Unit 1: Poetry, The Epic, and Analyze Literature

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

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

The Classical culture of ancient Greece produced The Iliad and The Odyssey, epic poems that tell tales of gods and heroes, while Anglo-Saxon epics mixed pagan and religious elements.

Works such as these are narrative poems, which tell stories.

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

Among the greatest lyric poems in Western civilization are the sonnets of Shakespeare, Petrarch, and John Donne.

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

Some lyric poetry is elegiac, mourning the dead in the manner of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

A dramatic poem relies heavily on dramatic elements such as monologue (speech by a single character) and dialogue (conversation involving two or more characters).

A dramatic poem relies heavily on dramatic elements such as monologue (speech by a single character) and dialogue (conversation involving two or more characters).

A dramatic poem relies heavily on dramatic elements such as monologue (speech by a single character) and dialogue (conversation involving two or more characters).

Next, you can analyze the poem’s structure, noting how the author has arranged lines on a page.

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

In Anglo-Saxon poetry, you will notice strongly accented lines, alliteration, and the caesura, a pause between the two halves of a line.

As you read poetry, you also will notice the presence or absence of a fixed meter, or a regular rhythmic pattern.

The meter of a poem creates its rhythm, the pattern of beats, or stresses, in a line of verse.

Figurative language is writing or speech meant to be understood imaginatively instead of literally.

The epic also is rich in hyperbole, deliberate exaggerations made for effect...

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

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

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

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

Repetition is the intentional reuse of a sound, word, phrase, or sentence to emphasize ideas or create a musical effect.

Many lyric poems have a refrain, which is a repeated line or group of lines.

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds, as in “cloudless climes and starry skies” and “Then shall the fall further the flight in me” from George Herbert’s “Easter Wings."

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

Common to Anglo-Saxon literature is a figurative device called a kenning, in which a new word or noun phrase is coined to describe an object in an original manner.

An allegory is a work in which each element symbolizes, or represents, something else.

A motif is any element that recurs in one or more works of literature or art.

Mood, or atmosphere, is the emotion created in the reader by part or all of a literary work.

An elegy is a poem of mourning, usually about someone who has died.