This
Major Authors class has been a really interesting class, and I have learned so
much about poetry. I really enjoyed looking at only two authors and comparing
those two because adding more authors into the picture would’ve made me feel
confused. I’m not the kind of person to
understand how poetry works because of how much digging you have to do just to
figure out what one poem is trying to say. There are tons of similes and
metaphors that I just don’t understand, and that is why Robert Browning was my
favorite of the two poets. I still really enjoyed looking at Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s poetry, but her poetry didn’t seem to intrigue me.
Robert used direct monologues to write his poetry. And coming into this class I had no idea what that even meant. I’ve learned that a dramatic monologue poem is a poem in the form of a speech or narrative (still in poem format), but this is by an imagined person, in which the speaker reveals the different aspects of their character while describing a particular situation or series of events. With this being said, this is why I connected more to Robert’s poetry. There wasn’t a poem I didn’t like from him. My favorite poem we read from Robert Browning’s Poetry was “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”. I really liked this poem because as I was reading it I was constantly connecting it back to the hero’s journey. I studied what that was in my Mythology class, and that’s something that really intrigued me. Just the way Robert went about the poem was awesome! He used great imagery, word choice, and even though it was one of the more lengthy poems I still really enjoyed it!
Now Elizabeth’s poetry like I mentioned above wasn’t “bad poetry”, but I just felt myself having to dig a little bit deeper into what she was trying to get at. She is just as strong of a poet as Robert, if not better. The one poem that I REALLY enjoyed from her was “The Cry of the Children”. Yes I did have to dig deep into this poem to correctly understand what Elizabeth was saying, but there was so much emotion put into this piece that that’s what made me enjoy it so much. I feel as a writer/poet grabbing the audience’s attention is the most important, and let me tell you, she had my full attention while reading that poem. This was also my favorite poem that we discussed in class because hearing others opinions on it was good and of course we dug a little more in depth on it.
This class was different than any other class I’ve ever taken, and I really actually enjoyed it. I not only enjoyed reading the different works, but having you as our teacher made it better. The way we talked and analyzed the poems made me really understand each and every poem from start to end, and I do feel like I can understand and analyze poetry a little better.
