Poetry 101
How to Analyze a Poem?
Poetry lectures -including every period- are one of my all time favorite lectures in my university life and they were also a favorite of mine during highschool as well. Over years, I’ve learned many different ways and tips to analyze a poem, how to understand the emotions and messages through the compact language of it. In this post I will share my tips with you. ✨
How I take notes about poems? Our professor always gives semester worth poems in a book, I take notes on those papers only about the structure. However meaning analysis is much more indepth then structure analysis, so a small piece of paper is not enough for me. I use simple lined papers to analyze the meaning step by step and collect them in my folder. When I need them for a test or a final, I simply go to my folder, take my notes and open our course book, then revise. 🌸
First and most important step to analyze a poem is background knowledge. Since it can be really hard to understand period poems -like Victorian era, Renaissance, Romantics etc.- due to their language, it is crucial to learn something before even looking at the poem itself. We can divide this section in two. Information about the period the poem belongs and the information about the poet.
Who is the poet?
Does the poet has a problem or a different ideology related to politics, religion, family or personal?
What year the poem was written in what country?
Does the poem belong to a particular period or literary movement?
What are the key points about this period? (Emotions, Allegories, Messages and Symbolism)
After gaining enough knowledge to at least relate how the mood or theme of the poem can be, we start analyzing. Again, I tend to divide general analysis into two parts. Structure and meaning. I always start with the structure because it takes small amount of time considering the “meaning analysis”.
The Structure:
Style of the poem (lyric, epic…),
Time and passage,
Language (repetition, symbolism, allegories, imagery and figure of speech),
The speaker,
Characters and their meanings, backgrounds
The Meaning:
Mood and theme,
Tone,
Meaning of the title,
Message (what poet wants to give to you, based on political problems, religions, family or personal problems such as fear of death, depression etc.)
After analyzing the structure and the meanig we are almost done collecting our needed information to draw our conclusion. When I am done with analyzing, I start reading at least two essays on the poem. Different eyes can give different ideas so it is pretty important to be sure that you didn’t miss anything in your work. We must remember that everybody is different. One mind may think that the poem is depressing and dark however you can think that it is realistic and bright. It depends on the mindset. So there is no true or wrong way to drawing your own conclusion. To express your feelings properly, revise your informations you’ve collected during your analysis and express your thoughts about poem.
Small side note, poetry and drama professors LOVE sophisticated language. Try to use more complex vocabulary in your exams.
I hope this post will help you my sweeties! 🌸 ✨
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