1. Poetry

2. What is Poetry
Poetry is a form of playing with words by using the imagination
Poets play with words, rhymes, and rhythms
Playing with meaning is Punning (a play on the multiple meanings of a word, or on two words that sound alike, but have different meanings)

3. How to Read a Poem:
Look for punctuation indicating where sentences begin and end.
Do not stop at the end of a line unless there is punctuation, which tells you to do so.
Look up words you don’t understand.
Watch for comparisons.
Read the poem aloud—hear with your ears, understand with your mind, feel with your heart.

4. Figurative Language
Figurative language is a literary phrase that is not meant to be interpreted literally; it is to be interpreted imaginatively.
It is used to create vivid pictures in the reader’s mind to make writing emotionally intense.
It is used to state ideas in new and unusual ways to satisfy the reader’s imagination.

5. Imagery A single word or a phrase that appeals to one of our senses
Sometimes it can help us hear sounds, smell an odor, feel texture or temperature, or even taste a sweet, sour, or salty flavor

6. Ethelbert Miller’s “heart on fire”
I am alone and
burning

7. Simile
Two dissimilar things clearly compared by words such as like, as, than, or resembles.
EX: Her feet felt like ice.

8. Metaphors
A comparison between two things without the use of the word like, as, than or resembles.
Direct metaphor
Compares the two things by the use of a verb such as is.
The city is a sleeping woman.
Implied metaphor
Implies or suggests the comparison between the two things, without using is.
The city sleeps peacefully.

9. Langston Hughes’ “Harlem”
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

10. Simile vs. Metaphor In a simile, the two subjects remain separate.
My head is like a disorganized file cabinet.
In a metaphor, the two subjects remain united.
My head is a disorganized file cabinet.

11. Onomatopoeia Fitting the sound of the words to the sense of the words.
EX: a gun bangs, canon booms, bacon sizzles, roosters cock-a-doodle-do.
A single word echoes a natural sound or a mechanical sound.
Can you think of any other examples?

12. Alliteration Two or more words with the same initial sound.
EX: money mad, hot and heavy, dog days, drip dry, was and wear, ready and raring to go.
Can also be the repetition of similar sounds.

13. Example: While I nodded, nearly napping.” Poe’s “The Raven”
Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn yard.
“The Highwayman”

14. Personification
A special kind of metaphor in which we give human qualities to something that is not human
A crying heart
The angry storm

15. Consonance vs. Assonance
Consonance: the repetition of the same consonant sound in several words.
EX: “The silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain.” Poe
Assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings
EX: “The death of the poet was kept from his poems.” Auden

16. Connotation
What is suggested by a word, apart from what it explicitly describes.
Ex: Her face was very red.
Is she embarrassed? Angry? Hot?
Justin skipped down the hall.
What might this connote?

17. Sounds of Poetry
Rhythm: A musical quality produced by the repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables, or by the repetition of certain other sound patterns in poetry
1. meter
2. free verse
3. rhyme
4. repetition of words, phrases, and sentences

18. Denotation
A word’s literal and primary meaning, independent of any connotations.
The “dictionary definition of a word.

19. Meter
Poetry that is written in meter has a regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line.
EX: “Simon the Cyrenian Speaks”
He never spoke a word to me,
And yet He called my name;
He never gave a sign to me,
And yet I knew and came.

20. Free Verse
Free verse is poetry that is “free” of regular meter—that is, free of a strict pattern. Free verse is very similar to prose, but it is only free in the sense that it is liberated from the formal rules governing meter. Poets still pay very close attention to the rhythmic rise and fall of the voice, to pauses, and to the balances between long and short phrases.

21. Enjambment French for “striding over”
A poetic expression that spans more than one line. Lines exhibiting enjambment do not end with grammatical breaks, and their sense is not complete without the following line(s).
Distinguished from end-stopped lines, where the physical end of the line coincides with the punctuation.

22. Enjambment cont. EX: sonnet by Wordsworth
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquility.

23. Rhyme
Rhyme is the repetition of the sound of a stressed syllable and any syllables that follow.
Approximate rhyme (slant rhyme, imperfect rhyme): repeat only some sounds-hollow/mellow or look/back
Internal rhyme: occurs inside a line of poetry-
“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” (Poe)

24. Diction and Tone
Tone is not easy to define because it is a quality of language that tends to be suggested rather than stated.
Tone is a speaker’s attitude--toward a subject or toward an audience.
Tone can be sarcastic, teasing, critical, serious, playful, angry, admiring, ironic, and so on.

25. Diction and Tone cont.
When we speak out loud, we reveal tone by using our voice and even body gestures.
EX: Look at the following sentences.
School starts next week. (sincere)
School starts next week? (disbelieving)
School starts next week. (excited)
School starts next week. (disgusted)

26. Diction and Tone cont.
When a poem is printed on a page, we can’t hear its tone, but it still conveys one through diction or word choice (remember connotation).
Rhythms and rhymes can also convey tone. If we hear a lively, bouncy rhythm and jingly rhymes, the poet is probably not taking a solemn tone.

27. Subject vs. Theme
The theme is the central idea of a work of literature. A theme is not the same as a “subject.” The subject of a work can usually be expressed in a word or two: love, childhood, death. The theme is the idea the writer wishes to convey about that subject. The theme must be expressed in a statement or sentence: love is more powerful than family loyalty. A work’s theme is not usually stated directly.

28. Speaker
The voice who is talking to us in a poem. Sometimes the speaker is identical to the poet, but often the speaker and the poet are not the same. The poet may be speaking as a child, a woman, a man, a whole people, an animal, or even an object
See Dickenson’s “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass and Marquis’s “Lesson of the Moth”