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Essay on using metaphors
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“A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself” this quote by E.M. Forster alludes to the concept of metafiction in poetry as a whole. According to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, “Metafiction is a kind of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction…[M]etafiction does not let the readers forget they are reading a work of fiction.” Some common metafictive strategies include a story about someone writing a story, a piece of fiction that references specific conventions of a story, or characters that are aware they are in a story or work of fiction. The poems, “Functional Poem by Mark Halliday and “The Poem You Asked For” by Larry Levis, embody various conceptions metafiction.
The metafictional devices in Larry Levis’ “The Poem You Asked For” are found in overt and subtle ways throughout the poem. The first metafictional device is the poem is about a character writing a poem. The narrator references the odious poem in every single stanza. Despite the narrator’s best efforts, the poem r...
The fear of reading literature and not being able to comprehend the ideas presented forces readers to create a deeper meaning through annotations, as expressed through Billy Collins’ use of comparative imagery and aggressive diction in “Marginalia” and “Introduction to Poetry.” Collins’ choice to
In the end of the narrator’s consciousness, the tone of the poem shifted from a hopeless bleak
A good example would be when the mother in the story talks about her life using a metaphor of a staircase. In the beginning of the poem, the mother says, "Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, [...] But all the time, I’se been a-climbin’ on" (Hughes lines 1-9). This metaphor describes the mother's life experience, the reader can infer was hard, but the nice part of this excerpt is the final lines, where the metaphor of continuing to climb on the staircase is used to symbolize the mother's goal to persevere, no matter how tough life gets because she believes her efforts will accomplish something good.
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
Sound Devices help convey the poet’s message by appealing to the reader’s ears and dr...
Good poetry provides meaningful commentary. One indication of a poem’s success in this is the depth of thought the reader has as a result of the poem. The poems I anthologized may take different
in Taormina. Metafiction is a type of fiction in which the author includes himself or herself in the story. Each story follows O’Brien’s platoon through the good times and the bad times during the war. The story ends with the reader deciding what parts of the story are fiction and non-fiction. In TTTC, O’Brien uses metafiction to help him cope with the war, and not give too many graphic details of the Vietnam War.
Humor and Irony are a unique combinations Collins displays in many of his poems, challenging the readers to interpret his work in different perspectives. In “Introduction to Poetry,” Collins offers a witty comparison between the definition of poetry and various other experiments. He asks the reader to “hold [the poem] up to the light/ like a color slide” (1-3), “press an ear against its hive” (4), “drop a mouse into a poem” (5), “walk inside the poem's room” (7), and “waterski across the surface of a poem” (9-10). Rather than stiffly explaining the definition of a poem, he finds creative and humorous approaches to explain his methods of enjoying the poems, and promote the readers’ interest towards discovering the true meaning of poetry. Just as the surrounding would seem different through color slides, he asks the readers to see the world in diverse viewpoints while reading and writing poems. Moreover, by listening to poem’s hive, dropping a mouse, and walking inside its room, Collins encourages readers to discover the concealed depth of poetry. He comments ...
Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Joseph Terry. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc, 2001. 123-154.
In the poem “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out,” by Shel Silverstein, the poet conveys his message to the audience extremely clearly. Shel Silverstein uses a mask of humor to make his message to the audience more impressive and strong than other poems. Three reasons contributing to making Shel Silverstein’s message clear are the fact that there is a funny part in the poem that people can relate to, that the poem itself is very descriptive to get lots of information from, and that the message is very deep and therefore readers really have to think deeply.
Shel Silverstein’s wit combined with his unconventional style sets him apart from other poets. His poems, though written mostly for children, contain double meanings that make th...
Language variation and the area of domain, subject matter and function, are the easiest kinds of variation to see within a text. Subject matter involves the use of lexical fields, that is to say, a grouping of words, belonging to a specific field of study, like law, medical or religious terminology. In this poem, cummings has chosen to incorporate popular clichés to portray the irony of what people say and what they mean. Through syntactical deviance, cummings shows just how jumbled these attitudes were and produces a poem that is very ironic in tone.
Through written communications, writers use a myriad of literary devices, to communicate ideas. With the use of metaphors, diction, and personification, writers are able to construct articles, books, and poems. Two examples of these included “Birthday” by M. T Buckley and “The Secret Life of Books” by Stephen Edgar. Each of these poems is trying to show an opinion toward the topic. The author in “Birthday” is trying to show how being born is similar to being in World War 2. On the other hand, “The secret Life of Books” is trying to show how books change the readers. Both poems use conceit, diction, and personification with the structure in order to convey their meaning of the poems.
Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Joseph Terry. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc, 2001.
The New Critics, just like Wimsatt and Beardsley put forward in their essay, also believed in the ‘organicity’ of the text. In the essay, they write, “A poem should not mean but be.” And, since the meaning of the poem or the text is the medium through which it can exist, and words, in turn, is the medium through which the meaning is expressed, the poem or the text b...