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Free An Approach to Poetry Essay Sample
Write a statement giving essential information about the book
The title of the book is practical stylistics: an approach to poetry. The author of the book is Henry Widdowson. This is an illustrated edition of the book. The publisher of the book is Oxford University Press, although the book was originally published from the University of California in 1992. The current edition of the book was digitized on 2nd April 2008. The book’s ISBN0 194371905, 9780194371902. The book has a length of 230 pages and its retail price is $79.99.
State the author’s purpose in writing the book
The author presents a view about the nature of poetry as a use of language, suggests the significance of this view for education and demonstrates how it might be acted upon in educational practice. Widdowson says that the book seeks to kindle an engagement with primary texts, to persuade individual interpretation. The most important aspect of this book is not the elucidation itself but the process of investigation of meaning.
The author seeks to inform the audience that conjectural constructs all designed to exhibit by argument that they are right and others are incorrect based on individual’s outlook. Widdowson says that the book helps us to rationalize our prejudiced dispositions so as to convince others to accept them as having more general validity.
The general field or genre of the book is poetry. This is because the author evidently explains the importance of poetry. Widdowson says that one point about poetry is that it outlasts and exceeds the occasion of its composition, and transfers its significance in some way to strangers in another time and place. From the book we articulate the significance of poetry in attempting to capture what is transitory coexists with different and institutionalized formulations of other worlds.
Throughout the book, Widdowson is seeking to typify the nature of poetry and to indicate an approach to understanding which allows access to its connotation without compromising its veracity as verbal art. While there is a common view that to subject a poem to analysis and to be clear about its language, is to lessen its effect and deny its obscurity, the author of the book says that it increases the effect by stimulating an engagement with the poem and extending the range of possible response.
The author informs the audience that poetry is a depiction of publicly unsanctioned certainty through the exploitation of unrealized possibilities in language. Widdowson says that “poems draw attention to themselves by their very peculiarity, and this peculiarity implies the new realization of some aspect of reality by which reader was previously unaffected”. The book outlines that poems make out of the ordinary meanings of varying intricacy of sense and force out of ordinary events and experiences.
The audience of the book includes readers, scholars and poets. The author helps the audience to understand that the measures of interpretation cannot be entirely dissociated from their normal practices, for then there could be no basis for analysis at all. I recommend this book to others because Widdowson advices the audience that when confronted with a poem, their first inclination perhaps is to read it as we could any other communication, looking for meaning which we can accommodate within their customary scheme of things.
State the theme and the thesis of the book
The book takes a meticulous point of view on the nature of poetry and follows this through to schemes for teaching. It focuses attention on how the use of language in short poems can set up conditions for individual explanations and the demonstration of certainty in ways other than those which are recognized by normal social standard. Through the book, this view of poetry results to identification of its crucial role in education, and provides a set of standards for an approach to teaching which incorporates the study of language and literature.
