Stephen Dobyns: Tone (January 1994)

Tone, Stephen Dobyns argues, is crucial to a poem’s clarity; it shapes our understanding of the writer’s intention and conveys the writer’s emotional relationship to her subject.  Dobyns looks at both poetry and prose to consider the elements of tone; how it can be shaped through word choice, vowel pitch, and meter; and the ways in which tone expands our understanding of a word’s denotative meaning to its wider connotative meanings.