1. art and entertainment
2. books and literature
3. poetry

POETRY
“We value poetry for what it shows us
about our inner and outer lives. We find
pleasure in its music, admire the power of
its language, take pride and comfort in
what it says.”
How do you feel about the study of poetry?
“In a world increasingly focused on the
material worth of the things we learn,
poetry becomes a harder sell. Arriving at
poetry’s complex pleasures and rewards
requires patience, skill, knowledge, and
even wisdom, none of which are a mere
double-click away.” Allan Gedalof
Professor / Writer
Translation: The art of poetry
Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind--
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit.
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
simile
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown-A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea-A poem should not mean
But be.
Moon
imagery
Oral Tradition
The first poetry to have been written in the English tongue was
that of the Anglo-Saxon period. Due to the lack of a printing
press until the 15th century and the fact that this was largely
a pre-literate society, it was necessary for poets to employ
complex systems of rhyme, familiar repeated phrases and
alliteration to make their verse memorable as well as
beautiful. Poems transmitted ideas. The purpose of this
poetry was clearly to educate and confirm new religious
thinking. The most famous Old English poem, Beowulf
(probably written in the later 8th century), acknowledges and
mourns the passing of the pre-Christian heroic age – of
monsters such as Grendel and the dragon.
From Beowulf

LO, praise of the prowess of peoplekings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long
sped,
we have heard, and what honor the
athelings won!
Oft Scyld the Scefing from
squadroned foes,
from many a tribe, the mead-bench
tore,
awing the earls. Since erst he lay
friendless, a foundling, fate repaid
him:
for he waxed under welkin, in wealth
he throve,
till before him the folk, both far and
near,
who house by the whale-path, heard
his mandate,
gave him gifts: a good king he!
.

Listen:
You have heard of the Danish
Kings
in the old days and how
they were great warriors.
Shield, the son of Sheaf,
took many an enemy's chair,
terrified many a warrior,
after he was found an orphan.
He prospered under the sky
until people everywhere
listened when he spoke.
He was a good king!
Connotation, Denotation

Connotation
The associations called up by a word that
goes beyond its dictionary meaning.

Denotation
The dictionary meaning of a word.
Denotation of a rose
Rose A rose is a flowering shrub of the genus Rosa,
and the flower of this shrub. There are more than
a hundred species of wild roses, all from the
northern hemisphere and mostly from temperate
regions. The species form a group of generally
prickly shrubs or climbers, and sometimes trailing
plants, reaching 2–5 m tall, rarely reaching as
high as 20 m by climbing over other plants.
Connotation of a rose

Love , romance, beauty, red, fragrant,
thorny, spring, romantic celebrations…
Metaphor
(from the Greek meaning: transference)

Metaphor
A comparison between essentially unlike
things without an explicitly comparative
word such as like or as. An example is "My
love is a red, red rose,“
Something is Something else.
Tenor – the subject of the comparison; the
thing that undergoes the transference.
Vehicle- the figure that completes the
metaphor; the source of the transferred
qualities, (gives the qualities to the Tenor).
Tenor
Vehicle
My Love is a rose.
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
Tenor
Vehicle
Simile, Conceit or Extended Metaphor


Conceit
In literary terms, a conceit is an extended metaphor with a
complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage.
By juxtaposing images and ideas in surprising ways, a
conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated
understanding of an object of comparison. When a metaphor
extends beyond its original comparison continuing through an
entire poem.
Simile
A figure of speech involving a comparison between unlike
things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is
like a red, red rose."
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Conceit:
Warm day
imagery
Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind--
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit.
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
simile
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown-A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea-A poem should not mean
But be.
Extended Metaphor: Moon
imagery
Synecdoche, Metonymy

Metonymy
A figure of speech in which a closely related term
is substituted for an object or idea. An example:
"We have always remained loyal to the crown."
Crown is a substitute for the king.
Synecdoche
A figure of speech in which a part is substituted
for the whole. An example: "Lend me a hand."

I heard a Fly buzz (465) by Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air –
Between the Heaves of Storm –
The Eyes around – had wrung them dry –
And Breaths were gathering firm
For that last Onset – when the King
Be witnessed – in the Room –
I willed my Keepsakes – Signed away
What portions of me be
Assignable – and then it was
There interposed a Fly –
With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed –
and then I could not see to see –
synecdoche
metonymy




Animism
The assigning of animal characteristics to humans. Example: Rolling
on the floor like puppies
Personification
The endowment of inanimate objects or abstract concepts with
animate or living qualities. An example: "The yellow leaves flaunted
their color gaily in the breeze." Wordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a
cloud" includes personification.
Image
A concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea
appealing to, 1 or all of the five senses. Imagery refers to the pattern
of related details in a work. Often writers use multiple images
throughout a work to suggest states of feeling and to convey
implications of thought and action.
Imagery
Any literary reference to the five senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing,
and taste). Essentially, imagery is any words that create a picture in
your head. Such images can be created by using figures of speech
such as similes, metaphors, personification, and assonance.
Next time you walk by my place
animism
in your bearcoat and mooseboots,
your hair all sticks and leaves
like an osprey's nest on a piling,
next time you walk across my shadow
animism
with those swamp-stumping galoshes
below that grizzly coat and your own whiskers
that look rumpled as if something's
been in them already this morning
mussing and growling and kissing—
next time you pole the raft of you downriver
down River Street past my place
you could say hello, you canoe-footed fur-faced
musk ox, pockets full of cheese and acorns
and live fish and four-headed winds and sky, hello
is what human beings say when they meet each
other
image
Exeunt
Piecemeal the summer dies;
At field’s edge a daisy lives alone;
A shawl last burning lies
On the gray field-stone.
personification
All cries are thin and terse;
The field has droned the summer’s final mass;
A cricket like a dwindled hearse
Crawls from the dry grass.

Oxymoron
putting two contradictory words together to create new meaning.
examples:
hot ice, cold fire, wise fool, sad joy, military intelligence,
eloquent silence, sweet-pain to describe love

Hyperbole (pronounced "hy-PER-buh-lee" and NOT hyper-bowl)
Largely synonymous with exaggeration and overstatement, is a
figure of speech in which statements are exaggerated or extravagant.
It may be used due to strong feelings or is used to create a strong
impression and is not meant to be taken literally. It gives greater
emphasis.
"She has a brain the size of a pinhead."
"I nearly died."
"He is so dumb his IQ is probably -2!"
Understatement
A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker says less than what
he or she means; the opposite of overstatement. The last line of
Frost's "Birches" illustrates this literary device: "One could do worse
than be a swinger of birches."

Dreary, drab day pressing in on me
until like gray, gloomy clouds filled
to saturation, my tears overflow.
I silently scream for help
That never seems to come.
oxymoron
hyperbole
My Papa's Waltz
by Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
hyperbole
understatement
Allusion
A brief reference to a person, event, or place, real or
fictitious, or to a work of art. Casual reference to a
famous historical or literary figure or event. An allusion
may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or
religion.
Onomatopoeia
The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe.
Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic. Most
often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and
groups of words, such as Tennyson's description of the
"murmur of innumerable bees," which attempts to
capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing. Other
examples include words such as: buzz, bam, slink,
swoop, squish,
Player Piano by -John UpdikeMy stick fingers click with a snicker
And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;
Light footed, my steel feelers flicker
And pluck from these keys melodies.
My paper can caper; abandon
Is broadcast by dint of my din,
And no man or band has a hand in
The tones I turn on from within.
At times I'm a jumble of rumbles,
At others I'm light like the moon,
But never my numb plunker fumbles,
Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.
Musée des Beaux Arts (1938)
W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
Translation:
Museum of Fine Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
Allusion to Renaissance artists
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
Allusion to the birth
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
of Jesus Christ
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
Allusion to
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Brueghel’s
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Fall of Icarus
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry
“As it had to on the white legs
disappearing into the green
Water”
and the expensive delicate ship
that must have seen
Something amazing,
Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel
a boy falling out of the sky
Brueghel was a Dutch artist noted for landscapes and scenes of the lives of
ordinary people.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
of the year was
awake tingling
with itself
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
Cacophony
refers to sound that is harsh and unpleasant-sounding. The opposite of cacophony is
euphony, meaning musical and pleasant.
Euphony
describes flowing and aesthetically pleasing speech. Poetry is often euphonic, as is wellcrafted literary prose.
Caesura
A strong pause within a line of verse. The following stanza from Hardy's "The Man He
Killed" contains caesuras in the middle two lines:
He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand-like--just as I—
End-stop
A feature in poetry in which the syntactic unit corresponds in length to the line. In other
words, when the line pauses at its end whether by punctuation or natural rhythm. Its
opposite is enjambment where the sense runs on into the next line.
Enjambment
A run-on line of poetry in which logical and grammatical sense carries over from one line
into the next. In the opening lines of Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," for example,
the first line is end-stopped and the second enjambed:
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now....
Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance



Alliteration
The repetition of consonant sounds, especially at the
beginning of words. Example: "Fetched fresh, as I suppose,
off some sweet wood."
Assonance
The repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sentence or a line
of poetry or prose, as in "I rose and told him of my woe."
Consonance
A stylistic device, often used in poetry. It is the repetition of
consonant sounds in a short sequence of words, for example,
the "t" sound in "Is it blunt and flat?"
alliteration
consonance
Find the sound devices.
So This Is Nebraska
by Ted Kooser
The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.
assonance
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,
clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like
waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
assonance
consonance
alliteration
On either side, those dear old ladies,
the loosening barns, their little windows
dulled by cataracts of hay and cobwebs
hide broken tractors under their skirts.
assonance
consonance
alliteration
So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.
assonance
consonance
alliteration
Behind a shelterbelt of cedars,
top-deep in hollyhocks, pollen and bees,
a pickup kicks its fenders off
and settles back to read the clouds.
assonance
consonance
alliteration
You feel like that; you feel like letting
your tires go flat, like letting the mice
build a nest in your muffler, like being
no more than a truck in the weeds,
assonance
consonance
alliteration
clucking with chickens or sticky with honey
or holding a skinny old man in your lap
while he watches the road, waiting
for someone to wave to. You feel like
assonance
consonance
alliteration
waving. You feel like stopping the car
and dancing around on the road. You wave
instead and leave your hand out gliding
larklike over the wheat, over the houses.
assonance
consonance
alliteration

Internal rhyme
Rhyming within a line.
Example:
I awoke to black flak.
True in the game, as long as blood is blue in my veins

Rhyme.
The similarity between syllable sounds at the end of two or more
lines. Some kinds of rhyme include:
True rhyme: occurs when the initial consonants change, but succeeding
vowels and consonants remain the same span and van or ends and
friends.
Slant rhyme: A partial or imperfect rhyme, often using assonance or
consonance only, as in dry and died or grown and moon. Also called
half rhyme or near rhyme.
Eye rhyme: words whose spellings would lead one to think that they
rhymed (slough, tough, cough, bough, though, hiccough. Or: love,
move, prove. Or: daughter, laughter.)
Meter
The measured pattern of rhythmic accents in poems.
Foot
A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed
syllables. For example, an iamb or iambic foot is
represented by ˘', that is, an unaccented syllable
followed by an accented one. Frost's line "Whose woods
these are I think I know" contains four iambs, and is thus
an iambic foot.
Rhythm
The recurrence of accent or stress in lines of verse. In
the following lines from "Same in Blues" by Langston
Hughes, the accented words and syllables are
underlined:
I said to my baby,
Baby take it slow....
Lulu said to Leonard
I want a diamond ring

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming lines
in a poem or in lyrics for music. It is usually
referred to by using letters to indicate which lines
rhyme.
For example "abab" indicates a four-line stanza
in which the first and third lines rhyme, as do the
second and fourth. Here is an example of this
rhyme scheme from To Anthea, Who May
Command Him Any Thing by Robert Herrick:
Bid me to weep, and I will weep,
While I have eyes to see;
And having none, yet I will keep
A heart to weep for thee.
Sonnet 29
a
When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
b
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries a
b
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
c
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, d
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
c
With what I most enjoy contented least;
d
e
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
b
Like to the lark at break of day arising
e
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; b
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings f
f
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Player Piano by -John UpdikeMy stick fingers click with a snicker
And, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;
Light footed, my steel feelers flicker
And pluck from these keys melodies.
a
My paper can caper; abandon
Is broadcast by dint of my din,
And no man or band has a hand in
The tones I turn on from within.
c
At times I'm a jumble of rumbles,
At others I'm light like the moon,
But never my numb plunker fumbles,
Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.
d
b
a
b
c
c
c
e
d
e

Iamb [ ^ ‘] unstressed , stressed
I taste / a liqu / or ne / ver brewed

Trochee [ ‘ ^ ] stressed, unstressed
Earth re/ceive an / honored / guest

Anapest [^ ^ ‘]unstressed, unstressed, stressed
The Ass / yrian came down / like the wolf / on the fold

Dactyl [ ‘ ^ ^] stressed, unstressed, unstressed
Out of the / cradle / endlessly / rocking
Number of Feet
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Line Length
Monometer
Dimeter
Trimeter
Tetrameter
Pentameter
Hexameter
Heptameter
The English Sonnet


The form is often named after Shakespeare, not because he
was the first to write in this form but because he became its
most famous practitioner. The form consists of three
quatrains and a couplet. The couplet generally introduced an
unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic "turn" called a volta.
The usual rhyme scheme was a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. In
addition, sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, meaning
that there are 10 syllables per line, and that every other
syllable is naturally accented.

Tone
The writer's attitude toward his readers and his
subject; his mood or moral view. A writer can be
formal, informal, playful, ironic, and especially,
optimistic or pessimistic.
Irony