Walt Whitman's "There Was a Child Went Forth"

Please use this post to discuss Whitman's "There Was a Child Went Forth". Some potential questions to consider:

What images stand out to you? Why?
What is the overall tone of the poem, and what effect does it have on your reading?
How do Kowit's chapters illuminate the devices the author uses here?

Please also feel free to relay any other impressions, questions, reactions to the poem.

W.H. Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening"

Please use this post to discuss Auden's "As I Walked Out One Evening". Some potential questions to consider:

What images stand out to you? Why?
What is the overall tone of the poem, and what effect does it have on your reading?
How do Kowit's chapters illuminate the devices the author uses here?

Please also feel free to relay any other impressions, questions, reactions to the poem.

Shakespeare's "Sonnet 19"

Use this post to comment on Shakespeare's "Sonnet 19". Some potential questions to consider:

What images stand out to you? Why?
What is the overall tone of the poem, and what effect does it have on your reading?
How do Kowit's chapters illuminate the devices the author uses here?

Please also feel free to relay any other impressions, questions, reactions to the poem.

Kowit, Chapters 6 - 9

Use this post to comment on Chapters 6 - 9 in Kowit's In the Palm of Your Hand. Some questions to potentially answer:

What good advice did you find?
What advice didn't make sense?
What devices in Chapter 7 are particularly useful to you?
What did you make of the discussion of figurative language in Chapter 8?
What did you take from the example poems Kowit gives in the chapters?
What could be the benefit of using a controlled metaphor in a poem, per Chapter 9?

You should pay particularly close attention to Chapter 8. Kowit's discussion of ambiguity ties into our previous discussion regarding implication. When you leave a level of ambiguity in your poems, the reader can work to fill in the blanks. It makes for a much more satisfying read. You know that a poem generally has multiple meanings (the surface-level walk in Frost's poem versus the deeper spiritual isolation we discussed, for example), and your sentence-to-sentence word choice can also function on multiple levels.

Also, the discussion on pgs 68 - 74 regarding word choice in simile/metaphor is very well-put. You should look at comparing things in a new way for your reader, as much as possible. You should also look to compare things in a way in which the language you use supports the tone of the poem. Think of the choir in the poem we discussed supporting the religious overtones of the poem as a whole.