Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the limerick as a poetic form. This might be something to use with English language learners.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Alliteration (noun) Recurrence of stressed sounds in words near one another, usually of initial consonants. Adj. alliterative; adv. Alliteratively; v. alliterate.
‘Even a writer who doesn’t, as Chandler usually did, clean as he goes, would normally liquidate so languorous an alliterative lullaby long before the final draft.'”
Clive James, First Reactions
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage, fiction/literature, poetry, term of art
“Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by.”
The Narrow Road to the Deep North (translation by Nobuyuki Yuasa)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Symbolist Movement: A literary movement in France (Stephane Mallarme, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine) which got underway about 1885 in reaction to Realism and Impressionism. In painting, Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon, and Gustav Klimt produced lyrical dream fantasies, combining mystical elements with an interest in the erotic and decadent.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Leaves of Grass ; the book actually went through numerous editions, depending on how one counts them. That count, in any case, includes the famous “deathbed edition,” which had grown to almost 400 poems from the 12 in the first edition.
Walt Whitman is a central figure in American letters and Leaves of Grass a milestone in American poetry. I can’t imagine why high school students shouldn’t learn something about him. Moreover, Whitman can serve as a means of introducing students to the concept of free verse–again, something high school students should understand, and be able to understand.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Blank-verse, n. Unrhymed iambic pentameters—the most difficult kind of English verse to write acceptably; a kind, therefore, much affected by those who cannot acceptably write any kind.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities, poetry
“Mahabhrata: One of the two great epic poems of ancient India (the other being the Ramayana), about eight times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey together. It is a great compendium, added to as late as AD 600, although it had very nearly acquired its present form by the 4th century. Covering an enormous range of topics, the Mahabharata, with its famous interpolation, the Bhagavadgita, has as its central theme the great war between the sons of two royal brothers, in a struggle for succession. The brothers are Dhritarashtra and Pandu, their families being referred to respectively as the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The Pandavas ultimately prevail, the eldest of them, Yudhishtira, gains the throne, and Arjuna, one of his younger brothers and in many ways the hero of the entire epic (especially through the Bhagavadgita), gains the hand of the lovely Draupadi and brings her home as the wife of all five brothers, The epic also contains the Shantiparvan, an important discourse on statecraft, and the famous Savitri episode, the tale of Nala Damayantt. In its totality, it is an encyclopedia of Hindu life, legend, and thought: ‘What is not in the Mahabharata,’ says the Mahabharata, ‘is not to be found anywhere else in the world.'”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged asian-pacific history, poetry, readings/research
“Jayanta Mahapatra: (1928-) Indian writer, translator, and educator, Born in Cuttack, India, he continues to live and work in his native Indian state. Mahapatra has taught college physics for most of his life, He came to writing late, publishing his first book at the age of forty. He is best known for his poetry in English, which is often characterized by a brooding tone and a mixture of concrete images with metaphysical abstractions. In the 1970s he began to achieve an international reputation. In addition to his many volumes of poetry, he has published juvenile fiction and English translations from Oriya.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Now is a good time to post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on Edgar Allan Poe. If you’re obsessively following news, then you may have seen this piece from Slate on Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death.” Somewhere in my iTunes library I have the story read by none other than William S. Burroughs, which is basically one of those perfect literary pairings. It looks like you can listen to Burroughs’ rendition of the story at no charge here at Open Culture.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“How many syllables are in a haiku? This highly stylized form of poetry consists of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables respectively—a total of seventeen syllables.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged asian-pacific history, poetry
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