How to Answer a poetry question

Think of your introduction as a road map. You have been given a destination (the question) and there are lots of perfectly acceptable ways of getting there. In your introduction you lay out clearly what directions you’ll take in your essay. Your conclusion is where you look back on the highlights of your journey and recap on what you have learnt along the way!

INTRODUCTION: MAKE SURE TO USE THE WORDS FROM THE Q – but don’t begin by simply parroting back the question word for word. There is nothing worse than the predictable “I agree 100% that…..”. You could begin with a quote and/or with a dramatic statement and you must engage with the question asked.

Each introduction needs the following:

• Thesis (main idea) = eg. Plath’s poetry is filled with the fears we all share.
• Main topics to be discussed = (1), (2), (3)
• Answer the Question = PR – my personal response (sentences using “I” or “me”)

Imagine the question is “Plath’s poetry offers us a frightening yet fascinating insight into her personal demons”
Sample introduction:

(Thesis) Plath’s poetry captures the fear in the heart of us all. Fear of failure, fear of unhappiness, fear of hitting the bottom and being unable to claw our way back to sanity. (1) In the poems “Morning Song” and “Child”, Plath is afraid that despite her best intentions she is will not be a good mother to her children. (2) In “Mirror” and “Elm” she fears that her depression & disappointment with life will destroy her. (3) In “Pheasant” and “The Arrival of the Beebox” she worries that power corrupts people in frightening ways. (PR) I found this exploration of human fears and insecurities in her poetry both fascinating & disturbing.

CONCLUSION: MAKE SURE TO USE THE WORDS FROM THE QUESTION but don’t simply repeat what you said in the introduction and don’t introduce new ideas.

Each conclusion must:

• Link the last paragraph to the first.
• Repeat the thesis (main idea) but rephrase it.
• Taking each idea in turn (1. motherhood, 2. depression, 3. power) say what you learned from studying each issue & this poet in general. By doing this you will be showing how you have proved your thesis/answered the Q

 Sample conclusion:

(Thesis) Thus we see that Plath’s poetry begins in fear and ends in fear. Yet studying her poetry and getting an insight into her personal demons was for me an uplifting as well as a depressing experience. (1)I personally admired her determination to provide only the best for her children and learnt that parenting can involve many difficult challenges. (2)I found her exploration of the loss of youth in Mirror and the loss of love & sanity in Elm truly disturbing, but in a positive way these poems encouraged me to avoid putting pressure on myself to be ‘perfect’ in appearance and behaviour. (3) Finally, Plath’s poetry challenged me to avoid exploiting the power I have over nature and to have a greater respect for the environment. Accompanying Plath on her journey to the bottom was not easy but I learnt a lot about life on the way and I would strongly recommend her poetry despite it’s difficult subject matter.

Some obvious things that need to be said:

Don’t put in the bits in bold/brackets – I’m just putting them in to make it really obvious what each sentence is doing.

This is a good introduction and conclusion FOR THIS PARTICULAR ESSAY TITLE. But don’t be rubbing your hands together in glee, saying ‘yey, I’ll just learn off this introduction and conclusion and write them if Plath comes up‘ – you can’t write a definitive introduction and conclusion in advance because you don’t know what the question will be until you open the exam paper. And you MUST answer the question. And there’s also the not so small matter of plagiarism to consider!

Modernism and T.S Eliot

The Waste Land was published in London and New york in autumn 1922. Earlier in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses had been published. These two works, the poem and the novel, quickly came to be recognised as the central literary texts of modernism.

The Waste Land forces readers to face difficult questions concerning values, related to religion, morality, history and art. 

Are values communal or individual?

We, as readers, are addressed and interrogated by the poem and responses are demanded of us; the poem does not provide answers or solutions. 

Although it is obviously a construction of its time and incorporated itself contemporary developments in the visual arts, music, and cinema as well as literature, it continues to broadcast beyond its period of creation, beyond the twentieth century. 

No poet of any ambition since 1922 can afford to ignore The Waste Land, and no individual concerned with how to live a decent or significant life can ignore the challenge set by the poem.

Modernism designates the broad literary and cultural movement that spanned all of the arts and even spilled into politics and philosophy. Like Romanticism, Modernism was highly varied in its manifestations between the arts and even within each art. The dates when Modernism flourished are in dispute, but few scholars identify its genesis as being before 1860 and World War II is generally considered to mark an end of the movements height. Modernist art initially began in Europe's capitals, primarily London,Milan, Berlin, St. Petersburg and especially Paris; it spread to the cities of the United States and South America after World I; by the 1940s, Modernism had thoroughly taken over the American and European academy, where it was challenged by nascent Postmodernism in the 1960s.

In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was the beginning of the distinction between "high" and "low" art. The educational reforms of the Victorian Age had led to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and therefore a greater demand for literature of all sorts. A popular press quickly developed to supply that demand. The sophisticated Literati looked upon this new popular literature with scorn. Writers who refused to bow the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation from the mainstream society. To some extent, this alienation fed into the stereotype of the aloof artist, producing nothing of commercial value for the market. It's worth mentioning that this alienation worked both ways, as the reading public by large turned their backs on many 'elitist' artists. The academic world became something of a refuge for disaffection artists, as they could rub elbows with fellow disenfranchised intellectuals. Still, the most effective poets and novelists did manage to make profound statements that were absorbed by the whole of society and not just the writers inner circles. in the later years of the modernist period, a form of populism returned to the literary mainstream, as regionalism and identity politics became significant influences on the purpose and direction of artistic endeavor. 

How to study a poem

Poetry is the most challenging kind of literary writing. In your first reading you may well not understand what the poem is about. Don't jump too swiftly to any conclusions about the poem's meaning.

Read the poem many times, including out loud. After the second or third reading, write down any features you find interesting or unusual.

What is the poem's tone of voice? What is the poem's mood?

Does the poem have an argument? Is it descriptive?

Is the poet writing in his or her own voice? Perhaps they are putting on a persona or a mask?

Is there anything special about the kind of language the poet has chosen? Which words stand out? Why?

What elements are repeated? Consider alliteration, assonance, rhyme, rhythm, metaphor and ideas.

What might the poems images suggest or symbolise?
 
What might be significant about the way the poem is arranged in lines? Does the grammar coincide with the ending of the lines or does it 'run over'? What is the effect of this?

Do not consider the poem in isolation. Can you compare and contrast the poem with any other work by the same poet with any other poem that deals with the same theme?

What do you think the poem is about?
 
 Every argument you make about the poem must be backed up with details and quotations that explore it's language and organisation?

Always express your ideas in your own words.

 

Useful language to use

Other words for suggests...

• Propose
• Put forward
• Recommend
• Advise
• Imply
• Insinuate
• Hint
• Evoke
• Intimate
• Indicate

Other words for creates...

• Compose
• Devise
• Initiate
• Establish
• Produce
• Generate
• Makes
• Constructs
• Stimulates
• Attains

Other words for effect...

• Impact
• Impression
• Meaning
• Significance
• Import

Practice Questions

How does Eliot comment on the act of writing poetry? How does his perspective change over the course of his career? Is he optimistic or pessimistic about the power of poetry to influence the modern world?

2. Describe the various speakers and characters in Eliot’s poems, particularly “Prufrock” and The Waste Land. Which of these poems, or which sections of these poems, would you call monologues? How does Eliot adapt the dramatic monologue form?

3. How does Eliot use the relationships between men and women to comment on society and culture? Why is “Prufrock” a “love song”?

4. What kinds of imagery does Eliot use? How do these sets of imagery change from “Prufrock” to Four Quartets?

5. Think about Eliot’s use of form and language. What is most “poetic” about his works? What linguistic devices does he use?

6. Describe Eliot’s range of cultural references. How do references to Eastern religions fit in with allusions to Christ and Dante? Why does Eliot include untranslated bits from non-English works?

7. What is the place of religion in Eliot’s work? How does this change over the course of his career?

8. What is the “Waste Land” Eliot describes? What other kinds of physical settings does Eliot use? How do they influence the messages of his poems?

9. Why is Eliot so fascinated with death imagery? What does the recurring imagery of drowning symbolize?

10. Describe the kind of person Eliot creates in “Prufrock.” How does Prufrock fulfill or rebut stereotypes of the modern intellectual?

Analysing Eliot

Eliot attributed a great deal of his early style to the French Symbolists—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Laforgue—whom he first encountered in college, in a book by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist Movement in Literature. It is easy to understand why a young aspiring poet would want to imitate these glamorous bohemian figures, but their ultimate effect on his poetry is perhaps less profound than he claimed. While he took from them their ability to infuse poetry with high intellectualism while maintaining a sensuousness of language, Eliot also developed a great deal that was new and original. His early works, like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, draw on a wide range of cultural reference to depict a modern world that is in ruins yet somehow beautiful and deeply meaningful. Eliot uses techniques like pastiche and juxtaposition to make his points without having to argue them explicitly. As Ezra Pound once famously said, Eliot truly did “modernize himself.” In addition to showcasing a variety of poetic innovations, Eliot’s early poetry also develops a series of characters who fit the type of the modern man as described by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others of Eliot’s contemporaries. The title character of “Prufrock” is a perfect example: solitary, neurasthenic, overly intellectual, and utterly incapable of expressing himself to the outside world.

As Eliot grew older, and particularly after he converted to Christianity, his poetry changed. The later poems emphasize depth of analysis over breadth of allusion; they simultaneously become more hopeful in tone: Thus, a work such as Four Quartets explores more philosophical territory and offers propositions instead of nihilism. The experiences of living in England during World War II inform the Quartets, which address issues of time, experience, mortality, and art. Rather than lamenting the ruin of modern culture and seeking redemption in the cultural past, as The Waste Land does, the quartets offer ways around human limits through art and spirituality. The pastiche of the earlier works is replaced by philosophy and logic, and the formal experiments of his early years are put aside in favor of a new language consciousness, which emphasizes the sounds and other physical properties of words to create musical, dramatic, and other subtle effects.

However, while Eliot’s poetry underwent significance transformations over the course of his career, his poems also bear many unifying aspects: all of Eliot’s poetry is marked by a conscious desire to bring together the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the emotional in a way that both honors the past and acknowledges the present. Eliot is always conscious of his own efforts, and he frequently comments on his poetic endeavors in the poems themselves. This humility, which often comes across as melancholy, makes Eliot’s some of the most personal, as well as the most intellectually satisfying, poetry in the English language.

The man behind the poetry

Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he is better known, was born in 1888 in St. Louis. He was the son of a prominent industrialist who came from a well- connected Boston family. Eliot always felt the loss of his family’s New England roots and seemed to be somewhat ashamed of his father’s business success; throughout his life he continually sought to return to the epicenter of Anglo- Saxon culture, first by attending Harvard and then by emigrating to England, where he lived from 1914 until his death. Eliot began graduate study in philosophy at Harvard and completed his dissertation, although the outbreak of World War I prevented him from taking his examinations and receiving the degree. By that time, though, Eliot had already written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the War, which kept him in England, led him to decide to pursue poetry full-time. 

 

 

Eliot met Ezra Pound in 1914, as well, and it was Pound who was his main mentor and editor and who got his poems published and noticed. During a 1921 break from his job as a bank clerk (to recover from a mental breakdown), Eliot finished the work that was to secure him fame, The Waste Land. This poem, heavily edited by Pound and perhaps also by Eliot’s wife, Vivien, addressed the fragmentation and alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these fragments to create a new kind of poetry. It was also around this time that Eliot began to write criticism, partly in an effort to explain his own methods. In 1925, he went to work for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Despite the distraction of his wife’s increasingly serious bouts of mental illness, Eliot was from this time until his death the preeminent literary figure in the English-speaking world; indeed, he was so monumental that younger poets often went out of their way to avoid his looming shadow, painstakingly avoiding all similarities of style.  

Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to Anglicanism. His poetry from this point onward shows a greater religious bent, although it never becomes dogmatic the way his sometimes controversial cultural criticism does. Four Quartets, his last major poetic work, combines a Christian sensibility with a profound uncertainty resulting from the war’s devastation of Europe. Eliot died in 1965 in London.