Course: How to Read French Poetry
Introduction
Last week, we looked at poems principally as ways of telling a story or painting a picture. Towards the end, we introduced a toolkit designed to allow the reader to …
A suggested toolkit
There is no one definitive way of analysing a poem, but the attached organigramme provides a suggested toolkit for approaching a reasoned analysis. The different elements will not be equally …
Two simple questions
One way to begin to analyse a poem is to ask two simple questions: What’s the story? (or sometimes, “what’s the picture?”) What poetic means does the poet use to …
A word about intertextuality
The perspective of a writer and that of a reader are quite different. Normally-speaking, of course, all writers are also readers, and their work will be informed, even at a …