COURSE :Introduction To Literature

DEPARTMENT : ENGLISH

PROFESSOR : OLMSTED

Lecture12 : Visual-Cues

View the Power Point Presentation of the Lecture

Hi this is a presentation on reading poetry visual cues. Now that you’ve had a chance to listen to some of the poets read their work and read the first assignment in our text about reading poetry, I’d like you to take some time to consider what visual cues poetry offers to help you understand it. I’ll also introduce a few terms so you might want to jot them down when compiling a list of terms as we go along and these will be posted under course documents so you can always find them there. We recognize a poem in print largely because it looks different from prose. It’s the way a poem looks was arbitrary than any shape or any poem would work. While it may be true that some poems would have the same meaning no matter how their lines were divided. Poets usually have a reason for shaping the poem the way they do. A poem is always divided into great numbers of separate pieces there are of course the words themselves and these appear in lines of various length. Lines are collected into poetic paragraphs what we call stanzas and these stanzas like paragraphs usually have a specific purpose or topic. Sometimes readers resist analyzing a poem saying that it ruins a poem to take it apart. Others want to be able to say only that they either like a poem or don’t like a poem rather than have to explain why. You’ve probably people say I don’t know why I like it I just do. In this course that’s not enough. Aside from the words, lines, and stanzas there are also other visual cues. Punctuation for instance that can provide clues to meaning. Let’s look at few examples and what we’re gonna do here in a second is shift over to text versions of some poems that are in your book that you can find. The first two are on page 314 if you want to go ahead and turn to that page and in activity two I’m going to ask you to write a paraphrase of one of them so here we go. What stands out visually that might help you paraphrase the poems? As you can see, both the poems rhyme let me get a pointer here you have me see, strings sings, song belong, outside guide, clamor glamour, cast and past. And the same over here first two lines rhyme and then the third and fourth line rhyme what. You all bear with me this is the first time I’ve done this so I’m probably gonna make some mistakes. Okay so you’ll also notice that they each have three stanzas and that the stanzas each have four lines. A stanza with four lines is called a quatrain. You may want to think of them the poems as having three paragraphs each paragraph has a specific contribution to make to the overall meaning of the poem. When you go about writing your paraphrase, do it that way stanza by stanza. Think about the setting of the poem, think about the poet’s attitude about the subject. This is what’s called the tone of the poem. In Lawrence’s poem, what is the relationship between the past and the present? In Rich’s poem, what is the relationship between the tigers and Aunt Jennifer? The other thing you’ll notice here is that each line begins with a capital letter and this is a convention that is more common in earlier poetry but it’s D.H. Lawrence wrote at the beginning part of the century Adrienne Rich wrote much later in fact she’s still alive and has been writing poems for probably 40 maybe even 50 years. She’s one of the most famous poets living today so but this is an early poem for Rich and I’ll get back to that in a minute. Most of Lawrence’s poems like this one rhyme and follow a format. Rich as I just said changed well she wrote this in the early days of writing poetry it’s one of her early publications. She wrote later when she started dropping the rhymes and dropping this kind of really strict structure. She said that it was a kind of a liberation for her. I don’t think a recognizable structure is necessarily imprisoning however. Other poets have written that when they write sonnets which is a very strict form, or other forms with strict conventions that the form itself can free up the mind to discover new aspects about the subject that they would not have found had they written in free verse. When Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson wrote in the 19th century the form or appearance their poems took was as shocking as the content especially in Whitman’s case. Let’s look at two of their poems which appear in your textbook on pages 327-329 and we’ll probably have to move this a little bit to see it all but as you can see Walt Whitman’s poem here on the left we’ll start with that one. How many stanzas does it have? Well obviously this is grouped together so this is the first stanza and this is the second stanza. Unlike the first two poems we just looked at which were four lines each stanza, these are uneven. The first one is very long and the second one less than half. Look at then ends of the line, you can see it reads like right here steel let’s see the fourth line reads steel the fifth line and side. So the poem does not rhyme. What else do you notice about this poem Walt Whitman’s? Look how long the lines are. I had to take care in order to get this line here for instance or this one line 20 onto the page. In your book you’re going to see that they weren’t able to do it and so it breaks and but this is how Walt Whitman would’ve intended it very long lines. This is characteristic of Whitman. He loved long lines. Often times his poems consisted of lists and that’s the case here, isn’t it? Look at the number of completed sentences in that first stanza and the way you do that is you look for ending punctuation. You know how would you end a sentence that’s a clue. Well, right here the very first one ends with an exclamation point. That’s probably the end of the first sentence so there’s one. Now the next is very long 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 it takes 12 lines to get to the end of the next sentence. Every one of those other lines ends with a semicolon or a comma so the second sentence of the first stanza is 12 lines and the third sentence of the first stanza is the remaining four lines. So one thing you might think about is well why. What’s going on in that very long sentence that twelve line part of portion of the first stanza that has to belong in one sentence. If you look at it you’ll see that it is a list. He goes every line is a new aspect of the poem so one reason that he’s got these twelve line sentences he’s got a lot to say about the poem so just by looking at that and identifying where the ends where the sentences end you get a sense of what the possible meaning is. What do you make of the exclamation points? He’s got several 1,2,3 at least 4. How do you think the emphasis on power and size is reflected in the way the poem looks cause this a poem about a locomotive in winter and so think about the subject as you look at the shape of the poem. Now let’s look at Dickinson’s poem. Very different it has 4 stanzas all but one are 4 lines long so 4 out of 5 of these stanzas are quatrains. Why do you suppose she threw in that extra line on the stanza? The most obvious typographical cue is her dashes. You might think well over here Whitman was using exclamation points, Emily Dickinson uses dashes. These are very characteristic of her work. You may already know that she achieved fame as a poet as a poet after her death and is now recognized as one of America one of the greatest American poets along with Whitman. What I find both amusing and a little sad certainly it was a bad decision was that way editors quote on quote corrected Dickinson’s poem by changing her dashes into proper punctuation. I think it’s fascinating to find out that even with the dashes which she intersperses in the middle of lines as well as at the end even with these dashes when Emily Dickinson wrote the poems in pen the dash is actually a rich variety of pen markings that we have no typographical correspondent for. Dashes are as close as we can get her dashes were either long or short sometimes they were even vertical as if to indicate musical phrasing and often elongated periods as if to indicate a slightly different kind of pause. Still the dashes and punctuation that she originally chose are so much better than the editor’s corrections. How does Dickinson’s use of short lines with dashes relate to her meaning about the train? does her style compare to Whitman’s? For me, Whitman represents a wide open expansive kind of American vision with broad celebration of every kind of person and every kind of relationship even those that scandalous at that time which was the middle of the 19th century. Dickinson on the other hand compressed meaning and squeezed the essence from experience. She is therefore harder to understand for a lot of people but her poems are so rich that every time you read one you are likely to discover something new. She has a poem about how rose petals are pressed for their attar which means scent or essence that’s a good metaphor for all her poetry I think. Here’s another example. We can almost get this onto one page. This is also in your book. All of these poems are in your book. In Andrew Marvel’s famous poem “To His Coy Mistress” you see right away that there are three stanzas 1, 2, 3. All the lines are punctuated correctly, comma, period, semicolon as if they were sentences. In this case, the three stanzas offer a different phase of an argument that poets like to use called carpe diem which means seize the day. If you’ve ever seen the Dead Poet’s Society with Robin Williams then you’ll remember his teaching the boys the importance of seizing the day basically that means living life to its fullest right now. You will have a chance to respond later to Marvel’s poem but for now I just wanted to point out that you get a sense of meaning if you look at the first line of each stanza and if you think of this the purpose of this poem as being in three parts. Sorry okay the first sentence had we but world enough and time the second stanza begins but at my back I always hear and the third stanza begins now therefore while the youthful hue the logic of the poem moves from if in the first sentence if we had enough time to but in the second time but we don’t have time. Death is coming therefore in the third stanza it’s a really good structure for an argument if but therefore and indeed the poet’s purpose is to persuade his lover to cast aside her doubts and act on her passion. In this case the shape of the poem is clearly related to its meaning. Finally look at these two poems. They both use a definite form but neither form is conventional. You’ve already read and heard Gwendolyn Brooks read her famous poem “We Real Cool” and you’ve probably also read E.E. Cummings’ poems as well. You’ll find these in your book and you’ll have a chance to talk about them in activity two but just as you’re thinking about it and as you’re responding to it do what I’ve just done in these other poems think about the shape, think about the decisions. Why does Gwendolyn Brooks end each line with the word we for instance. Why does she do it in two lines, two lines, two lines, two lines? Why does E.E. Cummings play with spaces? Here’s a space between far and we, why? What does that suggest about his meaning? Thanks for your attention. I hope this was helpful to you and I hope you enjoy the activities and I’ll see you next time.