Reading Poetry

Prose to Poetry

Readings

Whitman, Walt. “A March in the Ranks Hard-Pressed.” In Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959.

Harned, Thomas Biggs, and Walt Whitman. Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman: Recovered Cardboard Butterfly and Notebooks, 1847-Circa 1863 to 1864; Notebooks; Circa 1863 to 1864, Washington Hospital Notebook. 1863.

Whitman, Walt. “The Artilleryman’s Vision.” In Leaves of Grass. Digireads, 2016.

Yeats, W.B. “Easter 1916.” In The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. Digireads, 2018.

Frost, Robert. “The Death of the Hired Man.” In North of Boston. CreateSpace, 2012.

Questions

1. Look at Whitman’s journal entry and the poem “A March in the Ranks…” side by side, and note three things you’ve noticed that change between journal and poem. It’s a prose-y poem in the sense that it doesn’t rhyme, have a defined line-length, metre, or stanza form. So what does make it poem-like? Let’s gather some evidence of specific things that Whitman has changed (added, left out, rearranged, rephrased, etc.) in making a poem out of the prose text: try to find three, describe them as tightly as you can.
   1. One of the macro features that distinguishes poem from prose is lineation—the text of the journal entry wraps across the whole page just as this text does, but the text of the poem is broken into lines. We should also think about—given that this poem isn’t generated using the metrical “rule” of a ten-syllable, five-beat lines (like “The Death of the Hired Man” is)—how does Whitman decide it’s time to end a line? Is it possible to identify and articulate the rules of the game he’s decided to work with in this poem? If you have an intuition, add it—but let’s also discuss in class.
2. Read the Frost poem and record the sound of your voice reading about a 10-line chunk of this poem. Does it seem right that, although the poem is in iambic pentameter, Frost was working with “natural spoken speech” as Pound says? Some background may help explain what’s going on. The setting is a moment of transition between different ways of hiring farm workers.
   1. Old way: workers were compensated with room and board and a share of the harvest proceeds, so that they lived on the farm year-round, and were paid in case only once a year.
   2. New way: workers are paid “fixed wages” daily or weekly, and employment is more transient. Also pertinent: farm workers had been more like apprentices, learning the trade and saving up to become farmers themselves. This kind of upward mobility (“bettering” yourself) was sensitive to factors like declining prices for agricultural goods, increasing land prices, and increased mechanization of agriculture, which raised the cost associated with going from laborer to farmer.
3. Read the Yeats poem commemorating an unsuccessful and violently punished uprising against British rule in Ireland (there’s a nice Poem Guide that gives helpful background). I’ve included it in part for contrast: the short lines and end-rhymes make it more obviously “poem-like.” My question for you: what do you think is the dominant rhythm of this poem, in terms of stressed/unstressed syllables? Can you single out a line that makes a good example? This question I’ll ask in class!