INTERPRETING POETRY

WHAT IS POETRY?

Poetry is often considered mystical or spiritual.  It has been called “the most intimate and volatile form of literary discourse” that can deepen “our capacity for personhood, our achievement of humanity.”  Poetry also “conveys heightened forms of perception, experience, meaning, or consciousness in heightened language” (Brogan 938). As a “heightened mode of discourse,” poetry exhibits “intensified speech” by using conventions that are considered defining characteristics (Hirsch 27).

ELEMENTS OF POETRY

DICTION

Diction refers to the poet’s choice of words.  Poets often choose words that contribute to the poem’s meaning on both a denotational and a connotation level.

·         Denotation:  the object or idea that the word represents; the dictionary meaning

·         Connotation:  the subjective, emotional association that a word has for one person or a group of people.

·         Wordplay:  double meanings and puns.

SYNTAX

Syntax is sentence structure, the way words go together to make sentences. Poets often invert the normal word order so that they can make a sentence rhyme, to fit a metrical pattern, or to emphasize an idea.  Further difficulties arise because sentences are so long that we forget how they begin. 

CHARACTERIZATION, POINT OF VIEW, PLOT, SETTING AND THEME

Poems do not always offer a “story” in a conventional sense, but action may be implied, a place or time may be important, and characters may dramatize the key issues of the poem.

POINT OF VIEW

According to T.S. Eliot, in any poem there is always a speaker, “I” of the poem.  The first voice is the voice of the poet talking to himself (or to nobody).  The second voice is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small.  The third is the voice of the poet when he is saying, not what he would say in his own person, but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another imaginary character.  (Eliot, 96)

IMAGERY

Descriptive Language:  The poet often uses descriptive imagery to underscore other elements in a poem, such as tone, meaning, and characterization.  All of the senses can be engaged (touch, visual, motion, sound, thermal/temperature)

Figurative Language:  A second consideration about imagery refers to a conscious departure from normal or conventional ways of saying things. 

·         Tropes (literally “turns”) extend the meaning of words beyond their literal meaning.

·         Similes:  Using comparative words (like or as), a simile makes an analogous connection between two items.

·         Metaphors:  Generally, a metaphor is any analogy which shows similarity between things that are basically different.  Specifically, a metaphor is a type of figurative language that assumes a connection or comparison without using like or as.

·         Personification:  A more indirect analogy, personification bestows human characteristics to any inanimate object, animal, or abstract quality.

·         Extended Metaphor:  When a poet carries out a singular analogy throughout an entire poem, he has written an extended metaphor.

·         Symbolism:  Symbolism appeals to poets because symbols are highly suggestive.  A symbol is an object that represents an abstract idea or ideas.  The most powerful symbols are those that do not exactly specify the ideas they represent and carry meaning on multiple levels.

THE SOUND OF POETRY:  MUSICAL ELEMENTS

Rhythm:  One of the most naturally pleasing elements of poetry, rhythm, is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. 

Meter:  All human speech has rhythm, but poetry regularizes that rhythm into recognizable patterns.  These are called meters.  Metrical patterns vary depending on the sequence in which the poets arrange the accented (á) and unaccented (ă) syllables.  The unit that determines that arrangement is the foot; a foot is one unit of rhythm.

Word Sounds

·         Devices using word sounds:

·         Onomatopoeia:  the use of words that sound like what they mean (“buzz,” “boom,” “hiss,” “pop,” etc.)

·         Alliteration:  the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or at the beginning of accented syllables.

·         Assonance:  the repetition of vowel sounds followed by the different consonant sounds.

·         Consonance:  the repetition of final consonant sounds that are preceded by different vowel sounds.  Consonance is the opposite of alliteration which features initial consonance sounds.

·         Rhyme:  the repetition of accented vowels and the sounds that follow.  There are subcategories of rhyme:

STRUCTURE

Structure is the way the whole poem is organized and put together.  Poets give structure to their poems in two overlapping ways:  by organizing ideas according to a logical plan and by establishing a pattern of units. 

Lines:  Poetry is organized in lines while prose is divided into paragraphs. They use various criteria for choosing line lengths.  The best known criterion is meter – the number of feet per line.

Enjambment:  Enjambment is the continuance of a phrase from one line to the next so that there is no pause at the end of the line.  An end-stopped line has a definite pause at the end.  Enjambed and end-stopped lines create different effects. 

Blank Verse:  A line form that is always enjambed is blank verse.  The sentences run from line to line as if the lines don’t exist.

Stanza:  Stanzas in a poem typically resemble one another structurally.  The have the same number of lines, length of lines, metrical patterns, and rhyme schemes.  They are physically separated by a space.

Rhyme scheme:  Any pattern of end rhyme is a traditional method of organizing stanzas.  Rhyme scheme refers to that pattern. 

TYPES OF STRUCTURES

The Sonnet:  The most famous fixed form in English, sonnets consist of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. A Shakespearean sonnet rhymes abab/cdcd/efef/gg and has a structural division of three quatrains and a couplet.  A Petrarchan sonnet rhymes abbaabba in the octave and cdecde in the sestet.  Each kind of sonnet has a turn, a point in the poem at which the poet shifts from one meaning or mood to another.  The turn in the Shakespearean sonnet occurs between lines 12 and 13.  In the Petrarchan sonnet the turn occurs between the octave and the sestet.

The Ballad:  Defined as “a song, transmitted orally, which tells a story,” (Abrams, 18), ballads feature intense conflicts, emotional and melodramatic narratives, and are condensed retelling of portions of the whole story.

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Abrams, M.H.  A Glossary of Literary Terms.  7^th ed.  Fort Worth, TX:  Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.

Brogan, T.V. F. “Poetry.” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.  Ed. Alex

Hirsch, Edward.  How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry.  San Diego:  Harcourt, 1999.

Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan.  Princeton, NJ:  Princeton UP, 1993.

Eliot, T. S. “The Three Voices of Poetry.”  On Poetry and Poets.  New York: Octagon Books, 1975, 96 – 112.