Structure, Syntax, Diction, and Meaning : Writing about Short Stories and Poetry
Oh! Where have I seen that before? Allusions and Meaning
Essential Questions:
In Chapter 5 "Interpreting Poetry" of Writing Essays About Literature, Kelly Griffith reminds us that the search for meaning does not have to destroy the magic. In fact, when we shift our approach from a scientific method-style analysis of poetry to a more personal response, we can allow the meaning to unfold as it does through multiple re-readings. She helps us to see the mystical nature of poetry.
Edward Hirsch, author of the best-selling How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), claims that the defining characteristic of poetry is its spirituality. Poetry, which originated in prehistoric religious worship (86, 135), has never lost "its sense of sacred mystery" (16). The vocation of poets is thus "Orphic" (that is, mystical; associated with the miraculous gift for music manifested by Orpheus, a figure from Greek mythology). Poets enter "the mystery of a world riven with anima, with process, a world that awakens to the Orphic calling of the poet. The impulse [of the poet] is shamanistic" (78).
Hirsch concludes that since the essence of poetry is spiritual, it can transform us. Poetry is "the most intimate and volatile form of literary discourse" (xi). It can deepen "your capacity for personhood, our achievement of humanity" (xii). It induces insights in which "the self is both lost and found" (243). When "I encounter and interiorize the poem, when I ingest it, dreaming it and letting it dream its way into me," then "I can feel the Orphic enchantment, the delirium and lucidty, the swoon of poetry" (261).
What great poem does Hirsch claim is a great representation of the mystical nature of poetry? (See p. 108).
The Poetry Archive defines syntax and its relationship to meaning:
Syntax refers to word order, and the way in which it works with grammatical structures. As we are used to hearing things in certain orders, the effect of breaking with normal syntax is to draw attention to what is being said and the way it is said. P J Kavanagh's 'Beyond Decoration' has a speaker who says, rather than "I cannot go out", "Go out I cannot", which - by shifting its syntax - seems to make the impossibility in "cannot" stronger, as well as creating a reversed echo with the second half of that line. The opening of Dylan Thomas' 'A Refusal To Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London' is hypnotic in part because of its rhythms and rhyming, but also in that its syntax is designed to put such distance between "Never until..." and "..shall I".
Some poets will also deliberately fracture syntax beyond what is considered grammatically correct, which demands a lot of attention, but aims to repay this attention by revealing things that cannot be said within the habits of thought that grammatical language maintains.
How to use this term
The syntax of Adrienne Rich's 'For This' is stretched in the first two stanzas to hold off, in each case, what it is that depends on the "If" at the start of each stanza. - See more at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/glossary/syntax
In a nutshell: T.S. Eliot's "Prufrock" http://www.shmoop.com/love-song-alfred-prufrock/
The GRASPS process essay for this unit explores the essential questions for this unit and requires you to apply your understanding of structure, syntax, diction, allusion, and other literary elements as you compare and contrast T.S. Eliot's Prufrock and Gwendolyn Brooks' Satin-Legs Smith.
Compare and Contrast Poetry Essay GRASPS: T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”
In her essay "Sweet Bombs," Danielle Chapman compares the poetry of Eliot and of Brooks:
It's a particular Eliot—the lolling, amused Eliot who feasts on swollen images and revels in all that is vividly corrupt, the Eliot of "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," and parts of The Waste Land—that Brooks responded to most. In "The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith" she invents the ultimate anti-Prufrock. The poem takes us through a day in the life of a flagrant peacock of a hustler, a man who dresses in "wonder-suits in yellow and in wine,/Sarcastic green and zebra-striped cobalt....Ballooning pants that taper off to ends/Scheduled to choke precisely." Though in places the mock-allusions to Eliot can feel heavy ("Let us proceed. Let us inspect, together....the innards of this closet"), this meditation shows Brooks taking the sort of license that no pious imitator would dare:
His lady alters as to leg and eye,
Thickness and height, such minor points as these,
From Sunday to Sunday. But no matter what
Her name or body positively she's
In Queen Lace stockings with ambitious heels
That strain to kiss the calves, and vivid shoes
Frontless and backless, Chinese fingernails,
Earrings, three layers of lipstick, intense hat
Dripping with the most voluble of veils.
Her affable extremes are like sweet bombs
About him, whom no middle grace or good
Could gratify.
The impersonal, conversational purity that Brooks attained in lines like these is unmatched by anyone in her generation; the only poet who does this as well is Eliot. And in some ways she surpasses him, for, in her pure delight in Satin Legs, she enables the character to come alive and exist independently of her own interests, her pathos, herself. This was something that Eliot—for all his talk of escaping his personality—could never completely do.
Judith Saunders explores allusions and intertextualiy in her essay "The Love Song of Satin-Legs Smith: Gwendolyn Brooks Revisits Prufrock's Hell." She writes
Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" (1944) alludes unobtrusively throughout to T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which in turn refers both explicitly and implicitly to Dante's Inferno (1321). Together, Eliot's and Brooks's poems form a double-layered trajectory pointing back to a common fourteenth-century source, offering two distinctly different Modern revisions of its assumptions.[1] In their recasting of the Inferno, Eliot and Brooks locate hell on earth, in human social environments where their fictive characters are permanent residents; it is readers, rather than protagonists, who are taken on illuminating guided tours. Both poems provide stinging critiques of twentieth-century civilization, with its manifest social, ethical, and spiritual problems. Just as Eliot's depiction of Prufrock and his environment derives ironic impact from allusion to the Inferno, Brooks's portrait of Smith depends for similar effect upon covert comparison with Eliot's.
See Chapman's complete critical essay "Sweet Bombs" at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/178686
See Saunders' complete essay published in Papers on Language & Literature , Vol. 36, No. 1 , Winter 2000
Listen to Champan's Podcast as she argues it is high time for Gwendolyn Brooks "to get her due." http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/7
See this link for Gwendolyn Brooks reading more of her excellent poems (there is no recording of her reading "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" here). http://www.poetryarchive.org/explore/browse-poems?f[0]=field_poet:192513
Oh! Where have I seen that before? Allusions and Meaning
Essential Questions:
- How do poets and writers of short stories convey meaning?
- Does the search for meaning destroy the magic ?
- Understanding syntax: What's the point?
- Allusions: Do I have to see the allusions to explain a work's meaning?
In Chapter 5 "Interpreting Poetry" of Writing Essays About Literature, Kelly Griffith reminds us that the search for meaning does not have to destroy the magic. In fact, when we shift our approach from a scientific method-style analysis of poetry to a more personal response, we can allow the meaning to unfold as it does through multiple re-readings. She helps us to see the mystical nature of poetry.
Edward Hirsch, author of the best-selling How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), claims that the defining characteristic of poetry is its spirituality. Poetry, which originated in prehistoric religious worship (86, 135), has never lost "its sense of sacred mystery" (16). The vocation of poets is thus "Orphic" (that is, mystical; associated with the miraculous gift for music manifested by Orpheus, a figure from Greek mythology). Poets enter "the mystery of a world riven with anima, with process, a world that awakens to the Orphic calling of the poet. The impulse [of the poet] is shamanistic" (78).
Hirsch concludes that since the essence of poetry is spiritual, it can transform us. Poetry is "the most intimate and volatile form of literary discourse" (xi). It can deepen "your capacity for personhood, our achievement of humanity" (xii). It induces insights in which "the self is both lost and found" (243). When "I encounter and interiorize the poem, when I ingest it, dreaming it and letting it dream its way into me," then "I can feel the Orphic enchantment, the delirium and lucidty, the swoon of poetry" (261).
What great poem does Hirsch claim is a great representation of the mystical nature of poetry? (See p. 108).
The Poetry Archive defines syntax and its relationship to meaning:
Syntax refers to word order, and the way in which it works with grammatical structures. As we are used to hearing things in certain orders, the effect of breaking with normal syntax is to draw attention to what is being said and the way it is said. P J Kavanagh's 'Beyond Decoration' has a speaker who says, rather than "I cannot go out", "Go out I cannot", which - by shifting its syntax - seems to make the impossibility in "cannot" stronger, as well as creating a reversed echo with the second half of that line. The opening of Dylan Thomas' 'A Refusal To Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London' is hypnotic in part because of its rhythms and rhyming, but also in that its syntax is designed to put such distance between "Never until..." and "..shall I".
Some poets will also deliberately fracture syntax beyond what is considered grammatically correct, which demands a lot of attention, but aims to repay this attention by revealing things that cannot be said within the habits of thought that grammatical language maintains.
How to use this term
The syntax of Adrienne Rich's 'For This' is stretched in the first two stanzas to hold off, in each case, what it is that depends on the "If" at the start of each stanza. - See more at: http://www.poetryarchive.org/glossary/syntax
In a nutshell: T.S. Eliot's "Prufrock" http://www.shmoop.com/love-song-alfred-prufrock/
The GRASPS process essay for this unit explores the essential questions for this unit and requires you to apply your understanding of structure, syntax, diction, allusion, and other literary elements as you compare and contrast T.S. Eliot's Prufrock and Gwendolyn Brooks' Satin-Legs Smith.
Compare and Contrast Poetry Essay GRASPS: T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith”
In her essay "Sweet Bombs," Danielle Chapman compares the poetry of Eliot and of Brooks:
It's a particular Eliot—the lolling, amused Eliot who feasts on swollen images and revels in all that is vividly corrupt, the Eliot of "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," and parts of The Waste Land—that Brooks responded to most. In "The Sundays of Satin Legs Smith" she invents the ultimate anti-Prufrock. The poem takes us through a day in the life of a flagrant peacock of a hustler, a man who dresses in "wonder-suits in yellow and in wine,/Sarcastic green and zebra-striped cobalt....Ballooning pants that taper off to ends/Scheduled to choke precisely." Though in places the mock-allusions to Eliot can feel heavy ("Let us proceed. Let us inspect, together....the innards of this closet"), this meditation shows Brooks taking the sort of license that no pious imitator would dare:
His lady alters as to leg and eye,
Thickness and height, such minor points as these,
From Sunday to Sunday. But no matter what
Her name or body positively she's
In Queen Lace stockings with ambitious heels
That strain to kiss the calves, and vivid shoes
Frontless and backless, Chinese fingernails,
Earrings, three layers of lipstick, intense hat
Dripping with the most voluble of veils.
Her affable extremes are like sweet bombs
About him, whom no middle grace or good
Could gratify.
The impersonal, conversational purity that Brooks attained in lines like these is unmatched by anyone in her generation; the only poet who does this as well is Eliot. And in some ways she surpasses him, for, in her pure delight in Satin Legs, she enables the character to come alive and exist independently of her own interests, her pathos, herself. This was something that Eliot—for all his talk of escaping his personality—could never completely do.
Judith Saunders explores allusions and intertextualiy in her essay "The Love Song of Satin-Legs Smith: Gwendolyn Brooks Revisits Prufrock's Hell." She writes
Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" (1944) alludes unobtrusively throughout to T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which in turn refers both explicitly and implicitly to Dante's Inferno (1321). Together, Eliot's and Brooks's poems form a double-layered trajectory pointing back to a common fourteenth-century source, offering two distinctly different Modern revisions of its assumptions.[1] In their recasting of the Inferno, Eliot and Brooks locate hell on earth, in human social environments where their fictive characters are permanent residents; it is readers, rather than protagonists, who are taken on illuminating guided tours. Both poems provide stinging critiques of twentieth-century civilization, with its manifest social, ethical, and spiritual problems. Just as Eliot's depiction of Prufrock and his environment derives ironic impact from allusion to the Inferno, Brooks's portrait of Smith depends for similar effect upon covert comparison with Eliot's.
See Chapman's complete critical essay "Sweet Bombs" at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/178686
See Saunders' complete essay published in Papers on Language & Literature , Vol. 36, No. 1 , Winter 2000
Listen to Champan's Podcast as she argues it is high time for Gwendolyn Brooks "to get her due." http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/7
See this link for Gwendolyn Brooks reading more of her excellent poems (there is no recording of her reading "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" here). http://www.poetryarchive.org/explore/browse-poems?f[0]=field_poet:192513
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