HERE'S SOME USEFUL INFORMATION ABOUT READING POETRY.
DON'T SKIP IT!  TAKE THE TROUBLE TO STUDY IT BEFORE YOU READ "THE RAVEN"

How to Read a Poem

There’s really only one reason that poetry has gotten a reputation for being so darned “difficult”: it demands your full attention and won’t settle for less. Unlike a novel, where you can drift in and out and still follow the plot, poems are generally shorter and more intense, with less of a conventional story to follow. If you don’t make room for the experience, you probably won’t have one. 

But the rewards can be high. To make an analogy with rock and roll, it’s the difference between a two and a half minute pop song with a hook that you get sick of after the third listen, and a slow-building tour de force that sounds fresh and different every time you hear it. Once you’ve gotten a taste of the really rich stuff, you just want to listen to it over and over again and figure out: how’d they do that? 

Aside from its demands on your attention, there’s nothing too tricky about reading a poem. Like anything, it’s a matter of practice. But in case you haven’t read much (or any) poetry before, we’ve put together a short list of tips that will make it a whole lot more enjoyable.

• Follow Your Ears. It’s okay to ask, “What does it mean?” when reading a poem. But it’s even better to ask, “How does it sound?” If all else fails, treat it like a song. Even if you can’t understand a single thing about a poem’s “subject” or “theme,” you can always say something – anything – about the sound of the words. Does the poem move fast or slow? Does it sound awkward in sections or does it have an even flow? Do certain words stick out more than others? Trust your inner ear: if the poem sounds strange, it doesn’t mean you’re reading it wrong. In fact, you probably just discovered one of the poem’s secret tricks!
• Read It Aloud. OK, we’re not saying you have to shout it from the rooftops. If you’re embarrassed and want to lock yourself in the attic and read the poem in the faintest whisper possible, go ahead. Do whatever it takes, because reading even part of poem aloud can totally change your perspective on how it works.
• Become an Archaeologist. When you’ve drunk in the poem enough times, experiencing the sound and images found there, it is sometimes fun to switch gears and to become an archaeologist (you know -- someone who digs up the past and uncovers layers of history). Treat the poem like a room you have just entered. Perhaps it’s a strange room that you’ve never seen before, filled with objects or people that you don’t really recognize. Maybe you feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland. Assume your role as an archaeologist and take some measurements. What’s the weather like? Are there people there? What kind of objects do you find? Are there more verbs than adjectives? Do you detect a rhythm? Can you hear music? Is there furniture? Are there portraits of past poets on the walls? Are there traces of other poems or historical references to be found?
• Don’t Skim. Unlike the newspaper or a textbook, the point of poetry isn’t to cram information into your brain. We can’t repeat it enough: poetry is an experience. If you don’t have the patience to get through a long poem, no worries, just start with a really short poem. Understanding poetry is like getting a suntan: you have to let it sink in.
• Memorize! “Memorize” is such a scary word, isn’t it? It reminds us of multiplication tables. Maybe we should have said: “Tuck the poem into your snuggly memory-space.” Or maybe not. At any rate, don’t tax yourself: if you memorize one or two lines of a poem, or even just a single cool-sounding phrase, it will start to work on you in ways you didn’t know possible. You’ll be walking through the mall one day, and all of a sudden, you’ll shout, “I get it!” Just not too loud, or you’ll get mall security on your case.
• Be Patient. You can’t really understand a poem that you’ve only read once. You just can’t. So if you don’t get it, set the poem aside and come back to it later. And by “later” we mean days, months, or even years. Don’t rush it. It’s a much bigger accomplishment to actually enjoy a poem than it is to be able to explain every line of it. Treat the first reading as an investment – your effort might not pay off until well into the future, but when it does, it will totally be worth it. Trust us.
• Read in Crazy Places. Just like music, the experience of poetry changes depending on your mood and the environment. Read in as many different places as possible: at the beach, on a mountain, in the subway. Sometimes all it takes is a change of scenery for a poem to really come alive.
• Think Like a Poet. Here’s a fun exercise. Go through the poem one line at a time, covering up the next line with your hand so you can’t see it. Put yourself in the poet’s shoes: If I had to write a line to come after this line, what would I put? If you start to think like this, you’ll be able to appreciate all the different choices that go into making a poem. It can also be pretty humbling – at least we think so.
• “Look Who’s Talking.” Ask the most basic questions possible of the poem. Two of the most important are: “Who’s talking?” and “Who are they talking to?” If it’s a Shakespeare sonnet, don’t just assume that the speaker is Shakespeare. The speaker of every poem is kind of fictional creation, and so is the audience. Ask yourself: what would it be like to meet this person? What would they look like? What’s their “deal,” anyway?
• And, most importantly, Never Be Intimidated. Regardless of what your experience with poetry in the classroom has been, no poet wants to make his or her audience feel stupid. It’s just not good business, if you know what we mean. Sure, there might be tricky parts, but it’s not like you’re trying to unlock the secrets of the universe. Heck, if you want to ignore the “meaning” entirely, then go ahead. Why not?

Poetry is about freedom and exposing yourself to new things. In fact, if you find yourself stuck in a poem, just remember that the poet, 9 times out of 10, was a bit of a rebel and was trying to make his friends look at life in a completely different way. Find your inner rebel too. There isn’t a single poem out there that’s “too difficult” to try out – right now, today. So hop to it. As you’ll discover here at Shmoop, there’s plenty to choose from.


Sources:

http://allpoetry.com/column/2339540
http://academic.reed.edu/writing/paper_help/figurative_language.html
http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/Pages/LiteraryTermsTOC.html#RhetLang
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/allegory.html

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway, famous author and journalist, was born in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. His father was a doctor; his mother, a musician. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall. As a young man, he was interested in writing; he wrote for and edited his high school’s newspaper, as well as the high school yearbook. Upon graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1917, he worked for the Kansas City Star newspaper briefly, but in that short time, he learned the writing style that would shape nearly all of his future work.

As an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, Ernest Hemingway was wounded and spent several months in the hospital. While there, he met and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. They planned to marry; however, she became engaged to an Italian officer instead. This experience devastated Hemingway, and Agnes became the basis for the female characters in his subsequent short stories “A Very Short Story” (1925) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), as well as the famous novel “A Farewell To Arms” (1929). This would also start a pattern Ernest would repeat for the rest of his life – leaving women before they had the chance to leave him first.

Ernest Hemingway began work as a journalist upon moving to Paris in the early 1920s, but he still found time to write. He was at his most prolific in the 20s and 30s. His first short story collection, aptly titled “Three Stories and Ten Poems,” was published in 1923. His next short story collection, “In Our Time,” published in 1925, was the formal introduction of the vaunted Hemingway style to the rest of the world, and considered one of the most important works of 20th century prose. He would then go on to write some of the most famous works of the 20th century, including “A Farewell to Arms,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “The Old Man and the Sea.” He also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Ernest Hemingway lived most of his later years in Idaho. He began to suffer from paranoia, believing the FBI was aggressively monitoring him. In November of 1960 he began frequent trips to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for electroconvulsive therapy – colloquially known as “shock treatments.” He had his final treatment on June 30, 1961. Two days later, on July 2, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He was a few weeks short of his 62nd birthday. This wound up being a recurring trend in his family; his father, as well as his brother and sister, also died by committing suicide. The legend of Hemingway looms large, and his writing style is so unique that it left a legacy in literature that will endure forever.

Here's a list of the major works of Ernest Hemingway.

Novels/Novella

• The Torrents of Spring (1925)
• The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• To Have and Have Not(1937)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• Adventures of a Young Man (1962)
• Islands in the Stream (1970)
• The Garden of Eden (1986)

Nonfiction

• Death in the Afternoon (1932)
• Green Hills of Africa (1935)
• The Dangerous Summer (1960)
• A Moveable Feast (1964)

Short Story Collections

• Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
• In Our Time (1925)
• Men Without Women (1927)
• The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1932)
• Winner Take Nothing (1933)
• The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
• The Essential Hemingway (1947)
• The Hemingway Reader (1953)
• The Nick Adams Stories (1972)

Read more about E.Hemingway life

Hemingway's life and works

Listen to Hemingway's Nobel Prize Acceptance speech

Speech

Here are links to get ready for our discussion 

Cat in the Rain

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QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1.      Read the opening paragraph of the story closely and discuss how it helps to set the tone of the story and how it provides the readers with the theme(s) of the story. For example: Why are there only two Americans stopping at the hotel? What do “the public garden” and “the war monument stand” for in the story? What is the importance of the emphasis on the weather in the opening paragraph? What is the symbolic value of the artists? What is the reason for the narrator’s emphasis on the emptiness of the square?

2.      What is the significance of the rain in the story?

3.      Identify what the female protagonist is called in the whole story and discuss in what ways this could be significant.

4.      Why does the narrator describe the cat as “crouched under one of the dripping green tables”?

5.      Make a comparison between George and the hotel keeper. What is the function of each of these characters in the story?

6.      What could be the metaphorical value of the maid’s question to the wife: “Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signoria?” (“Have you lost something, Madam?”)

7.      Why does the hotel keeper make the American wife “feel very small and at the same time really important”?

8.  Discuss the references to the wife’s hair: Why does George like his wife’s hair “the way it is”? Why does the wife want to “make a big knot at the back”?

9.  There are two cats in the story. What does each of them symbolize? Why does the wife want a kitty to sit on her lap and purr?

10.  Extension Activity:
Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory”: Hemingway views his writing style as “fashioned on the “principle of the iceberg,” for “seven eights of it [is] under water for every part that shows” (cited in Thomas Strychacz, 1999,  in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Scott Donaldson (Ed.), p. 59). In other words, as Hemingway said, “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (cited in Elizabeth Dewberry, 1999, in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Scott Donaldson, Ed., p. 23)
Discuss Hemingway’s metaphor of “iceberg” in relation to his short story “Cat in the Rain”.

The Killers

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QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Author and critic Robert Penn Warren raised this question: "To whom does ‘The Killers’ belong?" and concluded that the answer was "Nick Adams." Is he right? Who and what is this story really about?
2. Which character does the reader most identify with?
3. Identify how Sam, George and Nick react when when they find out the killers are after Ole Andreson. Then discuss what these reactions reveal about these three characters.
4. Do we believe Nick’s claim at the end of the story that he’s going to get out of town? Does this seem like an extreme reaction on his part? Does George’s final comment that he’d "better not think about it" seem likely to change Nick’s resolve to leave?
5. Why do you think Ole Anderson refuses to take action?
6. We don’t ever see Ole’s death. What effect does this have on the story? Do we hold out hope that he might live, or take it for granted that the killers will find and whack him, as they say?
7. Comment on the physical description of the two killers: why are they depicted as identical and clownish?
8. Did you notice all the repetition of the same phrases and words in the story’s dialogue? ("I don’t know," "All right," "bright boy," etc.) What purpose does this serve thematically? Structurally? Does it affect the style or tone of the story? How?
9. What message(s) does the story convey as far as the nature of the world is concerned?

About Text Analysis


Writing a textual analysis is not writing how you feel about a text’s topic, and it’s not writing whether you agree with the argument presented in the text. In fact, you can write a textual analysis about a text that deals with a topic you know little about or disagree with entirely.
When you write a textual analysis, you are writing to tell readers whether or not a text’s author effectively presents an argument. You will decide how effectively an author presents his or her argument by examining the techniques the author uses, explaining which ones work (or not) and why. To do this, you must first think about how these techniques affect the author’s intended audience and how they help to achieve the author’s intended purpose. Your analysis will be an explanation of how the author reaches that audience and achieves that purpose (or not).
In short, analysis involves thinking critically about how a text works (or doesn’t) and why, and then communicating that clearly.

Key Features

Based on Richard Bullock, The Norton Field Guide (NY: Norton, 2006), p.50

Summary of the text: Depending on how well known the text you are analyzing is, you will most likely need to provide a brief summary of it. Attention to Context: Texts often exist as part of an ongoing conversation or as a response to particular events. Keep this in mind when analyzing a text; think about how those conversations or events influenced the author’s decisions about the text or how they influence the way the intended audience will feel about its message. Clear Interpretation or Judgment: This can be achieved through a clear thesis statement placed near the beginning of your paper that includes your interpretation of what you think the text means or what its intended purpose was, how well this message is communicated, and how the author does (or doesn’t) communicate it. Support for Your Conclusions: Because there is rarely just one way to interpret a text, examples of techniques and patterns from the text are good ways to support your claims.

Useful Questions to Ask Yourself

• Is everything in this text clear to me (including words, expressions, references)?
• What is the author’s purpose/audience for this text? How do I know that?
• What techniques does the author use to get his/her point across? For example, does the author quote or refer to credible sources, appeal to the audience’s emotions, organize the argument in a particular way?
• Do I have a clearly stated thesis? Do I provide sufficient evidence for my claims?
• What do I know or how do I feel about this topic/author? How will that influence my analysis?