One writing style I seem to find so common among literature that I read is the use of rhythym. Writers also create rhythm by repeating words and phrases or even by repeating whole lines and sentences, as Walt Whitman does in a poem named “Song of Myself”:
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sounds running together, combined, fused, or following,
Sounds of the city and sounds out of the city, sounds of the day and night,
Talkative young ones to those that like them, the loud laugh of work-people at their meals…
Writing is like the beat in music. In poetry, rhythm implies that certain words are produced more force- fully than others, and may be held for longer duration. The repetition of a pattern of such emphasis is what produces a “rhythmic effect.” The word rhythm comes from the Greek, meaning “measured motion.” What I learned from this was that a poem does not have to rhyme to have rhythym, but merely just flows, which is what a very important aspect in everything e do such as the music we listen to and even reading a novel (meaning it makes sense). Cool.
An idea I’d like to talk about is the use of a protagonist in a poem, but more specifically, a marginalized protagonist. A great example of a poet that does this is for example, Margaret Atwood. In Martgaret Atwood’s poems, I’ve realized that the women in the poems might start out just fine, but by the end of the story, they have had to face one or more power struggle situation. She incorporates power struggles when she creates situations in which women are burdened by the rules and inequalities of their societies, discover that they must reconstruct braver, self reliant personae in order to survive. I think that the use a marginalized protagonist is a great method because I don’t know about most people, but it makes me feel trusted and reliable in the information that they are sharing with me. I think this is because I believe that the character is a honest as opposed to a character that would be high in class. Characters that are marginalized such as women, the poor or children, in Atwood’s case, women. Because the characters seem to estrange themselves from society and dissassociate themselves from it, we see them as difefrent but that tends to make us feel comfortable because we might be able to relate better because of that. Well what can I say, the human psyche….
