Blog #2

One of the interesting concepts that we discussed this week was how poetry can be broken down line by line. Before entering this class, I generally focused on one general concept of a poem or a prose and usually went off of that as the theme. However, when critically analyzing a poem, a myriad of questions pop up and arise. We had an interesting discussion in class today when I was the only one who pulled a sexual connotation out of a seemingly harmless line. It goes to show you that poetry is all in the eye of the beholder. It also might be as a result of being the only male in the class, I have a different insight on things. That is another element that you have to consider when analyzing poetry; the audience. A poem will be interpeted differently from audience to audience, so you should never expect the same reaction from everyone. For example, a juvenile love poem might be seen as brilliant to a class of 11 and 12 year olds. However, it might be eaten up as trash by a group of upper division college students. All of this goes into account of how poetry is construed.