Elements of Literature

Style is the spoken characteristics of a writer, as unique as his or her face or voice.  Their styles express their individual ways of seeing humanity.  Style is an insignia of independence and distinguishes a good writer from a meager or average writer.   This is just one of the elements of literature.  There are many elements of literature.

When we read or hear poetry, we hear a speaker’s voice.  It is this tone of voice that conveys the poem’s tone, its indirect mind-set toward its focus.  Tone is a concept we make from fine points of a poem’s language:  the use of meter and rhyme (or need of them); the addition of certain kinds of fine points and exclusions of other kinds; exacting choices of words and sentence pattern, of images and symbolic language.  When we listen to a poem’s language and hear the voice of its speaker, we grasp its tone and feeling and eventually its meaning.  Poetry is the impulsive runoff of potent feelings: it takes its foundation from emotion recollected in silence: the emotion is a contemplated turn over, by a type of response, the silence steadily disappears, and an emotion, relatives to that which was before the topic of thought, is steadily formed, and does itself in reality be present in the mind.

In reading any poetry, it is essential to know what the words mean, but likewise imperative to understand what the words involve or propose.  Poets choose exacting words because they advocate what they want to advocate.  Its appropriateness is a function of both its denotation and its connotation.

Poetry is stuck in the solid and the precise in details that arouse our senses for it is through our senses that we see the world.  When such details become visible in poetry, they are called images.  An image is a solid symbol of a sense notion, reaction, or thought.

Language can be classified as both literal and not literal.  When we speak factually, we mean precisely what each word conveys; when we use metaphorical language we mean something other than the real meaning of the words.  Figures of speech are language or ways of using words in a non-literal logic.  They consist of hyperbole; irony; or use a part to indicate the whole; or substituting an aspect of an object for the object itself; endowing inert objects or conceptual concepts with living distinctiveness or persona. Two that are above all essential for poetry are simile or metaphor.

The feeling of both these figures is assessment, which is the building of relations between normally not related things.  Metaphor is an insightful view of the resemblance in dissimilar. Simile establishes the similarity clearly with the words like or as.  Metaphor, then again, employs no such clear spoken clue. The comparison is indirect in such a way that the symbolic term is substituted for or recognized with the exact one.  The simile is more limited in its relative implication than is the metaphor.

A symbol is an item or act that represents something further than itself.  Correlated to symbolism, allegory, is a type of sequence of events in which people, places and happenings have unknown or representational meaning.  Allegory differs from symbolism in establishing a firm system of correspondences linking facts of action and a guide of meaning.

Syntax is the display of words in sentences, phrases, or clauses.  Poets use syntax as they use images, pronunciation, formation, noise, and tempo to say meaning and suggest feelings.  It is an essential component of its tone and a lead to the speaker’s emotional state.

Rhyme is the nearly all recognizable aspect of poetry.  It is clear as the corresponding of concluding vowel or consonant sounds in two or more words.  When corresponding sounds take place at the ends of lines we have ending rhyme; when they take place inside lines we have inner rhyme. In addition to rhyme, two other forms of sound take part in reign in poetry: alliteration, which is the recurrence of consonant sounds, particularly at the beginning of words, and assonance, which is the recurrence of vowel sounds.

Rhythm refers to the standard repetition of the tone of voice or anxiety in poems or songs.  It is the pulsation or thrash we feel in a saying of music or a line of poetry. We obtain our logic of tempo from day by day life and from our knowledge with language and music.

Meter is the review or ornate reckoning of a poetic line.  Meter is a reckoning of the stresses we experience in the poem’s rhythm.  By principle, the component of poetic meter in English is the base, a component of assess consisting of strained and undisturbed syllables.

When we explore a poem’s structure, we center on its patterns of association.  Form exists in poems on various levels from patterns of noise and picture to structures of syntax and of thinking; it is as a great deal an issue of phrase and line as of verse and entire poem.  Open or free form does not mean fluidity.  It suggests, as an alternative, that poets get the most out of on the free will either to make their own forms or to use the conventional fixed forms in more supple ways. Structure regularly provides clues to disposition and achievement.

We have in the past defined theme as an inspiration or emotionally apprehensible meaning natural and understood in an effort.  When shaping a poem’s theme we should be cautious neither to generalize the poem nor to misrepresent its meaning.  We should also be on familiar terms with the fact that poems can have several themes: poems can be interpreted from more than one point of view and there is more than one way to affirm or clarify a poem’s meaning.  The essential idea of the poem is articulated in its opening line.  An announcement of the poem’s theme has to contain the idea of it.

In doing all of my readings for the past few weeks, I have come to realize that a lot of the stories and poems share some of the same themes.  For instance, the poem “To my Dear and Loving Husband,” by: Anne Bradstreet, p.1077 in the text, “My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun,” by: William Shakespeare, p.1187 in the text, and “My Papa’s Waltz,” by: Theodore Roethke, p.773 in the text, all have the theme of love.  “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” is the story of a woman’s unconditional love and honor of her husband.  She states in the poem, “I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold or all the riches that the East doth hold.”   “My Mistress eyes are nothing like the sun,” is the story of a man’s love for his mistress.  He states in the poem, “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she belied with false compare.”  “My Papa’s Waltz,” is the story of a young man growing up with an alcoholic father.  The young man loves his father, but the father loves his alcohol more and the young man is trying to get the love from his father.

I have come to realize that literature reflects community, and persons and the people affect each other.  Literature reflects communities by situation of time, culture, settings, attitude, and values at the time.   Literature uses language to indicate what it feels like to live during particular surroundings.   Literature also helps to create knowledge, not just imitate it.  Cultural approaching can be used to give an affluent and enlightening historical context for fictitious work.   It uses papers, expressions, and images of the area to assist the reader with a sense of the community described in the story.

In the story “The Lesson”, by Toni Bambara, it uses language to indicate circumstances, culture, and community.  The author used language spoken by some African-American citizens in the southern communities to assist readers with what culture and race the citizens are.   On page 427, the words “nappy hair” was used, then on pages 428-429, “purdee hot”, and “punchin” were used, and that gives readers a good idea of what race and culture the citizens were.  In “The Lesson”, the story also alerts you on the requirement of education and the consequences of having an education.  It illustrates how an education may not be fun or easy to achieve, but it is essential for a constructive change to come about.  The story looks at types of self-importance, direction, and ways people can value or disrepute each one in a community.

An additional example of a short story that demonstrates how literature reflects the community is “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. Faulkner uses “A Rose for Emily” to concentrate on theme of alteration and improvement, as it relates to the American South.  He was stimulated to write about this because he came from a family that some time ago owned an agricultural estate and he had family narration in the South.  Literatures sometimes use people as symbols.  An example of how Faulkner used his characters as symbols of the larger issues in the South is in the character of Homer Barron.  Homer Barron is the Yankee production foreman who became Emily’s first real boyfriend.  His association with Emily is well thought-out to be disreputable because he is a Northerner and because it doesn’t show as if they will ever be married.  An added example is by some of the old men wearing brushed rival uniforms at Emily’s funeral which gives the reader an additional clue about the moment in time, values, and setting in the story.

In wrapping up, I have specified examples to intricate the various elements of literature and expressed insight of the way literature reflects communities, cultures, individuals, and society in every day life.