Questions from Vendler

• What piece of life, private or public, is the poem concerned with? Where and when is this life being lived?
• How does the author avoid cliché? How does he or she bring originality to this moment?
• Where is the moment of disequilibrium in the poem? How is the status quo disturbed?
• What patterns (phonetic, grammatical, syntactic, psychological, temporal, spatial, etc.) appear in the poem? How do these patterns impact the sense of the experience depicted?
• How does the structure of the poem reinforce (or work against) the central contrast or comparison being made in the poem?
• Does the poem have a plot or a narrative? Does it begin at the beginning, in the middle, at the end, or somewhere else entirely? How does the author’s decision to begin at this point affect your interpretation of the action?
• What did you feel and think as you followed the poet on his or her journey? What aspects of the poem--structure, images, argument--generated those feelings and thoughts?
• What is the best (most efficient, most rewarding, etc.) way to navigate the poem using the map Vendler proposed in Chapter 4? What aspects of the map are more or less useful? Why?
• What are the interesting or unusual words in the sentence?
• What speech acts are taking place?
• What is implied in the "white space" between sentences or stanzas?
• Is the organization linear (start-to-finish), radial (a cluster of phrases around a center), or recursive (doubling back on itself)?
• Does the language change from concrete to abstract, or vice versa?
• Where is the speaker in time and space?
• Over how long a period does the poem take place?
• What are the speaker's motivations? How are they typical? Atypical?
• What tones of voice does the speaker use?
• Does the speaker resemble the poem's author or not?
• How does the poem "lyricize" landscape; that is, how is the land made a bearer of human feeling?
• Are there multiple points of view in the poem? How do these points of view represent an emotional or moral quarrel within the poet?
• How does the poet resolve the tension between the copiousness of history and the brevity of lyric?