Poetry quiz study guide
He wrote in order for his work to be read - he wanted/expected fame, a legacy, and for his work to carry
Outgoing and extravagant - didn’t believe in limitations, which shines through in his free verse writing (he felt like metric pattern was restrictive, didn’t allow him to get his intended message across)
His work was radically different from traditional poetry at the time, which troubled those who liked tradition and raised questions about the definition of poetry
Poetry was then considered high art by and for educated people - Whitman was not educated himself and wanted to make poetry more accessible to the average person
Known to contradict himself often
Liked lists (catalogs)
He had experience with both country life and city (Brooklyn) life
He had travelled throughout developing America - had positive ideas about the frontier/Manifest Destiny and LOVED democracy
He was a journalist - a keen observer of people
His collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, flopped originally b/c of its newness and strangeness, but he self-promoted and eventually got endorsement of Ralph Waldo Emerson - LoG occupied his entire life w/ republishing
Thumbs his nose at English traditional writing and uses casual American language in his poems
Chose the Anglo-Saxon word over the Latin, the rude word over the elegant, loved slang
He writes about things he observes in everyday life, not imaginative like Poe
Believed himself to be a spokesperson for the masses - the first urban poet
Celebrates brotherhood and unity (and manly love) often
Was born into a strict religious family and went to a monastery school but left within a year because she was deemed hopeless to become a pronounced Christian (she believed that calling herself a sinner would go against her beliefs because it wouldn’t be true to her own self-image)
She had fallen in love with a married man, then went on a trip with her congressman father and fell in love with another married man (Charles Wadsworth) who she saw as a muse
After the pain of losing two loves, she withdrew completely from social life and spent the rest of her life writing poetry by herself - she always wore bridal white
Her family was affluent - she could afford the luxury of living at home and never marrying for economic reasons
Didn’t hope/want to have an audience (“I’m Nobody!”)
Only published a few poems anonymously during her lifetime and willed her family to burn all her poems when she died, but they found bundles of poems in her things and published them
She likes metaphors - she takes aspects of daily life (mundanity) and presents them as metaphors for profound life concepts/lessons
Imaginative, but also practical
Though she was seen by some to be mad, she was doing her hermit thing entirely by choice and was (probably) completely sane - her emotional turmoil should come second to her genius
Writes with meter and traditional literary devices at the core, but violates the traditional form
Uses unconventional capitalization and punctuation
Nonconformity in her writing as well as in her life:
Rejected church doctrine (her rhythms come from hymns but she disrupts them with frequent dashes and enjambments)
Read female authors and came up with her own way of doing things, never married, challenged the way women were viewed
Colloquialism - words working-class people use (not King’s English)
Cadence - the natural rise and fall of speaking voice
Free verse - poetry without rhyme scheme or metric pattern
Catalogs - lists
Parallel structure - used to make lists better literature and less boring
Anaphora - the repeating of words/phrases at the beginning of lines
Consonance - the repeating of consonant sounds (often hand in hand with alliteration)
Assonance - the repeating of vowel sounds (sometimes hand in hand with rhyme)
Enjambment - the continuation of a sentence w/o pause or punctuation beyond the end of a line onto the next
Part of how Emily Dickinson violated traditional structure - when her thought exceeded the syllable limitation of her metric pattern, she used enjambment and continued her thought
Synesthesia - an intermingling of senses - describing one sense in terms of another
Apostrophe - lines of verse addressing an absent/dead person or abstract idea
Perfect rhyme - the repetition of similar sounds on the accented and all successive syllables of words
Slant rhyme - repetition of similar sounds on the non-stressed syllables, or words with similar but not identical sounds
Metonym - a comparison between two like things to give more meaning to one of them, substituting the name of a related object, person, or idea for the subject at hand
Synecdoche - a type of metonym where a part of an object, idea, or the like is used to represent the whole
ex) “To a discerning Eye” - people have eyes - the eyes represent a whole, discerning person
Iamb - u /
trochee - / u
anapest - u u /
dactyl - / u u
spondee - / /
used for exclamations/highly emotional statements - ex) Get lost! Shut up!
Monometer - one accented beat per line
Dimeter - 2 per line
Trimeter - 3 per line
Tetrameter - 4 per line
Pentameter - 5 per line
Hexameter - 6 per line
He wrote in order for his work to be read - he wanted/expected fame, a legacy, and for his work to carry
Outgoing and extravagant - didn’t believe in limitations, which shines through in his free verse writing (he felt like metric pattern was restrictive, didn’t allow him to get his intended message across)
His work was radically different from traditional poetry at the time, which troubled those who liked tradition and raised questions about the definition of poetry
Poetry was then considered high art by and for educated people - Whitman was not educated himself and wanted to make poetry more accessible to the average person
Known to contradict himself often
Liked lists (catalogs)
He had experience with both country life and city (Brooklyn) life
He had travelled throughout developing America - had positive ideas about the frontier/Manifest Destiny and LOVED democracy
He was a journalist - a keen observer of people
His collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, flopped originally b/c of its newness and strangeness, but he self-promoted and eventually got endorsement of Ralph Waldo Emerson - LoG occupied his entire life w/ republishing
Thumbs his nose at English traditional writing and uses casual American language in his poems
Chose the Anglo-Saxon word over the Latin, the rude word over the elegant, loved slang
He writes about things he observes in everyday life, not imaginative like Poe
Believed himself to be a spokesperson for the masses - the first urban poet
Celebrates brotherhood and unity (and manly love) often
Was born into a strict religious family and went to a monastery school but left within a year because she was deemed hopeless to become a pronounced Christian (she believed that calling herself a sinner would go against her beliefs because it wouldn’t be true to her own self-image)
She had fallen in love with a married man, then went on a trip with her congressman father and fell in love with another married man (Charles Wadsworth) who she saw as a muse
After the pain of losing two loves, she withdrew completely from social life and spent the rest of her life writing poetry by herself - she always wore bridal white
Her family was affluent - she could afford the luxury of living at home and never marrying for economic reasons
Didn’t hope/want to have an audience (“I’m Nobody!”)
Only published a few poems anonymously during her lifetime and willed her family to burn all her poems when she died, but they found bundles of poems in her things and published them
She likes metaphors - she takes aspects of daily life (mundanity) and presents them as metaphors for profound life concepts/lessons
Imaginative, but also practical
Though she was seen by some to be mad, she was doing her hermit thing entirely by choice and was (probably) completely sane - her emotional turmoil should come second to her genius
Writes with meter and traditional literary devices at the core, but violates the traditional form
Uses unconventional capitalization and punctuation
Nonconformity in her writing as well as in her life:
Rejected church doctrine (her rhythms come from hymns but she disrupts them with frequent dashes and enjambments)
Read female authors and came up with her own way of doing things, never married, challenged the way women were viewed
Colloquialism - words working-class people use (not King’s English)
Cadence - the natural rise and fall of speaking voice
Free verse - poetry without rhyme scheme or metric pattern
Catalogs - lists
Parallel structure - used to make lists better literature and less boring
Anaphora - the repeating of words/phrases at the beginning of lines
Consonance - the repeating of consonant sounds (often hand in hand with alliteration)
Assonance - the repeating of vowel sounds (sometimes hand in hand with rhyme)
Enjambment - the continuation of a sentence w/o pause or punctuation beyond the end of a line onto the next
Part of how Emily Dickinson violated traditional structure - when her thought exceeded the syllable limitation of her metric pattern, she used enjambment and continued her thought
Synesthesia - an intermingling of senses - describing one sense in terms of another
Apostrophe - lines of verse addressing an absent/dead person or abstract idea
Perfect rhyme - the repetition of similar sounds on the accented and all successive syllables of words
Slant rhyme - repetition of similar sounds on the non-stressed syllables, or words with similar but not identical sounds
Metonym - a comparison between two like things to give more meaning to one of them, substituting the name of a related object, person, or idea for the subject at hand
Synecdoche - a type of metonym where a part of an object, idea, or the like is used to represent the whole
ex) “To a discerning Eye” - people have eyes - the eyes represent a whole, discerning person
Iamb - u /
trochee - / u
anapest - u u /
dactyl - / u u
spondee - / /
used for exclamations/highly emotional statements - ex) Get lost! Shut up!
Monometer - one accented beat per line
Dimeter - 2 per line
Trimeter - 3 per line
Tetrameter - 4 per line
Pentameter - 5 per line
Hexameter - 6 per line
