While doing my poetry notebook...

While working on my poetry notebook I learned many new things. First I learned that procrastination is never a good thing. If you wait until the last few days to do a huge assignment, you will go crazy, you will be deprived of sleep, your fingers will be numb from typing, you will not function properly anymore and all the words will begin to blur together. Second, I learned that there are different types of structures of poems. There is the Sonnet, which consists of 14 lines and is usually about love, there is the Blank verse, which is unrhymed, similar to a Free verse, and there is the Didactic, which teaches a moral lesson. The meter of a poem counts how many syllables are present. Moreover, I became introduced to many different poets and writers that I did not know of before. Each one came from a different time period and represented a different part of time with a different idea. While some poets came from the Harlem Renaissance others came from 1970’s. One particular poet stood out to me by the name of Paul Dunbar, an African American poet. He wrote the poem “Life’s Tragedy” in which he contemplated the attitude of society, by ignoring the accomplishments and emphasizing on disappointments. His poem spoke to me and made me sit back and realize that truly bad things happen, but worse ones could happen as well. I realized that I should not get so upset with the little bad things that occur on a daily basis, because the next day something even worse could happen. The real tragedy of life that Dunbar says is failing to attain perfection. Now what makes me so emotional about this poem is the fact that Dunbar came about during the Realist literary movement. It is clear that his poem does fit this time period, as realists tried to write about ordinary things that happen to ordinary people every day. But was Dunbar’s own life filled with tragic events and he wanted to express his feelings out on paper? Or did he just have a lot of altruism? We may never know. The questions I am faced with while reading all kinds of poem’s for this assignment make me really gain knowledge about the past and about how certain people thought and related their own lives to poetry. Really makes me appreciate all the great poems that we have as of today and all the contributions that people have made throughout the years in order to help lead literature forward.