Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources College Board Suggestions for Studying Poetry

College Board Suggestions for Studying Poetry

[with links & commentary]

READING WIDELY

• Read poems from sixteenth to twenty-first centuries.
• Examine models of representative poems from particular eras.
• Practice unraveling conceits. ["Conceits" is a 17c critical term for extended metaphor.]
• Practice making sense of associative logic.
• Understand the importance of the line.
• Practice sorting out syntax.

READING DEEPLY

• Read closely and carefully.
• Seek out relation of writer’s craft and meaning.
• Identify speaker.
• Identify situation.

WRITING

• Practice annotation.
• Paraphrase.
• Identify sections.
• Note literary devices.
• Ask questions of the text.

Helen Vendler in Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, in her chapter “Describing Poems,” suggests that readers identify the kind of “speech act” a poem presents. Is it an apology, a declaration, a boast, an explanation, a prayer, or a reproach? Are there successive speech acts in the same poem?

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