Advice On Analyzing Poetry

Tue, 03/03/2015 - 13:22 -- BeckaD.

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First off, don’t.

Poems were never written to be analyzed.

To be dissected by the pre-teens of America who merely mimic the sympathy felt by their tepid instructor.

Emily Dickinson never intended to write for audiences to critically judge her philosophies.

“I heard a fly buzz when I died.”

An overzealous professor overly paid to fail every student, would describe the fly as sin or death or. . .

Stop.

A fly buzzed when she died. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Don’t tear apart a piece so simplistic, yet so complicated.

Walt Whitman pieces, things strewn about the universe can be analyzed later on.

No one questioned the stars when they entered the sky at night. They enjoyed them.

Now we have to know what solar system can sustain life like ours.

Why?

Because we dissected it.

We threw out the necessity of enjoyment and threw in the insanity of educating it.

The written word, the thoughts of great minds, the hope of a future generation

Gone.

Because we tore it apart like some frog whose liver has been violently ripped from it’s mesentery.

How do you analyze a poem?

You don’t.

 
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