Understanding Poetry

How to interpret Poems

No one can offer you a cut-and-dried definition of poetry, but its main feature – in contrast to prose – is its emphasis on form. Poetic form is a kind of structure, in which the words of the poem are set. This analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s more useful than you might imagine at first. Important examples of formal elements in poetry are metre, rhyme and the visual structure of the poem. Features like these work together to produce the situation in which ‘form enacts content’. This means that the form is just as important as the content in determining the meaning of the poem, and the relationship between the two is a key point for analysis. This highly popular book is presented for Kindle readers in its complete form and will be a magnificent study aid for students of English |Literature and lovers of poetry.