鑽石舞台

I

The purpose of this book can be expressed in one sentence. It is intended as an accessible survey of those technical aspects of poetry which students of English literature often see as daunting. It attempts to demystify the study of poetry, aiming to explain the issues in a lively and informative fashion.In effect, Poetry is intended as a route map though the poetic maze, with chapters t>n such essential but often complex issues as rhythm and metre, the use of metaphor in poetry, poetic sound effects and the visual appearance of poetry. Crucially, the book aims to make the jargon of poetry less intimidating, offering clear explanations of poetic terminology allied to close readings which demonstrate how poetry actually works in practice. Its organising principle is tripartite, consisting of the introduction of termin,ology,exposition and illustration. Our hope is that the text will thus provide a stimulating blend of different types of discussion. Throughout, poetic terms are introduced, explained and demonstrated by citation and analysis.The latter aspect is perhaps the most crucial to the reader. The study of poetic devices, like the study of the terminology of all intellectual disci,plines,is best addressed by examples of how poets have actually used these devices. Consequently, each chapter contains several sustained set,.piece readings of poems chat are presented as illustrations of the critical readings readers can learn to perform for themselves. It is our hope chat this book will allow students co move away from the feeling chat the formal aspects of poetry are matters which make sense only to a few initiates, and that they will, as a consequence, feel comfortable with these issues in a manner which will directly and practically inform their wider reading and studying of English poetry. If this book can prompt a sense amongst its readers that the technical analysis of poetry is both valuable and something which is well within their intellectt1al grasp, theq its purpose will have been achieved.

II

In his meditative satire Table Talk (published in 1782), the poet William Cowper (1731- 1800) worried that his great early eighteenth,century pre,decessor Alexander Pope, with his carefully contrived and regular verse,had 'made poetry a mere mechanic art'. Here Cowper stands at the cusp of the Romantic period and, indeed, seems to anticipate the Romantic view of poetry, with its distrust of an undue emphasis upon the technical aspects of verse and attendant privileging of the concepts of originality, spontaneity and self,expression. Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century, Cowper's great admirer William Wordsworth (1770-1850) manifests an anxiety that the formal examination of a work of art somehow threatens to mutilate and destroy its effect: 'we murder to dissect'. Such an attitude has its post,Romantic devotees to this day, amongst those readers of poetry who main,rain that there is something cold, even reptilian, about the academic study of literature and that poetry is an art primarily to be enjoyed on an emotional level. A fine poem, according to this line of argument, is, after all, a thing of beauty, appealing to the heart rather than the head; and close, formal analysis serves only to break the butterfly on the wheel. We would not wish to deny the emotional power of verse and acknowledge, furthermore, that the affective potency of good poetry does have something intangible about it,often seeming to deny and defy any attempt to catch its essence. However,and whatever high Romantic argument might suggest, we would also argue that poetry is a contrived and highly wrought cultural product which is heavily dependent upon formal and generic conventions which have developed ·and evolved through many centuries. This book's purpose is to explore these formal and technical aspects of English verse in an accessible and entertaining manner. In essence, Poetry examines the 'mechanic art' of verse, addressing what one might call the nuts and bolts which lock the poetic work of art together. Such an attention to the 'mechanic' is not to deny the 'art' of poetry, any more than an understanding of the machinery of a Ferrari distracts from its status as a thing of beauty - a mechanically tooled thing of beauty, but a thing of beauty nonetheless. Indeed, we would argue that an understanding of the formal underpinning of a poem actually serves to deepen one's appreciation of its status as a work of art: the pleasure and exhilaration which one can feel in reading a fine poem are sensations which should actually be heightened by an appreciation of the skill of its constructton.

On a more pragmatic level, it is undeniable that a knowledge of the poetic terminology addressed in this book and the critical skills which it seeks to demonstrate by example are of great utility to the principal audience for this book, the undergraduate student of English. This is a book which aims to give such readers the tools to work on the formal organisation of poetry with confidence. It discusses form both through definition and through example;each chapter's introduction of technical terminology is allied to close readings which demonstrate how poets have used these techniques. These illustrations take the form of examples drawn from a wide range of English poetry from the Renaissance to the present day, from the sixteenth,century work of Edmund Spenser (c. 1552- 1599) to the contemporary Afro,Caribbean voice of John Agard (b. 1949) - the adjective 'English' is here used with reference to language rather more than to nationality. English poetry is a tradition which continues to develop and mutate in exciting new forms to this day, a rich and diverse set of writings which in recent decades has demonstrated the capacity to assimilate new voices from a multitude of different circumstances (social, sexual, racial). Consequently, the critical skills which this book seeks to demonstrate are not, to use Wordsworth's term, skills of dissection, as the analysis of English poetry does not involve the student conducting an autopsy upon a deceased patient, but rather what one might call the diagnosis of a poetic body which is still healthy and vibrant today.

This book is based on the authors' practical experience of teaching poetry at undergraduate level. Indeed, it is heavily influenced by discussions with our first,year students about the difficulties raised by the study of poetry and,most crucially, by what students see as the key critical skills necessary to that study. We have commonly found that our students initially find the formal study of poetry, with its seemingly impenetrable jargon and preponderance of Greek words, somewhat daunting and this book seeks co dispel this impression. It does not seek to deny chat, for example, the discourse of prosody or the varieties of figurative language are intellectually challenging.However, it does assert that these are matters which can be understood by the student, rather than remaining the province of those initiated into the academic and poetic communities. This book attempts to fill the gaps in knowledge identified by our students, readers who feel little apprehension about being required to answer assignment questions about the themes and contexts of poetry (whether social, political or sexual), but who tend to find the technical aspects of poetry somewhat alienating. In other words,assessing what poetry says seems to hold few terrors for the typical student,but the question of how these meanings are delivered is rather more problem,atical. Consequently, our book is an attempt to offer an accessible and clearly,written textbook for both the student and the general reader seeking to understand how poetry works. It guides the reader who is, for example,uncertain about the distinction between free verse and blank verse or bemused by the difference between a metaphor and a metonym through the problems raised by the study of poetry.