TERMS TO KEEP IN MIND

TERMS TO KEEP IN MIND

The “I” of the poem is not the poet but someone who knows a great deal about the poet (Bell)

Narrative and lyric poetry

Prosody—rhythm of the human voice

Sound and rhythm

Image—uses concrete specific language (vs. abstract)

Metaphor or simile (like, as)

Tone and diction

Phrases—prepositional, participial

Chunking—syntactic units that drive the rhythm in a poem

Added or coordinated sentences (paratactic)

Subordinated sentences (hypotactic)

Noun style--nominalizations

Verb style—uses strong verbs

Lexicon—words

Plain colloquial rhetoric or conversational speech—one of American's great accomplishments (Bell)

Monosyllabic (Anglo-Saxon) words of one syllable

Polysyllabic (Latinate) words of more than one syllable

Adjectives are subjective, give evidence of the eye, the I of the poet (e.g., Sylvia Plath's poem)

Form (envelope)

Texture—"invisible stitching"

Stanza

Lineation—lines, linearity

Stress—rhetorical, accentual, or lexical (covered later)

Incantation or repetition

Parallel structure—adds stability

Tension—in a long sentence or in short choppy phrases (but all tension can equal no tension)

1st person singular, simple present tense—gives poem immediacy and strength

Alliteration—assonance and consonance

Sibilance

Rhyme—internal, end, or slant

Enjambment—line runs over (creating an orphaned line)

Caesura—mid-line break; punctuation creates a pause or stop

Anaphora—repeated word or phrase often at the beginning of a line

Kenning—creating a new word, "whistle-clean"

Volta or turn in a poem

Human body—a natural measure

Order and disorder, strain and tension, compression and elaboration— balancing opposites

"I strive for a transparency of surface," Kunitz tells us, "but I should be disappointed if my work yielded all its substance and tonality at first reading:"

"One thing that poems do," Bell reminds us, "is to give a phrase or sentence or thought more meaning. Or to find out how much more it meant all along." '

Carl Dennis recognizes that "the impulse to modify the tradition...is built into the tradition itself."