READING IMAGINATIVE EXPRESSION

DICTION AND LOGIC IN POETRY

 Sir.Junh

From the vantage point of logic, we have been able to reappraise the workings of language in advertising, politics, and journalism as they affect our daily lives. We have also seen how denotation and connotation   are related to clear and orderly thinking. Now we can apply all that we have learned so far to the critical reading of language as art, as literature.

Through analysis of the diction and thought of several poems and passages of literary types of prose, we shall try to arrive at some general methods of evaluating the quality on any creative expression. With this knowledge the reader may sharpen his perceptions and judgment of all that he reads. He may also discover how he can further apply those standards to the improvement of his own writing.

You may have worked through a few poems in earlier exercises and in doing so perhaps asked yourself: “Why doesn’t a poet just put down in plain words what he has to say and be done with it? Why does he have to make a poem look and read the way the poems do? Why can’t a poem be read as easily as prose is?”

The obvious reply is that both poetry and prose are literary genres, but that each makes different demands upon the reader. A writer of prose knows that he must be understood at even a hurried reading; poets, however, have always desired and even required repeated readings of their poems. Their meanings are more concentrated, and their rhythmic word patterns plead for more attentive ear and eye. Yet poetry and prose are close companions in language, as we shall see. Aside from possibly the rhythm and the usual appearance of the poem on a page, a passage of prose may possess all of attributes usually considered the distinction of good poetry- qualities such as these:

Imagination

Emotional thought

Connotative meanings

Rhythm

Insight, vision

Figurative language

Economy of words

Structure and form

Both poems and prose can explain, argue, describe and narrate; both quality have tone ang theme as well as all such necessities of rhetoric as parallelism, antithesis, paradox, definition, analysis, comparison and contrast. There is no difference between the language of poetry and prose in sense of separate, distinct vocabularies, as was true of, earlier poetry.

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SCHARBACH, Alexander ---Critical Reading and Writing