Method Guide to SEMINAR in LITERARY ANALYSIS

For the 2-nd year students of the English Department

Compiled by

Candidate of Philology Shkuropat M.Y.

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(протокол №1 від 28.08.09)

TOPIC: POETRY ANALYSIS

Analysis of the poem Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish;

Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare

the poem Hope by Emily Dickinson

Activity 1

• Read your notes to LECTURES 4 and 5. Revise the types of imagery, subject, theme/ idea, symbolism. Revise the types of diction, rhetoric figures, syntactical devices.

• Study the paragraphs The definition of poetry; Imagery in Poetry; Theme: The Ideas and the Meaning in Poetry; Strategy for Dealing with meaning in Poetry in this method guide.

• Answer the questions.

Questions

1. What is the definition of poetry?

2. How to start analyzing poetry?

3. What is the difference between the Persona or the Speaker and the Poet?

4. What are the peculiarities of imagery in poetry?

5. How are ideas defined in poetry?

6. What are the strategies of dealing with meaning?

Activity 2

• Read the poem Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish

• Study the analytical essays.

• Answer the questions.

Questions

1. What is the subject of this poem? To what extent does the title help define the subject? Why did the poet call it "Ars Poetica" instead of "The Art of Poetry"?

2. What does the first section (lines 1-8) assert that a poem should be? How are similes employed to make this assertion clearer and more concrete?

3. How can a poem be "mute" (line 1), "dumb" (line 3), "silent" (line 5) and "wordless" (line 7)? Since a poem (and this poem) must be made of words how can this paradox be resolved?

4. What does the second section (lines 9—16) assert about a poem? How are symbolism and simile used to clarify this assertion? How can something be "motionless" and "climb" at the same time? What is the effect of repetition this section?

5. What does the third section (lines 17-24) assert about a poem? What symbolizes “all the history of grief" here? What symbolizes "love"? Why are these two pies of symbolism included in the poem?

6. What does this poem finally assert about poetry? To what extent does "Ars Poetica" embody and illustrate its own ideas and total meaning?

Activity 3

• Read the Sonnet 130 My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun by W.Shakespeare

• Study the analytical essays.

• Answer the questions.

Questions

1. To what does the speaker negatively compare his mistress’s eyes? Lips? Breasts? Hair? Breath? Voice? Walk? What kinds of images are created in these negative comparisons?

2. What conventional images and comparisons does the poem ridicule? What sort of poem is Shakespeare mocking by using the negative images in lines 1-12?

3. Do the images seem insulting? In the light of the last two lines, do you think the speaker intends the images as insults? If not as insults, how should they be taken?

4. Are most of the images in poem auditory, olfactory, visual, or kinetic? Explain your answer using the evidence from the text.

5. What point does this poem make about love poetry? About human relationships? How does the imagery contribute to the development of both points?

Activity 4

• Read the poem HOPE by Emily Dickinson

• Study the analytical essays.

• Answer the questions.

Questions

1. Is the poem simple or complex by structure?

2. What is the subject, the idea and the message of the poem?

3. What diction is used in the story? What words create the contrast?

4. What imagery helps he poet create the image of hope? What auditory, olfactory, visual, or kinetic images predominate in the poem? Explain your answer using the evidence from the text.

5. What stylistic device serves to convey the image?

Activity 5 Write your own analytical essay on one of the poems: Cherry –ripe by Thomas Campion or The Man he Killed by Thomas Hardy

The definition of poetry

Lovers of poetry have been searching for an accurate definition of it for at least two thousand years. The ideal definition would be short. It would enable us to know a real poem when we hear it, and help us understand the power and long life of great poetry. But the search for this definition has not yielded a single description or formula to satisfy all admirers of this various art. Like most things human, poetry will not be reduced, tagged, or made to sit in one corner for very long. And there are as many ways to account for its power as there are poets.

W. H. Auden's description of poetry as "memorable speech" applies to most poetry but also to many things that are not poetry, such as advertising jingles. Matthew Arnold called poetry a "criticism of life," a characterization that is certainly true of his own poetry and discounts advertising jingles, but that is not a useful description of limericks or of nonsense poems such as Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." William Wordsworth believed that poetry was "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," a dramatic but broad definition, and Robert Frost viewed it as that property of speech that is "untranslatable."

All these poets would agree, however, that poetry is markedly different from the prose of legal contracts, encyclopedias, or newspapers. Poetry is more intense than other writing—more intense with feeling, and more intense in its concen­tration of meaning. Poetry is the true language of emotion. We have all had the experience of joy, love, or sadness so great that no matter how urgently we need to express it, words fail us. The birth of a child, the return of a friend after long absence, the death of a parent: these events can leave us speechless. At such times we might wish we were poets. For poetry succeeds where ordinary speech fails to communicate those urgent and subtle feelings that are most essentially human. That is why poetry is the most enduring form of literature.

By saying that poetry is the language of emotion, we do not mean to suggest that poetry does not engage our thoughts and ideas. Poets may praise the theories of relativity and economics as well as the colors of the sunset. Like Hamlet, they may pose an abstract question: "To be, or not to be, that is the question." But if the writer does not communicate the emotion of discovering thought, we are not likely to find poetry in that writer's work.

Ezra Pound said that "literature is news that stays news." He must have had poetry in mind, for great poetry is eternally fresh. The poet writes what is most important in a given moment, and writes with such intensity and clarity that years later the verse can still seem important to a reader. How does a poet do this? Suiting the words and the rhythm of language perfectly to the experience, the poet says it so that we cannot imagine it being said any better.

How to start analyzing poetry?

Before tackling any poem a reader should give himself time to reread it several times. We can do no more than read carefully. Then ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is speaking?

• To whom is he or she speaking?

• What has made the speaker talk?

We can do no more than read carefully. Do not ask questions for unnecessary information. The poet gives us exactly as much as it is necessary. Where the poem is silent, we must be silent too.

The Persona or the Speaker and the Poet

Keep in mind that the Persona or the Speaker should never be confused with the Poet. Even in poems in which the speaker is not clearly distinguished from the author, it is often useful to think of the speaker as a fictional character. Nevertheless, the poet can have various relationships to the persona of a poem. Sometimes the speaker is not a poet, but a fictional character. However, there are poems in which the speaker is unquestionably the poet. Biographical information may be useful for appreciating such poems. At still other times the speaker does not even appear as a character in the poem. Whatever relationship the poet adopts to the speaker, we should listen closely to the speaker’s words and base our assumption on the text of the poem and context of the speaker.

The Title

The title of the poem is often crucial to out understanding of it. Titles are always important and should not be overlooked.