Chapter 10-Introduction to Poetry
Reading poetry seems like a completely different experience than reading novels, short stories or plays, but don’t be intimidated . It’s similar to listening to a song. When a person hears a new song on the radio, he or she doesn’t always get the lyrics or the meaning the first or second time they hear a song. The person may have to hear the song several times before they begin to understand all the lyrics or enjoy the rhythms. Think of poetry the same way. Poems are generally short enough that reading them several times isn’t the problem it would be for a novel. Find a place to read the poem aloud. Most poetry should be read aloud and will have more meaning for the reader when they hear as well as see it.
When reading a poem aloud, pay attention to the punctuation; read the poem like prose. If there is not a period at the end of a line, don’t read as if there’s a period at the end of the line; keep reading until reaching a period. Poetry isn’t never meant to be read sing-songy. Pay attention to the punctuation and read accordingly. The visual aspects of a poem, especially modern and post-modern poetry may give the reader a different experience, an interesting design for the eyes, but the reader is meant to read as if reading prose, no matter what the physical shape of the poem. When reading a poem, stop at a period and don’t stop if there is no period, even if the physical line ends. Pause at commas, just as in prose writing.
Poetry is one of the most ancient art forms used by humans. Novels and short stories are relatively new inventions, especially short stories. Novels really didn’t start being written until the mid-1700 and short stories later than that. But people have written poetry since before the time of Homer in ancient Greece. Poetry is basic to human experience and the pleasure of the words comes through with poetry.
People love words. They are a person’s main form of expression. People develop different dialects and different ways of speaking to show how they think and feel. People may talk differently with their parents, friends, professors, or other people because the words mean something different with different people and how a person wants to express themselves varies depending on the circumstances.
Playing with words is all around us. Advertisers take advantage of the human love of words. They have little advertising jingles that will stick in the consumer’s head, especially if they put music to them. McDonald’s used to have the jingle, “You deserve a break today.” It was specifically designed to stick in hearer’s heads. Humans love that kind of thing. Kids on the playground will have little hopscotch rhymes or rhythms for their jumping rope. They do hand rhythms. Parents play Patty cake with their babies because babies love the sound and rhythm of words. It seems integral to humans.
The pleasure of words is what readers should think about with poetry, from those kids’ rhymes on the playground to the nursery rhymes learned as a small child and repeated to as parents to the sophisticated poetry read in a literature class. Poetry comes in various types, but poetic language surrounds people all the time.
Poetry takes language and concentrates it because poetry’s short form. Even in a long poem, the poet doesn’t have the kind of sprawl a novel can have or even that a short story can have. Every word has to mean something. The language is intense and concentrated. The poet must ensure nothing unneeded remains, and everything needed is present. Language is distilled down to its basic nature in poetry.
When writing about poetry in any form, scrutinizing the language becomes particularly important. The student must think about the meaning of the poem but that’s achieved by looking at the language. When a student is asked to write a paper about poetry, he or she will need to write a thesis statement, which means they must develop a solid claim about the poem that can be backed up with textual evidence. The claim is rarely expected to be about what the student thinks the poem means. The student would need to understand that, but the claim will be
something about how the language or the rhyme scheme or some other literary element helps create the theme or the feel of the poem. Just saying, “I think this poem means we should pay more attention to the people we love” isn’t enough. The writer would then need to talk about how the poet used words or settings or mood or tone or irony or whatever they used to get that across to the reader. Writing about poetry will always be writing about the literary elements, never just writing about the meaning without discussing the literary techniques used.
Poets don’t always have setting and character and action and all the elements in the same form a novelist does. Poets sometimes imply more than they state. A poet will use careful word choices to show these. Language, words, is what a poet has, so that is what they use to convey their meaning, gracefully and economically. They have very few words to say what they have to say. A poet, even more than a novelist, must think about each word choice they use. They’re never going to use a word that doesn’t provide a significant impact. They want impact from every word, so the reader really is analyzing the language more so than in the short stories.
Diction, or style, is another aspect of poetry. Poets use various styles to create different effects. “Poetic diction” is what readers often think of as the high blown or flowery style many famous poems use. This style distinctly says, “You’re reading a poem!” It’s not going to sound like common language. During the Romantic era, the 1700’s going into the early 1800’s, poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge deliberately backed away from that kind of flowery, overblown diction, and moved into a more everyday language. Earlier poets such as Shakespeare, John Dryden, or Alexander Pope used the poetic diction. It uses formal words and tone.
Poems written in the 1700’s tended to have the formal diction, which poets in the late 1700’s and 1800’s rebelled against. The poets of the Romantic era rebelled from that to try to make poetry sound more like the way that people actually talked, and middle diction sounds closer to everyday language.
Informal diction would have more slang, street talk, language used by kids, or what a person might use at home with just their families. Many post-modern and contemporary poets prefer this informal level of diction, and many readers today may also.
Some poets choose to write in dialect, which means they are trying to recreate the actual sounds of something. Maybe by they’re trying to make it sound like a person has a Spanish accent, and so they’re actually going to try to write the words in such a way that the Spanish accent comes through. Maybe they are trying to recreate a different form of spoken English, such that used by people on a Caribbean island or a South American country. That would be using dialect. If the poet were from the south, he or she may use the types of phrases peculiar to the south, such as the way southern people might use the phrase, “Bless their heart.” It’s used in a different way in the south than in the north. People in the north have specific words or phrases that are used differently than they are in the north.
The denotation of a word is its dictionary definition. The connotation of a word is the baggage it carries. All words carry baggage. “Slim” usually sounds more complimentary than “skinny.” even though they both probably would sound similar in their dictionary definition. Poets consciously choose words with the connotations they want. What kind of baggage is the reader hearing when they hear words like stubborn or persistent? Persistent sounds admirable; stubborn sounds less admirable, but they may both have similar meanings. So anytime a poet uses a word, they have thought it through. It has not happened accidentally. They have thought through the connotation of the word.
Ambiguity refers to words being used with unclear meanings, meanings different than how we usually think of them, or different meanings in different contexts, even in the same poem. Poets frequently use ambiguity as they play with language. In the poem The Golf Links, the poet talks about children working in a factor being able to see man at play on the golf course. “Play” is usually associated with children and “work” with adults, but the poet has switched what the expectations of those words to make her point.
The tone of a poem refers to the writer’s attitude towards the subject. The elements will all pull together to create this mood that shows the author’s attitude. In the poem by Walt Whitman, “Oh, Captain, My Captain,” about the death of Abraham Lincoln, the reader finds the serious tone easy to detect. A tone could be light and happy or sad, bitter or playful, angry or approving. The reader should be thinking, “What was the author’s attitude as he was writing?”
Tone isn’t always apparent on the first reading. The reader may not realize the author is being sarcastic, that the author is saying something different than what he or she actually thinks. When the reader reads the poem the second or third time, the sarcasm becomes clear.
With all these things to analyze or think about, read the poem through first just to enjoy it or get a sense of it. Don’t break it down the first time. Read for pleasure. Then, on the second reading, think about what the poet has to say or why he’s using the words that he’s using. That’s the time to notice their techniques. Seeing how the poet achieved their purpose shouldn’t lessen the enjoyment of the poem when the reader begins to think about the techniques used. Don’t try to beat a meaning out of it. Looking at the various techniques should heighten the enjoyment of the reader, not lessen it. Remember, poetry is like music. Everyone has their favorite types, but all are meant to be enjoyed.
