DOCSLIB.ORG

UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vv9m3c5 Author Larner-Lewis, Jonathan Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems By Jonathan Robert Larner-Lewis A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Kent Puckett, Chair Professor Charles Blanton Professor James Vernon Fall 2017 1 Abstract Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems by Jonathan Robert Larner-Lewis Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Kent Puckett, Chair This dissertation is a close look at poems written during the Great War by Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Wilfred Owen. I describe how each deploys poetry’s formal resources to engage the affective, cognitive, spiritual, and political problems the war produces for them. I argue that strategies of poetic doubling allow them to address—if not quite assuage—the effects of the war that trouble them the most. Each poem manifests this doubling in different ways, but the tactic of doubling is pervasive. Ultimately, I argue that this doubling is equally an effect of the war’s incessant production of antagonistic cultural forms, and of lyric poetry’s fundamental ability to accommodate internal opposition at the formal level. The intrinsic ambivalence of poetic form makes it a particularly effective discourse for examining war’s social and political contradictions. This unifying theme of formal doubling or what I call the “poetic versus”—double timeframes in Hardy, double identities and locations in Thomas, and two or more opposing verbal registers in Owen—is a careful instantiation of Isobel Armstrong’s influential figure of the “double poem.” I track examples of how poems formally enact the kind of doubleness Armstrong describes—how they enact a second-order commentary on their own primary expression. Doubling is a broad but apt name for the strategies by which the war’s disturbances and antagonisms are transferred between the poem’s double levels of engagement, whether conceived as formal/social (Raymond Williams), literary/political (Caroline Levine) or expressive/epistemological (Isobel Armstrong). The prominent forms of doubling I identify line up with tenets of liberal political thought threatened by the war: Hardy’s trouble with time is tied to a belief in rational human progress that the war renders increasingly difficult to maintain. Thomas’s dual identities, in light of the economic forces that ultimately forced him to abandon writing for a soldier’s salary, are traceable to a crisis of alienation underlying liberalism’s basis in the individual. Owen’s project of incorporating voices of inherited cultural tradition and authority, only to expose them as the very origins of the war’s depredations is a critique of liberalism cast as a personal betrayal. Drawing on critical work by William Empson and Paul Fussell, I identify a complex form of irony as the crucial intellectual and affective stance which poetic doubling enables, a stance that becomes an increasingly important cultural survival strategy as the war persists. 1 Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems Introduction The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves. —Oscar Wilde I. War on Christmas Let’s begin with a hymn: Christmas: 1924 ‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it, And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We’ve got as far as poison-gas. 1924 The first feeling one gets from reading this acerbic little lyric by Thomas Hardy is that nothing more needs to be said. It’s brutal, perfect. It utterly gibbets the Anglican pulpit, the gullible singers in the pews (us!), and that fatuous modern faith in technology and scientific progress. Rhyming “mass” with “gas” is the coup de grace. We’re all dead. And yet… right behind that is a feeling is that Hardy is not quite done with us. Here he has crafted a neat modern hymn in traditional long meter (iambic tetrameter); the setting perfectly fits the setting, as it were. But instead of opening us up to grace, it snaps shut like a nasty limerick. Clearly offense was meant, given and taken. And yet again, it is unlike Hardy to be merely blasphemous for no reason; he’s ironical, fatalistic, sure, but rarely so plainly bitter. There must be something else going on. I look to the interesting redundancy in the first line of “said” and “sing.” Why the shift immediately from the passive- voiced past tense to the first-person plural—who “said” and who “sing[s]”? I also look to the poem’s bad math. Even accounting for Jesus’s own ministries, we’re half a century short of 2000, give or take. There is, then, a vaguely millenarian tendency here, which undermines the firm historicity of the poem’s redundant dating in its title and postscript, and which is perhaps kin to the more explicit prophetic mode that we see in other Hardy poems. So maybe we still have a little time left. Which brings me to that last line again: “We’ve got as far as…” Yes, this is a straightforward travesty of the liturgy, which conveys clearly enough that we’ve gone in the wrong direction, that those who would argue “poison-gas” and the war itself were necessary steps towards global harmony are wicked, stupid or both. But there is also buried there, beneath that hard top crust of irony, a sense that we must keep going. Keep singing “Peace upon earth” together, even though our own recent history makes us look stupid doing it. The surface irony of this poem is ever so slightly undermined. We’re faced with a double negative: Priests and their peace talk are mocked, but industrial warfare is repudiated, even more strongly. There is literally no more 2 urgent call for peace on earth than poison-gas (until nukes). The poem has no faith in Anglican authority, yet it retains some small faith in having faith. Besides, it’s Christmas! It is that special time each year when we step out of the flow of our daily lives, sing songs together, try to be charitable and kind, and pledge to do better next year, in hope that the world may do the same. This hymn begins by excoriating empty rituals and traditions, yet somehow, despite itself, ends up reinforcing their necessity. The poem’s antagonist is not the priest, but the poem itself. Here I’ve expended almost 500 words on these four lines and haven’t even touched on Hardy’s intimate life-long relationship to church music, or to his late literary friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, whose influence seems all over this poem—not just in its particularly pointy brand of irony, but also its slide into self-contradiction—indeed, “Christmas: 1924” could be read as Hardy trying out a “Sassoon Poem” and productively failing. And I’d like to connect this poem to the rest of Winter Words, the threnodic posthumous volume that is underrepresented in Hardy criticism; or to Hardy’s counterintuitive optimism, aka “evolutionary meliorism”—famously if awkwardly set forth in the “Apology” to Late Lyrics —which urgently calls for poetry to provide an “alliance between religion” and scientific “rationality” (this poem sets itself against both, but that’s interesting too). But I’ll stop there, because we must move on. But this poem, like Christmas, will come back soon enough. This dissertation is a very close look at some poems written during the Great War by Hardy, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen. I describe the ways each deployed poetry’s formal resources to engage some of the affective, cognitive, spiritual, and political problems the war produced for them. Ultimately, I argue that strategies of poetic doubling allowed them to address—if not quite assuage—the effects of the war that troubled them the most. Each poet—indeed, each poem—manifests this idea of doubling in different ways, but the tactic of doubling is pervasive. Ultimately, I argue that this doubling is equally an effect of the war’s incessant production of antagonistic cultural forms, and of lyric poetry’s fundamental ability to accommodate internal opposition at the formal level. The intrinsic ambivalence of poetic form makes it a particularly effective discourse for examining war’s overwhelming contradictions. This introduction will proceed first with a descriptive and contextual account of my formalist critical method. Then I briefly lay out a more detailed account of the concept of poetic doubling, and why it is not reducible to mere irony or ambiguity. I then cite two recent literary-critical exemplars that help situate my archive and argument between the major disciplinary lines of Victorian and modernist literatures and the problematic minor classifications of “Georgian Poetry” and “War Poets.” Finally, I briefly summarize my chapters, touching on each poet’s central concerns in regards to the war, and the poetic strategies they use to address them. II. Formalist Versus This is an unabashedly formalist project. It is formalist, though, in two senses of the word, which differ but do not conflict. Raymond Williams usefully accounts for a basic duality built in to the very term in Keywords, first by tracking a split in the development of the root “form” which in English comes to mean two nearly opposite things: “(i) a visible outward 3 shape”; and/or “(ii) an essential shaping principle.” The first sense, as in “mere forms,” and the inexorable “form versus content,” leads to the derisive tone of “formalist” when used to describe the early 20th century Russian school of that name,1 along with the midcentury New Critics, and other critical schools which allegedly attempted to cordon off the individual artwork from its historical context, and the aesthetic generally from the social and political.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • I: Poets in S E Ac P
    POST A REVIEW OF POETRY STUDIES I: Poets ininin SSS eee aaacaccc ppp POST I: POETPOETSS in SPACE edited by Michael Hinds POST is the peer-reviewed e-journal of The Irish Centre for Poetry Studies at the Mater Dei Institute. Issues will be edited alternately by Michael Hinds and Kit Fryatt of the Centre, and will appear on at least a yearly basis. They can be contacted by email at ( [email protected] or [email protected] ). Letters to POST will be considered for publication if they are submitted in electronic form, and with the full address details of the writer. The activities of The Irish Centre for Poetry Studies are supported by the Research Committee of the Mater Dei Institute, for which we are very thankful. POST IIIIII:II ::: POETRY AND EDUCATION will be published in the early Autumn of 2009, edited by Kit Fryatt. POST would like to thank its contributors, peer-reviewers, and supporters. If you would like to be included on the mailing list for POST and The Irish Centre for Poetry studies, email Michael Hinds. Articles are copyright of POSTPOST, unless indicated otherwise. IRA LIGHTMAN 1. Ira Lightman, Spennymoor Surname SSignignignign POST I is showcasing the public poetry projects of Ira Lightman. Images of his works will intervene between some of the essays. The image on the front cover is from his series, Spennymoor Letters. POST I: POETPOETSS IN SPACE CONTENTS EditoriaEditorial:l: Passports to Poetry 999 Michael Hinds Poetry in the subway: Deixis and cognition in a journey through Lisbon 151515 Ana Margarida Abrantes Changing Places and Merging Spaces: the Poetry of Eamonn Wall 414141 Aoileann ni Eigeartaigh “AW.DAH.” An allegoallegoricalrical reading of Maurice Scully’sScully’s Things That Happen 595959 Kit Fryatt Space in Nature, in Mind, and on the Page: Reading W.C.
    [Show full text]
  • Poems by Thomas Hardy Questions by Dr
    Poems by Thomas Hardy Questions by Dr. Boos “Channel Firing” 1. Why does Hardy set this poem in a churchyard? What is the point of using such expressions as “the glebe cow” and “Christes sake”? 2. From whose point of view is the poem told? What is the effect of making “God” a character in the poem? 3. What is the effect of the stanza form and rhythm? 4. What do you make of God’s use of colloquial expression? 5. What dead human being receives the last word, and why is he chosen? 6. Are there droll or humorous aspects to the poem? Even if so, is the poem ultimately lighthearted? 7. What is the meaning of the poem? What is added by the final allusions to “Stourton Tower, / And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge”? “The Oxen” 1. To what legend does the poem refer? Why do you think Hardy chose the legend of the kneeling oxen to represent Chrismas rather than, say, legends of angels or Santa Claus? 2. What are features of the poem’s stanza form, rhythms, and rhymes? Are they appropriate for the topic? Is the poem too short? 3. How is dialogue and direct address used in the poem? What effect do these have? 4. What characterizes Hardy’s word choice? Would his audience have used words such as “barton” and “coomb”? 5. What does Hardy think of the truth of this legend? Why does he say that “I feel” I would go with a messenger reporting this event? 6. What are some implications of the finallLine? Are there beliefs beyond the legend of kneeling oxen in which the poet can have no faith? Or is the final line indeterminate? 7.
    [Show full text]
  • An Analysis of Wilfred Owen's War Poetry in the Light of Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory
    An Analysis of Wilfred Owen's War Poetry in the light of Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory Berna Köseoğlu Assist.Prof.Dr.Berna Köseoğlu Kocaeli University, Department of English Language and Literature, Kocaeli, Turkey Abstract: World War I influenced not only the lives of “the death of Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) at the many people and changed their perspectives towards hands of German machine-gunners in the final week life but also the literary works of the writers and of the Great War has been lamented as one of the altered the tradition in literature. The Poet of World greatest losses in the history of English poetry” [2]. War I, Wilfred Owen, after participating in the army Particularly, the descriptions of the soldiers who lose during the First World War, witnessed the destructive results of the war and produced his poetry regarding their lives during the battles turns out to be his own the terrible outcomes of war when he was a soldier. The tragic end; his own death, in this regard, underlines reflection of war in his poetry proves that he was the reliability and reality of the painful condition of psychologically affected by the war and until his death the soldiers during World War I. in the war, in his poetry, he portrayed how soldiers turned out to be hopeless, helpless, exhausted and In addition, Owen, in his poetry, did not hesitate repressed by the war and why they lost the meaning to criticize implicitly the members of the and joy of life after observing the sufferings of the other government who encouraged the soldiers to join in soldiers and after undergoing a psychological trauma.
    [Show full text]
  • Polygyny: a Study of Religious Fundamentalism Margaret L
    Polygyny: A Study of Religious Fundamentalism Margaret L. Granath Submitted under the supervision of Professor Kathleen Collins to the University Honors Program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, in political science. April 24, 2021 2 Acknowledgements: I would like to give thanks: To Prof. Kathleen Collins, for her guidance throughout the writing process of this work. She took a chance on me when I was a freshman, allowing me to work with her as a research assistant for three years of college until I wrote this thesis under her supervision. I am a better writer, a better researcher, and a better thinker due to her mentorship. To my parents, Al and Teresa. They never restricted what I read as a child (which turned out to be a good thing, because I read Under the Banner of Heaven in 7th grade, which turned into the inspiration for this thesis). Thank you for fostering my curiosity, then and now. To my siblings, Ellica and Kyle, thank you for allowing me to bore you with conversations about religion at dinner. All of my love. To Scott Romano, for delivering various fast foods to me during the writing process—I owe you many. Thank you for always reminding me of my worth (and to take a break). To Morgan McElroy, for his friendship. Editing your papers was a much-needed reprieve. Thank you for being there. To the women of Gamma Phi Beta, for listening each week as I shared the struggles and successes of this writing process.
    [Show full text]
  • 'I Should Want Nothing More': Edward Thomas and Simplicity
    Journal of the British Academy, 7, 89–121. DOI https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/007.089 Posted 4 November 2019. © The British Academy 2019 ‘I should want nothing more’: Edward Thomas and simplicity Chatterton Lecture on Poetry read 1 November 2018 GUY CUTHBERTSON Abstract: In the years before the First World War, the ‘Simple Life’ became somewhat fashionable, and Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was one of those Edwardians who were attracted to simplicity, both as a way of life and as a way of writing. As a book reviewer and biographer, he greatly admired simplicity in literature (as seen in, among others, William Cobbett, W. H. Davies, J. M. Synge and Robert Frost). His prose moved towards plainness, and his poetry is beautifully simple. This simplicity has been problematic, however. His poetry is unsuited to the decoding and exegesis (which might be suited to Modernism) that universities seek to conduct. Academics studying his poetry have allowed themselves to believe that they have found complexity, hidden beneath superficial simplicity, whereas in fact Thomas is a poet of genuine bareness, clear-as-glass honesty, magical brevity and childlike simplicity. His simplicity has been popular, and seems to suit some 21st-century fashions. Keywords: the Simple Life, simplicity, complexity, Edwardians, universities, First World War, Modernism, Robert Frost, William Cobbett, J. M. Synge In the decade or so before the First World War, simplicity became somewhat fashionable—indeed it was a religion for some. This craze is captured rather wonderfully in the Edwardian hit musical The Arcadians (1909), where the central character is given the name ‘Simplicitas’, idyllic Arcady is recreated in London at a successful new health food restaurant and men are ‘keen as a knife / On the simple life’.1 Although some might want it otherwise, Edward Thomas was part of this atmos- phere.
    [Show full text]
  • Your Feet's Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics
    Mad River Review Volume 1 Issue 1 Article 9 2016 Your Feet's Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics William Wilborn Follow this and additional works at: https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/mrr Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Wilborn, W. (2016). Your Feet's Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics, Mad River Review, 1 (1). This Criticism is brought to you for free and open access by CORE Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mad River Review by an authorized editor of CORE Scholar. For more information, please contact library- [email protected]. Wilborn: Your Feet's Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics WILLIAM WILBORN Your Feet’s Too Big: Downsizing English Metrics Classical English metrics, as in Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, is a method of grouping the local rhythms of language into two ascending levels of organization, the foot and the line or verse. Unfortunately our understanding of this method has long been clouded by theory. That is because verse is more like dancing than computation. A gardener at Rydal Mount remembered watching Wordsworth as he composed. In his innocence he reveals the physical basis of practical metrics. Essentially he tells us that for Wordsworth iambic meter was walking: I think I can see him at it now. He was ter'ble thrang [busy] with visitors and folks, you mun kna, at times, but if he could git awa fra them for a spell, he was out upon his gres [grass] walk; He would set his head a bit forrad, and put his hands behint his back. And then he would start bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, stop; then bum, bum, bum, reet down til t'other end [of the walk], and then he'd set down and git a bit o' paper out and write a bit; and then he git up, and bum, bum, bum, and goa on bumming for long enough right down and back agean.
    [Show full text]
  • Some Problems in Prosody
    1903·] Some Problems in Prosody. 33 ARTICLE III. SOME PROBLEMS IN PROSODY. BY PI10PlCSSOI1 R.aBUT W. KAGOUN, PR.D. IT has been shown repeatedly, in the scientific world, that theory must be supplemented by practice. In some cases, indeed, practice has succeeded in obtaining satisfac­ tory results after theory has failed. Deposits of Urate of Soda in the joints, caused by an excess of Uric acid in the blood, were long held to be practically insoluble, although Carbonate of Lithia was supposed to have a solvent effect upon them. The use of Tetra·Ethyl-Ammonium Hydrox­ ide as a medicine, to dissolve these deposits and remove the gout and rheumatism which they cause, is said to be due to some experiments made by Edison because a friend of his had the gout. Mter scientific men had decided that electric lighting could never be made sufficiently cheap to be practicable, he discovered the incandescent lamp, by continuing his experiments in spite of their ridicule.1 Two young men who "would not accept the dictum of the authorities that phosphorus ... cannot be expelled from iron ores at a high temperature, ... set to work ... to see whether the scientific world had not blundered.'" To drive the phosphorus out of low-grade ores and convert them into Bessemer steel, required a "pot-lining" capable of enduring 25000 F. The quest seemed extraordinary, to say the least; nevertheless the task was accomplished. This appears to justify the remark that "Thomas is our modem Moses";8 but, striking as the figure is, the young ICf.
    [Show full text]
  • Music Inspired by the Works of Thomas Hardy
    This article was first published in The Hardy Review , Volume XVI-i, Spring 2014, pp. 29-45, and is reproduced by kind permission of The Thomas Hardy Association, editor Rosemarie Morgan. Should you wish to purchase a copy of the paper please go to: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ttha/thr/2014/00000016/0 0000001/art00004 LITERATURE INTO MUSIC: MUSIC INSPIRED BY THE WORKS OF THOMAS HARDY Part Two: Music composed after Hardy’s lifetime CHARLES P. C. PETTIT Part One of this article was published in the Autumn 2013 issue. It covered music composed during Hardy’s lifetime. This second article covers music composed since Hardy’s death, coming right up to the present day. The focus is again on music by those composers who wrote operatic and orchestral works, and only mentions song settings of poems, and music in dramatisations for radio and other media, when they were written by featured composers. Hardy’s work is seen to have inspired a wide variety of music, from full-length operas and musicals, via short pieces featuring particular fictional episodes, to ballet music and purely orchestral responses. Hardy-inspired compositions show no sign of reducing in number over the decades. However despite the quantity of music produced and the quality of much of it, there is not the sense in this period that Hardy maintained the kind of universal appeal for composers that was evident during the last two decades of his life. Keywords : Thomas Hardy, Music, Opera, Far from the Madding Crowd , Tess of the d’Urbervilles , Alun Hoddinott, Benjamin Britten, Elizabeth Maconchy In my earlier article, published in the Autumn 2013 issue of the Hardy Review , I covered Hardy-inspired music composed during Hardy’s lifetime.
    [Show full text]
  • Thomas Hardy Poems
    1 Thomas Hardy Poems Thomas Hardy (1840 1928) was an English novelist and poet. After a successful writing career that included such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), his last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895) was roundly condemned by the church as immoral. After that, Hardy concentrated on writing poetry. In 1898 he published Wessex Poems; he continued to publish poetry throughout the rest of his life. “The Man He Killed” (1909) Had he and I but met By some old ancient inn, We should have set us down to wet Right many a nipperkin! But ranged as infantry, 5 And staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, And killed him in his place. I shot him dead because— Because he was my foe, 10 Just so: my foe of course he was; That's clear enough; although He thought he'd 'list, perhaps, Off-hand like—just as I— Was out of work—had sold his traps— 15 No other reason why. Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down You'd treat, if met where any bar is, Or help to half a crown. 20 Neutral Tones (1898) We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod; —They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove 5 2 Over tedious riddles solved years ago; And some words played between us to and fro On which lost the more by our love.
    [Show full text]
  • The Poet's Corpus WILFRED OWEN WAS AN
    CHARLES HUNTER JOPLIN The Poet’s Corpus Meter, Memory, and Monumentality in Wilfred Owen’s “The Show” The treatment worked: to use one of his favorite metaphors, [Owen] looked into the eyes of the Gorgon and was not turned to stone. In due course the nightmares that might have destroyed him were objectified into poetry. —Dominic Hibberd, Wilfred Owen: A New Biography WILFRED OWEN WAS AN ENGLISH POET who wrote his best work during the autumn of 1917 while recovering from shell shock in Craiglockhart War Hospital for Neurasthenic Officers. Although a few of his poems were published during his short lifetime, Owen died on November 8, 1918 in the Sambre-Oise Canal, before he could publish his book of war poetry. Owen’s body of work was collected by his mother and seven of those poems were edited by Edith Sitwell and published in a special edition of the avant-garde art magazine Wheels: 1919, which was dedicated to the memory of “Wilfred Owen, M.C.” (Stallworthy 81; v.). Following the Wheels edition, Owen’s war poetry spread slowly throughout the Western world. His work appeared in two separate collections in 1920 and 1931, saw widespread circulation during World War II, formed the basis for Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in 1962, circulated in two more collections in 1963 and 1983, and rose to become a staple of twentieth century poetry anthologies (Stallworthy 81). Although there are other “trench poets” who achieved notoriety after the war’s end, the gradual canonization of Owen’s corpus has entrenched his life and works as a literary monument to our prevailing myths, feelings, and narratives of the First World War.1 Owen’s monumental status in English literature is appropriate because, during his time as a war poet, he carried a monumental mission.
    [Show full text]
  • EDWARD THOMAS: Towards a Complete Checklist of His
    Edward Thomas: A Checklist © Jeff Cooper EDWARD THOMAS Towards a Complete Checklist Of His Published Writings Compiled by Jeff Cooper First published in Great Britain in 2004 by White Sheep Press Second edition published on-line in 2013; third edition, 2017 © 2013, 2017 Jeff Cooper All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied or reproduced for publication or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior permission of the copyright owner and the publishers. The rights of Jeff Cooper to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Preface This is the third edition, with some additions and amendments (and a complete re-numbering), of the edition originally published in 2004 under Richard Emeny’s name, with myself as the editor. The interest in Edward Thomas’s poetry and prose writings has grown considerably over the past few years, and this is an opportune moment to make the whole checklist freely available and accessible. The intention of the list is to provide those with an interest in Thomas with the tools to understand his enormous contribution to criticism as well as poetry. This is very much a work in progress. I can’t say that I have produced a complete or wholly accurate list, and any amendments or additions would be gratefully received by sending them to me at [email protected]. They will be incorporated in the list and acknowledged.
    [Show full text]
  • Definitions & Identify 1. Which of the Following Is A
    Check for Understanding: Definitions & Identify 1. Which of the following is a definition of an iamb? (Short = unstressed, long = stressed) a. 1 short syllable followed by another short syllable b. 1 short syllable followed by a long syllable c. 1 long syllable followed by another long syllable d. 1 long syllable followed by a short syllable 2. Which of these words is an iamb? a. Employ b. Coffee c. Drinking d. Eat 3. Which of these words is not an iamb? a. Unfit b. Unwell c. Behold d. Freedom 4. What is the definition of a metrical foot? a. A syllable b. A group of 5 or more syllables c. A rhyme scheme in a poem d. A group of 2-3 syllables that form a rhythmic unit 5. All of these are types of metrical feet except – a. Iamb b. Trochee c. Spondee d. Taradactyl e. Dactyl 6. True or False: A metrical foot can only be one word. a. True b. False 7. True or False: An iamb must be more than one word. a. True b. False 8. True or False: Poems that rhyme have meter. a. True b. False 9. True or False: Poems that do not rhyme have meter. a. True b. False 10. True or False: A poem’s meter cannot change throughout a poem. a. True b. False Answer KEY 1. Which of the following is a definition of an iamb? (Short = unstressed, long = stressed) a. 1 short syllable followed by another short syllable b. 1 short syllable followed by a long syllable c.
    [Show full text]