“Do not forget what’s left, because this is all we have, and you won’t found your roots online. We have no dances or chants if we have no history. Just rants—no roots, just tears. This is all I have of my family history that’s real. And now it’s yours.”

–from Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio’s “Kumulipo,” performed at the White House on May 12, 2009

Last spring, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted an evening of poetry, music, and spoken word for students from Howard, American, Galluadet, and Georgetown Universities. Readers included Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, a Hawaiian poet who later represented her state on HBO’s Brave New Voices, and Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the Broadway musical “In the Heights.” There was something different about the way these readers shared their original poems; these were not recitations, nor were they readings in any traditional sense. These performers brought passion and theatricality to their words; theirs was a form of slam poetry. Today we examine The Roots of Slam Poetry.

Of all the words in the English language, “slam” and “poetry” don’t seem to naturally connect. And yet, the slam poetry movement has been growing strong ever since its birth in late 1980s Chicago, when construction-worker-turned-poet Marc Smith coined the term while performing at his favorite jazz club. In its essence, poetry is usually defined by its poet, but the slam poetry movement arose out of a desire to raise the stakes with local, regional, and eventually national competition.

In the introduction to his book, The Spoken Word Revolution: Slam, Hip Hop, and the Poetry of a New Generation, Smith states that in the 1990s, “poetry reared its motley head” all across America.  Cafes and bars such as the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City, the Green Mill Jazz Club in Chicago, and Boston’s Cantab Lounge started hosting regular competitions in which poets were judged on their content, style, performance, and emotion.

Slam poets such as Saul Williams, Taylor Mali , Mayda del Valle helped publicize the burgeoning movement in the 1990s with their performances, both in their own communities, as well as televised competitions. Williams played the main character in the 1998 film Slam, which followed a young inmate who discovers his passion for poetry in a writing class in jail. Slam poetry teams and nonprofit organizations sprung up across the country, including the NYC-Urbana Slam Team, the Austin Slam Team, the nationwide program Youth Speaks , and Poetry Slam, Inc., the heart of the movement.

The slam movement picked up its pace in 2002, when television hip hop entrepenuer Russell Simmons began hosting Def Poetry Jam on HBO. The show followed a national competition every year until 2007. In 2008, the Def Poetry producers created Brave New Voices,  a new poetry competition that spotlights teenage voices.

Why is slam poetry important? Well, think of it this way: slam poetry is a way to expose talented young writers by challenging them to recreate their inspirations on stage. Poets are judged not only by their command of language, but by the ferocity or subtlety with which they speak. Many slam competitions have paved the way for writers who might not normally be nationally recognized, perhaps because of the communities they represent, perhaps because of the content of their work. Either way, slam competitions act as a platform for writers of all backgrounds and ideologies to voice their opinions, aspirations, fears, and desires.

“However it begins, it’s gotta be loud
and then it’s gotta get a little bit louder.
Because this is how you write a political poem
and how you deliver it with power.

Mix current events with platitudes of empowerment.
Wrap up in rhyme or rhyme it up in rap until it sounds true.

Glare until it sinks in.”

–from Taylor Mali’s “How to Write a Political Poem”

We know, we know: you hate poetry. Whether you are a poetic newbie laboring to compose a sonnet for a school assignment, or a tormented William Blake figure with a drawer full of tear-stained rhyming manifestos, poetry always asks a lot of you as a reader and as a writer. It can look like an antiquated art form, a roundabout or overly confusing way of expressing something, but in fact a good poem should cut directly to the heart of the matter in a way that expository writing can’t, and a good poet should be able to adapt the medium of poetry to any vernacular or subject. In this, the second installment of a series on ways to get your writing going, Eduify presents five ways to start writing poems that are different than anything you’ve ever written before.

1) Lost in the zoo of love

For people who only infrequently write poetry, the love poem is often the first poem they are inspired to write. It crystallizes a passionate impulse into a few lines of expression, which is one of the things poetry is good for. The master of the stormy, turgid love poem is undoubtedly Pablo Neruda:

“Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.

In this part of the story I am the one who
Dies, the only one, and I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood.”

(from “I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You”)

However, the stock images of roses and sunlight, burning desire and a beating heart might, if not expanded in creative directions, provide the writer of love poetry with a relatively limited assortment of metaphors and ideas to choose from. Try this exercise to stretch your love poetry:

Make a list of ten animals, the first ten that come to mind. Then get another sheet of paper and, next to this list, write a ten-line love poem that compares the loved object, or the relationship, to a different animal in each line. You will find yourself with an undoubtedly creative poem in front of you if you have to find the way in which the girl of your dreams is like a narwhal or a cicada, and it may help you figure out new aspects of your beloved that remind you why you are writing a poem to them in the first place.

2) Unapologetic apology

One of the most famous modern poems is William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.

Williams is apologizing to his wife, but the third stanza makes it apparent that if the poet sincerely regretted what he had done, he would not be luxuriating in the sensuous description of what it was like to eat the plums. One doesn’t say, “I’m sorry I borrowed your bike and lost it, but if it makes you feel any better, it was really wonderful to feel the wind whipping through my hair as I rode.” The poem, then, is only taking the apology form as pretext to go somewhere stranger.

Write your own poem in the form of an apology or secret confession. It can be sincere or sarcastic, revealing or surreal. For additional inspiration, look at PostSecret.com, where contributors write down their deepest darkest secrets on postcards.

3) Pick a form, any form.

Ever since poets like Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot started composing poems that weren’t bound by meter or rhyme, free verse has become the form of choice for thousands of aspiring poets. But free verse, and the A-B-A-B rhyme scheme of Hallmark cards, are not the only forms out there.

You could, for instance, try a ghazal: a Middle Eastern form of love poetry in which each couplet ends with a repeated word preceded by a repeated rhyme. Or a sestina, in which each word from a list of six appears in a different order in each of six six-line stanzas, and again in a tercet at the end. (Definitely be familiar with poetic terms before you tackle these more complicated forms. A stanza is any unit of one or more lines in a poem, a couplet is a stanza of two lines and a tercet is a stanza of three lines.) There is always the classic haiku, with three lines of five, seven, five syllables. Writing haikus can be addictive, but writing good ones is harder than it appears.

Sometimes the constraints that a specific form puts on your poem is just what you need to start thinking in a new direction, even if it seems awkward or forced at first. Think of form as the rules of the poetic game, and as Robert Frost said, “Free verse is like playing tennis without a net.”

4) Take the poem off the page.

With all the new forms of communication sprouting like mushrooms in our culture, many of them short enough to lend themselves well to poetry, why do poems have to be limited to scribbled lines in a notebook or Moleskine journal? Try a poem that looks like something else: Facebook status updates, a government questionnaire, a personality quiz, a fast-food menu, an instruction manual. Bringing the associative leaps and emotional content of poetry to these often superficial or impersonal types of writing can surprise the reader into really paying attention to your poem.

If you are truly bold, you could put your poem in a place where one generally doesn’t expect to find writing at all. Write it with a Sharpie on an old volleyball, making use of the spherical surface to find new possibilities in the words. Chalk it on the sidewalk or scratch it with a stick into the snow. One of my favorite poems is John Ashbery’s untitled poem commissioned for a bridge in Minneapolis. You can read it starting from either side of the bridge, going in different directions, and while it is not only about a bridge (that would be boring, since we can already see the bridge for ourselves) it carries some of the essence of the unusual surface it is on.

The entire poem (in photographs) is available here.

5) Blind translation

This is an experiment in how a poem can make sense without necessarily making sense at all. Go to the library and find a few poems that have been written in another language and are still published in that language, whether Czech, Italian or Brazilian Portuguese. (Poems in a language that uses a different system of characters altogether probably will not work for this purpose, and don’t pick a poem in a language that you already speak, such as Spanish.) Even if the English translation of the poem is available on the opposite page, don’t read it yet!

Now, type out the poem with the same punctuation and line lengths, but instead of using the original words, replace them with your own words in English (or whatever language you write poetry in.) This is not a real translation, so do not worry about whether the words you come up with have the same meaning as the original. You should be writing a new poem of your own based purely on the visual look of the first poem.

Did you feel any connection to the rhythm of the original poem, even if the meaning turned out completely different? We are used to writing to convey straightforward information and reading to absorb information in the same way, but poetry is often more like music: the sound and meter of the words may sometimes be more important than the meaning of the lyrics. The information you went on while doing your “blind translation” – the length of the lines, a mysterious exclamation point here and question mark there, a repeated unfamiliar word – may have been enough to start you off on a new poetic tangent of your own.

The Raven, from http://xkcd.com/

By Julia H. Jackson

Imagine that your significant other has recently fallen ill. You are an orphaned adult. Everyone who is close to you is slowly dying of tuberculosis, or as you call it, consumption. You can’t sleep. You fidget. You wait by your writing table and contemplate the slow descent of humanity. And suddenly, there is a knock at your door.

I should mention that you are a sometimes-successful editor of literary magazines. It is 1845.

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.’”

You are Edgar Allan Poe. This is the first stanza of perhaps your most famous poem, The Raven, a poem that English teachers and professors across the globe will soon be expecting students to analyze and understand. And just how exactly are they supposed to do that?

In this second installment of Write Like You Mean It, we offer a few suggestions for digesting such literary classics as Edgar Allan Poe, and invite you to craft Raven-esque poems of your own. Here are three tips to help you break down The Raven:

Context.

Sometimes it is hard to understand older works of literature because the author’s   vocabulary and cultural cues are different from what new readers are used to. If the text appears unrecognizable upon first read, return to the writer’s background and setting. When and where was the author writing? What major historical events were happening? What victories or tragedies were occurring in his or her personal life at that time? In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe was struggling to make ends meet as an editor of literary magazines. He had lost both his parents at a young age, and two years later his wife, a cousin fourteen years his junior, would also die. Given that, the following two lines carry even more weight:

“Other friends have flown before -
On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.’”

Terms.

Where is the “Plutonian Shore?” Who is “Pallas,” and why is it important that the raven sits upon his statue? What is a “nepenthe?” You’re a student—use your dictionary. While it certainly  isn’t helpful to look up every other word, it can be useful to note terms that could refer to important historical figures or myths. Poe has constructed this poem carefully, and these key words are little hints to the reader to think critically.

Style.

Poe achieved literary gymnastics with The Raven by writing it in trochaic octameter, a complicated meter that few poets have attempted since. The word “trochaic” refers back to “trochee,” a two-syllable word with emphasis on the first syllable. “Octameter” can be broken down into “octa” (eight) and “meter” (the pace or beat of the poem). As if that weren’t enough, he also use internal rhyme (the middle and third word of the first and third lines of each stanza rhyme; think dreary – weary, etc.), but he also rhymed the second, fourth, fifth and sixth lines rhyme as well (lore, door, more). For a full explanation of Poe’s rhyming scheme, check out this article from Shmoop.com.

Become Poe, Write Your Own.

No wonder Poe was feeling dreary and weary. Poetry is a lot of work! The Raven is an example of a narrative poem, meaning that it has a clear plot and typically uses a set form or meter. Now that you have grasped the cultural context for The Raven, looked up new terms, and examined the stanzas for their literary acrobatics, you are all set to write your own narrative poem. Here are some tips for getting started:

1. Keep it simple. Trochaic octameter is not necessary for telling a good story. If you want to try meter, maybe start with a basic rhyme scheme.
2. Remember that poetry is about word economy. Try writing what you feel in a sentence, and then parsing the idea down to a statement half its length.
3. Metaphors and similes are often more powerful than multi-syllabic adjectives. Instead of saying the sky is dark, say that the sky is spilled coffee. Own your metaphors.

In honor of Halloween, we challenge you to write to your own ravens. Frightened? Never say never –or should we say, nevermore.

The theater above is still used and often features Faust and other writing by Goethe.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – The Castle on the Mountain

THERE stands an ancient castle
On yonder mountain height,
Where, fenced with door and portal,
Once tarried steed and knight.

But gone are door and portal,
And all is hushed and still;
O’er ruined wall and rafter
I clamber as I will.

A cellar with many a vintage
Once lay in yonder nook;
Where now are the cellarer’s flagons
And where is his jovial look?

No more he sets the beakers
For the guests at the wassail feast;
Nor fills a flask from the oldest cask
For the duties of the priest.

No more he gives on the staircase
The stoup to the thirsty squires,
And a hurried thanks for the hurried gift
Receives, nor more requires.

For burned are roof and rafter,
And they hang begrimed and black;
And stair, and hall, and chapel,
Are turned to dust and wrack.

Yet, as with song and cittern,
One day when the sun was bright,
I saw my love ascending
The slopes of yon rocky height;

From the hush and the desolation
Sweet fancies did unfold,
And it seemed as they had come back again,
The jovial days of old.

As if the stateliest chambers
For noble guests were spread,
And out from the prime of that glorious time
A youth a maiden led.

And, standing in the chapel,
The good old priest did say,
“Will ye wed with one another?”
And we smiled and answered “Yea!”

We sung, and our hearts they bounded
To the thrilling lays we sung,
And every note was doubled
By the echo’s catching tongue.

And when, as eve descended,
The hush grew deep and still,
And the setting sun looked upward
On that great castled hill;

Then far and wide, like lord and bride,
In the radiant light we shone –
It sank; and again the ruins
Stood desolate and alone.

via

I’m glad of the arrival of the new movie Bright Star, based on the life of poet John Keats. Really, it’s high time Hollywood produced a movie based on the romantic and absolutely fascinating life of this famous poet. Bright Star focuses on Keats’ relationship with his neighbor Fanny Brawne, and the subsequent influence Brawne has had on the subject and nature of his work. Hopefully, the film will spark a fresh wave of interest in Keats, someone whose life hasn’t provided the kind of mainstream biographical interest as his contemporaries, Byron and Shelley.

Bright Star also got me thinking about the many if-not-great then at least ’solid’ biopics that have recently been produced on the lives of poets. Of course, we don’t prescribe to a biographical reading of any author’s work (we are strictly Barthesian in believing that the author is dead), but we whole-heartedly enjoy the singular sensation of watching the real-life, actual persona of a poet — a creator of poetic fictions — become the subject of a fictional portrayal itself. No one can possibly argue that a Hollywood biopic has any relevance in the discipline of academic biography, so the pleasures we experience in watching them are intently and completely based on fictional — i.e., entertainment — value. These poetic biopics are wholly ‘meta’, unapologetically middle-brow, and greatly entertaining, with small trivia takeaways that become of value later in board games and dinner conversation. We love them! And, without further ado, here are our five favorites.

Sylvia (2003)

Starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath, this biopic examines Plath’s years at Oxford, her meeting and eventual marriage with poet Ted Hughes, and her eventual suicide. In the film, Plath’s poems are given a fair share of the spotlight, though much of the movie’s momentum is derived from Plath’s unstable relationship with Hughes. Paltrow gives a decent (albeit constantly teary and at times violently melodramatic) depiction of Plath, and Daniel Craig’s Hughes is a cold, detached foil. While I wish more focus was put on Plath’s luminous, emotive poems than on a Paltrow’s character study of bipolarity, this film provides a decent glimpse into the various ways that domestic disturbance, depression, and hopelessness can channel itself into some of the most hopeful, violently beautiful poems ever written.

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Another vehicle for Gwyneth Paltrow’s impeccable English accent and manorial, patrician delivery, Shapespeare in Love nonetheless deserves a place on this list, not for its liberal use of Shakespeare’s life as fodder for a fictional love story, but because of the ingenious way Shakespearean dialogue finds itself into the fabric of this film’s screenplay. This movie portrays Joseph Fiennes as the Bard himself, and the story centers around Shakespeare’s relationship with Viola de Lesseps, played by Paltrow. Unfortunately, the love story [SPOILER] does not end happily for the couple, but they do turn in some brilliant performances as Romeo and Juliet in the theater production within the film. In a cheeky homage to the Bard’s repetoire, Paltrow’s Viola becomes immortalized at the end of the film as Shakespeare’s celebrated heroine of Twelfth Night.

Total Eclipse (1995)

A cheesy film to end all cheesy films, Total Eclipse is one of our biggest guilty pleasures. Leonardo di Caprio plays, of all people, Arthur Rimbaud, in a film that examines Rimbaud’s unstable and ultimately tragic romance (and mentor relationship) with Paul Verlaine. While I find it hard to imagine di Caprio even reading Rimbaud, much less portraying him in a film, he doesn’t do that bad of a job. He certainly looks the part (at least, they are both thin and young and have blonde hair). Much of the film is spent watching Leo drink absinthe rather than write poems, but I applaud the efforts of Hollywood to shed any light at all on this troubled poet’s life — even if Rimbaud is rolling in his grave as I write this.

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994)

I love Dorothy Parker. I appreciate Jennifer Jason Leigh on a much smaller level. While I don’t detect Parker’s presence anywhere in this performance by Leigh, I do enjoy parts of this movie for other reasons. You might miss some of the infinitely quotable Parkerisms in the film due to Leigh’s overdone slurring (Parker was an alcoholic for much of her life and was known for her raspy, smoker’s voice) the film does a credible job of depicting Parker’s life during the 1920s, starting at the time she wrote for the New Yorker and focusing on Parker’s blossoming from editorial voice to an unforgettable personality and celebrated writer. Alas, like all the movies we mentioned, this one too depicts the small tragedies of heartbreak, and the viewer is not allowed to miss the enormous impact Parker’s broken heart (at the hands of the unfaithful Charles MacArthur) had on the self-destructive habits that would plague her for the entirety of her life.

Tom & Viv (1994)

You cannot make a movie about T. S. Eliot without angering many, many people, and this film is no exception. If you’ll excuse the egregious biographical liberties the screenwriters take with a largely unknown swath of Eliot’s life (much of this plot is embellished and speculated from obscure and, for the most part, undocumented events) it does, however, provide some light entertainment and shed small dots of light on Eliot’s at-times frustratingly unscrutable life. The film follows Eliot’s relationship with Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom he was married to in 1915. They separated in 1933 but were never divorced, and the film is meant to dramatize Vivienne’s influence on T. S. Eliot’s work.

Honorable Mention: Edge of Love, starring Kiera Knightly and Sienna Miller, based on the life of Dylan Thomas

Looking Forward To: Howl, based on the life of Allen Ginsberg, starring James Franco

By: Garin Kilpatrick

The title of Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken, is often confused as The Road Less Travelled. Once you read to the end of this Prize Winning Poem you will understand why.

2. Robert Frost – The Road not Taken

a – Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
b – And sorry I could not travel both
a – And be one traveler, long I stood
a – And looked down one as far as I could
b – To where it bent in the undergrowth;

a – Then took the other, as just as fair,
b – And having perhaps the better claim,
a – Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
a – Though as for that the passing there
b – Had worn them really about the same,

a – And both that morning equally lay
b – In leaves no step had trodden black.
a – Oh, I kept the first for another day!
a – Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
b – I doubted if I should ever come back.

a – I shall be telling this with a sigh
b – Somewhere ages and ages hence:
a – Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
a – I took the one less traveled by,
b – And that has made all the difference.

(via)

Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry during his life and The Road not Taken was at least partially responsible for his success. The country lifestyle Frost lived seeps its way into his poetry and The Road not Taken is no exception. Readers of this poem are chilled by Frosts rhyming words, and find themselves in a cold yellow wood, looking down a fork in the road.

The Road not Taken says so much with so little that I have already as many word in analysis as are written in the Poem itself. The poem resonates deeply with some readers as it is easy to relate to the forks we face on the road of our life.

The common road is always going to be the most downtrodden, and thus the easiest to choose. This road has already been proven by others, and so it is not for trailblazers. Frost justifies “all the difference” as the ability to step away from the common path and prove your own path. All the difference for Frost is the ability to go your own way.

I recently completed the 5 poems in the Eduify Poetry Series below with accompanying videos that feature scrolling words of the poems as they are read. These videos and others are featured on our YouTube channel. If you check out our channel be sure to click “subscribe” so that you stay inside our video literature loop! Each of the poetry podcasts below has its own individual post, with accompanying analysis.  These analytical posts can be found by clicking the links to the individual posts for each podcast below.

Robert Frost – The Road not Taken

Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken from Garin Kilpatrick on Vimeo.

Goethe – The Castle on the Hill

Rudyard Kipling – If

William Shakespeare – Of Youth and Love

Louis Carrol – Jabberwocky

Feedback

What do you think of the Poems above? What type of poems would you like to see made into podcasts? Who is your favorite poet?

By: Garin Kilpatrick

Sonnet 76 is a Shakespearean Sonnet that shares a striking thematic semblance to his much longer poem A Lover’s Complaint. The Theme of Sonnet 76 is youth and in within the Sonnet Shakespeare does a candid job of confronting his ability to spin his own style by Spending again what is already spent.

Sonnet 76 mirrors Shakespeare’s A lover’s complaint by touching on the themes of youth and love. Despite sharing the same themes as A Lovers Complaint, Sonnet 76 has managed to do so without quite as much controversy. A Lovers Complaint was so controversial that Slate.com Author Ron Rosenbaum even questioned should “A Lover’s Complaint” be kicked out of the canon? I disagree with Ron and the idea that abolishing any of Shakespeare’s work from the Shakespearean canon could be a good thing.

My impression of the impact of Shakespeare is more along the lines of this quote attributed to Ben Johnson:

“He was not for an age, but for all time.”

The sonnet below is no timid example of Shakespeare’s timelessness.

Note: “of youth and love” is a description, not the original title of this poem

Sonnet #76

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Further Analysis

See this post for a Quatrain by Quatrain Analysis of this Sonnet.

When you must answer,
harsh questions of life,
Will you fall, or will you rise?
Will you stand tall, or meet your demise?
“Will you be noble?” Kiplings if asks us all.

1. Rudyard Kipling – If

a – IF you can keep your head when all about you
a – Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
a – If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
a – But make allowance for their doubting too;

b – If you can wait but not be tired by waiting,
c – Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
b – Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
c – And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

d – If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
e – If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
d – If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
e – And treat those two impostors just the same;

f – If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
g -Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
f – Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
g – And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

a – If you can make one heap of all your winnings
b – And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
a – And lose, and start again at your beginnings
b – And never breathe a word about your loss;

c – If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
d – To serve your turn long after they are gone,
c – And so hold on when there is nothing in you
d – Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

a – If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
b – ‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
a – if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
b – If all men count with you, but none too much;

c – If you can fill the unforgiving minute
d – With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
c – Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
d – And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

(via kipling.org)

Kipling may be best known for The Jungle Book, but the poem “If” is no less deserving of praise. If is arguably considered Kiplings magnum opus of poetry.

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;”

The theme of independent choice runs throughout Kiplings Poem. The ability to trust ourselves when all men doubt us is a component of a noble, independent, character.   Nobility is a theme that runs throughout “if” and expresses itself within the resolve to persevere through the most ravishing and dire consequences:

“Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:”

Kiplings life was not short of tragedy; his son, John Kipling, died in 1915 at the Battle of Loos. Kipling must have had to rebuild his own life in the wake of this tragedy.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Kiplings voice is clear;
If you can give life your all,
The world is yours for the taking.

By: Garin Kilpatrick

The eduify Poetry Analysis Series will consist of five separate Blog posts, and this introduction post. Each of the following five posts will analyze one of the five Poems by the five acclaimed Authors. Stay tuned to @eduify and @GarinKilpatrick as a new post will be announced every few days! The Poems we will be Analyzing are written by the 5 dead poets pictured above: Kipling, Frost, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Carrol.  Shakespeare has been in the ground the longest but nonetheless his poetry and plays remain very alive!  To learn when the aforementioned Authors lived, and what their first names are (and which Author used a pen name) simply read the rest of the post. You will also find introductions to these well written men and mention of the Poems that will be analyzed.

1. Rudyard Kipling – If

Rudyard Kipling was born on the 30th of December, 1865 and died on the 18th of January, 1936.

Kiplings most widely known work is The Jungle Book. Kipling was also a Poet and the poem that we will be analysing as a part of the eduify Poetry Analysis Series is “If.” “If” asks the questions that can either deny or define a life of nobility:

When you must answer the harsh questions of life,
Will you rise or will you fall?
Will you shrink or stand up tall?
Are we noble, “If” asks us all.

2. Robert Frost – The Road not Taken

Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26th, 1874 and died on January 29th, 1963.

During his life Robert Frost received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He was one of Americas most celebrated poets, and after reading “The Road Not Taken” (commonly confused as the road less travelled) you should have some understanding why. This poem celebrates the less trodden path from a split in a road, a split in a road that poignantly symbolizes the pivotal decisions we all must make in our lives.

3. William Shakespeare – A Lovers Complaint

William Shakespeare was born on April 16th, 1564 and died on April 23rd, 1616.

William is an author that needs little introduction. Shakespeare is widely regarded as the best crafter of the english language. Will wrote 38 plays, 154 sonnets, as well as a few fine examples of narrative poetry. The narrative poem we will be analyzing, “A Lovers Complaint,” is considered by many to be one of the best examples of Shakespeare’s work.

4. Louis Carroll – Jabberwocky

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Louis Carroll, lived from January 27th, 1832 until the 14th of January, 1898.

Louis Carroll is most famous for writing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.  Carroll is best remembered by his inventiveness.  He liked to create his own terms, words, and worlds.  Carroll was a creative genius, as anyone who has looked through the looking glass can attest. The inventive worlds of fiction Carroll created and the equally imaginative terms he used to describe them makes him a unique and praiseworthy poet. Jabberwocky is arguably Carrolls best poem, yet contains several undictionaried words. Nonetheless Jabberwocky has an unmistakable meter and a fantastical element of fantasy that only Carroll could conjure.

5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – The Castle on the Mountain

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on August 28th, 1749 and died on March 22nd, 1832.

Goethe was a brilliant polymath, having expertise in many fields of academia and the arts.  George Eliot considered Goethe to be “Germany’s greatest man of letters.” His Magnum Opus was a tragic play named Faust that had tempo and rhyming structure similar to that of his poetry. The Goethe poem we are featuring is called “The Castle on the Mountain” and shows the literary skill of Goethe as he constructs the vivid image of a past castle in its glory. Goethe then smashes this imaginary construct to the ground as he brings the reader back to the present tense of the poem. Any reader who is captivated by Goethe cannot help but reminisce about the vivid painting of a past time he paints in The Castle on the Mountain.