Reading Poetry: An Introduction

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
Part One: Formal Introduction
1. What Is Poetry? How Do We Read It?
Received Ideas and Common Assumptions
Poetry As Expression – the Experience of Its Speaker?
Poetry as a Response in the Reader?
Poetry and the World: The Poem as a Representation of Life?
Reading for the Message?
Romantic Poetry
Close Reading and the Language of Poetry
The Lineation of Poetry
Poetry and Meaning
The Poet’s Intention
And Now for Something Completely Different
Readers’ Assumptions and the Reading Experience
2. Rhythm and Metre
We’ve All Got Rhythm
Written Poetry and the Traces of Poetry’s Oral Origins
Have You Got Rhythm?
What is Rhythm?
What is Metre?
The Syllable as the Basic Unit of Rhythm in Language
Four-beat Metres
Five-beat Metres
Free Verse
Prose Poems?
3. Significant Form: Metre and Syntax
Form and Content
Anglo-American New Criticism
The Double Pattern
Double Syntax
Reader Response Theory and Poetic Form
Significant Form and the Temporal Nature of Reading
Concrete Poetry
The Double Pattern and the Romantic Imagination
4. Creative Form and the Arbitrary Nature of Language
End-rhymes and the Ends of Rhyme
End-rhyme and Poetic Endings
The Arbitrary Nature of Language
Neoclassicism: Language as the Dress of Thought
Romanticism: Language as the Body of the Spirit
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Parallelism
Foregrounding and Defamiliarisation
Roman Jakobson: The Poetic Function
Parallelism in Robert Browning’s ‘Meeting at Night’
Peculiar Language
Christina Rossetti and the Play of the Signifier
Part Two: Textual Strategies
5. Figurative Language
Figurative Language: the Acid Test
Metonymy and Synecdoche
Metaphor
The Analysis of Metaphor: Tenor, Vehicle, Ground
Simile
Explicit and Implicit Metaphors
Metaphors as Different Parts of Speech
The Transfer of Connotations
The Cognitive Power of Metaphor
Dead Metaphor and Poetic Metaphor
Metaphor in Poetry
The Political Possibilities of Poetic Metaphor
Poetic Symbol
Poetic Allegory
Poetic Apostrophe
6. Poetic Metaphor
Metaphor in the Renaissance
The Metaphysical Conceit: John Donne
Eighteenth-century Metaphor: Neoclassicism
Romantic Metaphor
Metaphor in Victorian Poetry
Modernism and Metaphor
7. Hearing Voices in Poetic Texts
Voices from Beyond the Grave
Voice and Genre
Voices in Narrative Poetry
The Speech Situation: Voices in Lyric Poems
Voices in Dramatic Poetry
The Dramatic Lyric, the Addressee and the Reader
The Dramatic Monologue
Challenges to Reading Poetry as Speech: Modernism and Intertextuality
Chapter 8. Speakers with Attitude: Tone and Irony
Tone in Speech
Tone in Writing?
Verbal Irony
Situational or Structural Irony
Dramatic Irony
Tone in Narrative Poetry
Political Irony in Lyrics
New Critical and Deconstructive Ironies
Undecidable Ironies and Sexual Politics
‘Romantic’ and ‘postmodern’ Irony
9. Ambiguity
The Dream of Single Meaning and Perfect Communication
Ambiguity as Characteristic of the Language of Poetry
Ambiguity and Obscurity
Ambiguity and Ambivalence
Ambiguity and Multiple Meaning
Ambiguity as a Form of Multiple Meaning
Ambiguity as ‘Either/Or’ or ‘Both/And’?
Lexical and Syntactical Ambiguity
Homonyms and Polysemous Words
Ambiguity of Connotations as Well as Denotations?
A Word of Caution
New Criticism: Interpreting Ambiguity as Organic Unity
The ‘Duck–Rabbit Effect’ of Strong Ambiguity
Part Three: Texts in Contexts/Contexts in Texts
10. Introducing Contexts
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and the Intertextual Context of Romanticism
Resisting the Literary Tradition: The Neoclassical Context
Periodisation: Constructing Contexts
Genre
Other Kinds of Context
‘September Song’: A Contextual Reading
11. Genre
Genres in General
Genres with Fixed Forms: The Limerick
Neoclassical Genre Theory
Recognising a Poem’s Genre: The Ballad as an Example
Genres in History: The History of a Genre
A Family of Related Genres: Towards a Literary System
The Literary System
Structuralist Theories of Genre
Literary Competence
Genres as Discourse: Tzvetan Todorov
Chapter 12. The Sonnet
The Sonnet as a Fixed Form
Finding the Volta: Form and Meaning
Identifying the Speaker
Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’: A Hybrid Form?
Expectation and Variation
A History of the Genre: Petrarchan Conventions
Constructing Voices: An Example from Sir Philip Sidney
Modifying the English Sonnet: John Milton
The Second Coming of the English Sonnet
Finding a Voice: Wordsworth and Milton
Romantic Sonnets: John Keats
The Modern Sonnet
13. Allusion, Influence and Intertextuality
Allusion
Influences and Echoes
The Burden of the Past
The Anxiety of Influence
A Poetry of Their Own?
The Poetics and Politics of Intertextuality
14. Poetry, Discourse, History
Text and Context
Poetry and History: Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’
Poetry and Ideology: Significant Omissions
Poetry as a Discourse in Relation to Discursive Contexts
Reading Marvell’s Ode in the Discursive Context of the Civil War
Debates
15. The Locations of Poetry
‘L’art pour l’art’ (Art for art’s sake)
The Politics of Reading and Writing
The Locations of Poetry
National Poetries
The Undoing of National Traditions
Chapter 16. Post-colonial Poetry
Post-colonial Studies
Hybridity
Post-colonial Literature: Language, History, Place
Post-colonial Poetry: A South African Poem
West Indian Poetry: Making National Traditions
Part Four: An Open-Ended Conclusion
17. Closure, Pluralism and Undecidability
Poetic Closure
Gestalt Reader Response Theory
Critical Pluralism: Positions and Perspectives
Critical Differences and ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’
‘American’ Deconstruction and Indeterminacy
‘French’ Deconstruction and Undecidability
Undecidability, Poetry and Political Responsibility
Glossary
Key to Poems and Passages Discussed or Used for Exercises
Bibliography
Index