Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic of language choices which evoke an emotional response. Poetry has an expression of what is thought and felt, rather than what is known as a fact. Poetry is an ancient form of a literary study that has gone through numerous and drastic reinvention over time. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define. Poetry describes specific thing as indication of how images work together to convey feeling and ideas. To create a good poetry, a poet usually uses elements in poem that is called the intrinsic elements and made the readers feel easy to understand what the poet means. Intrinsic elements are divided into two forms: the physical form and mental form. The physical form consists of diction, the concrete word, figurative language, and sound that produced a rhyme and rhythm. While the mental form involves feeling, sense, tone, and intention. 1 From the explanation above, the writer is interested in analyzing the mental form that focuses on the imagery of the poem. For the writer, imagery is one of elements in poem that gives a sense full of meaning of the poem. It is one of the reasons why someone remembers and loves poem. A powerful image in poetry conjures up memories, feeling in our mind. Poetry is 1 I.A. Richard, Practical Criticism, London: Heyneman Educational Books, 1929, p. 120 usually expressed based on our imagination. The important thing is that the image is an instrument that a poet uses to express his or her intention or feeling. By using of image means to understand the essential meaning of the poem. A good image puts the reader right in the scene itself; making the reader be able to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch what is expressed in the poem. When such specific details appear in poems called images. An image is a concrete representation of a sense impression, feeling, or idea. 2 And Image is appeal to one or more of our senses, and also images may be visual something seen, audotory something heard, tactile something felt, olfactory something smelled, or gustatory something tasted. Sometimes the poet use words imagery to refer a pattern of related details in a poem. Imagery has always existed in poetry; an image may occur in a single word, a phrase, and a sentence. And in poetry an image is a presentation in words of something the poet has perceived. In poem imagery is like the collective word we use for a group of images. The description may be an object seen, or of a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch or other physical sensation, or feeling tensions and movements in one’s own body. 3 For the writer, imagery becomes the most important one because imagery influences to convey the intention and felling of the poets itself. Imagery seems like the general description in picturing each physical sensation. 2 Robert DiYanni, Literature; Approach to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama: McGraw Hill Companies, 2001, p.557 3 Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’clair, Modern Poem; an Introduction to Poetry: W.W. Norton Company, New York, 1976, p. xl Like the poems that are chosen here, the writer chooses Billy Collin’s poems because the poems are unique and the poems were made by using the good rhythm and words choice. Billy Collin employs the conventional imagery to construct commentary on life. Billy Collins’s poetry shines brighter than others due to the sarcastic yet funny style he uses to create his poems. Collins uses simplistic stanzas to try to create images that pull the reader away from real life and draw them into his poetic creation. Billy Collins’s cherished American poetry is featured largely throughout the United States. His poems rarely follow a significant topic; instead they are just thoughts that happen to pop into his head. Often, he uses poetry to offer relief in troubled times for himself and the reader. Billy Collins, a current teacher at Lehman College, was born in 1941 and had lived in New York City since his birth. Collins completed his fellowships at the New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation. From the day one, his talents as a writer shined through, as he was able to express his thoughts on paper well throughout grade school. Billy Collins doesn’t force meter or rhyme into his poems in order to draw the reader’s attention; instead he uses his witty descriptions and comedy. As quoted by Richard Alleva in his article of A major minor poet: “The most important thing to say about Collins is that he is a deliberately minor poet, even a rebelliously minor poet, a poet who would reject major status if it were thrust upon him.” Alleva, Richard. A Major Minor Poet Billy Collins has excelled his way through poetry fairly easy with his light verse style poems. Billy Collins has been very successful in creating six published books and is featured around the country. His poetry is in many periodicals, and he does a lot of public reading in which he draws a large crowd. Collins has earned many awards for his incredible explanations through words. He won Best American Poetry twice for two of his books, once in 1992 and once in 1993. He won the Bess Hokin award in 1992, and finally, most recently was named US Poet Laureate in 2001. This award is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, awards received by a poet. Billy Collins has had no shortage of published books. The six currently published are: Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the room, Picnic Lightning, The Best Cigarette, The Art of Drowning, Questions about Angels and The Apple that Astonished Paris. Collins continues to strive as an achieved poet as people continue to find his simplistic poetry great. The writer would like to analyze three of Billy Collin’s poem such; Another reason why I dont keep a gun in the house, The Art of Drowning, and Flames these poems were written by different source publishers. It is obviously a good poem of Collin’s poem. Collin used imagery and word choice to create this poem, but more importantly to express the emotional significance that is implied. Then, in this research, the writer would like to analyze imagery and theme in those poems. And before analyzing imagery, the writer explicates the poems to get the ideas and meaning on each poem. Then, he will connect his analysis with theme of the poems.

B. Focus of the Study