Week 5 Class Notes (10/11-10/22)

Tone:

• Refers to the speaker/narrator’s attitude
• Can and does shift (sometimes often) with mood/subject
• Discussed in terms of emotion
• Behavior, word choices, motivations, and syntax label different emotional states
• An effect created by an author’s choices of techniques (diction, figurative language, syntax, etc…)
• Style belongs to author

Voice:

• Voice belongs to story (changes by story, not author)
• Refers to the speaker/narrator’s personality
• Can shift (infrequently) when the narrator is “dynamic” (changes)
• Discussed in terms of character (traits, ethics, literary attributes)
• An effect created by an author’s choices of techniques (diction, fig. language, syntax, etc…)

Style:

• Refers to the authorial persona’s personality
• Can and does shift (infrequently) when the author’s persona (changes)

An interesting perspective from a teacher about the personality of the writer:

This website has some nice descriptions of these terms.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Chapter Twelve: (Rhythm and Meter)

• Rhythm: any wavelike recurrence of motion or sound
• Accented/Stressed: when one or more syllables are given more prominence in pronunciation than the rest
• Rhythmic effects depend on what a statement means and different intended meanings will produce different rhythms even in identical statements
• End-stopped line: when the end of a line corresponds with a natural speech pause
• Run-On Line: when the sense of the line moves without pause on into the next line
• Caesuras: pauses that occur within lines, either grammatical or rhetorical; resource for varying the rhythm of lines
• Free Verse: nonmetrical poetry in which the basic rhythmic unit is the line, and in which pauses, line breaks, and formal patterns develop organically from the requirements of the individual poem rather than from established poetic forms
• Prose Poem: usually a short composition having the intentions of poetry but written in prose rather than verse
• Meter: “identifying characteristic of rhythmic language that we can tap our feet to”; equal intervals
• Rhythm designates the flow of actual, pronounced sound, whereas meter refers to the patterns that sounds follow when a poet has arranged them into metrical verse.
• When measuring verse we use the foot, the line, and sometimes the stanza
• Foot: one basic unit of meter; normally of one accented syllable plus one or two unaccented syllables
• Monomer= one foot; Dimeter= two feet; Trimeter= three feet; Tetrameter= four feet; Pentameter= five feet; Hexameter= six feet
• Metrical Variations: calls attention to some of the sounds because they depart from what is regular
• Substitution: replacing the regular foot with another one
• Extra-Metrical syllables: added at the beginnings or endings of lines
• Truncation: the omission of an unaccented syllable at either end of a line
• Scansion: defining the metrical form (identify the prevailing foot, name the number of feet in a line, describe the stanzaic pattern
• Grammatical and Rhetorical Pauses: punctuated pauses longer than commas

Chapter Thirteen: (Sound and Meaning)

• Onomatopoeia: the use of words which sound like what they mean (hiss, snap, bang)
• Phonetic Intensives:  group of words whose sound connects with their meaning to some degree
• -fl (moving light); -gl (idea of light); sl- (smoothly wet); short –I (smallness)
• Euphonious: smooth and pleasant sounding
• Cacophonous: Rough and harsh sounding

Chapter Fourteen: (Pattern)

• Structure: the arrangement of ideas, images, thoughts, sentences
• Form: external pattern of a poem
• Stanzaic form: poet uses a series of stanzas; repeated units having the same number of lines
• Fixed Form: traditional pattern that applies to a whole poem
• Limerick: aabba form; freely allows the use of a substitute foot for the first foot; used for humorous and nonsense verse
• Sonnet: must be fourteen lines in length, almost always is iambic pentameter; most sonnets are either Italian or English
• Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet: divided between eight lines (octave) using two or three rhymes using two rhymes arranged abbaabba and six lines (sestet) using any arrangement of either two or three rhymes cdcdcd and cdecde.
• English (Shakespearean) Sonnet: three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. Units are marked off by the thymes and the development of the thought
• Villanelle: complex pattern of repetition and rhyme; two rhyme sounds; 19 lines are divided into five three-line stanzas and a four-line concluding quatrain; varies stress patterns and the meaning of the repeated lines

Example of a villanelle:

• Traditional forms provide a challenge to the poet

Chapter Fifteen and Sixteen: (Evaluating Poetry 1 & 2)

• When evaluating a poem, ask these three questions:
• 1) What is its central purpose?
• 2) How fully has this purpose been accomplished?
• 3) How important is this purpose?
• Sentimentality: indulgence in emotion for its own sake, or expression of more emotion than an occasion warrants; aims to stimulate emotions
• Rhetorical Poetry: uses a language more glittering and high-flown than its substance warrants
• Didactic Poetry: has a primary purpose to teach or preach
• “Great poetry must, of course, be good poetry.”

Great poetry engages the whole person- senses, imagination, emotion, intellect…