Department of African Languages and Literature
Modern Literature: Poetry
1.
What is poetry?
Poetry is as universal as language and almost as ancient. The most primitive peoples have used
it and the most civilized have cultivated it. Poetry might be defined as a kind of language that
says more and says it more intensely than ordinary language. Language has different uses,
that is, language is employed on different occasions to say quite different kinds of things. May
be, the commonest use of language is to communicate information (Practical use). There are
three uses of language: Practical, literary and hortatory (language is used as an instrument of
persuasion like in advertisements, propaganda bulletins, sermons and political speeches).
Novels, short stories, poems and plays are written not merely to convey information to us but
to bring us a sense and a perception of life, to widen and sharpen our contacts with existence.
The concern of literature is with experience. We all have an inner need to live more deeply
and fully and with greater awareness, to know the experience of others and to understand our
own experience better. Poets select, combine and reorganize their observed or imagined
experiences for us (the readers). They create significant new experiences in which readers can
participate and from which they may gain a greater awareness and understanding of their
world. Literature, in other words can be used as a gear for stepping up the intensity and
increasing the range of our experience and as a glass for clarifying it. This is the literary use of
language, for literature is not only an aid to living but a means of living.
Language becomes literature when the desire to communicate experience predominates.
Literature exists to communicate significant experience. It is significant because it is
concentrated and organized. Its function is not to tell us about experience but to allow us
imaginatively to participate in it. It is a means of allowing us, through the imagination, to live
more fully, more deeply, more richly and with greater awareness.
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2.
How to read a poem:
a.
Read a poem more than once. A good poem will no more yield its full meaning on a
single reading. Two readings may be necessary simply to let you get your bearings. If the poem
is a work of art, it needs repeated and prolonged examination. One does not listen to a good
piece of music once and forget it; one does not look at a good painting once and throw it
away. A poem is not like a newspaper, to be hastily read and cast into the wastebasket. It is to
be hung on the wall of one’s mind.
b.
Keep a dictionary by you and use it. It is futile to try to understand poetry without
troubling to learn the meanings of words of which it is composed. One might as well play
football without a ball. One of your primary purposes while in your undergraduate studies
should be to build a good vocabulary, and the study of poetry gives you an excellent
opportunity.
c.
Read so as to hear the sounds of the words in your mind. Poetry is written to be heard:
its meanings are conveyed through sound as well as through print. Every word is therefore
important. The best way to read a poem is just the opposite of the best way to read a
newspaper. One reads a newspaper as rapidly as possible; one should read a poem as slowly
as possible.
d.
Always pay careful attention to what the poem is saying. For some readers, reading a
poem is like getting onboard a rhythmical roller coaster. The car starts, and off they go, up and
down, paying no attention to the landscape flashing past them, arriving at the end of the poem
breathless, with no idea of what it has been about. This is a wrong way to read a poem. One
should make the utmost effort to follow the thought continuously and to grasp the full
implications and suggestions. On the first reading you should determine the subjects of the
verbs and the antecedents of the pronouns.
e.
Practice reading poems aloud. Read the poem so that the rhythmical pattern is felt but
not exaggerated. Remember that poetry is written in sentences, just as prose is, and that
punctuation is a signal as to how it should be read.
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3.
Denotation and Connotation
A primary distinction between the practical use of language and the literary use is that in
literature, especially in poetry, a fuller use is made of individual words. The average word has
three meanings or senses: sound, denotation and connotation. Denotation is the dictionary
meaning or meanings of a word. Connotations are what it (the word) suggests beyond what it
expresses: its overtones of meaning. For example, the word, ‘home’, by denotation means ‘a
place where one lives’ and by connotation it suggests security, love, comfort and family. The
words, childlike and childish mean “characteristics of a child” but childlike by connotation
suggests meekness, innocence and wide-eyed wonder and childish suggests pettiness,
willfulness and temper tantrums.
Connotation is important in poetry, for it is one of the means by which the poet can
concentrate or enrich meaning – say more in fewer words.
4.
Imagery
Experience comes to us largely through senses. For instance our experience of a spring day
may consist of certain emotions we feel and certain thoughts we think, but most of it will be a
cluster of sense impressions. It will consists of hearing the birds singing early in the morning,
smelling the blossoming of flowers, feeling the warm climate and seeing the purple flowers in
the jacaranda trees. So a poet seeking to express the experience of a spring day must
therefore provide a selection of sense impressions. These sense impressions can be portrayed
through a set of images.
Imagery may be defined as the representation through language of sense experience. Poetry
appeals directly to our senses through its music and rhythms, which we actually hear when it is
read aloud. But indirectly it appeals to our senses through imagery.
The word, “image” perhaps most often suggests a mental picture, something seen in the
mind’s eye – and visual imagery is the kind of imagery that occurs most frequently in poetry.
But there are different kinds of imagery: auditory imagery (image that represents a sound),
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olfactory imagery (image that represents a smell), gustatory imagery (image that represents a
taste), tactile imagery (image that represents the sense of touch, such as hardness, softness,
wetness or heat or cold), organic imagery (image that represent an internal sensation, such as
hunger, thirst, fatigue or nausea), kinesthetic imagery (image that represents a movement or
tension in the muscles or joints). We could extend this list further, but for the purposes of
discussing poetry, this classification should be sufficient.
5.
Figurative Language
Let us assume that your sister has just come in out of a rainstorm and you say to her, “well,
you’re a pretty sight! Got slightly wet, didn’t you?” and she says, “wet? I’m drowned! It’s
raining cats and dogs, and my raincoat’s like a sieve!” Actually you have been speaking
figuratively. You have been saying less than what you mean, or more than what you mean, or
opposite of what you mean or something other than what you mean.
Figurative language is language that that cannot be taken literally. Metaphor and simile are
both used as a means of comparing things that are essentially unlike. Simile uses words such as
‘like, as, than, similar to resembles or seems.’ In metaphor, the comparison is implied – that is
the figurative term is substituted for or identified with the literal term. For example, in the
line, “Life the hound,” both the literal (life) and figurative (hound) terms are named.
Personification is giving the attributes of a human being to an animal, an object or a concept.
Synecdoche (the use of the part for the whole) and metonymy (the use of something closely
related for the thing actually meant) are both alike in that both substitute some significant
detail or aspect of an experience for the experience itself. For example, in the poetic line,
“Great minds have sought you” the poet is using synecdoche, because what he means is “men
with great minds.” Symbol may be roughly defined as something that means more than what it
is. It functions literally and figuratively at the same time. A paradox is an apparent contradiction
that is nevertheless somehow true. It may be either a situation or a statement. As a figure of
speech, it is a statement. Overstatement or hyperbole is simply exaggeration, but exaggeration
in the service of truth. Example: “you could have knocked me over with a feather” or “I’ll die if I
don’t pass this course.” Understatement is saying less than what one means. Example: upon
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sitting down to a loaded dinner plate, you say, “this looks like a nice snack.” Irony is saying the
opposite of what one means.
6. Allusion
Allusion is a reference to something in history or previous literature and it may be a
richly connotative word or a symbol which suggests far more than it says.
Perrine, Laurence. Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1987.
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