Michael Meyer ought to be lauded for such a well-rounded, comprehensive resource as the Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. It offers a wonderful variety of poetry and critical commentaries on various selections and gives wry examples on how to recognize bad writing, including a passage from a particularly bad romantic novel and an example of doggerel poetry -- what a student of literature would find stimulating and appealing.
In the pages mentioned (page 570-580), where the speaker elaborately discusses word choice, word order and tone, the speaker pays careful attention to language: the connotations of words, allusion, figurative language, irony, symbol, rhythm, sound, and so on. These elements are examined in relation to one another and to the overall effect and meaning of a work. For example, when he elaborates the term "explication." Now, what is explication? The speaker tells us that an explication is a detailed analysis of a passage of poetry or prose. Because explication is an intensive examination of a text line by line, it is mostly used to interpret a...
A poet's job, according to the speaker, is not writing reality as it is. Poetry condenses reality. Even a single word can have two, three, ten meanings. In the " Reading, thinking, Writing" (5th ed., New York, St. Martin Press, 2000) we get an idea about what a poetry should be. According to the speaker, a poem can be like a recipe. Just as, to make a cake, one does not just drop all of the ingredients into a big bowl and mix. One has to first mix the dry ingredients together; then mix cream butter and sugar separately, then add eggs, then stir the dry ingredients in. Poetry is very similar. One needs to be very careful about choice of word, word orders and tones if one does not want a poem, to be a lumpy mess.
Word order matters -- sometimes for clarity of meaning (a solo guitar isn't the same as a guitar solo) and sometimes for effect ("a dying man" is roughly the same as "a man, dying," but the effect of the word order matters). There are many different ways to order words…
