Language Of Poetry: Amy Lowell And Stephen Crane Essay, Research Paper

ril Brooks Page 1 3/29/01

1. Poetry allows in a musical language of an economy of words to express ones emotions. Through writing people express their hidden ideas and feelings about life. A poem can be musical by the rhythm and the sound, these aspects seem to give the writing a tempo. The way the tempo is expressed is through assonance, alliteration, and rhythm. The poet uses these assets in an economy of words to convey their personal emotion or tone. The assonance is the recitation of vowel sounds, and through the nascent vowel sound a person can hear a beat and also determine what kind of tone the poet is trying to pursue. Through alliteration the poet can actually give the poem definite musical sounds by the recitation of consonant sounds and through these repetitive sounds negative or positive emotion can be detected. Utilizing rhyme in the verse helps people understand what emotions the poet is felling in a song sort of way. The way the poet sorts their words give the reader an idea about the poems theme. Using poetry helps humans to live their lives knowing they can express all they need through writing.

2. Images in writing give a poem life. Giving writing images, people can better understand what, who, when, and where the poet comes from. Through the images in the poem “Patterns”, by Amy Lowell suggests that she was a woman trapped but wanted to be free. Lowell starts out giving us the image of her being trapped by her “stiff , brocaded gown”, statement. There is an eagerness about her, she wants to be free and through the images of a woman taking a bath in a marble fountain suggests that she wants to be cleansed from all the rules she is bounded by, just because she is a woman. Recognizing that she is unable to change the ideas of her time she refers back to being trapped at the end of the poem when she will be “guarded from embrace” just because she is trapped of following the rules of being a lady. Feeling trapped in anyway always makes a person search for freedom.

5. Stephen Crane’s word choice in “Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War is Kind” , describes actions of the soldiers in war and the reality of fighting in the battles. The word choice of wild hands flying in the beginning of the poem is to portray a young soldier being shot, the reality of the pain and the death is portrayed in Crane’ first word choice in his poem. Also Crane used an image of a patriotic flag in the line “The unexplained glory flies above them,” this statement not only gives an image of a flag but it leaves the question of why war is fought, just for a piece of fabric. At the end of the poem Crane gives the image of a gun, the killing machine, in the line “Point for them the virtue of slaughter.” humans give up life for their country and most don’t even know what reason they are fighting for.

6. American poetry is an explanation of what suffering the people had to go through to get America established to what it is today. Normally all of the American poems were in a negative tone but that was to show the suffering of the new nation, like in Crane’s poem he wrote about war(Civil War) and the nation suffered because of the myriad of deaths. But even though there was suffering all of the poems gave a sense of hope, such as the Navajo’s poem, they had been through the worst of times by being forced away from their homes but through it all they still could find beauty wherever they were forced to live. These themes in the American poetry are an emotional dictation of America’s history. Poetry gives life to the American history which people normally find to be boring