Poems Theory Flashcards
Hearing voices
the most striking thing about poetry is how the language generates a sense of the speaking character.
• In reading poetry, we need to be attentive to the way languages creates voices
=> Who speaks the words on the page ?
=> How did we come to «overhear» these words ?
(Not waving but drowining)
Rhetorical figures definition
an expression that departs from the accepted literal sense or from the normal order of words, or in which an emphasis is produced by patterns of sound. Such figurative language is an especially important resource of poetry, although not every poem will use it: it is also constantly present in all other kinds of speech and writing, even though it usually passes unnoticed. (Oxford dictionnary of literary terms)
• Rhetoric : ars bene dicendi / the art of speaking well
• Aim : movere / to move the listener or reader : to move emotionally, to persuade, to manipulate !?
Hyperbole
Metaphor
Exaggeration for the sake of emphasis, which is not meant to be taken literally
Figure of speech, in which one thing, idea, or action is referred to by a word or expression normally denoting another thing, idea or action, so as to suggest some common quality shared by the two.
• it consists of tenor (the subject of the comparison), and vehicle (the image evoked, what it implies)
Ballad
a folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is told simply, impersonnally, and often with vivid dialogue.
• Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, the second and fourth lines rhyming: but some ballads are in couplet form, and some others have six-line stanzas.
• Besides «A red, red rose», other famous ballads are John Keats’ «La belle dame sans merci», and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s «the rime of the ancient mariner»
So ballads
1. Focus on a single crucial episode
2. Dramatic immediacy, sometimes assisted by dialogue
3. Impersonnal narration
4. Plot as central
5. Few arresting figures of speech
6. Much repetition and parallelism, which is not ornamental but advances the plot and heightens atmosphere
7. Appealing to a popular audience, but describing the adventures of aristocratic of heroic participants
Epic
Epic 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’s Paradise Lost), they tend to use an elevated style of language and supernatural beings take part in the action.
Narrative poetry
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 (see narrator in narrative prose)
• Sub-categories of narrative poetry are for example: epic or ballad.
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.
• Usually quite long
• Examples of this type of lyric poetry are Robert Browning’s «My Last Duchess», Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s «The runaway slave at Pilgrim’s Point» and T.S Eliot’s «the love song of J.Alfred Prufrock»
Ode
An elaborately formal lyric poem, often in the form of a lenghty ceremonious address to a person or abstract entity, always serious and elevated in tone
• There are 2 different types of odes :
=> Horatian: more privately reflective odes. In English literature, these include the celebrated odes of John Keats, notably ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820).
=> Pindaric: devoted to public praise. In English literature, these include Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1754), and other types of more irregular odes with varying lengths of strophes introduced by Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, William Collins, and WilliamWordsworth.
Elegy
an elaborately formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject
• The elegiac stanza is a quatrain of iambic pentameters rhyming ABAB (but also AABB)
• In an extended sense, a prose work dealing with a vanished way of life or with the passing of youth may sometimes be called an elegy.
(Ode to solitude)
Sonnet
A lyric poem comprising fourteen rhyming lines of equal lenght and in iambic pentameter (5 feet)
Lyric poetry
A lyric poem is comparatively short, non-narrative poem in which a single speaker presents a state of mind or an emotional state
• Subcategories of the lyric are, for example: sonnet, elegy, ode, dramatic monologue and most occasional poetry
=> analysis of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s «Ozymandias» (a sonnet)
Poetic genres
Lyric poetry (sonnet, elegy, ode, dramatic monologue) vs narrative poetry (epic, ballad)
Free verse
A kind of poetry that does not conform to any regular metre: the length of its lines is irregular, as is its use of rhyme—if any.” (Baldrick 146)
Blank verse
It is a kind of poetry that observes regular metres but has unrhymed lines.
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
(Lord Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, Lines 69-71)
=> for more info about all this, see the printed annex
Rhymes
Rhymes can be on one syllable or on two or three syllables.
• Rhymes of one identical syllable are called masculine rhymes: street/meet, man/ban, galaxy/merrily.
• Rhymes of two identical syllables are called feminine rhymes: straining/complaining, slowly/holy.
• Very rarely there are rhymes with three identical syllables, so-called triple rhymes: icicles/bicycles.
