Anti-poetry is a style of writing poems, in which poets in use some of our most exciting realities and experiences to bring to the fore the themes they prefer to. Anti-poetry is achieved in poems by use of various elements like; humor, irony, sarcasm, paradox and oxymoron, understatements and litotes and overstatements.
The following elements of antipoetry are clearly used in T.S Eliot’s “ preludes ”. Paradox is clearly seen in poem when Eliot writes “ Of faint stale smell of beer, And now a gusty shower wraps”, since both of these lines mean the contrary. Understatement is clearly visible in the poem when the poet writes “ A lonely cab-horse and stamps, And then the lighting lamps” and “The morning comes to consciousness, Of faint stale smell of beer”, because the poet intentionally leaves out a lot of information which we can clearly pick out. Irony is also illustrated in the poem and can be seen in “ On broken blinds and chimney pots” and “ You dozed, and watched the night revealing”. Both statements are ironical, since they are the opposite of what they are supposed to be, like broken blinds. Lastly, overstatement is also depicted by the poet when he writes “ You tossed a blanket from bed, You lay upon your back and waited, You dozed and watched the night revealing”. The author goes a step further to give more information on what was taking place, thus clearly creating an image of the scene.
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B.H Fairchild does an excellent job to employ and use understatement in his poem “ Brazil”, to clearly bring out his desired themes of love, sex and other social themes without being vulgar. He carefully censors the words used so as to hide the true meaning of his poem; hence, can only be deciphered by the desired audience of the poem. This element is so well used by leaving out a lot of information about what is being written about but at the same time leaving enough clues for the readers to help them decipher and understand the information that was supposed to be passed across without leaving out any theme or important information.
