The Poet By Tom Wayman Analysis

The Poem “The Poet” by Tom Wayman is a poem that takes the reader through the physical characteristics of your average poet. The entirety of the “The Poet” consists of a list of 14 descriptors that could be used to describe the typical poet. Each of the descriptive phrases seems to be negative towards the unknown poet that he is talking about. Although the poem seems quite literal, a figurative message is portrayed though text, tone, structure and the literary devices used in the poem. To start off, the specific word usage that Wayman chose to use gives off the impression that poets have their drawbacks. Not once throughout the poem does he put in a positive word for the poet. In order to look at the figurative meaning of the poem we should look at the literal meaning of the text. For instance, “Cannot recognize visual absurdities” (Wayman, line 10). This quite literally means that the poet has trouble recognizing or simply cannot recognize anything that is absurd visually. Another portion of the text that is worth analyzing is whether or not the poet is a real person or a generalization about all or most poets. All of the lines in the poem use general text and never label a specific person. What’s interesting about the text is that without the title it would be nearly impossible to distinguish whether or not the person the poem is about is a poet or not. The way the text allows the reader to find a figurative meaning to the poem is by being vague enough and