Basics - Poetry
What is a line?
There are some guys who want to chop wood in this poem, and it's April
What is "Two Tramps in Mud Time"?
This shared theme connects "The Death of the Hired Man" with "Mowing" and "Two Tramps in Mud Time"
What is labor?
This poem famously ends with the same line twice: "And miles to go before I sleep / and miles to go before I sleep."
What is "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"?
Oh that's easy! It's the state where your pal Dr. Linebaugh grew up! it's not the Robert Frost one and it's famous for being "the nutmeg state" even though there's no nutmeg there.
What is Connecticut?
When lines are grouped together, it's not a paragraph! It's this word derived from the Italian for "room"
What is a Stanza?
Its speaker takes a walk past "the furthest city light" and sees a big ole moon in the sky that he thinks is like a "luminary clock"
What is "Acquainted with the Night"?
"Home Burial" connects to "The Hill Wife" based on what shared thematic concern?
What is rural isolation? (or marriage/alienation, too!)
What is blank verse?
Pencil and paper ready! Not actually. But we use that prompt all the time in this extracurricular activity that i coach.
What is quiz bowl?
Instead of "narrator", when analyzing poetry we use this term to discuss who is doing the talking.
What is a Speaker?
This poem in blank verse makes use of plain speech and clashing dialogue to create an air of tension related to grief.
What is "Home Burial"?
These two poems share an explicit and direct intertextual link by taking place in the same field at different times, though their speakers are different.
What are "Mowing" and "The Tuft of Flowers"?
This type of stanza is commonly used by Frost, including in poems such as "The Pasture" and "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"
What is quatrain?
It's not just Frost season B.S., Linebaugh is really like this. What Robert-Frost-like type of landscape was right next to Linebaugh's high school?
An Apple Orchard (over the right field fence of the baseball field)
This poetic form comes in English and Italian varieties and (just about) always has 14 lines. Frost doesn't have many of these, but Shakespeare did!
What is a sonnet?
Someone is cleaning out a spring in this poem and invites the audience to come along.
What is "The Pasture"?
This pair of poems has a more literal connection: solitary speakers wandering around alone at night and contemplating things.
What are "Stopping by Woods" and "Acquainted with the night"?
This poem is really a cycle of shorter poems, some of which are written in quatrains while others are written in single stanza forms.
What is "The Hill Wife"?
(just one for credit)
Who are Pepper, Tayto, Millie, Ollie, or Chicken Nugget?
What is a couplet?
This poem imagines someone as "an old-stone savage armed" and laments the "darkness" of this person's simplistic thinking that sees people as best alienated.
What is "Mending Wall"?
This pair of poems shares interest in the notion of the fleeting nature of life.
What are "Out, Out" and "Nothing Gold Can Stay"?
This poem is a good example of structure that follows meaning as the speaker appears to become drowsy over the course of the poem.
What is "After Apple-Picking"?
It's because i very nearly made Irish Literature my sole academic specialty that this 20th Century Irish author has an entire shelf in my office dedicated to his work (and work about his life and books).
Who is James Joyce?
This poetic structure encompasses a range of styles, though you mostly won't see Frost go anywhere near it. It's typically unrhymed but may have lots of different combinations of other structuring elements.
What is Free Verse?
A speaker imagines sparks from a fire joining the night sky as constellations on a March evening in this poem.
What is "Evening in a Sugar Orchard"?
This poem shares with "The Tuft of Flowers" the sense of humans in conflict with nature but does not share with it a sense of comraderie in labor (or any interest in human work at all)
What is "Range-Finding"?
These two types of poetry serve as sub-genres for Frost's work, but also suggest very different structures, with some being short and conceptual and others being story-driven.
(need both for credit)
What are "lyric" and "narrative" poems?
He's an American hero in my book, and we just recently passed the 167th anniversary of his historic raid on Harper's Ferry. But in Linebaugh terms, he's the abolitionist radical who is my email and Teams avatar.
Who is John Brown?