Helen Vendler

Helen Vendler
Poems, Poets, Poetry: An

Introduction and Anthology.
2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 2002
Longer genres of poetry
 Epic poetry, e.g. Homer’s
Iliad and The Odyssey,
Derek Walcott’s Omeros
 Dramatic poetry, e.g.
Shakespeare’s plays,
Short poetry
 Narrative poems tell a story,
e.g. a ballad
 Lyric poems may contain the
germ of a story, but dwell less
on plot than on the narrators’
feelings.
 Lyrical ballads tell a story, but
the characters’ feelings are
more important than the plot.
Short poetry cont.
 Lyric poems in which there is a
distinct narrative interest often
show changes in verb tense.
The narrative unfolds in the
verbs and verbals, i.e. tensed
verbs, infinitives, present and
past participles.
 As a general rule, it is useful to
look for the narrative in all
poems, and to decide how much
of the poem is narrative versus
how much stays the same.
Short poetry cont.
 Meditative poetry--some
poems are almost purely
meditative, in the sense that
nothing happens. The
successive items or themes
reflected on in the
meditation are the focus of
interest, culminating with
the final redefinition of the
problem.
Classification of lyric
poems
 Lyric poems are
classified by content, by
speech act, and by outer
form.
Content genres of lyric
poems
 Love poems
 The aubade (a dawn poem in which one’s love is awakened
by the sun and speaks)
 The nocturne (a night scene)
 The pastoral (a poem in the countryside)
 The elegy (mourning a death)
 Epithalamion (celebrating a wedding)
 Prayer
 Autobiography
 Flower
 Sea
 Travel
 birthday
Speech acts
 The term ‘speech act’ refers to
manner of expression. When
we ‘map’ a poem by its speech
acts, we are able to see its
skeletal structure and to
describe it precisely. Examples
of speech acts: apology,
apostrophe, declaration,
description, hypothesis,
rebuttal, narration, prayer,
debate or dialogue, reproach,
etc.
Outer form
 Outer form refers to meter, rhyme,
and stanza-form
 Line-width--always look at lines in
groups when deciding how many
beats they have. The best way to
‘hear’ the beats of a poem is to read it
aloud, and to notice the natural
stresses of the sentences as you read.
 Example--a pentameter poem’s lines
are five beats wide.
Outer form cont.
 Rhythm--poems may be
characterized by a rising rhythm
(the stress falls on the second
syllable) or a falling rhythm (the
stress falls on the first syllable). A
falling rhythm is much heavier,
used to imitate marching, hoof-
beats, drumming, or some form of
raw poem.
 Poem-length refers to the number
of lines and stanzas.
Checklist of questions for
exploring any poem
 Meaning-what is the general
outline of the poem?
 Antecedent scenario-What has
been happening before the
poem begins? What has
provoked the speaker into
utterance? How has a previous
equilibrium been unsettled?
(These questions get at the
social and historical context of
the poem.)
Checklist cont.
 Division into parts: How many? Where
do the breaks come?
 The climax: How do the other parts fall
into place around it?
 The other parts: Are there changes in
person? In agency? In tense? In parts
of speech?
 Find the skeleton: What is the
emotional curve on which the whole
poem is strung?
Checklist cont.
 Games with the skeleton: How is this
emotional curve made new?
 Language: What are the contexts of
diction; chains of significant relation;
parts of speech emphasized; tenses;
and so on?
 Tone: Can you name the pieces of the
emotional curve-the changes in tone
you hear in the speaker’s voice as the
poem moves along?
Checklist cont.
 Agency and its speech acts:
Who is the main agent in the
poem, and does the main
agent change as the poem
progresses?
Checklist cont.
 Genres: What are they
by content, by speech
act, by outer form?
 The imagination: What
has s/he invented that is
new, striking,
memorable--in content,
in genre, in analogies, in
rhythm, in a speaker?
Play of Language
 Sound units: The sound
units of a poem are its
syllables.
 Word roots: The pieces
of words that come from
words in earlier
languages, often Greek,
Latin, or Anglo-Saxon.
Play of Language cont.
 Words: The meaning of a word in a poem is
determined less by its dictionary definition than
by the words around it. Every word in a poem
enters into relation with the other words in that
poem. Kinds of relation: thematic (or meaning)
relation; phonemic relation, e.g. stars, stage,
stay; grammatical relation; or syntactic relation.
Each word exists in several ‘constellations’ of
relation, all of which the reader needs to notice
in order to see the overlapping structures of
language in the poem.
 Sentences--by tracking changes of
subject, predicate, and tense you can
see the dynamics of the poem.
 Implication--because poems are short,
they depend more on implication than
longer works. A poem compresses the
maximum into each word. Because a
poem can only suggest, not expatiate, it
requires you to supply the concrete
instances for each of its suggestions.
 This process of paying
attention to words, their
functions, their logical
arrangements in
sentences, and their
implications is what we
really mean by ‘close’
reading.
Constructing a Self
 The persona--the speaker of a poem who
is not the author. (Persona is from the
Latin verb personare-to speak through a
mask. Why would a poet adopt a
persona? When you see an obvious
persona speaking in a poem, ask
yourself what the persona is being used
to express that the poet could not
believably convey in a contemporary
‘real life’ voice.
Constructing a Self cont.
 Because every speaker of a
lyric is a constructed
speaker, made ‘alive’ by the
imagination, and delineated
in the play of language, a
poem asks that as you step
into the shoes of the
speaker, you notice how
language has been arranged
to make that act possible.
History and Regionality
 Does the poem take place
over time, and if so, how
many episodes does it show?
 Does the poem bring in
several different spaces?
 Does the poem refer to a time
in the historical past? If so,
what does that epoch mean to
the speaker?
History and Regionality
cont.
 If the poem treats a contemporary
episode, how is the chaos of history
ordered into the brief space of a
lyric?
 Does the poem move from space to
space as it goes along, or does it
remain in one place?
 If the poem treats imagined
spaces, how are those spaces laid
out and demarcated?

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Poems, Poets, Poetry: An

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