Often beginners are somewhat petrified asked to make a critical appreciation of an unseen poem. The main questions that disturbs and invades the mind are, what points should I cover? what if I am unable to extract the original meaning of the poem. The answer to the question that, what points should be covered while critically analyzing a poem are discussed below and the answer to the next question about interpreting the original meaning of the poem is further more simple. There are various Schools of Literary Criticisms. According to the Reader Response Theory there is nothing called the original meaning of the poem. The poet’s interpretation might not match with the interpretation of the readers. The critical appreciation is solely the discretion of the reader.
The next very important point to be remembered is that, even if you know the title of the poem and the name of the poet, it should not be written while writing the critical appreciation. Remember you are dealing with an unseen poem so strictly deal with it as unknown. The examiner here will not be testing your general knowledge that you have read the poem before or not. He or she will examine your linguistic competence, interpretation skills and creativity and your critical approach towards the subject.
While analyzing an unseen poem beginners should follow the simple method of CATSDRIFT which stands for :-
C- CONTENT
A- AIM
T-THEME
S-SYNTAX
D-DICTION
R-RYTHM/RHYME
I-IMAGES
F-FORM
T-TECHNIQUE
content is nothing but the brief summary of the poem. this should include the description of setting, characters involved, the time and the place. Many do have the habit of starting the critical appreciation with “ In this paragraph…” without realizing the fact that the poem does not have paragraphs but stanzas. Stories have paragraphs. So, the word stanza should be used instead of paragraphs.
Aim should decipher the reason why the poem has been written. For example is it an elegy or a satire or didactic in nature. The genre of the poem if known can also be written in this paragraph. In order to guess the genre of a poem a brief knowledge about all the ages of literature is a prerequisite. You should know what kind of poems were written in which age. For example, in the Romantic Age, nature was one of the main themes of almost all the poems, while modern poets focused on individualism, inner turmoils and anxiety. If you are not sure about the genre you can always take an intelligent approach towards it. For example, if the poem has nature as its main subject and you are still confused about the exact genre of the poem, then instead of writing directly that the poem is a product of Romantic Age, you could put it as the poem is romantic in nature.
Theme should include the ideas that a poem captures like love, loss, agony. The paragraph on theme might also explore if any social issues are involved in the poem.
Syntax should focus on the sentence formation or the grammatical structure of the poem. For example, it should describe that the poem is written in active or passive voice, is there any interrogation or exclamation involved or not. In this paragraph you can also discuss about the punctuations used in the poem
In the paragraph of diction you should take up individual words from the literary piece and describe its meaning and origin, in turn describing the entire language structure of the poem that is it modern or archaic or the combination of both.
Rhythm or rhyme paragraph should describe that the rhyming pattern is irregular or regular or more appropriately does it maintain a certain kind of rhythm or is written in a prose style.
Form should explain the length of the line or the stanza in short.
Tone excavates and puts forth the mood that dominates the entire poem. For example the dominant mood in Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ is melancholy.
At last you can also include the name of any other similar kind of poem which you have read and draw a vivid comparison between the two in order to portray a more advanced critical approach.
No comments:
Post a Comment