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We study poems, plays, and books in English class, but strangely if you really think about it, we never actually learn how to analyze literature.

Rather, we were expected to pick it up along the way.

This, however, is unfortunately easier said than done, and as a result, we're just left with the too vague

or go deeper comments on our essays without actually knowing how to improve.

Today we're going to change that.

Here is my five -step critical literary analysis guide

that I developed over the course of my high school career

that got me an A -star in IGCSE English and A7 in IB English HL.

It honestly made my life so much easier

because it meant I could spend the minimum amount of time worrying about English exams

and spend more time on things like my university applications.

If you want to improve your English grades, watch this.

There is just one thing you need for this critical literary analysis framework, your text.

The steps will be simple, but you have to follow them exactly.

They're also all linked together with the fifth step being the most important

because that's what's actually going to make your analysis precise and deep.

In order to demonstrate these steps in real time, I'll be using one of my favorite poems, A .E.

Hausmann's Because I Loved You Better, as an example.

But this method works on both a large scale, so on a whole poem or a book, and small scale, so on individual sentences and quotes.

If you want to know how you can use this method to analyze a full book,

make sure to check it out on my free Patreon linked down below.

Step one, summarize what is actually happening.

The first step is to summarize exactly what is happening.

Don't worry about literary meaning or devices or anything like that at this stage.

Focus on just the plot, as if you're trying to give a factual report.

And this doesn't have to be very long either, you just have to make sure that you understand fully the sequence of events.

If you want to, you can write this out to practice the first few times, but afterwards you can just do it in your head.

For example, the poem that we're going to discuss, Because I'd Like To Better, tells the story of a man,

our speaker, who has just confessed to his lover that he likes them, probably more than a man should, in his words.

Basically, he's confessed that his feelings are stronger than he would like to admit to himself.

Unfortunately, the other person does not reciprocate his feelings and has asked our speaker to forget him entirely, which our speaker promises to do.

In the third stanza, the scene cuts to a tomb.

It is of our speaker.

He has died trying to keep his promise, and he asks his lover to stop by his headstone

and know that he has died trying to keep his word to him.

Step two, generalize it to a wider human experience.

Right now, what is happening in this work is limited to our speaker.

So why are we affected by it?

Why do we care about the fiction at all when they are all stories about other people?

But because they talk about the general human condition, experiences the majority of us will go through at least once in our life.

That's why we relate to fiction, to songs, to movies, and so on.

So once you've established the plotline of the work, it's time to extrapolate from it the general human condition that it is describing.

In the case of our poem, for example, it talks about three main universal experiences.

First, loving somebody, having a crush, but then having your feelings rejected by the other person.

A devastating experience for everybody.

Sometimes it hurts so much that it feels like you're dying.

Second, still loving your crush, for lack of a better term, even after the rejection.

In this poem, for instance, the speaker still feels very much in love with this you figure, even after his metaphorical death.

And third, and this is a slightly more nuanced experience, but feeling like you ought not to love someone, not being able to help it,

but also not being able to quite admit it even to yourself.

That is why perhaps the speaker says that he likes his lover, even though his actions clearly point to a deep love for this other person.

And if you know the authorial and historical context of this poem,

you'll understand why the poet and the speaker is not in a position where he can freely admit to his feelings,

and he probably also has a layer of internalized homophobia

that is stopping himself from being able to accept it even to himself.

If you're interested for more on this check out my free Patreon where I explain more on this poem as well.

Step three, name the emotions.

Next we have to describe what we're actually feeling from this work.

I know this slightly sounds like some strange group therapy session

but one key part of literary analysis is being able to explicitly describe exactly what this is making us feel.

That is also why reading makes us more emotionally mature people

because we're able to exactly understand and name what we were feeling.

So first, put an emotion to the work.

For instance, in Because I Like You Better, the big feeling here is sadness.

Step four, be a bit more specific.

As you can probably tell though, sadness alone is not nearly satisfactory enough to describe all of the nuanced feelings going on in this poem.

And there is definitely more than one feeling going on here too.

So the next step is to be more specific with the emotions and how we describe these emotions.

Let's apply this back to our case study, our poem.

We know that the speaker feels sad, but he's also feeling many smaller emotions under this sadness umbrella.

So essentially we're trying to splice this larger emotion into all of its smaller and more intricate parts.

First we have his resigned acceptance that his lover does not love him back.

Next we have the speaker's yearning and a deep love for his lover, hoping that his lover will still remember him even after his metaphorical death.

There's also a degree of self -blame.

This is why as we mentioned before he uses like instead of love

and why he says all this was because he liked his lover.

Blaming his own emotions and affection for this other person for all of the sadness and not the other person.

We can also see that the speaker is feeling ignored because his emotions, which for him was life -endingly deep,

was nothing but annoying or irksome to his lover.

That is why he uses the word irksome.

There's also the sense of not belonging because his feelings, which are natural and uncontrollable as we all know, are not accepted by society.

Hence why he says that his feelings are more than suits a man to say.

Presumably because society has historically told men that they have to be stoic and restrained in their emotions.

Step 5.

Why this?

And this is the key difference between a B and an A star answer.

Finally, we have the most important step.

This is the one step that everyone misses in their literary analysis, and why your analysis might sound vague or not deep enough.

The last step is to explain exactly why the author chose these words to express themselves,

and all of these smaller emotions that we were able to identify in our previous step.

For example, for this poem, let's say that you want to analyze the quote, throw the thought away.

A B -level answer, or a 5 -6 level answer if you're doing the IB, might say the poet uses the metaphor to say

that the speaker will throw the thought away to show how much he wanted to get rid of his thoughts.

However, that analysis is still just explaining the plot of what is happening in those words, that the speaker wants to throw away the thought.

It does not explain why Hausman chose the verbs throw or the word thought.

We have to fully explain this if we were to make it a top -level answer.

For example, we might analyze the word throw like this.

The speaker promises to throw his thought away as though it were nothing more than an irksome piece of trash

and not as devastatingly deep feelings for his lover.

100

So linking the word throwaway, which is commonly used for trash,

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and how much the speaker of the poem is feeling like his emotions are literally being treated like trash.

102

Likewise, we might analyze Hausmann's specific choice of the word thought like this.

103

Furthermore, Hausmann describes the speaker's uncontrollable feelings and emotions as a thought, as though it was a conscious thing the speaker could control,

104

and therefore just stop thinking about.

105

Pay close attention to the difference between the first answer,

106

which only explains the effects of the word and the plot of what is happening in that line, and the other two answers,

107

which specifically comments on why these words were intentionally chosen by Hausmann and the effect that those words have on the reader.

108

So this is the simple five -step guide to critical literary analysis.

109

As you can see, the steps themselves are extremely simple, but it can be tricky to execute them accurately.

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But actually being able to follow them explicitly is the difference between a vague and a deep understanding of the literary text.

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And that is why I've posted another full example analysis, this time for a whole book, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, for free on my Patreon,

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where as you know I post all of my study resources for free.

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Thank you so much for watching and bye!

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Vocabolario e note di pronuncia per questa lezione

Questa lezione di conversazione si basa sul video “how to do critical literary analysis”. Le parole che ritornano più spesso: step, feeling, speaker, emotion, poem. Questo video contiene 113 frasi e 1684 parole da ripetere con lo shadowing. Il parlato dura 7:39. Chi parla va veloce, circa 220 parole al minuto: aspettati suoni legati e ridotti. Il 87% delle parole rientra nelle 3.000 più comuni dell’inglese, quindi il lessico è facile da seguire.

Vocaboli chiave di questo video

15 parole del video che vale la pena imparare, con pronuncia e significato:

Parola	Pronuncia	Significato
poem sostantivo	/ˈpoʊ.əm/	poema, poesia
emotion sostantivo	/ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/	emozione
lover sostantivo	/ˈlʌvɚ/	amante
literary aggettivo	/ˈlɪt.(ə.)ɹə.ɹi/	letterario
analyze verbo	/ˈæn.əˌlaɪz/	analizzare
sadness sostantivo	/ˈsædnəs/	tristezza
trash sostantivo	/tɹæʃ/	spazzatura, immondizia
vague aggettivo	/veɪɡ/	vago
fiction sostantivo	/ˈfɪkʃən/	finzione
poet sostantivo	/ˈpoʊ.ət/	poeta, poetessa
crush verbo	/kɹʌʃ/	schiacciare, pigiare
explicitly avverbio		esplicitamente
confess verbo	/kənˈfɛs/	confessare
ignore verbo	/ɪɡˈnɔː/	ignorare
establish verbo	/ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/	stabilire, confermare

I phrasal verb che sentirai

Parola	Significato
check out verbo	investigare
throw away verbo	buttare via

La grammatica di questo video

Le strutture che chi parla usa di più, con le parole esatte del video:

Struttura	Nel video
Present perfect have/has + participio passato — un’azione passata che conta ancora adesso	has just confessed · has asked · you've established
Forma passiva be + participio passato — conta ciò che accade, non chi lo fa	were expected · are not accepted · being treated
Frasi relative who / which + frase — un’informazione in più su una persona o una cosa	feelings, which are · throwaway, which is

Pronuncia a cui fare attenzione

Chi parla usa 18 contrazioni e forme ridotte, come we're, you're, doesn't. Pronunciale nella forma breve, così come le senti.

I suoni “sh” e “zh”: emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, trash /tɹæʃ/, fiction /ˈfɪkʃən/, crush /kɹʌʃ/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/
Parole lunghe — attenzione all’accento: literary /ˈlɪt.(ə.)ɹə.ɹi/, universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, historically /hɪˈstɔɹɪkli/, presumably /pɹɪˈzuːməbli/

I suoni difficili per chi parla italiano:

/h/ — va soffiata, non è muta: hence /ˈhɛns/, historically /hɪˈstɔɹɪkli/, headstone /ˈhɛdstoʊn/, homophobia /ˌhoʊ.məˈfoʊ.bi.ə/
Consonante finale — senza aggiungere una vocale dopo: analyze /ˈæn.əˌlaɪz/, sadness /ˈsædnəs/, trash /tɹæʃ/, vague /veɪɡ/, poet /ˈpoʊ.ət/
/æ/ — più aperta della “e”: analyze /ˈæn.əˌlaɪz/, sadness /ˈsædnəs/, trash /tɹæʃ/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, afterwards /ˈæf.tɚ.wɚdz/

Come esercitarsi con questo video

Ascolta tutto il video una volta senza parlare e annota le parole che non conosci.
Inizia a velocità 0,75×, fai shadowing frase per frase e torna alla velocità normale quando diventa facile.
Registrati e confronta con l’originale, facendo attenzione a parole come poem, emotion, lover.

Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?

Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.

Tecnica dello shadowing: leggi la guida completa passo dopo passo →