Poetry 2-1: Understanding the Text
Walt Whitman’s “I Celebrate myself, and sing myself”
"Song of Myself" is a poem by Walt Whitman that is included in his work Leaves of Grass. It has been credited as "representing the core of Whitman’s poetic vision."
The Carpe Diem poem: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”
"To His Coy Mistress" is a metaphysical poem written by the English author and politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the Interregnum.
This poem is considered one of Marvell's finest and is possibly the best recognized carpe diem poem in English. Although the date of its composition is not known, it may have been written in the early 1650s. At that time, Marvell was serving as a tutor to the daughter of the retired commander of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax.
Setting: Matthew Arnold - “Dover Beach”
"Dover Beach" is a short lyric poem by the English poet Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1867 in the collection New Poems, but surviving notes indicate its composition may have begun as early as 1849. The most likely date is 1851. The title, locale and subject of the poem's descriptive opening lines is the shore of the English ferry port of Dover, Kent, facing Calais, France, at the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part (21 miles) of the English Channel, where Arnold honeymooned in 1851.
The Aubade: John Donne’s “The Good-Morrow”
"The Good-Morrow" is a poem by John Donne, published in his 1633 collection Songs and Sonnets. Written while Donne was a student at Lincoln's Inn, the poem is one of his earliest works and is thematically considered to be the "first" work in Songs and Sonnets. Although referred to as a sonnet, the work does not follow the most common rhyming scheme of such works—a 14-line poem, consisting of an eight-line stanza followed by a six-line conclusion—but is instead 21 lines long, divided into three stanzas. "The Good-Morrow" is written from the point of view of an awaking lover and describes the lover's thoughts as he wakes next to his partner. The lover's musings move from discussing sensual love to spiritual love as he realises that, with spiritual love, the couple are liberated from fear and the need to seek adventure. The poem makes use of biblical and Catholic writings, indirectly referencing the legend of the Seven Sleepers and Paul the Apostle's description of divine, agapic love – two concepts with which, as a practising Catholic, Donne would have been familiar.
W. H. Auden’s “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”
"Funeral Blues" or "Stop all the clocks" is a poem by W. H. Auden. An early version was published in 1936, but the poem in its final, familiar form was first published in The Year's Poetry.
Rhetorical situation
The rhetorical situation is the context of a rhetorical event that consists of an issue, an audience, and a set of constraints. Three leading views of the rhetorical situation exist today. One argues that a situation determines and brings about rhetoric, another proposes that rhetoric creates “situations” by making issues salient, and yet another explores the rhetor as an artist of rhetoric, creating salience through a knowledge of commonplaces.
Tone (literature)
Tone is a literary compound of composition, which encompasses the attitudes toward the subject and toward the audience implied in a literary work. Tone may be formal, informal, intimate, solemn, somber, playful, serious, ironic, condescending, or many other possible attitudes. Works of literature are often conceptualized as having at least one theme, or central question about a topic; and how the theme is approached within the work constitutes the work's tone.
Dactyl (poetry)
A dactyl is a foot in poetic meter. In quantitative verse, often used in Greek or Latin, a dactyl is a long syllable followed by two short syllables, as determined by syllable weight. In accentual verse, often used in English, it is a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables—the opposite is the anapaest (two unstressed followed by a stressed syllable).
Theme and tone
Theme is what the poem says about its topic; tone is its attitude toward its topic.
Brevity
Concise and exact use of words in writing or speech.
Discipline
The practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.
Personification
The attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form.
Diction
The choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing.
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