ENGL 263: POETRY AND DRAMA

THE CONTENT OF THE COURSE IS MADE UP OF THE FOLLOWING:

A: SIX SELECTED POEMS
B: ONE PLAY (DRAMA)
DETAILS OF COURSE CONTENT
• POETRY: A: THINGS FALL APART BY KOFI KINATA
• B: SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY BY LORD BYRON
• C: THE SECOND COMING BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
• D: WHEN I CONSIDER HOW MY LIGHT IS SPENT BY JOHN MILTON
• E: DEATH IN THE DAWN BY WOLE SOYINKA
• F: NIGHT RAIN BY JOHN PEPPER CLARK
• DRAMA: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS
LITERATURE? AND WHAT IS POETRY
• Literature is a subject that is interested in the study of creative works.
These works could be fictional(created through imagination) or they
could be biographical(true to life and are divided into autobiographical
and biographical works). We study these works to educate ourselves
about life, about the culture of other people and our own culture, to
draw moral lessons, to entertain ourselves, to learn how language is
used creatively, to sharpen our skills in criticism, and to develop our
creative skills. Though literature studies creative works, these works
are written by humans who lived in particular societies and in our
world and therefore take the raw material of their works from life and
hence, there is a closer link between literature and life.
GENRES OF LITERATURE
• Literature is generally divided into three genres: poetry, drama and
prose. Poetry is the oldest and the most condensed, drama is the next in
terms of age and prose is the youngest. Literature can exist in the written
form and is therefore referred to as written literature and it can also exist
in the oral form and is therefore referred as oral literature or orature.
The basic ingredient common to both written and oral literature is the
idea of creativity when it comes to the use of language. Language is like
a paint to the creative writer or composer. Language is used to creatively
paint the images and imagery that a writer or composer wants to paint
for our mental consumption and to prick our senses. Depending on
which genre the writer/composer is into, we can have poets,
dramatists/playwrights, and novelists.
What is poetry?
• Poetry can tentatively be defined as a form of art that has a message and uses a
specific medium to express that message. The medium of expression could be
language, performance or performance together with language. A poem is
therefore a unique way of expressing an emotion, giving an opinion or telling a
story. Poetry is an art form whose pleasure is derived mainly from sound.
• We have two main types of poetry: the narrative poetry and the lyrical poetry
• Narrative poetry as the name denotes is a kind of poetry that is used to tell or
narrate a story. Narrative poems include the epics and the ballads. Because of
their narrative nature, they tend to be long and extansive but their language is
verse and not prose. Example of epics include the epic of Sundiata, The Rape of
the Lock by John Pope, Paradise Lost by John Milton, etc. We also have primary
epics, secondary epics and mock epics
What is poetry?
• Lyrical poetry, unlike the narrative one, is usually short, highly
rhythmic and is used to express the feelings, musings or emotions of a
speaker/ persona in a poem. The word lyrical is derived from the
name of a musical instrument called the lyre because of the close
association between the lyre and this kind of poetry. The sonnet, the
ode, the elegy, the dirge, the epithalamium, the aubade, the
villanelle, the haiku etc are all examples of lyrical poetry.
• A third type of poetry that is less known is the dramatic poem. It
possesses the elements of surprise, dialogue and the use of poetic
features. My Last Duchess by Robert Browning is a clear example of
the dramatic poem.
FEATURES OF POETRY
• Every poem has all or most of the following features:
• Poet versus persona/personae
• Title
• Subject matter
• Theme
• Structure
• Language(diction, imagery)
• Setting
• tone
Features of poetry
• Atmosphere
• Connotative/ denotative meanings
DETAILS ON FEATURES OF POETRY

• Every written poem has an author/ composer/ or the one who wrote it. That
person who composed the poem is different from what we technically
referred to as the persona(e) of the poem. The persona is the speaking voice
in the poem. In analyzing the poem and for the sake of objectivity, we
normally refer to the persona as the one who does or says most of the things
in the poem. We always want to take away the author from the poem and
concentrate on the context, language, imagery, structure and sound pattern
in the poem. By so doing, we remain objective and faithful to what the text of
the poem says and not concentrate on the biography of the author in order to
elucidate meaning on the poem. In traditional oral poetry, it is possible to
come across compositions that have collective or communal ownership. In
the written case, it is always individual ownership that is involved.
DETAILS ON FEATURES OF POETRY
• Most poems have titles. These titles serve as a window to the content
or meaning of the poem. Sometimes, the way a poem is titled throws
a lot of meaning into the content of the poem. In other words, there
could be a direct link between the meaning of a poem and its title.
However, sometimes, some writers intentionally use titles that are
ironical, paradoxical, exaggerated, etc in order to mislead
unsuspecting readers and to create a special meaning. Sometimes,
such tricky titles lead to the addition of creative flair to the meaning
of a poem. For example, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi
Kwei Armah and The Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta are
some of the crafty titles that can easily mislead unsuspecting readers
DETAILS ON FEATURES OF POETRY
• A poem’s subject matter is what the poem is all about. If the poem is
written on war, we say the subject matter is on war or it is about war.
If it is a poem on death, we say the subject matter is death. However,
there is a close relationship between subject matter and theme. If the
poem talks about war and the subject matter is war, then the theme
refers to the specific general moral lesson about war that the poem
talked about. From the subject matter we derive the theme and
whereas the subject matter can be stated in a word, the theme is
usually a clause or a sentence. Thus, there is a specific reason why we
write on war, love, death, unfaithfulness, etc. That specific reason is
what usually constitutes the theme of the poem
DETAILS ON FEATURES OF POETRY
• Structure in poetry is an important and interesting feature. It is
interesting because it is not every poem that is written in two or three
or four stanzas. A single line can constitute a whole poem. At the
same time, there are some types of poems that have fixed structures.
Such poems include the sonnet, the villanelle, the haiku, etc. In
looking at the structure of the poem, we are interested in the division
of the poem into stanzas, how many lines per stanza, we are
interested in the mid-rhymes and end rhymes, we are interested in
any rhyming scheme that we can establish, we are interested in types
of lines used(run-on lines/end stopped lines), the use caesura etc and
how they all contribute to the overall meaning of the poem.
DETAILS ON FEATURES OF POETRY
• Language is the paint and brush of the poet and therefore, words used in
the poem cannot be glossed over. Language in poetry is normally divided
into two sections for detailed analysis(diction/imagery). The choice of
words used in the poem is normally referred to as diction and the literary
devices or figures of speech used constitute the imagery. In analyzing
these two aspects of the poem, we usually concentrate on how
appropriate the diction or imagery is to the subject matter and theme,
how they contribute to the meaning of the poem and the beauty of the
language used, how technical, ordinary, archaic they are and why. It is not
enough to identify an image and move on. Its meaning and contribution
to the overall meaning of the poem and the beauty of language used
must be explained as well.
DETAILS ON FEATURES OF POETRY
• Setting is also an important component in poetry. It simply refers to
the place where the poem is set or written. We can therefore talk
about historical and geographical settings. These two elements talk
about time and place and these elements are important in poetry
analysis. They help understand the context of the literary piece. Tone
also is the attitude of the persona towards the subject matter based
on the choice of words. The tone could be ironical, harsh, critical,
satiric, passionate, detached, etc
WHAT IS VERSE?
• Verse is the language of poetry. Verse is any arrangement of words to
produce a regular effect through metre, rhythm, and or rhyme.
Consequently, all poetry is written or composed in verse, but not all
poems have the attributes of metre, rhythm and rhyme as well.
• Blank verse has all the features of poetry except, in most cases,
rhyme. In most of the Shakespearean plays, almost all the noble
characters speak in blank verse whereas villains and common
characters speak in prose. Blank verse is usually in iambic pentameter,
the nearest pattern to human speech.
WHAT IS VERSE
• Free verse is a kind of arrangement of words that does not give much
attention to metre or rhyme, or even rhythm. Its distinctive feature as poetry
derives from the sequence or iteration of ideas than anything else; it is
therefore very much like prose arranged in shorter lengths to give the visual
shape or structure as that of the verse. Metre, rhythm, and rhyme are
therefore incidental to free verse. The poetry of T. S. Eliot and most other
20th century poets is largely free verse.
• Rhyme: This is the sameness of the sounds of words (particularly their ends)
that are not related in meaning. Thus the endings of the words have similar
sounds though the words are not synonyms. Rhyme was one of the
distinguishing features of poetry up to the beginning of the 20th century; but
it is now, along with other things, no more a requirement of poetry.
WHAT IS VERSE?
• Rhyme could be true or false. A true rhyme is a rhyme involving two words
with the same (or different) vowel arrangement in spelling but have the same
vowel sound in pronunciation; e.g, sound and found, bough and bow. A false
rhyme is one in which two words with the same vowel arrangement in
spelling have different pronunciation; e.g bow (weapon) and bow (to bend).
• Rhythm: rhythm is the movement of words through a regular succession of
strong and weak accents that gives indication of “pulse” or “beat” in poetry
or prose. Rhythm is more important to poetry than it is to prose. Rhythm
engages the ear through a regular flow of feet and thereby enables the mind
to take in definite stretches of thought and feelings expressed in the lines. A
break in rhythm nearly always implies a break in thought and feeling and calls
for a new adjustment or reaction from the reader or listener.
WHAT IS VERSE?
• Metre: This is the word used in describing the fixed foot-pattern in a
whole poem. It simply means measure. It is the metre which gives the
rhythmic shape of the whole poem. Some poems have rigid or regular
metre in which the rhythmic shape of the first stanza is repeated
throughout the whole poem; others have irregular metres in which
the rhythmic shape varies from stanza to stanza. There is therefore a
close link between music and poetry and the example of the ballad
and the lyric attest to this.
THE SONNET
• It is a poem that has a fixed form: fourteen lines. The composer of sonnets is
often referred to as a sonneteer. The sonnet is the most popular example of the
lyric. The etymology of the word sonnet can be traced to the Italian word
‘sonnetto,’ which means a sound or a song. Obviously, considering its musical
nature, it is the meaning of ‘a song’ that fits the word. The sonnet started as a
literary composition in Italy and was made popular by Francesco Petrarch and
hence the name Petrarchan sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet is normally divided
into an octave and a sestet. The rhyming scheme for the octave is normally
constant while the rhyming scheme for that of the sestet remains flexible and
changeable. For the octave, we normally have abba, abba as its rhyming scheme.
The sestet can take the form of cd, cd, cd, or cde, cde or a different combination
altogether. There is usually a volta in between the octave and the sestet in which
there is always a change in the line of argument presented in the poem
THE SONNET
• It was much later that the sonnet moved to England and English
writers experimented with the sonnet for some time. Shakespeare
wrote a lot of sonnets and he also helped in establishing the form of
what later became known as the Shakespearean, English or
Elizabethan sonnet. Instead of composing it in an octave and a sestet,
the English sonnet was rather composed in quatrains and a couplet.
The quatrains present the argument and the couplet sums up or
resolves the problem stated in the poem. The rhyming scheme for the
typical Shakespearean sonnet is normally abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The
typical Shakespearean sonnet is usually composed in the iambic
pentameter.
THE SONNET
• Much later, another version of the sonnet was developed in England
by another group of authors. This third version was known as the
Spenserian sonnet which was also composed in quatrains and a
couplet but with a different rhyming scheme. The rhyming scheme for
the Spenserian sonnet is usually abab, bcbc, cdcd, ff.