Guide And the Mind Speaks : Poems-Monologues-Opinions And Lots of Truth!

Jeanette Winterson on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy – of course it's political

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A Practical Introduction and Guide to Explication

That the poem is a way of thinking without losing the feeling. That a poem is a way of feeling without being too overwhelmed by feeling to think straight. That the poem is an intervention: Carol Ann Duffy has often spoken about poetry as an everyday event and not as a special occasion. She wants us to enjoy poetry, to have as much as we like, to be able to help ourselves to a good, fresh supply, to let poetry be as daily as talking — because poetry is talking.

Words begin in the mouth before they hit the page. Speech is older than writing, and poetry is as old as speech. Poems are best spoken to get the full weight and taste of the words and the run of the lines.

Difficult poems become easier when spoken. Rhythm and rhyme aid recall.

Robert Browning

Poems are always rhythmic but not always rhyming. In the same way that melody became rather suspect in 20th-century classical music — atonal fractures being the mark of seriousness — so modernism rebranded rhyme as pastoral, lovesick, feminine, superficial. Fine for kids and tea towels; not fine for the muscular combative voice of the urban poet. It has taken a long time for rhyme to return to favour. Rap and the rise of performance poetry have played a part in that return. As a powerful modern voice, Duffy has been unafraid to use rhyme from the beginning. In her TS Eliot prizewinning collection, Rapture , poem after poem deployed rhyme with accurate beauty.

Her poetry is a practical proof of rhyme as expressive, flexible, purposefully baited.

Dangle a rhyme at the end of a line and the mind-fish bites. Not only end-rhymes, but off-rhymes, hidden rhymes, half-rhymes, ghost rhymes, deliberate near-misses that hit the mark:. Other poems rhyme with cheeky exuberance.

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But the fact that three simple title-words can be the challenger affirms the power of language to disclose the unthought norm. And the unthought known. Men and women alike know that more than half the world is female but men and women alike forget it every day. It takes a poet to jog our memory. Their common link is that the poems themselves are told by the spouse-voice of the famous male.

This headstand, the world turned upside down, gives us another look at history through her-story. The politics is feminism. They are written with such humour or poignancy, or insight or recognition, that we get the point, the many points, the points of view and the points of light.

Here is Frau Freud, in mad lexical delight, listing every word she can think of for Penis — and at last, in a bout of new theory-making that would have given us a very different psychoanalysis, she drops Penis Envy and opts instead for Penis Pity. Actually or symbolically, practically or poetically.

Only a man would think anyone could. She has no objection to sleeping with him first, or bringing him breakfast in bed. The skeleton of language is female. Deeper, it seems, than our mother tongue. What you risk reveals what you value. This thoughtful, funny poem questions the masculine obsession with money — far from the stereotype of woman as a gold digger. What Mrs Midas misses most about her husband is the one thing she can never have: Deeply influenced by Shelley, Robert Browning made two false starts.

The other was as the late-Romantic poet of the confessional meditation Pauline and the difficult though innovatory narrative…. The son of a clerk in the Bank of England in London , Browning received only a slight formal education, although his father gave him a grounding in Greek and Latin. In he attended classes at the University of London but left after half a session.

Apart from a journey to St. Petersburg in with George de Benkhausen, the Russian consul general, and two short visits to Italy in and , he lived with his parents in London until , first at Camberwell and after at Hatcham. During this period —46 he wrote his early long poems and most of his plays. A Fragment of a Confession , anonymous , although formally a dramatic monologue, embodied many of his own adolescent passions and anxieties. In he published Paracelsus and in Sordello , both poems dealing with men of great ability striving to reconcile the demands of their own personalities with those of the world.

A Practical Introduction and Guide to Explication

Encouraged by the actor Charles Macready, Browning devoted his main energies for some years to verse drama, a form that he had already adopted for Strafford In that year he met Elizabeth Barrett. In her Poems Barrett had included lines praising Browning, who wrote to thank her January In May they met and soon discovered their love for each other.

Barrett had, however, been for many years an invalid, confined to her room and thought incurable. Her father, moreover, was a dominant and selfish man, jealously fond of his daughter, who in turn had come to depend on his love.

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When her doctors ordered her to Italy for her health and her father refused to allow her to go, the lovers, who had been corresponding and meeting regularly, were forced to act. They were married secretly in September ; a week later they left for Pisa. Throughout their married life, although they spent holidays in France and England , their home was in Italy, mainly at Florence , where they had a flat in Casa Guidi. Their income was small, although after the birth of their son, Robert, in Mrs. Browning produced comparatively little poetry during his married life. Men and Women, however, had no great sale, and many of the reviews were unfavourable and unhelpful.

Disappointed for the first time by the reception of his work, Browning in the following years wrote little, sketching and modeling in clay by day and enjoying the society of his friends at night. In the autumn he returned slowly to London with his young son. At first he avoided company, but gradually he accepted invitations more freely and began to move in society.

Another collected edition of his poems was called for in , but Pauline was not included. In —69 he published his greatest work, The Ring and the Book , based on the proceedings in a murder trial in Rome in Grand alike in plan and execution, it was at once received with enthusiasm, and Browning was established as one of the most important literary figures of the day.

For the rest of his life he was much in demand in London society.

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He spent his summers with friends in France, Scotland, or Switzerland or, after , in Italy. The most important works of his last years, when he wrote with great fluency, were the long narrative or dramatic poems, often dealing with contemporary themes, such as Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau , Fifine at the Fair , Red Cotton Night-Cap Country , The Inn Album , and the two series of Dramatic Idyls and Fancies and Facts —Browning published toward the end of his life two books of unusually personal origin— La Saisiaz , at once an elegy for his friend Anne Egerton-Smith and a meditation on mortality, and Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day , in which he discussed books and ideas that had influenced him since his youth.

While staying in Venice in , Browning caught cold, became seriously ill, and died on December He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Few poets have suffered more than Browning from hostile incomprehension or misplaced admiration, both arising very often from a failure to recognize the predominantly dramatic nature of his work. The bulk of his writing before was for the theatre; thereafter his major poems showed his increasing mastery of the dramatic monologue. This consists essentially of a narrative spoken by a single character and amplified by his comments on his story and the circumstances in which he is speaking.

From his own knowledge of the historical or other events described, or else by inference from the poem itself, the reader is eventually enabled to assess the intelligence and honesty of the narrator and the value of the views he expresses. This type of dramatic monologue, since it depends on the unconscious provision by the speaker of the evidence by which the reader is to judge him, is eminently suitable for the ironist. Neither of these criticisms is groundless; both are incomplete. Browning is not always difficult. In many poems, especially short lyrics, he achieves effects of obvious felicity.

Nevertheless, his superficial difficulties, which prevent an easy understanding of the sense of a passage, are evident enough: Sludge or Napoleon III , obliges the reader to follow a chain of subtle or paradoxical arguments. All these characteristics stand in the way of easy reading. First, Browning often chooses an unexpected point of view, especially in his monologues, thus forcing the reader to accept an unfamiliar perspective.

Robert Browning

A Practical Introduction and Guide to Explication

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