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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
The first reason why the writer chose poetry as research subject is because poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through
meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry had so many movements in its development. Some of them
are classical, romanticism, symbolism, surrealism, and many others. One of important movement which had appeared and became famous
on 17
th
and 18
th
century was Romanticism. Romanticism is a movement which emphasized
on human‘s emotion. Those acts of expressing real life use beautiful language so that they can touch the feeling of the reader. The beauty
became important focus in Romanticism field.
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The famous poets who much influenced by Romanticism are William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
One of the modern poets who are influenced by Romanticism is Louise Elisabeth Glück. The writer chose Louise Glück
‘s poem because she is one of notable American poet in this modern era. She won the Pulitzer Prize
for Poetry in 1993 and was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003. One of her works which gets a lot of
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Suwardi Endaswara, Metodologi Penelitian Sastra Yogyakarta: Pustaka Widyatama, 2003, p. 33.
attention is Averno. Averno or Lake Avernus is a lake west of Naples which the Romans mythologized as the entrance to the underworld. The Greek myth
of Demeters daughter Persephone and her marriage to Hades is a recurring topic in the collection, as are the themes of oblivion and death, soul and body,
love and isolation which is have strong bond with Romanticism elements. By analyzing the poem in the collection, the writer want to prove that
Romanticism movement still affect modern generation of poet nowadays. The writer is also interested to analyze Romanticism because Romantic
nowadays has different context with Romanticism that the writer described by definition. Romantic is an adjective which means feeling of love between man
and woman whilst Romanticism means a movement tend to think that literary is a reflection of the real life which is added by the feeling of the writer. The
elements of Romanticism emphasized on human emotion which is more important than ratio and imagined expression of author‘s feeling. Besides this
element, there are still more elements in Romanticism, such as love, nature, individualism, primitivism, spontaneous, spirit of revolution, and exoticism,
which is interesting to be analyzed especially in poem. For extracting Romanticism elements in the poem, the writer first analyzes figurative
language because the poet of Romanticism usually uses it to enrich and support or emphasize the elements of romanticism in the poem. Figurative
language is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense. Appealing to the imagination, figurative language provides new ways of looking at the world. It
always makes use of a comparison between different things. Figurative
language compares two things that are different in enough ways so that their similarities, when pointed out, are interesting, unique andor surprising.
Based on the explanation above, the writer is interested to analyze Romanticism elements by analyzing figurative language which appeared in the
poems by Louise Glück entitled A Myth of Devotion and Fugue which are taken from Averno poem collection.
B. Focus of the study
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