Poetic+Language

=Poetic Language=

In no other form of literature are words so important as in poetry. As you study the language of poetry - its freshness, precision, and beauty - you can learn ways in which to use words effectively in your own prose writing.

What Do the Words Suggest?
Your sensitivity to poetic language will ve enhanced if you learn a few terns used in literary criticism.

Connotation and Denotation
"I crawled back to him." What do those five words mean to you? You may picture a scene of a battle or adventure in which one person must move to another on hands and knees. Or you may envision an emotional scene in which a spurned lover accepts a humiliating reconciliation. Which scene you picture depends on whether you are thinking of the denotative or connotative meaning of the word crawl. The first choice uses the denotative meaning - the definition of crawl that you would find in a dictionary. The second choice involves the connotative meaning of the word - the meaning that carries the emotional weight. For another example of the imprortance of connotation, consider the variations in emotional message in the following three statements:

I lost. I was defeated. I was mastered.

Connotation is the reason a cashier at Disney World is called a Merchandise Host. You might, if you wanted to be facetious, consider your teacher in this course as a Written Communications Group Consultant. These are //euphemisms//, which substitute words with high-class connotations for plain-sounding words.

Figures of Speech, Imagery, Symbol, and Paradox
Merchandise Host is a figure of speech, a variation of the usual denotative way words would be used. Figures of speech show up all the time in our everyday talk, but even more frequently in poetic language. Three kinds that you should know so that you can analyze and write about poetry are //metaphor//, //simile//, and //personification//. Metaphor and simies are comparisons that make use of the connotative values of words. When Shakespeare writes to a young lover that, "Thy eternal summer shall not fade," he is comparing her youth to the joys of summertime. In "Dulce Et Decorum Est," a compelling anti-war poem, Wilifred Owen used the metaphors "drunk with fatigue, "blood-shod", "like old beggars under sacks", "coughing like hags", "flound'ring like a man in fire or line,"and "his hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin." The last four of these singularly grim comparisons would usually be called similes because they include the connective //like//, but you can also find similes that use //as// and other explicitly comparative words. "Daylight is nobody's friend," writes Anne Sexton in a metaphor that compares daylight to a friend, but more exactly it is a //personification//, because it makes a nonhuman thing sound like a human being. T.S. Eliot uses personification when he writes "...the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully," as does Andrew Marvell in "fate with jealous eyes does see." Perhaps personification is so widely used in poetry because it gives us a clear image of something otherwise vague or abstract, like daylight or fate. //Imagery// is the term we use to speak of these sensory impressions literature gives us. Robert Frost, in a famous poem, describes a sleigh driver "...stopping here/ To watch his woods fill up with snow," providing a visual image that most readers find easy to picture. In the same poem, Frost gives us an apt auditory image: "The only other sound's the sweep/ Of easy wind and downy flake." And anyone who has spent time in a big airport agrees with Yvor Winter's image of one: "...the light gives perfect vision, false and hard;/ The metal glitters, deep and bright." A //symbol// is an image that becomes so suggestive that it takes on much more meaning tan its descriptive value. The connotations of the words, repetition, placement, or other indications of emphasis elp identify an image as a symbol. Blue skies and fresh spring breezes can certainly be just that, but they can also symbolize freedom. Look at the first stanza of a W.H. Auden poem:

As I walked out one evening Walking down Bristol Street The people on the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat

The image in lines 3 and 4 is descriptive: you cn evision a crowd of moving people seeming to ripple like wheat. The observation is also symbolic, because harvest wheat is just about to be cut down; the rest of the poem endorses a rather dim view of human hopes and dreams. The same poem says, "You shall love your crooked neighbor/ With your crooked heart." An inexperienced reader might say, "Now, that doesn't make any sense! Crooked heart and love seem contradictory." Others, though, would be sensitive to the paradox in those lines. A //paradox// is a phrase or statement that on the surface seems contradictory but makes some kind of emotional sense. Looking back at Yvor Winters description of the San Franciso airport at night, you will find the phrase "perfect vision, false and hard." How can perfect vision be false instead of true? Only as a paradox. So are "the sounds of silence", "grim humor", "lonely in a crowd", "icy hot saxophone work."

//Source: Literature and the Writing Process: Second Edition//