Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Tuesday 6 October 2015

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Biographia Literaria: Chapter 14


In chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria, S.T. Coleridge thrown his philosophical-critical insights on following issues. These issues are discussed in the below given presentation.
  • Two Cardinal Points of Poetry
  • Coleridge’s views towards Wordsworth’s poetic creed


  • Difference between Poem and Prose
  • Definition of Liegitimate Poem & Function of Poem
  • Difference between Poem and Poetry

After viewing this presentation, to check your understanding of Coleridge's views in Ch 14 of Biographia Literaria, take this online quiz.



Samuel Coleridge- Biographia Literaria Ch 14 from Dilip Barad


Online Quiz

Tasks

  • Write in your words the difference between poem and prose.
  • Write in your words the difference between poem and poetry.
  • Give illustrations to support your answer.




Wednesday 24 September 2014

Short Learning Videos on Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Here are some short videos on Wordsworth's Preface. After viewing them you will be able to:
* differentiate between Classicism and Romanticism 
* understand basic concept of Wordsworth's poetic creed
* attempt questions given below these videos 
(Reading material can be downloaded from here or here)













After watching these videos, you can attempt below given questions. You can give your answers in 'Comment' below this blog-post.

  • What is the basic difference between the poetic creed of 'Classicism' and 'Romanticism'?
  • Why does Wordsworth say 'What' is poet? rather than Who is poet?
  • What is poetic diction? Which sort of poetic diction is suggested by Wordsworth in his Preface?
  • What is poetry?
  • Discuss 'Daffodils - I wandered lonely as a cloud' with reference to Wordsworth's poetic creed.

Additional study questions: 
(All these questions are not addressed in the video lectures. You can download documents from this page to prepare answers of the below given questions)

1.      What according to Wordsworth should be the theme of Poetry?
2.      Write note on Wordsworth’s view on the subject matter of poetry
3.      Write note on Wordsworth’s theory of poetic diction. Illustrate from Wordsworth’s reading of Dr. Johnson’s The Ant & Cowper’s Religion!
4.      Assess the greatness of Wordsworth as a literary critic.
5.      “A language was thus insensibly produced, differing materially from the real language of men in any situation.” Explain and illustrat with reference to your reading of Wordsworth’s views on Poetic Diction in Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
6.      “A Poet is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness.” Explain with reference to your reading of Wordsworth’s views in Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
7.      “A Poet has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than one supposed to be common among mankind.” Explain with reference to your reading of Wordsworth’s views in Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
8.      “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”. Explain with reference to Wordsworth’s definition of Poetry.
9.      “There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” Explain with reference to Wordsworth discussion on Gray’s Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West.
10.   How does Wordsworth describe the language he claims to have selected for his poems? how does he describe the language used by "many modern writers"?
11.  What sorts of "incidents and situations" does Wordsworth claim to have chosen for his poems? How does he believe such incidents can be made "interesting"? Why does he choose situations from "Humble and rustic life"? What is the presumed state of the "essential passions of the heart" in that condition? What is the relationship of these passions to language? To the "forms of nature"?
12.  What, according to Wordsworth, is the relationship in his poems between feeling and action?
13.  According to Wordsworth, "one being is elevated above another in proportion as he possesses" what capability?
14.  What does Wordsworth think of the distinction between the language of prose and metrical composition? Why?
15.  What are some of the characteristics of the poet? What is his relationship to his "own passions and volitions"? What is the relationship between his feelings and the "goings-on of the Universe"?
16.  What sort of truth does poetry give? How is this truth communicated? To what tribunal does it appeal?
17.  Of what is poetry the image? Under what one restriction does a poet write? What sort of information may he expect his reader to possess?
18.  What sort of song does the poet sing? What is his metaphorical relationship to human nature? What does he do for the "vast empire of human society"?
19.  How is the poet "chiefly distinguished from other men"? What characterizes his "passions and thoughts and feelings"? With what are they connected?
20.   What, according to Wordsworth, is the "great spring of the activity of our minds"?
21.   Poetry is defined by Wordsworth as a spontaneous what? From what does poetry take its origin? Then what happens? In what mood is "successful composition" carried on?
Examine ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . daffodils’ to illustrate Wordsworth’s poetic creed.

Thursday 26 December 2013

Cleanth Brooks: The Language of Paradox (The Well Wrought Urn)

This is compiled from various web and book resources

Cleanth Brooks’s concept of Paradox and Irony and their importance in poetry as discussed in his essay “The Language of Paradox” in The Well Wrought Urn (1947).

“The language of poetry is the language of paradox” Elucidate with reference to Cleanth Brooks’s essay The Language of Paradox.




In literature, the paradox is a literary device consisting of the anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It functions as a method of literary composition - and analysis - which involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to reconcile them or to explain their presence.
Cleanth Brooks, an active member of the New Critical movement, outlines the use of reading poems through paradox as a method of critical interpretation. Paradox in poetry means that tension at the surface of a verse can lead to apparent contradictions and hypocrisies. His seminal essay, "The Language of Paradox," lays out Brooks' argument for the centrality of paradox by demonstrating that paradox is “the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry." The argument is based on the contention that referential language is too vague for the specific message a poet expresses; he must “make up his language as he goes." This, Brooks argues, is because words are mutable and meaning shifts when words are placed in relation to one another.
In this essay ("The Language of Paradox,"), Cleanth Brooks emphasizes how the language of poetry is different from that of the sciences, claiming that he is interested in our seeing that the paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet's language: “it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all--as a scientist may properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make up his language as he goes.”
In this passage, Brooks stresses that poetic language is inherently different from scientific language because the poet constructs his language as he goes and defines his own rules. The poet, then, has control over language, and must take an active role in the shaping of what literature means. The poet, then, is not limited to the denotations of words, but, instead,  revel in the possible connotations of words. The individual poet is given a great deal of power, then, in the process of knowledge making and the reader is isolated from the production of meaning.
Paradox:
In the writing of poems, paradox is used as a method by which unlikely comparisons can be drawn and meaning can be extracted from poems both straightforward and enigmatic.
Brooks points to William Wordsworth's poem “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.” He begins by outlining the initial and surface conflict, which is that the speaker is filled with worship, while his female companion does not seem to be. The paradox, discovered by the poem’s end, is that the girl is more full of worship than the speaker precisely because she is always consumed with sympathy for nature and not - as is the speaker - in tune with nature while immersed in it.
In his reading of Wordsworth's poem, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” Brooks contends that the poem offers paradox not in its details, but in the situation which the speaker creates. Though London is a man-made marvel, and in many respects in opposition to nature, the speaker does not view London as a mechanical and artificial landscape but as a landscape comprised entirely of nature. Since London was created by man, and man is a part of nature, London is thus too a part of nature. It is this reason that gives the speaker the opportunity to remark upon the beauty of London as he would a natural phenomenon, and, as Brooks points out, can call the houses “sleeping” rather than “dead,” because they too are vivified with the natural spark of life, granted to them by the men that built them.
Brooks ends his essay with a reading of John Donne’s poem "The Canonization," which uses a paradox as its underlying metaphor. Using a charged religious term to describe the speaker’s physical love as saintly, Donne effectively argues that in rejecting the material world and withdrawing to a world of each other, the two lovers are appropriate candidates for canonization. This seems to parody both love and religion, but in fact it combines them, pairing unlikely circumstances and demonstrating their resulting complex meaning. Brooks points also to secondary paradoxes in the poem: the simultaneous duality and singleness of love, and the double and contradictory meanings of “die” in Metaphysical poetry (used here as both sexual union and literal death). He contends that these several meanings are impossible to convey at the right depth and emotion in any language but that of paradox. A similar paradox is used in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” when Juliet says “For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch and palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss.”
Brooks' contemporaries in the sciences were, in the 40's and 50's, reorganizing university science curricula into codified disciplines. The study of English, however, remained less defined and it became a goal of the New Critical movement to justify literature in an age of science by separating the work from its author and reader, and by examining it as a self-sufficient artifact. In Brooks’s use of the paradox as a tool for analysis, however, he develops a logical case as a literary technique with strong emotional affect. His reading of “The Canonization” in “The Language of Paradox,” where paradox becomes central to expressing complicated ideas of sacred and secular love, provides an example of this development.

Irony

Although paradox and irony as New Critical tools for reading poetry are often conflated, they are independent poetical devices. Irony for Brooks is “the obvious warping of a statement by the context” whereas paradox is later glossed as “a special kind of qualification which involves the resolution of opposites.”
Irony functions as a presence in the text – the overriding context of the surrounding words that make up the poem. Only sentences such as 2 + 2 = 4 are free from irony; most other statements are prey to their immediate context and are altered by it (take, as an example, the following joke. "A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entendre. The bartender gives it to her." This last statement, perfectly acceptable elsewhere, is transformed by its context in the joke to an innuendo) take their effect from it. Irony is the key to validating the poem because a test of any statement grows from the context – validating a statement demands examining the statement in the context of the poem and determining whether it is appropriate to that context.
Paradox, however, is essential to the structure and being of the poem. In The Language of Paradox (The Well Wrought Urn) Brooks shows that paradox was so essential to poetic meaning that paradox was almost identical to poetry. According to fellow New Critic Leroy Searle, Brooks’ use of paradox emphasized the indeterminate lines between form and content. “The form of the poem uniquely embodies its meaning” and the language of the poem “effects the reconciliation of opposites or contraries.” While irony functions within the poem, paradox often refers to the meaning and structure of the poem and is thus inclusive of irony. This existence of opposites or contraries and the reconciliation thereof is poetry and the meaning of the poem.

Criticism

R.S. Crane, in his essay "The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks," argues strongly against Brooks’ centrality of paradox. For one, Brooks believes that the very structure of poetry is paradox, and ignores the other subtleties of imagination and power that poets bring to their poems. Brooks simply believed that “’imagination’ reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.” Brooks, in leaning on the crutch of paradox, only discusses the truth which poetry can reveal, and speaks nothing about the pleasure it can give. Also, by defining poetry as uniquely having a structure of paradox, Brooks ignores the power of paradox in everyday conversation and discourse, including scientific discourse, which Brooks claimed was opposed to poetry. Crane claims that, using Brooks’ definition of poetry, the most powerful paradoxical poem in modern history is Einstein’s formula E = mc2, which is a profound paradox in that matter and energy are the same thing. The argument for the centrality of paradox (and irony) becomes a reductio ad absurdum and is therefore void (or at least ineffective) for literary analysis.

Friday 8 November 2013

How to teach poetry? : An Enigma!

(One of th M.Phil students Alpesh Parmar posted message on FB asking to share something on 'how to teach poetry?'... this note is written extempore for him... which may be helpful to others as well... I request all the readers of this note to contribute something by sharing your experince of teaching poetry by commenting on this note)

Dear Friends,
Teaching poetry is not everyone's cup of tea. There is no fun in the world as great as teaching it to those who love it... there is nothing as boring as teaching poetry to those who hate it. It is so because (to quote Yuri Lotman) - ‘A poem is both a system of rules, and a system of their violation’.

Reading/Teaching poetry is not as easy as one thinks. It necessisates undertanding of culture (in/for which it is written), history (historiography of metaphors, semantics etc) and above all linguistic competency.
Here is the list of books and websites which may help teachers and students in reading/teaching poetry:
  • Books:
  1. Terry Eagleton: How to read a poem? Blackwell Publisher (2006). TERRY EAGLETON’S book seeks to teach its readers how to read poems through a combination of literary history, theoretical discussion, and leading by example. The book develops a simple and unshowy working definition of poetry (‘a certain memorable or inventive use of language, and a moral insight into human existence’), but at the same time suggests a correspondence between the best poetry and a kind of productive contradiction … (read Jonathan Baines's  full article on http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/57/1/151.full)
  2. I.A. Richards: Pratical Criticism (1920) From his practical experiments into 'reading poems' at Cambidge University, I A Richards drew 'a list of principle difficulties that may be encountered by any reader in the presence of any poem. This analysis was in part intended to develop educational method to teach poetry in the classroom. (read Robert Shaffer's full article on http://www.jstor.org/pss/40012942)
  3. Elaine Showalter: Teaching Literature Blackwell Publisher (2003). Drawing on 40 years of international teaching experience, as well as the real life experiences of friends and colleagues in the field,Showalter offers original and provocative reflections on teaching literature in higher education, and addresses practical, theoretical, and methodological issues.
  • Websites:
Whenever students come with such questions which can't be answered, the easy way is to give him 'list' of books - whcih are unattainable... there are at least two benefits of doing this - (i) As teachers, we can create a favourable impression - of knowing names of so many books and we speak on those books with such an air of authority - as if we have written it or 'read' it - (ii) it helps in establishing superiority over student's lack of knowledge. But the best of all is - students will never dare to come agian to ask for anything.
I believe, if teacher 'really' want to 'share' with students, he should give books instead of lists - or atleast photocopies of important pages. I find easy way in sharing weblinks. Click and go...

Well, these weblinks are not as goos as the books listed above but it will serve the purpose of two-minute-maggie to hungry child - just as maggie does not give nutritions but helps in satisfying hunger - similarly, these weblinks are not 'nutritious' but it surely will cater the needs of hungry mind - i would be glad if it makes you more hungry to read the books.
  1. http://www.poetryteachers.com/poetclass/poetclass.html
  2. http://www.ehow.com/how_2179046_teach-poetry-high-school-students.html
  3. http://www.slideshare.net/mungo13/teaching-poetry
  4. http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/Showalter/004.pdf (read chapter 4 on Teaching Poetry from Elaine Shawalter's book 'Teaching Literature')
  5. http://www.hstreasures.com/articles/poetry.html