L. G. Alexander. Poetry and Prose Appreciation for Oversees Students. 1963.London: Longman Group Ltd

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L. G. Alexander. Poetry and Prose Appreciation
for Oversees Students. 1963.London Longman Group
Ltd., 1975, rpt.
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Literary Appreciation

• Bewildering
• Difficult
• Acute
• Limited vocabulary
• Comment intellectually
• Power of comprehension
• A certain vagueness
• Does not know what to say
• Enjoyment and understanding
• Necessity to explain beyond the powers

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Outlook

• Clear and well defined method
• Little difficulty
• An interesting appreciation
• Opportunity to read the original texts
• No shortcut or substitute
• Appreciation not criticism misleading
• Originality not finding fault with everything
• Must learn to appreciate long before to criticize

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Enjoyment of Literature

• Key to true appreciation
• Depends largely on own attitude
• Easily adapt the book to suit the need
• Enjoyment primary for understanding and
  appreciating
• Good reading important not an irksome duty
• Reading aloud background information
• Added interest makes receptive

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Stages of Learning

• How to read and understand
• Poetry very difficult
• Careless reading and hasty, ill-informed
  conclusions
• Learn to make sense
• Learn to recognize techniques
• Learn to appreciate

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Vocabulary Lists

• Archaic expressions
• Difficult words
• Phrases, idioms
• Distorted syntax
• Essential/inessential words

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Prose

• Easier to understand - difficult to appreciate
• Less obvious means
• Complete and self-contained?
• Narrative
• Descriptive
• Argumentative
• Language
• Content

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Poetry
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Poetry

• Free interpretation of the poem
• Group analysis
• Gaps in the understanding
• Various levels of understanding
• Pure pleasure
• Didactic
• Social sarcasm
• Simultaneously simple and complex
• Collective exposure

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Reading a Poem

• Can enjoy a poem sans understanding the meaning
• More attention to the way it is said than what is
  said
• Enjoyment different from appreciation
• Why you liked it
• A meaning that is simple and obvious
• Might just describe a scene or tell a story
• Not for lazy reading might misread
• Look for a simple explanation and do express the
  understanding
• Feel what does the poet say not what you can add
  to it
• General meaning detailed meaning intentions
  of the writer

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Shades of Meaning

• General
• Based on reading the poem as a whole
• Often title gives the general meaning
• Detailed
• Stanza by stanza but dont paraphrase
• Pay special attention to your prose sentences
• How the poem begins, develops the theme, how it
  is concluded
• Learn to find the twist or shift and divide the
  lines into self contained groups

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Intention

• Every poem conveys an experience
• Attempts to arouse certain feelings in reader
• After initial and detained meaning find out which
  feelings the poet is trying to arouse
• A poem likely to affect different people in
  different ways hard to define true intentions
• A personal matter but should not be far-fetched
• If poets intentions are not understood then its
  hard to appreciate it

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Appreciation

• Finding the meaning of a poem and the intentions
  of the writer are simply the means
• Hard to state the reason of pleasure
• Subject matter not necessarily the most important
  thing
• A great deal more about the expression of the
  idea
• Its musical qualities and the striking way in
  which the poet uses words
• Every poem unique qualities of its own
• Essential to recognize the qualities

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Devices

• Sake of convenience devices
• Structural
• Sense
• Sound
• What effect these have and how these help the
  poet to fulfill his intentions

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Structural

• Contrast,
• Illustration
• Repetition
• Indicate the way a whole poem is built
• Become apparent immediately after the meaning is
  clear

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Contrast

• Most common of all structural devices
• Occurs when two completely opposite pictures side
  by side
• Sometimes contrast obvious sometimes implied
• Contrast
• Ancient and modern times
• Motion and stillness
• Greatness and emptiness
• Life and death
• Permanent and transitory

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• Illustration
• An example which usually takes the form of a
  vivid picture by which a poet may make an idea
  clear
• Pictorial description of the scene
• Day after day, day after day
• We struck, nor breath nor motion
• Repetition
• To emphasize a particular idea
• Aiming at special musical effects
• To pay close attention to something
• Simultaneously water everywhere and nowhere

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Sense Devices

• Simile
• Metaphor
• Personification
• Effect lies in the way apparently unrelated
  objects or ideas are brought together
• Often compels us to fix our attention on one
  object while comparing it with another
• The ability of the poet depends on his ability to
  bring together objects and ideas which are
  unconnected

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• Simile
• Direct comparison like and as
• Enable to imagine how still the ship was
• As idle as a painted ship
• Metaphor
• Rather like a simile except that the contrast is
  not direct but implied
• A violet (a girl) by a mossy stone
• Half hidden from the eye.
• Metaphor vividly expresses the idea
• A great deal of meaning can be compressed in the
  metaphor
• Personification
• When inanimate objects are given a human form, or
  when they are made to speak

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Sound Devices

• Alliteration
• Onomatopoeia
• Rhyme
• Assonance
• Rhythm
• These add musical quality to a poem

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• Alliteration
• Repetition of the same sound at frequent
  intervals
• The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
• The furrow followed free.
• Rhyme
• Usually occurs at line endings in poetry
• Rhyme in rapid succession quicken the pace of the
  poem
• Consists of words which have the same sound
• Night sight - v sight site X
• Internal rhyme expanded rhyme
• All in a hot and copper sky,
• The bloody Sun, at noon
• Right up above the mast did stand,
• No bigger than the Moon.

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• Onomatopoeia
• Occurs in the words which imitate sounds and thus
  suggest the object described
• Assonance
• Occurs when a poet introduces imperfect rhymes
• Deliberately used to avoid the jingling sound of
  a too-insistent rhyme pattern
• Wreck rock grind ground speak break
• Thus, rhymes do not fall into a singular pattern
  and lines flow easily.
• Rhythm
• Too much common with music
• Sounds used follow a definite pattern
• Meant to appeal to the ear
• Sound should closely match with the sense to make
  it dignified
• A way to the poets intentions and indication of
  the mood

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Types

• Descriptive
• Reflective
• Narrative
• Lyric
• Sonnet

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• Descriptive
• Which describe people, experiences, scenes, or
  objects
• Reflective
• Thoughtful poem often containing a great deal of
  description which the poet comments on or from
  which he draws conclusions.
• Sometimes the conclusions direct implied
• Narrative
• Poems which tell a story
• Tend to be longer than other type of poetry
• Comparatively easy to recognize the poets
  intention

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• The lyric
• A short poem like a song which is usually the
  expression of a mood or feeling
• The sonnet
• A poem of fourteen lines which follows a very
  strict rhyme pattern
• Tend to be difficult as a great deal of meaning
  is often conveyed in a few lines
• A general statement made in the Octave is
  illustrated or amplified in the Sestet
• Types
• Petrarchan
• Strictest follows only three rhymes
• Shakespearean
• Miltonic
• No break in the thought between the octave and
  the sestet

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Literary Appreciation

• How a particular device is suited to the subject
  matter of the poem
• Comment with proving it by referring to the text
• Find exactly which devices are used
• Try to discern the poets intentions
• Which type of poem is used