Literature Poetry Work

GLOSSARY

Abstract: Abstract diction occurs when the poet wants to express something ephemeral, or

ungraspable. Abstract diction refers to words that do not appeal imaginatively to the reader's

senses. Abstract words create no "mental picture" or any other imagined sensations for readers. An

example of abstract diction is love. Because it is an abstraction, the word "love" itself does not

imaginatively appeal to the reader's senses.

Allusion: Allusion is a figure of speech, in which an object or circumstance from unrelated context is

referred to covertly or indirectly. It is left to the audience to make the direct connection. Where the

connection is directly and explicitly stated by the author, it is instead usually termed a reference.

Apostrophe: As a literary device, apostrophe refers to a speech or address to a person who is not

present or to a personified object, such as Yorick's skull in Hamlet. It comes from the Greek word

apostrephein which means "to turn away." You are already familiar with the punctuation mark known

as the apostrophe.

Assonance: resemblance of sound between syllables of nearby words, arising particularly from the

rhyming of two or more stressed vowels, but not consonants (e.g. sonnet, porridge ), but also from the

use of identical consonants with different vowels (e.g. killed, cold, culled ).

Caesurae: A caesura, also written cæsura and cesura, is a metrical pause or break in a verse where

one phrase ends and another phrase begins. It may be expressed by a comma (, ), a tick, or two lines,

either slashed or upright.

Connotation: A connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any

given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation. A

connotation is frequently described as either positive or negative, with regard to its pleasing or

displeasing emotional connection.

Consonance: Consonance is a stylistic literary device identified by the repetition of identical or

similar consonants in neighbouring words whose vowel sounds are different. Consonance may be

regarded as the counterpart to the vowel-sound repetition known as assonance

Context: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of

which it can be fully understood and assessed.

Content: something contained. the topics or matter treated in a written work. the principal substance

(such as written matter, illustrations, or music) offered by a website.

Critics: A critic is a person who communicates an assessment and an opinion of various forms of

creative works such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture, and food. Critics

may also take as their subject social or government policy.

Couplets: A couplet is a pair of successive lines of metre in poetry. A couplet usually consists of two

successive lines that rhyme and have the same metre. A couplet may be formal or run-on. In a formal

couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there is a grammatical pause at the end of

a line of verse.

Demotic Language: Written in a simplified form of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing. Of or

relating to people and especially their speech. Of or relating to the form of Modern Greek that is based

on everyday speech.

Denotation: The denotation of a word is its central sense and the entire set of objects that can be

contained in the word's meaning.

Dramatic significance: This refers to the elements of drama, acting in unity to effect the purpose of

the play. If something is dramatically significant it may serve to advance the plot, develop a character,

heighten the conflict, create audience expectancy and create irony.

Features and Characteristics of the genre: These are the features and uses that together create, the

entity known as drama, poetry or prose fiction. For example, setting is a feature common to all three,
but it can be characterised differently in each. In drama setting may depend on a stage direction, in

poetry it may be captured in one line, while in prose fiction, setting may be described at great length.

Figurative devices: Any use of language where the intended meaning differs from the actual literal

meaning of the words themselves in order to achieve some special meaning or effect is described as

figurative use of language. Perhaps the two most common figurative devices are the simile and the

metaphor. There are many techniques which can rightly be called figurative language, including

hyperbole, personification, onomatopoeia, verbal irony, and oxymoron. Figures of speech are

figurative devices.

Genre: A type or category of literature or film marked by certain shared features. The three broadest

categories of genre include poetry, drama, and prose fiction. These general genres are often

subdivided into more specific genres and subgenres. For instance, precise examples of genres might

include murder mysteries, romances, sonnets, lyric poetry, epics, tragedies and comedies.

Hyperbole: That extreme kind of exaggeration in speech is the literary device known as hyperbole.

Take this statement for example: I'm so hungry, I could eat a horse. In truth, you wouldn't be able to

eat a whole horse. But you use the phrase to show people you're extremely hungry

Intertextuality: This is where echoes and threads of other texts are heard and seen within a given text.

For example, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by its very title resonates with the degeneration alluded to

in the Yeats’ line of poetry, “the centre does not hold/things fall apart...” Intertexuality is evident in

elements of repetition, annotation, quotation, allusion, parody and revision.

Irony:  The use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal

meaning. A usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony.

Juxtaposition: The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words

side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrasts, rhetorical

effect, suspense, or character development.

Literary devices: Literary devices refer to specific aspects of literature, in the sense of their universal

function as an art form that expresses ideas through language, which we can recognise, identify,

interpret and/or analyse. Literary devices collectively comprise the art form’s components; the means

by which authors create meaning through language, and by which readers gain understanding of and

appreciation for their works. Both literary elements and literary techniques can rightly be called

literary devices. Literary elements refer to particular identifiable characteristics of a whole text. For

example, every story has a theme, a setting, a conflict, and every story is written from a particular

point-of-view. In order to be discussed legitimately as part of a textual analysis, literary elements

must be specifically identified for that particular text. Literary techniques refer to any specific,

deliberate constructions or choices of language which an author uses to convey meaning in a

particular way. An author’s use of a literary technique usually occurs with a single word or phrase, or

a particular group of words or phrases, at one single point in a text. Unlike literary elements, literary

techniques are not necessarily present in every text; they represent deliberate, conscious choices by

individual authors.

Litotes: In rhetoric, litotes is a figure of speech and form of verbal irony in which understatement is

used to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive, often incorporating double

negatives for effect.

Metaphor: A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by

mentioning another. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas.

Metaphors are often compared with other types of figurative language, such as antithesis, hyperbole,

metonymy and simile.

Metonymy: Metonymy, (from Greek metōnymia, “change of name,” or “misnomer”), figure of speech

in which the name of an object or concept is replaced with a word closely related to or suggested by

the original, as “crown” to mean “king” (“The power of the crown was mortally weakened”) or an

author for his works (“I'm studying ...

Mood: In literature, mood is the atmosphere of the narrative. Mood is created by means of setting,

attitude, and descriptions. Though atmosphere and setting are connected, they may be considered

separately to a degree. Atmosphere is the aura of mood that surrounds the story

Narrative strategies/techniques: A narrative is a collection of events that tell a story, which may be

true or not, placed in a particular order and recounted through either telling or writing. Narrative

strategies/techniques are the means by which the story is told. A narrative has a sequence in which the

events are told. Most novels and short stories are placed into the categories of first-person and third-

person narratives, which are based on who is telling the story and from what perspective. Point of

view is an example of a narrative strategy/ technique.

Oxymoron: An oxymoron is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposing meanings

within a word or phrase that creates an ostensible self-contradiction. An oxymoron can be used as a

rhetorical device to illustrate a rhetorical point or to reveal a paradox.

Paradox: A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to

one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to

a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion.

Parallelism: In grammar, parallelism, also known as parallel structure or parallel construction, is a

balance within one or more sentences of similar phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical

structure. The application of parallelism affects readability and may make texts easier to process.

Parallelism in literature is the repetition of a word or phrase within a sentence or group of

sentences. It is used to help organize ideas, but also to make the ideas memorable.

Poetic Persona: Persona poetry is poetry that is written from the perspective of a 'persona' that a poet

creates, who is the speaker of the poem. Dramatic monologues are a type of persona poem, because

"as they must create a character, necessarily create a persona".

Point of View: Point of view refers to who is telling or narrating a story. A story can be told from

the first person, second person or third person point of view (POV). Writers use POV to express the

personal emotions of either themselves or their characters.

Pun: The pun, also known as paronomasia, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of

a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities

can arise from the intentional use of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or figurative language.

Punctuation: Punctuation is the use of spacing, conventional signs, and certain typographical devices

as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud.

Rhetorical: Rhetorical devices are literary elements used to convince or persuade audiences using

logos, pathos, and ethos. Their appropriate use makes the text rich, lifelike and enjoyable in prose

and poetry.

Setting: Setting, in literature, the location and time frame in which the action of a narrative takes

place. The three types of setting are the elements of time, place, and environment (both physical and

social). Each of these types contributes to building the setting of a story. The elements of setting

– time, place, mood, social and cultural context – help to make a novel feel real and alive.

Spectacle: A display that is large, lavish, unusual, and striking, usually employed as much for its own

effect as for its role in a work. For example, the appearance of the witches in Macbeth and the arrival

of Banquo’s ghost at the feast are examples of spectacle. Spectacle often occurs in drama, but can also

be found in the novel.

Style: The author's words and the characteristic way that a writer uses language to achieve certain

effects. An important part of interpreting and understanding fiction is being attentive to the way the

author uses words. What effects, for instance, do word choice and sentence structure have on a story

and its meaning? How does the author use imagery, figurative devices, repetition, or allusion? In what

ways does the style seem appropriate to or discordant with the work's subject and theme? Some

common styles might be labeled ornate, plain, emotive, and contemplative. Most writers have their

own particular styles.

Symbolism: A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as

representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or

seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different concepts and experiences
Synecdoche: A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something refers to the

whole of something or vice versa. A synecdoche is a class of metonymy, often by means of either

mentioning a part for the whole or conversely the whole for one of its parts.

Technique: This refers to how something is done rather than what is done. Technique, form and style

overlap somewhat, with technique connoting the literal, mechanical, or procedural parts of the

execution. Assonance and alliteration are techniques of sound, stream of consciousness is represented

through varying techniques of grammar, punctuation and use of imagery.

Use of language: Written words should be chosen with great deliberation and thought, and a written

argument can be extraordinarily compelling if the writer’s choice of language is appropriate, precise,

controlled and demonstrates a level of sophistication. Students should be encouraged to develop and

refine their writing.

BIODATA

Born in Akron Ohio, to Ray Dove and Elvira Hord, Rita Dove was encouraged by her parents to read,

and shared this passion with her mother. In 1970, Dove graduated from Buchtel High School as

a Presidential Scholar. Later, Dove graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. from Miami

University in 1973. From an early age, Rita loved poetry and music. She played cello in her high

school orchestra and led her high school’s majorette squad. At Miami University in Ohio, she began

to pursue writing seriously. After graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English in 1973, she

won a Fulbright Scholarship to study in Germany for two years at the University of Tubingen.

Although Dove has published a novel and a collection of short fiction, she seems most at home in

poetry. She writes primarily in free verse, in both first and third-person. Although the prose poem
published here is a departure from her usual style, it is characteristic of Dove's interest in obliquely

stated narratives. Thomas and Beulah, a narrative sequence, is hardly straightforward in its

development; in that Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Dove provides the pieces with which we can

envision (and continually re-envision) the evolving puzzle of two interwoven lives. In her poems,

Dove often distills the experiences of oppressed groups: women, blacks, and working-class

Americans, among others. She does not strike a victim's pose, however. Whether she is dealing with

contemporary scenes or historical events, she speaks with the calm confidence of one who knows she

will be listened to.

As an African-American woman who has spent virtually her entire adult life affiliated with one

university or another, she represents an intriguing mix of "outsider" and "insider" perspectives. The

academic life seems to have provided her with a forum quite compatible with her interest in the

intersections of the personal, the political, and the intellectual. As an American who believes strongly

in the value of traveling to other countries and learning other languages, Dove brings an international

perspective to many of her poems as well.

Rita Dove has been the most direct about her appropriation of Greco-Roman mythology for two of her

major works, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994) and Mother Love (1995). Both texts adopt

thematic and structural elements from Greek mythology. In The Darker Face of the Earth, Dove

recasts the Oedipus myth into a story about slavery and lost love, and in Mother Love the Persephone

and Demeter myth is reworked into a narrative about creating and losing identities.
SECONDARY SOURCES

By Scintilla (May 10, 2019)

-Rita Dove served as US Poet Laureate in the 1990s. Her collection of sonnets, Mother Love, was

written at the end of her tenure in that post. It is a powerful collection inspired by the myth of

Persephone. Dove’s speaker sometimes is Persephone, sometimes her mother Demeter, and

sometimes a much more modern woman addressing the roles of mother, daughter,

wife/girlfriend/other that women often fulfill during their lives.

In Greek mythology, Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, goddess of the harvest and seasons.

Hades, god of the underworld, fell in love with Persephone and captured her to be his wife. Demeter

was so stricken by the loss she made the earth barren and cold until the other gods prevailed on Hades

to allow Persephone to return to the surface. He allowed her return, but warned that she could not eat

or drink anything from the underworld or that would require her to return. Persephone did eat three
pomegranate seeds despite herself–or maybe intentionally–and so every year she had to spend three

months with Hades underground. Thus, we experience those three months of Demeter’s grief as

winter, ending when Persephone returns in the spring, and so on.

Sonnets are fourteen lined poems. Dove makes the choice to limit herself to sonnets, because it

“chains” her to a format. Since Persephone, and in her own way Demeter, are chained, since women

are also often chained to their roles and expectations, Dove felt the format itself would be a poem

within the poems, chaining the form as further expression of the content. The poems do not limit

themselves to the ancient myth, but rather express the relationships which comprise the myth: mother,

daughter, wife, mother-in-law, girlfriend, etc. They express the pain of letting go, of watching a

daughter grow up and make her own choices, of not interfering even when those choices diverge from

your own. They express the pain of growing up, of making difficult choices, of living with the

consequences of those choices, of finding out that love and sex and independence and adulthood are

not everything we thought they might be. Women (and men) face these challenges, but it is fair to say

that society places burdens on women that men often escape, and Dove’s poems look unflinchingly at

those expectations and what it takes to meet them, or what it takes to defy them.

Mother Love was written, the author says, “for her mother and to her daughter.” It is a challenging

and arresting work, powerfully unified throughout and offering deep insight on the pains and joys of

being a mother, a daughter, and everything else we ask women to be.

CONTEXT

During 1995, President Bill Clinton would have been in office with many Americans being

discontented. Many Americans are dissatisfied with the state of the nation because of the way the

political system works as are disillusioned for other reasons. Higher taxes, the moral crisis, the size of

government, a declining educational system, the need for welfare reform, and the budget deficit round

out the long list of reasons that make Americans unhappy with conditions in the country. Although no

single problem or concern is driving public discontent with the country’s course, the public is more of

one mind as to who’s at fault — 35% name Congress and 27% blame “the people themselves” for the

country’s problems. In contrast, only 7% said the President is principally at fault. There are also less

direct indications that Clinton may not be blamed as Presidents usually are for the country’s problems.

Some say that the government shut down under his ruling.

However, a lot of women empowerment movements would have been taking place at this time. In

1995, leaders from 189 nations came together in Beijing and adopted the most thorough platform for

action on women’s rights and gender equality ever produced. This policy agenda, known as

the Beijing Platform for Action, remains a cornerstone of the global women’s movement and set in

motion policies and programs that forever changed the lives of millions of women and girls around

the world. Gender inequality cannot be written off as only a problem of the developing world. Women

do not receive equal pay for equal work in virtually any country, and hold only 21.8 percent of the

world’s parliamentary seats.

The world is certainly a different place than it was in 1995. Government leaders increasingly

understand that promoting the health and rights of women and girls is the key to sustainable

development, economic growth, and peace and security, something they lacked understanding of in

1995. Because of this lack of understanding , Ria Dove herself admitted that she sometimes felt left

out or had a sense of displacement which she expressed through many characters and situations in her
book ‘Museum’. But despite this, she says that her stay in Europe broadened her world view and

contributed to her growth as a person and artist. “As a black person living in predominately white

societies of the Old and New worlds, … Dove has often crossed social and literary boundaries,

violated taboos and experienced displacement, i.e. living “in two different worlds, seeing things with

double vision”.

Rita Dove has been the foremost direct about her appropriation of Greco-Roman mythology for 2 of

her major works, The Darker Face of the earth (1994) and Mother Love (1995). Both texts adopt

thematic and structural elements from Greek mythology. In Mother Love the Persephone and Demeter

myth is reworked into a story about creating and losing identities. A comparative reading of Dove’s

classical revisions against Brooks’ and Morrison’s indicates that while the latter two authors’

renditions of the Demeter and Persephone myth feature female protagonists who are victims of brutal

physical and emotional male assault, Dove depicts an alternate image of the mythic heroine. In

Mother Love, Dove portrays Persephone as an empowered woman free from male oppression. Where

Brooks’ and Morrison’s adaptations of the parable centre on sexual politics, Dove’s shifts the main

target from male-female conflict to a discussion of the mother-daughter relationship. Dove

demonstrates that tension between mothers and daughters is two-fold: within the interest of protecting

their children from the planet, mothers often stifle their daughters’ ability to experience both the

hardships and pleasures of life.

Rita Dove states that writing is an “intensely intimate activity that begins in absolute stillness, then

progresses through a series of rewrites in which I try to make sure that what I’ve written is intelligible

– that is, able to be felt by stranger –and hopefully ends up in a resurrection of that original intimate

experience, so that the reader will be drawn into the space that the poem has shaped and will feel what

I as the writer have tried to create.”

Her inspiration came from reading Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and her literary heroes

James Baldwin and Adrienne Rich. In an interview she said she would think: “They’re speaking to

me, this little Black girl sitting here in Akron, Ohio!” They made me feel like I can do anything. And

that’s the power of words.” Rita Dove writes with the intent to move and touch others. “Words enable

us, they embody our wants. Words can be the articulation of our dreams, our most private yearnings

and fears”. She says, for her “ writing is an intensely intimate activity that begins in absolute stillness,

then progresses through a series of rewrites in which I try to make sure that what I’ve written is

intelligible – that is, able to be felt by stranger –and hopefully ends up in a resurrection of that

original intimate experience, so that the reader will be drawn into the space that the poem has shaped

and will feel what I as the writer have tried to create”. Rita admits that some of her pieces have a

sense of surrealism, her first book containing a lot of dream-like poems.

INTERTEXTUALITY

Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination, investigates Toni Morrison's Beloved in

light of Hellenic language influences, arguing that the African American experience depicted within

the novel are often set in an exceedingly broader context than is sometimes allowed. Kathleen Marks

gives a history of the apotropaic from ancient to modern world, and shows the ways in which

Beloved's protagonist, Sethe, and her community, engage the apotropaic as a mode of addressing their

communal suffering. Apotropaic, from the Greek, meaning ""to regress from, "refers to rites that were

executed in times of yore to keep at bay evil deities. Modern scholars use the term to denote an action

that, in attempting to stop an evil, causes that very evil. Freud used the apotropaic to tell his thought

concerning Medusa and therefore the castration complex, and Derrida found the apotropaic's logic of

self-sabotage consonant along with his own thought. Marks draws on this critical history and argues

that Morrison's heroine's effort to stay the past treed is apotropaic: gestures aimed toward resisting a

danger, a threat, an essential. These gestures anticipate, mirror, and put into effect that which they

seek to avoid - one does what one finds horrible so on mitigate its horror. In Beloved, Sethe's killing

of her baby reveals this logic: she kills the baby to avoid wasting it. Her action has ritualistic

undertones that link it to the kind of primal crimes that may bring relief not only to herself but also to

a petrified community. As do all great heroes, Sethe transgresses boundaries, and such transgressions

bring with them terrific dangers. it's through a series of those gestures that the heroine and also the

community resist what Morrison calls ""cultural amnesia"" and have interaction during a shared past,

inaugurating a brand new order of affection. Toni Morrison's Beloved and also the Apotropaic

Imagination is eclectic in its approach - calling upon Greek religion, classical mythology and

underworld images, and psychology. Marks looks at the losses and benefits of the sort of self-damage

the apotropaic affords. This helps in framing the questions of the role of suffering in human life, the

relation between humans and also the underworld, and also the uses of memory and history.

Morrison’s revisions of Greek mythical narratives are that incorporating the Black female experience

into the narrative has been integral to their stories. In contrast, while in Dove’s narrative Persephone
and Demeter are occasionally portrayed as identifiably Black characters, the duo’s racial heritage is

secondary to the development of the narrative. While racial themes are present within the text, Dove

focuses less on race and more on the universality of the mother–daughter conflict. Dove’s universal

aesthetic is reflective of her non-racialized and non-gender specified definition of self. Although

Dove is commonly categorized as a Black writer, and her works are viewed as a part of the African

American literary tradition, throughout her career Dove has struggled to forge a private and artistic

identity independent of race and gender. In numerous interviews, Dove explains that she doesn't write

specifically Black poems or female poems because these identifying markers result in dictating how

poets should write and what they must write about. Instead of writing Black poems or women-

centered

poems, Dove seeks to make poems about the human experience relatable to all or any readers. While

Dove might believe her poems evade categorization, texts just like the Darker Face of the world and

Mother Love emphasize problems with race and gender. Dove emphasizes the complexity of the

mother–daughter experience, her reprisal of the Demeter-Persephone myth also differs from other

versions because she incorporates semiautobiographical details into the narrative. Dove’s mythic

reconstruction reveals her own epic journey across the globe yet as her transition from daughter to

wife and mother. The poem, as the dedication indicates, is written for Dove’s mother and to her

daughter. Additionally to conveying to her own mother her struggle for independence, Dove also

prepares her daughter, Aviva, for her own potential future mother–daughter battle