How Poetry Has Never Been An Easy Part Of The English Curriculum For Me

Language is a remarkable thing. It can convey every thought, feeling, and emotion with perfect accuracy. Almost exclusively, language has taken awkward, unfit animals out of nature and made them rulers over the earth and many of its elements. When used well, it has the power to change an individual's view of the world, make someone believe they have seen something they have not, and even more astonishingly, look inside one's self and see what exists. If language is mixed with the tempo of music, something new arises; poetry is born. When words and ideas are set to a beat, they can far more subtly convey concepts that would otherwise need to be explicitly stated and the poem can be appreciated more as a whole,

|Spend about 1 hour on this section. Think carefully about the poems before you write your answer. |

Most poems, new and old, almost always have an important message to teach to all those who take the time to read it. Authors use poetic devices to get their message across in creative, yet effective ways. For example, Mary Oliver carefully uses several poetic devices to teach her own personal message to her readers. Oliver’s use of the poem’s organization, diction, figurative language, and title aids in conveying the message of how small, yet vital oxygen is to all living and nonliving things in her poem, “Oxygen.”

A poet hopes that people would appreciate their poem in a way that it is not mistreating the work’s value. In the poem “Introduction to poetry” Billy Collins describes his desires on how students should connect with poems. Collins states that students try to force out meanings out of poems instead of diving in to understand its true nature. The author creates a sensitive yet aggressive tone to convey two ways of poetry appreciation through his use of diction, personification and metaphor.

The conversation between child and parent in the previous paragraph may be a relatable situation for students, but it is not one they often see presented to them poetically. The Crossover is rife with everyday activities such as conversation, texting, doing homework and, of course, playing basketball. These scene present in poetry expose the growing resentment and eventual grief of the protagonist through a variety of figurative language techniques that enforces their importance and power to students in a way the traditional, unconnected anthology poetic does not. By doing this, “The Crossover” opens up a new understanding to students who found understanding poetry both boring and unattainable enter their literary

My English Literature major has helped me to achieve an outstanding level of appreciation, enjoyment, and knowledge of both American and British Literature. As a high school AP English student, I struggled through great works like Hamlet and To the Lighthouse. My teacher’s daily lectures (there was no such thing as class discussion) taught me merely to interpret the works as critics had in the past. I did not enjoy the reading or writing process. As a freshman at Loras, I was enrolled in the Critical Writing: Poetry class. For the first time since grade school, my writing ability was praised and the sharing of my ideas was encouraged by an enthusiastic and nurturing professor. Despite the difficulty of poetry, I enjoyed reading it.

“Introduction to Poetry” and “Traveling Through the Dark,” are poems written by Billy Collins and William Stafford. The poem’s, “Introduction to Poetry”, main conflict is a teacher who tries to get his students to read and appreciate a poem, but what all the students only care about is figuring out what it means. The conflict is highlighted through the many uses of metaphors to help us understand how he wants the students to look and decipher a poem and how they only focus on finding the meaning instead of taking their time to listen and see the art of poetry. William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” describes a driver’s dilemma of deciding whether to throw a dead pregnant deer into the river, or leave it laying on the road where it can cause an accident. In both poems, the use of literary devices such as metaphors, personification, imagery, and diction are effective in making and building up the conflict and reaching the resolution.

Poetry, what first comes to mind? If your anything like me, poetry can seem somewhat monotonous, rather like a locked door exclusive, complicated, and hard to understand. I think poetry tends to be a big game of “Guess what I’m thinking!” and I hate that game. I’m not a mind-reader. I think a lot of people who get excited about poetry are really pretentious. This possibly comes from believing that they actually can guess what other people are thinking. When we think poetry, we tend to know poetry by it’s traditional forms of having sonnets, ballads, often rhyming (but not always) and they tend to have a specific and symmetrical structure (APA). Throughout this essay I wanted to consider poetry through different explorations and how subverting the traditional conventions of poetry might be an effective way of engagement or in an opposing way of demotivating the reader.

Assignment 1.7 Poetry Assessment How does communication change us? 1. Does communication change us? Write a paragraph in which you answer this question and provide at least 3 reasons to support your opinion. In my own personal opinion, communication most definately changes us, and our life. Without communication, We wouldnt be able to talk to and understand our children or whats going on in their life, which could cause many behavioral and emotional problems. Another reason communication changes us, is back in the olddays people used to use horses and telographs to communicate which made it very difficult to get a message across. Now we have the privilage to use social media and technology which makes communication very easy and much faster.

Poetry has a role in society, not only to serve as part of the aesthetics or of the arts. It also gives us a view of what the society is in the context of when it was written and what the author is trying to express through words. The words as a tool in poetry may seem ordinary when used in ordinary circumstance. Yet, these words can hold more emotion and thought, however brief it was presented.

The works of poetry are often underappreciated and overlooked. The stories of plenty are being neglected in the education of our youth. The work of Cathy Song, per say, personally has never come up prior to the assigning of this paper. In Song’s “The Youngest Daughter”, we are introduced to a variety of meanings in which an analysis full of depth is required to clearly interpret and understand what it is that the speaker is attempting to bring across through the use of clever diction. The poem in itself also contains a compilation of carefully puzzle together literary techniques that are taught to be broken down to provide a good understanding of a work of

The anthology is compiled of my favorite poems, and I purposely selected poems with controversial and subjective meanings. Unlike other forms of literature, such as narrations, in which the meaning and language is more direct, poetry tends to be more personal and open to interpretation. In many cases, even the poet never clearly reveals their poem’s true intent, allowing a myriad of theories to formulate. The subjectiveness of poetry allows the audience to develop various interpretations, which also ensures that more people are identify with them through different ways. For example, the meaning of A Girl by Ezra Pound is still debated, and while it is mostly accepted that the poem is based off the myth of Apollo and Daphne, there are still

In the poem “Wild Geese” the writer, Mary Oliver, makes many points about choosing to pursue the way of life one desires. She uses metaphors to make her audience understand her purpose of writing the poem. Oliver’s use of metaphors, ethos, logos, and pathos play a big role in supporting her claim that it is ok to be different and encourage people to find their place in the world. With her poem, Oliver is writing to the people who are discouraged and feel lost in the world. While she writes towards this audience, she also makes it relatable to the general audience.

If she had presented an over detailed, extremely specific and complicated poem, the reader would more than likely be unable to grasp its concept and connect to its underlying meaning. Louise Glück’s use of poetic devices such as rhyme scheme, apostrophe, and imagery, as well as her simplistic and familiar language gives readers the ability to interpret and relate to her poem, “Dead End” in their own, unique

Poetry allows the writer, the reader and even those listening to get a deeper sense of being. It gives us the opportunity to break free from simple and boring routine. If done correctly a poem will done correctly a poem will be able to stir emotion, and create wonder. In order to this however all the part that make up a poem must be in sync. Its tone, diction, imaginary, rhythm, symbolism and subject matter are all critical areas. A good poem will draw an emotional reaction from its audience, whether those are light and upbeat or darker more serious feelings they will come away with a new experience, changed by what they just experienced. Two such poems that embody what a good poem should be are “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath and “Harlem”, also published as “Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes. These poems elevate the experience for reading, listening and writing poetry, and serve as an excellent reference for a poem should be.