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reading poetry. Reading Poetry Here are some questions you might ask when you
are faced with the task of reading and writing about poetry. ...
Reading Poetry. This essay will analyse two poems by the English poet Wilfred Owen
(1893-1918), Dulce et Decorum est and Anthem for Doomed Youth. ...
... the meanings behind it. We have never been affected emotionally to the
point where we love reading poetry. Maclennan’s states in ...
... This certainly is also applicable to reading poetry, where students not only are
focused on the meaning of words, but also as Rodger (1983:49) states: ”While ...
... In my opinion the main point of this reading was to illustrate how the meaning of
"poetry" has changed over the many years since Plato wrote about poetry. ...
Submitted by chimut on April 3, 2007
Category: English
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Reading Poetry
Here are some questions you might ask when you are faced with the task of reading and writing about poetry. (Note that cross-references refer to selections in Literature: Reading and Writing the Human Experience, seventh edition.)
1. Who is the speaker?
What does the poem reveal about the speaker's character? In some poems the speaker may be nothing more than a voice meditating on a theme, while in others the speaker takes on a specific personality. For example, the speaker in Shelley's "Ozymandias" (p. 1264) is a voice meditating on the transitoriness of all things; except for the views expressed in the poem, we know nothing about the speaker's character. The same might be said of the speaker in Hopkins's "Spring and Fall To a Young Child" (p. 136) but with this important exception: we know that he is older than Margaret and therefore has a wisdom she does not.
2. Is the speaker addressing a particular person?
If so, who is that person, and why is the speaker interested in him or her? Many poems, like "Ozymandias," are addressed to no one in particular and therefore to anyone, any reader. Others, such as Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" (p. 1000), while addressed to a specific person, reveal nothing about that person because the focus of the poem is on the speaker's feelings and attitudes. In a dramatic monologue (see "Glossary of Literary Terms"), the speaker usually addresses a silent auditor. The identity of the auditor will be important to the poem.
3. Does the poem have a setting?
Is the poem occasioned by a particular event? The answer to these questions will often be "no" for lyric poems, such as Frost's "Fire and Ice" (p. 1008). It will always be "yes" if the poem is a dramatic monologue or a poem that tells or implies a story, such as Tennyson's "Ulysses" (p. 434) and Lowell's "Patterns" (p. 716).
4. Is the theme of the poem...
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