William FitzGerald                                                                     Fall 2006
English 220 - Introduction to Literary Study

Homework for Monday, September 22:

To read:

No new assignments of specific poems for this class, in part because I have asked you to produce a short analysis of one of three odes . Instead, you are to reflect upon your encounters with the poems you have recently read and, equally important, to consider your experiences of reading them. Remember, this course is not a study of one particular broad genre (poetry, drama, fiction), historical period, or theme; rather, it is a study of how scholars in English encounter and respond to literary texts. A basic dimension of that 'how' is the act of reading itself. On the whole, those trained in the language arts learn to read differently from others. They focus on the act of reading itself as something complex, something to be learned.

1. These short texts shed some light on the reading process with respect to literature in general and poetry in particular.

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng301/readprocess.htm

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng301/poem1.htm

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng301/poem2.htm


2. At this point (if not well before), you have discovered that poetry is sometimes difficult to read because it has a flow of words quite different from ordinary language. Indeed, poetry is typically recognized as such, as a distinct departure from ordinary language. Poetry exploits features of a language but heightens or distorts those features to some extent. In addition to elements of versification (e.g, meter, rhyme, stanza), poetry also relies for its effects on the syntactic structures of English, often reshaping those structures to rhetorical effect. If you are going to read and understand poetry (and prose too), you will need to know something about English syntax. Our anthology contains a short essay on "Poetic Syntax," p. 1277-98. Read that essay carefully and take notes as you do. For Monday's class, at least, read through page 1289.


To write:

For one of the odes by Keats ("On Melancholy" or "To Autumn") or Shelley ("Ode to the West Wind") listed above, write, as an exercise, a (semi)coherent set of observational notes that address matters of form and, to a lesser extent, interpretation. That is, tell us (an audience of this class) what structures and themes are to be observed in this poem. Pay attention, of course, to choices in meter, rhyme scheme, and stanzaic (ir)regularity, but also note elements of diction and sentence structure; the resources of the line (including the use of  enjambment and caesura); the effect of sound patterns. At a larger level, pay some attention to the overall form of the poem, its organization and development, its tone(s), its division into distinct segments (beyond or within the stanza); its use of figurative language (e.g., metaphor, simile, personification, patterns of repetition). At the level of widest circumference, in which myriad details come together, you will likely make tentative observations about the poem's argument, message, or meaning. At some point, you will find yourself thinking that particular elements is not simply there but also significant, that is, they signify something and contribute to a reader's experience and interpretation of the poem.


To begin, briefly summarize the poem in several sentences (something easier said than done, perhaps); then proceed to make several observations along the lines of the questions I have written above. Finally, feel free to pose your own genuine questions--what intrigues or puzzles you?--about this poem's meaning or purpose. If you have any short, tentative answers to those questions, feel free to sketch them. You will be asked to contribute something to class on the particular poem you choose.

Note: This is an exercise, one of several, in close reading preparatory to a more sustained, formal effort in the first formal essay. Here, your task (in no more than two typed pages) is to test  the variety and volume of things you can observe and comment upon in a poem.

Here are two websites that can help get you started:

http://www.uri.edu/artsci/english/jjj/courses/English_375/assignments/closeReading.html
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/s/a/sam50/closeread.htm