PoetryLibrary

Rough Guide to Submitting Poetry to Literary Journals (by Email) First thing you need is your poems, naturally; these must be fully redrafted to your satisfaction to have much of a chance of getting anywhere in the world of self-respecting mags. Try out some workshops (there are a tonne on the internet, and plenty in the real world too), ask your friends, but most of all just mull them over for yourself until you're happy. Do not pad your submission with bad poems, thinking the worse ones might get through thanks to your stronger work. This will just result in the whole bunch being rejected, in all probability. Next we need to scope out a

"Concrete poetry is poetry in which the typographical arrangement of words is as important in conveying the intended effect as the conventional elements of the poem..." ~Wikipedia Visual poetry, also known as concrete poetry, is fun to write because you have colors, textures, and words all at your power to manipulate. You've probably seen visual poetry before, where a poem is written in the shape of what it describes, like "Pyramids":                    A               glimmer         of hope through      the heat, that simple  materials in simple shapes can stand as skyscrapers fall. It's a start, but as a visual poet you've got

Keats, in his Sleep and Poetry, enumerates the aspects of a rather intriguing fancy of his. If, for ten years, he could overwhelm himself in poesy, he would make a certain set of ventures into a set of symbolic worlds; the first of these locales ‘seen in long perspective’ being the realms of Flora (the Roman goddess of the vegetative) and Old Pan (a player of piping music). Here we see exhibited a bona fide paradise, complete with near enough to all the archetypal pleasures conjured within man as paradisiac. Upon first inclination, the paradisiac ensorcels young John, but before long this fruitful setting comes to its own fruition a

The Fashioned Crown: Heroicism and Realism in Henry V An analysis of Act III, Scenes 0-2 Shakespeare's history play Henry V has been criticised widely for being a play whose propagandist nature has compromised the consistency of character and action: 'what [Shakespeare] produced was a propaganda-play on National Unity: heavily orchestrated for the brass.'  These criticisms are reliant on mimetic assumptions: 'in the characters and plot construction alike, one must strive for that which is either necessary or probable.'  These inconsistencies are certainly observable, but Shakespeare is famous for confounding tradition, and mimetic tradition

A word about haiku I believe there are a few basic precepts about haiku that are largely overlooked, or just flat out just not taught in most basic literary (poetic) courses. Everyone seems to know that a haiku is suppose to be written in the structure of 5-7-5 syllables per line respectively, but there is much more going on than just a simple syllable constraint. I shall attempt to give a brief overview of the main points about haiku. First off, the 5-7-5 syllable structure most often cited as being the sole 'structural rule' of haiku is based on the original Japanese constraint. However, the Japanese language and more specifically their w

An Inspective Look At William Wordsworth's                                                      The World Is Too Much With Us Upon the initial reading of Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much With Us one might, as I have, make recall to the colored tradition of the pastoral elegy. It would be foolish to purport that there is a succinct stylistic correlation between the piece and this mode, or that the piece is comparable to the various exemplars of that mode, such as the exalting reverie of Milton's Lycidas or the impassioned outpour of Shelley's Adonais, but the specific relation springs more directly from the fact of the poem's ultimate aim

Linguistic Nationalism: Milton's Lycidas 'Lycidas' (p. 516), written in 1637 on occasion of the death of Edward King, is by Milton's own affirmation a monody, but the poem is nevertheless a site of much alternation of tone and landscape. These shifts reflect 'the two worlds of the poem: of innocence and of experience.' The world where flowers may 'strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies' (p. 519) is constantly in opposition with, and is invaded by, the one that admits 'the remorseless deep / Closed o'er the head' (p. 517) of Lycidas. Milton does not 'admit the traditional extravagance of proclaiming that the young man's death caused natur

Since the relationship between language and external reality had become so unreliable, Modernist writers sought to re-locate reality in language itself. In regards to this "external reality", modernist writers produced two types of work: affected and effective.  The Russian Formalists, Shklovsky notably, begin not only this idea of defamiliarization (ostraneniye, "making it new") that is at the heart of so much writing of the period, but also the privileging of language as a site for this relocation of reality: "Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important".  Thus discourse rises over plot; plausibili

'A poem should not mean, but be.' (Wimsatt and Beardsley, after Macleish) What relation does this idea have to theories of literary form? The quotation from Ars Poetica 'a poem should not mean but be' is one, in this instance, taken up by objective criticism as an argumentative focal point for its exponents. The citing of this extract from the poem occurs in 'The Intentional Fallacy', the first in a set of two essays by Wimsatt and Beardsley. This essay seeks to strip away any claimed validity of authorial purpose in criticism: 'A poem can be only through its meaning—since its medium is words—yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have n

Modernist Remnants: John Burnside's Annunciation with Zero Point Field Much of John Burnside's work deals with belonging and, as follows, alienation: 'Hand in hand with this impulse for home comes "the dread of belonging"'.  His poem Annunciation with Zero Point Field  is no exception. Here an angel becomes the vessel in which the poem's various symbols clash and mingle, in itself becoming a symbol for this shared space.  By unravelling those threads of symbolism the angel embodies, the poem's themes can be revealed and properly examined. Much of modernist writing concentrates, or at least meditates, on the impossibility of connecting with a