Session Two
Søren Hattesen Balle
English
Department of Culture and Identity
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Introduction: the summary assignment for
today and next time
Introduction: today’s session
Presentation:
the genre of poetry
 reading and analyzing poetry
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Class room discussion:
William Wordsworth, ”Lines Composed a Few Miles
above Tintern Abbey” (1798)
 Wordsworth’s poem as poetry and the role of the lyric
speaker
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J. Culler: poetics, rhetoric, poetry
Poetics: the description of the conventions and
reading operations that make literary (or textual)
effects possible (representation/imitation)
Rhetoric: the study of the persuasive and
expressive resources of language in discourse
(persuasion/eloquence)
Poetry: language that makes abundant use of
figures of speech and other linguistic acts
(representation + persuasion)
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Poetry contains images and/or figurative language
What is imagery and figurative language?
”..all the objects and qualities of sense perception ..”
(Abrams)
 The vehicles of figurative language, especially metaphors
and similes
 Figurative language: an alteration or swerve from
’ordinary’ usage (order of words or meaning)
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The distinction between the figurative and the
literal
Metaphor as literary effect: to see something as something
else ( (tenor/vehicle/ground): metaphor/simile
 Metaphor as a basic way of knowing: problematizing the
literal/figurative distinction
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Genre as a set of conventions and expectations
→ generates particular reading protocols
(sub-)genres or types of poetry: lyric,
epic/narrative, dramatic
Relation of speaker to audience:
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Lyric: 1st person speaker/speaking to himself or
someone else
Narrative: speaker and characters
speaking/speaking to a listening audience
Dramatic: speaker concealed from audience and
characters/characters speaking among themselves
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Persona, tone, voice:
Persona: the (lyric) speaker of the poem or
poet-speaker
Tone:
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the expression of a literary speaker’s attitude to
whom or what he/she is addressing
’Implied audience’
Voice: ’implied author’
The complexity of voice in literature and
poetry
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Imagery, figurative language and poetic
voices/speakers have to be interpreted to create
meaning
How to read, analyze, and interpret poetry?
Poetry as structure or event
The poem as a structure of words
The study of the relation between meaning and the
non-semantic features of language
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Sound and sight in poetry: ’babble’ and ’doodle’/’charm’ and
’riddle’ (N. Frye)
Meaning(?) and sound: alliteration, assonance, metre, rhyme,
etc.
Meaning (?) and sight: stanza, lineation, enjambment, figurative
language, etc.
Sound and sight in ”Tintern Abbey”: do they create meaning?
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The poem as event
The role of the speaking voice of poetry
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The three voices of poetry (at least!):
Author, lyric speaker (persona), implied author
Poetry as the imitation of ordinary speech acts or poetry as
poetry as the imitation of poetry itself? As discourse or as
(literary) ’text’?
Meaning(?) and poetic voice:
The paradox of poetic voice: extravagance/the
’sublime’ vs. the rhetorical figure of apostrophe,
personification, prosopopoeia, hyperbole
”Voice calls in order to be calling” (J. Culler, p. 78):
”Lyrics, we might say, strives to be an event” – in
language, we might add…
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(Lyric ) poetry as ”the foregrounding and
making strange of language” (J. Culler)
The signifiers of poetry reconstitutes its
signifieds: form/content
The nature of interpretation in poetry: part and
whole – the hermeneutic circle (cf. Abrams,
”Interpretation and Hermeneutics”)
The limits of hermeneutic interpretation: the
role of intertextuality and polyphony in poetry
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Why has Wordsworth decided on a very elaborate
titling of his poem?
What type of poem is Wordsworh’s poem (lyric, epic,
dramatic)?
Characterize the speaker of the poem? What is the
relation of the speaker to ’nature’ in the poem?
Characterize the tone of the speaker?
How is the poem organized and structured? What is
the thematic importance of its organization/structure?
Outline the speaker's reasons for entreating his sister to
go out alone at night in the wind and rain.
Which role does ‘voice’ play in the poem?