Questions tagged [poetry]

Questions about poetry in general or about any specific poem. Please use this tag with the appropriate author tag, and, if applicable, a language tag (such as [french-literature].

The tag should be used on questions about poetry in general, or about any specific poems which are too short to merit their own tag. From this meta post:

For questions about short works, use the author tag with or . New users will be able to tag their questions appropriately even if there've been no previous questions about precisely the same work, and we won't be overrun by thousands of overly specific tags. (Tags for specific, perhaps especially noteworthy, short works are optional but not encouraged.)

835 questions
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Who is "Reported Missing" addressed to?

Anna Keown's poem "Reported Missing" is addressed to a World War One soldier by a first-person narrator who is desperately hopeful that he isn't dead. Here's the poem in full: My thought shall never be that you are dead: Who laughed so lately in…
Rand al'Thor
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Why did the Seed-Merchant thank God?

"The Seed-Merchant's Son" is a poem by Agnes Grozier Herbertson, often included in collections of WWI poetry. It doesn't go into the details of the war, like some other WWI poems; in fact, the war is only mentioned once in the poem, which mainly…
Rand al'Thor
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Why does the speaker in the famous poem want the western wind to blow?

There is a famous short poem, of very murky provenance, which exists in a number of versions, one of which reads: Western wind, when wilt thou blow, The small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again. The…
Tom Hosker
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The use of "thou" etc. in Romantic poetry

A lot of Romantic poetry (for e.g. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn") uses words like thou, thee and thy even though these had fallen out of use in regular speech sometime in the seventeenth century. Was this merely…
user392289
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Poems collecting African proverbs

When I was a student, many years ago, in the mid 1990s, I remember reading a fascinating piece about traditional African poetry. If I remember correctly, it was a scholarly article reprinted an anthology that we were assigned in high school --but I…
Chris Sunami
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What do superscript circles mean in poetry?

I am reading a book on the collected works of Alexander Pope. Peppered throughout his poems are little superscript circles or degrees symbols, seen in this image of the text (transcribed below) What do these mean? So by false learning is good…
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Starting a poem with a "small letter"

I read a poem entitled Archery by Carl Phillips: The first few lines read as: was still a thing, then. To have timed your arrow perfectly meant watching the air for a moment... As a basic reader I saw a poem starting with a small letter for the…
user100323
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How do we parse poems with unusual grammar?

I quote here without typography, because I don't know how to show it on stack Morning breeze morning breeze murmurs / on water trembles leaves / young trees above green branches / birds cascade / sing sweetly the east is bright. / See, already…
user5641
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How to tell if this is poem or not

How to tell if something is a poem or not. Like for example this below me. That one seems so simple without any Supposition like personification. If it's a poem, without personification etc. Is it even a good poem. A delusional idiot, i am. I know…
Bobi brai
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Has Lorem ipsum ever been analyzed as a poem by literary critics or scholars?

Lorem ipsum is a popular filler text. Have any literary critics or scholars analyzed it as a poem? Here's an example of Lorem ipsum: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna…
kenorb
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