Poetry Notes

Language use marked by design, ordering or patterning

Language with form
Word: Physical, Meaning
Musical language, aesthetic realm
Connotation and ambiguity, iconicity, value
Fallacy of Interpretation
Read as a totality: synchronous meaning- traces its parts
Synecdoche: Parts of a whole
Imagery
Tropes showing how little we know
Prosody
All aspects of versification
Order in verse form
Difference & alternation
Major & minor elements
Natural rhythm already found within words that poets manipulate
Key terms: Repetition, Rhythm/Meter, Line, Stanza, Meter, Parellism
Trochee (Falling, ritualised)
Rhythmic variations on an underlying metric pattern
Semantic & sound sense
Meaning: diachronic Sound: synchronic
Repetition (sound) Variation (meaning)
Sense of time
The Sonnet
Make poet persona
Discourse style
High & low culture
Presence & absence
Traditional form & conventions
Fashion for oxymoron, concepts eg, doleful despair
Turn of argument
Observation statement counter resolution/conclusion
Proposition Established Confirmed Conclusion
Not likely English if no couplet
English sonnet form: 3 quatrains and couplet
Sonnet sequences- as a narrative
Light final stress: feminine
Invention rhetoric- form with logic. Imitate and invent (not repetition) add
originality
Reiterating sonnet
Psalm 150: divinity, into sacred rather than secular realm. Assonance,
repetition.
Renaissance Poetic Forms
Figures of speech
Argument, Rhetoric and Figurative Language & Motivation

John Donne Womans Constancy (Editors title): Compositional technique,

recurrence. Delay tomorrow, Verbal correspondences, echoing, patterns.
FoS: Deliberate patterning of words
Preoccupation with argument: sequence of claims, propositions and questions
Evoke a speaking voice. Attempting to understand their actions
Self-persuasion? Acts of persuasion: power of language
Relationship between sleep and death
Rhetoric: persuade and influence others, body of rules observed to express
himself with eloquence
Imitation of literary texts
Speak on both sides of question (think Shakespearian drama)
Participating in common rhetorical culture
Working on physical structure of language
Acts of evaluation: credibility of speaker nature of speaker
Post-romantic readers: we think perhaps are all these uses of Fos not artificial?
Astrophil and Stella is about how you write poetry
Motivation: poetry has an argument evaluate in rhetorical terms
Status and value of speaker
Make and unmake our understanding of the world
The Lyric
Etymological relation: the lyric, a song. Musical language
What music does to words
Quality and Activity changed
Affect
Sense- metaphorical. Absence of real music
Create musicality that is missing from them. White space
Lyrical
3 Genres of poetry: 1. Epic 2. Dramatic 3. Lyric
Minimum of design
Lyricism. Mode or manner of writing
1. Musical 2. Short 3. Single speaker (status of mind, process of perception,
thought & feeling)
Subjectivity. Sharing this subjectivity
Only since 18th century is the lyric spoken in terms of subjectivity
Communal sense of lyric (religious writings, hymns)
Marked by prosodic devices
Cuckoo song:
Affective experience of song itself. Parenthetical, Onomatopoeia writ large
Spring: involved prosody. Pastoral. Create a sense of presence. Words
interiorise things they are talking about, make present their subject matter.

Concrete & Abstract intertwined.

Expands and extents our sense of boundaries of realities
Personification
Apostrophe: Addressing an absent or dead person, thing or, abstract idea as if
it were alive and present.
Limitless concourse with world
Deixis (lack of contextual info or orientation)
Increase immediacy of peom
Poem taking place in your space and time
To Autumn: 2nd stanza- fancy autumn, personification
Nature & aesthetic fuse. Apostrophe- dont worry about spring
Rather than action is barrage of images, as sensual facts
Paradox: soft dying day
Thing of beauty and death- going into winter
Live these images
Spontaneity but also thought
Sensual + intellectual (rational)
Sonnet invented by lawyers. Rhetorical ingenuity.
Manipulation of reason and emotion
Rhetorical heritage of its form
Lyric as subjective and objective
Bathos: anti-climatic
Zeugma: means yoking. One verb and two objects eg stain her honour, or her
new brocade
Modernist Poetics
Rules
chequered silence synaesthesia (impressions coming together to give sense)
Urban modernism
Influenced by French symbolists
Imagists: short, precise
Essence
Symbolism- look at form
Victorian poetry- decayed Romanticism, coming to an end
Shape
Pounds list: Direct treatment of the thing, use no word that doesnt
contribute, Rhythm: in the sequence of musical phrase not metronome
In that moment, that was what is important (The Encounter)
About this precise moment and what happened to me
Realising the image

In a specific moment
Pound metro: no connection between lines. Reader to make connection
Evoke a sense of word poetry (MacDiarmid)
A feeling, different mythologies

in the seventeenth century, the poet John Donne wanted to roughen up the
smooth textures of Petrarchan love poetry with vernacular idioms and rhythms.