REVIEW FOR IN CLASS ESSAY

mkay, so its not exactly done, but these are the characteristics of each poet that i found in my notes.. if anyone wants examples of a technique or needs analysis of a poem or something, leave a comment and i'll try to type it up

WW:

Themes etc:

Many reviewers believed he was vulgar, Emerson did not

-celebrates greatness of poetry

-greatness of common people

-transcendental, romantic

-poet = equalizer of age and land

-inclusiveness of poems [e.g. all people’s experiences helped pull him closer to goodness]

-poetry comes from the soul, there is no higher form of expression

-like Thoreau, stresses simplicity of life

-We need a new way to address the old- e.g. religion must morph outer shell while maintaining essential constancy

-“grow or die”

-devoted himself to celebrating glories of life through poetry

-imitation is suicide

-All is good- unity in the goodness of all things- e.g. “stuff outside of my soul is just as good as stuff inside it”

-singing=happiness

-Two ways to knowledge:

I. science, logical, proofs, mathematical

II. emotional, firsthand, sublime, soul

Techniques:

-antithesis [pairing of opposites to show totality of current experience]à illustrates inclusiveness

-anaphora [the repetition of the same word or expression at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or lines for rhetorical or poetic effect, as in Lincoln's "we cannot dedicate- we cannot consecrate-we cannot hallow this ground"] - *this is one of the most characteristic traits of Whitman’s writing, there is almost certain to be an example of it in the given poems

-apostrophe [talking at an animal or object, a type of personification] e.g. the thrush singing in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

[sometimes wrote elegies:

elegy:

general elegy- a general reflection upon death

specific elegy- death of a specific person

three parts of elegies:

I-evocation

II-grief

III-consolation]

ED:

wrote four types of poems:

-art [expressive style, a recognition of her isolation]

-love [soul as seat of love- greek psyche]

-death [sometimes the speaker is already dead]

-nature

-wrote more on death than anything else

-isolation over inclusiveness, nobody is there for her etc

-all people have perfect soulmate- the soul chooses, witdraws from the majority

-difficult to understand subjective choices of the soul

-unique ungoverned by fixed values

-deprivation breeds appreciation

-Like Keats, Dickinson saw writing poetry as an exalted calling (or profession) and dedicated her life to poetry. She was willing to give the name of poetry only to verse that moved the reader profoundly:

-Writing poetry may have served Dickinson as a way of releasing or escaping from pain

-Dickinson adopts a variety of personas, including a little girl, a queen, a bride, a bridegroom, a wife, a dying woman, a nun, a boy, and a bee

-To casual readers of poetry, it may seem that Dickinson uses rhyme infrequently. They are thinking of exact rhyme (for example, see, tree). She does use rhyme, but she uses forms of rhyme that were not generally accepted till late in the nineteenth century and are used by modern poets. Dickinson experimented with rhyme, and her poetry shows what subtle effects can be achieved with these rhymes. Dickinson uses identical rhyme (sane, insane) sparingly. She also uses eye rhyme (though, through), vowel rhymes (see, buy), imperfect rhymes (time, thin), and suspended rhyme (thing, along).

Techniques:

Onomatopoeia [

Synecdoche [part of the whole - a literary technique in which the whole is represented by naming one of its parts (genus named for species), or vice versa (species named for genus). Example: “You’ve got to come take a look at my new set of wheels.” The vehicle here is represented by its parts, or wheels.]

Synaesthesia [stimulation of two or more senses in a single image- when one type of sensation evokes another sense. For example when a sound is experienced in part as a color, or when a color prompts a sound]

(OVER)USE OF THE DASH “––”

Alliteration

Repetition

Personification

• Some poems are unfinished; a few even seem to be rough drafts.
• More than one version exists of a number of poems. Because she did not publish these poems, she did not have to make a final decision about which word, line, or stanza she preferred. Also, she included poems in her letters, changing them to fit her correspondent or the subject of the letter.
• In her letters, she sometimes writes poems as prose and prose as poetry, so that it is hard to distinguish them.
• Her occasionally idiosyncratic spelling, punctuation, and word choice can be distracting to readers, so that editors have to decide whether to change her text to conform to modern usage.

she drops endings from verbs and nouns. It is not always clear what her pronouns refer to; sometimes a pronoun refers to a word which does not appear in the poem. At her best, she achieves breathtaking effects by compressing language. Her disregard for the rules of grammar and sentence structure is one reason twentieth century critics found her so appealing; her use of language anticipates the way modern poets use language. The downside of her language is that the compression may be so drastic that the poem is incomprehensible; it becomes a riddle or an intellectual puzzle. Dickinson said in a letter, "All men say 'what' to me"; readers are still saying "What?" in response to some of her poems.