Difficulty in Poetry: A Stylistic Model

Abstract

As its title suggests, Difficulty in Poetry: A Stylistic Model tackles poetic difficulty. The question here is, why would one consider a poem difficult? Is it a semantic issue, facing unfamiliar meanings of words? Alternatively, it can be a pragmatic issue, the unfamiliar context to readers. Or is it a cultural issue? Or can it be a combination of all the factors mentioned above? The author endeavors to define difficulty based on previous relevant work that dealt with the same vein. In previous work, Castiglione (2017) defined difficulty “as a text-driven response phenomenon associated with resistance to reading fluency”(p.99). In general, this book in review addresses difficulty in poetry with the aim of finding understanding and analyzing difficulty. Readers need to know what poetic difficulty means and why some poems are considered complex and difficult to understand. Castiglione (2018) used an interesting metaphor to make the idea of his book more reachable to the readers. He describes difficulty as a metropolis. The ways of understanding it are described as vehicles. Issues might be faced during the journey to the center of this city. Moreover, the author advertently shows how difficulty is different from ambiguity and obscurity. This book achieves the following main goals: (1) it presents a definition of difficulty in poetry (2) it aims at approaching difficulty in poetry.

A Contemporary Free Verse from American and Ukrainian Readers’ Perspectives

“…Poetry is approached from the perspectives of the genre (Hanauer, 1998); polyvalence conventions, metaphoric content, making a significant point (Peskin, 2007); symbolic interpretation (Svensson, 1987); Text World Theory -TWT (Gavins, 2007); schema theory (Semino, 2014); difficult poetry (Steiner, 1978;Yaron, 2002Yaron, , 2003Castiglione, 2017Castiglione, , 2019; expert-novice comparison (Peskin, 1998); feelings and thoughts (Eva-Wood, 2004), and others.…”