Why do Poets write Iambic Pentameter? « PoemShape May 14, 2009 Tweaked & corrected some typos. Because it wasn’t there. During the sixteenth century, which culminated in poets like Drayton, Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, and Shakespeare, English was seen as common and vulgar – fit for record keeping. Latin was still considered, by many, to be the language of true literature. Latin was essentially the second language of every educated Elizabethan and many poets, even the much later Milton, wrote poetry in Latin rather than English. Iambic Pentameter originated as an attempt to develop a meter for the English language legitimizing English as an alternative and equal to Latin (as a language also capable of great poetry and literature). Since meter was a feature of all great Latin poetry, it was deemed essential that an equivalent be developed for the English Language. False Starts But this didn’t stop Elizabethan poets from trying. The symbols used to scan the poem reflect Spenser’s attempt to imitate the long and short syllables of Latin. T.S.
Serendip-o-matic: Let Your Sources Surprise You Her Own Society In April of 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote to a stranger, initiating a fervent twenty-four-year correspondence, in the course of which they managed to meet only twice. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, thirty-eight, was a man of letters, a clergyman, a fitness enthusiast, a celebrated abolitionist, and a champion of women’s rights, whose essays on slavery and suffrage, but also on snow, flowers, and calisthenics, appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. “Letter to a Young Contributor,” the article that inspired Dickinson to approach him, was a column addressed to literary débutantes and—despite his deep engagement with the Civil War—a paean to the bookish life: “There may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence,” he wrote, evoking Dickinson’s poetry without yet having seen it. “Mr. Higginson,” she began, with no endearment. “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Higginson, the radical, was a pious man.
Poetry in EFL classes Today I would like to talk about poetry. Could it be useful in an EFL class? As usual, I try to imagine some activities that involve the use of different digital tools. What's poetry? At the following link you can find some great definitions (I made the above word cloud from some of these definitions using Tagul): Why study poetry in an ESL classroom? Click to enlarge my diagram Some links about the different kinds of poetry Different types of poetry: What about writing a poem? Watch the video Where to begin? Click to enlarge my map Some more tips Some useful figures of speech: find rhymes: Let's practise! Magnetic Poetry is a funny tool to write poems. You could also make a poetry magazine where you could collect all your poems!
The Literary Elements by Joel Pardalis on Prezi LA Welcomes Three New Service Hubs to its Growing Collections: New York, North Carolina, Texas October 24, 2013 Boston, MA – The Digital Public Library of America announced the addition of three new Service Hubs today at a reception celebrating the April 2013 launch of the DPLA and the start of DPLAfest, a two-day series of events free and open to the public taking place in Boston on October 24-25, 2013. The three new Service Hubs – Empire State Digital Network (New York), The Portal to Texas History (Texas), and the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (North Carolina) – will bring hundreds of thousands of new digital materials into the DPLA collections in the weeks and months following the DPLAfest festivities. The DPLA Service Hubs are state or regional digital libraries that aggregate information about digital objects from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions within their given state or region. These new Service Hubs represent the geographic and cultural diversity of the expanding DPLA collections: Empire State Digital Network (New York)
Home Alone With the Ghost of Emily Dickinson AMHERST, Mass. — Does it matter where a writer lived? Can creativity and inspiration insinuate themselves into a physical space, somehow becoming part of the atmosphere? Do you believe in ghosts? It’s impossible not to think about these things when you visit the Emily Dickinson Museum, which includes the house where Dickinson spent most of her outwardly uneventful life, her fierce mind raging away, quietly producing her profound and enigmatic poetry. On a recent afternoon, I found myself all alone in Dickinson’s bedroom, having paid $100 for the chance to spend an hour there. Because Dickinson spent so much time and was so productive here, the room has particular resonance for scholars and lovers of her poetry. “I wanted to see what it would be like to spend some time in that room,” said Lanette Ward, 70, a retired English teacher from Atlanta who admires Dickinson so much she named her daughter Emily. “Oh, yes, I felt closer to her,” Ms. “He was very mysterious about it,” Ms.
World Poetry Day: 28 of poetry's most powerful lines ever written | The Independent The rhythm of the tongue brings wordless music into the air; it is in poetry that the human essence is refined to such ritualistic purity. It's in the steady beats, the sonorous rise-and-fall of speech; for a moment it appears as if all the mysteries of the world have unlocked themselves to our private view. It's these works which are celebrated on World Poetry Day, falling on 21 March, in which UNESCO recognises the moving spirit of poetry and its transformative effect on culture. In honour of these celebrations, here stands a small collection of singular lines, stanzas, and notions possessing of a power which springs the most moving of thoughts and feelings off of the page and into the humming imagination of its readers. Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality 'Because I could not stop for Death', Emily Dickinson This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper 'The Hollow Men', T.S Eliot
Foreign Language Teaching Methods About the Site Foreign Language Teaching Methods focuses on 12 different aspects of language teaching, each taught by a different expert instructor. The site contains video footage from an actual methods course held at the University of Texas at Austin. This flexible resource is designed to be used by foreign language teachers as a component of a classroom methods course or as a stand-alone course for independent learners. “While I was taking this course, I was already changing what I was doing and I can already see the difference. ” - Verónica, beginning language teacher (Spanish) “I loved having a different teacher [for each module]. - Sarah, beginning language teacher (ESL) “People have so many different creative ideas you can draw from and use for your own class.” - Judith beginning language teacher (German) “The more different languages and different types of approaches we saw, the better understanding of teaching languages I got.” - Elena, beginning language teacher (Russian)
Usenet and discussion list archives Discussion lists These are also referred to as mailing lists or list-servs, but whatever they're called, they mean the same thing. A mailing list is a glorified email 'cc' - sending copies of exactly the same email or, when referring to mailing lists or Usenet post to a large number of people. Rather than having to know the email addresses of all of the people you want to send a post to, the hosting service does this for you. The hosting service will keep a list of all of the different discussion lists and the people who subscribe to them. All that you have to do is to find the list that you want to join, join it and then start participating in the discussions! The image above shows in a graphical format how a mailing list works. Advantages and disadvantages of discussion lists Advantages Disadvantages A frighteningly easy way to waste time Personal disputes can escalate into 'flame wars' Possible confusion arising from a personal opinion/company viewpoint What information can you get?
North of Boston: Models of Identity, Subjectivity… – Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net Robert Frost might seem an unlikely candidate for a collection of essays concerned with Romantic and post-Romantic models of selfhood and subjectivity. He was a far less flamboyant figure than some of the poets who come readily to mind in the context of “modelling the self”—Byron, Yeats and Pound, for instance. He was not a poet who indulged in grandiose displays of self-fashioning and heroic myth-making. We can see now that the New England identity certainly was a model, and one that was carefully constructed and scrupulously maintained for nearly sixty years. Many of Frost’s shorter lyrics might be regarded as cognitive models which variously present the mind-world relationship and explore the possibilities of creative interaction between them. Tree at my window, window tree,My sash is lowered when night comes on;But let there never be curtain drawnBetween you and me. [1] The preposition in the title is telling: not through or outside my window, but at my window.