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Style, meaning & choice in poems
Below is a poem by Stephen Crane  ,
but with a choice of three possible alternatives in four places in the
poem. Preferably working with some other students, your task is:
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to work out, in each of the four places, which choice that you think
Crane actually made, and
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to work out why you think your choice is preferable, taking into
account the effects at different linguistic levels that one choice
or another has in relation to the rest of the poem.
It is important that you work carefully at what you think the best choices
are, and why, as you will then get more out of comparing our view with
yours, and so learn more.
After you have made your choices you can submit your answer and find
out what choices Crane made and why we think he made the choices he did.
The above task is adapted from Faulstich's cloze-version presentation
of Crane's poem as reported in an article by Willie van Peer (see below
for reference details).
References
Faulstich, W (1976) 'Die relevanz der cloze-procedure als methods wissenschaftlicher
text-untersuchung', in Lili. Aeitschrift fur Literatur- wisssenschaft
und Linguistik, 6, 81-95. van Peer, W (1988) 'How to do things with
texts: Towards a pragmatic foundation for the teaching of texts', in Short,
M (ed) Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature, 267-297.
In our next section, we take a look at some of the language level changes
that Wilfred Owen made to his final draft of 'Anthem for Doomed Youth',
and the effects he achieved.
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