COURSE :Introduction To Literature

DEPARTMENT : ENGLISH

PROFESSOR : WATERS

Lecture7 : Poetry

View the Power Point Presentation of the Lecture

We’re now ready to begin the poetry unit and poetry is one of my favorite out of the three the fiction, the poetry, and the drama because poetry is a unique form. It’s fun, it’s accessible, it’s brief, and it’s usually with modern poetry which is what I focus is very easy to understand I think that we can kind of see into the souls of the poets when we read their poetry and that’s kind of a neat thing because it makes us more aware of ourselves and more aware of others around and that’s the purpose of good literature is to do that kind of thing. So here’s what we’re going to do we are going to look at literature and I’ve gotta get the pen to work let’s see hmmm ah thank you. And we have fiction, poetry, and drama and today we’re gonna focus on poetry. Now I’ll move on to the next slide there are four main types of poetry now we’re not going to cover all four main types then we focus on the lyric type of poetry because the how do I get the little things to come up Elizabeth there it goes I just hit this little button when it comes up. There’s a narrative form of poetry which is basically a story being told in the poem like a ballad or something like that. A lot of song lyrics are narrative but we won’t be covering any narrative poems. A lyric poem now this is the one that we will be covering a lot of and a lyric poem is just a short poem, it’s very brief and it just really kind of shows the thoughts and feelings of the author. Dramatic poetry this is poetry that’s written for the purpose of being acted out or for inclusion in a play and Shakespeare’s plays are dramatic poetry usually. Didactic poetry is another form and basically it is poetry that preaches or teaches. Ben Franklin’s little poem “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise that’s an example of didactic poem. So what does good poetry do and when I say good poetry realize that I’m talking about poems that are considered good by literary critics and those in the scholarly field who determine what goes into the literary canon and a literary canon is simply a collection of literary works that are considered worthy to be considered a classic. So what does good poetry do according to the literary critics? Well it engages the whole person not just our minds but our spirits, our senses, our emotion, our imagination, our intellect. It reaches the whole person now you may say well you know I like “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll but that doesn’t engage my whole person well you’re right, it may not but it does according to the literary canon or the literary critics it does do that according to them but you know all of us have different opinions about what good poetry is and basically you know you may find one person may find a poem to be really, really good and another person may be just like well I don’t get the whole gist of that poem. I don’t think it’s any good at all. A good poem employs no excess words, it’s sort of like a game that the poets play. They want to use as few words as possible to say as much as possible and they only use words that bear their full weight that contribute to the total meaning of the poem. They don’t and they choose words carefully sometimes to have double meanings, sometimes to have allusions to bring about certain responses in the reader so look for that when you’re reading the poems that I’ve assigned to you. Another thing is that there are no clichés in poems, the diction which is the language and the images, the figures of speech are very, very fresh except when irony is the purpose. In a good poem, the sound of the poem doesn’t clash with the sense or the form with its content. It seems to flow, there’s not you realize when you’re reading it that it’s supposed to be that way. It’s easy once you start reading poetry to kind of pick up when something doesn’t fit. Another thing is that images and ideas are so effectively crafted that any rearrangement would be harmful to the overall effectiveness of the poem. Poets are craftsman, it’s just like if somebody was building a wooden table you know you can kind of tell the difference like if you go to the Dollar Store and get a table but the craftsmanship of that table is gonna be a whole lot different than if you get one that somebody handmade and took a lot of time with and you know so good poetry is good craftsmanship. Poetry is a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language. Ah and here is one of my favorite quotes the greatness of a poem is in proportion to the range and depth and intensity of experience that it brings to us its amount of life. Poems bring us a lot of life. It kind of lets us see deeper into what humanity’s all about. That’s the end of the poetry unit and I would encourage you to listen more than once to the poems that I have listed for you in the assignments. Enjoy.