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Sample Chapter Contents Acknowledgements ix Preface x PART I APPROACHES TO POETRY 1 Introduction 2 Reading a poem. The approach of the book. The organisation of the book 2 What is poetry 4 A starting point. Activity 2.1 Your thoughts about poetry. What the writers say. Activity 2.2 Poets on poetry. Poetry versus prose. What makes a poem? Activity 2.3 ‘How Do I Love thee?’, Barrett Browning; ‘The Eagle’, Tennyson. 3 Distinctive features of poetry 13 End-stopped lines. Activity 3.1 ‘A Satirical Elegy on the Death of the Late Famous General’, Swift. Run-on lines. Activity 3.2 ‘Morning Work’, D.H. Lawrence. Metre: Stressed and unstressed syllables. Metrical feet. Caesura. Activity 3.3 ‘Binnorie’, Anon; ‘The Lost Leader’, Robert Browning. 4 Poetic form 23 End rhyme. Blank verse. Free verse. Activity 4.1 ‘Ulysses’, Tennyson; ‘A Man Said to the Universe’, Stephen Crane; ‘We’ll Go No More A-Roving’, Byron. Form: The sonnet. Activity 4.2 ‘Amoretti LXXIX’, Spenser; ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, Keats. The villanelle. Activity 4.3 ‘One Art’, Elizabeth Bishop. Haiku. Elegy. Lyric. Ode. Pastoral. Narrative. Activity 4.4 ‘Spellbound’, Emily Brontë; ‘Break, Break, Break’, Tennyson; ‘The Twa Corbies’, Anon; ‘To Autumn’, Keats; ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, Marlowe. 5 Style 48 Diction: Tone. Activity 5.1 ‘If I Shouldn’t Be Alive’, Emily Dickinson. The connotations of words. Word classes. Activity 5.2 ‘Song Making’, Sara Teasdale.Unusual words. Activity 5.3 Contents v An extract from ‘Ghostie Men’, Tom Leonard. Grammar: Phrases. Activity 5.4 ‘Country Life’, Elma Mitchell. Sentence types. Activity 5.5 ‘Work’, D.H. Lawrence; ‘It’s Coming’, Emily Dickinson. Word order. Activity 5.6 ‘A Kill’, Ted Hughes. 6 Literary and rhetorical devices 69 Sound patterning. Activity 6.1 ‘God’s Grandeur’, Gerard Manley Hopkins.Imagery: Literal images. Activity 6.2 An extract from ‘London Snow’, Robert Bridges.Figurative language. Activity 6.3 ‘A Red, Red Rose’, Robert Burns. Activity 6.4 ‘You Open Your Hands to Me’, Paula Meehan. Rhetorical devices: Repetition, tripling and parallelism. Activity 6.5 ‘Forgetfulness’, Hart Crane; ‘Epilogue’, Grace Nichols; ‘A Birthday’, Christina Rossetti. Listing, climax and anticlimax, antithesis. Activity 6.6 ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’, Wordsworth. 7 How to read a poem 88 A guide to analysis. Getting started. PART II KEY POETS Introduction: English poets and the English poetic tradition 94 8 The beginnings of the English poetic tradition 96 The literary context. Religious verse: Activity 8.1 Extracts from ‘The Vision of Piers Plowman’, William Langland. Old English heroic verse and medieval romance: Activity 8.2 Extracts from a modern verse translation of Beowulf. Activity 8.3 Extracts from Gawain and the Green Knight. The beginnings of the English poetic tradition. 9 Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400) 113 Chaucer’s world. The literary context. Chaucer’s work. The Canterbury Tales: The General Prologue. Activity 9.1 The opening of ‘The General Prologue’. Activity 9.2 Extracts from ‘The General Prologue’: the Franklin and the Miller. The tales. Studying a tale. Activity 9.3 An extract from ‘The Miller’s Tale’. Chaucer and the English poetic tradition. 10 Poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 133 The literary context. Elizabethan verse: Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99). Activity 10.1 Extracts from The Faerie Queene. Shakespeare’s sonnets. The Metaphysical poets: John Donne (1572–1631). Activity 10.2 ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’. George Herbert (1593–1633) and Henry Vaughan (1621–95). The Metaphysicals and the English poetic tradition. John Milton (1608–74): Paradise Lost. Samson Agonistes. Milton and the English poetic tradition. Activity 10.3 An extract from Paradise Lost. Restoration poetry: John Dryden (1631–1700). The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the English poetic tradition. vi Contents 11 Poetry of the eighteenth century 172 The literary context. The Augustans. Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Activity 11.1 An extract from The Rape of the Lock. The reflective tradition. The Augustans and the English poetic tradition. 12 Poetry of the nineteenth century 183 The literary context. The Romantics: William Blake (1757–1827). Activity 12.1 ‘The Nurse’s Song’. Wordsworth, Coleridge and the principles of Romanticism. William Wordsworth (1770–1850). Activity 12.2 An extract from The Prelude. Lord George Byron (1788–1824) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). John Keats (1795–1821). Activity 12.3 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The Romantic poets and the English poetic tradition. The Victorians: Poetry and the role of the poet. The content. The poetry of escape and the ‘individual moment’. The dramatic monologue. Style. The Victorians and the English poetic tradition. Activity 12.4 ‘Dover Beach’, Matthew Arnold. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889): Influences. Attitudes to poetry. Language and structure. The content. Hopkins and the English poetic tradition. Activity 12.5 ‘The Windhover’. 13 Poetry of the twentieth century 241 The literary context. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928). The literary context. The content. Language, structure and style. Thomas Hardy and the English poetic tradition. Activity 13.1 ‘The Voice’. The War poets: Rupert Brooke (1887–1915). Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967). Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). The War poets and the English poetic tradition. Activity 13.2 ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, Wilfred Owen. W.B. Yeats (1865–1939): The literary context. The development of Yeats’s work. Yeats’s approach to writing. Yeats’s beliefs. Content and themes. Style. Imagery and symbolism. Structure. Yeats and the English poetic tradition. Activity 13.3 ‘Meru’. T.S. Eliot (1888–1965): The literary context. The development of Eliot’s verse. Eliot’s approach to poetry. Content and themes. Style. Imagery and symbolism. Poetic form. Eliot and the English poetic tradition. Activity 13.4 An extract from The Waste Land. Dylan Thomas (1914–53): The literary context. Thomas’s approach to poetry. Content and themes. Images and symbols. Poetic form. Style. Dylan Thomas and the English poetic tradition. Activity 13.5 ‘Fern Hill’. Neo-Romanticism and its alternatives: The New Apocalypse. Alternatives to Neo- Romanticism. Activity 13.6 ‘Invocation’, Kathleen Raine. Philip Larkin (1922–85): The literary context. The development of Larkin’s work. Attitudes to poetry. Content and themes. Poetic voice and style. Imagery. Poetic form. Larkin and the English poetic tradition. Activity 13.7 ‘Here’. Ted Hughes (1930–98): The literary context. The development of Hughes’s work verse. Contents vii Hughes’s approach to poetry. Hughes, nature and the inner life. Content and themes. Images and symbols. Poetic form. Style. Ted Hughes and the English poetic tradition. Activity 13.8 ‘Red’. Women poets 1960–90: The emergence of a strong women’s tradition. Single-gender anthologies. The groundbreakers. Sylvia Plath (1932–63). Women poets of the 1970s and 1980s. The search for an appropriate voice. The dramatic monologue. Content and themes. Language, style and tone. Women poets and the English poetic tradition. Activity 13.9 ‘Because She Has Come’, Grace Nichols. 14 Into the twenty-first century 386 Poems written to mark a public event: Activity 14.1 ‘Everyday Eclipses’, Roger McGough; ‘R.S.’, Gillian Clarke; ‘Regime Change’, Andrew Motion. Poems written to mark a private experience: Activity 14.2 ‘Seeing the Sick’, Seamus Heaney; ‘White Writing’, Carol Ann Duffy; ‘Ultrasound’, Kathleen Jamie. Where next? Glossary 405 Wider reading 425 Index 429 viii Contents Part I Approaches to poetry 1 Introduction Poetry is perhaps the most distinctive literary genre in terms of its presentation on the page, its structural conventions, and its often unexpected approach to language and syntax. For these very reasons it is both challenging and exciting. This book aims to help you unravel the complexities so that you can enjoy your experience of poetry whether you are reading it for pleasure or as part of an exam- ination syllabus. Reading a poem On first reading, we respond to a poem at a personal level. We may engage with the ideas, empathise with the poet’s attitudes, relish the sound of the words, or be fascinated by the lexical choice – we may even be bewildered. All of these are valid first responses, but where do we go from this starting point? Poems are complex texts that merit closer reading. They are ‘products’ created by a poet who wishes, perhaps, to explore universal feelings and attitudes, or to express a personal response to a particular event, place or occasion. They are ‘products’ in the sense that poems, on the whole, do not just ‘happen’ – they are crafted, consciously composed from words, grammatical structures, poetic devices and forms. The poet makes decisions and each of these decisions will have an effect on the final work. This book will help you to look at a poet’s decisions, moving beyond your first response to an analytical assessment that will enhance your understanding. You will become an active reader, able to look more closely at the techniques a poet uses and the effects they create. The approach of the book Beginning with the assumption that how a poet says something is as important as what he or she says, this book aims to use close reading techniques to explore the ways in which poets communicate with their readers. Words may be chosen according to their sound, their meaning, their function or their relationship with the words around them. They are used within syntactical structures and, on a larger scale, within the conventions of poetic form. It would therefore seem logi- cal that, once we have familiarised ourselves with the general ideas of a poem, we must look more closely at the language and structure. 2 Approaches to poetry By combining the benefits of language study with traditional literary approaches, you will be able to explore the relationship between poets and their material, words and their effects, meaning and structure.
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  • Robert Browning 1 Robert Browning
    Robert Browning 1 Robert Browning Robert Browning Robert Browning during his later years Born 7 May 1812 Camberwell, London, England Died 12 December 1889 (aged 77) Venice, Italy Occupation Poet Notable work(s) The Ring and the Book, Men and Women, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess Signature Robert Browning (7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889) was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets. Early years Robert Browning was born in Camberwell - a district now forming part of the borough of Southwark in South London, England - the only son of Sarah Anna (née Wiedemann) and Robert Browning.[1][2] His father was a well-paid clerk for the Bank of England, earning about £150 per year.[3] Browning’s paternal grandfather was a wealthy slave owner in Saint Kitts, West Indies, but Browning's father was an abolitionist. Browning's father had been sent to the West Indies to work on a sugar plantation, but revolted by the slavery there, he returned to England. Browning’s mother was a daughter of a German shipowner who had settled in Dundee, and his Scottish wife. Browning had one sister, Sarianna. Browning's paternal grandmother, Margaret Tittle, who had inherited a plantation in St Kitts, was rumoured within the family to have had some Jamaican mixed race ancestry. Author Julia Markus suggests St Kitts rather than Jamaica.[4][5] There is little evidence to support this rumour, and it seems to be merely an anecdotal family story.[6] Robert's father, a literary collector, amassed a library of around 6,000 books, many of them rare.
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