Week 2 WS 8 and 9 Oct
Osnova sekce
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WHAT IS POETRY?
FOUR BASIC TROPES: METAPHOR, SIMILE, METONYMY, SYNECDOCHE
Ted Cohen: "Metaphor is the achievement of intimacy [between writer/text and reader]."
Assignment for WEEK 2
For discussion:
- Think (and prepare written notes) about how you would define POETRY. What are its derining qualities? What distinguishes it from other genres? Are there differences between how poetry is written and read today and how it was composed and experienced in the past? Note down 2 things that you think poetry is not or does not do.
- Read the two poems on Moodle (Shakespeare and Shelley) and make yourselves familiar with their language and contents. Print the poems out or download them to be able to make notes prior to and in the class.
Writing:
- Consult three reputable sources and compose definitions of the terms METAPHOR, METONYMY, SYNECDOCHE and SIMILE, using footnotes to reference your sources. Include a bibliography at the end. The individual definitions should be concise but written in academic prose using complete sentences (not bullet points etc.).
o Are there any significant differences between the definitions of the individual terms you have found?
o Your sources should be print, NOT websites or standard (language) dictionaries (dictionaries of literary terms are fine).
o Try to use your own words as much as you can but include at least three paraphrases and three citations with the sources referenced in the footnotes. Remember that all quotations and paraphrases must be identified in the text”
- use quotation marks for direct quotations
- embed (introduce) your quotations AND paraphrases by relevant introductory tags (as XY argues; writes XY; to use XY’s terms etc.)
- include properly formatted references to your sources in the FOOTNOTES (and in the BIBLIOGRAPHY section at the end)
o All sources on which your definitions draw must be listed (in the footnotes and bibliography sections). Consult the “UALK Chicago Guidelines” to properly format your footnotes and bibliography.
o One short paragraph per term should suffice (approx. 50 to 120 words). Try to be concise and concentrate on the formal aspects of your writing as well as the contents.
o Use the ‘References/Footnotes’ tab to insert your footnotes in your text.
Do not submit your definitions beforehand. We will discuss them IN CLASS.
Some links (optional):
Ted Cohen - Metaphor and Ambiguity: Two for the Price of One (a lecture).
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Studenti musíOznačit jako hotovo
Please note that the homework/assignment for this week (Week 2) will not be collected until later. Prepare your definitions and try to locate the sources but there is no need to submit them at this point.
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Studenti musíOznačit jako hotovo
Some sources on poetry, mentioned in the discussions this week:
- Derek Attridge, The Craft of Poetry: Dialogues on Minimal Interpretation (with Henry Staten)
- John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?
- Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric
- Vona Groarke, Four Sides Full
- Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry
- James Longenbach, The Lyric Now
- Glyn Maxwell, On Poetry & Drinks with Dead Poets: The Autumn Terms
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The New Yorker Fiction Podcast: Teju Cole Reads Anne Carson (with December 1, 2023
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In Poetry: A Very Short Introduction, Bernard O’Donoghue, notes that most theories of poetry (and art as such) in the Western tradition have evolved around the basic distinction between ‘the idea of poetry [...] as either imitative, or transcendent: either imitating lie or reality of nature, or surpassing those things in a way that somehow compensates for their deficiencies’.[1] Other ongoing arguments include the question about which is more important: the sense or the sound of poetry – its semantic or its sonic/material qualities. This is related to the idea that poetry either leads us to deeper knowledge of the world (or self-knowledge), or that it is concerned with providing aesthetic pleasure. Yet another distinction is found in the contrast between Shelley’s famous claim that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’,[2] and W. H. Auden’s counterclaim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.[3] The latter idea is supported by James Longenbach’s argument that ‘the marginality of poetry is in many ways the source of its power, a power contingent on poetry’s capacity to resist itself more strenuously than it is resisted by the culture at large’.[4] Many conceptions of poetry and its role (answers to the questions of ‘What poetry is’ and ‘What it is for’), as you can see below, focus on its universality (despite its marginal status in most modern cultures), or on the importance of language and sound for the way poetry communicates its meaning.
FEEL FREE TO KEEP ADDING TO THIS BANK OF IDEAS ON POETRY – its possibilities as well as limitations!
[Poetry is] the first light-giver to ignorance. — Philip Sidney
Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it. —Percy Bysshe Shelley
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson
Poets fear wisdom. — James Longenbach
Poetry is my deepest health. — Sylvia Plath
Poems are moments’ monuments. — Sylvia Plath
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valéry
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. — Leonard Cohen.
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought, and the thought has found words. — Robert Frost
[Lyric as a form] stands or falls on the accuracy of language with which it reports the author’s emotional responses to the life around him. — Helen Vendler
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. — T. S. Eliot
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words, as the rhythmical creation of beauty. — Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry is a composition of words set to music. Most other definitions of it are indefensible or metaphysical. — E. A. Poe
The poem: a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense. — Paul Valéry
Poet is the One Who, on Behalf of Others and for their Benefit, Maintains a Friendship with Language. — Petr Borkovec
Poetry is words. — A. C. Bradley
Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. — Rita Dove
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. — W. H. Auden
Poetry is the form of supreme locution in any culture. — Joseph Brodsky
[P]oetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere and at all times in hundreds and hundreds of men. [...] National literature is now an unmeaning terms; the epoch of world literature is at hand. — J. W. Goethe
[1] Bernard O’Donoghue, Poetry: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3.
[2] Percy Bysshe Shelley. A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays, 1821, Project Gutenberg (April 2004) accessed October 10 2024, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9097.
[3] W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 242. Auden’s phrase is one of the most disputed statements about poetry in twentieth-century criticism. For a concise summary of the debate, see John Lyon, ‘Disappearing Poetry: Auden, Yeats, Empson’, in The Oxford Hanbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 279–85.
[4] James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1.
- Think (and prepare written notes) about how you would define POETRY. What are its derining qualities? What distinguishes it from other genres? Are there differences between how poetry is written and read today and how it was composed and experienced in the past? Note down 2 things that you think poetry is not or does not do.