Poetic Form and Close Reading | Memorable Characters in English Poetry | Historical Contexts | Genres | Famous Conceits |
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What is polyvalent (or ambiguous).
When a word has more than one meaning, it can be said to be this.
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Who is Porphyria's Lover.
He strangles his companion with her own blonde hair.
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Who is John Milton.
This poet's revolutionary politics mirrored those of his character, Satan.
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What is the Pastoral.
This kind of poem usually reveals tensions between literacy and illiteracy.
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What is Paradise Lost or The Darkling Thrush.
This poem likens poetry to the nightingale's song.
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What is Practical Criticism.
This famous book by I.A. Richards inaugurated the practice of close reading.
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Who is Despair.
He tries to convince Redcrosse to take his own life.
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What is the Preface to Lyrical Ballads
This prose work was concerned with "gross and violent stimulants" of modern life and its effect on the human mind.
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What is allegory.
Spenser described this genre as a "dark conceit."
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Who is Andrea del Sarto.
This timid painter likens all of his paintings to "twilight"
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What is a message/messages.
Brooks and Warren thought it was reductive to say that poem was this, and warned against hunting for them.
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Who is J. Alfred Prufrock?
He thought he "should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
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What is In Memoriam?
This poem alludes to contemporaneous scientific developments when it imagines Nature responding, "A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go"
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What is a lyrical ballad.
"Simon Lee" is an example of a hybrid genre called this.
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What is "The Idea of Order at Key West"
This poem describes the woman singing as "the maker."
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What is trochaic tetrameter.
This is the meter of the poem, if each line is 8 syllables long and is comprised of four "feet" that scan "STRESS - UNSTRESSED."
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Who is Eve?
She asked, "If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit straitened... How are we happy? |
What is "The Darkling Thrush"
This poem reflects on the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th.
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What is an aubade.
This kind of poem is typically addressed to the morning or the morning sun.
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Who is Shakespeare.
This poet describes how he believes he is perceived by describing "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."
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What is Paradise Lost.
This work is prefaced by a short essay describing why the poet is rejecting rhyme -- the first instance of unrhymed narrative poetry in English.
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Who is the Nymph (in Ralegh's "The Nymph's Reply")
She declines an invitation, saying "If all the world and love were young / And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue / These pretty pleasures might me move / To live with thee, and be thy love."
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What is "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"
This poetic work reveals the poet's anxieties about his class and educational background.
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What is the georgic.
This middle genre was traditionally attempted by a poem after he/she wrote pastorals but before he/she wrote an epic.
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What is "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
This poem compared the rural dead to unseen underwater gems or unseen flowers.
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