Poetry

The “characteristics” of poetry are what separate it as a medium of writing from other forms. Specifically, what does poetry use as part of its forms and functions that different types of writing...

"Get up and Bar the Door" is an anonymous ballad, written in English with some Scots dialect, that appears to date from the seventeenth century. The poet recounts an argument between husband and...

The words "modern" and "modernist" are both disputed descriptions of poetry and several other arts. Matters for dispute include the period covered and the characteristics of modernity and...

In short, what makes a poem a poem is the ability to make the reader feel something. I know that can happen with prose, as well, but it seems to me it must happen with a poem. As has already been...

To examine a poem's style, let's first consider two poems with quite different styles. First, these are the opening lines of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven": Once upon a midnight dreary, while I...

The best starting point when writing a critical appreciation of a poem is to determine what the author's message or theme is. Once you determine this key point, the rest of the paper falls into...

James Reeves's poem "The Sea" uses an extended metaphor to describe the sea as a dog. In the first stanza, the choppy gray sea is characterized as a hungry dog with "clashing teeth and shaggy...

Lyric poetry is relatively short, especially compared to epic poetry, and it makes use of one speaker who presents his or her emotions or state of mind. The sonnet is one of the quintessential...

In general, the titles of long works are italicized or underlined; italicize them when you are typing and underline them when you are writing them out by hand. Likewise, in general, we place the...

Let's begin by taking the poem piece by piece in order to figure out what it means: "This is the Dark Time, My Love" --we can learn a lot by looking at the titles to poems. "Dark Time" has the...

Nowadays, a line of poetry is most commonly called just that, a line. A line can be identified as the string of words before a break, even if a sentence is not complete before the break occurs. A...

The term "poetic language" is used to highlight the differences between poetry and other forms of speech. The specific nature of what is considered poetic varies over period and culture. In those...

Arun Kolatkar, an Indian poet, wrote in both Marathi and English. An exceptional graphic artist, he is considered as the premiere Indian poet. Kaolatkar's poem "An Old Woman" follows a formal...

This intriguingly unique poem has an overall tone and a secondary, middle tone along with a tertiary (third) tone. The overall tone is heard in the first six and last two lines. In between are the...

"Song of a Dream" by Naidu expresses the speaker's vision of a land of truth, love, and peace in a magical wood. Though this place is a dreamscape, not reality, the speaker feels a deep "longing"...

The Elizabethan age ushered in a period of literary freedom and provided grounds for experimentation for the poets. The age was a break away from the tumultuous socioeconomic events of the previous...

Bruce Dawe wrote his poem “Homecoming” in 1968 during the Viet Nam war. The poem is an anti-war poem giving the author’s negative view of his home country Australia’s involvement in the...

First, neither haiku or free verse rely on end rhymes or a set meter for their effect. Second, both are often used to convey emotion. Third, both often have longing or a love of nature as themes. A...

The main similarity between lyric and epic poetry is that they're both primarily concerned with telling stories of one kind or another. Lyric poetry is poetry of the emotions; more often than not,...

Naidu’s “The Bangle Sellers” can be seen as a celebration of Indian womanhood. Naidu celebrates both the women who sell bangles—which are used here as a symbol of the successive stages of Indian...

Popular among the nobility and upper crust during the Renaissance, metrical romances are non-rhyming prose poems that tell a story, usually concluding with a happy ending. Metrical romances do not...

"The Lotus" by Toru Dutt is a beautiful example of a Petrarchan sonnet. In the opening lines, we see a conflict between the rose and the lily flower. The mythological goddess of Love, Aphrodite,...

The first thing I encourage my students to do when reading a new poem for the first time is to read it once to get a sense of the entire text and where it is leading, and then to read it one more...

Gieve Patel's poem "On Killing a Tree" is deeper than the title would leave one to believe. While the depiction of a tree being killed is provided, it is justifiable that Patel is speaking about...

The central message of the poem is that war is a mistaken notion because all people on earth are connected through their common humanity. The poet describes a number of similarities that we share...

The ultimate meaning of "West Indies USA" is in the last three lines, however the entire poem contains the meanings that lead up to the final one. In other words, in "West Indies, USA," the...

All of "The Wife's Lament," a heartfelt elegy for a lost loved one, is written with caesuras. These are wide breaks or pauses in the middle of a line. Along with alliteration, they add a sense of...

Lenrie Peters's poem "Homecoming" is about nostalgia and the inevitability of change. In the opening stanza of the poem, the speaker says that "The present reigned supreme / Like the shallow floods...

As another reviewer stated, "Night of the Scorpion" is not heavy on metaphors. There is more imagery and descriptive detail in the way Nissim Ezekiel presents the anecdote of a scorpion stinging...

It is very common- and easy- to confuse a subject and theme of a literary work, particularly poetry. However, these literary terms have universal meanings across different genres and types of...

"Mr. Nobody" was published in 1947 in The Golden Book of Poetry, a collection of works for children. The poem observes that household responsibilities left undone (oiling the door hinges, closing...

There are many possibilities for analysis in Hayan Charara's poem “Usage.” Let's look at a few examples. First, we might talk about the poem's themes. The most obvious theme is language usage (and...

"Night of the Scorpion" is a poem written in 1965. The poem's speaker uses first person to relate a memory of his mother being bitten on the toe by a scorpion on a rainy night in India. In the...

Juliet Wilson's poem "The Lost Dances of Cranes" reflects on the changeover from endangered species to the development of cities via construction cranes. In this poetic analysis, lines from the...

The speaker seems to be experiencing a loss or absence of personal identity. He feels that he can only see the similarities that he shares with other people, and, despite the fact that his...

In terms of poetry, there are two kinds or forms, based upon the "structure or pattern of organization" that a poet adopts when writing his verse. These are called "open" or "closed" forms. When...

In Agha Shahid Ali’s poem titled “Postcard from Kashmir,” the speaker describes receiving a postcard from his native land, “Kashmir,” a region of the Indian subcontinent. Parts of Kashmir are...

The tone of an author roughly means the same thing as the mood. When examining the tone of a poet, it normally refers to the author's feelings towards the subject. In regards to poetry, on the...

Let's see, I think I'll defer to Mr. Keating here from Dead Poet's Society: We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race....

Polanco’s poem draws a dichotomy between “flowers” which have exchanged their freedom for human care and love (“watered, fed, guarded, admired / but harnessed to a pot of dirt”) with the wild...

The purpose of imagery in poetry is to help get the poet's message across in language that is strong, vivid and very visual. The poet will use words to create images in our heads that help us to...

W. B. Rands, who originated the long-running Boy's Own Paper, was a Victorian author of children's literature and poetry who contributed much to the canon, although little of it has survived to be...

In formalist literary criticism, the important thing is the process by which the work is created. Formalism doesn't engage in evaluating the work in terms of truth or morality. On the other hand,...

A metaphor is a comparison of two unalike things where one thing is said to be another thing. It is usually meant to emphasize some quality of the literal thing that actually exists in a new or...

The poem “Obituary” was written by A.K. Ramanujan. An obituary is usually a tribute to the person who has passed away, featuring the high points of his life. Such is not the case in this poem....

The famous poem "Casey at the Bat" is full of figurative language, as the other educator has pointed out. Let's take a look at a few more examples: Personification is the attribution of human-like...

A literary analysis of a poem asks the reader to examine the title, mood, and writing within a specific poem. The title of Max Ehrmann's poem "Desiderata" originates from the Latin for "something...

In Arun Kolatkar's poem, "An Old Woman," the main theme is about keeping what is important in perspective—in this case, an old woman and her heritage—the land from which she comes. Someone may be...

Sipho Sepamla is a South African poet born in 1932. He wrote during Apartheid and had some of his work banned by the Apartheid regime. Apartheid was a strict and violently enforced system of racial...

Various elements make up the unique voice of a poet or poem, including grammar, syntax and diction, as well as more elusive elements, like outlook and the cadence of the words. In Barbara Hamby's...