KarakterløftetPoetry Through the Ages
You will learn to analyse poems from the sonnet to spoken word – classic, war and contemporary poetry, with the devices that carry them.
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English 2's poetry spans four centuries, and the historical arc IS the syllabus: classic poetry in fixed forms – the Shakespearean sonnet (14 lines, three quatrains and a couplet, iambic pentameter, the turn/volta), Donne's metaphysical conceits, Poe's Gothic soundscapes, Whitman's free-verse democracy, Dickinson's compressed dashes; war poetry as the tradition's great collision – from Tennyson's cavalry glory and Brooke's patriotic sonnet to Owen's trench truth ('Dulce et Decorum Est' calling the old motto 'the old Lie') – form and attitude changing together as the war did; and contemporary poetry, where voice, identity and performance lead: Agard's 'Listen Mr Oxford Don' weaponising Caribbean English against the standard, Sissay's spoken-word directness, Lowe's autobiographical forms. The device toolkit transfers across all of it: imagery, metaphor and simile, alliteration and assonance, rhyme and metre, enjambment, tone and the speaker (never automatically the poet). Analysis rule as always: device → effect → meaning – and in this topic, add form-as-history: WHY free verse replaces the sonnet, why war breaks metre, why the ex-colonial poet refuses 'proper' English, are context questions your analysis can answer.
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