Introduction to
Poetry
Speaker: Whose
Voice do We
Hear?
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Subject, Topic
• Categories of poetry, such as “the love poem,”
can indicate the subject of a poem—the topic it
engages—but poems about the same subject can
be very different in their attitudes, ideas, and
approaches.
• A poem’s theme is the statement it makes about
its subject.
• Tone is closely related to style and diction.
• denotation, connotation
• syntax
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Speaker
• The speaker of a poem is the voice offering
the poem’s words to the reader. That voice
may be the poet’s or it may be that of a
created character who expresses ideas or
feelings very different from the poet’s own.
• In some poems we are meant to dislike or
distrust the speaker rather than take his or
her words at face value.
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Margaret Atwood’s “Death of a
Young Son by Drowning”
This poem is from Atwood’s book The Journals of
Susanna Moodie (1970), which is written as if
spoken by Susanna Moodie, a real person (1805–
85) who emigrated from England to upper Canada
and wrote several books about her experiences. In
these poems, Atwood fictionalizes Moodie’s life
considerably but works from actual incidents
recounted by Moodie. “Death of a Young Son by
Drowning” is from section II of the book, which
recounts incidents in Moodie’s life between 1840
and 1871.
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Atwood, cont.
• Does Atwood's poem provide any internal
evidence to suggest it is not a personal,
confessional poem?
• How might the reader discover that Atwood
based the poem on another person’s
experience?
• Does the knowledge that Atwood based her
poem on incidents in the life of Susanna
Moodie change your reaction to the work?
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Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We
Real Cool
• How does the rhythm of the poem contribute to the
characterization of the speaker(s)?
• What does it mean to “[s]trike straight”? To “[t]hin gin”?
To “[j]azz June”? How do these phrases help
characterize the speaker(s)?
• Are the speaker’s idea of what is “cool” and the poet’s
idea of what is “cool” the same? (Are the poet’s
perspective and the speaker’s perspective the same?)
Does Gwendolyn Brooks’s discussion of what she was
doing in that poem confirm your impression, or is it
surprising in some way?
• Audio
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Bruce Springsteen’s
“Nebraska”
• dramatic monologue is a poem spoken
entirely by one fictional speaker in a
specific time, place, and situation.
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“Nebraska”
• Who is the speaker in this poem? What do
we know about him?
• Who is the speaker addressing? How do we
know?
• To what degree is the speaker a reliable
narrator? Should he be believed?
• What is it that the speaker is asking of the
sheriff in lines 19– 20? Is this his final
request? What does it mean?
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Setting, Situation
• Sometimes identifying the poem’s setting
is important to understanding the speaker,
as when a speaker reflects on events that
are long past.
• The setting is the time and place in which a
poem is situated. Sometimes the setting of
a poem is vague or unspecified.
• spatial setting, temporal setting
• situation
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Allusion, Occasional Poem,
Referential Poem
• An allusion is a reference to something
outside the poem that carries a history of
meaning and strong emotional
associations.
• A poem written about a specific occasion is
called an occasional poem, and such a
poem is referential; that is, it refers to a
certain historical time or event.
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Sensory Elements
• Instead of depending on abstract ideas, the
language of poetry is most often concretely visual
and pictorial.
• Words are not simply sounds; they represent or
signify things, actions, ideas, or feelings. Poets
provide vivid verbal representations to convey
what they have seen or imagined to readers.
• Description can involve narrowing terms by
category, expanding through detail, or
comparing two things or ideas.
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Figurative Speech,
Language
• A figure of speech pictures something in
terms of something else familiar to us,
asking us to think of the one thing as if it
were the other.
• Poets frequently rely on figures of speech,
or figurative language, to clarify and make
their ideas precise as well as to suggest a
range of feelings.
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Metaphor, Simile
• In a metaphor, something is implicitly compared
to something else, or represented as if it is that
thing.
• When metaphors extend over long sections of a
poem, they are called extended metaphors.
• A controlling metaphor extends over an entire
poem.
• In a simile, one thing is directly compared to
something else, usually with the word like or as.
Similes usually make quick comparisons that are
not elaborated.
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Analogy, Symbol,
Personification
• When a simile develops a very elaborate comparison
and extends through long sections of a poem, it is
called an analogy.
• A symbol, defined at the most basic level, is
something that stands for something else. Symbols
in poetry are words and phrases that have a range of
reference beyond their literal signification or
denotation.
• Personification involves treating an abstraction,
such as death or justice or beauty, or an inanimate
object, as if it were a person.
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Sounds of Poetry
• Poets choose words for their sounds as well
as for their meanings, using sound effects to
create a mood or establish a tone.
Sometimes the sounds in poems provide
special effects, but often sound is
intertwined with meaning.
• To get the full effect of a poem, it is
important to read it aloud and attend to its
vocal rhythms and sounds.
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Sounds of Poetry
• When a word captures or approximates the
sound of what it describes (such as “splash”
or “squish”), it is called onomatopoeia.
• Poets can use pacing, rhythm, and pauses
as well as sounds to imitate the subject
being described.
• Meter is the basic rhythmic pattern of
stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem.
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Meter
• A foot is a unit of measure of poetry. Meter is
determined by the kind of foot, or the regular pattern of
accents and number of syllables per line. Line lengths
are usually described in terms of the number of feet:
pentameter uses five feet per line, octameter uses
eight, tetrameter uses four, etc.
• In English, the most common metrical pattern is iambic,
in which each foot contains an unstressed syllable
followed by a stressed syllable; iambic pentameter, one
of the most common meters used in poetry written in
English, consists of lines containing five iambic feet.
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Meter
• A trochee is a stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed syllable.
• An anapest is made up of two unstressed
syllables followed by a stressed syllable.
• A dactyl is a stressed syllable followed by two
unstressed syllables.
• A spondee is a pair of unstressed syllables.
• A caesura is a short pause within a line, often
(though not always) signaled by a mark of
punctuation such as a comma.
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Meter cont’d
• Poets may adhere to traditional metrical
forms or experiment with new patterns.
Poetry that has no governing pattern of
stresses or line lengths is called free verse.
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Rhyme
• Rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes in
a poem, usually at the end of the lines.
Rhymes are indicated by using a different
letter of the alphabet to represent each
distinct rhyme sound, e.g., abab.
• Old English poetry (such as the epic poem
Beowulf) used alliteration, the repetition of
sounds, instead of rhyme.
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Rhyme cont’d
• Blank verse is poetry that does not rhyme
but that adheres to strict metrical
requirements.
• Consonance is the repetition of initial
consonant sounds through a sequence of
words. Assonance is the repetition of
vowel sounds through a sequence of words.
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Stanzas
• Most poems of more than a few lines are
divided into stanzas, groups of lines divided
from other groups by white space on the
page.
• Stanza breaks often mark turns of thought,
changes of scene or image, or other shifts in
structure or direction.
• terza rima, Spenserian stanza
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Stanzas cont’d
• The ballad stanza alternates unrhymed lines of
iambic tetrameter with rhymed lines of iambic
trimeter.
• A sestina, written in blank verse, relies on an
elaborate structure of repeated words at the ends of
the lines.
• A villanelle depends on the patterned repetition of
whole lines.
• Other stanza or verse forms you might encounter
include the heroic couplet, the tetrameter couplet,
the limerick, and free verse.
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Scansion
• Scansion is the process of scanning a
poem—tracking its meter line by line to
chart its metrical pattern. Scansion involves
reading aloud, listening carefully, marking
the stressed and unstressed syllables,
counting the syllables and feet, and tracking
the rhyme patterns.
• Scanning is an imprecise craft, so readers
may plausibly disagree about whether to
stress certain syllables.
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Types of Structures
• The term lyric, as it is used in poetry, usually refers to a
short poem in which the speaker expresses personal
emotion. Lyric poetry is often harmonious or romantic.
• A poem has a narrative structure if it tells a story—that
is, if its organization involves the passing of time as well
as action moving forward.
• A poem has a dramatic structure when it consists of a
series of scenes, presented vividly, as if on stage.
• A poem has a discursive structure if it is organized like a
treatise, an argument, or an essay.
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Structure cont’d
• Poems with descriptive structures strive to be
almost purely descriptive of someone or
something.
• Some poems use imitative structures, mirroring
as closely as possible the structure of something
that already exists as an object and can be seen.
• Poems with reflective or meditative structures
ponder a subject, theme, or event, moving
(logically or not) from one sound to another or to
related thoughts or objects.
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Sonnet
• A sonnet consists of fourteen lines, usually written in
iambic pentameter and printed as if it were a single
stanza.
• The Shakespearean sonnet, or English sonnet, is
divided into three quatrains (units of four lines each) and
a final couplet (unit of two lines), for a pattern of 4-4-4-2.
Its traditional rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg, but
there are variations. Shakespearean sonnets lend
themselves to three-step arguments or to setting up
brief, cumulative images.
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Sonnet cont’d
• The Petrarchan sonnet, or Italian sonnet,
is divided into two parts: an octave (eight
lines) and a sestet (six lines). Its traditional
rhyme scheme is abbaabbacdecde, but there
are variations. Petrarchan sonnets work
well for poems that make two points or for
poems that make one point and then
illustrate it.
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Visual Formatting
• Technopaegnia is the
construction of poems
with visual appeal.
• Poems composed in a
specific shape to
resemble physical objects
are called concrete
poems or shaped verse.
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