th century, and concluded when William Blake bridged the gap between metaphysical and romantic poetry. The poets sought to minimize their place within the poem and to look beyond the obvious – a style that greatly informed American transcendentalism and the Romantics who followed. Among the greatest adherents were Samuel Cowley, John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, George Chapman, Edward Herbert, and Katherine Philips.

Romantic Poets Early 19th C• The third of England’s "big three" movements completed a three-

century period during which the British Isles took the Western poetic mantle from Italy and molded the forms, styles, and poems that fill school classrooms to this day. The Romantic period, or Romanticism, is regarded as one of the greatest and most illustrious movements in literary history, which is all the more amazing considering that it primarily consisted of just seven poets and lasted approximately 25 years – from William Blake’s rise in the late 1790s to Lord Byron’s d

• In between, the group of poets lived as mighty flames of poetic production who were extinguished well before their time. The core group included Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a magnificent trio of friends: Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. Ironically, the poets held distinctly different religious beliefs and led divergent lifestyles. Blake was a Christian, Wordsworth was a naturalist, Byron urbane, Keats a free spirit, Shelley an atheist, and Coleridge a card-carrying member of the Church of England.

Romantics, continued• The romantics made nature even more central to their work than the

metaphysical poets, treating it as an elusive metaphor in their work. They sought a freer, more personal expression of passion, pathos, and personal feelings, and challenged their readers to open their minds and imaginations. Through their voluminous output, the romantics’ message was clear: life is centered in the heart, and the relationships we build with nature and others through our hearts defines our lives. They anticipated and planted the seeds for free verse, transcendentalism, the Beat movement, and countless other artistic, musical, and poetic expressions.

• The Romantic movement would have likely extended further into the 19th century, but the premature deaths of the younger poets, followed in 1832 by the death of their elderly German admirer, Goethe, brought the period to an end.

American Transcendentalists 19th C• Of all the great communities and movements, the American

Transcendentalists might be the first to have an intentional, chronicled starting date: September 8, 1836, when a group of prominent New England intellectuals led by poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson met at the Transcendental Club in Boston. They gathered to discuss Emerson’s essay, "Nature" and developed "The American Soul," which stated, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds ... A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.“

• The Transcendentalists grew from that mission statement, which was inspired by Emerson’s love of Hinduism, Swedenbourg’s mystical Christianity, and Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy. They created a shadow society that espoused utopian values, spiritual exploration, and full development of the arts. They revolted against a culture they thought was becoming too puritanical, and an educational system they thought overly intellectual.

Transcendentalists, continued• Like the Romantics, heart-centered, personal expression was their aim.

Unlike the Romantics, who often clashed because of their personal differences, the Transcendentalists sought commonalities. They included Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Orestes Brownson, William Ellery Channing, Sophia Peabody, and her husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Beat Movement 20th C• It only lasted 15 years and was known by the masses only in the last six, but

the combination of disenfranchisement, wanderlust, and creative expression that inflicted a handful of New York and San Francisco students and young intellectuals resulted in the most influential movement of the past 100 years – the Beat movement.

• The Beats formed from a wide variety of characters and interests, but were linked by a common thread: a desire to live life as they defined it. The mixture of academia, be-bop jazz, the liberating free verse of William Carlos Williams, and the influence of budding author Jack Kerouac (who coined the term "Beat Generation" in 1948 at a meeting with Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, and William S. Burroughs) inspired a young Ginsberg to change everything he’d learned about poetry. He wrote throughout the early 1950s in a narrative free verse, joined by the young Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, and the older Burroughs, who, like Kerouac, opted for fiction – though Kerouac wrote beautiful poetry that has been read and appreciated over the past two decades.

The Beats, continued

• By the mid-1950s, the Beats’ mixture of free-expression jazz and socially informed free verse poetry became the anthem for a generation of Greenwich Village youth seeking greater spiritual meaning through visceral experiences and the laying down – or trampling – of their parents’ strict, Depression and World War II-fed mores.

http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/home_movements.htmlAll of the poetry timeline information is from the above site.

Types of PoemsLyric poems

• lyric poem is a comparatively short, non-narrative poem in which a single speaker presents a state of mind or an emotional state. Lyric poetry retains some of the elements of song which is said to be its origin: For Greek writers the lyric was a song accompanied by the lyre.

http://www2.anglistik.uni-freiburg.de/intranet/englishbasics/PoetryTypes01.htmAll of the information about types of poems comes from the above site.

Elegies and Odes

• In modern usage, elegy is a formal lament for the death of a particular person (for example

Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.). More broadly defined, the term elegy is also used for solemn meditations, often on questions of death, such as Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.• An ode is a long lyric poem with a serious subject

written in an elevated style. Famous examples are Wordsworth’s Hymn to Duty or Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn.

Sonnet• The sonnet was originally a love poem which dealt with the

lover’s sufferings and hopes. It originated in Italy and became popular in England in the Renaissance, when Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey translated and imitated the sonnets written by Petrarch (Petrarchan sonnet). From the seventeenth century onwards the sonnet was also used for other topics than love, for instance for religious experience (by Donne and Milton), reflections on art (by Keats or Shelley) or even the war experience (by Brooke or Owen).

• The sonnet uses a single stanza of (usually) fourteen lines and an intricate rhyme pattern (see stanza forms). Many poets wrote a series of sonnets linked by the same theme, so-called sonnet cycles – (for instance, Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, Drayton, Barret-Browning,

Meredith) which depict the various stages of a love relationship.

Dramatic monologue

• In a dramatic monologue a speaker, who is explicitly someone other than the author, makes a speech to a silent auditor in a specific situation and at a critical moment. Without intending to do so, the speaker reveals aspects of his temperament and character. In Browning's My Last Duchess for instance, the Duke shows the picture of his last wife to the emissary from his prospective new wife and reveals his excessive pride in his position and his jealous temperament.

Occasional Poem

• Occasional poetry is written for a specific occasion: a wedding (then it is called an epithalamion, – for instance Spenser’s Epithalamion), – the return of a king from exile (for instance

Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis) – or a death (for example Milton’sLycidas), etc.

Narrative Poetry• Gives a verbal representation, in verse, of a sequence of connected

events, it propels characters through a plot. It is always told by a narrator. Narrative poems might tell of a love story (like Tennyson's Maud), the story of a father and son (like Wordsworth's Michael) or the deeds of a hero or heroine (likeWalter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel).

• Sub-categories of narrative poetry:– Epics usually operate on a large scale, both in length and topic, such as

the founding of a nation (Virgil’s Aeneid) or the beginning of world history (Milton'sParadise Lost), they tend to use an elevated style of language and supernatural beings take part in the action.

– The mock-epic makes use of epic conventions, like the elevated style and the assumption that the topic is of great importance, to deal with completely insignificant occurrences. A famous example is Pope's The Rape of the Lock, which tells the story of a young beauty whose suitor secretly cuts off a lock of her hair.

– A ballad is a song, originally transmitted orally, which tells a story. It is an important form of folk poetry which was adapted for literary uses from the sixteenth century onwards. The ballad stanza is usually a four-line stanza, alternating tetrameter and trimeter.

Descriptive or Didactic Poetry• Both lyric and narrative poetry can contain lengthy and detailed

descriptions (descriptive poetry) or scenes in direct speech (dramatic poetry).

• The purpose of a didactic poem is primarily to teach something. This can take the form of very specific instructions, such as how to catch a fish, as in James Thomson’s The Seasons (Spring 379-442) or how to write good poetry as in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism. But it can also be meant as instructive in a general way. Until the twentieth century all literature was expected to have a didactic purpose in a general sense, that is, to impart moral, theoretical or even practical knowledge;

• Horace famously demanded that poetry should combine prodesse (learning) and delectare (pleasure).

• The twentieth century was more reluctant to proclaim literature openly as a teaching tool.