practical criticism

1. PRACTICAL CRITICISM
Dr. Sarangpai Ramchandra Shinde.
Assistant Professor,
Department of English,
Amdar Shashikant Shinde Mahavidyalaya, Medha.

2. What is practical criticism?
• Criticism based on close textual analysis
• Poetry analysis, close reading of the text
• Introduced by I A Richards in England in the 18th century

3. Tips to understand and appreciate a poem
• Quick first reading
• Read the questions asked and direct your reading to answer them
• Try to understand what the poem is about
• Don’t try to make the poem unnecessarily complicated by involving your
own/subjective imaginations and emotions
• Divide the poem into stanzas and try to understand every line and stanza
objectively
• If you feel that the given poem is very difficult to understand, there are
other things you can try without going deep into the meaning and
understanding of the poem.

4. What if you don’t understand the poem at all?
• Count lines and stanza
• Comment on the stanza pattern, rhyme scheme
• Figures of speech can also be hunt down just by having a glimpse of
the poem.
• eg. Similie, repetation, alliteration, onomatopoea, hyperbole etc

5. Diving deep into the poem
• A branch of literature which is suggestive, imaginative and emotive
• A poem is like an iceberg
• It always carries message or intends to share his/her feelings to the reader
• A Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
• Revolves around one particular theme: love, nature, death, etc.
• Language is not explicit; to say something and to mean something
• There is no final meaning as such of a poem. The meaning keeps on
changing with different readers.

6. CONTENT OF THE POEM
• Types of poem:
• Narrative: a poem that tells a story; eg. The epic, ballad, etc.
• This kind of poetry reveals the speaker’s emotion, feeling, thought, mode,
attitude, belief, observation, experience, state of mind etc.
• Poets of non-narrative poetry directly address the readers
• In this genre of poetry, poems are totally focused on the inner thought, ideas,
feeling, perception and emotion of the speaker or poet.
• Some of the popular forms of non-narrative poetry are Lyric, Sonnet,
Ode, Elegy etc.

7. Theme/ Central Idea of the poem
• The central theme of a poem represents its controlling idea.
• This idea is crafted and developed throughout the poem and can be
identified by assessing the poem’s rhythm, setting, tone, mood,
diction and, occasionally, title.
• The theme is rarely stated explicitly, and it is not a moral but an
important idea that is prevalent throughout the poem.

8. FORM
• A poetic form just refers to a type of poem that follows a particular
set of rules, whether it be the number of lines, the length or number
of stanzas, rhyme scheme, subject matter, or really whatever rule you
can think of.
• The most famous poetic form of all has to be the sonnets and lyrics.

9. Figures of speech

10. IMAGERY
• Imagery means to use
figurative language to
represent objects,
actions, and ideas in
such a way that it
appeals to our physical
senses. ...

11. RHYME
• correspondence of sound
between words or the endings
of words, especially when these
are used at the ends of lines of
poetry.