Analyzing Poetry

Undergraduate Writing Center Handouts. Analyzing Poetry. Workplace Document.

University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Writing Center. Projects.uwc. utexas.edu/handouts. University of Texas at Austin. Web. 13 Oct. 2010.

This text hopes to get its reader to learn how to analyze poetry. Poetry can be difficult to understand in general and therefore difficult to analyze. Some poems have very deep underlying meanings and we need tools to figure out these meanings. The primary audience of this text is University of Texas at Austin undergraduate students. Secondary audience could be students from any university and above the undergraduate level. Accidental audience could be anyone who comes across this document on the internet. I found this text on the internet on the University of Texas at Austin’s undergraduate writing center web page. This text was written by University of Texas at Austin’s undergraduate writing center.

The writer wants his/her audience to understand the elements of poetry, content, language, imagery, form and syntax. Content: How does the tone of the speaker and the context of the work change your understanding of the poem? Language: How does the language and rhythm contribute to the meaning, purpose or emotional force? Imagery: How does the imagery construct the poem’s theme, tone, and purpose? Form: How does the form of the poem correspond to theme and main idea of the work? And Syntax: How do the poet’s syntactical choices change or expand the ideas in the poem? It is important to able to answer these questions as we read poetry because they will better help us understand and therefore analyze poetry.

The language choice is very clear and simple, this makes the text easy to understand and follow. Knowledge is created in this text by breaking down each element. For example under content you will find, speaker, tone, tension, context with further explanations. Knowledge is conveyed by teaching us how to apply these elements and sub-elements when reading poetry to help the reader in the process of analyzing poetry.