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Introducing Poetry
Lecture and Seminar One
What is poetic language?
-Lyre
-Aeolian Harp; wind
-Both hold the importance of sound within them, like poetry
Robert Herrick
-Importance of song
-Repetition of ‘I sing’
-Both there in poetic language, but also often used as a theme
“The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry” William Empson
Sound in poetic language
-Rhythm – rhyme /alliteration/consonance/stress…
-Form/metre
William Barnes
-Geographical location – Devon
-Metrical beats
W
...
Yeats
-Lack of regular rhyme scheme
-Otarmourima (?)
-Use of half rhymes and full rhymes
-Against the grid it is supposed to be forming to
-Dying generations dying off as they are out of date
Iambic Pentameter
-A line of verse with five metrical feet, each one consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable
followed by one long (or stressed) syllable
“Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon
...
Seigworth
William Shakespeare
-Anxiousness
-Line endings and phrases
-Pulling in different directions
-Raises questions of what poetic language should consist of
-Compounds
-Concludes that because love is constant, no need to create new poetic language
-Couplet at the end of the poem

“What does the word or phrase bring with it that is constant enough to make it a contributor as
well as a recipient of the poetic power of the structure it enters?” Winnifred Nowotty
John Keats
-On the Sonnet
-Stressing a poem, by a poet considering the limits of form
-Strain on poetic language
-Set free
-Continuity of idea, what poetic language might be
-What does and why does…
-Rhymes conform to sonnet structure ABCCBDCAD ETC
-Imagery of sandals; like a Greek sandal interwoven
-Capitalisation; personification of poetry
-Metrical foot of poetry and foot of the goddess of poetry
“Poetry is a form for special attention and one that calls unusual attention to the way it is
formed” Jefferey Wainwright
“Poetics deal primarily with the question, what makes a verbal message a work of art?” Roman
Jakobson
-Resurgence of finding new ways to read poems, depending on their shape in other ways to
depict their meanings
-William Blake (TATE); often figured in relation to the real, mixed up with the visual on the
page, attention to the world outside the poem, verbal images
Poetic language in context
-Importance of material shape of form in relation to meaning
-Aeolian Harp; “And that simplest Lute, /Placed length ways in the clasping casement, hark!”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“Poetry is a social institution
...
It does not attempt to find a meaning but to understand
the techniques…”
Seminar
What is poetry?
(refer to sheet)
-narrative, dramatic and lyric
-Poetry s valued for combining pleasure of dignity of expression
‘Poetry interacts with the language we use in our daily lives’ -Jefferey Wainwright
How do we recognise poetry to be ‘poetry’? How do we know a poem is a ‘poem’?
-Forms and structures; verse, sonnet, rhyme etc etc
-Doesn’t read naturally like prose
-Use of language is different; phrases or expressions
-The conveying of emotions; detailed imagery put short description
-Double meanings
-Contextual influence
-Authors; prominence
-Meaning more distinctive in prose
-Having unruliness; can be disorganised
W
...
Yeat’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
-Use of octaves; four stanzas
-Last line; ‘of what is passing, past or to come’ reference to past, present and future leaves the
poem open at the end for intrigue
-‘no country for old men’ setting an image that all men that remain in the country are full of life
and youth
-Imagery of life; fish swimming, birds in the trees,
-Sustained metaphor of being old and how the speaker is recognising this compared to
everything else full of life

-Metaphor ‘a tattered coat upon a stick’ alludes to the idea of fragility within old age, it is the coat
that masks his skeleton underneath, frail and fragile
-Cesura in the first line
-Uses metaphors to depict the reality of death being imminent within old age; there is a
persistent cycle which is inescapable
-Very structured; stanzas being numbered
-Rhyming couplets at the end of each stanza

Lecture and Seminar Two
-Ambiguity
-Wainwright – ‘draws attention to language itself as a medium through which we make meaning
or ‘express’ ourselces’
-The gestural uses of language
What is gestural language?
-All the ways in which language works beside communication
-Rhythm, rhyme, repetition
-Sensuous aspects of language
-Acquisition of language to children
-Nursery rhymes, prayer, song
-All of these uses depend on the acoustic patterning
-Interlocking patterns of the sonnet; expect certain sounds to form in certain places
-Language is deeply unruly; we may want to be instrumental but cannot always do this
-How often we miss hear songs
Mondegreens
-Example of a mishearing or misinterpretation that gives something a new meaning
-You replace a phrase with another one, thus a new understanding is established
-Term coined in 1954 Silvia Wright
-Poetry calls for special attention; in different moments they are formalised in different ways
-Violence in poetry
-Presentation of a prayer
-Idea of when God destroys, he makes new
John Donne ‘Holy Sonnet 14’
-Mixes the Shakespearean sonnet and the Petrarchan sonnet
-ABBA as quite constricting; pressure to the poem
John Milton ‘When I consider how my Light is spent’
-Tension between line endings and the presence of flow
-Changes the natural order of which you would expect the words to appear
-Straddling of octave and sestet
-Artificiality of the mode
-Speaker with the poet
-Two or three speakers in the poem; the dominant
William Wordsworth ‘I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD’
-Sestets

-Diction is direct and simple; uses a number of inversions
-Wordsworth was committed to the idea of emotion recollected to tranquillity
-Re-presented
Wallace Stevens ‘Anecdote of the Jar’
-Draws upon the children’s rhyme
-Inversion of words
-Speaker vanishes after the first action
-No rhyme patterns
This is just to say
-Simplistic
-The poet thinks with his poem
-Sensuous and gestural qualities of the language
-Resolutely unsymbolic
-A great deal to say about it
-The title is also part of the poem
-The event it explains is that of a note that has been left
-Line and stanza breaks
Gretel In Darkness Louise Gluck
-Idea of the witch, but other horrible factors remain
-De-mythologizing
Seminar
-Nursery rhymes as compelling
-Mondegreen
Close reading of ‘This is just to say’ and ‘Gretel in Darkness’
‘This is just to say’ William Carlos Williams
-Repetition of ‘so’
-Single isolated line – one word
-Quatrains
-No punctuation
-Use of extended metaphor
-Not really an apparent pattern – more so of a continuous sentence – reflecting the continuation
of the note he describes
-Capitalisation of ‘Forgive’ emphasises the empathy and potential regret of the speaker
-Clear language as it describes what has happened
-Meaning is unclear in the sense that the poems message seems to simple
-Almost like a nursery rhyme
‘Gretel in Darkness’ Louise Gluck
-Use of enjambment
-Rhetorical question
-Sestets
-Sibilance in final stanza
-Natural imagery

-Language is conveyed simply and clearly in the opening sentence; how this is suggestive of the
course of the poem reflecting upon a world ‘we’ wanted
-Also, the natural imagery gives a good representation of what earth appears like literally
-The rest of the poem is quite unclear; the use of not remembering, spies (which is also isolated)
-Vivid in description; but darkly twists the children’s story to imagine what life was like after for
Gretel, why not Hansel?

Lecture and Seminar Three
Measure and Metre
Key terms:
-Metre
-Measure
-The poet thinks with his poem
-Presenting poetry as an art of making
-What he makes
- ‘With such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own’
-Texts can mean more than one thing at the same time
-Poems can address a range of themes, but the what of what the poem says cannot be separated
from the how
-Modes of speech and thought
- ‘Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they
represent’
-Sound is not incidental to thought
-The form of stanza breaks
-Silence of the poem
-Double stresses or spondees
-Eternal and divine love
-Poems capacity to convey meaning
-Coleridge lyrical ballads
-Idea of a manifesto
-Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
-Passion of writing, emerges from writing and feeling
-The regularity of metre can calm a poem down
-Metre can offer the reverse function
-Feeling of pleasure is connected
-Affect the complex end that the poet proposes
-Use of cesuras
-Patterns can pull in different directions
-Immediacy of nature
-All language has beats
-Rhythm is a general umbrella term
Issues of form

Delight in disorder
-Performs the disorder
-Offers a dress for poetic form
-Mimic disorder
-Erotic dress
-Variations are slight
-Connection between form and feeling
-Said to think to express thought
-Merely making meaning than reflecting meaning
-Poets have a sonnet shape and sound
-Importance of rhythm
-Regularity and control
Seminar
Tyger, Tyger
-How the poem has four beats; much like nursery rhymes
-We stress the first word, and this transfers to the next line
-Basic message; the order of the words puts different emphasis on the words
-Nursery rhyme lyric
-Message; a strong emphasis of the childhood meter even though the questions within the poem
are not directed at children
-The use of ‘as’ and ‘like’
-Like makes it sound smoother and like a poem
-As sounds more like prose
-They change the word order
-8 syllables in each
-The first has 4 stressed beats whereas the second has 5
-Second stresses the image of the cloud more
-First compares the first to a cloud; a likening
-The second appears more fragmented as there is a stronger emphasis upon ‘as’
-The beat underlines the loneliness
-Beat fell in different places, but similar
First stanza
-Hermit is someone who lives alone in religious solitude
-Repetition of ‘five’
- ‘the’ separates the sentences
-It is a monologue
-Plainspoken manner
-The imagery is largely confined to the natural world
-Nautical and architectural metaphors; the memory of ‘the anchor’ is his ‘purest thought’ and the
mind is a ‘mansion’ of memory
-There is also a subtle strain of religious settlement which links to the image of the Hermit at the
end of the stanza
-Punctuation appears to be all over the place and break up the lines; causes fragmentation and
cesuras – following the speakers’ thoughts
-Five years – reinforcement; emphasis on the number intensifies the meaning
-Could be confessional; the use of first person

-The exclamation mark; the prolonged feeling – the feeling never stops
-beginning impersonal and detached and then amore attached tone
-The five years foreshadows the repetition and the prolonging
-Appears like prose
-Iambic pentameter
-How that effects the regularity; disjointed by the cesura
-Irregular rhyme scheme

Lecture and Seminar Four
Wake up
Get Up
Shake Up
Makeup
Go out
Show out
Be out
Leave out
Rest it
Stress it
Be it
Sleep it
Elegy
‘A poem occasioned by the death of someone
...
Usually quite formal in style and manner
...
A foot usually contains
one stressed syllable and one unstressed syllable
...

Christopher Marlowe – ‘The Passionate Shepard to His Love’
The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepard
John Donne – ‘John Donne, ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day’
William Blake, The Sick Rose
Wainwright ‘The Stanza’ Notes:
-1590s – A grouping of lines
-The French Word; verse
DEFINITIONS
-The original sense of Stanza in Italian was a ‘stopping place’
-Stanzas offer a place for words to work, and allow them a stopping place
-Can allow organisation; the lines can be of similar or of dissimilar lengths

-Traditionally based on patterns and metrical rhyme schemes
-Also provides its own aesthetic experience within a poem
-The idea of a free standing verse, i
...
the sonnet
-Where mnemonics originated form and the oral tradition of them
-Idea of the ballad’s narrative; how long is a ballad? Where did it originate?
-Segmentation and recapitulation

ALTERNATING VOICES
-Division serving long narrative poems
-Any poem that requires a balance or sequencing of voice or topic can use stanza-form
-Anaphoric structures; AND/AND/AND//FROM/FROM
-Idea of stanza breaks
-many poems use stanzas a form of balancing
-Stanza-form has meant that it finds little place in verse drama
-greater impression of naturalness needed
-Blank verse is generally non-stanzaic; although that is much less true in the 20thc
-Poems that make use of dialogue often use a argument as a feature within the poem
-Rhetoric; regular use in the renaissance
-Picture of the body within in the renaissance
-Some poems i
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Wordsworth

Seminar

The Sick Rose
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
O Rose thou art sick
...

NOT: A, B, F, H, I, J
IS: C, D (sort of – jumps a little but tends to stick around five syllables), E, G (yes as the lines
are of similar length),
-The speaker of the poem addresses the Rose and informs her that she is sick
...

-The invisible worm infects her with his dark secret love and destroys her life
...

-ABCB DEFE
Percy Bysshe Shelley ‘Ode to the West Wind’
What kind of wind is Shelley’s ‘West Wind’?
-A wind that effects the different parts of the earth, air and ocean
...
e
when winter comes, spring is next – so don’t be discouraged
What do you think is the effect of dividing and punctuating the lines in this way?
-Fragments the poem to understand the different elements of nature and the effects they have
upon humanity
-Isolates
If you were to rewrite any group of the stanzas into two- or four-line units, where would you
choose to break them up? What would be the effects of these revisions?
-Some lines overlap onto a new stanza
-More prose like and modern

Lecture and Seminar Eight – Meaning, Form and Genre
Epic
Lyric
History
Intertextuality
Poems
George Herbert, 'The Collar' N379/ N399
Alexander Pope, 'The Rape of the Lock' N604/ N644
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese, 43 ('How do I love thee? Let me count the
ways') N947/ N1001
Anon, 'Go Down Moses' N1057/ N1492
Emily Dickinson, 445, 'They shut me up in Prose –' N1119/ N1181
Ezra Pound, 'The River Merchant's Wife: a Letter' N1297/ N1360
Kenneth Koch, 'Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams' N1693/ N1751

Seminar
Examples of genres:
-Horror
-Romance
-Comedy
-Gothic
-Drama
-Fable
-Fairy-tale
-Fantasy
-Folklore
-Mystery
-Mythology
-Musicals
-Crime
What are the ‘Epic’ and ‘Lyric’ Poetry?
-Epic
-Mock Epic
-Lyric

How do you distinguish one from the other?
-Length
-Purpose – epic poems tend to be more heroic
-Main character – epic poem tends to be in third person
-Form – lyric poems often have free verse
-Lyric poem is the most prominent type of all poems
-Lyric is normally focused on individual emotion
-Lyric can normally be performed
What is ‘intertextuality’?
A term which indicates that a text is not a self-contained or autonomous entity but is produced
from other texts
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There can never be
a definitive reading of a text, for each reading generates a new text that itself becomes part of the
frame within which the original text is interpreted
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The Greek and Roman gods are
developed into undifferentiated army of ineffectual sprites
Is there any intertextual element of the poem?
The epigraph
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Book 13 of Ovid’s
Metamorphosis
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We know that poems aruse out of the process of history – that
they are written by men who live in that process – and the temptation is strong to see the poem
merely as a historical document or to allow our reading of it as a historical document or to allow
our reading of it as a historical document to settle for us the whole question of the failure or
success of the peom
...

Often can be seen in the bible
Walt Whitman ‘Song of Myself’
‘For me’ anaphora
-Connects the lines of free verse
-Not a line without repetition or patterning
-What constrains does this cause?
Howl, Allen Ginsberg
-Relation to the politics of poetics
-‘who’ anaphora
Origins of Free Verse in Modernism
-Ezra Pound
-T
...
Eliot
Texts and intertextuality
-Possibilities of free verse
-Previous verse forms and text making
-Text: an autonomous verbal object endowed with ‘public’ meaning – Roland Barthes – defined
object vs methodological field
-Patterning in relation to free verse
Intertextuality: the multiple ways in which any one literary text echoes, or is inseparably linked
to, other texts, whether by open or covert citations or allusion, or by the assimilation of the

formal or substantive features of an earlier text, or simply by participation in a common stock og
literary and linguistic procedures and conventions
-Texts as the methodological field
-Composition i
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of the field; looking at the way a poem is organised on the page
Robert Lowell
-much more conventional poet
Ekphrasis – an ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of
art
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Abstract expressionism
Jackson Pollock
What does this have to do with free verse?
Rich writes in her 1971 essay “when we dead awaken: writing as re-vision:
“Re-vision – the act og looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a
new critical direction --- is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of
survival”
For writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and
promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored
...
What is Free Verse?
a) Free verse / verse libre Most often taken to refer to poetry that has no recurring
metrical pattern to its lines and does not use rhyme
...
(Jeffrey Wainwright, Poetry: The Basics, 188-9)
b) T
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Eliot said, ‘No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job
...
Such poetry derives its rhythmic qualities from the repetition of
words, phrases, or grammatical structures, the arrangement of words on the printed
page, or by some other means
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25)

c) ‘Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race’ (William Blake
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85)
· What is the difference between metrical verse and free verse?
Blank verse has a consistent meter, usually iambic pentameter, that creates a du-DUM
rhythm effect
Free verse is free from both meter and rhyme – it is free from the limitations of verse
poetry popular in the 19thc
· Are there differing degrees of free verse?
-Free verse can have different characteristics, like; repetition, patterns of stressed and
unstressed syllables, alliteration, occasional internal rhyme, occasional rhyme at the
ends of lines (often imperfect rhymes such as half-rhymes and pararyhmes), patterns of
assonace (syllables in which the vowel sounds are the same) and imagery
· How might the formal difference between free (or ‘unmetred’) verse and metrical
verse affect the meaning or the tone of the poem?
-The pace can be varied allowing a different pace in the readers narration and tone;
which can indicate potentially a faster more hurried meaning
· What do you think Eliot means here?
· In what way(s) might Blake’s idea of ‘fetter’d’ verse seem relevant to wider issues of
artistic, social, or political liberation?
-Fragmented idea, reflecting the current society with all the political issues we have
2
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a) Robert Lowell, 'Epilogue'
· How do we know this is free verse?
· How does the poem generate its rhythmic qualities? Is it through the repetition of
words, phrases, or grammatical structures, or the arrangement of words on the printed
page? Or by some other means?
· Does the poem avoid ‘all kinds of recurrence’, such as stanza pattern and repetition of
words or phrases, or any kind of refrain?
· The poem contemplates the ‘structures of plot and rhyme’: are these ‘structures’ also
strictures? (In other words, are they liberating or imprisoning?)

· The speaker compares his poem with other forms of representation

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