Peter Schakel and Jack Ridl, Hope College
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-13281-6
Table of Contents
Preface
Foreword, by Alberto Rmos
PART I: STARTING POINTS
1. Approaching Poetry
2. Reading Responsively
PART II: ENTRY POINTS
3. Words
4. Images
5. Speaker, Tone, and Irony
6. Figures
7. Symbols
8. Sounds
9. Rhythm and Meter
10. Form
PART III: VANTAGE POINTS
11. Authors
12. Texts
13. Readers
14. Culture
PART IV: POINTS OF DEPARTURE
An Anthology of Poems for Further Reading
APPENDICES
A. Bibliography
Resources for the Study of Poetry
Additional Sources: Poetry and Poets
Further Reading on Critical Approaches
B. Responding on Paper
I. Writing in the Margins
II.Journal Writing
III.Writing Essay Examination Answers
IV.Writing Short Papers about Poetry
V.Writing Essays in Other Formats
VI.Writing a Literary Research Paper
C. Genre
D. More on Scansion
Biographical Sketches
Index of Authors and Titles
Index of Terms
Contents
Preface
Foreword by Alberto Rmos
PART I: STARTING POINTS
1. Approaching Poetry
Robert Frost, from "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from "How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways"
Emily Dickinson, "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?"
Richard Kostalanetz, "Disintegration"
Lucille Clifton, "homage to my hips"
Nancy Willard, "Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him"
Lisel Mueller, "The Deaf Dancing to Rock"
Alberta Turner, "Drift"
Robert Francis, "Silent Poem"
WHAT, THEN, IS POETRY?
Heather McHugh, "What He Thought"
READING POETRY
WHAT POEMS DO
William Stafford, "Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing"
WHERE TO START
James Dickey, "Cherrylog Road"
Anonymous, "There Is a Lady Sweet and Kind"
William Stafford, "Traveling through the Dark"
Russell Edson, "The Fall"
Langston Hughes, "Harlem"
Emily Brontk, "Riches I Hold in Light Esteem"
Gary Soto, "The Morning They Shot Tony Lopez, Barber and Pusher Who Went TooFar, 1958"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
2. Reading Responsively
FOCUSING ON THE READER
Robert Frost, "`Out, Out-'"
THE READING PROCESS
FILLING GAPS
"TEXT" AND "POEM"
EFFECT AS MEANING
Sharon Olds, "The Victims"
Ted Kooser, "Flying at Night"
Anonymous, "Western Wind"
Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar"
Wanda Coleman, "At the Jazz Club He Comes on a Ghost"
Sir Thomas Wyatt, "They Flee from Me"
Jimmy Santiago Baca, "Family Ties"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
PART II: ENTRY POINTS
3. Words
DENOTATION
Rita Dove, "Silos"
John Skelton, "Though Ye Suppose All Jeopardies Are Passed"
CONNOTATION
Emily Dickinson, "There Is No Frigate Like a Book"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "The Bean Eaters"
Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"
IMAGINATIVE USES OF WORDS
Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], "Jabberwocky"
Edward Lueders, "Your Poem, Man..."
James Tate, "End of a Semester"
SOME POEMS PARTLY ABOUT WORDS
Muriel Rukeyser, "Rune"
Gary Miranda, "Love Poem"
Heather McHugh, "Language Lesson, 1976"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
4. Images
IMAGING A POEM
Gary Snyder, "Riprap"
REALISTIC IMAGERY
William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow"
Garrett Kaoru Hongo, "Yellow Light"
NONREALISTIC IMAGERY
Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry"
John Keats, "To Autumn"
Cathy Song, "Girl Powdering Her Neck"
Robert Bly, "Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter"
Theodore Roethke, "Meditation at Oyster River"
Robert Hayden, "Bone-Flower Elegy"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
5. Speaker,Tone, and Irony
AUTHOR AND SPEAKER
Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
A. E. Housman, "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now"
Thomas Hardy, "The Man He Killed"
LISTENING TO A VOICE
Gerald Stern, "The Dog"
James Wright, "Saint Judas"
TONE AND IRONY
Theodore Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz"
Stephen Crane, "Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War is Kind"
Dudley Randall, "Ballad of Birmingham"
Dorothy Parker, "Risumi"
John Betjeman, "In Westminster Abbey"
Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess"
Linda Hogan, "Workday"
Kenneth Fearing, "Love, 20" the First Quarter Mile"
Paul Zimmer, "The Eisenhower Years"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
6. Figures
COMPARING
Julie Moulds, from "Wedding Iva"
Robert Burns, from "A Red, Red Rose"
Dorothy Livesay, "Green Rain"
IDENTIFYING
Jean Toomer, "Face"
Mary Oliver, "Sleeping in the Forest"
SUBSTITUTION
Dylan Thomas, "The Hand That Signed the Paper Felled A City"
Edwin Arlington Robinson, "Richard Cory"
Vern Rutsala, "The Furniture Factory"
TRANSFERRING
Theodore Roethke, "Dolor"
SOME OTHER FIGURATIVE ACTIONS
William Shakespeare, "When My Love Swears That She Is Made of Truth"
Richard Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars"
W. H. Auden, from "As I Walked Out One Evening"
A. E. Housman, "With Rue My Heart Is Laden"
Hilaire Belloc, "On His Books"
John Frederick Nims, "Love Poem"
Dennis Brutus, "Nightsong: City"
Audre Lorde, "Coal"
Anita Endrezze, "The Girl Who Loved the Sky"
Larry Levis, "The Poem You Asked For"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
7. Symbols
SYMBOLS
Edmund Waller, "Song"
Winifred Welles, "Cruciform"
John Berryman, "The Ball Poem"
William Matthews, "Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41"
William Blake, "Ah! Sun-flower"
Countee Cullen, "Incident"
Emily Dickinson, "I Heard a Fly Buzz"
ARCHETYPES
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall"
William Shakespeare, "That Time of Year Thou Mayest in Me Behold"
W. H. Auden, from "The Quest"
T. S. Eliot, "The Journey of the Magi"
Thylias Moss, "Sunrise Comes to Second Avenue"
David Young, "The Portable Earth Lamp"
Eavan Boland, "The Pomegranate"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
8. Sounds
SOUNDS AND MEANING
Emily Dickinson, "I Heard a Fly Buzz"
ALLITERATION, CONSONANCE, ASSONANCE
Edward Thomas, "The Dark Forest"
W. H. Auden, "The Three Companions"
Martmn Espada, "The Saint Vincent de Paul Food Pantry Stomp"
RHYME
William Blake, "To See a World in a Grain of Sand"
Mekeel McBride, from "A Blessing"
William Wordsworth, "My Heart Leaps Up"
Percy Bysshe Shelley, from "The Cloud"
Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill"
Alberto Rmos, "Fixing Tires"
James Joyce, "On the Beach at Fontana"
Alice Fulton, "You Can't Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain"
Susan Howe, from "Speeches at the Barriers"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
9. Rhythm and Meter
RHYTHM
e. e. cummings, "in Just-"
Walt Whitman, from "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed"
Linda Pastan, "love poem"
Joy Harjo, "She Had Some Horses"
Quincy Troupe, "Snake-Back Solo"
METER
Luella Clark, "If You Love Me"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from "The Lady of Shalott"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Metrical Feet"
Emily Dickinson, "I Like to See It Lap the Miles"
Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay"
William Blake, "Introduction" to Songs of Innocence
Robert Browning, from "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent toAix"
Thomas Hardy, from "The Voice"
John Donne, "Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God"
e. e. cummings, "Buffalo Bill's"
Lucille Clifton, "good times"
Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"
Francis Fike, "Doves"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
10. Form
INNER ARRANGEMENT
Cheryl Savageau, "Bones-A City Poem"
EXTERNAL SHAPE:
LINES
J. V. Cunningham, "Here Lies My Wife"
Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool"
Langston Hughes, "Dream Variations"
Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
STANZAS
Robert Herrick, "To Daffodils"
QUATRAINS, TERZA RIMA, RHYME ROYAL, OTTAVA RIMA, SPENSERIAN
STANZA
SONNETS
William Wordsworth, "It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free"
William Shakespeare, "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds"
Claude McKay, "America"
HAIKU, SESTINA, VILLANELLE
George Ralph, "Darkness of the Rose" and "Hanging from the Eaves"
Elizabeth Bishop, "Sestina"
John Yau, "Chinese Villanelle"
BLANK VERSE
John Milton, from Paradise Lost
COUPLETS
Sir John Denham, from "Cooper's Hill"
CONCRETE POEMS
George Herbert, "Easter Wings"
Mary Ellen Solt, "Forsythia"
OPEN FORM
Leslie Marmon Silko, "Prayer to the Pacific"
Simon J. Ortiz, "Speaking"
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "Constantly Risking Absurdity"
Li-Young Lee, "Visions and Interpretations"
May Swenson, "The Shape of Death" (1963)
May Swenson, "The Shape of Death" (1970)
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
PART III: VANTAGE POINTS
11. Authors
"OLD HISTORICISM"
John Milton, "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont"
BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM
William Shakespeare, "Thou Art As Tyrannous, So As Thou Art"
Sylvia Plath, "Edge"
PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM
Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"
Sylvia Plath, "The Colossus"
Sylvia Plath, "Tulips"
Sylvia Plath, "Nick and the Candlestick"
Gavin Ewart, "Psychoanalysis"
Alta, "Penus Envy"
Charles Simic, "Everybody knows the story about me and Dr. Freud"
John Keats
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
from Sleep and Poetry
from Endymion: A Poetic Romance
"When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be"
"Ode to a Nightingale"
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
Rita Dove
"Adolescence-III"
"Anti-Father"
"The Event"
"Jiving"
"Courtship"
"The Satisfaction Coal Company"
"Weathering Out"
"Sunday Greens"
Gary Soto
"The Elements of San Joaquin"
"Summer"
"Field Poem"
"Hoeing"
"History"
"Mexicans Begin Jogging"
"Envying the Children of San Francisco"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
12. Texts
NEW CRITICISM
FOCUSING ON FORM
"Cherrylog Road" (again)
THE NEW CRITICAL APPROACH
THE UNDERLYING THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
Richard Wilbur, "Year's End"
Roberta Hill Whiteman, "The White Land"
THE TEXT AND PSYCHOANALYTICAL CRITICISM
David Ray, "Greens"
DECONSTRUCTION
STRUCTURALISM
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
Robert Francis, "The Base Stealer"
ELEMENTS AND PROCEDURES OF DECONSTRUCTION
Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica"
THE SELF-REFERENTIALITY OF TEXTS
Richard Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars" (again)
William Wordsworth, "She Was a Phantom of Delight"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways"
Josephine Miles, "On Inhabiting an Orange"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
13. Readers
THE NATURE OF "THE READER"
Margaret Atwood, "Postcard"
THE READER AND THE TEXT
Linda Hogan, "The Rainy Season"
THE QUESTION OF LIMITS
Jean Valentine, "December 21st"
READER, TEXT, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Russell Edson, "A Performance at Hog Theatre"
Robert Creeley, "The Language"
THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
Yosef Komunyakaa, "Facing It"
Lee Upton, "Photographs"
Mark Doty, "Tiara"
Medbh McGuckian, "Lighthouse with Dead Leaves"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
14. Culture
CULTURAL CRITICISM
Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach"
CULTURAL STUDIES
Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, AnIntelligent, Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War between Races"
NEW HISTORICISM
MARXIST CRITICISM
William Blake, "The Chimney Sweeper"
William Blake, "London"
Felicia Hemans, "The Homes of England"
James Welch, "Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat"
FEMINIST CRITICISM
BECOMING A RESISTING READER
"Cherrylog Road" (again)
Robert Herrick, "Delight in Disorder"
RECLAIMING THE FEMININE TRADITION
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, "The Introduction"
Charlotte Mew, "The Farmer's Bride"
Carolyn Kizer, "Bitch"
Jo Carson, "I Cannot Remember All the Times . . ."
FEMINIST CULTURAL CRITICISM
GENDER STUDIES
Olga Broumas, "Cinderella"
APPLICATIONS
SUGGESTIONS FOR WRITING
SUGGESTIONS AS YOU CONTINUE TO READ POETRY
PART IV: POINTS OF DEPARTURE
An Anthology of Poems for Further Reading
Anonymous, "Lord Randal"
Anonymous, "Sir Patrick Spens"
Queen Elizabeth I, "When I Was Fair and Young"
Edmund Spenser, "One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand"
Sir Philip Sidney, "Loving in Truth, and Fain in Verse My Love to Show"
Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, "Psalm 100 Jubilate Deo"
Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"
Thomas Campion, "When Thou Must Home"
John Donne, "The Sun Rising"
John Donne, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"
Ben Jonson, "On My First Son"
Lady Mary Wroth, "Am I Thus Conquered?"
Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time"
Thomas Carew, "The Spring"
John Milton, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"
Anne Bradstreet, "To My Dear and Loving Husband"
Aphra Behn, "On Her Loving Two Equally"
Jonathan Swift, "A Description of the Morning"
Alexander Pope, "Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness"
William Blake, "The Lamb"
William Blake, "The Tyger"
William Blake, "The Garden of Love"
Robert Burns, "A Red, Red Rose"
William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan"
George Gordon, Lord Byron, "She Walks in Beauty"
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Splendour Falls"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Ulysses"
Robert Browning, "Home-Thoughts, From Abroad"
Arthur Hugh Clough, "The Latest Decalogue"
Emily Dickinson, "Because I Could Not Stop for Death"
Christina Rossetti, "Song"
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Inversnaid"
A. E. Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young"
A. E. Housman, "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff..."
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, "The Other Side of a Mirror"
William Butler Yeats, "Adam's Curse"
William Butler Yeats, "The Wild Swans at Coole"
William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
William Butler Yeats, "Leda and the Swan"
Robert Frost, "After Apple Picking"
Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"
Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
Amy Lowell, "Madonna of the Evening Flowers"
Gertrude Stein, "Susie Asado"
Wallace Stevens, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Mina Loy, "The Widow's Jazz"
William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All"
Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro"
H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], "Garden"
Marianne Moore, "The Steeple-Jack"
Edith Sitwell, "Lullaby"
Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks"
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
T. S. Eliot, "Preludes"
John Crowe Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter"
Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Wild Swans"
Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"
Yvor Winters, "At the San Fransisco Airport"
Langston Hughes, "Theme for English B"
Lorine Niedecker, "Will You Write Me A Christmas Poem?"
Louis Zukofsky, "`A' 15"
Stanley Kunitz, "Father and Son"
W. H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening"
W. H. Auden, "Musie des Beaux Arts"
Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
Henry Reed, "Naming of Parts"
Randall Jarrell, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo"
John Berryman, "Henry's Confession"
Thomas McGrath, "All the Dead Soldiers"
Robert Lowell, "Skunk Hour"
Robert Duncan, "The Torso"
Charles Bukowski, "my old man"
Richard Wilbur, "Thyme Flowering among Rocks"
Jack Kerouac, "239th Chorus"
Shirley Kaufman, "Nechama"
Denise Levertov, "February Evening in New York"
Alan Dugan, "On Hurricane Jackson"
Richard Hugo, "Driving Montana"
Dannie Abse, "Pathology of Colours"
Donald Justice, "Sonatina in Yellow"
Maxine Kumin, "The Excrement Poem"
Kenneth Koch, "The History of Jazz"
Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died"
A. R. Ammons, "The City Limits"
Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"
Paul Blackburn, "Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot"
James Merrill, "The Pier: Under Pisces"
Harry Humes, "The Great Wilno"
W. S. Merwin, "Yesterday"
Galway Kinnell, "St. Francis and the Sow"
Martin Carter, "After One Year"
John Ashbery, "One Coat of Paint"
Philip Levine, "What Work Is"
Conrad Hilberry, "The Moon Seen as a Slice of Pineapple"
Anne Sexton, "Her Kind"
Donald Hall, "Names of Horses"
Adrienne Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"
Adrienne Rich, "Diving into the Wreck"
Adrienne Rich, "Rape"
Gary Snyder, "Hitch Haiku"
Derek Walcott, "Sea Grapes"
Ted Hughes, "Crow's First Lesson"
Jerome Rothenberg, "B-R-M-Tz-V-H"
Geoffrey Hill, "In Memory of Jane Fraser"
Sylvia Plath, "Metaphors"
Christopher Okigbo, "Elegy for Alto"
Etheridge Knight, "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for theCriminal Insane"
Jim Barnes, "Return to La Plata, Missouri"
Kamala Das, "In Love"
Imamu Amiri Baraka, "The New World"
Charles Wright, "Sitting at Night on the Front Porch"
Marge Piercy, "The Friend"
Jayne Cortez, "Into This Time"
Nancy Willard, "Saint Pumpkin"
C. K. Williams, "From My Window"
Keki N. Daruwalla, "Pestilence"
Charles Simic, "Begotten of the Spleen"
Michael Harper, "Nightmare Begins Responsibility"
Gary Gildner, "The High Class Bananas"
Seamus Heaney, "Digging"
Al Young, "A Dance For Ma Rainy"
Stephen Dobyns, "Black Dog, Red Dog"
Robert Hass, "Late Spring"
Lyn Hejinian, "A Mask of Anger"
James A. Perkins, "Boundaries"
Richard Garcia, "Why I Left the Church"
Ellen Bryant Voigt, "The Farmer"
Michael Ondaatje, "Biography"
James Tate, "The Wheelchair Butterfly"
Nikki Giovanni, "Nikki-Rosa"
Michael Palmer, "Fifth Prose"
Louise Gl|ck, "Gratitude"
Craig Raine, "Dandelions"
Robert Morgan, "Mountain Bride"
Alice Walker, "Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning"
Jack Mapanje, "From Florrie Abraham Witness, December 1972"
Anne Waldman, "Bluehawk"
Ai, "Why Can't I Leave You?"
Shelly Wagner, "Thirteenth Birthday"
Wendy Rose, "Loo Wit"
Sekou Sundiate, "Blink Your Eyes"
Agha Shahid Ali, "I Dream It Is Afternoon When I Return to Delhi"
James Fenton, "God, A Poem"
Victor Hernandez Cruz, "Problems with Hurricanes"
Ray A. Young Bear, "From the Spotted Night"
Charles Bernstein, "Of Time and the Line"
Carolyn Forchi, "The Colonel"
Jorie Graham, "Wanting a Child"
Paul Muldoon, "Hedgehog"
David Mura, "The Natives"
Naomi Shihab Nye, "Catalogue Army"
Mary Ruefle, "The Derision of Christ in New England"
Alberto Rmos, "Mi Abuelo"
Richard Jones, "The Color of Grief"
Louise Erdrich, "A Love Medicine"
Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Freeway 280"
Cornelius Eady, "My Mother, If She Had Won Free Dance Lessons"
Marilyn Chin, "Turtle Soup"
Jim Daniels, "Hard Times in the Motor City"
Li-Young Lee, "Eating Alone"
Tom Andrews, "The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle"
APPENDICES
A. Bibliography
Resources for the Study of Poetry
Additional Sources: Poetry and Poets
Further Reading on Critical Approaches
B. Responding on Paper
I. Writing in the Margins
II.Journal Writing
III.Writing Essay Examination Answers
IV.Writing Short Papers about Poetry
V.Writing Essays in Other Formats
VI.Writing a Literary Research Paper
C. Genre
D. More on Scansion
Biographical Sketches
Index of Authors
Index of Terms