Short thought/Long thought

Perhaps the most basic conceptual tool with which to understand a poem is thought length. What is a thought? A package of words that says one thing, this one thing consisting at times of a hierarchy of thought for example in Donne. Someone like Ashbury, on the other hand, uses dabs of thought similar (thank you Murchadha) to the impressionistic aesthetic. The reader in a sense steps back and sees, maybe enjoys, the landscape for what it is. But note that it is the connections among thoughts that create the illusion of one or many, such linkages determined by common sense as formed within a culture, a reassuring sense of literalness, of what can actually happen in the world.