Sir Thomas Wyatt was a 16th century poet and statesman. Today we would call him a Renaissance man, and did as much pioneering and inventing in English poetics as American renaissance men such as Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison did in more mechanical respects. Wyatt delved into erotic subject matter with grace and civility so as to make it socially acceptable to read. His poem They Flee from Me can be explicated as such, especially by looking at the extended metaphor used. Wyatt was skilled in using metaphors of animals and nature to tone down the true undercurrent of his poems - which were sexual in nature. They Flee from Me is no acceptation to this. The scansion of the poem is irregular iambic pentameter, dipping to nine syllable lines and even tetrameter in line thirteen:

"They Flee From Me"

What can attitude tell us? To help you find out the meaning behind this poem, begin by asking who owns the action of each stanza in this poem. This will help trace the speaker’s transformation from line to line and stanza to stanza. Then ask about shifts in the speaker’s attitudes toward women, the loose gown–wearing ones in particular. How does the speaker feel about women by the end of the poem? Be warned: This provocative poem is rated PG-13, after close reading you might understand it perfectly.......

At the age of twelve, Walt Whitman began to learn the printer's trade, and fell in love with the written word. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously, becoming acquainted with the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and the Bible........






"Beat! Beat! Drums"
What can intonation tell us? With pounding rhythms and overwhelming images of destruction, Whitman’s famous anti-war poem mimics the fervent speech of a warmonger but leaves the reader nearly chanting in protest of war.

In three powerful stanzas, Whitman catalogs the ways in which war obliterates peaceful domesticity, civil society, and even the restfulness of death. This text presents a number of interesting challenges for the performer. Paying special attention to the actors and what they say will highlight the emotional dramas, which are expressed in a series of ironic commands and rhetorical questions. The last line in each of these stanzas suggests the question How would you say that aloud? “So fierce you whir and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.”

Taken as a separate unit of meaning, this line could be an answer to the question What is the cause of this horror? As part of the sentence, however, it must be spoken as a command. Thus, part of the difficulty of this performance is negotiating the irony of these speech acts. The powerful cadence of this series of iconic images and the onomatopoeic devices gathers enormous weight in performance.