Poetry

Crafted speech in poetry Phonolgical features in poetry Literary and lingustic language

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A HIT POEM

  • A- About (what happens)
  • H-Historical (social context)
  •  I-Imagery (what images are used and what impact do they have)
  • T-Techniques (Impact they have on the audience and purpose)
  • P-Personal (responses)
  • O-Organisation (how has the poet structured the poem and why?)
  •  E-Emotions (what is the tone or mood?)
  • M-Message (what is the poet's message?)
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Era's of poetry

  • Metaphysical poetry- associated with an intellectual approach to emotional topics, use images- Donne displays scientific and geographical references Donne's poetry displays complex arguments with paradoxes and puns.
  • 18th century poetry- emphasis on love and religion, preocupation with society, manenrs and morals- rhyming iambic pentameter used with rhythmic balance, strong interest in the classical writers of the ancient world
  • Romatic poetry- reaction against 18th century commitment to order and reason, stress the importance of human emotions, enthusiasm for nature.
  • Mountains are seen as a recurring symbol of beauty and mystery in the romantic verse, nostalgia for simple rural society
  • Later poetry- realism to english poetry, shocking images of violence and suffering
  • Modernist poetry-response to the horrors of global conflict ( development of free verse that broke conventions of traditional metre
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Poetic form and structure

  • Stanza's- four line stanza's are known as quatrains and are combined with a regular metre/ rhyme scheme (most poems are divided into stanza's of equal length)
  • Lyric poetry- expresses and individual's thoughts and feelings, quite short with love being the principal subject (examples of lyric poetry are sonnets odes and elegies)
  • Sonnets- poem of 14 lines with a rhythm of iambic pentameter
  • Petrarchan- rhyme scheme that divides the poem into two sections
  • octave, outlines situation or a problem (first 8 lines) sestet, offers the response to a problem (last six lines)
  • regular rhyme scheme abbaa
  • Shakespearean- three quatrains (four lines each) ends with a rhyming couplet- may express a concluding thought/ introduce a new idea rhyme scheme abab
  • Sonnets can be romantic, religious and about nature (relationship between the different sections of sonnet's should be looked at)
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Poetic imagery

  • Figurative and literal language - large amounts of this particular lanuage in poems (poets use comparisons to make their writing more vivid and suggestive)
  •  Similes, metaphors, personification
  • Lexis of formality- formal vocabulary is associated with more serious subjects,
  • informal lexis can include non standard vocabulary (regional or national dialect)
  • Connotations- words of its associations, emotions, sensations and attitude that it evokes (ambiguity, contrasts, repetition, abstract/ concrete words)
  • Archasims and neologisms - archaisms used to create an authentic mood or atmosphere by setting the poem in the past
  •  Neologism- newly coined word or expression- create freshness and vitality
  • Grammar- dynamic verbs can create excitement and action,
  • sentence types and sentence length, word order, (grammatical patterns i.e. parallelism)
  • Use of first person narration and tense
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Rhythm in poetry

  • Enjambment- one line continues into the next
  • End stopped line- line coincides with a grammatical pause, indicated with a punctuation mark
  • Ceasura- pause in the middle of a line
  •  Rhyme helps to give a poem a lively, jaunty rhythm or a sense of narrative and pace to create a feeling of order or harmony-
  • rhyming words can be significant
  • Internal rhyme- words rhyme within a line
  • Half rhyme- rhyme is not quite complete (creates a jarring and discordant effect)
  • Dissonance- different sounds that clash with one another
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Poetic form and structure

  •  Odes- elaborate lyrical poem, extends over several stanza's, usually addressed to a person, object or idea (serious poems that praise the person or object addressed)
  • Elegies- mourns someone's death and applied to solemn and contemplative poems
  • Narrative poetry- poems that tell a story
  • Epic- long poems that are about mythical heroes, with grand and impressive settings
  • ballads- tell stories in everyday lanuage, emphasis on action and dialogue,
  • ballad metre of four line stanza's and four/ three stress lines, refrain regular repetition of words or lines
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