mvuent
Void Dweller
the other day i was looking through a poetry anthology i was apparently assigned in 8th grade. in the intro, the editor says that when analyzing a poem, the first thing you need to do is determine the speaker, audience, and rhetorical situation. to demonstrate this point, he uses a wordsworth poem. he says it's not really clear who the speaker is, but we can speculate. he says the audience is even tougher to define, but apologizes that "this is not always the case". he then notes that "we don't have many clues" as to the rhetorical situation. so why did he use the poem as literally his first example? surely his analysis strategy would look better if it worked at least once? is his entire pedagogical model based on some kind of personal humiliation fetish, and if so, are people like this really who middle schoolers should be learning about poetry from?