Academic Excercise
The articulation of affect in poetry is a rather complex subject. What are the basic questions? Not just what the underlying tonality or mood of the poem is, but the basic approach taken, the attitude toward the emotion, the strategies for articulation or evasion. If you took Plath, O'Hara, Ashbery, and Creeley, for example, you would find four separate and unequal strategies for expressing and/or evading the expression of affect. You might even find several strategies in a single poet.
Our emotions about poetry include the actual emotions of the poem as well as our feeling about poetry itself. The experience of being moved by a poem includes these secondary feelings of being moved by the very existence of poetry in such a moving form. For example, I might be moved that Bach existed and wrote this music I am now listening to, by the fact that I can emotionally respond to something written hundreds of years ago.
Explore some dimension of this topic in an essay of fewer than 300 words. You will be graded on your emotional articulateness and intelligence.
It may be worthwhile to study rasa .
ResponderEliminarWhat is rasa?
ResponderEliminarRasa is the Indian system of classifying emotions, particularly in relation to music and raga, but also to other forms of the arts. Like any classification of something as linguistically determined as the emotions, it's "problematic" ( I think of Wittgenstein here), but nonetheless super-interesting!
ResponderEliminarTry these links or just search "rasa" and "emotions" for lots of interesting info...
http://www.sikhnet.com/sikhnet/Gurbani.nsf/0/4c742cd523763e1d872565bc004de788?OpenDocument
http://www.nadanam.com/general/g_rasabhava.htm