The Regents ELA Exam: Elements of Poetry

Part 1 of the Regents ELA exam will include one poem for close reading.The multiple-choice questions are designed to measure your skill at reading for the meaning. You are also expected to recognize and identify elements of poetry.

Poetry and Experience
In poetry, we are meant to sense a structure and to feel the rhythm (see meter and rhythm, page 64). The structure and rhythm of poetry may be formal, informal, even “free.” Poetry is also characterized by its directness of effect and by its concentration—ideas and feelings are expressed in relatively few words. Karl Shapiro says, “Poems are what ideas feel like.”

Where the writer of prose may seek immediate clarity of meaning above all, the poet often seeks ambiguity, not to create “confusion,” but to offer multiplicity of meaning: in single words, in images, in the meaning of the poem itself.

The experience of poetry is conveyed in vivid imagery, which appeals to the mind and to the senses. It is often expressed in figurative language; that is, through imaginative use of words and comparisons that are not literal but which create original, vivid, and often unexpected images and associations. (See metaphor and simile) Finally, in poetry there is particular significance in the way words and lines sound. The story or experience is enhanced through musical effects. A poem must be felt and heard!

Theme in Poetry
Some poems may assert a belief. Others may be a comment on the nature of human experience—love, death, loss or triumph, mystery and confusion, conflict and peace, on the humorous and the ironic, on the imagined and the unexpected in all its forms. Some poems reflect on the nature of time, of existence. Many poems are about poetry itself. These aspects of human experience are what we refer to as the themes of poetry.

Tone
Tone in poetry, as in prose and all forms of human communication, expresses the attitude of the speaker toward the reader or listener and toward the subject. Tone in literature is as varied as the range of human experience and feeling it reflects. When we speak of the mood of a piece of writing, we are also speaking of tone, of an overall feeling generated by the work.

Here are some terms to help you recognize and articulate tone or mood:
 

Related: Poetry Glossary