Lecture 5 Poetry Interpretation

References

1. Delaney, D. Fields of Vision. Literature in the English Language. Volume 1 / Denis Delaney, Ciaran Ward, Carla Rho Fiorina. – Longman, 2003.

2. Verdonk, P. Stylistics. – OUP, 2003. – 124 p. (reading hall)

3. Galperin, I.R. Stylistics. M.: Higher School, 1977. – 332 p.

4. Lethbridge, Stefanie & Mildorf, Jarmila. Basics of English Studies: An introductory course for students of literary studies in English. Developed at the English departments of the Universities of Tübingen, Stuttgart and Freiburg.

5. Widdowson, H. G. Practical Stylistics: an approach to poetry. Oxford University Press, 1992. – 230 p.

6. Скребнев, Ю.М. Основы стилистики английского языка: учебник для ин-тов и фак. иностр. яз. – М., 2003. – 221 с.

Plan:

1. The distinctive nature and characteristics of poetry.

2. Types of poetry.

3. Imagery.

4. Symbols.

5. Figures of speech.

6. Sound features.

7. The structure of verse. The stanza.

8. Layout.

1. Delaney, 4: One modern poet, when asked the question "What is poetry?", replied that poetry, unlike prose, is a form of writing in which few lines run to the edge of the page! The American poet Robert Frost contended that "poetry is the kind of thing poets write". While these replies, at first, may not seem serious, they inadvertently reveal two important aspects of poetry: the first quotation indicates the arrangement of the words on the page as an important element of poetry, while the second emphasizes that there is a special "poetic" way of using language. A working definition may, therefore, be that poetry emerges from the interplay between the meaning of words and their arrangement on paper; or – as the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it – "poetry is the best words in their best order".

Poetry, like all literature, is a writer's attempt to communicate to others his emotional and intellectual response to his own experiences and the world that surrounds him. The poet puts word together to make the reader feel that he has felt and experience what he has experienced.

According to Delaney, although poems come in all shapes and sizes, they share certain characteristics.

• Imagery, metaphors and symbols make poetry dense with meaning;

• Sound features, such as rhyme, rhythm and repetition, give the language a special musical quality.

• The standard rules of grammar and syntax are often ignored, so that the language may be used in a striking or original way.

According to Verdonk, 11: the language of poetry has the following characteristics:

• Its meaning is often ambiguous and elusive;

• It may flout the conventional rules of grammar;

• It has a peculiar sound structure;

• It is spatially arranged in metrical lines and stanzas;

• It often reveals foregrounded patterns in its sounds, vocabulary, grammar, or syntax;

• It frequently contains indirect references to other texts.

According to Lethbridge, 142: there are a number of outward signs that indicate a poem:

• The individual text lines in poetry do not fill the entire width of the page;

• Very dense use of specialized language. Poems usually try to express their meaning in much less space than, say a novel or a short story.

• As a result of its relative brevity, poetry tends to make more concentrated use of formal elements, it displays a tendency for structural, phonological, morphological and syntactic overstructuring. It means that poetry uses elements such as pound patterns, verse and metre, rhetorical devices, style, stanza form or imagery more frequently than other types of text. Most poetry depends on the aesthetic effects of a formalized use of language;

• Some people associate poetry with subjectivity and the expression of intense personal experience. While this is true for some poetry, especially lyrical poetry, there are a great number of poems this does not apply to (e.g. some narrative didactic and philosophical poems). One should not assume that the author of a poem is identical with its speaker and thus even lyrical poems cannot be treated as subjective expressions of the author. The two levels of author and speaker should always be kept separate.

According to Muller-Zettelmann (ibid. 144): poetic texts have a tendency to:

• Relative brevity (with some notable exceptions)

• Dense expression;

• Express subjectivity more than other texts

• Display a musical or songlike quality

• Be structurally and phonologically overstructured

• Be syntactically and morphologically overstructured

• Deviate from everyday language

• Aesthetic self-referentiality (which means that they draw attention to themselves as art form both through the form in which they are written and through explicit references to the writing of poetry).

With all the difficulties of defining poetry it is worth remembering that poetry, especially in the form of song, is one of the oldest forms of artistic expression, much older than prose, and that it seems to answer – or to originate in – a human impulse that reaches for expression in joy, grief, doubt, hope, loneliness, and much more.

Verdonk, 12: Our socialization has trained us to immediately perceive the purpose and intended effects, i.e. the social function, of most texts we are confronted with. Clearly, the majority of these texts have some practical function in that they have intentions which can be related to the real world around us. For instance, a headline encourages us to read a news story, a publisher's blurb encourages us to buy a book, and an advertisement is designed to promote a product. Whereas the non-literary text makes a connection with the context of our everyday social practice, the literary text does not: it is self-enclosed.

The first thing we might note is that poetry bears no relation to our socially established needs and conventions, because unlike non-literary texts, poetry is detached from the ordinary contexts of social life. To put it differently, poetry does not make direct reference to the world of phenomena but provides a representation of it through its peculiar and unconventional uses of language which invite and motivate, sometimes even provoke, readers to create an imaginary alternative world.

It is this potential of a literary text which is its essential function, namely that it enables us to satisfy our needs as individuals, to escape, be it ever so briefly, from our humdrum socialized existence, to feel reassured about the disorder and confusion in our minds, and to find a reflection of our conflicting emotions. We may conclude that the function of literature is not socializing but individualizing.

In ordinary communication we use language to make reference to all sorts of items in the material world around us. But when language does not refer to our everyday social context, as in literary texts, when it is the only thing available to us to construct an imaginary context, then the language becomes the constant factor to which we have to go back every time we wish to recall what we have imagined.

Unsurprisingly, our awareness and perception of this particular use of language have to be much more astute than in ordinary communication, and we therefore experience the verbal structures of a literary text as elements of a dynamic communicative interaction between the writer and reader, in which our expectations are fulfilled or frustrated and our emotions roused or soothed by incentives in the text whenever we turn to it. Of course, given the fact that we all have different expectations and different emotions, the responses to these incentives, and thereby our interpretation of the text as a whole, are bound to differ from reader to reader, and it may include total rejection. A literary text prompts a more individual, more creative response. The text seems to alert the reader to some significance which is implied but not made linguistically explicit, which is somehow read into the text.

Widdowson, 24: Unlike other types of discourse, poetry is cut off from normal social practice. Its interpretation does not depend on being referred to some external situational context. So the poet must of necessity compensate for this lack of normal contextual connection by increasing unique patterns of language within the context of the poem itself, thereby representing an elusive alternative to familiar social reality. Poetry sets up an alternative order of its own. All poems contain within their design the potential of multiple significance. There are ideas and experience particular to the individual which cannot be made general within the scope of rational description or explanation. Poems represent them, fashion them into a form which we can apprehend without being able to explain.

Widdowson, xii: the effects of poetry are never precise: they are evocative, suggestive, elusive. If they were made precise, they would become referential. The poem would then simply conform to the normal conditions of conventional statement and lose its point.