Poetry Study Goals

• More easily understand a poem’s often difficult sentence syntax.
• Understand the significance, the big picture.
•  Learn more poetry terms
• Improve my general vocabulary.
• Make sure I get bogged down on detail only if I need to.

I really struggled with the poetry section. The first thing I noticed was the difficult sentence syntax that most of the poems had. As I read, my primary focus was on simply grasping the meaning of each sentence, a few words at a time. That’s why my biggest goal is getting used to the unusual poetry-style sentence syntax. And because of my narrow line-by-line focus, I had trouble recognizing the speaker’s emphasis on the paleness around him or his tendency to refer to the tombstone mournfully. Understanding the significance of these details will help me answer big picture questions. I realized the need to learn more poetry terms after seeing answer choices that included poetry terms that I weren’t familiar with, such as “masculine rhyme.” I also saw non-poetry vocab words that I didn’t know, such as “oblong” and “jetsam.” Not being able to use POI on these answer choices made it much harder to choose an answer. Finally, I realized most of the questions didn’t require as deep of an understanding of the poem as I thought. That’s why I made a goal to do a cursory read of the entire poem and look at the questions before I get bogged down on confusing sections