Question regarding the analysis of any poem

Cafe Society
1

Hi

Looking at different approached to tackling any analysis of a poem, is it best to structure an essay by

  1. tackling each stanza at a time and examining the structure, tone and literary devices all in one paragraph (ie. one paragraph per stanza) ?
  2. or it is better to examine the poem thematically paragraph by paragraph, viewing the poem in one broad sweep and examining the structure, tone and literary devices paragraph by paragraph (i.e. devoting each paragraph to structure, then tone and then literary devices for example)?

I look forward to your feedback.

2

You should know what nature of analysis your examiner wants. If you don’t, ask them!

3

This is purely for myself. I’ve been reading different analyses and was wondering which approach was the more preferred one.

4

If the poem’s any good, then there are going to be a lot of ties between different stanzas: Covering the same themes, references to what comes before or after, and so on. I’m not sure how you’d handle that with one paragraph per stanza.

5

Poetry is an art form. It is not a registered and controlled communications system.

You might as well ask for the “preferred” method to approach dissecting a painting, as though it is a murder victim, and not a painting/artistic expression at all.

6

You are finding different analyses to be different precisely because there is no preferred method to criticism.

7

Since this is about art, let’s move it to Cafe Society.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

8

Your two proposed approaches sound to me like a bottom-up or a top-down analysis.

Which is more informative would depend on what you’re trying to learn or teach about. If you’re trying to learn or teach everything, conduct both analyses and write both essays.

9

Come to think of it, it also depends on what you’re calling a “stanza”. If you’re looking at Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, for instance, not only are all of the stanzas together (which are individually quite short) telling a single, unified story, but the stanzas are even tied together via the rhyme scheme. On the other hand, if you’re looking at T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, most of the stanzas are quite long, and they could really just as easily be considered as five separate poems, with different structures and subject matter. There, a stanza-by-stanza approach might make more sense.

10

I’d do both.

11

Thank you all. So I do have a choice. It does seem that a thematic subdivision of a poem and devoting a paragraph for each theme might be more sensible for longer or more substantive poems. For a narrower focus, perhaps a broad analysis of each stanza and devoting a paragraph per stanza might do.
Thank you all. Very helpful.