Unit 3: Poetry & Analyze Literature

Poetry is a major genre of literature and includes narrative, dramatic, and lyric poems.

Poetry differs from prose in that it compresses meaning into fewer words and often uses meter, rhyme, and imagery.

A lyric poem is a highly musical type of poetry that expresses the emotions of a speaker.

Lyric poems can be contrasted with narrative poems, which have storytelling as their main purpose.

Lyric poems also can be contrasted with dramatic poems, which rely heavily on dramatic elements such as monologue (speech by a single character) and dialogue (conversation involving two or more characters).

The themes of lyric poetry are as varied as love and loss, war and peace, and religion and nature.

Some lyric poems are elegies, mourning the dead in the manner of Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” which was composed after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Another lyric form is the ode, a poem on a serious theme, usually with varying line lengths and complex stanzas.

To celebrate the nation, Whitman composed his Leaves of Grass as a “lyric-epic,” an open form characterized by free verse, what he called his “language experiment.”

The stanza, a group of lines in a poem, varies in average length from two to eight lines.

Examining a stanza, you will notice the presence or absence of a rhyme scheme.

Dickinson also frequently uses enjambment, continuing a statement beyond the end of a line, rather than the end-stopped line of verse, in which both the sense and the grammar are complete at the end of the line.

Whitman also incorporated into his poems catalogs, or lists of items, as you will see in the excerpt from “Song of Myself.”

Meter is a regular rhythmic pattern in poetry.

A poem’s meter creates rhythm, the pattern of beats or stresses in a line of verse or prose.

Many poets use figurative language—writing or speech that is meant to be understood imaginatively instead of literally—to help readers to see things in new ways.

Types of figurative language include hyperbole, metaphor, personification, simile, and understatement.

Types of figurative language include hyperbole, metaphor, personification, simile, and understatement.

Types of figurative language include hyperbole, metaphor, personification, simile, and understatement.

Types of figurative language include hyperbole, metaphor, personification, simile, and understatement.

Types of figurative language include hyperbole, metaphor, personification, simile, and understatement.

Repetition is a writer’s intentional reuse of a sound, word, phrase, or sentence.

Alliteration is the repetition of an initial consonant sound, as in “the cow crunching” and “a mouse is a miracle.”

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in stressed syllables that end with different consonant sounds.

A stereotype is an uncritically accepted fixed or conventional idea, particularly such an idea held about a whole group of people.

Tone is the emotional attitude toward the reader or toward the subject implied by a literary work.

Parallelism is a technique in which a writer emphasizes the equal value of two or more ideas by expressing them in the same grammatical form.

Antithesis is a technique in which words, phrases, or ideas are contrasted, often by repetition of a grammatical structure.

Onomatopoeia is the use of words or phrases that sound like the things to which they refer, such as buzz, click, and pop.