A Level classes tend to struggle with analysing poetry more than any other aspect of the Literature course.
What follows is not designed to be a comprehensive guide to analysing poetry at A Level but a set of individual observations designed to hone the precision of your writing. It focuses mainly on analysing unseen poems but its principles are true whatever poem you are studying.
1. Read the poem several times before you begin planning an answer. Develop a sense of how its subject matter, tone and form change across the whole poem.
Many students are so eager to begin writing their essays that they don't spend long enough reading the poem and, as a result, haven't organised their thoughts precisely enough as they put pen to page.
You can't begin writing an essay until you have a clear sense of a poem's subject matter and the methods with which that subject is presented.
For example, an unseen poem might be an elegy delivered by a first-person speaker whose relationship with the deceased is ambiguous but is implied to have been rather fractious, a detail that emerges in the penultimate stanza as the poem's tone starts to grow less respectful. It might take you between five and ten minutes of careful reading to understand this. However, you can't begin writing your essay without this understanding.
Low-scoring answers are often the product of rushed and superficial reading. Such answers often seize on a particular image, sometimes removing it from the context which allows it to make sense, and begin writing about that, ignoring the rest of the poem and its overall effect on the reader. Avoid this approach: remain calm and develop a sense of the poem's subject matter and the ways in which it presents its ideas, even if this means writing a slightly shorter essay.
2. Analyse your own experience of reading the poem. If you find parts of the poem difficult to understand, explain how and why this is so and explain why the poet might have done this intentionally.
Poetry often resists easy understanding; poems demand to be both read and re-read. They tend to contain all sorts of features that distinguish them from pieces of functional writing – line-breaks, inverted syntax, metre and so forth. As a result, one can't hope to appreciate a poem's subtleties on a first reading.
If you are struggling to work out what a poem is about, explain why you are struggling, making precise reference to the poem's language, grammar and syntax. More importantly, speculate as to why the poem's author might want you to find the meaning of a phrase, line or stanza difficult to decipher.
The difficulties that we might have in understanding a poem are an important part of that poem's meaning. Don't shy away from acknowledging those difficulties or explaining their effects.
3. Read poetry in your spare time and keep broadening your vocabulary.
A few years ago, I set A Display of Mackerel by Mark Doty as an unseen poem in a mock exam. I was quite surprised that more than half the class clearly didn't know that a mackerel was a fish – a point that Doty's poem doesn't make in as many words. Some students explained that they didn't know this in their answers – always the best policy if you encounter unfamiliar lexis. Others guessed at the meaning with one student assuming that a 'mackerel' was a military term: he went on to select parts of the poem that seemed to support this view and, more damagingly to his mark, to ignore those that didn't. He would have been better served by admitting that he didn't know and attempting to work out the word's meaning from the context.
My point here is that 'mackerel', a product available in almost every supermarket, is not an obscure word and an exam paper will not explain what it means.
We're at a point in cultural history when the idea of 'common knowledge' is being challenged. However, examiners still do expect A Level students to have broad vocabularies and, whether one likes it or not, historically, a great deal of poetry has engaged with the natural world, both as an abstract concept and in references to its flora, fauna, fish and fowl. There is no agreed list of 'words a student must know' but some knowledge of these phenomena might well prove useful to you when analysing unseen poems.
Keep reading as wide a range of texts as possible and keep adding words to your active vocabulary.
4. Don't adopt a 'feature-spotting' approach to critical analysis.
To put it simply, literary criticism is the study of why texts mean what they mean. It is therefore useful to acquire a knowledge of the subject-specific vocabulary associated with literary analysis.
However, as an A Level student, I sometimes mistakenly prioritised identifying examples of this newly-learnt jargon ahead of analysing the effects of these techniques.
For example, I was often quite eager to point out examples of anaphora but wasn't always certain about how the poem's use of that technique contributed to its meaning.
Analysing poetry is not primarily an exercise in showing off the breadth of your critical vocabulary. It is possible to write an excellent analysis of a sonnet without making reference to its use of iambic pentameter. Historically, many sonnets have been written simply because their poets have wanted to shape their ideas within the constraints of this particular poetic form. Students often want to force comments about a poem's metre into their essays without having anything interesting to say about its effect. Avoid this approach. I would also urge students to stop comparing the use of iambic pentameter to the rhythm of a heartbeat: this has become a cliché of students' writing and very rarely leads to interesting analysis.
(I do not mean to imply that learning about poetic metre is futile, merely to advise against the idea that you are obliged to mention metre in any essay on poetry.)
Keep focused on explaining why you are responding to a poem in the way that you are and only use subject-specific terms if they help explain this.
5. Focus on the methods with which poems present their subjects, not the subjects themselves.
Poems cannot be paraphrased. In pre-GCSE writing, it is common to read answers that begin "Shakespeare is trying to say...” as though his sonnets were failed attempts at expressing sentiments which should have been articulated more simply.
If John Keats had wanted to say 'summer's over', he would have done so, rather than writing 'To Autumn'. In that poem, Keats's subject-matter is simple enough but his methods are elaborate and it is these methods that deserve careful analysis. A good essay will comment on, among other things, his presentation of autumn as a conscious collusion between personified elements of the natural world, his dense layering of sensory imagery, the way that the (largely) iambic metre helps synthesise the poem's diverse elements into a whole and the occasional departures from this metre which allow him to make use of a more declamatory tone, particularly at the beginnings of certain lines.
Avoid simply stating what a poem is about: stay focused on a poet's methods.
6. Be aware of ambiguities when analysing a poem.
If an image, phrase or other textual detail can be interpreted in two or more distinct ways, it is 'ambiguous'.
In my experience, the words 'ambiguity' and 'subtext' are the most important words in an A Level student's critical vocabulary but I'm sometimes surprised by how rarely teachers use the words in class discussions. The sustained, calculated use of ambiguity is what makes literature different from other types of writing.
Be aware of potential ambiguities in the poems you analyse. Moreover, if you explain how an individual detail in a text might be interpreted in two or more different ways, you are likely to impress an examiner.
Consider what a poem is not telling us, what it is implying, what we might 'read between the lines'.
7. Poems are not opinion pieces: don't use poems to draw conclusions about their authors' beliefs.
Poems are not necessarily expressions of their authors' opinions. When they do express opinions, these may well be inconsistent or ambiguously worded.
Poems imply, allude, hint and juxtapose contrasting ideas but they seldom express fixed and unambiguous viewpoints. Even when written in the first-person, they often present shifting or ambivalent perspectives. Don't try to resolve the contradictions within a poem into a single, consistent perspective. I have read some bizarre answers from students who approach poems as though they were editorials in newspapers, effectively reducing complex poems into headlines or slogans. Although we might reasonably expect consistency and clarity from politicians and our friends, we should be prepared to encounter 'grey areas' within a poem without regarding these as flaws.
8. Avoid using the terms 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' unless you are wholly sure of their relevance to a particular poem.
The words 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' are used too loosely in many students' essays. Some mistakenly use 'modernist' to describe any text written after the First World War. Others propose that any poem written in the 21st century qualifies as 'postmodernist', often for reasons that they don't explain.
These terms refer to philosophical ideas that underpin individual pieces of art and wider trends within culture, ideas whose full exploration extends beyond the scope of this short blog-post, but often include expressing a sense of radical estrangement from familiar conceptions of time, place, language and being. I have heard some convincing arguments that there is no worthwhile distinction to be made between the two terms.
The terms do not refer to historical periods. There are plenty of texts published in 1922, the year of the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land, that could not reasonably be described as modernist. Similarly, there is a great deal of late 20th and 21st century fiction that doesn't engage with postmodernist ideas whatsoever.
Examiners often complain that answers on unseen poetry regard the use of these terms as a vaguely worded short-cut to engaging with a poem's context of production. The longer I spend thinking about these terms, the less useful I find them. If your analysis of the socio-cultural forces that have influenced an unseen poem is precise, you will be credited highly by the examiner.
Unless you have very specific reason to use either of them, I would recommend avoiding them altogether when analysing unseen poetry.
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I hope that you have found this piece useful.
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