How do you study for poetry?

c_f_p99

Any sixth year or past leaving cert student, how do you effectively study for poetry? I just look at the poems, try to understand and remember them, and the next day, I forget everything. What quotes are the best to learn for Boland, Dickenson, Frost and Wordsworth? My teacher said you should learn off all the poems, but sorry, I'm not going to do that! I'm only looking for around a H4/H3 so nothing too high.

John_2187

c_f_p99 wrote: »

Any sixth year or past leaving cert student, how do you effectively study for poetry? I just look at the poems, try to understand and remember them, and the next day, I forget everything. What quotes are the best to learn for Boland, Dickenson, Frost and Wordsworth? My teacher said you should learn off all the poems, but sorry, I'm not going to do that! I'm only looking for around a H4/H3 so nothing too high.

learn the theme, tone and technique of each poem. make a grid for each poet and have the theme, tone and technique of all of their poems in this grid, that way you can look over the whole poet on a single page.

no need to learn off the entire poem at all, a few quotes will do the trick. i tend to take one quote with an image, and one which supports my interpretation of the theme, in each poem.

spurious

Learn technical terms to do with poetry too, so you can refer to them in the poems you are answering on.

A97

The preceding advice is good. I generally found it helpful to try to capture the fundamentals of each poem. Why did the poet write this? What are they trying to say? This isn't too difficult to do once you have class notes or other resources. Of course, it's also great if you are able to find meaning in it by yourself, as you will probably remember that more.

Another important thing to note is that you are studying poetry, which is a very specific kind of art form. For each poem, try to see what poetic techniques the poets use, and explain how they use these techniques to help make their key points. For a lot of the poems that I covered, you could typically do a good job of this by being able to summarise poems along with one or two quotes per poem to back up what you're saying regarding themes and/or techniques. Sometimes even partial lines or even a word or two can get a point across.

When you're answering questions, don't just write stuff down. Explain how what you're saying relates to the question being asked. Always bring it back to the question. Often, poets have overarching themes in their poems, so it can also be good to wrap it all up with how they fit together.

I would advise knowing six poems from five poets. You don't need to know the poems off by heart. You can do a lot with a couple of key lines from each, but make sure that what you do learn is correct as misquotes look bad. That will guarantee a question on the exam, and probably some choice on the day as well. You don't need to know any more than that as you may want to focus on your other subjects with the time you have.

c_f_p99

Thanks. I honestly find it very time-consuming and some things about certain poems make absolutely no sense to me. I actually find Maths a lot easier to understand than that, but that's a different topic altogether. You know though, I find it very odd that people say that the science subjects and maths are the hardest to understand because you have to have a certain logic for them. I find Maths, Physics and (mostly) Applied Maths easy to understand, because of that logic. Whereas, Economics, which is more common-sense like (which I agree with) I can find it to be very confusing (particularly macro topics like Banking and Balance of Payments) because the logic behind it isn't as strong. It's like as if the subject just expects you to be familiar with all the concepts and terminology without explaining what they actually are properly. I wish I did Chemistry or Accounting instead, are any of those two doable in a year? I'm low H2 standard in Economics btw. I can find English very hard to understand at times because of that too. I like the subject a lot more than I used to though (I wanted to do pass for leaving cert) and am pretty strong actually in Hamlet and understand that perfectly, Comparative is nothing hard either, but Poetry just seems like a lot. I guess I should get to studying, I've only done 1.5 poets out of four (and only three poems from each). I don't have much else to do (other than bits of economics) so is it feasible to get even 1.5 more poets done by next week? I am getting complacent with the studying (since I did on average 5-6 hours daily over the second week of Easter, 2-3 hours first week) and feel like I know everything, even though I don't.

A97

If you're H2 standard in Economics, you are probably capable of pushing for the H1. I didn't do it, but isn't there a bit of choice? Focus on your strongest topics, but also pay a lot of attention to the parts that you don't know or fully understand in those topics. Maybe try to think about them from another perspective, or just learn them in such a way that you conciously know that the answer is not what you think it is.

Are you in 5th or 6th year? I wouldn't really recommend extra subjects as you are probably better off in improving the base level you already have in other subjects. Don't create more work for yourself. You already have a lot to do. The only circumstances in which I might recommend another subject is if you are certain that you won't get the points you need elsewhere (like if you're doing ordinary level and you need high points for a course), or if you feel that the subject might benefit you in college or a future career. Even at that, going at a subject alone is a lot trickier than with a teacher and you will need a lot of external motivation (and/or money for grinds/classes), and this will take up a lot of your time. Also, most subjects probably can't be covered properly in a year if you're juggling seven or so other subjects.

Just keep at the studying. Cover at least the bare minimum of what you need to cover (that means five poets for the Leaving Cert English exam). Exams are important, but don't overstress yourself either, especially if you're in 5th year. Just do what you can and keep working hard. You might not remember everything you do or look at, but you will retain at lot of information that you can use to show off what you know.

c_f_p99

A97 wrote: »

If you're H2 standard in Economics, you are probably capable of pushing for the H1. I didn't do it, but isn't there a bit of choice? Focus on your strongest topics, but also pay a lot of attention to the parts that you don't know or fully understand in those topics. Maybe try to think about them from another perspective, or just learn them in such a way that you conciously know that the answer is not what you think it is.

Are you in 5th or 6th year? I wouldn't really recommend extra subjects as you are probably better off in improving the base level you already have in other subjects. Don't create more work for yourself. You already have a lot to do. The only circumstances in which I might recommend another subject is if you are certain that you won't get the points you need elsewhere (like if you're doing ordinary level and you need high points for a course), or if you feel that the subject might benefit you in college or a future career. Even at that, going at a subject alone is a lot trickier than with a teacher and you will need a lot of external motivation (and/or money for grinds/classes), and this will take up a lot of your time. Also, most subjects probably can't be covered properly in a year if you're juggling seven or so other subjects.

Just keep at the studying. Cover at least the bare minimum of what you need to cover (that means five poets for the Leaving Cert English exam). Exams are important, but don't overstress yourself either, especially if you're in 5th year. Just do what you can and keep working hard. You might not remember everything you do or look at, but you will retain at lot of information that you can use to show off what you know.

The choice isn't as nice as one would think. The short questions for instance, carry a penalty of a maximum of three marks if you pick the wrong ones. Pretty annoying. Topics are very commonly mixed up in the long questions so you'd be better off covering everything just in case. I'm not going to drop it after what you said though.

I probably do understand them tbf, there are a lot of times where my lack of understanding is due to certain material that makes them easier to understand are not on the course (electricity and magnetism in Physics for instance) so you need to partially understand them and regurgitate the rest.

Yeah, at first, I was kinda laughed at the idea of studying less than five poets and dismissed the people doing it as lazy, but they are far more time consuming than I'd ever imagined. Doing just three gives you a 92% chance (more if you chose predicted poets) of one of them coming up, a risk that I'd be willing to take. Though, I might look over two more as well. It's in a year's time though so of course it'll all depend on how much work there will be to do next year.