Part Six. Musical Matters: Sound, Rhythm, and the Line Summary and Analysis

Part Six. Musical Matters: Sound, Rhythm and the Line

The sixteen exercises in this section acquaint students with some of the more technical aspects of poetry.

"A Lewis Carroll Carol" encourages the use of unfamiliar words. Students go through a dictionary and pick out words they do not know without looking at the definition or understanding what part of speech the word might be. Students use the words in a poem and use them in whatever grammatical fashion they choose. They should pay particular attention to sounds and can make their "new" words into adverbs by adding -ly or any other suffixes or prefixes. Karen Swenson invokes Lewis Carroll in "A Lewis Carroll Carol" because probably most students will be familiar with his poem "Jaberwocky...