Geniusby Mark Twain Essay Analysis

Genius

        Mark Twain the creative author of the nineteen century was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and writer who got famous for his narratives. His actual name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he is well known for Mark Twain. Composed in 1866 Twain wrote a poem that goes around genius characteristics and qualities. It is curious enough to mention that this poem was written in Twain journal during his journey to South America. It seems that this poem, which was kept in Twain journal during the twenty thousand miles of voyaging, became the dearest ambition for him because he has kept a faithful records of a genius characteristics. In the first few lines he goes into defining looks, imageries, and the social life of a genius. A genius is man or a woman who possess great intelligence, skill, or artistic ability. In other words they have a special skill or they have invisible ability like imagining and writing emotional and very strange poems. Achieving fame by their own energy and their own skill, genius people possess high mental state which is rare. The author goes by describing these characteristics by using many adjectives. This one kind poem is a famous one, and the purpose of this paper is talk about it with the literacy explanations.

        The first use of imagery can be seen in the first line of the poem when the author links the image of gold stone to a genius person “genius, like gold and precious stones.” Because gold metals are rare, geniuses are people who exist in small numbers and also they are valuable or interesting people as Mark has mentioned them into his poem. A thing that is surely rare is certainly about quarters of the globe, and in my opinion that is the population of the whole geniuses. The interesting thing about Twain and his poem genius is that he measures the geniuses, and then he goes to the imagery by drawing an image into the reader as treasure or gold. This link between rarity and beauty come as precious stones.

         The next use of imagery we see in the poem is describing geniuses as people who produce hard to understand poems, and they produce poems with full range of emotions. Twain says, “Geniuses are people who dash of weird, wild, incomprehensible poem’s with astonishing facility and get booming drunk and sleep.”  To create a sense of humor in the poem Twain says that geniuses get very drunk and sleep after they create these hard to understand poems with determination, but without problems or difficulty.

A poem is a combination of literacy and grammar like using the morphosyntax system. Therefore, it could be seen that there is an alteration between the words “weird” and the word “wild” because the first two words begins with the letter w. A similar type of literacy is using the word “booming” which is onomatopoeia syntax.

        Twain employs another imagery of the genius that is singularity. In his opinion he says, “Geniuses are very singular.” There is no doubt that smart people who feel superior to others are lonely people because they enjoy a feeling that differentiates them from others. They have knowledge, and they are capable so they feel superior. Another morphosyntax system is using word function in the line, “geniuses are very singular.” The word function lies in the opposite word order so the order here will be flipped; “very singular are geniuses.”

From the below lines of the genius poem, it is quite enough to see the repetition of the phrase “if he” repeated several times at the beginning to each line:

“If he sings about the degeneracy of a world

which courts vulgar opulence

and neglects brains,

he is undoubtedly a genius.

If he is too proud to accept assistance,

and spurns it with a lordly air

at the very same time

that he knows he can't make a living to save his life,

he is most certainly a genius.

If he hangs on and sticks to poetry,.”

Another morphosyntax method here is the use of collocations with the phrase “if he hangs on .“ The words hangs on is the collocation meaning two words cannot be split and can represent only one meaning. In addition, there is a quite strong relationship between the structure above and how author wants the reader to think about the genius. The poet’s use of short phrases that focus on strong adjectives create a tone that urges the reader to measure the genius characteristics, and here is a good easy technique use of whorf hypothesis.

Because whorf hypothesis refer to the use of language as cognitive process that run deep into the readers’ brain, t he structural language that Twain used is deeply related to reality. According to Native Lange this is called, “linguistic relativity.” For example, Twain says that if a genius is too proud to accept assistance, he does not accept assistance and he is a bad social creator. According to Gustavo in response to the lines above analysis he says that Twain, “genius is so smart that he has become unintelligent, in the sense of connecting with the real world.” From this perspective, a language is a way of shaping the world through critical definition of all geniuses’ characteristics. Because whorf hypothesis also suggests that language has a big influence on the readers thinking, it must be said that Twain made up good critical argument about genius people categories. Therefore, this poem were  critical because it produces new concept about geniuses that other cultures may have different views and different perspectives because humans are conditioned by language a simple or controversial definition of one category of a human being is absolutely critical. Therefore, whorf hypothesis could be clearly distinguished through the lines above.