POETRY

What is poetry?

Sung+ chanted+ spoken+ written pattern that emphasizes sound+ sense+ condensed medium

A prose and e

Pattern, sound, meter, rhyme, alliteration, condensed variations (key words)

What is a poem?

- A structure made of words and an event (act of the poet, experience of the reader,
event in literary history)
- The relation between meaning and the non-semantic features of language such a
sound and rhythm
- It is organized un lines and provides the framework for a range of other devices of
sound and syntax

Functions of poetry

- Entertain, ritual, healing and chaotic power, to praise and dignify, insult, didact
function, conscious-raising function, communicating feelings and emotions
- Topics (commons)
• Love, death, grief, passing of time, poetry (self-reflexivity), history, nature,
objects and events from daily life

Genres

- Narrative
• tells stories
• Ex : ballads, epic, verse romance
- Dramatic
• Composition of Theatrical performance / non-theatrical
• Close+ drama, dramatic monologue
- Lyric
• Express personal mood, feelings or meditation
• Most extensive category of verse
• Ex : sonnet, ode, elegy, haiku, hymn

Key aspects to consider while we analyse

- Main topic and theme (s)

- Participants: Poetic speaker, Addressee (who receive the poem), Lyrical object (about
whom is talking)
- Title
- Tone (feelings that are being transferred)
- Nature (narrative, descriptive, lyrical)
- Genre
- Formal features: structure, meter, rhythm, rhyme, rhetorical figures
- Use of language (register, diction)
 DEVIATION AND DEFAMILIARIZATION

Introduction

2 principles dominate the language of literature

- Rule-making: superimposition of extra pattering in the language of literature

• Rhyme and sound pattering
• Meter and rhythmic pattering
• Structural pattering
- Rule-breaking: deviation
• In substance
• In form
• In meaning

DEVIATION

- The key feature of the language of literature, especially of poetry

- Tendency to deviate from standard, common norms of language use
- Result of deliberate manipulation and exploitation of norms (on purpose)→ nothing is
accidental
- Different degrees of linguistic deviation (degrees in a spectrum= range)
- Deviation operates against the background of 2 sets of norms
• Ordinary usage
• The literary system itself
- Deviant elements are perceptually more prominent (captures our attention)
Ex of deviations: kids learning how to talk, SMS or texts, dyslexia…

Deviation in substance

The physical medium, where expressions take place (articulated sounds—speech / marks on
paper—writing)

1- Graphological deviation→ In layout, punctuation and spelling

• Organization in lines—poetic convention
Ex: Calligram (the visual image of the lines evokes the meaning of the poem)
2- Phonological deviation→ In sounds (less common because poems are more written
than spoken)
• the elision (leaving out letters) or addition of syllables for metrical reason
• irregularities in pronunciation
Deviation in form

How these sounds became organized into words, and words in sentences

1- Lexical deviation→ in vocabulary (new words are created)

• Neologism (create new words that did not exist before)
• Portmanteau words (combine 2 words to make a new)
• Substitution of words on the basis on pronunciation—ex: cannot say their
worms (=words)
2- Syntactical deviation
• Inversion of normal word order (hyperbaton)→ motivated by the need to
create rhyme, emphasis…
• Unexpected word combinations
Ex: oxymorons—bright night // wondered to (not common)

Deviation in meaning

- Figurative language: calls attention to the way it deviates from literal or conventional
use→ they are direct manipulation of conventional meanings in themselves
• Metaphor, Simile, Metonymy, Synecdoche, Irony, Personification, Litote,
Hyperbole, Periphrasis

Literature as deviant discourse

- Literature as a whole is deviant
- Fundamental kind of deviation of literary discourse→ peculiarities in which literature
relates to the world:
• The way literary texts constructs imagined words (not referentially)
• The way literary texts constructs imagined speakers (lyrical subject≠ poet)
• The wat literary texts addresses imagined addressees (implied reader,
apostrophe)
- Literary discourse
• Non-referential
• Things which refer to things in the world are not expected to be taken
seriously

Effect: Defamiliarization (an effect of deviation)

- An effect of deviation
- Literature use deviation to see the world from unfamiliar and revealing angles
- Term defamiliarization→ Russian formalist criticism
- “Literature extends the boundaries of our-taken-for-granted word and allows us to
think and feel it afresh by systematically deviating from conventional linguistic
practices and habitual modes of expression. It allows us to explore new kinds of
identity, forms of relationship and ways of seeing the world”
 NATURALIZATION

Naturalization

- To naturalize a text is to bring it into relations with a type of discourse or model which
is already, in some sense, natural and legible
- The process of (close) reading reduces the text’s strangeness (defamiliarized) by
naturalizing it

Frameworks of our understanding

1- General knowledge of the world, the reality

2- Cultural knowledge (stereotypes, accepted knowledge, cultural references…)
3- Literary competence (the author, literary movements, literary conventions, generic
conventions…)→ the higher the literary competences is, the higher naturalization of
the text
4- Specific context of the poem as an act of communication

Literary competence

To read a text as literature one must bring to it an implicit understanding of the operations of
literary discourse which tells one what to look for. Anyone lacking this knowledge, anyone
wholly unacquainted with literature and unfamiliar with the conventions by which fictions are
read, would, for example, be quite baffled if presented with a poem. His knowledge of the
language would enable him to understand phrases and sentences but he would not know,
quite literally, what to make of this strange concentration of phrases. He would be unable to
read it as literature because he lacks the complex “literary competence” which would permit
him to convert linguistic sequences into literary structures and meanings

- Literary competence as “a set of conventions for reading literary texts”

- Presumption that we can distinguish between competent and incompetent reader
- We have to become competent readers

Key: read as literature→ knowing that you are reading literature

Accept conventions→ understand literature ex: Harry Potter magic
Conventions= list of elements that creates aspects in literature
With conventions we can differentiate between competent and incompetent→ become a
competent reader
 RHETORICAL FIGURES—FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Definition—rhetorical figures

- A word or phrase which cannot be, or is not meant to be taken literally

- An expression that departs from the accepted literal sense or from the normal order
of words, or in which an emphasis is produced by patterns of sound. Such figurative
language is an especially resource of the poetry

Types of rhetorical figures

1- Based on meaning→ an expression that departs from the accepted literal sense
2- Based on syntax→ an expression that departs from the normal order of words
3- Based on sound→ an expression in which an emphasis is produced by patterns of
sound

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

METAPHOR

- From the Greek (metaphorá)= “to transfer”

- Based on the similarities between 2 different things: transferring the connotations of
one thing/ idea to another
- Allows to talk about intangible or abstract things in concrete ways
- They represent something in the world while also revealing the state of mind of the
speaker viewing the world
- Used in all kind of language
- Metaphor as a means of thought (figurative thinking): influence the way in which we
understand something

Types of metaphor

- Dead metaphor vs Vital metaphor

• Dead metaphor→ it is over familiar (we do not realize it as a metaphor)
Ex: sleep with someone
• Vital metaphor→ it is not common and makes us think in a different way
- Explicit metaphor vs Implicit metaphor (these are vital metaphores)
• Explicit metaphor
o We are given the tenor and the vehicle
o It is clear what is being compared to what
Ex: your love is a thorny rose
• Implicit metaphor
o We are not given the tenor, we are expected to infer it
o Interpretation depends on the context
Ex: there are many more fish in the sea
- Extended metaphor
• A metaphor which is developed in length, extended through a series of related
subjects, images or ideas
• Multiple pairings of interconnected tenors and vehicles
• Also called conceit
 The analysis of metaphors

IA Richards:

- Tenor (literal term): what is being talked about

- Vehicle (metaphorical term): the metaphorical way in which the literal term (tenor) is
talked about
- Ground: relationship between tenor and vehicle, the similarities between them

Ex: Time is money Ground: in order to earn one must act, and therefore, use
tenor vehicle one’s time

→Analysing metaphor= work on the ground

→Understand ground= understand metaphor

POETIC SYMBOL

- Anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it, usually an idea
conventionally associated with it
- In literature, a symbol is an evocative kind of image (word/ phrase) referring to a
concrete object, scene or action with a further significance→ meaning depends on the
culture
Ex: colours: white= purity/ death
- Its application is open→ people creating symbol do not have to tell what is referred to
- It is regarded as a literal object in its own right→ it has literal meaning and symbolic

Ex : Jesus Christ Cross (religion)

A normal cross

ALLEGORY

- A fictional narrative, dialogue or scene that works on two parallel levels of meaning
simultaneously, so that its persons and events correspond to their equivalents in a
system of ideas or a chain of events external to the tale
- Main technique→ personification
- The characters, speech, action and setting make coherent sense on literal level, but
there are signals in the text that we need to translate into another equally coherent
story
- types of allegories
• Historical and poetical allegories (story—read as a version of political and
historical events+ characters)
• The allegories of ideas (characters—represent abstract concepts) (plot—
exemplifies a doctrine or thesis)
- Close related to symbols: something physical stands for some other meaning (political,
historical, religious, moral…)
- Conventional symbolism
- Unlike symbols, allegory offers a code of interpretation to guide our translation of
surface to underlying meaning→ offers a code to let us understand the meaning
OTHER RHETORICAL FIGURES

Oxymoron→ combination of 2 contradictory terms

Ex: silent scream / perfectly imperfect

Alliteration→ repetition of the same sound (initial consonants/ stressed syllables)

Ex: the beautiful black bunny ate broad beans

Hyperbaton→ normal order of words in a sentence is altered

Ex: Disturb me not! (Do not disturb me)

Apostrophe→ the poetic speaker turns from the audience to address a single person or thing
(dead, absent person, inanimate object, abstraction)

Ex: hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again

Personification→ animals, abstract ideas, inanimate things are referred as humans (connects
readers with the object personified—sympathize)

Ex: the mouth of the river perpetually splits water into the sea

Anaphora→ same word/ phrase repeated in the beginning of successive lines

Ex: it was the…- It was the… - It was the…

Assonance→ repetition of certain vocalic sound in stressed syllables (and sometimes in the
following unstressed)

Ex: the cat is out of the bag / After awhile, crocodile / Cock of the walk

Synecdoche→ way of expressing a “whole” entity or idea by using a part pf it (allows to think
in a diff way, in terms of the representation of its parts)

Ex: Look at those wheels! (Referring to a vehicle, but using part of the vehicle to
represent it)

Metonymy → one thing is replaced with the name of something else closely associated with it

Ex: Hollywood (represents associations with the movie industry) / This class is more
intelligent and engaged than the last one. (Class is metonymy for a group of students)

Parallelism → the repetition of grammatical elements

Ex: cousins by chance; friends by choice / today a reader, tomorrow a leader / no pain,
no gain

Paradox → made up of 2 opposite things and seems impossible or untrue but it is actually
possible or true

Ex: less is more / the more you give, the more you get / all animals are equal, but some
animals are more equal than others

Asyndeton → the omission of linking words, usually conjunctions

Ex: and then he could run, jump, fly…

Polysyndeton → the use of conjunction between each word, phase, or cause

Ex: they read and studied and wrote and drilled

Litote → by denying the contrary of the thing being affirmed

Ex: not bad (good) / you are not wrong (you are right)

Hyperbole → exaggeration

Ex: I am so hungry that I could eat a horse

Synaesthesia→ one sense is described using terms from another

Ex: I smell trouble / pepsi: you’ve never seen a taste like this

Simile → comparison (like, as, resembles)

Ex: I am mad as a storm / colourful like crayons

Epanalepsis → repetition of initial word (s) at the end of the same clause or sentence

Ex: be all that you can be / mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to
mankind
 RHYME AND SOUND PATTERING

RHYME

- Def: The identity of sound between syllables or paired groups of syllables

- Effect: create musicality and poetic quality → makes lines more memorable (cohesive
device)

END-RHYME→ rhyme at the end of the line

- Full rhyme (perfect rhyme): coincide of sounds from the last stressed vowel sound till
the end of the word Ex: young- tongue / weep-sleep
- Eye rhyme: the spelling of paired words appears to match, but without
correspondence in pronunciation Ex: wind- behind (diff pronunciation)
- Slant rhyme (half rhyme): imperfect rhyme created through consonance or assonance
• Consonance ex: bridge- grudge
• Assonance ex: death- ourselves

Rhyme schemes

- Function→form units of sound and suggest units of sense (creates rhythm, musicality)
- The pattern in which the rimed line-endings are arranged in a poem or stanza. This
may be expressed as a sequence in which each line ending on the same rhyme is given
the same letter
- Some common rhyme schemes
• ABAB CDCD EFEF GHGH ------- ABA CDC EFE
• ABBA CDDC
• ABAB BCBC CDCD ----------- ABA BCB CDC
• AA BB CC DD…
• Every line—same rhyme scheme

INTERNAL RHYME→ rhyme in the middle of lines

- Device by which 2 or more words rhyme within the same verse line (1), or in the
middle of separates lines (2), or the word at the end of a line rhymes with a word in
the middle of the next line (3)
Ex: I drove myself to the water and dove into the water (1)
I drove myself to the lake/ and dove into the water (2)
Late Sunday afternoon. I drove/ myself to the lake and dove… (3)
- Through assonance or consonance
• Assonance→ repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in the stressed
syllables Ex: go slow on the road // sell the wedding bells
• Consonance→ repetition of identical or similar consonant in neighbouring
word whose vowel sounds are different Ex: the lint was sent with the tent

HEAD RHYME= ALLITERATION

- Repetition of the same sound, usually initial consonants of words or of stressed

syllables in any sequence of neighbouring words→ use of the same consonant at the
beginning of each stressed syllable in a line of verse
- Often combined with consonance
 FREE VERSE

What is free verse?

- Poetry that does not conform to a regular metrical pattern

- Free verse as both as formal and cultural development
- Characterized by the Movement towards democratic informality
- Liberation from inherited formal and thematic demands: form to suit the demands of
each individual poem
- As a result, form is as important as the content (of the poem)

History

- Precedents:
• The biblical lire • Gerald Manley Hopkins
• Christopher Smart (1722- (1844-1889)
1771) • French “vers libre” (2nd half
• William Blake (1757-1827) of the 19th cent)
• Walt Whitman (1819-1898)
- Acquired status as a legitimate poetic form in the early 20th cent (imagist poets)
- Experimental poetry of the 20th cent (Anglo-American Modernism)
- 2 of its major influences: Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot

Characteristics

- Irregular length of lines and numbers of accents

- Irregular use of end-rhyme (if any)
- More flexible and subtle rhythm:
• Repetition (anaphora, parallelism)
• Internal sound pattering
• Line division (caesura, enjambment: tension between line and meaning),
manipulation of line length
- Filled composition: configuration of a poem across the full dimension of the page
- Seeking connections with the “naturalness” of speech
- Complex relationship between form and meaning
- Changes in choice of themes and diction
- Two directions: minimalism/ expansiveness

The minimal lines (minimalism)

- Spare, minimalist short line

- Free of elevation or pretension
- Stripped down to the barest elements
- Operated by highlight content words+ minimalizing syntactic connections
- Importance of the visual elements, concentrated look
- Depersonalized voices

Expansiveness

- Deliberately, often ostentatiously - Long run-on lines

casual - Lines based on the breathing
- Daily flow of everyday language rhythms of the poet
 POETIC RHYTHM AND METER

Definition

- The pattern of measured sound-units recurring more or less regularly in lines of

verses (no poner esta def si pide def corta en el examen)
- 4 main metrical systems of compositions
• Quantitive meter (ex : Greek + latin verse)
• Syllabic meter (ex: French, Spanish and Japanese)
• Accentual meter (ex: old English)
➔ Accentual-syllabic meter (most English verse in the literary tradition since the medieval
period)

Accentual-syllabic meter (poner esta def si es pregunta corta en el examen)

- Meter is determined by the number of alternations of stressed and unstressed

syllables, organized into feet. From line to line, the number of stresses (accents) may
vary, but the total number of syllables within each line is fixed (although variations
often occur)
- The minimal unit is the foot: fixed combination of 2 or 3 syllables, each of which is
counted as stressed (/) or unstressed (U)
- Types of feet
• Most common
o Iamb (iambic foot/ meter)→ (U /)
o Trochee (trochaic foot/ meter)→ (/ U)
• Substitutive foot (do not form the basis for whole lines)
o Spondee (spondaic foot/ meter)→ (/ /)
o Pyrrhic (weak foot/ meter)→ (U U)
• Less common foot
o Dactyl (dactylic foot/ meter)→ (/ U U)
o Anapest (anapestic foot/ meter)→ (U U /)
o Amphibrach (amphibraic foot/meter)→ (U / U)

Line length

- The number of feet in a line determined the description of its length

• 1 foot→ monometer • 4 feet→ tetrameter
• 2 feet→ dimeter • 5 feet→ pentameter
• 3 feet→ trimeter • 6 feet→ hexameter

Tips

- A foot does not have to respect word-limits. The structure od an individual word does
not determinate the foot
- There is one accent in each foot (except for the spondee and the pyrrhic)
- Take into account the natural stress patterns of words and the distinction between
context and function words→The metrical accent cannot violate the natural stress
pattern
- Naturally unstressed words or syllables may be accented, and the other way round
- It is not necessary to scan the whole poem to be able to analyse the meter, a few lines
are enough
 VERSE FORMS AND GENRES

Definition

- A literary genre is a recognizable and established category of written work employing

such common conventions as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking for
another kind
- A way of organizing cultural products into different categories or kinds
- Genres have particular (formal, thematic and stylistic) features and functions that
distinguish them from one another
- Generic expectations shape the way we understand and respond to given text
- “Genre”: term applied at different levels of classification
sonnet

Lyric ode

elegy...

ballad

Poetry Narrative epic

Narrative verse
Literature
fiction romance

Drama melodrama

Dramatic
comedy
poetry

tragedy

- Genres can be defined according different criteria

- The easiest genres to recognize are those with a fixed form (ex: sonnet, the haiku):
• Particular stanza form
• Specific number of lines
• Predetermined meter and rhyme scheme
- Genres often also involve assumption about typical subject meter, tone…

→ Conventions: “an established practice—whether in technique, style, structure or subject

meter—commonly adopted in literary works by customary and implicit agreement or
precedent” (they are not natural as they can be broken)

Neoclassical genre theory (17th cent)

They understand:

- literature as a hierarchical system in which each genre is assigned a position on the

basis of its style
- Literature as a rigid system of fixed forms
- Prescriptive and restrictive genre rules (if something does not follow the conventions it is not
poetry)

→ this is against our perception as readers

The literary system

- Genres have history: they change through history and through interaction with each
other
- The genre system is not fixed, but continually evolving, unstable
- Emergence of new genres (schools or movements) ex: symbolist poetry, imagism…
- Genres exist within family networks
- The system is dynamic, multidimensional, constantly changing

→ How far can a poem depart from the conventions which define the genre before it ceases to
belong to that genre at all?

Genre recognition

- Genre recognition depends on having read widely and on a willingness to make

comparisons between works that seems to resemble each other, so that we may
generalize the characteristics they share

→What does a reader gain by recognizing that a poem belongs to a specific genre?

- Improved responsiveness to the poem

- The poem’s genre as a context which allows us to read the text with greater
confidence and insight
- Recognize deviations from the conventions: more profound and nuanced (matizado)
reading

Contemporary theories of genre: structuralism

- Genre as a set of expectations which enable readers to naturalize texts

- Conventions control reader’s expectations of what is plausible in a genre
- Literary competence
- The semi logical approach suggests the poem be thought of as an utterance that has
meaning only with respect to a system of conventions which the readers have
assimilated

→ those conventions are largely the conventions of particular genres

Genre as discourse : Tzvetan Todorov

- Against the attempt to see literature as a self-contained structure of related, if shifting,

genres
- Genres as a function of discourse (things we do with language)
- “Can be defined not only in terms of their structure, but also in terms of their
function”
- What a poem is used for affects its genre (the function is more important than the structure)
- Literature as a shifting body of discursive practices to which a culture assigns a literary
function
- To study of literature has to involve the history of changing conceptions of the literary,
the poetic and the generic
 THE BALLAD

Definition

A folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular
story usually derived from a tragic incident in local history or legend. The story is told simply,
impersonally, and often with vivid dialogue

- Origins:
• Late Middle Ages in many • Anonymous, many variants
parts of Europe • Ex. Lord Randal (border
• Sung with the ballad)
accompaniment of music
Subgenres

- Traditional ballads (composed between 1200-1700): a story told in song by a ballad

singer (low culture)
- Broadside ballad: ballads printed and broadsheets (from the mid-16th cent)
• Similar form, but other subject-matter
• Written compositions, composed for the print medium
• Adapted to urban tastes
- The literary ballad: appropriation of the conventions of the traditional ballad by high
culture in the late 18th and 19th cent (Romanticism made its way to the canon)

Features of the traditional ballad

- Focus on a single crucial episode, beginning at a point where the action is decisively
directed towards its catastrophe
- No emphasis on setting characterization, no careful definition of character or
explanation of psychological motivation
- Dramatic: Show things happening: immediacy (not narrated in the past) + Frequent
use of dialogue (sparse+ tense)
- Narrated impersonally: narrator represents community
- Normally composed in regular rhymed quatrains with alternating 4-stress and 3-stress
lines, the 2nd and the 4th line rhyming
- Sparsity of figures of speech based on meaning
- Big number of repetitions and parallelism: The repetition is not ornamental, but
emphatic, and meant to assist the memory of the singer
- Incremental repetition: repetition of a phrase with additions
- Air of mystery and aura of emotion, sentimentalist tone

The literary ballad

- Term meant to distinguish the new ballad o the late 18th cent and the 19th cent from
the authentic folk song
- Poems which use the conventions of the traditional ballad
- Appeal to Romantic poets:
• Popular form: preference for forms of expression used by ordinary people
• Taste for Gothic and medieval subjects
• Appeal of mysteriously remote settings and heroic or chivalric characters
• Appeal of poetry that calls up intense emotions that evokes powerful feelings
 THE SONNET

Definition

- A lyric poem comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameters in

English
- It can often be divided into 2 parts by the so-called “volta” (turn)
- Fixed poetic form defined by its formal features
- Close relationship between the formal and argumentative structure→ accommodation
of meaning to form or form to meaning
→ “All the sonnets require is the articulation of conflicting thoughts or feelings and a
move towards some kind of resolution of that conflict”

Types

- Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet

• Octave+ sestet
• ABBA ABBA CDE CDE
- English (Shakespearean, Elizabethan) sonnet
• 3 quatrains+ a couplet
• ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
- Spenserian sonnet
• 3 interlocked quatrains+ a couplet
• ABAB BCBC CDCD EE
- Hybrid forms of sonnets / variations
• 2 quatrains+ sestet → ABAB CDCD EFG EFG / EFG GFE
• Italian octave (ABBA ABBA) + English sestet (quatrain+ couplet: CDCD EE)

The volta (very important element→ gives info about the theme)

- Italian term for the “turn” in the argument or mood of a sonnet

- It signifies a change in the narrative, offering a contradiction or complication of the
sonnet’s initial theme or argument
- Sometimes (but not always) accompanied by a turn in the syntax or grammar (ex: and
yet/ but/ then/ only)
- Clear and sudden, subtle, non-existent
- It may coincide with a shift in the rhyme pattern (depending on the type)

The poetic speaker + addressee

- Sonnets presented as the speech of a 1st person speaker→ access to thoughts+
feelings
- Addressed to reader/ the poetic speaker himself/ a 3rd person addressee (ex: Patron,
Mistress, God)
- Gives impression of immediacy and confessionally (the speaker)
- Expresses feelings and thoughts and examines and rationalizes the in order to reach a
conclusion
- Speaker attempts to persuade the addressee or thinks about own feelings (to reach a
conclusion about them)
Historical evolution

- Origin: 1st half of the 13rd century in the Sicilian court (courtly Italian poetry—courtly
love tradition)
- Francisco Petrarch (14th century)→ the love sonnet (Petrarchan erotic paradigm)
• Adoration of an idealized and largely unresponsive mistress (lyrical object)→
passive role
• Confessional narrative voice
- Elizabethan sonnet tradition (late 16th century)
• Play with generic conventions (convention/ deviation)
• New themes: love, time, the writing of poetry (self-reflexive metafiction), etc.
- Elizabeth sonnets sequences (cycles)
• Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1578): “Astrophel and Stella”
• Edmund Spenser (1552-1599): “Amoretti”; combining the spirit and the flesh→
Spenserian sonnet
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616): sonnets (Fair Friend and Dark woman)→
Shakespearean sonnets
- John Donne (metaphysical poet): “holly sonnets” (1633)→ hybrid sonnets
- John Milton (1608-1675): tension between the syntactic or sense units and the verse
units

The modern sonnet

- Edna St Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, Gwendolyn Brooks,
Langston Hughes…
- Adapted sonnet conventions to new types of subject matter→ flexibility
- Moral and political issues of the time

→“Writers have felt that the sonnet, for all its apparent artificiality and conventionality, is well
adapted to address real and relevant issues, whether personal or wider public importance”

*****************************************************************************

2nd half of the 18th century: the revival of the English sonnet:

- “Its rebirth coincides with the rise of a definable women’s literary movement and with
the beginning of the Romanticism”
- Romantic poets
- New types of subject-matter:
• Speaker’s response to natural scenery
• The natural world as sympathizing with the poetic speaker (later called the
“pathetic fallacy”)
• Melancholy reflection in solitary surroundings
• National identity and destiny
• Self-reflexive metafictionality
- Formal innovation, flexibility
 TONE AND TEXTUAL STRATEGIES

TONE
Definition
A vague critical term usually designating the mood or atmosphere of a work, although in some
more restricted uses it refers to the author’s attitude to the readers (e.g formal, intimate,
pompous) or to the subject-matter (e.g ironic, solemn, satiric, sentimental)
Function
- Influences how the reader feels while reading
- Influences how the reader reads the poem (serious, comical…)
- Gives life to the text by creating a mood
- Throws light on the feelings, personality or dispositions of the poetic speaker
Analyzing tone
Often early to recognize:
- How does the poetic speaker seem to feel?
- What’s his/her attitude about what is being said?
• Informal/ formal
• Serious/ comic
• Sad/ melancholy/ anguished/ desperate
• Cheerful/ ecstatic
• Angry/ furious
• Contemplative/ introspective
TEXTUAL STRATEGIES—IRONY
Definition
A subtly humorous perception of inconsistency, in which an apparently straightforward statement
or event is undetermined by its context so as to give it a very different significance
Verbal irony
- Use of language where we do not literally mean what we say; instead, we imply an
attitude of disbelief towards the content of our assurance/writing
- Involves a discrepancy between what is said and what is really meant
- The speaker/ writer puts forward what is not true for him/her
- The ironist communicates both his own attitude (or disbelief) along with implying a
different attitude (of belief) attributed to someone else
- Amused or mocking attitude towards those who hold that belief
- Irony depends on cultural identification and knowledge
Mechanism of irony
- Successful irony: when understood as that
- Clues for the reader, evidences:
• Contradiction between what the text is telling us and what we already know
• Exaggeration and emphasis
• Disruption— internal consistency (e.g in the register, in the voice)
Why do we use irony?
- By saying something that the writer does not believe, he/she communicates a rich
range of meaning that he/she believes
- Irony demonstrates the existence of incorrect certainties
- For the reader to take on a set of attitudes that will later be manipulated
- To shock the reader into re-accommodation of his/her assumptions
TEXTUAL STRATEGIES—ALUSION
What is it?
- A kind of intertextual relationship between texts (it may be intentional or not
intentional)
- “Allusion is an indirect or passing reference to some event, person, place or artistic
work, the nature and relevance of which is not explained by the writer but relies on
the reader’s familiarity with what is mentioned”
- “An allusion occurs when one text makes an implicit or explicit reference to another
text”
- Explicit allusion: actual quotation, with question marks
- Implicit allusion: no signal, words are not quoted literally
- Common forms of allusions:
• Verbal reference to another text
• Epigraphs
• Names of characters
• Choice of title
Functions
- Place a text within the textual network
- Establish a relation to a textual and cultural tradition
- Add cultural value to a text (process of transference)
- “An adequate reading of a literary or other cultural text will reed to recognize two
texts that are momentarily brought together by the allusion” (compulsory reading)
→what is the author’s intention in bringing the other text to this one?
TEXTUAL STRATEGIES—PARODY
What is it?
- Another type of intertextuality
- “A mocking imitation of the style of a literary work or works, ridiculing the stylistic
habits of an author or school by exaggerated mimicry”
- Very popular in times of Postmodernism:
• “Through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how
present representations come from past ones and what ideological
consequences derive from both continuity and difference”
Intertextuality
- “Various relationships that a given text may have with other texts”
- Negation of the idea of a text as autonomous and closed: text are not isolated objects
- Genre
- Intentional/ unintentional
- Intertextuality opens the texts up to literature, art and society
- Post-structuralism: infinite network of links and echoes between the texts