In an earlier scheme of work – see ‘What is this thing called literature?' – the essence of language art was the central concern. The focus of the activities foregrounded a debate between those who claim that artistic merit is inherent to a literary text, and those who contend that artistic merit has more to do with the dominant ideologies of powerful groups in societies. Students were encouraged to evaluate positions critically.

Amongst those who endorse the ‘inherency approach’ – including theorists such as Roman Jackobson – there is a view that texts become literary where, primarily, language draws attention to itself in a way that stimulates or moves the reader to a fresh perception and appreciation of the subject matter. Put differently, texts can be regarded as essentially literary where the ‘poetic function’ is dominant. In ‘What is this thing called literature?’, one of the earlier activities asked students to consider two poems: William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ and ee cummings’ ‘love is more thicker than forget’. These poems were chosen because each represents how, in different ways, language can, apparently, foreground itself. In Blake’s poem, repetition of pattern and parallelism seem to dominate. In cummings’ poem, by contrast, it is the deviation from convention that is most prevalent.

On this page, you will find materials that may help you guide students through the poems. There are some prompts to help students access the poems, and this is followed by ‘notes to teachers’. The poetry of cummings is, at first glance, potentially challenging for students. Patient scaffolding, however, tends to make it more accessible.

Teachers may find it useful for students to work in smaller groups. Perhaps as a strategy for differentiation, some students can work with the poetry of Blake, and others with cummings’ poem. Each group can, in turn, report back to the other. 

The Tyger - Teacher's Notes

In ‘The Tyger’ the rhythm seems particularly prominent. Notice, in each line of the poem, that four stressed syllables tend to alternate with three or four unstressed syllables. This mainly trochaic meter gives the poem a certain beat that is perhaps indicative of the beating of a drum or anvil, and may evoke a sense of the foot of an animal, such as a tiger, pounding the ground. This notion, arguably, is reinforced through the repetition of plosives - /d/, /t/, or /p/. The poem comprises six stanzas. Each stanza is a quatrain. Each quatrain comprises two rhyming couplets – aabb – where rhyme may be regarded as a kind of phonetic echo. The symmetry of the rhyme scheme seems to parallel the ‘fearful symmetry’ of the tiger in the poem. And, with only small modification, the first and last stanzas are identical. Moreover, particular words and imagery – fire, blackness, and the blacksmith are repeated. There is, then, in the poem as a whole, a sense of completeness.

love is more thicker than forget - Teacher's Notes

The poem ‘love is more thicker than forget’ is not an easy poem to work with. It’s difficult, in the main, because students need to work out what conventions are being challenged, and what ‘rules’ are being broken. cummings treats language as something that is self-referential, and he sets to work on breaking customary syntactic and morphological patterns. What does this mean? Well, for example, cummings writes that ‘love is more thicker than forget’. Here, he breaks the rule for forming comparative structures in English; essentially, he doubles the comparative. The poem also includes curious semantic combinations. Thus, whilst we may conventionally regard love in a range of ways (e.g. as blind), we would not normally claim that it is ‘thick’ or ‘thin’. And, ‘love is less always’ is unusual given that ‘less’ does not normally modify the time adverbial ‘always’. Then, there are the neologisms, words such as ‘unbe’, ‘sunly’, and ‘moonly’. Finally, Cummings makes comparisons between, ordinarily, non-comparable phenomena. Hence, he compares ‘love’ with ‘forget’, although it seems odd to compare a noun (‘love’) with a verb (‘forget’). It may be tempting to ignore cummings’ poem as a kind of esoteric ramble. However, the ‘inherency approach’ would suggest that foregrounding language should encourage a new appreciation on the theme and content of the poem. In this view, it may be the case that the poem provokes readers to conclude that love breaks rules, as Cummings breaks rules with language; love is unpredictable, and allows for the possibility of odd and unusual unions.

Teachers may use these poems within the wider scheme of work suggested in 'What is this thing called literature?', or not, depending on time, focus, and interest. It should perhaps be suggested, however, that the ‘Formalist approach’ to literature would regard the above poems as self-contained works of language art. From this perspective, social and historical contexts, facts about the writer’s life, or the reader’s own narrative, is irrelevant. The general contention of the Language and Literature course would tend to challenge this position.

Towards Assessment  

These poems could be used, particularly at Higher Level (HL), as the basis for a Comparative Commentary (Paper 1, HL). Whilst students will not be asked to compare two literary texts in their exam, students can be afforded the opportunity to develop skills of comparison and contrast, considering the ways in which the poems either build language patterns or break them.