revision of poetic techniques ao2: analyse ways in which meanings are shaped in literary texts

Revision of Poetic Techniques

AO2: Analyse ways in which meanings are shaped in literary texts.


What is the effect? Why? How? Look closely at the detail of the text.

Structure: Overall layout of the text, e.g. stanzas, metre, rhyme scheme...Form: The method and style used by the writer, e.g. sonnet.Language: The way the writer has used words, e.g. alliteration, assonance, personification...

AQA Specification:

“a particular focus on the structures of texts as a form of shaping”

24%


What is poetry?



Literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.

A quality of beauty and intensity of emotion.

“If normal sentences are orange squash, poetry is like the syrup before it is diluted”.

"The best words in the best order." Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"The record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds." Percy Bysshe Shelley

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that it is poetry." Emily Dickinson

"A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfilment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words. Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat." Robert Frost

"Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." William Wordsworth

What is poetry?

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” TS Eliot

Poetic Techniques:• Metaphor• Simile• Personification• Hyperbole• Assonance• Alliteration• Consonance• Onomatopoeia• End rhyme• Internal rhyme• Iambic pentameter• Trochee• Foot


• Half rhymes• Pathetic fallacy• Symbol • Paradox• Ambiguity • Juxtaposition• Caesura• Enjambment • Sensory detail• Couplet • Quatrain• Sestet• Octave


Using at least five of these poetic techniques, write a poem.

1. Pick a subject. Your poem needs to say something. Pick a topic that makes you feel something or that you have an opinion about.

2. Jot down the techniques you plan to use. Have an idea about how you’ll use them before you start.

3. Decide how you’re going to structure your poem. You can always change your mind after you start but thingslike stanza and line length will have an impact on the voice of your poem.

4. Experiment! Write and re-draft your poem until you’re happy with it.

Stuck? Why not write about light? You’ve been given some quotes to help.


“When he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.”Juliet in Romeo and Juliet

Light

““Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” Martin Luther King

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.” Ralph Waldo Emerson“There are two kinds of light - the

glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.” James Thurber “When you light a candle, you also cast a

shadow.” Ursula K LeGuin

“Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.” Haruki Murakami

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” Plato

“If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“PHOSPHORESCENCE. Now there's a word to lift your hat to... to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry.” Emily Dickinson

revision of poetic techniques ao2: analyse ways in which meanings are shaped in literary texts

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