Poems are not puzzles to be cracked. What you are required to do when you write about poetry is to arrive at a genuine and individual personal response to something which is carefully crafted in language.
Poets are masters of language. They choose words more deliberately and consciously than is usual. After all, language is their craft. However, although we cannot all be poets, it is important to realize that what poets do is not alien to us. We are all immersed in language. We all experience the world in language. We all seek self-expression. To express exactly what you mean is not always easy (just as poetry is not always easy), but it is always satisfying and rewarding.
To the Cuckoo by William Wordsworth William Wordsworth’s poem “To the Cuckoo” is a eulogy for the bird. The poet is resting on the grass, immersed in nature when he hears the Cuckoo’s song. Wordsworth labels the bird as cheerful and unaffected by the constraints of industrial life. The bird’s Read more…
Mac Flecknoe by John Dryden Analysis “Mac Flecknoe” is one of the most well-known mock-heroic verses in English literature. In it, Dryden challenges his former friend Thomas Shadwell for claiming to be the true heir of Richard Flecknoe, a recently deceased dramatist and poet whom Dryden portrays as having long Read more…
A Poison Tree by William Blake Study Guide Summary of the Poem “A Poison Tree” is one of the lesser-known of William Blake’s twenty-six Songs of Experience poems, which also include “The Tyger,” “Ah, Sun-flower,” and “London.” The companion volume to Blake’s Songs of Innocence, released in 1789, is Songs Read more…
Ulysses – Summary and Analysis Ulysses (Odysseus) declares that it is pointless for him to sit at home “by this still hearth” with his old wife, bestowing gifts and punishments on the anonymous masses that reside in his country. Still speaking to himself, he declares that he “cannot rest from Read more…
Dover Beach by Mathew Arnold About the Poem “Dover Beach” is a lyric poem written by English poet Matthew Arnold. It was initially published in 1867 in the anthology New Poems, but surviving notes indicate that it was written as early as 1849. The most likely year is 1851. This Read more…
Second Coming by W. B. Yeats About the poem. The poem The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats is regarded as one of his greatest masterpieces. It was written by the poet just a month before A Prayer For My Daughter in 1919. The poet was motivated to write it by the Read more…
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a poem composed by John Keats, an English Romantic poet, and first published anonymously in Annals of the Fine Arts in May 1819. “Ode on Indolence,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and “Ode to Read more…
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats Summary The poem was composed in May 1819 at Wentworth, Hamstead, where there was a garden frequented by a nightingale. In the first stanza, the poet aspires to get intoxicated so that he might forget his life and the trials and despair of Read more…
Summary of To Autumn In the opening stanza , Keats’s speaker is talking about Autumn and how it has a close relationship with the sun, which makes fruits ripen and flowers bloom. In the second stanza, the speaker presents Autumn as a female goddess, frequently observed seated on the granary Read more…
My Last Duchess by Browning Introduction “My Last Duchess,” which was first published in the collection Dramatic Lyrics in 1842, is an excellent example of Browning’s use of dramatic monologue. Browning’s psychological portrayal of a great Renaissance aristocrat is given to the reader as if he or she were “eavesdropping” Read more…
