Discussion of Poems

On Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”

Free verse
 Frequently employed by writers such as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot,
William Carlos Williams
 No regular metre or rhyme scheme or line length, has a more controlled
rhythmic pattern than ordinary prose
 Depends on recurrence, with variations, of significant phrases, image patterns
and the like
 Considered to be more natural than regular meter, does not deform the natural
speech pattern (Pound, Williams)
 The irregularity involves both the eye and the ear
 Pace, pause and time become more important

Ezra Pound:
Three years ago [1911] in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw
suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's
face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what
this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as
lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening I found, suddenly, the expression. I do
not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little
splotches of colour… [Emphasis added]
[…]
I wrote a thirty-line poem and destroyed it because it was what we call work of the
second intensity. Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later [1912] I
made the following hokku-like sentence:
 "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals, on a wet, black bough."
I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a
poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and
objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective. [She turns words
into colours. Then she can brief the idea in two lines. She takes the image of a flower
that blums, as the human bodies. The petals are the faces, which is a part of the flower.
The body petals also means the colour of the skin, as the colors of people].
Imagism:
 A school of poetry that flourished in North America and England at the
beginning of the 20th century.
 Imagists oppose any sentimentalism (typical for late 19th century poetry) and
rely on concrete imagery.
 Representatives: Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell,H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Carl
Sandburg, William Carlos Williams.
Haiku: Japanese poem that represents the poet’s emotional or spiritual response to a
natural object, scene, or season of the year The typical Imagist poems are written in free
verse and undertakes to render as precisely and tersely as possible, and without
comment or generalization, the writer’s impression of a visual object or scene; often the
impression is rendered by means of metaphor, or by juxtaposing, without indicating a
relation.

Elizabeth Bishop: “One Art” (1976)

The art of losing isn't hard to master;1
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster2
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther3, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
––Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't4 have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Writeit!) like disaster.
 line 1 -a -1st refrain
line 2 -b
line 3 -a -2nd refrain
line 4 -a
line 5 -b
line 6 -a -1st refrain (same as line 1)
line 7 -a
line 8 -b
line 9 -a -2nd refrain (same as line 2)
line 10 -a
line 11 -b
line 12 -a -1st refrain (same as line 1)
line 13 -a
line 14 -b
line 15 -a -2nd refrain (same as line 2)
line 16 -a
line 17 -b
line 18 -a -1st refrain (same as line 1)
line 19 -a -2nd refrain (same as line 2)

On Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”—VILLANELLE

 The villanelle has 19 lines, 5 tercets, 1 quatrain.
 The 1st, then the 3rd lines alternate as the last lines of stanzas 2,3,and 4, and
then stanza 5 (the end) as a couplet.
 It is usually written in tetrameter (4 feet) or pentameter.
This poem is a comparative power, to show poets that we still use fixed forms. This one
talks about losing things  art forms are not so difficult; Then the author loses memory
Forgetting; Losing places where the author lived She lived there but not currently;
Losing memories At first, things are not a problem, but in the end they are.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; -/-/-/-/-/
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; /--/-/-/-/
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; -/-/-/-/-/
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. -/-//---//
I have seen roses damasked, red and white, -/-/-/-/-/
But no such roses see I in her cheeks, -/-/-/-/-/
And in some perfumes is there more delight -/-/-/-/-/
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. -/-/-/-/-/
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know -/-/-/-/-/
That music hath a far more pleasing sound; -/-/-/-/-/
I grant I never saw a goddess go – -/-/-/-/-/
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground. -/-/-/-/-/
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare -/-/-/-/-/
As any she belied with false compare. -/-/-/-/-/

John Donne: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1633)

...
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two,
Thy soul the fixt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the'other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th'other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.
On John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”:
Metaphysical Poets
17th century group of poets (John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw,
George Herbert, Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughn) against Elizabethan love poetry;
similar images in secular and religious poetry.

Conceit:
 Term coined by John Dryden in 1692
 Dr. Samuel Johnson: “the most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together”
 Figure of speech which establishes a striking parallel, usually an elaborate
parallel-between two very dissimilar things or situations, in order to describe
what actually happened or did
Metaphysical: Highly intellectual and philosophical, using turns of wit, often drawing
on natural sciences.

George Herbert and e.e. cummings:

Pattern Poetry, shaped verse. Concrete Poetry (1950s and 1960s). (COMPLETE WITH
THE WHOLE POEM IN POETRY READER).