MAJOR POETS BIOS

who guards the gates of hell in PL?

Satan, who volunteers to scout the earth and its inhabitants, departs through the gates of Hell, which are guarded by two figures, Sin and Death

Which significant poetic work did Whitman's "LIlacs..." supposedly inspire?

Scholars believe that T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) drew from Whitman's elegy in fashioning his poem The Waste Land (1922).[citation needed] In the poem, Eliot prominently mentions lilacs and April in its opening lines, and later passages about "dry grass singing" and "where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees.

What was Matthew Arnold's professional job?

School inspector. In the new age of trains, this job took him across the country, exposing him to the nation and its people.

Some consider Arnold to be the bridge between...

Some consider Arnold to be the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism.His use of symbolic landscapes was typical of the Romantic era, while his sceptical and pessimistic perspective was typical of the Modern era.

What are some different ways that readers have allegorized Satan in PL?

Some have regarded Satan as an allegory for either the papacy, the English monarchy, or the excesses of revolutionary individualism.

What is the theme of "The Strong are Saying Nothing" by Frost?

it embodies the the will of what we used to be, and the want of what we still hope to be, in the simple, hardworking, wisdom of plowing the land without a hope and praying on the sun:

What is the poetic form of Ammons "The City Limits"

it is much more orderly than Ammons's other poems "small and easy," consisting of one long sentence broken into six open tercets, with a great deal of repetition (especially of "when you consider"), and a slow stately rhythm (six or seven stresses per line), culminating in the final iambic heptameter:

WHat is the genre of Ppope's "the rape of the lock?

mock-epic

With which movements is William Carlos Williams associated?

modernism, imagism, painting

Donne's "holy sonnets" are written in which Sonnet form?

mostly petrarchan with a little shakesperian rhythms and couplets

When was Emily Dickinson writing?

mid 19th c.

In "Immortality Ode" Wordsworth suggests children

are the best philosophers, aer connected to nature

What is the subject of Frost's "Mending Wall'?

" Mending Wall" is a narrative poem that presents an encounter between two neighbors whose property line is marked by a stone fence. Each spring, they cooperate in repairing the damage the winter weather has caused to it. Although the speaker of the poem claims to believe the wall is unnecessary, he is clearly ambivalent about its presence, since he also initiates the repair. His neighbor, on the other hand, strongly asserts his desire to maintain the wall,

What is the subject of Hecht's "A Hill"?

"A Hill" begins offhandedly in the voice of a debonair skeptic who prepares us for, and simultaneously disavows, the surprises that follow: "In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur, / I had a vision once--though you understand / It was nothing at all like Dante's, or the visions of saints, / And perhaps not a vision at all." The figure of occupatio, the age-old rhetorical trick of having things two ways at once (of course we're now prepared to think of Dante and saints, to look for correspondences, even negative ones), opens to a morning scene in Rome when, for a moment, the speaker loses consciousness of his immediate environment, and a Wordsworthian spot of time returns, him to a winter's scene, in childhood, on a hill where he heard What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed; At least I was not alone. But just after that Came the soft and papery crash Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth. And that was all, except for the cold and silence That promised to last forever, like the hill.

What is the poetic form of Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in CA"?

"A Supermarket in California" is a prose poem with an irregular format that does not adhere to traditional poetic form including stanza and rhyme scheme.

What is the poetic form of "home burial"?

"Home Burial" is structured into a combination of lengthy stanzas and individual lines of dialogue, each of which, in effect, functions as its own stanza.

What is the poetic form of WIlfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth"? What is its genre

"Anthem for Doomed Youth" employs the traditional form of a Petrarchan sonnet, but it uses the rhyme scheme of an English sonnet....THE GRENRE IS ELEGY

Which notable poems are included in "Life Studies"?

"Beyond the Alps" (part 1) 91 revere street Skunk Hour (re to Bishop's 'armadillo') Home after 3 months away Waking in the blue Man and Wife

How is the Angelic War in PL in keeping with epic convention?

Satan's rebellion follows the epic convention of large-scale warfare.

What is Moore's "Combat Cultural" about?

"Combat Cultural" honors the lessoning obtained from the sight of two ballet dancers enacting a scene of combat though dressed as twin brothers. The "moral" they point to, the ending says wryly, is the need to unify the elements of any "objective" that represents wisdom and ethical behavior. The work of art, we deduce, should unite whatever diversities it may contain. As often, the poem leads up to its objective with a seeming indirectness, beginning with references to various scenes of active creatures leaping or flying, moving to Russian dances and then to Arctic Russian sack wrestling in which the combatants are blanketed together. From seemingly casual suggestions of physical action the poem moves first to the generalized unity of action in a dance, then to the enforced unity of a sack dan

What is the subject of Whitman's Crossing Brooklyn Ferry?

"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is a poem about a man taking the Brooklyn ferry home from Manhattan at the end of a working day. It is one of Walt Whitman's best-known and best-loved poems because it so astutely and insightfully argues for Whitman's idea that all humans are united in their common experience of life.

What are two sonnets in donne's "Holy Sonnets"?

"Death be not proud" and "batter my heart..."

What is the subject of Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas"?

"Elegiac Stanzas" was inspired by a painting by Sir George Beaumont of Peele Castle - which Wordsworth lived by briefly - in a storm. Wordsworth spends the entire poem lamenting the fact that he no longer views the world in the way he once did. In other words, one result of the death of his brother comes to stand in for that death itself, and is mourned in its place.

In which poem did Lowell talk openly about his confessional style?

"Epilogue," in which Lowell reflects upon the "confessional" school of poetry with which his work was associated. In this poem he wrote, But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All's misalliance. Yet why not say what happened

What is the quatrain (full poem) for "Faith is a fine invention"?

"Faith" is a fine invention For Gentlemen who see! But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency!

What ist he poetic form of Fra Lippo Lippi?

"Fra Lippo Lippi" takes the form of blank verse—unrhymed lines, most of which fall roughly into iambic pentameter. As in much of his other poetry, Browning seeks to capture colloquial speech, and in many parts of the poem he succeeds admirably: Lippo includes outbursts, bits of songs, and other odds and ends in his rant. In his way Browning brilliantly captures the feel of a late-night, drunken encounter.

What is the subject of Browning's Fro Lippo Lippi?

"Fra Lippo Lippi," another of Browning's dramatic monologues, appeared in the 1855 collection Men and Women. Fra (Brother) Lippo Lippi was an actual Florentine monk who lived in the fifteenth century. He was a painter of some renown, and Browning most probably gained familiarity with his works during the time he spent in Italy. "Fra Lippo Lippi" introduces us to the monk as he is being interrogated by some Medici watchmen, who have caught him out at night. Because Lippo's patron is Cosimo de Medici, he has little to fear from the guards, but he has been out partying and is clearly in a mood to talk. He shares with the men the hardships of monastic life: he is forced to carry on his relationships with women in secret, and his superiors are always defeating his good spirits. But Lippo's most important statements concern the basis of art: should art be realistic and true-to-life, or should it be idealistic and didactic? Should Lippo's paintings of saints look like the Prior's mistress and the men of the neighborhood, or should they evoke an otherworldly surreality? Which kind of art best serves religious purposes? Should art even serve religion at all? Lippo's rambling speech touches on all of these issues.

What is the subject of Whitman's "Pent up Aching Rivers"

"From Pent-Up Aching Rivers" describes Whitman's thoughts regarding nature, and how the human really is, in all, just an animal in nature's course (Whitman). It also describes how sex is not just merely for pleasure, but that God created us in his image and therefore we are all perfect creations and sex is a divine activity (Oliver).

What does the neighbor say repeatedly in "Mending Wall'?

"Good fences make good neighbors."

What is the subject of Larkin's "high Windows'?

"High Windows," with its frank sexual language, traditional form, and search for transcendence in the everyday world, is often cited by critics as an example of Larkin at his stubborn and cranky best. The poem, triggered by an older speaker's envy at seeing a younger man and woman whom he speculates are sexually involved, quickly widens in scope to raise questions of personal freedom, definitions of paradise, religious transcendence, and even the act of writing poetry itself. Driven by an undercurrent of sexual jealousy bordering on rage, the poem moves quickly from image to image, perhaps to reflect the speaker's obsessive train of thought. Some critics have said that "High Windows" may look, at first glance, like a poem about sex, but that it turns into a commentary on religion. By the end of the poem, Larkin's relentless questioning leads him to a surprising and almost inarticulate revelation

What is the subject of Frost's "Home Burial"?

"Home Burial" is a deeply emotional blank-verse poem that is filled with grief and loss. Structured as a metered but unrhymed narrative, complete with extensive dialogue, the poem captures a moment in a marriage as husband and wife attempt to cope with the loss of a child. The timing of the death referred to is not specified; only the presence of the child's grave is noted. Throughout the poem, Frost captures the anger, despair, and frustration the couple feel in response to their child's death. The man and woman depicted alternately turn to one another and turn on the other, shouting and crying. Both express feelings of being misunderstood, and the wife, Amy, attempts several times during the course of the argument to leave the house. Her husband repeatedly begs her not to go, promising, at the end of the poem that if she leaves he will follow her and bring her home by force if necessary. The weight of the emotion in the poem propels the verse forward. In detailing the couple's argument, Frost conveys the raw edges of the sorrow and rage the husband and wife experience.

Which literary movment in the 50s did Ginsberg have to contend with?

"Howl" came out during a potentially hostile literary environment, less welcoming to non-traditional, free verse poetry; there was a renewed focus on form and structure among academic poets and critics partly inspired by New Criticism. Consequently, Ginsberg often had to defend his choice to employ long, free verse lines, often citing Whitman's free verse used in Leaves of Grass as a precursor.[citation needed] Ginsberg claimed Whitman's long line was a dynamic technique few other poets had ventured to develop further, and Whitman is also often compared to Ginsberg because their poetry sexualized aspects of the male form

which line from howl among others prompted censorship trial?

"Howl" contains many references to illicit drugs and sexual practices, both heterosexual and homosexual. On the basis of one line in particular who let themselves be ****ed ********** by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy Customs officials seized 520 copies of the poem on March 25, 1957, being imported from the printer in London.

Why did Ginsberg add more poems to Howl in the publication?

"Howl" was too short to make an entire book, so Ferlinghetti requested some other poems. Thus the final collection contained several other poems written at that time; with these poems, Ginsberg continued the experimentation with long lines and a fixed base he'd discovered with the composition of "Howl" and these poems have likewise become some of Ginsberg's most famous: "America", "Sunflower Sutra," "A Supermarket in California", etc.

What did WC Williams think of Eliot and the Wasteland?

"I felt at once that The Waste Land had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit." And although he respected the work of Eliot, Williams became openly critical of Eliot's highly intellectual style with its frequent use of foreign languages and allusions to classical and European literature.[8] Instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English.[9]

Browning responded to Wordsworth's praise of Shakespeare's sonnets by saying...

"If so, the less Shakespeare he."

What happens in "In the Waiting Room"?

"In the Waiting Room" begins with the speaker, Elizabeth, sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's office on a dark winter afternoon in Massachusetts. While she waits for her aunt, who is seeing the dentist, Elizabeth looks around and sees that the room is filled with adults. To keep herself occupied, she reads a copy of National Geographic magazine. She looks at pictures of volcanoes, famous explorers, and people very different from herself (including naked black women), and is scared by what she reads and sees. Suddenly, she hears a cry of pain from her aunt in the dentist's office, and says that she realizes that "it was me" - that the cry was coming from her aunt, but also from herself. She imagines that she and her aunt are the same person, and that they are falling. In an attempt to calm down, Elizabeth says to herself that she is just about to turn seven years old. She compares herself to the adults in the waiting room, and wonders if she is one of "them." She seems to realize that she is, and looking around, says that "nothing / stranger could ever happen." Elizabeth then questions her basic humanity, and asks about the similarities between herself and others. What are the similarities between herself and her aunt? Between herself and the naked women in the magazine? How did she get where she is? What kind of connections does she have with the rest of the world? Elizabeth is overwhelmed. The waiting room is bright and hot, and she feels like she's sliding beneath a black wave. Finally, she snaps out of it. She remembers that World War I is still going on, that she's still in Massachusetts, and that it's still a cold and slushy night in February, 1918.

How is Mont Blanc a response to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey?

"Mont Blanc" is a 144-line natural ode divided into five stanzas and written in irregular rhyme.[12] It serves as Shelley's response to William Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and as a "defiant reaction" against the "religious certainties" of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Hymn before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni",[13] which "credits God for the sublime wonders of the landscape".[1] When the narrator of the poem looks upon Mont Blanc, he is unable to agree with Wordsworth that nature is benevolent and gentle. Instead, the narrator contends that nature is a powerful force

Which poem is included in Williams collection "Pictures from Brueghel"?

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is an ecphrastic poem by the 20th-century American poet William Carlos Williams that was written in response to Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally attributed to Pieter Bruegel. This subject—and Bruegel's painting—are also treated by another Modernist poet, W. H. Auden, in "Musée des Beaux Arts".

Why was James Wright's later work celebrated more than his ealrier, formally restricted verese?

"Long before [he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize], Wright had been acknowledged by a generation of poets as the artisan of a new language for poetry: A style of pastoral surrealism, built around strong images and a simple spoken rhetoric. Wright's art lay not in complex grammar, but in a stark structure of perceptions which became their own statement."

how does Lycidas anticipate the themes of PL?

"Lycidas" anticipates a recurrent theme in Milton's major poems: the justification of God's ways to humankind.

what is the meter/form of "my last duchess"?

"My Last Duchess" comprises rhyming pentameter lines. The lines do not employ end-stops; rather, they use enjambment—gthat is, sentences and other grammatical units do not necessarily conclude at the end of lines. Consequently, the rhymes do not create a sense of closure when they come, but rather remain a subtle driving force behind the Duke's compulsive revelations. The Duke is quite a performer: he mimics others' voices, creates hypothetical situations, and uses the force of his personality to make horrifying information seem merely colorful. Indeed, the poem provides a classic example of a dramatic monologue: the speaker is clearly distinct from the poet; an audience is suggested but never appears in the poem; and the revelation of the Duke's character is the poem's primary aim.

What is the subject of "Once by the Pacific" by Frost?

"Once by the Pacific" is also oriented toward the west, exploring the violent and almost apocalyptic way the waves of the Pacific crash against the seaside cliffs (the coastal tides of the Atlantic are much calmer).

How did Porphyrias lover utilize Romanticism and address sex?

"Porphyria's Lover" opens with a scene taken straight from the Romantic poetry of the earlier nineteenth century. While a storm rages outdoors, giving a demonstration of nature at its most sublime, the speaker sits in a cozy cottage. This is the picture of rural simplicity—a cottage by a lake, a rosy-cheeked girl, a roaring fire. However, once Porphyria begins to take off her wet clothing, the poem leaps into the modern world. She bares her shoulder to her lover and begins to caress him; this is a level of overt sexuality that has not been seen in poetry since the Renaissance. We then learn that Porphyria is defying her family and friends to be with the speaker; the scene is now not just sexual, but transgressively so. Illicit sex out of wedlock presented a major concern for Victorian society; the famous Victorian "prudery" constituted only a backlash to what was in fact a popular obsession with the theme: the newspapers of the day reveled in stories about prostitutes and unwed mothers. Here, however, in "Porphyria's Lover," sex appears as something natural, acceptable, almost wholesome: Porphyria's girlishness and affection take prominence over any hints of immorality.

What is the subject of Brownings Porphyrias Lover?

"Porphyria's Lover," which first appeared in 1836, is one of the earliest and most shocking of Browning's dramatic monologues. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover, a blooming young woman named Porphyria, comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and bring cheer to the cottage. She embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. Instead, he says, she begins to tell him how she has momentarily overcome societal strictures to be with him. He realizes that she "worship[s]" him at this instant. Realizing that she will eventually give in to society's pressures, and wanting to preserve the moment, he wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him.

what is the form of "porophyrias lover"?

"Porphyria's Lover," while natural in its language, does not display the colloquialisms or dialectical markers of some of Browning's later poems. Moreover, while the cadence of the poem mimics natural speech, it actually takes the form of highly patterned verse, rhyming ABABB. The intensity and asymmetry of the pattern suggests the madness concealed within the speaker's reasoned self-presentation. This poem is a dramatic monologue—a fictional speech presented as the musings of a speaker who is separate from the poet. Like most of Browning's other dramatic monologues, this one captures a moment after a main event or action. Porphyria already lies dead when the speaker begins. Just as the nameless speaker seeks to stop time by killing her, so too does this kind of poem seek to freeze the consciousness of an instant.

What is the gist of Penn Warren's argument in Pure and IMpure poetry?

"Pure and Impure Poetry" advocates in favor of an examination of concerns regarding conventional approaches to poetry. In this consideration of poetry, Warren asserts that the impure poem better reflects the complex conditions usually explored in examples of accomplished poetry. This perspective counters Edgar Allan Poe's original notion of pure poetry, outlined in his essay titled "The Poetic Principle." Poe believed that poetry ought to be compact and include only elevated language, and he suggested that long poems or poetry that does not limit itself to elegant language of lyrical intensity would be better presented in pieces of prose. Warren suggests the purity of poetry can be attained through poetic tactics that might be regarded as impure or appear contradictory to the notion of pure poetry. At the heart of Warren's thesis, he states his case: "Poetry wants to be pure, but poems do not. At least, most of them do not want to be pure. The poems want to give us poetry, which is pure, and the elements of a poem, in so far as it is a good poem, will work together toward that end, but many of the elements, taken in themselves, may actually seem to contradict that end, or be neutral toward the achieving of that end. Are we then to conclude that neutral or recalcitrant elements are simply an index of human frailty, and that in a perfect world there would be no dross in poems, which would, then, be perfectly pure? No, it does not seem to be merely the fault of our world, for the poems include, deliberately, more of the so-called dross than would appear necessary. They are not even as pure as they might be in this imperfect world. They mar themselves with cacophonies, clichés, sterile technical terms, headwork and argument, self-contradictions, cleverness, irony, realism—all things which call us back to the world of prose and imperfection."

What is the subject of Auden's Sept. 1, 1939?

"September 1, 1939" is a poem by W. H. Auden written on the occasion of the outbreak of World War II. The poem deliberately echoes the stanza form of W. B. Yeats's "Easter, 1916", another poem about an important historical event; like Yeats' poem, Auden's moves from a description of historical failures and frustrations to a possible transformation in the present or future. Until the two final stanzas, the poem briefly describes the social and personal pathology that has brought about the outbreak of war: first the historical development of Germany "from Luther until now", next the internal conflicts in every individual person that correspond to the external conflicts of the war. Much of the language and content of the poem echoes that of C. G. Jung's Psychology and Religion (1938). The final two stanzas shift radically in tone and content, turning to the truth that the poet can tell, "We must love one another or die," and to the presence in the world of "the Just" who exchange messages of hope. The poem ends with the hope that the poet, like "the Just", can "show an affirming flame" in the midst of the disaster.

Four Shakespeare sonnets that I can focus attention on are:

"Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?", "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds," "Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments," and "My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun"

What is the content and structure of whitman's starting from pamautok?

"Starting from Paumanok" is a poem mapping a journey, the emblematic journey enacted in the whole of Leaves of Grass: an archetypal journey of life. As "Starting from Paumanok" progresses, the poet turns more and more, as in Section 9, to the technique of direct address—talking intimately to You: You are there inside the book, by the poet's side—just the two of you ("us two only"), filling the role of the poet's "camerado," holding his hand ("hand in hand"), and becoming his "desirer and lover."

What is the subject of Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra"?

"Sunflower Sutra" is an account of a sojourn with Jack Kerouac in a railroad yard, the discovery of a sunflower covered in dirt and soot from the railroad yard, and the subsequent revelation that this is a metaphor for all humanity: "we are not our skin of grime." This relates to his vision/auditory hallucination of poet William Blake reading "Ah, Sunflower": "Blake, my visions." (See also line in Howl: "Blake-light tragedies" and references in other poems). The theme of the poem is consistent with Ginsberg's revelation in his original vision of Blake: the revelation that all of humanity was interconnected. (See also the line in "Footnote to Howl": "The world is holy!"). The structure of this poem relates to "Howl" both in its use of the long line and its repetition of the "eyeball kick"

What is the form and subject of Merrill's "A Broken Home"?

"The Broken Home" is a sequence of seven sonnets that appeared in Merrill's 1966 volume Nights and Days. The sonnets are connected by imagery, themes and autobiography, concerning, as they do, two central issues: the trauma of Merrill's parents' divorce and the poet's own incomplete or "broken" childless home. The sonnets travel far, both temporally and spatially, through actual details of the poet's life as well as through the poet's worldly perceptions and sedulously analyzed inner life. ...Formally, the poem displays all of Merrill's dexterity and inventiveness, consisting of seven sonnet variations: unrhymed, rhymed pentameters, rhymed free verse, rhymed tetrameters, rhymed free verse, slant rhymes, and concluding with a perfect Petrarchian sestet. Like the broken home itself, the sonnets are broken up into different metrical and rhyming patterns (each of the rhyming sonnets avails itself of a different rhyme scheme). Merrill also engages in richly textured wordplay; throughout the poem the reader encounters puns, homophones and double-entendres, sometimes wry, often humorous, at times surprising or unsettling and, as in the final image of the seventh sonnet, confidently beautiful. Ultimately the reader sees that the poem is not about the child as a pawn in the parents' dysfunction, but what the poet makes of his child-self. The sequence and tone of the sonnets in the poem itself is mimetic of a child coming to terms as an adult with the separate experience and understanding of parents as people.

Why did Cleanth Brooks concern himself with Donne's "The Canonization"?

"The Canonization" figures prominently in critic Cleanth Brooks's arguments for the paradox as integral to poetry, a central tenet of New Criticism. In his collection of critical essays, The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks writes that a poet "must work by contradiction and qualification," and that paradox "is an extension of the normal language of poetry, not a perversion of it"

What ist he poetic form of Tennysons' Kraken"?

"The Kraken" as one of Tennyson's few good sonnets, even though it has fifteen lines. In terms of rhyme scheme, the ABABCDDCEFEAAFE pattern suggests that it is modelled on the Petrarchan (Italian) rather than the Shakespearean (English) form of three quatrains and a concluding couplet

What is the poetic form of Bishop's "The Map"?

"The Map" is a descriptive poem divided into three stanzas. The first and last are eight-line stanzas with repeated Petrarchan rhyme schemes (abbacddc), while the longer central stanza is written in free verse.

How did Stevens conceptualize imagination?

"The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,"[38] he wrote. Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens would write in "The Idea of Order at Key West," Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.[39] In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." [40] But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible. Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible."[41] Likewise, were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape. As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", "The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."[42] The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.

how does the speaker of Lycidas extending his feeligns about King's death to the whole of human experience

"The shepherd-poet reflects... that thoughts of how Lycidas might have been saved are futile... turning from lamenting Lycidas's death to lamenting the futility of all human labor."

Why has Wilbur's work sometimes not been as popular as his contemporaries?

"The typical ghastly poem of the fifties was a Wilbur poem not written by Wilbur," wrote Donald Hall in 1961, "a poem with tired wit and obvious comparisons and nothing to keep the mind or the ear occupied." Hall knowingly added: "It wasn't Wilbur's fault, though I expect he will be asked to suffer for it." When the Confessional poets of the 1960s and '70s came into vogue, Wilbur's reputation began to suffer. "Public taste," Stephen Metcalf wrote in the New York Times, "courtesy of 'Howl' and Lowell's 'Life Studies' and the phenomenon known as Sylvia Plath—edged away from Wilbur, and from his dedication to urbanity and metrical poise. Wilbur, it used to be said, coasted along a little too smoothly; he wrote the poem bien fait." However, Wilbur's work has always enjoyed critical acclaim, a

Wordsworth said that in his sonnets Shakespeare...____

"unlocked his heart." -- despite this, we don't know about the nature of the authorial "I" in these poems or how autobiographical they are

How does Milton describe Lycidas (King) in contrast to other clergy?

"Through allegory, the speaker accuses God of unjustly punishing the young, selfless King, whose premature death ended a career that would have unfolded in stark contrast to the majority of the ministers and bishops of the Church of England, whom the speaker condemns as depraved, materialistic, and selfish.

Famous quotes from pope's essay on criticism?

"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance" (362-363), meaning poets are made, not born. A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring. To err is human, to forgive divine.

How does the poetic form support the subject matter of Lowell's "Waking in the Blue"?

"Waking in the Blue"; the irregular use of end rhyme and varying line lengths work perfectly with the subject: a speaker confined in an expensive Boston mental institution.

what is frost's great ability when it comes to writing about nature?

"ability to portray the local truth in nature," He stays as clear of religion and mysticism as he does of politics. What he finds in nature is sensuous pleasure; he is also sensitive to the earth's fertility and to man's relationship to the soil. To critic M. L. Rosenthal, Frost's pastoral quality, his "lyrical and realistic repossession of the rural and 'natural,'" is the staple of his reputation.

What does L'Allegro mean?

"happy man" (Il Penseroso means "sad man")

how does donne use euphemisms for sex in "the flea"?

"pamper'd swells" evokes the idea of an erection.

What poetic genre is Hecht's "A Hill"?

'A Hill'- a 'dramatic' monologue that is meant to be deep- in a Browningian sort of way.

What was Larkin's day to day professio?

, Larkin became a librarian. It was during the thirty years he worked with distinction as university librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull that he produced the greater part of his published work

What inspired the "Man-moth"?

, the poem was inspired by a typo in a news article in the New York Times, in which the word manmoth was used instead of the correct term: mammoth.

submerged sonnet?

-A submerged sonnet is tucked into a longer poetic work; see lines 235-48 of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

Spencerian sonnet?

-The Spenserian sonnet is a 14-line poem developed by Edmund Spenser in his Amoretti, that varies the English form by interlocking the three quatrains (ABAB BCBC CDCD EE).

caudate sonnet?

-The caudate sonnet, which adds codas or tails to the 14-line poem. See Gerard Manley Hopkins's "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire."

curtal sonnet?

-The curtal sonnet, a shortened version devised by Gerard Manley Hopkins that maintains the proportions of the Italian form, substituting two six-stress tercets for two quatrains in the octave (rhyming ABC ABC), and four and a half lines for the sestet (rhyming DEBDE), also six-stress except for the final three-stress line. See his poem "Pied Beauty."

what is the subject of dh lawrences' "the snake"?

.H. Lawrence's Snake is an interesting poem. Lawrence paints a vivid picture of the snake at the trough, yet it seems as if it is a metaphor. Lawrence seems to be mocking society through his use of the snake. The snake represents the upper class while he, D.H. Lawrence, is just a middle class worker. In Stanza's 1 and 2, Lawrence begins by describing that the snake arrived at the trough first and that he therefore must await his turn. There is no hint that the man fears the snake, but instead there seems to be a respect that provides the man with the patience to wait his turn. As the poem continues, Lawrence paints a picture of the snake. In stanze 5 he states that the snake came from "the burning bowls of the earth." This could be an allusion to hell or even a reflection by man that he does not actually respect the social rankings and only does so for lack of choice. In stanza's 6 and 7 he struggles with his conscience and the idea of killing the snake. This could parallel to social rankings because the under classes may always be thinking of a way to "kill" the upper class; revolts, wars, uprisings etc. Since the man does not kill the snake, we see that he has succumbs to the social conventions and is in fact going to wait his turn as any peasant would in society. When Lawrence says "Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? /Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? /Was it humility, to feel so honoured?/I felt so honoured" it parallels to society. The rich people, being the snake, would drink from the trough first feeling no remorse for the middle class man waiting in their presence. The middle class person, feeling as if he should shew the rich person from their trough, instead feels honored to have such nobility around, and as Lawrence later states, is actually afraid to fight back. D.H. Lawrence is combating social structure through the symbolic use of a snake. Eventually the man acknowledges that is is indeed fear of the snake, not respect, that has him waiting. He hurls a log at the snake. The snake, shocked and angry, leaves the trough; but we end up feeling remorse for the snake. Having done nothing wrong, the snake seems like a kind animal, when in reality we know it is not. This could reflect society because people were aware that the upper classes were sneaky like snakes but instead chose to believe that they did not fear them but instead respected them. The man regrets throwing the log as he feels like he has missed out on a memory with a majestic creature. Most people would not think of a snakes as a majestic creature, but D.H. Lawrence makes it clear in this poem that he does. Many people would take a snake to symbolize sin and evil as seen in the Bible and the Garden of Eden, but actually Lawrence is using it in a majestic and noble light. Perhaps this is the case because he is paralleling society and the nobility can be sneaky and sinful yet still seem majestic, just like the snake. "And I have some to expiate, a pettiness" is the last and most powerful line of the poem. Expiate is such a strong word meaning repent or atone. The man wants to atone for his sin. He regrets throwing the log at the snake as he realized that the snake was not going to harm him. He wants to repent his pettiness and atone for the sin he has committed. The use of the word expiate and the talk of atoning for sins leads one to understand that religion is indeed a theme in this poem. The use of the snake as a symbol and the battle between good and evil in this poem are all reasons that religion can be seen as an undertone. The battle of good vs. evil is ongoing in the Bible and can be seen here in this poem, if not only just in the symbol of the snake itself but also in the interaction between the snake and the man being that the man believes he is good vs. the snake whom he believes to be evil.

how does eve reveal her hierarchical relationship with adam through her diction?

Appellations that she applies to him, such as "Author" and "Disposer," reaffirm the relationship, along with her other assessments: "God is thy law, thou mine."

What form is the Scholar Gypsy?

10 line stanzas borrowed from Keats

What is the form of Thyrsis?

10 line stanzas like The Scholar Gypsy, but The rhyme scheme in each stanza is set and consistent, as is the constant use of iambic pentameter. However, the sixth line of every stanza is written in iambic trimeter instead. This interruption of something unusual represents the suddenness of Clough's death, and how it immediately and unexpectedly impacted Arnold's life. And yet the regularity of this unique form only reminds us that no matter how unexpected things might become, we might always find constancy in those most important relationships.

What is the poetic structure of Herrick's "Corinna's GOing a maying"

14 line stanzs, couplets throughout, lines of varying length

How many sonnets did Shakespeare write?

154

When was PL published?

1667 (10 books), then 1674 (12 books and minor revisions)

Which century was Wyatt writing in?

16th c.

Auden's career can be divided into two parts at what year?

1939, before that in England, then after that a US citizen

When was John Milton writing?

17th c.

How many sonnets are in Donne's "Holy Sonnets"?

19

When was the wasteland published and what are some its most famous lines?

1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust",

According to Bloom, what political purposes have elegies often served?

Literary scholar Harold Bloom writes that "Elegies often have been used for political purposes, as a means of healing the nation".[

Lycidas is almost ______ lines long

200

How many pulitzer prizes did frost win?

4

What is the subject matter of Wyatt's "Whoso List..."

A deer is pursued but ultimately is owned by the royal landowner

dirge?

A brief hymn or song of lamentation and grief; it was typically composed to be performed at a funeral. In lyric poetry, a dirge tends to be shorter and less meditative than an elegy. See Christina Rossetti's "A Dirge" and Sir Philip Sidney's "Ring Out Your Bells."

eclogue?

A brief, dramatic pastoral poem, set in an idyllic rural place but discussing urban, legal, political, or social issues. Bucolics and idylls, like eclogues, are pastoral poems, but in nondramatic form. See Edmund Spenser's "Shepheardes Calendar: April," Andrew Marvell's "Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn," and John Crowe Ransom's "Eclogue."

modernism?

A broadly defined multinational cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century and reached its most radical peak on the eve of World War I. It grew out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath. For artists and writers, the Modernist project was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors. It evolved from the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason. Modernist writers broke with Romantic pieties and clichés (such as the notion of the Sublime) and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence. In the early 20th century, novelists such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf (and, later, Joseph Conrad) experimented with shifts in time and narrative points of view. While living in Paris before the war, Gertrude Stein explored the possibilities of creating literary works that broke with conventional syntactical and referential practices. Ezra Pound vowed to "make it new" and "break the pentameter," while T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in the shadow of World War I. Shortly after The Waste Land was published in 1922, it became the archetypical Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed registers and languages. Other poets most often associated with Modernism include H.D., W.H. Auden, Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. Modernism also generated many smaller movements; see also Acmeism, Dada, Free verse, Futurism, Imagism, Objectivism, Postmodernism, and Surrealism. Browse more Modern poets.

epic similie?

A detailed, often complex poetic comparison (see simile) that unfolds over the course of several lines. It is also known as a Homeric simile, because the Greek poet Homer is thought to have originated the device in the epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey. In the following passage from Book I of Paradise Lost, John Milton compares Lucifer's massive army to scattered autumn leaves:

Cockney school of poets?

A dismissive name for London-based Romantic poets such as John Keats, Leigh Hunt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The term was first used in a scathing review in Blackwood's Magazine in October 1817, in which the anonymous reviewer mocked the poets' lack of pedigree and sophistication.

what about the interrelation of love and war (epic convention) in pL?

A fifth convention is the interrelation of love and war. The love of Adam and Eve before and after their expulsion from Eden is central to the epic, but the self-sacrifice of the Son on behalf of fallen humankind is the most magnanimous example of love. Warfare in Paradise Lost is sensational when the good and evil angels clash and as the Son expels Satan and his followers from Heaven; but the epic develops another form of struggle, humankind's experience of temptation after Satan conceals his malice behind external friendliness and solicitude.

ode?

A formal, often ceremonious lyric poem that addresses and often celebrates a person, place, thing, or idea. Its stanza forms vary. The Greek or Pindaric (Pindar, ca. 552-442 B.C.E.) ode was a public poem, usually set to music, that celebrated athletic victories. (See Stephen Burt's article "And the Winner Is . . . Pindar!") English odes written in the Pindaric tradition include Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode" and William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflections of Early Childhood." Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), were written in quatrains in a more philosophical, contemplative manner; see Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland." The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11-syllable lines, and a final five-syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict meter. See Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Sapphics." The odes of the English Romantic poets vary in stanza form. They often address an intense emotion at the onset of a personal crisis (see Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode,") or celebrate an object or image that leads to revelation (see John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode to a Nightingale," and "To Autumn").

fugitive poets?

A group of Southern poets associated with the Fugitive, a literary magazine produced in the early 1920s. Its prominent ranks included Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren. In general, their poetry was formal, featuring traditional prosody and concrete imagery frequently drawn from the rural Southern experience. These poet-critics' principles gave rise to the method of close reading and textual analysis known as New Criticism. Browse more Fugitive poets.

What is the subject of "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things"

A house that has burned down; birds and nature go on without a care becuase they are "versed in country things" - this is the way things go

For what is Wyatt sometimes criticized?

A lack of metrical consistency

Trochee?

A metrical foot consisting of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented syllable. Examples of trochaic words include "garden" and "highway." William Blake opens "The Tyger" with a predominantly trochaic line: "Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright." Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" is mainly trochaic.

spondee?

A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables. An example of a spondaic word is "hog-wild." Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty" is heavily spondaic: With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

dada?

A movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. The founders of this movement struck upon this essentially nonsense word to embody a simultaneously playful and nihilistic spirit alive among European visual artists and writers during and immediately after World War I. They salvaged a sense of freedom from the cultural and moral instability that followed the war, and embraced both "everything and nothing" in their desire to "sweep, sweep clean," as Tristan Tzara wrote in his Dadaist Manifesto in 1920. In visual arts, this enterprise took the form of collage and juxtaposition of unrelated objects, as in the work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. T.S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's allusive, often syntactically and imagistically fractured poems of this era reflect a Dadaist influence. Dadaism gave rise to surrealism.

ubi sunt?

A number of medieval European poems begin with this Latin phrase meaning "Where are they?" By posing a series of questions about the fate of the strong, beautiful, or virtuous, these poems meditate on the transitory nature of life and the inevitability of death. The phrase can now refer to any poetry that treats these themes. One of the most famous ubi sunt poems is "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" ("Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past") by medieval French poet François Villon, with its refrain "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" See also Thomas Nashe's "Adieu, Farewell, Earth's Bliss," Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella CII: 'Where be the roses gone, which sweetened so our eyes?'", and "Where Are the Waters of Childhood?" by Mark Strand.

What formal innovation did Milton offer especially in Lycidas?

A paragraphing of stanzas that mixes blank verse and rhymed verse.

Common measure?

A quatrain that rhymes ABAB and alternates four-stress and three-stress iambic lines. It is the meter of the hymn and the ballad. Many of Emily Dickinson's poems are written in common measure, including [It was not death, for I stood up]. See also Robert Hayden's "The Ballad of Nat Turner" and Elinor Wylie's "A Crowded Trolley Car." See also Poulter's measure and fourteener. Browse more common measure poems.

What is the subject of Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper"?

A reaper's song are incomprehensible to the speaker, so his attention is free to focus on the tone, expressive beauty, and the blissful mood it creates in him. The poem functions to 'praise the beauty of music and its fluid expressive beauty, the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" that Wordsworth identified at the heart of poetry.'[1] The poet orders or requests his listeners to behold a young maiden reaping and singing to herself. The poet says that anyone passing by should either stop or gently pass as not to disturb her

Rhyme royal and examples?

A stanza of seven 10-syllable lines, rhyming ABABBCC, popularized by Geoffrey Chaucer and termed "royal" because his imitator, James I of Scotland, employed it in his own verse. In addition to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, see Sir Thomas Wyatt's "They flee from me" and William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence."

transcendentlaism?

A strain of Romanticism that took root among writers in mid-19th-century New England. Ralph Waldo Emerson laid out its principles in his 1836 manifesto Nature, in which he asserted that the natural and material world exists to reveal universal meaning to the individual soul via one's subjective experiences. He promoted the poet's role as seer, a "transparent eyeball" that received insight intuitively through his or her perception of nature. Henry David Thoreau was an early disciple of Emerson's philosophy.

What happens to Adam and Eve at the end of PL?

Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden, and Michael says that Adam may find "a paradise within thee, happier far".

negative capabilty?

A theory of John Keats, who suggested in one of his famous letters that a great thinker is "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." A poet, then, has the power to bury self-consciousness, dwell in a state of openness to all experience, and identify with the object contemplated. See Keats's "To Autumn." The inspirational power of beauty, according to Keats, is more important than the quest for objective fact; as he writes in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

what about intrusion of supernatural beings (epic convention) in PL?

A third convention is intrusion by supernatural beings, action that takes place throughout the epic—when, for example, the godhead sends Raphael to forewarn Adam and Eve of the dangers of Satan or when the Son descends to Eden as the judge of humankind after the fall.

How does Roethke's "elegy for jane" depart from traditional elegiac conventins/

A traditional elegy is written in elegiac stanzas, often in lines of iambic pentameter that have a rhyme scheme of ABAB. (Each letter represents the end sound of the line, so line 1 would rhyme with line 3, line 2 with line 4.) Not this one. And elegies typically end with a feeling of consolation; but we don't get that feeling from the end of "Elegy for Jane." Roethke doesn't follow these traditional elements, but that doesn't make "Elegy for Jane" any less an elegy.

What did Pound say about composing "n a station at the metro"?

A typical example is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (1913), inspired by an experience on the Paris Underground, about which he wrote, "I got out of a train at, I think, La Concorde, and in the jostle I saw a beautiful face, and then, turning suddenly, another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful face. All that day I tried to find words for what this made me feel." He worked on the poem for a year, reducing it to its essence in the style of a Japanese haiku.[46]

What are some conventions of pastoral elegy?

A typical pastoral elegy contains several features, including "a procession of mourners, the decoration of a hearse or grave, a list of flowers, the changing of the seasons, and the association of the dead person with a star or other permanent natural object."

What is a villanelle?

A villanelle (also known as villanesque) is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.

Why does Adam sin too in PL?

Adam, learning that Eve has sinned, knowingly commits the same sin. He declares to Eve that since she was made from his flesh, they are bound to one another ‒ if she dies, he must also die.

How is Adam both a heroic figure and an even bigger sinner than Eve?

Adam, learning that Eve has sinned, knowingly commits the same sin. In this manner, Milton portrays Adam as a heroic figure, but also as a greater sinner than Eve, as he is aware that what he is doing is wrong.

How is Ammons in the Romantic trdaition?

A. R. Ammons is a representative nature poet in the sense that Walt Whitman describes in his 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, a poet whose art "finds no sphere worthy of itself and makes one." Ammons revives the romantic correspondence between nature and human perception through a lifelong study of the intricacies of observable phenomena and the networks of energy and material that make up the natural world. His love of the particular thing in nature is enriched by his exploration of transient forms. His knowledge of science moves from the depths of biology to the heights of astronomy, and his mind is drawn to the abstract philosophical implications of physical things and processes. Infused with the actions and energies of the natural world that exist beyond the boundaries of the self, Ammons's post-Romantic poetics illuminates the place of poetry in a postmodern world.

What is the subject of Ammon's "Corson's Inlet"?

A.R. Ammons is a master when it comes to making sense out of the senseless in "Corson's Inlet." In his poem he narrates his walk along Corson's Inlet and describes everything he sees along the way. He begins by describing that he is escaping the rigid walls of our human world into nature when he says, "I was released from forms,/from the perpendiculars/straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds/of thought" (13-16). This is probably how most of us feel when we are constrained to the rigid thought processes of close reading poetry. As the speaker walks further into nature he discovers that the forms he could once understand and control are no longer susceptible to his grasp of intellectual understanding. He says, "but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events/I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting beyond account:" (30-32). This seems to be his general point in this poem. Ammons has no grasp of the occurrences of nature, which are transitively the occurrences of the universe. Ammons implies he is talking about the universe when he capitalizes the "O" in "overall. Things change and the speaker must go with the flow in the way that the dune's sand do when presented with the force of wind. The speaker summarizes his walk at the end of the poem and summarizes the poem itself in the last few lines, "I will try/to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening/ scope, but enjoying the freedom that/Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,/ that I have perceived nothing completely,/that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk" (123-128).

What is the poetic form of Wilbur's "Advice to a Prophet"?

ABBA quatrains

What have critics celebrated about R. Wilbur's work?

About Wilbur's poems, one reviewer for The Washington Post said, "Throughout his career Wilbur has shown, within the compass of his classicism, enviable variety. His poems describe fountains and fire trucks, grasshoppers and toads, European cities and country pleasures. All of them are easy to read, while being suffused with an astonishing verbal music and a compacted thoughtfulness that invite sustained reflection."

What inspired Hughes poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"?

According to Hughes, the poem was written while he was 17 and on a train crossing the Mississippi River on the way to visit his father in Mexico in 1920

When was Life Studies published, and what was its significance?

After the publication of his 1959 book Life Studies, which won the 1960 National Book Award and "featured a new emphasis on intense, uninhibited discussion of personal, family, and psychological struggles," he was considered an important part of the confessional poetry movement.[4][5] However, much of Lowell's work, which often combined the public with the personal, did not conform to a typical "confessional poetry" model. Instead, Lowell worked in a number of distinctive stylistic modes and forms over the course of his career.[5]

With which poet did Lowell take up residence after leaving Harvard?

After two years at Harvard, Lowell was unhappy,[19] and his psychiatrist, Merrill Moore, who was also a poet, suggested that Lowell take a leave of absence from Harvard to get away from his parents and to study with Moore's friend, the poet-professor Allen Tate who was then living in Nashville and teaching at Vanderbilt.[8] Lowell traveled to Nashville with Moore who took Lowell to Tate's house. Lowell asked Tate if he could live with him and his wife, and Tate joked that if Lowell wanted to, Lowell could pitch a tent on Tate's lawn; then Lowell went to Sears, Roebuck to purchase a tent that he set up on Tate's lawn and lived in for two months.[20][21] Lowell called the act "a terrible piece of youthful callousness".[21]

Why was Wyatt imprisoned?

Alleged adultery with Anne Boleyn

Why did Bishop criticize Lowell?

Although generally supportive of the "confessional" style of her friend, Robert Lowell, she drew the line at his highly controversial book The Dolphin (1973), in which he used and altered private letters from his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick (whom he'd recently divorced after 23 years of marriage), as material for his poems. In a letter to Lowell, dated March 21, 1972, Bishop strongly urged him against publishing the book, writing, "One can use one's life as material [for poems]—one does anyway—but these letters—aren't you violating a trust? IF you were given permission—IF you hadn't changed them ... etc. But art just isn't worth that much."[29]

What is the poetic form of Donne's "The Good Morrow"?

Although referred to as a sonnet, the work does not follow the most common rhyming scheme of such works—a 14-line poem, consisting of an eight-line stanza followed by a six-line conclusion—but is instead 21 lines long, divided into three stanzas

What job did Wyatt hold?

Ambassador for Henry VIII

What kind of style of poetic line does Ammons like to use, and of whom is it reminiscent?

Ammons often writes in two- or three-line stanzas. Poet David Lehman notes a resemblance between Ammons's terza libre (unrhymed three-line stanzas) and the terza rima of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." Lines are strongly enjambed.[14]

In which poetic tradition was Ammons writing?

Ammons wrote about humanity's relationship to nature in alternately comic and solemn tones. His poetry often addresses religious and philosophical matters and scenes involving nature, almost in a Transcendental fashion. According to reviewer Daniel Hoffman, his work "is founded on an implied Emersonian division of experience into Nature and the Soul," adding that it "sometimes consciously echo[es] familiar lines from Emerson, Whitman and [Emily] Dickinson."

What is the subject of Ammons' "He Held Radical Light"?

Ammons' later poem,"He Held Radical Light," describes the conflicts of a man who feels torn between the delight of the influx of transcendental power and the desire to remain within the security of a human community. In the opening stanza, the "radical light" of transcendence is figured as a version of the "music of the spheres" which came to "the furrows" of the man's "brain/ into the dark, shuddered, / shot out again/ in long swaying swirls of sound...." This remarkable energy, evoked grandly by the alliteration, seems an almost sexual release from "the dark" of limited perception and the constraints of ordinary experience. As indicated by the use of the word "radical" in the title and first line, the visionary/ musician thinks that he has been allowed to return to the "root" or origin of his being, the source of unlimited power. But the second stanza immediately discloses that he is afraid this liberating energy will uproot him from the context he has known all his life, a world full of other people. Understanding that "reality had little weight in his transcendence," the man has been terrified of losing contact with the ground (in a literal and figurative sense) "and liked himself, and others, mostly/ under roofs...." Comically, he can appreciate the commonplace restriction or "government" of a roof, because he has the paradoxical awareness that this agent of limitation is actually a source of liberation from a seemingly external force that would (in the name of freedom) coerce the individual to abandon the people and things he values so highly. If the man finds at times that he desires to experience the powerful influx of "radical light," he knows that to adopt some version of transcendence as a permanent, unchanging attitude would prove an insupportable restriction of possibility, and so he must be satisfied with temporary flashes of transcendence. Furthermore, as much as the visionary/musician may hope to discover the "radical" truth of his self-identity (whatever distinguishes him from all other entities), he desires even more strongly to gain psychological strength from his identification with—or sense of being rooted in— his community: released, hidden from stars, he ate, burped, said he was like any one of us: demanded he was like any one of us. As in Whitman's "Song of Myself," the reference to burping is a sign of liberation from the tyrannical allurement of the Sublime, the immaculate starlight, which would reduce the diversity of human behavior into the unity of inhuman perfection.

apostrophe?

An address to a dead or absent person, or personification as if he or she were present. In his Holy Sonnet "Death, be not proud," John Donne denies death's power by directly admonishing it. Emily Dickinson addresses her absent object of passion in "Wild nights!—Wild nights!"

What kind of poem is Donne's "The Sun Rising"?

An aubade, wanting to stay in bed

Wyatt's "Whoso List.." is likely an allegory for...

Anne Boleyn's relationship with Henry VIII

According to legend, with whom did Wyatt fall in love?

Anne Boleyn; possible references in his poems ("Noli me tangere" in "Whoso List...")

Together with ___, Ginsberg established _____ writing program at ___ university.

Anne Waldman...The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974...Naropa (CO).

what about milton's invocation of a muse (epic convention)?

Another convention is the invocation of the muse, who is not precisely identified—whether the Holy Spirit or, more generally, the spirit of the godhead. At times, Milton alludes to the classical muse of epic poetry, Urania.

How did Keroac's style influence Ginsberg?

Another major influence was Ginsberg's friend Kerouac, who wrote novels in a "spontaneous prose" style that Ginsberg admired and adapted in his own work. Kerouac had written some of his books by putting a roll of white paper into a typewriter and typing continuously in a "stream of consciousness." Ginsberg began writing poems not, as he states, "by working on it in little pieces and fragments from different times, but remembering an idea in my head and writing it down on the spot and completing it there." Both Williams and Kerouac emphasized a writer's emotions and natural mode of expression over traditional literary structures. Ginsberg cited as historical precedents for this idea the works of poet Walt Whitman, novelist Herman Melville, and writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

for whom did arnold write Thyrsis?

Arthur Clough

What is the subject and theme of frost's "neither out far nor too deep"?

As "the people" stare vacantly seaward in search of "the truth," mesmerized by the mysterious, limitless sea, they closely resemble standing (as opposed to flying) gulls. Never directly stated, this comparison, so crucial to the poem's meaning, is clearly implied, and it works very much to the people's disadvantage. For the gull is doing what comes naturally, staring into the teeming sea that is its source of life (that is, of food), and it is merely resting from its life-sustaining labors. "The people," implies Frost, in literally and symbolically turning their backs on their domain, the land, to stare incessantly seaward, are unnatural. Their efforts are life-denying in the extreme.

How does WC Williams compare Howl to Dante?

As Williams puts it in concluding his introduction to the first edition of Howl and Other Poems, "Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell." This trip through hell differs from the best known literary version, the one in Dante's Inferno, in a number of ways beyond the specifics. For one thing, Dante had the earlier poet Virgil as guide and protector; Ginsberg acts Page 76 | Top of Article as the reader's guide, but he has no protector, and means to shock rather than protect those who hear what he says. For another, Dante's vision of hell was hierarchical and systematic, with punishments specifically designed to fit alleged sins, while Ginsberg's hell is chaotic and the sufferings result from society's failure to value its "best minds" rather than from any conscious, deliberate punishment. Yet another difference is that all of the souls Dante encounters are those of people who have already died, and though some of those whose lives are recounted in "Howl" were dead by the time Ginsberg wrote the poem, the miseries he describes all belong to the living—or living dead, those so at odds with the society they live in they cannot function as part of it.

What compelled R. Wilbur to write poetry?

As a student at Amherst College in the early 1940s, Wilbur wrote stories, editorials, and poems for his college newspaper and magazine. His experience as a soldier in World War II, however, drove him to "versify in earnest." He has described the influence of his experiences in war on his poetry: "One does not use poetry for its major purposes, as a means to organize oneself and the world, until one's world somehow gets out of hand."

What was Lowell's nickname throughout his life?

As a teenager, Lowell's peers gave him the nickname "Cal" after both the villainous Shakespeare character Caliban and the tyrannical Roman emperor Caligula, and the nickname stuck with him throughout his life.

What happens to Satan and his fellow angels after his return from paradise?

As he finishes his speech, however, the fallen angels around him become hideous snakes, and soon enough, Satan himself turned into a snake, deprived of limbs and unable to talk. Thus, they share the same punishment, as they shared the same guilt.

What is teh gist of Hart Crane's "General Aims and Theories"?

As with Eliot's "objective correlative," a certain vocabulary haunts Crane criticism, his "logic of metaphor" being perhaps the most vexed. His most quoted formulation is in the circulated, if long unpublished, "General Aims and Theories": "As to technical considerations: the motivation of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used, and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical (literal) significance than for their associational meanings. Via this and their metaphorical inter-relationships, the entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a 'logic of metaphor,' which antedates our so-called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech, hence consciousness and thought-extension

What happens at the end of the debate in Paendemonium?

At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers to poison the newly created Earth and God's new and most favoured creation, Mankind.

How does Lycidas conclude?

At the end of the poem, King/Lycidas appears as a resurrected figure, being delivered, through the resurrecting power of Christ, by the waters that lead to his death:

What happens at the end of the Angelic battles in PL?

At the final battle, the Son of God single-handedly defeats the entire legion of angelic rebels and banishes them from Heaven. Following this purge, God creates the World, culminating in his creation of Adam and Eve. While God gave Adam and Eve total freedom and power to rule over all creation, he gave them one explicit command: not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on penalty of death.

Who remained one of Plath's lifelong poetic friends?

At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend.[19] Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.[3]

Which poet encouraged Adrienne Rich early ion her career by awarding her a prize?

Auden

O'hara was regarded as a leader of which school of poetry and art?

O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

What is the subject of Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"?

Based on the theme of two lovers about to part for an extended time, the poem is notable for its use of conceits and ingenious analogies to describe the couple's relationship;

What is the opening quatrain for "Because I could not stop for death"?

Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality.

When was Frost publishing?

Beginning 1895 but mostly early 20th c.

what happens in "the rape of the lock"?

Belinda arises to prepare for the day's social activities after sleeping late. Her guardian sylph, Ariel, warned her in a dream that some disaster will befall her, and promises to protect her to the best of his abilities. Belinda takes little notice of this oracle, however. After an elaborate ritual of dressing and primping, she travels on the Thames River to Hampton Court Palace, an ancient royal residence outside of London, where a group of wealthy young socialites are gathering for a party. Among them is the Baron, who has already made up his mind to steal a lock of Belinda's hair. He has risen early to perform and elaborate set of prayers and sacrifices to promote success in this enterprise. When the partygoers arrive at the palace, they enjoy a tense game of cards, which Pope describes in mock-heroic terms as a battle. This is followed by a round of coffee. Then the Baron takes up a pair of scissors and manages, on the third try, to cut off the coveted lock of Belinda's hair. Belinda is furious. Umbriel, a mischievous gnome, journeys down to the Cave of Spleen to procure a sack of sighs and a flask of tears which he then bestows on the heroine to fan the flames of her ire. Clarissa, who had aided the Baron in his crime, now urges Belinda to give up her anger in favor of good humor and good sense, moral qualities which will outlast her vanities. But Clarissa's moralizing falls on deaf ears, and Belinda initiates a scuffle between the ladies and the gentlemen, in which she attempts to recover the severed curl. The lock is lost in the confusion of this mock battle, however; the poet consoles the bereft Belinda with the suggestion that it has been taken up into the heavens and immortalized as a constellation.

How did Bishop manage to travel so much?

Bishop had a small independent income in early adulthood, as a result of an inheritance from her deceased father, that did not run out until near the end of her life. This income allowed her to travel widely, though cheaply, without worrying about employment, and to live in many cities and countries which are described in her poems

Which poet that she met had a particularly significant influence on Bishop?

Bishop was greatly influenced by the poet Marianne Moore,[9] to whom she was introduced by a librarian at Vassar in 1934. Moore took a keen interest in Bishop's work and, at one point, Moore dissuaded Bishop from attending Cornell Medical School, where the poet had briefly enrolled herself after moving to New York City following her Vassar graduation. Regarding Moore's influence on Bishop's writing, Bishop's friend and Vassar peer, the writer Mary McCarthy stated, "Certainly between Bishop and Marianne Moore there are resemblances: the sort of close microscopic inspection of certain parts of experience. [However,] I think there is something a bit too demure about Marianne Moore, and there's nothing demure about Elizabeth Bishop."[10] Moore helped Bishop first publish some of her poems in an anthology called Trial Balances in which established poets introduced the work of unknown, younger poets.[10]

How is Bishop similar to WC Williams?

Bishop worked as a painter as well as a poet, and her verse, like visual art, is known for its ability to capture significant scenes.

What is the subject of "one art"?

Bishop's late poem, "One Art' (whose title conveys the implicit suggestion that mastery sought over loss in love is closely related to poetic control), The poet offers a primer for the mastery of disaster, couched in the Puritan form of the sermon to others for their moral improvement. Readers of Bishop frequently turn to "One Art" in Geography III as distinctively Bishopian in its restraint, formality, classicism. Yet this poem deals openly with loss and has been rightly called by J. D. McClatchy "painfully autobiographical." The formal demands of the villanelle keep "squads of undisciplined emotion" from overwhelming the poem, while James Merrill has spoken of "One Art" as resuscitating the villanelle in that its "key lines seem merely to approximate themselves, and the form, awakened by a kiss, simply toddles off to a new stage in its life, under the proud eye of Mother, or the Muse." Personal expression makes the form looser, more pliant and intimate. In fact, Bishop uses form frequently, and especially here, to show its arbitrariness, its attractive flimsiness.It is a form tellingly imitative of the obsessional behavior of mourners with their need for repetition and ritual as resistance to "moving on" and their inevitable search for substitutions.

What are some motifs in Bishop's verse?

Bishop's poetics of geography or travel as a horizontal poetics, as opposed to the ascendant and sublime impulses in many of the poets that we have been examining this term. This poetics is ultimately a poetry of shifting perspectives and local perceptions.

Which formal innovation did Milton introduce and popularize in English poetry?

Blank verse (PL) - unrhymed iambic pentameter

How did Milton write PL?

Blind. Through dictation

What is the identity of the imagined singer in "The Phoenix and the Turtle"?

Reason, who is "confounded" by the unity of these lovers

What is the subject of Frost's "out,out--"

Both the description of a terrible accident and a comment on the human need to resume one's life after a tragedy, "Out, Out--" is one of Frost's most shocking and disturbing performances. The poem is based upon a real incident. In 1901, Michael Fitzgerald, one of Frost's friends and neighbors, lost his son Raymond during an accident with a buzzsaw; after accidentally hitting a loose pulley, the saw descended and began cutting his hand. He bled profusely and was rushed into the house; a doctor was called, but the young man went into shock and died of heart failure.

how does Milton include his own blindness in PL?

Building on the earlier invocation, in which he courts comparison with earlier epic authors, he acknowledges a desire for fame comparable to that of Homer and Thamyris, a blind Thracian poet. Like the blind prophets of classical antiquity, Tiresias and Phineus, the narrator affirms that his physical affliction is offset by the gift of inward illumination.

How does Donne parody the traditional love sonnet in "To his mistress going to bed"?

By combining Petrarch's technique of "wooing from afar" with Ovid's sexually aggressive language and style, Donne creates a parody of the conventional love sonnet, and an early specimen of libertine poetry.

What was Part 1 of "Howl" about?

Called by Ginsberg "a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths", Part I is perhaps the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, and psychiatric patients whom he encountered in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ginsberg refers to these people, who were underrepresented outcasts in what the poet believed to be an oppressively conformist and materialistic era as "the best minds of my generation." He describes their experiences in graphic detail, openly discussing drug use and homosexual activity at multiple points. Most lines in this section contain the fixed base "who." In "Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl," Ginsberg writes, "I depended on the word 'who' to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention."

why is arnold's choice of pastoral elegy in the vein of Virgil ironic?

Clough was best known for a thoroughly modern poem which broke all the rules of classical pastoral poetry.

What is the gist of Coleridge's "On Poesy and Art"?

Coleridge believes ("On Poesy or Art," 1963): The artist must imitate that which is within the thing, that which is active through form and figure, and discourses to us by symbols—the Natur-geist, or spirit of nature, as we unconsciously imitate those whom we love; for so only can he hope to produce any work truly natural in object and truly human in the effect" (p. 259). Thus, the poet is not just a tabula rasa or copier from nature like a wax-work figure, but rather a sensitive instrument upon which nature plays. In his critical article, "On Poesy or Art," Coleridge (1962) illustrates the organic relationship between the poet's creative "I AM" and nature: Now Art...is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, Nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.... Now so to place these images, totalized, and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from, and super induce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflexions to which they approximate, to make the external internal, and the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature, -- this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. (pp. 253, 258) Thus, the pivotal role of imagination is to make "the external internal, and the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature." Nature, of course, does not only refer to the observable reality, but also to its spirit to which the poet connects and through which is able to reconcile the universal and the particular to become one.

What is the gist of Coleridge's "Mechanic and Organic Form"?

Coleridge distinguished between mechanic form and organic form in an essay on Shakespeare: The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material — as when to a mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic form on the other hand is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward Form. Such is the Life, such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms. Coleridge made a strong distinction between the mechanical fancy and the living imagination, and suggested that the work of art is like a living organism, especially a plant, which originates in a seed, continues to grow (in Shakespeare, "All is growth, evolution, genesis,—each line, each word almost, begets the following"), assimilates and "enters into open communion with all the elements," and evolves spontaneously from within," effectuating "its own secret growth." The metaphor of organic or appropriate form, something that develops naturally from within, has been crucial to the development of romantic and certain crucial strands of American poetry. The idea that art derives from nature rather than from other art has fueled American ideas of originality.

What is teh gist of Coleridges idesa about allegory and symbol in the Statesman's manual?

Coleridge draws an important distinction between the key literary devices of what he calls 'allegory' and 'symbol.' The former is something grasped by what he calls the "mechanical understanding" (476) (this is the part of the psyche, according to Coleridge, whereby humans process knowledge acquired through the senses). He defines allegory as "a translation of abstract notions into a picture language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses"... allegory is his term for any device of figurative language, e.g. metaphor or simile, by which one thing has come over the years to be compared to another...Coleridge reserves the term 'symbol' for the representation of any physical object which does not in turn merely 'stand for' or in place of something abstract or non-physical (such as pure goodness or love) which belongs to the world of ideal forms but in fact manifests or expresses it. This is why, he contends in a celebrated definition, the symbol is characterised by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative. (476) The non-physical world, from this point of view, illuminates from within the physical world in a manner similar to a lamp, as a result of which every physical object rightly viewed is seen as a symbol of the non-physical. A majestic mountain range, to use a common Romantic example, is a wonderful symbol of God's handiwork. God's spirit, like a lamp, 'shines through' (hence, 'translucence') the mountain range. To put this another way, what the soul is to the body, God is to nature. It is important to note that this connection between the seemingly merely physical and the non-physical is not something which the 'mechanical understanding' can apprehend: such links are made by that part of our intellect which Coleridge terms the 'imagination'

What is the general interpretatoin of "In the Waiting Room"?

Commentaries on "In the Waiting Room" thed to agree that the poem presents a young girl's moment of awakening to the separations and the bonds among human beings, to the forces that shape individual identity through the interreleated recognitions of community and isolation..."In the Waiting Room," then, properly tells or narrates the "growth of a poet's mind." The poet originates in the recognition of her separation from, and identity with, her world, at once finding and losing her "self." Her birth or awakening comes with a scream from inside the dentist's office that is also the voice of the child in the waiting room, since "inside" says "either." When the child produces her explanation, she is a poet: How—I didn't know any word for it—how "unlikely" . . .

What was Dickinson's theory of identity?

Dickinson's construction of a self was particularly focused on issues connected with power, authority, and control. In fact, we could say that for Dickinson, identity was consistent with authority, to the extent that having a self meant being able to define, to interpret, to construct meaning. Dickinson's attempts to create herself, therefore, have to do with finding a way to be a woman who has authority and authenticity in relation to all that is external to her: the world.

What is the subject of Bishop's "At the Fishhouses"?

Comparing the Nova Scotia coast to a woman's body; "At the Fishhouses" begins, as a poem by Moore might, with a description of a scene that seems eternally suspended. The verbs in the opening section are stative -- "the five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs," "all is silver," "the big fish tubs are completely lined," "on the slope . . . is an ancient wooden capstan," etc. The fixity of the scene at the fishhouses is further undercut as the speaker becomes an active participant, offering the old man a Lucky Strike and engaging him in conversation. Reminders of historical process now become more overt; "he was a friend of my grandfather" implies her grandfather's death, and "the decline of the population" tells of broader changes. Moreover, Bishop's enchantment with this place emerges as a fascination not so much with the visible world people inhabit as with the unknowable sea it borders. Drawing a message from the scene very different from any Moore would offer, Bishop presents the sea as a symbol of "what we imagine knowledge to be: . . . drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world, derived from the rocky breasts / forever, flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown." In suggesting that our knowing anything is itself imaginary, in adhering to a vision of unending process, in believing revelations in this harsh world fleeting and costly, Bishop stands firmly in the mainstream of contemporary art.

How have critics interpreted the allegory of the "The Phoenix and the Turtle" historically?

Comparing the two main characters to Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex.

How does R. Wilbur fall in the poetic tradition?

Continuing the tradition of Robert Frost and W. H. Auden, Wilbur's poetry finds illumination in everyday experiences.

What kind of diction does Frost use?

Critics frequently point out that Frost complicated his problem and enriched his style by setting traditional meters against the natural rhythms of speech. Drawing his language primarily from the vernacular, he avoided artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of a soft-spoken New Englander.

What made Dickinson's poetry unique, and which themes did she explore?

Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.[3] Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality

What kinds of influences do critics identify in Dickinson's verse?

Dickinson scholar and poet Anthony Hecht finds resonances in Dickinson's poetry not only with hymns and song-forms but also with psalms and riddles...Dickinson's poetry was heavily influenced by the Metaphysical poets of seventeenth-century England, as well as her reading of the Book of Revelation and her upbringing in a Puritan New England town, which encouraged a Calvinist, orthodox, and conservative approach to Christianity.

What did Lowell say about Plath's poems Daddy and Lazarus?

Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape. [...] In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus,' fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.'

Which convention in love poetry did Wyatt contribute to the origin of?

Depicting the mistress as hard-hearted and cruel

Why did black intellectuals criticize Hughes' work?

Despite Heyward's statement, much of Hughes's early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life. In his autobiographical The Big Sea, Hughes commented: "Fine Clothes to the Jew was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES' BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES—THE SEWER DWELLER.

What is the subject of Whitman's "When Lilacs Last..."

Despite the poem being an elegy to the fallen president, Whitman neither mentions Lincoln by name nor discusses the circumstances of his death. Instead, Whitman uses a series of rural and natural imagery including the symbols of the lilacs, a drooping star in the western sky (Venus), and the hermit thrush, and employs the traditional progression of the pastoral elegy in moving from grief toward an acceptance and knowledge of death

How is Thyrsis a quest?

Despite the poem's length, it is bookended by an explicit quest: to find the elm. By relating the elm to the scholar-gipsy, Arnold makes the countryside a clear symbol for truth and transcendence.

How did WS Merwin's writing evolve over his career?

During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin's writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology.

What is the subject matter of Wyatt's "Blame Not My Lute"?

Don't kill the messenger (don't blame the lute) - he puts the blame on his audience (spurned lover or perhaps the king -- Wyatt was a diplomat)

what are the themes of donne's "holy sonnets"?

Donne addresses religious themes of mortality, divine judgment, divine love, and humble penance while reflecting deeply personal anxieties...The poems address "the problem of faith in a tortured world with its death and misery."[9]

How do Donne's "Holy Sonnets" relate to Jesuit meditation?

Donne chose the sonnet because the form can be divided into three parts (two quatrains, one sestet) similar to the form of meditation or spiritual exercise described by Loyola in which (1) the penitent conjures up the scene of meditation before him (2) the penitent analyses, seeking to glean and then embrace whatever truths it may contain; and (3) after analysis, the penitent is ready to address God in a form of petition or resign himself to divine will that the meditation reveals.

What are some characeristics of Donne's love poems?

Donne's love poems, "marked by an energetic, often bawdy wit, a new explicitness about sexual desire and experience, and an irreverent new attitude towards authority figures"

What is the subject of Donne's "To his mistress going to bed"

Donne's male speaker urges his mistress into bed. Donne's speaker fervently describes undressing and caressing his mistress, and at the end, the speaker reveals that he is fully unclothed and erect. The process of disrobing is followed from top to toe, centred on the belly and vulva, and each stage compares the beauty of dress as external decoration with the natural beauty of the undressed woman.

How does Donne's "The Canonization" utilize paradox according to Cleanth Brooks?

Donne's speaker takes both love and religion seriously. He neither intends to mock religion by exalting love beside it, nor aims to poke fun at love by comparing it to sainthood. Instead, Brooks argues, the apparent contradiction in taking both seriously translates into a truer account of both love and spirituality.

How is Donne's style characterized?

Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations.

What is the conceit in Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"?

Donne's use of a drafting compass as an analogy for the couple—two points, inextricably linked—has been both praised as an example of his "virtuoso display of similitude",[1] and also criticised as an illustration of the excesses of metaphysical poetry; despite detractors, it remains "the best known sustained conceit" in English poetry.[2]

How are donne's works witty?

Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet remarkable analogies

In which book did Lowell publish a sonnet sequence?

During 1967 and 1968, Lowell experimented with a verse journal, first published as Notebook 1967-68 (and later republished in a revised and expanded edition, titled Notebook). Lowell referred to these fourteen-line poems as sonnets although they sometimes failed to incorporate regular meter and rhyme (both of which are defining features of the sonnet form); however, some of Lowell's sonnets (particularly the ones in Notebook 1967-1968) were written in blank verse with a definitive pentameter and a small handful also included rhyme. Regarding the issue of meter in these poems, Lowell wrote "My meter, fourteen line unrhymed blank verse sections, is fairly strict at first and elsewhere, but often corrupts in single lines to the freedom of prose.

How have there been conflicting interpretations of the final images of skunks in the poeM?

During his Guggenheim Reading from 1963, Lowell notes that there have been conflicting interpretations of the final image of skunks in the poem. He states that "Richard Wilbur said that [the skunks] were delightful creatures. . . and John Berryman wrote. . .[that the skunks] were utterly terrifying, catatonic creatures." Lowell concludes that "both [interpretations] could be right." [8]

What makes Directive unique in frost's poetry?

Earlier Frost poems can teach a reader what to make of deceptively simple natural images, but "Directive" must first be read by submitting to its insistence on "getting lost." Finding-in-losing is the poem's crucial paradox, and unless a reader has been scared by his own desert places he may not be "lost enough" to be guided by Frost through this high-country quest.

When was John Donne publishing?

Early 17th c.

What was WC Williams relationship with the Imagists/

Early in his career, he briefly became involved in the Imagist movement through his friendships with Pound and H.D. (whom he also befriended at the University of Pennsylvania), but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from theirs and his style changed to express his commitment to a modernist expression of his immediate environment.

Lycidas was written for whom?

Edward King, a Cambridge classmate who died at sea

How does Auden's "IN memory...yeats" depart from elegiac tradition?

Elegies typically declare a poets death and have nature mourn the man and his work, but Auden merely lists the weather on the day of his death:...With the personification of W.B. Yeats' poems, nature, and the weather Auden examines the effect that Yeats had on human beings. Through the poetry and the death of the poet Auden implies that he was just an ordinary man: "silly like us." (32) Yeats did not change Ireland and Auden states that few would remember him, but a new poet will inspire nature and man.

What is the gist of Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent?

Eliot attempts to do two things in this essay: he first redefines "tradition" by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and he then argues that poetry should be essentially "impersonal," that is separate and distinct from the personality of its writer. Eliot's idea of tradition is complex and unusual, involving something he describes as "the historical sense" which is a perception of "the pastness of the past" but also of its "presence." For Eliot, past works of art form an order or "tradition"; however, that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the "tradition" to make room for itself. This view, in which "the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past," requires that a poet be familiar with almost all literary history—not just the immediate past but the distant past and not just the literature of his or her own country but the whole "mind of Europe." Eliot's second point is one of his most famous and contentious. A poet, Eliot maintains, must "self-sacrifice" to this special awareness of the past; once this awareness is achieved, it will erase any trace of personality from the poetry because the poet has become a mere medium for expression. Using the analogy of a chemical reaction, Eliot explains that a "mature" poet's mind works by being a passive "receptacle" of images, phrases and feelings which are combined, under immense concentration, into a new "art emotion." For Eliot, true art has nothing to do with the personal life of the artist but is merely the result of a greater ability to synthesize and combine, an ability which comes from deep study and comprehensive knowledge. Though Eliot's belief that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" sprang from what he viewed as the excesses of Romanticism, many scholars have noted how continuous Eliot's thought—and the whole of Modernism—is with that of the Romantics'; his "impersonal poet" even has links with John Keats, who proposed a similar figure in "the chameleon poet." But Eliot's belief that critical study should be "diverted" from the poet to the poetry shaped the study of poetry for half a century, and while "Tradition and the Individual Talent" has had many detractors, especially those who question Eliot's insistence on canonical works as standards of greatness, it is difficult to overemphasize the essay's influence. It has shaped generations of poets, critics and theorists and is a key text in modern literary criticism.

What is teh wasteland?

Eliot's poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. Because of this, critics and scholars regard the poem as obscure.[4] The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures. The poem's structure is divided into five sections. The first section, The Burial of the Dead, introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, A Game of Chess, employs vignettes of several characters—alternating narrations—that address those themes experientially. The Fire Sermon, the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions. After a fourth section that includes a brief lyrical petition, the culminating fifth section, What the Thunder Said, concludes with an image of judgment.

How long did it take Bishop to write "The Moose"?

Elizabeth Bishop claimed that it took her around 20 years to finish her poem "The Moose."

What is Larkin's nationality?

English

Which poetic movement does Wyatt belong to?

English Renaissance

What thematic contrasts does Milton explore in Allegro and Penseroso?

Essentially, Milton compares and contrasts two impulses in human nature: the active and contemplative, the social and solitary, the mirthful and melancholic, the cheerful and meditative, the erotic and Platonic.

What is the subject of roethke's "My papa's waltz"?

Even in a poem about a memory of a father that should be happy - dancing in the kitchen, making lots of noise, and annoying mom - death and a little bit of violence still creep in. This poem is actually pretty controversial - some people think it's about an abusive, alcoholic father, while others think it's just a happy memory. We guess that the poem is waltzing somewhere in the ambiguity between extremes, so it's up to you to decide how happy this poem really is.

what is the subject of hayden's "Those winter sundays"? how does the subject relate to the form?

Even though Hayden's poem isn't about romantic love (as so many sonnets are) it is about deep and abiding love—the love that a father has for his children, and the love that children have for their parents. "Those Winter Sundays" isn't filled with hugs and kisses, but that doesn't make it any less a love poem. We also think that the secret sonnet-ness of the poem's form connects up with its content. Just as the speaker doesn't understand the nature of his father's love until he's grown, we don't understand the poem's form to be a sonnet until we finish it (and realize in retrospect that it has fourteen lines). So there's a delayed, or belated, recognition of love (and its many forms) for both the speaker and for us, the readers.

What ist he subject and poetic genre of Tennyson's "Tithonus"?

Faced with old age, Tithonus, weary of his immortality, yearns for death. The poem is a dramatic monologue with Tithonus addressing his consort Eos, the goddess of the dawn.,..Tithonus speaks to his beloved, the goddess Eos (or Aurora). The woods are decaying, men work the land but then die and lie beneath it, and the swan dies after many years. Tithonus, however, lingers on in "cruel immortality." He has become immortal, but he is old, withering in the arms of his beloved on the eastern edge of the world, and feeling like a wandering shadow. He was once a man, he says, feeling "glorious in his beauty" and in being chosen by this goddess. He asked for immortality, and she got it for him, yet he still aged and aged. Meanwhile she is eternally young, so their existence is "immortal age beside immortal youth." Is her love enough to overcome this horror? Why should anyone want this kind of special treatment and avoid the normal death of mortals? When a soft breeze parts the clouds, Tithonus can see the Earth below. He sees the glimmer in his beloved's brow, her cheeks reddening, her eyes brightening, at the prospect of bringing dawn with her horses and chariot. The constant renewal of the dawn brings her to tears when she looks at Tithonus in contrast. Tithonus is afraid that it will be true that "the Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts," that his situation will continue forever. He remembers, as if from another life or as another man, when he used to love the experience of the dawn: the outline forming around her, the "sunny rings" of hair, his own blood glowing as the day would warm, the feeling of the dawn kissing him. She would whisper something otherworldly, like "that strange song I heard Apollo sing / While Ilion like a mist rose into towers." He asks her to release him and restore him to mortality and the grave because his nature can never truly mix with hers. He experiences the coolness of her "rosy shadows" while the men below are still warmed by the day. These men are happy and possess "the power to die," and are even happier in death. By letting him go, she would still be able to see his grave eternally. By returning to the Earth he would forget "these empty courts," while she would continue to bring the dawn on her silver wheels.

What is the subject of Wyatt's "The Long Love that..."

Fidelity to a lover, or, allegorically, fidelity to Henry VIII

Where were Hughes' poems mostly published?

First published in The Crisis — official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) — in 1921, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", which became Hughes's signature poem, was collected in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues (1926).[40] Hughes's first and last published poems appeared in The Crisis; more of his poems were published in The Crisis than in any other journal.[41]

What is unique about Bishop's publshing?

For a major American poet, Bishop published very sparingly.

Where did Lowell teach?

From 1950 to 1953, Lowell taught in the well-reputed Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, then a lot of other colleges

collage?

From the French coller, meaning to paste or glue. In visual arts, a technique that involves juxtaposing photographs, cuttings, newspapers, or other media on a surface. Widely seen as a hallmark of Modernist art, collage was first developed in the early 20th century by Pablo Picasso and other Cubists. Avant-garde groups such as the Dadaists and Surrealists also used the form to create new visual and language-based work. Tristan Tzara famously advocated a "cut-up" method of composition, involving cutting out words from a newspaper and drawing them randomly from a hat to create a poem. Collage in language-based work can now mean any composition that includes words, phrases, or sections of outside source material in juxtaposition. An early example is T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," which includes newspaper clippings, music lyrics, nursery rhymes, and overheard speech. Ezra Pound's Cantos also use the technique extensively. For more examples of language-based collage see Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson and Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets.

conceit?

From the Latin term for "concept," a poetic conceit is an often unconventional, logically complex, or surprising metaphor whose delights are more intellectual than sensual. Petrarchan (after the Italian poet Petrarch) conceits figure heavily in sonnets, and contrast more conventional sensual imagery to describe the experience of love. In Shakespeare's "Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been," for example, "What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!" laments the lover, though his separation takes place in the fertile days of summer and fall. Less conventional, more esoteric associations characterize the metaphysical conceit. John Donne and other so-called metaphysical poets used conceits to fuse the sensory and the abstract, trading on the element of surprise and unlikeness to hold the reader's attention. In "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," for instance, John Donne envisions two entwined lovers as the points of a compass. (For more on Donne's conceits, see Stephen Burt's Poem Guide on John Donne's "The Sun Rising.")

What did Frost say about free verse?

Frost's poems "show a successful striving for utter colloquialism" and always try to remain down to earth, while at the same time using traditional forms despite the trend of American poetry towards free verse which Frost famously said was "'like playing tennis without a net.'

What is the subject of Herrick's "Corinna's going a maying"

Gather ye rosebuds. Now let us sport us while we may. Give me everything tonight. From Marvell to Pitbull, "Corinna's Going A-Maying" joins a long line of male poets begging women to just do it already. Carpe diem? Carpe him. These poems are all about seizing the man. Usually that means that you're about to read a bunch of lines about getting a woman into bed. But "Corinna" shakes things up by doing just the opposite: this speaker is trying to get a woman out of bed. What the why? Well, it's a witty reverse of the aubade, a love poem set at dawn that's usually about prolonging the night...The speaker in "Corinna" is totally on the same page, only he wants to jumpstart the day and take the fun outside. Why? Because that's where the entire village is celebrating the arrival of spring with games, cakes, and courting. What better place to fall in love and get down to business?

How did the poetic form of "HowL" evolve as he composed it?

Ginsberg began the poem in the stepped triadic form he took from Williams but, in the middle of typing the poem, his style altered such that his own unique form (a long line based on breath organized by a fixed base) began to emerge

What is Part 2 of "Howl"?

Ginsberg says that Part II, in relation to Part I, "names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb." Part II is about the state of industrial civilization, characterized in the poem as "Moloch". Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II during a period of peyote-induced visionary consciousness in which he saw a hotel façade as a monstrous and horrible visage which he identified with that of Moloch, the Biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children.[14] Ginsberg intends that the characters he portrays in Part I be understood to have been sacrificed to this idol. Moloch is also the name of an industrial, demonic figure in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a film that Ginsberg credits with influencing "Howl, Part II" in his annotations for the poem (see especially Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions). Most lines in this section contain the fixed base "Moloch". Ginsberg says of Part II, "Here the long line is used as a stanza form broken into exclamatory units punctuated by a base repetition, Moloch."[

What religion did Ginsberg adopt?

Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who studied Eastern religious disciplines extensively. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in downscale apartments in New York's East Village

Which poetic and cultural movements influenced Ginsberg's work?

Ginsberg's poetry was strongly influenced by Modernism (most importantly the American style of Modernism pioneered by William Carlos Williams), Romanticism (specifically William Blake and John Keats), the beat and cadence of jazz (specifically that of bop musicians such as Charlie Parker), and his Kagyu Buddhist practice and Jewish background.

The setting of Il Penseroso is...

Gothic, solitary and scholarly

mimesis?

Greek for "imitation." In aesthetic theory, mimesis can also connote "representation," and has typically meant the reproduction of an external reality, such as nature, through artistic expression. Plato disparaged mimesis for merely providing inferior copies of original forms; Aristotle, in his Poetics, recuperated the idea, alleging that mimesis is "natural" to humans. For Aristotle, mimesis in part both recreates the objects of reality and improves them; it provides humans with a special kind of symbolic order. In the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers and writers such as Rousseau and Lessing began to emphasize the relationship between mimesis and inner experiences and emotions, not just objective reality or nature. By the 20th century, the term housed a number of theories, theorists, and schools of thought. Erich Auerbach's highly influential book Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953) attempted to chart the history of culture through representational practices in literature. Thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno, on the other hand, described mimesis as fundamental to human experience, a practice that precedes language but is suppressed or distorted by society. Rather than mimesis as the process of reproducing copies of nature, reality, or experience, these theorists suggested that mimesis has to do with social practices and inter-subjective relationships. Jacques Derrida also claimed mimesis for deconstruction, focusing on texts as "doubled" objects, which can never refer to an original source.

Alternative name to Wordsworth's "Prelude":

Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem

What is the gist of Bloom's "internalization of quest romance"?

Harold Bloom had this idea back in the late 60s called the Internalization of Quest Romance. It was a way of characterizing what happened to poetry around the time of Wordsworth: Wordsworth, argues Bloom, took all of the poetic machinery of epic poetry that culminated in Milton -- heroes, villains, battles, the quest for some object or person -- and made it internal: the conflict portrayed in post Wordsworth poetry is not with an external figure, but with whatever mental blocks are getting in the way of access to your own imagination, for example....As Bloom will say "The deepest satisfactions of reading Blake or Wordsworth come from the realization of new ranges of tensions in the mind, but Blake and Wordsworth both believed, in different ways, that the pleasures of poetry were only forepleasures, in the sense that poems, finally, were scaffoldings for a more imaginative vision, and not ends in themselves."2 What he means by scaffoldings is the sense of poems as "maps of the mind" that chart the way toward its sublime internal quest to free up imagination and vision of reality unfettered by both the encumbrances of culture, ideology, and the natural.was more "than a revival, it is an internalization of romance, particularly of the quest variety, an internalization made for more than therapeutic purposes, because made in the name of a humanizing hope that approaches apocalyptic intensity" (BPS, Introduction). The poet takes the patterns of quest-romance and transposes them into his own imaginative life, so that the entire rhythm of the quest is heard again in the movement of the poet himself from poem to poem. In the older forms of romance quests from the Arthurian mythos up to the Romantic Era the movement of the quest was from "nature to redeemed nature", with the placement of either a religious/spiritual (Christian) or natural/magical (Fairy/Pagan) authority as guarantee of this redemption. Yet, in the Romantic era a transformation occurred in romance theory and practice, and it would become a movement from nature to the imagination's freedom; and the imagination's freedom is frequently purgatorial, redemptive in direction but destructive of the social self. The high cost of Romantic internalization, that is, of finding paradises within a renovated man, shows itself in the arena of self-consciousness. The quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it, but the quest is shadowed by a spirit that tends to narrow consciousness to an acute preoccupation with self. This shadow of imagination is solipsism, what Shelley calls the Spirit of Solitude or Alastor, the avenging daimon who is a baffled residue of the self, determined to be compensated for its loss of natural assurance, for having been awakened from the merely given condition that to Shelley, as to Blake, was but the sleep of death-in-life. (BPS, Introduction) This purging of the Self-as-Identity toward a more expansive sense not of identity but of a sense of the Self-as-Nothing or Imagination & Vision without the encumbrance of a personal reduction to the historical self is at the heart of the quest. Yet, none of the poets have ever been able to overcome this inherent dualism both within and without us, and each has failed in his own way. As Bloom will ask in our own time with such poets as Stevens, Ashbury, Cole, and others: what, for poets "without belief and even without credulity, is the spiritual form of romance?" If the goal of Romantic internalization of the quest is a wider consciousness that would be free of the excesses of self-consciousness (solipsism), then the notion of more enlarged and more numerous senses are necessary, an enormous virtue of Romantic poetry clearly being that it not only demands such expansion but begins to make it possible, or at least attempts to do so.

With which two poetic movements is Langston Hughes associated?

He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue",

What is the gist of Emerson's The Poet?

He argues that the poet is a seer who penetrates the mysteries of the universe and articulates the universal truths that bind humanity together. Hence, the true poet, who puts into words what others feel but cannot express, speaks for all men and women....It is not about "men of poetical talents, or of industry and skill in meter, but of the true poet."...The essay offers a profound look at the poem and its role in society. In a paragraph mid-essay, Emerson observes: For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations. For nature is as truly beautiful as it is good, or as it is reasonable, and must as much appear, as it must be done, or be known. Words and deeds are quite indifferent modes of the divine energy. Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words

Where does Satan journey after Paendemonium? Like ____...?

He braves the dangers of the Abyss alone in a manner reminiscent of Odysseus or Aeneas. After an arduous traversal of the Chaos outside Hell, he enters God's new material World, and later the Garden of Eden.

How did Wyatt depart from Petrarch?

He changed the 2nd sestet to include a rhyming couplet at the end; so, moving towards 3 quatrains and one couplet (English Sonnet)

In which poets footsteps did Ginsberg see himself working as a visionary poet?

He considered himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed down from the English poet and artist William Blake, the American poet Walt Whitman and the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. The power of Ginsberg's verse, its searching, probing focus, its long and lilting lines, as well as its New World exuberance, all echo the continuity of inspiration that he claimed.

What is one possible critical interpertation of Plath's "Edge"?

He considers "Edge" to be a "poetic epitaph." The scrolls and words of the poem are a "necessity," but the coiled children (which represent poetry itself) are folded back into her empty self. The woman cannot actually be perfected because her texts are merely "warring forces of signification." No matter what she intended to write, the poems now mean various different things. As a result, the speaker has misread her own texts, the poet has miswritten her own poems, and they no longer express what she intended them to. Perhaps, therefore, the texts are telling the woman to live, to continue searching for the meaning behind their words. Axelrod concludes, "On an edge between metaphysics and indeterminacy as well as between life and death, Plath's last poem gapes at the space separating words from their referents and meanings, while the moon's shadows 'crackle and drag' to commemorate the dissolution." Of course, even from this interpretation, the sense of helplessness and misunderstanding of one's own passion and work feed the idea of suicidal depression. Nobody would deny that the poem, no matter whether it is to be taken literally or figuratively, is a bleak cry.

What is the gist of Wordsworth's Preface?

He describes poetry as the spontaneous overflow of emotions. Poetry is not dependent upon rhetorical and literary devices, but is the free expression of the poet's thought and feeling. The poet is a teacher and must strive to reveal truth, not through scientific analysis and abstraction, but through an imaginative awareness of persons and things. He may broaden and enrich our human sympathies and our enjoyment of nature in this way. He must communicate his ideas and emotions through a powerful re-creation of the original experience. For this, he must have a sensibility far beyond that of the ordinary individual.

What about Milton's diction?

He employs some archaic language; he drew attention to the connotative, imaginative and poetic value of words

How did Arnold view poetry?

He felt that poetry should be the 'criticism of life' and express a philosophy. he valued 'disinterested' criticism

For what reasons is Frost celebrated, and what were his primary themes?

He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech.[2] His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.

How did Wyatt anticipate the metaphysical poets?

He wrote elaborate conceits

what does the speaker repeatedly say in "Mending Wall'?

He notes twice in the poem that "something there is that doesn't love a wall"

In London Merwin was friends with --__

He returned to London where he was friends with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

With what other poets did Hecht train after WWII?

He returned to the US in March 1946 and immediately took advantage of the G.I. bill to study under the poet-critic John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, Ohio. Here he came into contact with fellow poets such as Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Allen Tate.

What was Hecht's most significant combat experience?

He saw combat in Germany in the "Ruhr Pocket"[4] and in Cheb in Czechoslovakia. However, his most significant experience occurred on April 23, 1945 when Hecht's division helped liberate Flossenbürg concentration camp. Hecht was ordered to interview French prisoners in the hope of gathering evidence on the camp's commanders. Years later, Hecht said of this experience, The place, the suffering, the prisoners' accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking

How did Milton innovate in his use of caesura and enjambment?

He uses caesura not just in the middle or end of lines; he enjambs quite a bit (see opening lines of PL)

Which countercultural views did Ginsberg most vigorously adopt?

He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism and sexual repression and was known as embodying various aspects of this counterculture, such as his views on drugs, hostility to bureaucracy and openness to Eastern religions.[

What is the subject of Tate's "Ode to the Conf. Dead"?

Heavily influenced by the work of T.S. Eliot, this Modernist poem takes place in a graveyard in the South where the narrator grieves the loss of the Confederate soldiers buried there. However, unlike the "Ode" to the Confederate Dead written by the 19th-century American poet Henry Timrod, Tate's "Ode" is not a straightforward ode. Instead, Tate uses the graveyard and the dead Confederate soldiers as a metaphor for his narrator's troubled state of mind, and the poem charts the narrator's dark stream of consciousness, as he contemplates (or tries to avoid contemplating) his own mortality. Tate says that "Ode to the Confederate Dead" is "'about' solipsism, a philosophical doctrine which says that we create the world in the act of perceiving it; or about Narcissism, or any other ism that denotes the failure of the human personality to function objectively in nature and society."[2] The poem presents the symbolic dilemma of a man who has stopped at the gate of a Confederate graveyard. He is trapped in time, isolated, alone, self-conscious, caught between a heroic Civil War past, which is irrecoverable, and the chaotic, degenerate present. I

With his mastery of forms, with what other poet is Hecht often compared/

Hecht's poetry was often compared with that of Auden, with whom Hecht had become friends in 1951 during a holiday on the Italian island of Ischia, where Auden spent each summer.

For what is Larkin's poetry known?

His poems are marked by what Andrew Motion calls a very English, glum accuracy about emotions, places, and relationships, and what Donald Davie described as lowered sights and diminished expectations. Eric Homberger (echoing Randall Jarrell) called him "the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket"—Larkin himself said that deprivation for him was what daffodils were for Wordsworth.[3] Influenced by W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy, his poems are highly structured but flexible verse forms. They were described by Jean Hartley, the ex-wife of Larkin's publisher George Hartley (the Marvell Press), as a "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent",[4] though anthologist Keith Tuma writes that there is more to Larkin's work than its reputation for dour pessimism suggests.[

What different types of versee did James Merrill write in his careeer?

His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover (published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980), which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays.

What is the poetic structure of Donne's "To his mistress going to bed"?

His use of continuous verse, without separate stanzas, and heroic rhyming couplets, creates a sense of continuity, a driving rhythm moving the poem towards its climax.

What was Moore's perspective on poetry?

Her most famous poem is perhaps the one entitled, appropriately, "Poetry", in which she hopes for poets who can produce "imaginary gardens with real toads in them". It also expressed her idea that meter, or anything else that claims the exclusive title "poetry", is not as important as delight in language and precise, heartfelt expression in any form. Moore's meter was radically separate from the English tradition; writing her syllabic poems after the advent of free verse, she was thereby encouraged to try previously unusual meters.[24]

What are the characteristics and themes of Bishop's poetry?

Her verse is marked by precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity, but her underlying themes include the struggle to find a sense of belonging, and the human experiences of grief and longing.

Which two poetic genres does Whitman combine in Leaves according to some critics?

Here is the germ of Whitman's radical innovation. His inspiration is lyric, his ambition epic, the one to be fitted within the structure of the other. A lyric is traditionally defined as a short poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of the poet or speaker. On the surface, the lyric appears poles apart from the epic, embodying as it does the poet's own "physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality." But Whitman in effect decided to cast himself in the role of his own epic hero, using his lyric gift not only to express himself but also to "tally" the "momentous spirit and facts" of his "immediate days, and of current America." His eyes would be turned both inward and outward, and his voice would be both personal and public. His qualifications for appearing as the hero of America's epic were those very qualities disdained by past epics: he was one of the average, with a station neither above nor below that of others, identifying with "the working-man and working-woman," and ready to "endow the democratic averages of America" with the "ranges of heroism and loftiness" that the "Greek and feudal poets" reserved for their "lordly born characters" (452).

What happens at the end of the flea?

His beloved kills the flea; his logical farce fails

What are some theme sof DH Lawrence's verse/

His collected works, among other things, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct.

What is Ezra Pound most known for, and where did this new kind of poetry come from?

His contribution to poetry began with his development of Imagism, a movement derived from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language.

which poetic movement did dh lawrence belong to?

His early works clearly place him in the school of Georgian poets, a group not only named after the reigning monarch but also to the romantic poets of the previous Georgian period whose work they were trying to emulate.[19] What typified the entire movement, and Lawrence's poems of the time, were well-worn poetic tropes and deliberately archaic language. Many of these poems displayed what John Ruskin referred to as the pathetic fallacy, the tendency to ascribe human emotions to animals and even inanimate objects.

Where were A. Hecht's primary interests in his poetry?

His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work.[1]

How did Hollander view poetry?

Hollander stressed the importance of hearing poems out loud: 'A good poem satisfies the ear. It creates a story or picture that grabs you, informs you and entertains you.[9] The poet needing to be aware of the 'sound of sense;the music of speech'.[10] To Hollander, verse was a kind of music in words , and he spoke eloquently about their connection with the human voice.[11]

What is the subject of Dickinson's " The Soul selects her own Society"?

How the soul seeks companions, and how "she" often is satisfied with just one; The Soul selects her own Society — Then — shuts the Door — To her divine Majority — Present no more —

What is the irony of the publication of his imagist poems like "This is just to say"?

However, Williams, like his peer and friend Ezra Pound, had already rejected the Imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 1923.

What were hte views of the Harlem Renaissance artists?

Hughes and his contemporaries had different goals and aspirations than the black middle class. They criticized the men known as the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance: W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Alain LeRoy Locke, as being overly accommodating and assimilating eurocentric values and culture to achieve social equality. Hughes and his fellows tried to depict the "low-life" in their art, that is, the real lives of blacks in the lower social-economic strata. They criticized the divisions and prejudices based on skin color within the black community.[

What about Hughes' politics?

Hughes was accused of being a Communist by many on the political right, but he always denied it. When asked why he never joined the Communist Party, he wrote, "it was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept." In 1953, he was called before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He stated, "I never read the theoretical books of socialism or communism or the Democratic or Republican parties for that matter, and so my interest in whatever may be considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely emotional and born out of my own need to find some way of thinking about this whole problem of myself."[74]

What is the opening quatrain to "I Dwell in Possibility"?

I dwell in Possibility — A fairer House than Prose — More numerous of Windows — Superior — for Doors —

What are the words to "This is Just to Say..."

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

What is the final line of Wright's "Lying in a Hammock..."

I have wasted my life.

in terms of form, what are the three different parts of auden's elegy for yeats?

I: Free form. No rhymes. No metrical pattern. It's free, free, free. II: Unrhymed hexameter. Each line has twelve beats, but they don't rhyme. III: Rhymed eight-beat couplets. There are eight beats (or syllables) per line. And each line rhymes with the one next to it.

What is the purpose of Moo'res "Arctic OX"

IN it she evokes the low brow world of advertising

What is the subject of Whitman's "As I Ebbed on the Ocean of Life"?

If "Out of the Cradle" describes the birth and adolescence of a poet, then "As I Ebb'd" poem is one of mid-life crisis. This is Whitman's "Dejection Ode," the place where he faces up to the fact that his poetry might not be doing what he wants it to be doing.The occasion of the poem is a walk along the beach, during which the narrator is "seeking types" and trying to create poetry. Suddenly he is struck by massive doubt, and sees his poetry as a manifestation of ego that approaches neither the universal nor his fundamental self. He sees the shore as a place of wrecks and corpses strewn on the sand, and realizes that he himself will be no more than debris someday.

How does "The Red Wheelbarrow" work as a poem?

If "The Red Wheelbarrow" feels refreshing, it is in part because it releases us from one set of expectations about poetry and appears to give us something genuine and direct. The poem reinforces this sense of refreshment in that the scene described is apparently a sunny moment following a rain. As simple as the poem may seem, the source of its effects is complicated. Some words, such as "wheelbarrow" and "rainwater," are broken apart. It is even possible to see the two-line stanzas as visual representations of a wheelbarrow. For a poem that sounds as if it were speaking naturally, "The Red Wheelbarrow" shows signs that someone arranged its words for some effect.

Milton's L'Allegro is often paired with his ____

Il Penseroso (both pastorals)

What is the subject of Merrill's "A Downward Look"?

In "A Downward Look," the poet peers down on the sky--on the "long, luxurious bath" of his poetic career. From this vantage point, his poems become bath salts scattered to heal, to restore, to preserve. With the confidence that these preservatives give him, the poet announces that he "hardly registers" that the "plug" is about to be pulled on the bath of his mortal life. Instead, he "Still radiates new projects old as day."

What is the subject of roethke's "elegy for jane"?

In "Elegy for Jane" Theodore Roethke mourns the death of the girl whom he identifies in the poem's subtitle as "My Student, Thrown by a Horse." In the first lines of the poem he recalls her very clearly: "I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils; / And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile". He is painting a picture of Jane as the epitome of youth and beauty. This is a stark contrast to her violent death. Jane's radiance, as the poet describes it, makes her death seem even more tragic to the reader.The poet's love for Jane is complicated because the poet does not know how to categorize his affection for Jane: "I, with no rights in this matter, / neither father nor lover." While he is in neither of these roles, the poet feels aspects of both. He admires her beauty as a lover would, yet he also views her as a young person he could teach or guide. That Jane's life was brutally cut short confirms the poet's, and reader's, anguish.

What does Auden accomplish in "In memory...yeats"?

In "In Memory of W.B. Yeats", W.H. Auden writes an elegy to the death and work of Yeats. Auden is particularly concerned with the relationship between humans and the impersonal realm of nature. Throughout "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" Auden personifies nature and weather, juxtaposing it with the man-made world, and humanizing Yeats' poetry. This personification serves to elegize Yeats while simultaneously ushering in a new poet who can transform society.

What is the subject of Shelley's "Mont blanc?

In "Mont Blanc", Percy Shelley compares the power of the mountain against the power of the human imagination. Although he emphasised the ability of the human imagination to uncover truth through a study of nature, he questions the notion of religious certainty. The poet concludes that only a privileged few can see nature as it really is, and are able to express its benevolence and malevolence through the device of poetry.

What is the gist of Frost's "The Figure a Poem makes"?

In "The Figure a Poem Makes," Frost states that a poem should be surprising while still fulfilling its subject. To be a poem, the work's ending must be structured in a way that surprises both the writer and the reader. However, after the initial surprise, the ending must be recognizable as the only possible way the poem could have ended, given its beginning. Frost also emphasizes his perception of the very purpose of poetry. He writes in "The Figure of a Poem" that a true poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom, The figure is the same for love." In this way, a poem becomes a "clarification of life...a momentary stay against confusion...No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader...Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting...

What is the subject of Bishop's "The Map"?

In "The Map," Elizabeth Bishop records her thoughts on the nature of a map's relationship to the real world. Implicitly, the poem asks why maps fascinate people so much. The poet suggests that the human fascination with small-scale representations of land and water has to do with the imagined worlds maps can offer, the images of far-off people and places that maps can bring to mind. More precisely, maps excite the viewer's imagination. "The Map" celebrates the mapmaker's (or poet's) power to create illusion and fantasy as well as new ways of looking at what is real.

What was the basis for Shelley's Ozymandias?

In antiquity, Ozymandias was a Greek name for the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Shelley began writing his poem in 1817, soon after the announcement of the British Museum's acquisition of a large fragment of a statue of Ramesses II from the thirteenth century BC, leading some scholars to believe that Shelley was inspired by this. The 7.25-ton fragment of the statue's head and torso had been removed in 1816 from the mortuary temple of Ramesses at Thebes by Italian adventurer Giovanni Battista Belzoni

For which publication is the british poet mina loy best known?

In 1914, while living in an expatriate community in Florence, Italy, Loy wrote the Feminist Manifesto, for which she is perhaps best known today. The manifesto begins with a direct call on women:[6] The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate. Women if you want to realize yourselves-you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval-all your pet illusions must be unmasked—the lies of centuries have got to go—are you prepared for the Wrench—? There is no half-measure—NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition. Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice-crusades & uniform education-you are glossing over Reality. Professional & commercial careers are opening up for you—Is that all you want ? A galvanising polemic against the subordinate position of women in society, the short text remained unpublished in Loy's lifetime.

With which artistic group did Williams associate in NYC?

In 1915 Williams began to associate with the New York group of artists and writers known as "The Others."[26] Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and the artist Man Ray, they included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Marcel Duchamp.

What was Ginsberg's "Blake Vision"?

In 1948 in an apartment in Harlem, Ginsberg had an auditory hallucination while reading the poetry of William Blake (later referred to as his "Blake vision"). At first, Ginsberg claimed to have heard the voice of God, but later interpreted the voice as that of Blake himself reading Ah, Sunflower, The Sick Rose, and Little Girl Lost, also described by Ginsberg as "voice of the ancient of days".[citation needed] The experience lasted several days. Ginsberg believed that he had witnessed the interconnectedness of the universe. He looked at lattice-work on the fire escape and realized some hand had crafted that; he then looked at the sky and intuited that some hand had crafted that also, or rather, that the sky was the hand that crafted itself. He explained that this hallucination was not inspired by drug use, but said he sought to recapture that feeling later with various drugs.[20] Ginsberg stated: "living blue hand itself [E]xistence itself was God" and "[I] felt a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe."

Where did Ginsberg meet his fellow beat poets and who were they?

In Ginsberg's freshman year at Columbia he met fellow undergraduate Lucien Carr, who introduced him to a number of future Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes.

How did Ginsberg reenter western culture after his travels?

In May 1965, Allen Ginsberg arrived in London, and offered to read anywhere for free.[47] Shortly after his arrival, he gave a reading at Better Books, which was described by Jeff Nuttall as "the first healing wind on a very parched collective mind".[47] Tom McGrath wrote "This could well turn out to have been a very significant moment in the history of England - or at least in the history of English Poetry".[48]

What is the capital of hell?

In Pandæmonium, Satan employs his rhetorical skill to organise his followers;

How does Ginsberg's America in the poem "A Supermarket..." contrast with Whitman's America/

In Story Line, Ian Marshall suggests that the poem is written to show the differences in American life depicted by Whitman and that which faces Ginsberg in the 1950s: "It's the distance of a century—with Civil War and the 'triumph' of the Industrial Revolution and Darwinism and Freud and two world wars, mustard gas, and the hydrogen bomb, the advent of the technological era, Vietnam, and IBM."[13] To Marshall, the poem is meant to show the change from 19th century optimism to the "ennui" portrayed in Ginsberg's poems.[13] Marshall's notion about Ginsberg's portrayal of the evolution of society is shown within the lines, "I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?" [14] In Whitman's day, he would have known the answer to those questions because back then, one would go to the farmer directly to get the products unlike the modern American supermarkets where one does not know where the products come from.

How does Wordworth describe London in "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge"?

In a pastoral way

What was the Imagist Movement?

In a similar way, it was a reaction against the rigid and ordered poetry of the time that led Williams to join Pound, H.D., and others as the core of what became known as the Imagist movement. The Imagists broke from this formulaic poetry by stressing a verse of "swift, uncluttered, functional phrasing."

______ appears before Adam after he and Eve pray in order to show him a vision of _____

In a vision shown to him by the angel Michael, Adam witnesses everything that will happen to mankind until the Great Flood. Adam is very upset by this vision of the future, so Michael also tells him about humankind's potential redemption from original sin through Jesus Christ (whom Michael calls "King Messiah").

How did Hughes innovate in poetic form?

In addition to his example in social attitudes, Hughes had an important technical influence by his emphasis on folk and jazz rhythms as the basis of his poetry of racial pride.

What was WC Williams professional career?

In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pediatrics and general medicine.

What about Bishop's feminism?

In an interview with The Paris Review from 1978, she said that, despite her insistence on being excluded from female poetry anthologies, she still considered herself to be "a strong feminist" but that she only wanted to be judged based on the quality of her writing and not on her gender or sexual orientation.[3][28]

Dover Beach is often acknowledged as the first poem to capture the _____

It is sometimes held up as an early, if not the first, example of the modern sensibility.

Which poetic movements did WC Williams influence?

In his later years, Williams mentored and influenced many younger poets. He had an especially significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s, including the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School.

What was William's epic?

In his modernist epic collage of place entitled Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), an account of the history, people, and essence of Paterson, New Jersey, Williams wrote his own modern epic poem, focusing on "the local" on a wider scale than he had previously attempted. He also examined the role of the poet in American society and famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his poem "A Sort of a Song" and repeated again and again in Paterson).

What did WC Williams say in his preface to Patterson?

In his prefatory notes to the original four-book Paterson, Williams explained "that a man himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions."

What made ee cummings poetry unique?

In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

What is the subject of Frost's "Directive"?

In it the speaker coaxes you to accompany him to a simple, primordial time and place removed from the clamor and chaos of modern urban life-a space of renewal and wisdom, a sanctuary. To arrive at this fantastical, trippy no-place, you have to get lost first; and, "if you're lost enough to find yourself," you'll make your way, in time, to a special goblet lodged in the inside of a tree-trunk, a grail-like chalice that, when drunk from, will make you "whole again beyond confusion."

In keeping with epic conventions, how does PL begin?

In medias res, background is given later

What views did Arnold expound in his "essay on poetry"?

In one of his most famous essays on the topic, "The Study of Poetry", Arnold wrote that, "Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry". He considered the most important criteria used to judge the value of a poem were "high truth" and "high seriousness". By this standard, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales did not merit Arnold's approval. Further, Arnold thought the works that had been proven to possess both "high truth" and "high seriousness", such as those of Shakespeare and Milton, could be used as a basis of comparison to determine the merit of other works of poetry. He also sought for literary criticism to remain disinterested, and said that the appreciation should be of "the object as in itself it really is."

How did Milton have a grand and heroic conception of the poet's vocation?

In opposition to the authority of church and state (a libertarian), Milton believed that the poet's self-reflection and contemplation were important

How was Ginsberg's spirituality similar to Whitman's?

In spite of Ginsberg's attraction to Eastern religions, the journalist Jane Kramer argues that he, like Whitman, adhered to an "American brand of mysticism" that was "rooted in humanism and in a romantic and visionary ideal of harmony among men."[68]

How can Wordsworth's Immortality Ode be divded into three sections?

It is split into three movements: the first four stanzas discuss death, and the loss of youth and innocence; the second four stanzas describes how age causes man to lose sight of the divine, and the final three stanzas express hope that the memory of the divine allow us to sympathise with our fellow man.

What is the subject and thematic importance of Lowell's "Skunk Hour"

In the first four stanzas the narrator describes several residents of his coastal resort town in Maine. In the final four stanzas the narrator isolates himself from the other townspeople, focusing on his inner turmoil. His anguished reverie gives way to a concluding description of other inhabitants of the town, a bold family of hungry skunks in a single-minded and confident search for food. thematically: "Skunk Hour" expresses the turmoil of Lowell's personal life at this crucial point. It is a poem framed by matriarchal images, and built around an analogy between art and voyeurism. It also dramatizes an inner debate between the demands of formality and discretion on the one hand and, on the other, the longing for an open and candid poetry that would capture the life of a privileged and educated American man in the middle of the 20th century.

How does Bishop pun on a location in "the Map"?

In the long central stanza, the map receives the close inspection for which Bishop's poetry is well known. Newfoundland (perhaps "new found land") suggests that the imagination can create new territory, new realities.

What is the subject of Wordsworth's poem "London, 1802"?

In the poem Wordsworth castigates the English people as stagnant and selfish, and eulogises seventeenth-century poet John Milton.

How is Wordsworth's Elegiac Stanzas about memory?

In these lines, Wordsworth acknowledges that our senses "half create" the objects they perceive, but in such a way that points to earlier experiences.

How does form contribute to our understanding of Plath's "Lady Lazarus"?

In this poem a disturbing tension is established between the seriousness of the experience described and the misleadingly light form of the poem. The vocabulary and rhythms which approximate to the colloquial simplicity of conversational speech, the frequently end-stopped lines, the repetitions which have the effect of mockingly counteracting the violence of the meaning, all establish the deliberately flippant note which this poem strives to achieve.

What is the subject of Lowell's poem "man and wife"?

In this poem, Lowell takes a typical dystopic scene (albeit one from a financially comfortable New England lifestyle). His wife is suffering from clinical depression, and needs to be heavily medicated (Miltown was a popular, and fashionable, tranquilizer). Lowell is with her. He looks out at the neat suburban landscape, and thinks back to their privileged youth and courtship. The wealthy, stable world outside is very different from the desperate mental torture his wife is going through now.

What is the subject of Wilbur's "Love calls..."

In this poem, Wilbur presents a person waking up in the morning and looking outside at laundry that has just been hung on the clothesline and imaging, in a half-aware slumber, that the clothes and sheets hung there are moved by angels, not the wind. He examines the balance between the material world and the spiritual world. This poem's central image, of laundry waving on a line, opens up the poem to issues of existence, morality and religion.

How was Adrienne RIch politicaly active?

Increasingly militant, Rich hosted anti-war and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment; tensions began to split the marriage, Conrad fearing that his wife had lost her mind.[9] The couple separated in mid-1970 and shortly afterward, in October, Conrad drove into the woods and shot himself.[9][13] - objectived to vietnma

What allusion does Frost include in "Birches"?

Inspired by medieval cosmology and by a famous passage from Shelley's "Adonais" (an elegy for Keats, about poetic power cut off in mid-career by death), Frost writes of all the broken ice-glass: "You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen."

What is thes ubject of Dickinson's "Much Madness is Divinest Sense"?

It can be said to represent her sense of humor, or rebellion, as well as her sense of frustration as an intelligent female living in a world that was dominated by dictatorial males. The poem can also reflect her anger, for although she was described as quiet spoken and demure, Dickinson did not hold back her strongest sentiments when it came to writing them. Read in another view, the poem could be taken to express Dickinson's fear of literal madness.

What is the significance of Williams poem "Between Walls"?

It captures everyday observations in the hospital

What is the gist of Shelley's A Defense of Poetry?

It contains Shelley's famous claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".Shelley writes in Defence that while "ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created," and leads to a moral civil life, poetry acts in a way that "awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought"...In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley argued that the invention of language reveals a human impulse to reproduce the rhythmic and ordered, so that harmony and unity are delighted in wherever they are found and incorporated, instinctively, into creative activities: "Every man in the infancy of art, observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which highest delight results..." This "faculty of approximation" enables the observer to experience the beautiful, by establishing a "relation between the highest pleasure and its causes". Those who possess this faculty "in excess are poets" and their task is to communicate the "pleasure" of their experiences to the community. Shelley does not claim language is poetry on the grounds that language is the medium of poetry; rather he recognises in the creation of language an adherence to the poetic precepts of order, harmony, unity, and a desire to express delight in the beautiful. Aesthetic admiration of "the true and the beautiful" is provided with an important social aspect which extends beyond communication and precipitates self-awareness. Poetry and the various modes of art it incorporates are directly involved with the social activities of life. Shelley nominated unlikely figures such as Plato and Jesus in their excellent use of language to conceive the inconceivable. For Shelley, "poets ... are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society..." Social and linguistic order are not the sole products of the rational faculty, as language is "arbitrarily produced by the imagination" and reveals "the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension" of a higher beauty and truth. Shelley's conclusive remark that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" suggests his awareness of "the profound ambiguity inherent in linguistic means, which he considers at once as an instrument of intellectual freedom and a vehicle for political and social subjugation"

How does Satan trick Eve?

Satan, disguised in the form of a serpent, successfully tempts Eve to eat from the Tree by preying on her vanity and tricking her with rhetoric.

What makes Bishop's "The Man-moth" unique among her poetry?

It is a poem unlike the rest of Bishop's work in that it leans toward the surreal. The abstract images in this poem leave "The Man-Moth" open to a diverse range of interpretations. Indeed, the poem may be read as a meditation on the interplay between light and dark. It has also been suggested that the poet's destructive bouts with alcoholism might have influenced the poem, as the image of the Man-Moth going backward on a too fast train is an experience that the poem associates with poison. Another interpretation, based on the significance of the Man-Moth's attempts to reach the moon, suggests that the poet is attempting to express her spirituality.

What is parataxis, a trope that Ginsberg used?

It is also used to describe a technique in poetry in which two images or fragments, usually starkly dissimilar images or fragments, are juxtaposed without a clear connection. Readers are then left to make their own connections implied by the paratactic syntax. Ezra Pound, in his adaptation of Chinese and Japanese poetry, made the stark juxtaposition of images an important part of English language poetry.

What is the subject of Plath's "Lady Lazarus"?=

It is known as one of her "Holocaust poems", along with "Daddy" and "Mary's Song".[1] She develops a German image to denote Nazism and in turn, oppression. She accounts this connotation to the doctors in the poem, such as calling the doctor Herr Doktor, because they continue to bring her back to life when all she wants is to finally die. This is the speaker's third time facing death. She faces once every decade; the first was an accident and the second a failed attempt at reaching death. At the end of the poem, when the speaker experiences the unwanted rebirth, she is represented by the image of a phoenix (a mythical bird that is burned alive and then reborn in the ashes). This next decade will be different for the speaker because she plans to "eat" the men, or doctors, so they cannot revive her next time she faces death.

What is teh significance of the speaker's voyeurism in "Skunk HOur"?

It is not long before we realize the explanation of Lowell's reluctance to assume responsibility. He is engaged in illicit and voyeuristic activity, spying on the "love-cars" in which young lovers, inspired by the era's pop songs, are pursuing their furtive trysts. The link between poetry and voyeurism is the vertebral metaphor of the poem: Lowell's spying is a metaphor for his art, which, as he was coming to realize, could not be as honest as it needed to be without revealing confidences and risking pain. Even as he finds himself drawn toward a new, more candid type of poetry, he worries ("My mind's not right") that this desire is a manifestation of a base impulse, perhaps even a consequence of his mental instability.

volta?

Italian word for "turn." In a sonnet, the volta is the turn of thought or argument: in Petrarchan or Italian sonnets it occurs between the octave and the sestet, and in Shakespearean or English before the final couplet. See Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt, I Know Where Is an Hind" and William Shakespeare's Sonnet CXXIX, "Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame" for examples of voltas of each type.

Why did Hughes' popularity diminish later in this career?

It was Hughes's belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that "most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been."

What is the subject of Wright's "Lying in a Hammock"?

It was William Wordsworth's famous definition of poetry in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800) that moved the whole notion of poetry away from product, as words written on paper, to process, as "spontaneous overflow of powerful emotionsrecollected in tranquility." Wright's tranquil moment in a hammock, however, requires no recollection. Unlike William Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," this poem appears to be a moment experienced more than a moment remembered. The poem unfolds a series of epiphanies as the poet observes the world from his hammock on a summer day.

What about the reception history of Donne's verse?

It was pretty much lost to history until, In the first two decades of the 20th century Donne's poetry was decisively rehabilitated.

What is the significance of the Place de la Concorde in "Sleeping on the Ceiling"?

It was the site of the guillotine and the end of utopian views of teh French Rev.

What is the personal context for Wiliams publication of "Asphodel"?

It was written by a man in his 70s who had to type it with the fingers of one hand, who could sometimes barely see. he was confessing previous adulteries to his wife

How have critics seen medieval theology in "The Phoenix and the Turtle"?

It's about a "mystical union"; the three-part structure also evokes the trinity

What makes "once by the pacific" unique among frost's works?

It's not set in New Eng. Where many of his poems play with form, "Once by the Pacific" adheres to it strictly, and it is composed as a straightforward sonnet. Nevertheless, like most of Frost's poems, "Once by the Pacific" draws on nature and natural images to comment on the human condition, and on humanity's fleeting place within nature.

Whom did Plath marry?

Plath first met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, at a party in Cambridge

How does donne's verse represent shifts in poetic tradition?

John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech

Who was one of Lowell's ancestors?

Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist theologian (about whom Lowell wrote the poems "Mr. Edwards and the Spider," "Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts," "After the Surprising Conversions," and "The Worst Sinner"

What part of England was Wordsworth born in?

Lake District

Plath is credited with advancing the genre ____ poetry in the mid 20th c.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems, and Ariel.

Larkin became a prominent member of which poeitic movement? What were their poetic values?

Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, and a leading voice of what came to be called "The Movement," a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas. Like Hardy, Larkin focused on intense personal emotion but strictly avoided sentimentality or self-pity.

When was Shakespeare writing?

Late 16th early 17th c.

How did Ginsberg bridge two cultural movements later in his careeR?

Later in his life, Ginsberg formed a bridge between the beat movement of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, befriending, among others, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and Bob Dylan. Ginsberg gave his last public reading at Booksmith, a bookstore in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, a few months before his death.[51]

What is the subject of Bishop's "Over 2,000 Illustrations..."

Like "The Map," it's a poem that is in part about a representation. She, by implication, begins the poem by referring to a book, presumably the one mentioned in the title, "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance." Thus should have been our travels: serious, engravable. Our travels, our experience in the world, our experience of geography, and our experience as geography should have been, ought to be, serious. It ought to add up to something. I ought to be engravable, something that might be bound in book form. Against this ideal or this model of things, where illustration and text are bound together, Bishop poses her own wayward experience - her travels - which this poem will list, record, and give us fragments of. What the poem reveals to us is a world of discrete fragments, parts that gain meaning, if at all, through their mere adjacency or through the perceiver who holds them together - holds them together through the quality of her attention and the sensibility behind it, a form of attention for Bishop that is always pushing towards revelation and seeking meaning or something beyond surface detail but never quite arrives there and never, in that sense, arrives at a place of repose or rest or home.The poem is composed almost of the fragments of a travel diary or bits of a letter, and if you read Bishop's letters you will indeed find observations like this on every page.Looking at this series, this way Bishop's life seems to add up, she continues reflecting on the poem and on its structure. Everything only connected by "and" and "and." Open the book.Bishop wants us - as in "The Map," too - she wants the book as something that can be held and touched. She's a marvelously tactile poet.

What was M. Moore's view of religion?

Like her mother and her older brother, Moore remained a devoted Presbyterian, strongly influenced by her grandfather, approaching her Christian faith as a lesson in strength vindicated through trials and temptations; her poems often deal with the themes of strength and adversity.[1] She thought "it was not possible to live without religious faith".

What is the subject of "THe City Limits"?

Like much of A. R. Ammons's poetry, "The City Limits" explores the uneasy relationship between modern civilization and the natural world. The images that Ammons uses in this poem, such as his consideration of the sound of "birds' bones" or of the "glow-blue" of the bodies of flies, make readers aware of the subtle things in the natural world that ordinarily would go unnoticed. He also draws readers' attention to dark, fearsome, and unpleasant aspects of the world around them, such as the "guts of natural slaughter" that flies feed on and the "dark work of the deepest cells," an allusion to cancer. It is typical of Ammons's poetry that he is able to show the duality of the way that humans view nature. After making his readers uncomfortable, Ammons ends by making a convincing case that understanding can make fear of nature "calmly turn to praise."

What is the theme of "Star in a Stoneboat"?

Like other poems, he's focusing on his preference for imagination over practicality. he'd rather imagine something cool about this object than know the science

What are the three primary synbols in "WHen Lilacs last..."

Loving describes the trinity of symbols, the lilacs (the poet's perennial love for Lincoln), the fallen star (Lincoln), and the hermit thrush (death, or its chant), as brilliant.[66]

With whom did Lowell have a close working relationshiop?

Lowell had a close friendship with the poet Elizabeth Bishop that lasted from 1947 until Lowell's death in 1977. Both writers relied upon one another for critiques of their poetry...Lowell also maintained a close friendship with Jarrell from their 1937 meeting at Kenyon College until Jarrell's 1965 death. Lowell openly acknowledged Jarrell's influence over his writing and frequently sought out Jarrell's input regarding his poems before he published them.

Which three poets did Lowell identify as big influences on him?

Lowell stated, "The poets who most directly influenced me ... were Allen Tate, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams. An unlikely combination! ... but you can see that Bishop is a sort of bridge between Tate's formalism and Williams's informal art."[3]

What was Lowell's mental state?

Lowell suffered from manic depression and was hospitalized many times throughout his adult life for this mental illness.[56] On multiple occasions, Lowell was admitted to the famous psychiatric hospital, McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, and one of his poems, "Waking in the Blue" references his stay there.[57] Although Lowell's manic depression was often a great burden (for himself and his family), the subject of that mental illness led to some of his most important poetry, particularly as it manifested itself in his book Life Studies.[58]

Why was Lowell imprisoned for several months?

Lowell was a conscientious objector during World War II[25] and served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

What kinds verse did Lowell write?

Lowell was capable of writing both formal, metered verse as well as free verse; his verse in some poems from Life Studies and Notebook fell somewhere in between metered and free verse.

What are the qualities of Lowell's early work?

Lowell's early poetry was "characterized by its Christian motifs and symbolism, historical references, and intricate formalism."[60] His first three volumes were notably influenced by the New Critics, particularly Lowell's former professors, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate.[5] Lowell's first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness (1944) was also highly influenced by Lowell's conversion to Catholicism, leading Tate to call Lowell "a Catholic poet" in his introduction to the volume

What other poetic form did Wyatt use, other than the sonnet?

Lyrics (the Lute...)

Who are Satan's comrades in PL?

Mammon and Beelzebub. Belial and Moloch are also present

Which poetic trope did Ginsberg clearly borrow from Whitman/

Many of Ginsberg's early long line experiments contain some sort of anaphora, repetition of a "fixed base" (for example "who" in "Howl", "America" in America) and this has become a recognizable feature of Ginsberg's style.[citation needed] He said later this was a crutch because he lacked confidence; he did not yet trust "free flight".[citation needed] In the 1960s, after employing it in some sections of "Kaddish" ("caw" for example) he, for the most part, abandoned the anaphoric form.[77][93]...and LONG LINES

How does Ammons use punctuation?

Many readers and critics have noted Ammons's idiosyncratic approach to punctuation. Lehman has written that Ammons "bears out T. S. Eliot's observation that poetry is a 'system of punctuation'." Instead of periods, some poems end with an ellipsis; others have no terminal punctuation at all. The colon is an Ammons "signature"; he uses it "as an all-purpose punctuation mark." The colon permits him to stress the linkage between clauses and to postpone closure indefinitely.... When I asked Archie about his use of colons, he said that when he started writing poetry, he couldn't write if he thought "it was going to be important," so he wrote "on the back of used mimeographed paper my wife brought home, and I used small [lowercase] letters and colons, which were democratic, and meant that there would be something before and after [every phrase] and the writing would be a kind of continuous stream

What is the importance and subject of Moore's the "fish"?

Marianne Moore wrote "The Fish" in 1918 but it was published later in her first collection, Poems, in 1921. This collection was published, without her knowledge, in England by two of Moore's friends. An example of rhymed syllabic verse, "The Fish" highlights Moore's ability for precise visual description. Ironically, the poem is not about fish at all, but rather the relationship among a seaside cliff, sea life, and the sea itself. Sunlight acts upon the sea and its creatures, and the sea acts upon a cliff. Moore highlights the interdependence of these elements in the shape of the poem, which moves like a wave, surging towards a subject, then retreating from it. The narrator of the poem describes this interdependence in a hard, emotionally detached manner. Her images paradoxically suggest both fecundity and abundance and starkness and death. This dichotomy drives the poem, but Moore never resolves the paradox; rather, she suggests that it is a necessary part of the world. The processes of life and death are evident everywhere, and as much a part of the human as the natural landscape.

whats the poetic form of moore's "in distrust""?

Marianne Moore's "In Distrust of Merits" is a poem so artfully constructed that although it seems to read like prose, it actually follows a consistent pattern that contains many conventional poetic forms. Each of the eight stanzas comprises ten lines. The first four lines of each stanza form a quatrain in which the second and fourth lines rhyme, while the next two lines are decasyllabic (ten syllables to a line). These lines are followed by another quatrain that differs from the first one in that both alternating lines rhyme. Although Moore imposes this formal pattern of syllabic grouping and internal as well as end rhyme, the rhymes are muted and the lines remain flexible.

What is the subject of Moore's poem "Marriage"?

Marianne Moore's poem "Marriage" is her longest work. "Marriage" is an example of modernism, meaning that it breaks with traditional Western poetry in both style and subject matter. Published in 1923, "Marriage" explores traditional gender roles and the relationships between men and women. In this poem, Moore studies the dynamics of a traditional marriage, as well as its role in culture and society. While this is not an overtly feminist work, in it Moore does argue that the institution of marriage results in a loss of freedom and independence for women, which reflects the patriarchal attitudes and overwhelming pressure to marry that women faced at the time. It is interesting that "Marriage" is Moore's longest poem because she never married, choosing instead to remain single.

what is the theme of frost's "directive"?

Maybe it goes without saying that Frost was talking on some level about the experience of reading poetry. To be sure, there's something fundamentally disorienting-and therefore humbling-about poetry. One of its hallmarks is its sheer strangeness, how it greets us with all the discomfiting weirdness of a foreign language, playing stubbornly by its own rules, making words stretch and contort in ways they're not accustomed to doing. Better: it forces us to learn our own native language afresh with each successive poem we encounter. But-here's what old Bob was getting at, I think-this can be an amazingly healthful and exhilarating experience. Poems make us willfully submit to getting lost, to abandoning all our stale habits of mind and everything we think we know-and this lostness turns out to be the prerequisite to order, understanding, wholeness. We're temporarily reduced to children learning to read and see from scratch, and we end up, if we're persistent, having remapped the coordinates of our selves and our place in the world.

What does Satan do after successfully tricking Eve?

Meanwhile, Satan returns triumphantly to Hell, amidst the praise of his fellow fallen angels. He tells them about how their scheme worked and human kind has fallen, giving them complete dominion over Paradise.

Most of Il Pensero consists of poetic visions of...

Melancholy

What is the subject of Merrill's "Self-Portrait in a Tyvek Windbreaker"?

Merrill's poem dramatizes the very problem that concerned Bishop and Pascal. Merrill represents himself as a superior outsider who, dressed down in a Tyvek windbreaker with a world map on it, is mistaken for "Everyman . . . the whole world's pal!" N ot recognizing that his green "terry-cloth headband" is the laurel that distinguishes him as a poet, people on the street, to his veiled horror, hail him familiarly. A "smilingas-if-I-should-know-her teenager," also wearing a windbreaker, waves at him, and though he doesn't welcome the wave he returns it "Like an accomplice." His good manners have no substance, however, as his Pascalian imperative for reciprocating the greeting makes clear: we must behave as if others are our equals, though we know they are not. Merrill cannot quite make himself treat the people on the street reciprocally as equals, and his scorn, which is perceptible, leads him to question whether there is such a thing as "we": "'We'? A few hundred decades ...II Between us and the red genetic muck" doesn't make for an "Everyman."

How do Merwin's verses wrestle with languae?

Merwin has created a body of poetry that is a severe meditation on the nature and condition of language; his is a body of poetry, moreover, that deeply probes the ways in which language crucially mirrors human identity and human action. Nevertheless, even while his poetry relentlessly tests the possibilities of language, Merwin also celebrates the concentrated power of language.

Merwin is best known for his poetry about _____

Merwin is probably best known for his poetry about the Vietnam War,

What do wek now abotu Merwin's book "the Lice"?

Merwin's 1967 collection, The Lice, which manifested itself almost entirely in the "open form" praised earlier. Trading punctuation for "a quality of transparency," the poems enact their subject matter by requiring the reader to navigate syntax without expected assistance. "Punctuation nails the poem down on the page," Merwin writes. "When you don't use it the poem becomes more a thing in itself, at once more transparent and more actual." The tone and subjects of the poems also reached a stylistic climax which rose from Merwin's personal experience during the mid-1960s. "Most of The Lice was written at a time when I really felt there was no point in writing," Merwin stated in an interview with David L. Elliot. "I got to the point where I thought the future was so bleak that there was no point in writing anything at all. And so the poems kind of pushed their way upon me when I wasn't thinking of writing. I would be out growing vegetables and walking around the countryside when all of a sudden I'd find myself writing a poem, and I'd write it." As Jarold Ramsey states in a critical essay on Merwin's work: "What makes The Lice special in a decade of writing that will be remembered for its apocalyptic obsessions is an eerie sense of bearing witness to a world already in mid-apocalypse. These are not portentous poems so much as notations on the experience that it is all but over and done with, that we are merely 'the echo of the future,' and 'tomorrow belongs to no one.'" Many poems in the collection (which was tentatively titled The Glass Towers while in manuscript form) address nonhuman subjects ("For a Coming Extinction," "In a Clearing," "My Brothers the Silent," "The Herds," "In Autumn," "Death of a Favorite Bird," and "Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise"), and others are overtly political ("Caesar" and "The Asians Dying"

Which group of poets did Bishop really admire?

Metaphysical poets, especailly Herbert

How is the depiction of the Son of God in PL consistent with Milton's theological beliefs?

Milton believed in a subordinationist doctrine of Christology that regarded the Son as secondary to the Father, His "great Vice-gerent" (5.609). The poem is not explicitly anti-trinitarian, but is consistent with Milton's heretical convictions.

Which scientist does Milton describe ( and defend) in PL?

Milton refers to Galileo's telescope and to the view of the heavens that it provided. As a victim of persecution, Galileo became for Milton a symbol of the adversity that a spokesperson of the truth underwent.

how does Milton critique heroism?

Milton uses the epic form simultaneously as a critique of an earlier tradition of heroism and as a means of advancing a new idea of Christian heroism for which the crucial virtues are faith, patience, and fortitude.

What is the stated purpose of PL?

Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men".[5]

What are the two main narrative arcs of PL?

Milton's story has two narrative arcs, one about Satan (Lucifer) and the other following Adam and Eve.

How did Moore rethink meter for English poetry?

Moore often composed her poetry in syllabics, she used stanzas with a predetermined number of syllables as her "unit of sense", with indentation underlining the parallels, the shape of the stanza indicating the syllabic disposition, and her reading voice conveying the syntactical line.[26] These syllabic lines from "Poetry" illustrate her position: poetry is a matter of skill and honesty in any form whatsoever, while anything written poorly, although in perfect form, cannot be poetry:

Which poetic movement helped to advance Moore's career early on by publishing her works?

Moore's first book, Poems, was published in 1921 by the Imagist poet H.D. and her partner, the British novelist Bryher, without Moore's permission.[3][6] Moore's later poetry shows some influence from the Imagists' principles.[7]

What is ironic about the way that Arnold memorializes Clough in Thyrsis?

Most of the poem criticizes Clough, rather than honors his memory. Instead of lamenting his death, Arnold suggests that Clough gave up, that he chose to give in to the world rather than persevere in the quest he and Arnold were leading towards a greater existence. Now that Clough has died, there is no possibility that Clough will ever resume the quest with his friend.

How did Ginsberg bridge music and poetry?

Music and chanting were both important parts of Ginsberg's live delivery during poetry readings.[63] He often accompanied himself on a harmonium, and was often accompanied by a guitarist. It is believed that the Hindi and Buddhist poet Nagarjuna had introduced Ginsberg to the harmonium in Banaras.

Which line is repeated at the end of the "Negro Speaks of Rivers"?

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

What about the narrative sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets?

No evidence that they are arranged chronologically by publication, or that they are sequenced according to author's intent. Many of the sonnets are clearly related though.

What allusions are included in the Kraken?

Norse legends of sea monster...Tennyson was no doubt influenced by the Biblical Leviathan, and especially its presence in John Milton's Paradise Lost. In Book One, Milton writes, "There Leviathan / Hugest of living creatures, on the deep / Stretch'd like a promontory." Other possible sources are Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-1833), which challenged the geological timetable of the Bible, and T.C. Croker's Fairy Legends (1828), a book Tennyson owned.

What is the subject of "o sweet spontaneous earth"?

O sweet spontaneous" simply states that philosophers, scientists, and the religious have used earth for their own wants and needs. Nonetheless, every year earth still gives us spring. A common theme with Cummings is that life goes on, and this poem is another example of that.

How have critics described O'hara's poetry?

O'Hara's poetry is personal in tone and in content and described as reading "like entries in a diary".[1] Poet and critic Mark Doty has said O'Hara's poetry is "urbane, ironic, sometimes genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny" containing "material and associations alien to academic verse" such as "the camp icons of movie stars of the twenties and thirties, the daily landscape of social activity in Manhattan, jazz music, telephone calls from friends".[2] O'Hara's writing "sought to capture in his poetry the immediacy of life, feeling that poetry should be "between two persons instead of two pages."[1]

What does Ginsberg remember about his father and poetry?

Of his father Ginsberg said "My father would go around the house either reciting Emily Dickinson and Longfellow under his breath or attacking T. S. Eliot for ruining poetry with his 'obscurantism.' I grew suspicious of both sides...his father wrote poetry.

What were two exceptionally influential pastorals that preceded Lycidas?

Of the works by these poets, the fifth and tenth eclogues of Virgil's Bucolics and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579) were exceptionally influential.

What are some distinguishing features of Plath's work?

Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.

What is the subject of frost's "after apple picking"?

On the simplest narrative level, the poem describes how, after a strenuous day of apple-picking, the speaker dreams dreams in which his previous activities return to him 'magnified', blurred and distorted by memory and sleep. On a deeper level, however, it presents us with an experience in which the world of normal consciousness and the world that lies beyond it meet and mingle. 'I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight', says the narrator, and this strangeness, the 'essence of winter sleep', is something he shares with the reader.

Which three memorable poems are in Bishop's book Geography III?

One Art, The Moose, and The Waiting Room

With which poet did WC Williams have a particularly dynamic relationshiop?

One of Williams's most dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg. Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth section of that work. Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg's important first book, Howl and Other Poems in 1956.

What was Williams famous manifesto for poetry?

One of his rallying cries throughout his career was "No ideas but in things," a manifesto for concrete realities against philosophical abstractions

What are the two contrasting patterns in Shakespeare's sonnets?

One sequence about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion (the "dark lady"); one sequence about conflicted love for a fair young man (the "fair youth")

What is thes ubject of "Mowing"?

Ostensibly, the speaker muses about the sound a scythe makes mowing hay in a field by a forest, and what this sound might signify. He rejects the idea that it speaks of something dreamlike or supernatural, concluding that reality of the work itself is rewarding enough, and the speaker need not call on fanciful invention.

How was cummings' verse connected with Romanticism?

Other critics focused on the subjects of Cummings' poetry. Though his poetic language was uniquely his own, Cummings' poems were unusual because they unabashedly focused on such traditional and somewhat passe poetic themes as love, childhood, and flowers. What Cummings did with such subjects, according to Stephen E. Whicher in Twelve American Poets, was, "by verbal ingenuity, without the irony with which another modern poet would treat such a topic, create a sophisticated modern facsimile of the 'naive' lyricism of Campion or Blake." This resulted in what Whicher termed "the renewal of the cliche." Penberthy detected in Cummings a "nineteenth-century romantic reverence for natural order over man-made order, for intuition and imagination over routine-grounded perception. His exalted vision of life and love is served well by his linguistic agility. He was an unabashed lyricist, a modern cavalier love poet. But alongside his lyrical celebrations of nature, love, and the imagination are his satirical denouncements of tawdry, defiling, flat-footed, urban and political life—open terrain for invective and verbal inventiveness."

What is the subject of "Out of the Cradle..."

Out of the ceaselessly rocking cradle of the sea waves, a memory comes back to the poet. He recalls that as a child, he left his bed and "wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot" in search of the mystery of life and death. He is a man now but "by these tears a little boy again," and he throws himself on the shore "confronting the waves." In this experience the boy attempted to fuse the vision of the sea with that of the bird, and this knowledge marked the beginning of the poet in him. The bird, the solitary singer, was a projection of the boy's consciousness. The sea, like the "old crone rocking the cradle," whispered the key word in his ears.

What were e pounds political views?

Outraged by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini's Italian Fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested by American forces in Italy in 1945 on charges of treason, after which he spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage that he said triggered a mental breakdown, "when the raft broke and the waters went over me." Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.[2] While in custody in Italy, he had begun work on sections of The Cantos that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948), for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress, triggering enormous controversy. He was released from St. Elizabeths in 1958, thanks to a campaign by his fellow writers, and returned to live in Italy until his death. His political views ensure that his work remains as controversial now as it was during his lifetime;

Whom did Plath study under in her early career?

Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evening sat in on creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck)

What is Part 4 of "howl"?

Part III, in relation to Parts I, II, and IV is "a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory," according to Ginsberg. It is directly addressed to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949; called "Rockland" in the poem, it was actually Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute. This section is notable for its refrain, "I'm with you in Rockland," and represents something of a turning point away from the grim tone of the "Moloch"-section. Of the structure, Ginsberg says Part III is, "pyramidal, with a graduated longer response to the fixed base."

How has Ammons been contrasted with Elliot and Pound in terms of his handling of subjec tmatter?

Partisan Review contributor Paul Zweig agreed that "unlike [T. S.] Eliot or Stevens, Ammons does not write well about ideas." Zweig felt that "only when his poem plunges into the moment itself does it gain the exhilarating clarity which is Ammons' best quality." Zweig asserted that Ammons's strength is in his form. "At first glance," he wrote, "Ammons . . . seems to be a maverick, working vigorously against the limitations of the plain style. . . . Yet his best poems are closer to the plain style than one might think. It is when one hears William Carlos Williams in the background of his voice that the poems work clearly and solidly."

didactic examples?

Poetry that instructs, either in terms of morals or by providing knowledge of philosophy, religion, arts, science, or skills. Although some poets believe that all poetry is inherently instructional, didactic poetry separately refers to poems that contain a clear moral or message or purpose to convey to its readers. John Milton's epic Paradise Lost and Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man are famous examples. See also William Blake's "A Divine Image," Rudyard Kipling's "If—," and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam."

syllabic verse?

Poetry whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses. Marianne Moore's poetry is mostly syllabic

Genre of "Lycidas"?

Pastoral elegy

Whom did Wyatt translate and imitate?

Petrarch

Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt" is an imitation of a sonnet by ______

Petrarch

What about the form of Milton's sonnet "How Soon Hath Time..."

Petrarchan Sonnet. Each quatrain is a complete sentence. Same with the last sestet.

What is the poetic form of Wordsworth's poem, "London, 1802"

Petrarchan sonnet

What is the subject and poetic form of Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge"

Petrarchan sonnet about the Thames, as seen from the bridge

____ interrupts the monologue in Lycidas to explain how ...

Phoebus, "the sun-god, an image drawn out of the mythology of classical Roman poetry, [who] replies that fame is not mortal but eternal, witnessed by Jove (God) himself on judgment day."

What is the paradox of "The Phoenix and the Turtle"?

Phoenixes are reborn.

What is the gist of Pope's Essay on Criticism?

Pope contends in the poem's opening couplets that bad criticism does greater harm than bad writing: Despite the harmful effects of bad criticism, literature requires worthy criticism.Pope delineates common faults of poets, e.g., settling for easy and cliché rhymes:...Throughout the poem, Pope refers to ancient writers such as Virgil, Homer, Aristotle, Horace and Longinus. This is a testament to his belief that the "Imitation of the ancients" is the ultimate standard for taste. Pope also says, "True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, / As those move easiest who have learned to dance" (362-363), meaning poets are made, not born.

How does pope make "the rape of hte lock" mock epic?

Pope's use of the mock-epic genre is intricate and exhaustive. The Rape of the Lock is a poem in which every element of the contemporary scene conjures up some image from epic tradition or the classical world view, and the pieces are wrought together with a cleverness and expertise that makes the poem surprising and delightful. Pope's transformations are numerous, striking, and loaded with moral implications. The great battles of epic become bouts of gambling and flirtatious tiffs. The great, if capricious, Greek and Roman gods are converted into a relatively undifferentiated army of basically ineffectual sprites. Cosmetics, clothing, and jewelry substitute for armor and weapons, and the rituals of religious sacrifice are transplanted to the dressing room and the altar of love....Pope's poem uses the traditional high stature of classical epics to emphasise the triviality of the incident. The abduction of Helen of Troy becomes here the theft of a lock of hair; the gods become minute sylphs; the description of Achilles' shield becomes an excursus on one of Belinda's petticoats. He also uses the epic style of invocations, lamentations, exclamations and similes, and in some cases adds parody to imitation by following the framework of actual speeches in Homer's Iliad. Although the poem is humorous at times, Pope keeps a sense that beauty is fragile, and emphasizes that the loss of a lock of hair touches Belinda deeply. As his introductory letter makes clear, women in that period were essentially supposed to be decorative rather than rational, and the loss of beauty was a serious matter. "The New Star," Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for The Rape of the Lock The humour of the poem comes from the storm in a teacup being couched within the elaborate, formal verbal structure of an epic poem. It is a satire on the contemporary society which showcases the lifestyle led by some people of that age. Pope arguably satirises the society by being a part of it rather than standing outside and looking down on the fellow beings. Belinda's legitimate rage is thus alleviated and tempered by her good humour, as directed by the character Clarissa.

When were Wyatt's poems published?

Posthumously

What often earns Wyatt praise? criticism?

Praise: psychological intelligence & emotional complexity; Criticism: he's not a technician

What was his job after he established himself as poet?

Prof of poetry at Oxford, where he was the first to teach in English

How does rhetoric factor into Satan's character?

Satan's persuasive powers are evident throughout the book; not only is he cunning and deceptive, but he is also able to rally the fallen angels to continue in the rebellion after their agonizing defeat in the Angelic War. He argues that God rules as a tyrant and that all the angels ought to rule as gods

What is the form of Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas"?

Quatrains

What is the form of Wyatt's "My Lute Awake"?

Quintains with the last line of each stanza as a refrain with tone of resignation ("my lute and I have done")

How did Ginsberg see his own writing as a spiritual quest?

Relating his poetry to his interest in the spiritual, Ginsberg once said: "Writing poetry is a form of discovering who I am, and getting beyond who I am to free awakeness of consciousness, to a self that isn't who I am. It's a form of discovering my own nature, and my own identity, or my own ego, or outlining my own ego, and also seeing what part of me is beyond that."

chiasmus?

Repetition of any group of verse elements (including rhyme and grammatical structure) in reverse order, such as the rhyme scheme ABBA. Examples can be found in Biblical scripture ("But many that are first / Shall be last, / And many that are last / Shall be first"; Matthew 19:30). See also John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty").

What is the poetic form for Wyatt's "They Flee from Me"?

Rhyme royal (seven line stanza in iambic pentameter with rhyming scheme); formally, this poem is a ballad, but its subject is more sonnet-like

What is the subject of Wilbur's "A Baroque Wall-Fountain..."

Richard Wilbur's poem "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" consists of a long meditation that springs from a careful examination of two types of fountains in Rome, the first constructed in a large public park, the second, the fountains placed at Saint Peter's Basilica. In comparing the two fountains, Wilbur questions the very essence of the human denotations of sacred and profane.

What is the subject of a "Star in a Stoneboat"?

Robert Frost's poem "A Star in a Stoneboat" is a hyperbole for "a meteorite found in a field and supposed to be a star which has fallen to earth."

How has roethke's poetry been characterized?

Roethke's work is characterized by its introspection, rhythm and natural imagery.

Where did Bishop live for 15 years with her lover?

Santos, Brazil

How should readers think of Satan, in the context of epic tradition?

Satan may be best defined as a tragic or Hellenic hero. he is not perfectly good and that his defeat is caused by a tragic flaw. As Satan causes both the downfall of man and the eternal damnation of his fellow fallen angels despite his dedication to his comrades, Satan is perhaps an ur-example of the trope. In addition, Satan's Hellenic qualities, such as his immense courage and perhaps, lack of completely defined morals, compound on his tragic nature.[8]

what did sex represent to ginsberg?

Sex represented a number of things to Ginsberg: the body, which he considered the home of the soul, and which therefore needed to be brought into poetry (though he struggled for years to accept this truth himself); a potential doorway to altered consciousness; and a source of intense emotions ranging from pleasure to power to shame.

What is the subject of Dickinson's "Wild Nights"?

Sexual desire...opening stanza: Wild Nights — Wild Nights! Were I with thee Wild Nights should be Our luxury!

How does the subject matter of Shakespeare's sonnets represent a shift away from Petrarchan subject (the idealized beloved)?

Shakespeare focuses on the subjectivity of the speaker.

How did Ginsberg's relationship with his mother inform his poetrY?

She had mental breakdowns....also tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists and was soon taken to Greystone, a mental hospital; she would spend much of Ginsberg's youth in mental hospitals.[31][32] His experiences with his mother and her mental illness were a major inspiration for his two major works, "Howl" and his long autobiographical poem "Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)".[33]

How has Dickinson been categorized as a poet?

She has been regarded, alongside Emerson (whose poems Dickinson admired), as a Transcendentalist.[143] However, Farr disagrees with this analysis, saying that Dickinson's "relentlessly measuring mind ... deflates the airy elevation of the Transcendental".

who was moore's lifelong friend?

She was a lifelong ally and friend of the American poet Wallace Stevens, as demonstrated in her review of Stevens's first collection, Harmonium

With whom did Bishop have a close friendship through letter writing?

She was introduced to Robert Lowell by Randall Jarrell in 1947, and they became great friends, mostly through their written correspondence, until Lowell's death in 1977. After his death, she wrote, "our friendship, [which was] often kept alive through years of separation only by letters, remained constant and affectionate, and I shall always be deeply grateful for it."[12] They also influenced each other's poetry. Lowell cited Bishop's influence on his poem "Skunk Hour" which he said, "[was] modeled on Miss Bishop's 'The Armadillo.'"[13] Also, his poem "The Scream" is "derived from...Bishop's story In the Village."[14] "North Haven," one of the last poems she published during her lifetime, was written in memory of Lowell in 1978.

Moore's poetry is often celebrated for...

She wrote with the freedom characteristic of the other modernist poets, often incorporating quotes from other sources into the text, yet her use of language was always extraordinarily condensed and precise, capable of suggesting a variety of ideas and associations within a single, compact image. In his 1925 essay "Marianne Moore," William Carlos Williams wrote about Moore's signature mode, the vastness of the particular: "So that in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events."

How is Satan's stance similar to Milton's on religion?

Similar to Milton's republican sentiments of overthrowing the King of England for both better representation and parliamentary power, Satan argues that his shared rebellion with the fallen angels is an effort to "explain the hypocrisy of God", and in doing so, they will be treated with the respect and acknowledgement that they deserve. As scholar Wayne Rebhorn argues, "Satan insists that he and his fellow revolutionaries held their places by right and even leading him to claim that they were self-created and self-sustained" and thus Satan's position in the rebellion is much like that of his own real world creator.[14]

What is the form of Wyatt's "Blame Not My Lute"?

Six septets (7 line stanzas) with the last line a refrain: "Blame Not My Lute."

What have feminists celebrated about Plath's work?

Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius."[30] Writer Honor Moore describes Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened [...] Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified.

What poetic form did Wyatt introduce to English?

Sonnet

What about the sonnet form of Milton's "Methought I Saw..."?

Sonnet XXIII combines two traditions, with its argument developing in the way of the English sonnet (in quatrains and a couplet) while its rhyme scheme follows the Italian form.[3

What did Wyatt borrow from Petrarch?

Sonnet form and its general themes or topics

What is the poetic form of Wyatt's "The Long Love that in my Thought doth Harbor" ?

Sonnet; this is another imitation of Petrarch

who are some of teh specific enemies in Howl?

Specific enemies begin to appear: the FBI, capitalism, the atomic scientists at Los Alamos, the police.

what is sprung rhythm and who coined the term?

Sprung rhythm is a poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables.[1] The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this previously unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al. He used diacritical marks on syllables to indicate which should be drawn out (acute e.g. á ) and which uttered quickly (grave, e.g., è). Some critics believe he merely coined a name for poems with mixed, irregular feet, like free verse. However, while sprung rhythm allows for an indeterminate number of syllables to a foot, Hopkins was very careful to keep the number of feet he had per line consistent across each individual work, a trait that free verse does not share. Sprung rhythm may be classed as a form of accentual verse, due to its being stress-timed, rather than syllable-timed,[2] and while sprung rhythm did not become a popular literary form, Hopkins's advocacy did assist in a revival of accentual verse more generally.[3]

which Christian figure appears in Lycidas so that Milton can convey his own voice?

St. Peter appears simply as an apostolic authority, through whom Milton might express his frustration with unworthy members of the English clergy.[15] Fraser also agrees that St. Peter, indeed, serves as a vehicle for Milton's voice to enter the poem.[16]

What else about his sonnets?

Steven Gould Axelrod wrote that, "[Lowell's concept behind the sonnet form] was to achieve the balance of freedom and order, discontinuity and continuity, that he [had] observed in [Wallace] Stevens's late long poems and in John Berryman's Dream Songs, then nearing completion. He hoped that his form ... would enable him 'to describe the immediate instant,' an instant in which political and personal happenings interacted with a lifetime's accumulation of memories, dreams, and knowledge."[87] Lowell liked the new form so much that he reworked and revised many of the poems from Notebook and used them as the foundation for his next three volumes of verse, all of which employed the same loose, fourteen-line sonnet form.

what is unusual about wallaces stevens publications?

Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine)[29] was written at age 35, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50.

What is the line break pattern with which Williams experimented?

Stylistically, Williams also worked with variations on a line-break pattern that he labeled "triadic-line poetry" in which he broke a long line into three free-verse segments. A well-known example of the "triadic line [break]" can be found in Williams's love-poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower."[20]

What is the poetic genre of Hughes "Theme for ENglish B"?

Stylistically, the piece is a dramatic monologue (in the voice of an African-American student at Columbia University, where Hughes himself spent a dissatisfying period during the early 1920s), and it utilizes the superficially simplistic rhymes for which Hughes had become famous.

Why is frost often compared to Emerson and Dickinson?

Such symbolic import of mundane facts informs many of Frost's poems,

objective correlative?

T.S. Eliot used this phrase to describe "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion" that the poet feels and hopes to evoke in the reader ("Hamlet," 1919). There must be a positive connection between the emotion the poet is trying to express and the object, image, or situation in the poem that helps to convey that emotion to the reader. Eliot thus determined that Shakespeare's play Hamlet was an "artistic failure" because Hamlet's intense emotions overwhelmed the author's attempts to express them through an objective correlative. In other words, Eliot felt that Shakespeare was unable to provoke the audience to feel as Prince Hamlet did through images, actions, and characters, and instead only inadequately described his emotional state through the play's dialogue. Eliot's theory of the objective correlative is closely related to the Imagist movement.

What are the words to "In a station at the metro"?

THE apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough

How is Frost like Pound?

Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound

Who were the biggest poetic influences on Wilbur's style of poetry?

Taking the English metaphysical poets as his models in his own work, Wilbur has excelled at polished, witty, self-contained lyrics with formal stanzas and controlled metrics. He believes, as with his signature poem "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," in spiritual impulses grounded in ordinary life. Yet the most ordinary things can, in the intense elegance of a civilizing gaze, become extraordinary.

What is the subject of "The Moose"?

Taking up a theme she explored in poems such as "The Fish" and "The Armadillo," "The Moose" meditates on the transcendent power of nature, and its often startling intrusion into our modern lives. The poem also maps the physical and psychological terrain of Nova Scotia, where the young Bishop was taken to live with her maternal grandparents after being effectively orphaned by her father's early death and her mother's institutionalization for mental illness. The speaker describes the setting, drifts asleep on a bus, which separates her from nature. suddenly the bus stops for a moose, the wild invades the domestic, and vice versa, everyone remarks "curious creatures", then they drive off and the smell of moose is replaced by teh smell of gasoline in teh last line.

What is hell called in PL?

Tartarus

What did Milton say about his abandonment of rhyme?

That it was an extension of his own personal liberty.

What is the poetic form of Frost's "Design" and why is that form important?

That the poem was conceived in the form of a sonnet, I would propose, is the poet's final irony, for the strict formal design which characterizes the sonnet apes and mimes the internal argument of the poem

How did Arnold change the poetic line in dover beach and other works?

That's the payoff for this experimentation. Breaking the iambic traditions passed down from Shakespeare and Milton helps him to make us feel how the world itself is changed and broken. Pretty cool, huh?...he deviates from iambnic pentameter occasionally...We get more or less the same effect with the rhyme. There's a ton of rhyme in this poem, but it doesn't follow a regular pattern from one stanza to the next. Let's look first at the second stanza (we'll put the rhyming sounds in bold and match them up using capital letters).Faith" and "breath" is close at best—a kind of near rhyme. Again, this choice of form fits naturally with Arnold's larger point in this poem. In this dark new world, faith is out of place

What is the subject of Thyrsis?

The 24-stanza poem eulogizes his friend, poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had died in 1861. In rich pastoral imagery Arnold recalls the Oxford countryside the two explored as students in the 1840s and reviews the fate of their youthful ideals after they left the university. Thyrsis is considered one of Arnold's finest poems

What inspired Crane's "the bridge"?

The Bridge was inspired by New York City's "poetry landmark",[2] the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane lived for some time at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, where he had an excellent view of the bridge; only after The Bridge was finished did Crane learn that one of its key builders, Washington Roebling, had once lived at the same address.[3]

What is the genre of Hart Crane's "The Bridge"?

The Bridge, first published in 1930 by the Black Sun Press, is Hart Crane's first, and only, attempt at a long poem. (Its primary status as either an epic or a series of lyrical poems remains contested; recent criticism tends to read it as a hybrid, perhaps indicative of a new genre, the "modernist epic.

what are metaphysical poets known for?

The Metaphysical Poets are known for their ability to startle the reader and coax new perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy, and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit.

What is the subject and poetic form of Frost's "The Oven Bird"?

The Oven Bird," one of Frost's unforgettable sonnets. Like "Mowing," it is a poem implicitly about the act of writing, about a bird who "knows in singing not to sing," which is to say that he must abandon the worn-out poetical diction and rhetorical conventions of his predecessors and offer a new kind of song. "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." The last two lines resonate with implications. What poet now writing is not faced with this dilemma? The world as we find it, much as the world Frost found, is sadly diminished, and the poet's job in the twentieth century has been what to make of this world, how to respond to its indignities, its savage and vengeful self-absorption, its greed, its abandonment of common decency and justice.

What is distinctly Romantic about "Out of the Cradle" other than the natural imagery?

The Romantic influence is apparent in this poem as Whitman recalls a moment in childhood from the wise, adult perspective

How does Milton use a pathetic fallacy in Lycidas?

The poet notes the "'heavy change' suffered by nature now that Lycidas is gone—a 'pathetic fallacy' in which the willows, hazel groves, woods, and caves lament Lycidas's death."

What is the gist of Yeats "the Symbolism of Poetry"?

The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900), he uses Jungian concepts of archetypes to explain why great poets and painters use symbols that have nearly universal effectiveness. He states in "The Philosophy of Shelley's Poetry" (1900) that any writer sensitive to the supernatural will share "the sudden conviction that our little memories are but a part of some great Memory that renews the world and men's thoughts age after age, and that our thoughts are not, as we suppose, the deep, but a little foam upon the deep." The connection between artist and audience that makes symbolism resonate is explained, to Yeats, by our common link to the supernatural, not by genetics or other scientifically explainable means. Yeats therefore preferred the Romantics and the symbolist writers to the Victorians, arguing in "The Symbolism of Poetry" that Tennyson was hobbled by "brooding over scientific opinion." The Romantics, with their emphasis on nature for inspiration, were more sensitive to the occult forces that Yeats associated with forests, lakes, and other natural settings. He particularly admired Shelley and Blake, the latter as much for his painting as for his poetry. Shelley is a central example in "The Symbolism of Poetry,"

which poet helped wc williams to publish some of his works?

The Tempers, was published by a London press through the help of his friend Ezra Pound, whom he met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania.

What are the final two lines of "Tell all the truth but tell it slant"?

The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —

What kind of diction does Donne use in the "Holy Sonnets"?

The poems are "suffused with the language of bodily decay" expressing a fear of death that recognizes the impermanence of life by descriptions of his physical condition and inevitability of "mortal flesh" compared with an eternal afterlife.

What is the form and subject of Auden's "From the very first coming down?"

The above lines represent Auden in his youth, a prodigy, according to some critics. There is no playfulness of craft to this work reminiscent of Auden's later periods—the syllabic meter is strict, using rhymed couplets of nine syllables per line in the first stanza and eight per line in the second with barely a hint of variety. There is, however, a cool analytical approach to the subject matter, almost impersonal. The central theme is the cycle of life as represented through a failed love. Most interesting—and typical of Auden—is the usage of scientific, in this case electrical, imagery in the poem. He uses terms like "arc," "circuit," and "shunting" in the context of the work, which I read as comparing the connection of a relationship to the connection of an electrical circuit. This provides a contrast with the more pastoral/natural elements of the poem: storm, bird, seasons, Spring and Autumn, etc. This is Auden the post-Romantic; we don't necessarily feel the grief of the voice character in this work, but are presented with a dialectical insight through the varying details provided within the poem. Although "The Letter" may be construed as more technically primitive and somewhat obscure as compared with Auden's later craft, it reflects a style that would be refined and evolve into clever twists of form and content.

What is ironic abotu the way that Auden's "MUsee de Beaux arts" is structured?

Usually we move from description to analysis. Here, Auden slams us with analysis before giving us context.

What is the refrain that is repeated in Bishop's "One Art"?

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

What is the gist of Perloff's "The Poetics of Indeterminacy"?

The assumption of a single set of criteria identifying a single canonical trajectory was and still is, for anyone who reads this book, convincingly dispensed with. In its place is not only a richly complicated genealogy but an argument for still emerging values and principles of composition that would radically transform the sense of what a poem could be over the next four decades. From Perloff's preface: What we loosely call "Modernism" in Anglo-American poetry is really made up of two separate though often interwoven strands: the Symbolist mode that Lowell inherited from Eliot and Baudelaire and, beyond them, from the great Romantic poets, and the "anti-Symbolist" mode of indeterminacy or "undecidability," of literalness and free play, whose first real exemplar was the Rimbaud of the Illuminations. While some of the ideas that went into this study were crystallizing, I accepted an assignment to write a book on the poetry of Frank O'Hara. This particular project, completed in 1977, reenforced my conviction that we cannot really come to terms with the major poetic experiments occurring in our own time without some understanding of what we might call "the French connection" — the line that goes from Rimbaud to Stein, Pound, and Williams by way of Cubist, Dada, and early Surrealist art, a line that also includes the great French/English verbal compositions of Beckett. It is this "other tradition" (I take the phrase from the title of a poem by John Ashbery) in twentieth-century poetry that is the subject of my book.[1]...The central thrust of Marjorie Perloff's book may be simply and schematically stated: that two traditions, both deriving from French poetry, are evident in twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. In the ascendent has been the post-symbolist tradition which found its most persuasive voice in T. S. Eliot. 'The Other Tradition' (currently packaged as 'post-modernism') derives not from Baudelaire, but from Rimbaud. These two traditions are convincingly lined up with Jakobson's generally unconvincing dichotomy between the paradigmatic or metaphoric axis of language (which corresponds to 'symbolism') and the contiguous or metonymic axis (which corresponds to indeterminacy or 'the mode of undecidability'). On one hand we have the symbolic patterning of Eliot's The Waste Land; on the other the 'open field of narrative possibilities') of Stein or Ashbery. Somewhere in between lies a writer like Stevens, capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a 'thematic motif' but unable to adopt this 'irreducible ambiguity' into his formal concerns. Simple 'ambiguity', so reified by Anglo-American criticism, has been eclipsed it would seem.

Where did Eliz Bishop go to college?

Vassar

What is the poetic form of Bishop's "One Art"?

Villanelle

What is the poetic form of Wordworth's "The Solitary Reader"?

The four eight-line stanzas of this poem are written in a tight iambic tetrameter. Each follows a rhyme scheme of ABABCCDD,

What is the subject of Auden's "Musee to Beau Arts"

The basic premise of the poem is response to tragedy, or as the song goes "Obla Di, Obla Da, Life Goes On." The title refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels. Auden visited the museum in 1938 and viewed the painting by Brueghel, which the poem is basically about. Generalizing at first, and then going into specifics the poem theme is the apathy with which humans view individual suffering. Auden wrote that "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." The poem juxtaposes ordinary events and exraordinary ones, although extraordinary events seem to deflate to everyday ones with his descriptions. Life goes on while a "miraculous birth occurs", but also while "the disaster" of Icarus's death happens.

How many days does the Angelic War in PL last?

The battles between the faithful angels and Satan's forces take place over three days.

What is the fourth and final section of "howl"?

The closing section of the poem is the "Footnote", characterized by its repetitive "Holy!" mantra, an ecstatic assertion that everything is holy. Ginsberg says, "I remembered the archetypal rhythm of Holy Holy Holy weeping in a bus on Kearny Street, and wrote most of it down in notebook there .. I set it as 'Footnote to Howl' because it was an extra variation of the form of Part II."[14]

which three poets in particular had a significant nfluence on wililams pursuit of poetry?

The conflict Williams felt between his parents' hopes for their son's success in medicine and his own less conventional impulses is mirrored in his poetic heroes of the time—John Keats and Walt Whitman. Keats's traditionally rhymed and metered verse impressed the young poet tremendously. "Keats was my God," Williams later revealed; and his first major poetic work was a model of Keats's "Endymion." In contrast, Whitman's free verse offered "an impulse toward freedom and release of the self," said Donald Barlow Stauffer. Williams explained how he came to associate Whitman with this impulse toward freedom when he said, "I reserved my 'Whitmanesque' thoughts, a sort of purgation and confessional, to clear my head and heart from turgid obsessions." Yet, by his first year at Pennsylvania Williams had found a considerably more vivid mentor than Whitman in a friend, Ezra Pound.

What kind of letter did Ginsberg receive from a colleague after the release of Howl?

The day after the performance, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, by then an accomplished poet and owner of City Lights Books in North Beach, sent Ginsberg a letter, saying, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?"—a reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson's letter to Walt Whitman exactly a century earlier.

What about a descent into the underworld (epic convention ) in PL?

The descent into the underworld, a fourth epic convention, occurs in Paradise Lost as early as book 1, which shows the punishment of the fallen angels in Hell.

what characteristics distinguish mina loy's verse?

The eccentric vocabulary and syntax of Loy's free-verse poems and their sardonic treatment of love can puzzle and offend, but no reader can question the work's originality nor the poet's fierce intelligence.

Which poets did Life Studies really influence?

The editors of Contemporary Literary Criticism wrote that the book "exerted a profound influence on subsequent American poets, including other first generation confessionalists such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton."[39] In a 1962 interview, Sylvia Plath stated that Life Studies had influenced the poetry she was writing at that time (and which her husband, Ted Hughes, would publish posthumously as Ariel a few years later): "I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell's poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much."[40][41] In an essay published in 1985, the poet Stanley Kunitz wrote that Life Studies was "perhaps the most influential book of modern verse since T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land."[6][42]

What is teh gist of Sidney's An Apology for poetry?

The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. The significance of the nobility of poetry is its power to move readers to virtuous action. True poets must teach and delight - a view that dates back to Horace.

What is the gist of Keats perspective on poetry as expressed in his letters?

The excerpts from Keats's letters give us glimpses of his thoughts about poetry, and of the concerns that occupied him in 1817 and 1818, the years before he would write some of his best-known works. His letters have also served generations of writers with provocative ideas and insights into poetry and the creative process. In the letters, he writes about beauty, the imagination, and the concept of "Negative Capability"—"when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." Keats also address the merits of other poets, including Milton, Keat's contemporary Wordsworth, and Shakespeare, who Keats admired above all other writers. He often calls out for qualities he wishes he could attain as a poet and person, as when he asks "for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!" In other letters Keats shows his talent for original metaphors and insights into life, as when he likens life to a "large Mansion of Many Apartments," in which we slowly feel and find our way through darkened rooms." Such observations and imaginative spurts make Keats's letters required reading for any poet or critic and as important as Keats's poems.

What made Dickinson's style unique?

The extensive use of dashes and unconventional capitalization in Dickinson's manuscripts, and the idiosyncratic vocabulary and imagery, combine to create a body of work that is "far more various in its styles and forms than is commonly supposed". Late 20th-century scholars are "deeply interested" by Dickinson's highly individual use of punctuation and lineation (line lengths and line breaks

What is the context and the subject for Bishop's poem "The Bight"?

The fact that Elizabeth Bishop wrote The Bight on her 37th birthday is significant. In the poem, the poet looks out to sea and searches for symbols that have significance in her own life. She takes soundings from the sea, diving deep into her subconscious in order to examine what those soundings mean.

What is the irony in the last line of "THeme for English B"?

The final line, then, is full of irony. "This is my page for English B" re-situates the student--from whom we now understand the teacher himself can learn--in his student role, completing his assignment, while it also stresses the word "my" which, given how the speaker has complicated the whole issue of identity and self-determination, seems finally both simplistic and ironic.

What is the subject of Ammons' "Gravelly Run"?

The final poem in Corsons Inlet, "Gravelly Run," reiterates this generative poetic principle. At the same time, it announces the recalcitrance of nature's mutable forms. Ammons writes that there is no use to make any philosophies here: I see no god in the holly, hear no song from the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never heard of trees: surrendered self among unwelcoming forms: stranger, hoist your burdens, get on down the road The conclusion of "Gravely Run" articulates the paradox of "the surrendered self / among unwelcome forms." Ammons, attracted to transcendence but acutely aware of its costs, articulates the alienated condition of a poet who forever will feel himself an exile.

What are the three conceits in Donne's "A Valediction of Weeping"?

The first conceit, in the first stanza, is of tears as coins and fruit. In the second stanza, the conceit is of tears as worlds or globes, again picturing them as round. The third stanza uses the conceit of tears as tides and seas.

Why was Plath's collection Ariel significant?

The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. Robert Lowell's poetry may have played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's 1959 book Life Studies as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death.[58] Posthumously published in 1966, the impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as '"Tulips", "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus".[58] Plath's work is often held within the genre of confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries,

What is the subject and form of Hopkins "God's Grandeur"

The first four lines of the octave (the first eight-line stanza of an Italian sonnet) describe a natural world through which God's presence runs like an electrical current, becoming momentarily visible in flashes like the refracted glintings of light produced by metal foil when rumpled or quickly moved. Alternatively, God's presence is a rich oil, a kind of sap that wells up "to a greatness" when tapped with a certain kind of patient pressure. Given these clear, strong proofs of God's presence in the world, the poet asks how it is that humans fail to heed ("reck") His divine authority ("his rod"). The second quatrain within the octave describes the state of contemporary human life—the blind repetitiveness of human labor, and the sordidness and stain of "toil" and "trade." The landscape in its natural state reflects God as its creator; but industry and the prioritization of the economic over the spiritual have transformed the landscape, and robbed humans of their sensitivity to the those few beauties of nature still left. The shoes people wear sever the physical connection between our feet and the earth they walk on, symbolizing an ever-increasing spiritual alienation from nature. The sestet (the final six lines of the sonnet, enacting a turn or shift in argument) asserts that, in spite of the fallenness of Hopkins's contemporary Victorian world, nature does not cease offering up its spiritual indices. Permeating the world is a deep "freshness" that testifies to the continual renewing power of God's creation. This power of renewal is seen in the way morning always waits on the other side of dark night. The source of this constant regeneration is the grace of a God who "broods" over a seemingly lifeless world with the patient nurture of a mother hen. This final image is one of God guarding the potential of the world and containing within Himself the power and promise of rebirth. With the final exclamation ("ah! bright wings") Hopkins suggests both an awed intuition of the beauty of God's grace, and the joyful suddenness of a hatchling bird emerging out of God's loving incubation.

Augustan Age?

The first half of the 18th century, during which English poets such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift emulated Virgil, Ovid, and Horace—the great Latin poets of the reign of the Emperor Augustus (27 BCE to 14 CE). Like the classical poets who inspired them, the English Augustan writers engaged the political and philosophical ideas of their day through urbane, often satirical verse. Browse more Augustan poets.

What is the subject of Plath's "The Moon and the Yew Tree"?

The fundamental theme of the poem revolves around her bleakness owing to the untimely death of her father and strained relations with her mother. The acute isolation, in turn, calls on her to connect with her surroundings, with nature. The attempt, however, fails. Here, "The Moon" has been personified as her mother while "The Yew Tree" is the symbol of her father.

How does "The Bight" work allegorically?

The metaphors Bishop employs in The Bight would appear to be representative of her own work. The 'crumbling ribs of marl' with clay and lime deposits indicate the poet's preoccupation with time and what time represents in terms of the work. Bishop tells us 'the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches' - the pilings being the piles of poems that lie stacked and unfinished on her desk. The Bight is the poem the poet is presently working on. The 'gas flame' of the sea suggests the poem will burst into flame depending on the intensity of the heat applied. The poet working on combustible material and reasons that if one were Baudelaire it's possible the heat applied would turn the words into 'marimba music'.

How does Lycidas lead Milton to question himself?

The impossibility of accounting for a world that would so unfairly take the life of a young man forces Milton to question his own poetic vocation: "What boots it with incessant care / To tend the homely slighted Shepherd's trade, / And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?" The "Shepherd's Trade" could have either the classical sense of the poet or the more modern sense of the Christian pastor, the keeper of the flock—or, perhaps, both.

What is the gist of Johnson's citique of metaphysical poets?

The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and, to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and, very often, such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables... The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtilty surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.[2]

What is the poetic form of Wilbur's poem "Mind"?

The meter is Iambic Pentameter and the poem itself consists of three quatrains with an interlocking rhyme scheme. The first rhyme of the first quatrain is a slant rhyme - bat/wit. Other than that, everything else about the poem is conventional.

What is the subject of hopkins "as kingfishers catch fire"?

The kingfisher, one of the most colorful birds in England, "catches fire" as the light brings its plumage to a bright radiance. Similarly, the iridescent wings of the dragonfly glint with a flame-like beauty. These two optical images are followed by three aural ones: the tinkling sound of pebbles tossed down wells, the plucking of strings on a musical instrument, and the ringing of bells as the "bow" swings like a pendulum to strike the metal side. Each of these objects does exactly what its nature dictates, in a kind of (unwilled) self-assertion. More generally, every "mortal thing" might be thought to do the same: to express that essence that dwells inside ("indoors") of it. "Selves" (assumedly from the infinitive "to self," or "to selve,") is Hopkins's coined verb for that self-enacting, and he elaborates upon this process in the lines that follow: to "self" is to go oneself, to speak and spell "myself," to cry, "What I do is me: for that I came." The next stanza extends this concept from object to man. "Justices" (from the made-up infinitive "to justice") becomes the verb for that which the just man does or enacts. He harbors a grace (bestowed by God) that reveals itself in all his "goings" or everyday activities. And he acts before God as the being that God sees him as, which is Christ, who is both man and God. Christ dwells everywhere—in bodies and in the expressions of human eyes. It is the beauty lent by Christ's presence that makes "the features of men's faces" lovely in God's sight.

What is unusual about the land and sea in "the Map"?

The land is active--it seems to lean, lift, and draw the water around itself. The poet asks, "is the land tugging at the sea from under?" Because these questions go unanswered, the reader begins to understand that not everyone interprets a map the same way.

What is the subject of Frost's "birches"?

The main image of the poem is of a series of birch trees that have been bowed down so that they no longer stand up straight, but rather are arched over. While the poet quickly establishes that he knows the real reason that this has happened--ice storms have weighed down the branches of the birch trees, causing them to bend over--he prefers instead to imagine that something else entirely has happened: a young boy has climbed to the top of the trees and pulled them down, riding the trees as they droop down and then spring back up over and over again until they become arched over. This tension between what has actually happened and what the poet would like to have happened, between the real world and the world of the imagination, runs throughout Frost's poetry and gives the poem philosophical dimension and meaning far greater than that of a simple meditation on birch trees.

elision?

The omission of unstressed syllables (e.g., "ere" for "ever," "tother" for "the other"), usually to fit a metrical scheme. "What dire offence from am'rous causes springs," goes the first line of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, in which "amorous" is elided to "am'rous" to establish the pentameter (five-foot) line.

What biblical allusion is in Bishop's "roosters"?

The poem alludes to the story in the Bible of Peter's denial of Jesus. After Jesus told Peter that he'd deny him three times before the cock crowed, it came to pass; the cock's crow in the Bible to me represented awareness and alertness-it made Peter aware of his sin and alert that he just confirmed what Jesus had told him. I think that cock crows nowadays make us aware and alert that it is morning and that it is time for us to wake up.

What is the subject of Shelley's "Ode to the west wind"?

The poem begins with three sections describing the wind's effects upon earth, air, and ocean. The last two sections are Shelley speaking directly to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him like a leaf, a cloudw or a wave and make him its companion in its wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and spread them all over the world so that the youth are awoken with his ideas. The poem ends with an optimistic note which is that if winter days are here then spring is not very far.

How can Wordsworth's Prelude be divivded into three sections?

The poem falls rather naturally into three consecutive sections: Books 1-7 offer a half-literal, half-fanciful description of his boyhood and youthful environment; Book 8 is a kind of reprise. Books 9-11, in a more fluid and narrative style, depict his exciting adventures in France and London. Books 12-14 are mostly metaphysical and are devoted to an attempt at a philosophy of art, with the end of the last book giving a little summary.

What is the subject of Tennysons' Mariana"?

The poem follows a common theme in much of Tennyson's work—that of despondent isolation. The subject of Mariana is a woman who continuously laments her lack of connection with society. The isolation defines her existence, and her longing for a connection leaves her wishing for death at the end of every stanza. The premise of Mariana originates in William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure,

what is hte form of "as kingfishers..."

The poem is an Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet: 14 lines divided into an octave and a sestet. Hopkins's variations on straight iambic pentameter enhance the ideas the poem expresses, and the poem provides one of the best examples of his dexterous use of musical effects. For example, examine the third line: "As tumbled over rim in roundy wells." While the line is neat iambic pentameter, the iambs fall in such a way that they split the words "tumbled," "over," and "roundy." This splitting (which Hopkins called "counterpoint") effects a regular, quick, and broken feel, and re-creates beautifully the reverberations of stones plunking down a well.

What is the poetic form of Wordworth's "Immortality Ode"

The poem is an irregular Pindaric ode in 11 stanzas, irregular rhyming

What is the subject of The Scholar Gypsy?

The poem's subject is a legendary Oxford scholar who gives up his academic life to roam the world with a band of Gypsies, absorbing their customs and seeking the source of their wisdom. The poem is filled with vivid descriptions of the countryside around Oxford. He repeats the gist of Glanvill's story, but extends it with an account of rumours that the scholar gipsy was again seen from time to time around Oxford. Arnold imagines him as a shadowy figure who can even now be glimpsed in the Berkshire and Oxfordshire countryside, "waiting for the spark from Heaven to fall",[4] and claims to have once seen him himself. He entertains a doubt as to the scholar gypsy's still being alive after two centuries, but then shakes off the thought. He cannot have died:

How is Wordsworth's Prelude like Whitmans' Leaves?

The poem, revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry.

What is the subject of Ginsberg's "America"?

The poem is in the first person and reads much like a monologue. It is presented in a somewhat rambling, stream of consciousness format. America is a largely political work, with much of the poem consisting of various accusations against the United States, its government, and its citizens. Ginsberg uses sarcasm to accuse America of attempting to divert responsibility for the Cold War ("America you don't want to go to war/ it's them bad Russians / Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. / And them Russians"), and makes numerous references to both leftist and anarchist political movements and figures (including Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys and the Wobblies). Ginsberg's dissatisfaction, however, is tinged with optimism and hope, as exemplified by phrases like "When will you end the human war?" (as opposed to "why don't you...?"). The poem's ending is also highly optimistic, a promise to put his "queer shoulder to the wheel," although the original draft ended on a bleaker note: "Dark America! toward whom I close my eyes for prophecy, / and bend my speaking heart! / Betrayed! Betrayed!"[1] America is also an intensely personal poem, making references to Ginsberg's use of marijuana and his homosexuality, as well as fellow Beat writer William S. Burroughs. There is considerable reference to the alienation Ginsberg felt as a result of the culture of the McCarthy era combined with the values implied in the burgeoning suburbia. The longest line in the poem is a sentimental description of a Communist meeting his mother took him to when he was a child, ending abruptly with the ironic pronouncement "Everybody must have been a spy." .

How does Donne's "The Good MOrrow" depict love?

The poem is primarily to do with evolving love; the movement from pure lust, in the first stanza, to a nascent and evolving spirituality which liberates the lovers because they no longer "watch each other out of fear" but can instead see clearly...BLOOM says he intertwines sensual and spiritual love

What is the form of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"?

The poem is written in blank verse and comprises verse-paragraphs rather than stanzas. It would have seemed like prose to its first readers. Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains some elements of the ode and of the dramatic monologue. The apostrophe at its beginning is reminiscent of the 18th century landscape-poem, but it is now agreed that the best designation of the work would be the conversation poem, which is an organic development of the loco-descriptive.[2] The silent listener in this case is Wordsworth's sister Dorothy,

What is the subject of Milton's "MeThought I Saw..."

The poem recounts a dream vision in which the speaker saw his wife return to him (as the dead Alcestis appeared to her husband Admetus), only to see her disappear again as day comes

What is the subject of Donne's erotic poem "The Flea"?

The poem uses the conceit of a flea, which has sucked blood from the male speaker and his female lover, to serve as an extended metaphor for the relationship between them. The speaker tries to convince a lady to sleep with him, arguing that if their blood mingling in the flea is innocent, then sexual mingling would also be innocent. His argument hinges on the belief that blood mixes during sexual intercourse.[1]

What was the subject of Lowell's "Beyond the Alps' and why was this significant in his career?

The poem was inspired by a trip to Europe that he took with his second wife Elizabeth Hardwick.[2] It documents his journey, by train, through the Alps, from Rome to Paris in 1950 and captures his feelings towards his waning faith in Catholicism. Evidence of this interpretation can be heard at Lowell's 1963 poetry reading at the Guggenheim Museum, when he introduced his reading of "Beyond the Alps" by stating that, "[the poem was] a declaration of my faith or lack of faith." [3] He has stated that "the poem is about people who go beyond nature... Mussolini or the Pope.... What [the poem] means theologically, I think, is impenetrable."[2] The journey away from rome is allegorical. The poem begins Lowell's Life Studies and this is significant because it marks a break from his previous books which were written while Lowell was much more serious, even fervent, about his Catholic faith (and a recent convert as well).

What was Wordsworth's original intent with the "Prelude"?

The poem was intended as the prologue to a long three-part epic and philosophical poem, The Recluse. Wordsworth planned to write this work together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, their joint intent being to surpass John Milton's Paradise Lost

What is the love song of J Alfred Prufrock?

The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri[3] and makes several references to the Bible and other literary works—including William Shakespeare's plays Henry IV Part II, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet, the poetry of seventeenth-century metaphysical poet John Donne, and the nineteenth-century French Symbolists. Eliot narrates the experience of Prufrock using the stream of consciousness technique developed by his fellow Modernist writers. The poem, described as a "drama of literary anguish", is a dramatic interior monologue of an urban man, stricken with feelings of isolation and an incapability for decisive action that is said "to epitomize frustration and impotence of the modern individual" and "represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment".[4] Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, "Prufrock" has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature. Because the poem is concerned primarily with the irregular musings of the narrator, it can be difficult to interpret. Laurence Perrine wrote, "[the poem] presents the apparently random thoughts going through a person's head within a certain time interval, in which the transitional links are psychological rather than logical".[25] This stylistic choice makes it difficult to determine exactly what is literal and what is symbolic. On the surface, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" relays the thoughts of a sexually frustrated middle-aged man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does not.[25][26] The dispute, however, lies in to whom Prufrock is speaking, whether he is actually going anywhere, what he wants to say, and to what the various images refer. The intended audience is not evident. Some believe that Prufrock is talking to another person[27] or directly to the reader,[28] while others believe Prufrock's monologue is internal. Perrine writes "The 'you and I' of the first line are divided parts of Prufrock's own nature",[25] while Mutlu Konuk Blasing suggests that the "you and I" refers to the relationship between the dilemmas of the character and the author.[29] Similarly, critics dispute whether Prufrock is going somewhere during the course of the poem. In the first half of the poem, Prufrock uses various outdoor images (the sky, streets, cheap restaurants and hotels, fog), and talks about how there will be time for various things before "the taking of a toast and tea", and "time to turn back and descend the stair." This has led many to believe that Prufrock is on his way to an afternoon tea, where he is preparing to ask this "overwhelming question".[25] Others, however, believe that Prufrock is not physically going anywhere, but rather, is playing through it in his mind.[28][29] Perhaps the most significant dispute lies over the "overwhelming question" that Prufrock is trying to ask. Many believe that Prufrock is trying to tell a woman of his romantic interest in her,[25] pointing to the various images of women's arms and clothing and the final few lines in which Prufrock laments that the mermaids will not sing to him. Others, however, believe that Prufrock is trying to express some deeper philosophical insight or disillusionment with society, but fears rejection, pointing to statements that express a disillusionment with society, such as "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" (line 51). Many believe that the poem is a criticism of Edwardian society and Prufrock's dilemma represents the inability to live a meaningful existence in the modern world.[30] McCoy and Harlan wrote "For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment."[28] In general, Eliot uses imagery which is indicative of Prufrock's character,[25] representing ageing and decay. For example, "When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" (lines 2-3), the "sawdust restaurants" and "cheap hotels," the yellow fog, and the afternoon "Asleep...tired... or it malingers" (line 77), are reminiscent of languor and decay, while Prufrock's various concerns about his hair and teeth, as well as the mermaids "Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black," show his concern over aging.

Donne's "The Canonization" is about _____ and addressed to _____

all consuming romantic love, addressed to a friend though

What makes Lowell's "man and wife" a significant poem?

The point of the poem is that Lowell manages to present this vision of private mental disintegration in terms of a semi-classical imagery (Dionysian, magnolia, Greenwich Village), and in faultless iambic pentameter (though this breaks down as the poem progresses). Lowell is showing how the horror exists right in the middle of the sheltered lifestyle: this makes us think more carefully about just how much of a benefit it is to be rich and idle, and also reminds us how very fragile human happiness is: All night I've held your hand, as if you had a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad - A common technique in classical painting was to show happy shepherds in a beautiful landscape, and then to place a tomb near the edge of the painting. The proximity of death makes the happiness seem more intense, the nearness of happiness makes death even more terrifying. But Lowell juxtaposes insanity and social privilege. His intention is the same as the old painters.

Which regular poetic form does Dickinson most often employ?

The regular form that she most often employs is the ballad stanza, a traditional form that is divided into quatrains, using tetrameter for the first and third lines and trimeter for the second and fourth, while rhyming the second and fourth lines (ABCB). Though Dickinson often uses perfect rhymes for lines two and four, she also makes frequent use of slant rhyme.[140] In some of her poems, she varies the meter from the traditional ballad stanza by using trimeter for lines one, two and four, while only using tetrameter for line three.

What is the poetic form of Larkin's "Church Going"?

The rhythm of the poem is iambic tetrameter, and it has a strict rhyme of ababcadcd. The language of the poem is conversational, and the narrator poses many interrogatives (asks questions). Larkin uses a lot of religious imagery and words, some are used as they are intended, but others are used in a blasphemous way.

What is the subject of Shelley's "Ode to Intellectual beauty"?

The shadow of a strange power floats unseen throughout the world, entering into man, coming and going mysteriously. Shelley asks this shadow, which he calls a "Spirit of Beauty," where it has gone and why it disappears and leaves us desolate. Then he acknowledges that it is vain to ask this question; one might as well ask why rainbows disappear or why man can both love and hate, despair and hope. No voice from another world has ever answered these questions. The "names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven" are the record of men's vain attempts to get answers to such questions. Only the light of the Spirit of Beauty gives grace and truth to the restless dream which life is. If the Spirit of Beauty remained constantly with man, man would be immortal and omnipotent. It nourishes human thought. The poet beseeches this spirit not to depart from the world. Without it, death would be an experience to be feared....again contrasting with wordsworth's view of nature

What is the subject of Plath's "Colossus"?

The speaker crouches in the ear of a giant statue that overlooks the world, a powerful, multi-layered, and disturbing image that many can relate to even if their relationship with their fathers are not quite akin to Plath's...he tries to grapple with the legacy and memory of her father, who died when she was eight years old. The title and subject of the poem allude to the ancient Greek idea of the colossus, which was a statue that represented a deceased person. The colossus was meant to evoke the individual's presence as well as his absence, thus creating a sense of the uncanny. There is a paradox inherent in its meaning, an attempt to both mourn and celebrate. The Colossus was able to speak from beyond the grave, which illustrates its mysterious, paradoxical allure. The poem also alludes to the Colossus that stood on the island of Rhodes until it was destroyed by an earthquake; it is deemed one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. In the poem, Plath uses the colossus to represent her attempt to reconstruct the father whose absence looms so large in her psyche. By connecting her father to one of the world's great wonders, she acknowledges his power, and yet she is unable to make him speak, therefore simultaneously stressing his impotence. He cannot perform at the level that she expects, considering his greatness. She tries to "dredge the silt from [his] throat," but all he produces for her are terrifying and ludicrous animal sounds. Her challenge, then, is to come to terms with his monumentality while accepting his limitations. As critic Elizabeth Bronfen explains, she is "fully fusing with this human-shaped ruin" who offers "a viable shelter from the contingencies of worldly existence." Even if her devotion to the statue means she must forfeit her individuality, it means she is free from the struggles that come with facing the world as an individual. Bundtzen also interprets the poem through a feminist lens. She sees it as an illumination of "woman's psyche as it is shaped by a patriarchal culture."

What is the subject of "Dream Variations"?

The speaker dreams of a joyful life, proud of blackness. compares nature to himself ("like me"). Night closes the poem, forming the last image of passing time. Through this comparison and this concluding image, Hughes conveys a pride in blackness. Hughes's poems consistently create images and arguments for black pride. I

What is the subject of Williams "Danse Russe"?

The speaker is a husband and father. He is isolated in his own House, not only physically in his "north room", but also as the sole male figure in a family of females or sexually ambiguous babies.Kathleen refers to Kathleen McBride, the Williams' nanny, which places William Carlos Williams immediately in the position of speaker. This is a personal poem

What is the subject of Plath's "Tulips"?

The speaker is in a hospital bed and describes her experience using an image of red tulips (presumably a gift) that interrupt her calm stay in the white hospital.[2] During her stay at the hospital she has given up everything, including her identity, as expressed by the lines:[1] I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons. She wishes to remain in a state of emptiness, but the flowers intrude upon this state:[1] I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. Eileen Aird remarks: "The world of Ariel is a black and white one into which red, which represents blood, the heart and living is always an intrusion."[1][3] Renée R. Curry takes this further by claiming the tulips signify "by their glorious and bold colors, glaring Otherness. The main tension in the poem, therefore, is between the speaker's desire for the simplicity of death and the tulip's encouragement towards life. What attracts her to the sterility of the hospital room is that it allows her to ignore the complications and pains of living. Her "loving associations" have been stripped away, and she feels pure and peaceful. The feelings suggested by her description of the room are hibernation, dormancy, and detachment.

What is the subject of Auden's "Now from my windowsill i watch the night"

The speaker is looking down, noticing objects around the town while mentioning that the date is around New Year's Day. Everyone else in the town is asleep. helensburgh-450He then examines things that are closer to him. He looks up at the night sky, and sees Gemini, the constellation, looking back down. The speaker sees them in such a bright light, he wonders if it is a dream. The speaker then notices the "stocky keepers." (Although they are debatable, I interpreted them as corn dollies). They stand guard over the village while they sleep. He thinks about how later in the year, they will be destroyed in a celebration. Without the ritual, the speaker believes that the town would fall into madness rather than peacefully work in their fields.

How is the fall of Adam and Eve a new kind of epic?

The story of Adam and Eve's temptation and fall is a fundamentally different, new kind of epic: a domestic one.

How is the structure of "Skunk Hour" balanced?

The structure of the poem, we now realize, is highly symmetrical: two stanzas devoted to a matriarchal figure; two to a society in crisis; two to an individual—the poet—in crisis; and two to a society led by an alternative matriarchal figure who represents a potential resolution to Lowell's dilemma.

What is the subject of Larkin's "Church Going"?

The theme of Philip Larkin's poem "Church Going" is the erosion of religious abutments. Larkin is largely considered to be an atheist; however, he did live in a society that was predominantly Christian, so this poem is perhaps his way of trying to understand the attraction of religion. The narrator, who appears to be an atheist also, goes to a church, wanders around, and leaves unsatisfied. He doesn't understand the allure of churches or religion, and wonders to himself when they will go out of fashion. He then goes on to imagine what they will be turned into once they do fall out of use. In the end, the narrator comes to the realization that religion and churches will never go out of style, because mankind has an innate need to believe in something greater than themselves.

What is the subject of Donne's "A Valediction of Weeping"?

The theme of the poem is the departure of the poet for a voyage. The poem expresses intense misery on part of the lovers caused by the parting.

what did williams see as the most important subject matter for poets?

Williams was "beginning to stress that poetry must find its 'primary impetus'... in 'local conditions.'" "I was determined to use the material I knew," Williams later reflected; and as a doctor, Williams knew intimately the people of Rutherford.

What notes can we make on the style of the wasteland?

The style of the poem is marked by the hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts (classic and obscure; "highbrow" and "lowbrow") that Eliot peppered throughout the poem. In addition to the many "highbrow" references and/or quotes from poets like Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Ovid, and Homer, Eliot also included a couple of references to "lowbrow" genres. A good example of this is Eliot's quote from the 1912 popular song "The Shakespearian Rag" by lyricists Herman Ruby and Gene Buck.[26] There were also a number of lowbrow references in the opening section of Eliot's original manuscript (when the poem was entitled "He Do The Police in Different Voices"), but they were removed from the final draft after Eliot cut this original opening section.[27] The style of the work in part grows out of Eliot's interest in exploring the possibilities of dramatic monologue. This interest dates back at least as far as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". The Waste Land is not a single monologue like "Prufrock". Instead, it is made up of a wide variety of voices (sometimes in monologue, dialogue, or with more than two characters speaking). The Waste Land is notable for its seemingly disjointed structure, indicative of the Modernist style of James Joyce's Ulysses (which Eliot cited as an influence and which he read the same year that he was writing The Waste Land).[28] In the Modernist style, Eliot jumps from one voice or image to another without clearly delineating these shifts for the reader. He also includes phrases from multiple foreign languages (Latin, Greek, Italian, German, French and Sanskrit), indicative of Pound's influence.

What is the last section of the wasteland?

The text of the poem is followed by several pages of notes, purporting to explain his metaphors, references, and allusions. Some of these notes are helpful in interpreting the poem, but some are arguably even more puzzling, and many of the most opaque passages are left unannotated. The notes were added after Eliot's publisher requested something longer to justify printing The Waste Land in a separate book.[G] Thirty years after publishing the poem with these notes, Eliot expressed his regret at "having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail".[25]

What is the gist of Eliot's essay The Metaphysical poets?

The theory of dissociation of sensibility rests largely upon Eliot's description of the disparity in style that exists between the metaphysical poets of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century and the poets of the late seventeenth century onward. In "The Metaphysical Poets,"[1] Eliot claims that the earlier grouping of poets were "constantly amalgamating disparate experience" and thus expressing their thoughts through the experience of feeling, while the later poets did not unite their thoughts with their emotive experiences and therefore expressed thought separately from feeling. He explains that the dissociation of sensibility is the reason for the "difference between the intellectual and the reflective poet." The earlier intellectual poet, Eliot writes, "possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience." When the dissociation of sensibility occurred, "[the] poets revolted against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by fits, unbalanced; they reflected." Thus dissociation of sensibility is the point at which and the manner by which this change in poetic method and style occurred; it is defined by Eliot as the loss of sensation united with thought. Eliot uses John Donne's poetry as the most prominent example of united sensibility and thought. He writes, "[a] thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility." Eliot's apparent appreciation of Donne's ability to unify intellectual thought and the sensation of feeling demonstrates that he believes dissociation of sensibility to be a hindrance in the progression of poetry. Eliot asserts that despite the progress of refined language, the separation between thought and emotion led to the end of an era of poetry that was "more mature" and that would "wear better" than the poetry that followed. Eliot, later on in his career, was challenged with the thought that the dissociation within literature had been caused by the English Civil War in the mid 17th century. He did not agree or disagree to this theory but rather stated, 'cryptically that he thought it might have been caused by the same factors as those which brought about the Civil War'.[2]

What is the subject of Adrienne Rich's "Snapshots...Daughter in law"?

The title itself hints at discontinued, disorderly photographs of a woman, daughter-in-law, the relation dominantly linked with son. Rich has deliberately selected daughter-in-law not sister or daughter in order to disclose a position of a woman who has hardly lived as an independent daughter but a dependent daughter-in-law. It is mainly about anxiety of a modern woman. The poem creeps from experiences of a woman at her house working continuously throughout the days, serving her husband with her body at night, continuing a routine, monotonous life by sacrificing her wishes, ambitions and cheers - then it moves towards a revolutionary tone and encourages woman to be bold and to demand her rights, declare independence from family fetters. Towards the end, the poem explodes into a devastating weapon for the might and right of woman."Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," her first overtly feminist poem and one that she worked on over a period of two years, signaled this shift by giving voice to the discontent of many women and, more generally, to that of people who are ignored or silenced by sexism, racism, or social injustice. The poem is an angry poem that examines the plight of women during a transitional period in American history, when women were growing more acutely aware of the limitations imposed on them by family, culture, history, and male-dominated institutions and were taking steps to overcome those limitations.

What allusion explains the title of R. Wilbur's "Love Calls us to the things..."

The title refers to a passage from St. Augustine's Confessions, written in the fourth century, in which the saint laments that the beautiful things of the world have created distance between him and God. St. Augustine is responding to the gospel of St. John, who advises humans to "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world."

Spencerian stanza?

The unit of Edmund Spenser's long poem The Faerie Queene, consisting of eight iambic-pentameter lines and a final alexandrine, with a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCC. Later uses of this stanza form include John Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes," Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais," and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters."

how long is PL?

almost eleven thousand lines long

How does Milton use pastoral imagery to describe his time with King? (Examples of diction)

The university is the "self-same hill" upon which the speaker and Lycidas were "nurst"; their studies are likened to the shepherds' work "Batt'ning... flocks"; classmates are "Rough satyrs"

What did Williams say about meeting Pound?

Williams's friendship with Pound marked a watershed in the young poet's life: he later insisted, "before meeting Pound is like B.C. and A.D." "

What are some details about the content of "Waking in the Blue" by Lowell?

There are three specific mentally ill characters in the poem: Stanley, the "once all-American fullback" taking a bath, Bobbie who is swashbuckling naked, and the narrator, who is clearly Lowell. There are also the "Roman Catholic attendants"—it must be a Catholic hospital and the "pinched, indigenous faces" of the other patients. Both Stanley and Bobbie are much older, and poem's climax is when Lowell standing in front of the mirror shaving sees his "shaky future grow familiar" in the lives of the other mentally ill. The theme of the poem can be seen in the isolated line, "These victorious figures of bravado ossified young." Age plays an important role in this poem. The poem starts with a young man, who is rather nimble (he "catwalks" down the hall), then transitions to two "ossified" old men and concludes with a middle age man who looks into his future. Weight and eating play an important role as well. Stanley is obsessed with his once perfect physique, Bobbie is "roly-poly" fat, and Lowell is getting fat. Sharp objects are also a motif; the metaphoric harpoon that was threatening Lowell's heart in the first stanza, the imaginary sword of the swashbuckling Bobbie, and the shaving razor on which the poem concludes. That last sentence is rather pregnant with meaning: "We are all old-timers,/each of us holds a locked razor."

What about Dickinson and gender norms?

These two apparently contradictory impulses determined the kind of self she would create, one neither traditionally "female" nor traditionally "male." Unlike a traditional woman, she did not marry, bear children, or satisfy af-filiative needs in the social world of her community. Unlike a traditional man, she did not seek or achieve power over others in the public world of professional enterprise. Instead she sought to create herself, in private, as a writer whose words would reach out for her and do the deeds she yearned to do, deeds that included both taking charge of experience and connecting herself to it: belonging.

What is the opening quatrain to "They Shut me up in Prose.."?

They shut me up in Prose — As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet — Because they liked me "still" — like how her publishers 'fixed' her verse; also obvious feminist line of reasonign here

How do Adam and Eve deal with their guilt and shame?

They supplicate before God.

What is the central conflict in "Much Madness is Divinest..."

This conflict is a universal one. It defines the relationship between parents and children; families and villages; tribes and states. To go along with the majority is to find peace, at least in some situations, but it is not always a comfortable peace. It is sometimes a peace that comes at a high price, the price of one's own private sanity.

What is the poetic form of Frost's "Mowing"?

This is a sonnet with a peculiar rhyme scheme: ABC ABD ECD GEH GH. In terms of rhyme, "Mowing" does not fit into either a strict Shakespearean or Petrarchan model; rather, it draws a little from both traditions. Like Petrarch's sonnets, the poem divides thematically into an octet and a sextet: The first eight lines introduce the sound of the scythe and then muse about the abstract (heat, silence) or imaginary (elves) significance of this sound; the last six lines present an alternative interpretation, celebrating fact and nothing more. But "Mowing" also hinges, like Shakespeare's sonnets, on its two final lines. In terms of meter, each line comprises five stressed syllables separated by varying numbers of unstressed syllables. Only one line (12) can reasonably be read as strictly iambic.

What are opening two lines to "This is mY Letter to the World" ?

This is my letter to the World That never wrote to Me — could be feminist

What is the form of "In the Wiaitng Room"?

This poem was written in free verse; it has no set rhyme scheme or meter. One interesting thing about the poem's form is that, in a way, it shrinks as it goes along.It's almost like the gaps between the stanzas reflect her inability to answer the big questions that she poses. Instead of answers, we get (almost) silence. So, even though the poem is free verse, its form still affects its meaning.

What is the subject of Williams' "Spring and All...Hospital" and how does it respond to "The Wasteland"?

This poem does not simply describe the physical qualities in a landscape; its center is an act of perception, "the stark dignity of / entrance," the slow penetration of a desolate landscape by an awakening observer. We follow the thrust of his imagination downward, through obstacles, to a new union with the physical environment. The progression in the poem is literally downward: the observer goes from "the blue / mottled clouds," across a distant view of "broad, muddy fields," to the quickening plant life right before him--and then penetrates even further downward, into the dark earth, as he imagines the roots taking hold again. The panoramic view, with its prospect of "muddy fields," dried weeds, "patches of standing water," offers nothing with which the imagination might joyously connect itself. At first an apparently blank and "lifeless" nature invites the observer to passivity and despair; but Williams pushes through vacancy to uncover dormant life. Implicitly, "By the road" argues that Eliot's despair derives from his cosmopolitanism, his detachment from a locality. What the tenacious observer here finally perceives is no "waste" land but a "new world" and he makes his discovery by narrowing and focusing Whitman's panoramic vision upon the near and the ordinary. In the torpor of ordinary consciousness, what we find by the road to the contagious hospital is a desolate landscape. But the awakened consciousness, focused sharply and including everything in the scene, discovers novelty and life, the first "sluggish / dazed" stirrings of spring. Hence poet and landscape are gradually identified--as he too grips down and begins to awaken.

What is the thematic importance of shelley's "ode to the west wind"?

This poem is a highly controlled text about the role of the poet as the agent of political and moral change.[according to whom?] This was a subject Shelley wrote a great deal about, especially around 1819, with this strongest version of it articulated the last famous lines of his "Defence of Poetry": "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

What is the subject of Browning's "My last duchess"?

This poem is loosely based on historical events involving Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, who lived in the 16th century. The Duke is the speaker of the poem, and tells us he is entertaining an emissary who has come to negotiate the Duke's marriage (he has recently been widowed) to the daughter of another powerful family. As he shows the visitor through his palace, he stops before a portrait of the late Duchess, apparently a young and lovely girl. The Duke begins reminiscing about the portrait sessions, then about the Duchess herself. His musings give way to a diatribe on her disgraceful behavior: he claims she flirted with everyone and did not appreciate his "gift of a nine-hundred-years- old name." As his monologue continues, the reader realizes with ever-more chilling certainty that the Duke in fact caused the Duchess's early demise: when her behavior escalated, "[he] gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together." Having made this disclosure, the Duke returns to the business at hand: arranging for another marriage, with another young girl. As the Duke and the emissary walk leave the painting behind, the Duke points out other notable artworks in his collection.

What is the form of Tennysons Ulysses"?

This poem is written as a dramatic monologue: the entire poem is spoken by a single character, whose identity is revealed by his own words. The lines are in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, which serves to impart a fluid and natural quality to Ulysses's speech. Many of the lines are enjambed, which means that a thought does not end with the line-break; the sentences often end in the middle, rather than the end, of the lines. The use of enjambment is appropriate in a poem about pushing forward "beyond the utmost bound of human thought." Finally, the poem is divided into four paragraph-like sections, each of which comprises a distinct thematic unit of the poem.

How can Donne's "The Bait" be seen as pastoral?

This poem shows Donne's ability to take the standard pastoral form and apply it to a traditional spiritual metaphor. Whereas the traditional pastoral would focus on a shepherd or another land-based outdoorsman, "The Bait" takes as its motif a fisherman. Instead of sheep and green fields, Donne describes sparkling water and fish.

Wha tis the subject and form of Plath's "Edge"?

This poem, comprised of ten two-line stanzas, is famously difficult to summarize due to its ambiguous, abstruse nature. It seems to be about a woman who has recently committed or is soon to commit suicide. It begins with the description of a "perfected" woman, whose dead body smiles with accomplishment. She wears a toga, and her feet are bare. The feet suggest that they have traveled far but have now reached their end. Several dead children are folded like serpents, each with a pitcher of milk. The woman has folded them into her body. She compares this effect to rose petals which close when the garden "stiffens" and the night flower's odor issues forth. The moon looks down over this scene, but has no cause for sadness because she is used to "this sort of thing."

What are some typical thems in Browning's verse?

This poem, like much of Browning's work, conflates sex, violence, and aesthetics. Like many Victorian writers, Browning was trying to explore the boundaries of sensuality in his work. How is it that society considers the beauty of the female body to be immoral while never questioning the morality of language's sensuality—a sensuality often most manifest in poetry? Why does society see both sex and violence as transgressive? What is the relationship between the two? Which is "worse"? These are some of the questions that Browning's poetry posits. And he typically does not offer any answers to them: Browning is no moralist, although he is no libertine either. As a fairly liberal man, he is confused by his society's simultaneous embrace of both moral righteousness and a desire for sensation; "Porphyria's Lover" explores this contradiction.

What did cummings often satirize in his verse?

This satirical aspect to Cummings' work drew both praise and criticism. His attacks on the mass mind, conventional patterns of thought, and society's restrictions on free expression, were born of his strong commitment to the individual. In the "nonlectures" he delivered at Harvard University Cummings explained his position: "So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was, is, and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality." As Penberthy noted, Cummings' consistent attitude in all of his work was "condemning mankind while idealizing the individual." "Cummings' lifelong belief," Bernard Dekle stated in Profiles of Modern American Authors, "was a simple faith in the miracle of man's individuality. Much of his literary effort was directed against what he considered the principal enemies of this individuality—mass thought, group conformity, and commercialism." For this reason, Cummings satirized what he called "mostpeople," that is, the herd mentality found in modern society

What is the subject of Whitman's "As Adam Early..."

This, the concluding poem of Children of Adam, contains the central thought of Whitman in this group, that Adam continually returns to the earth in the shape of modem man. He is aware of the beauty, strength, and vitality of his body. The central verb in this poem is "touch," which is a means of sensory perception, sexual enjoyment, and spiritual fulfillment. There is an image of Christ in this Adam — his touch contains the promise of healing diseased society. The poet appeals to the reader to listen to him as he expounds his message of joyous, natural sex.

What was TS Eliot's nationality?

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 - 4 January 1965) was a British, American-born essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major poets".[1] He moved to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship.[2]

Which group of poets helped to jumpstart frost's careeR?

Though Frost allied himself with no literary school or movement, the imagists helped at the start to promote his American reputation

How did Keroac allude to Ginsberg nad his politics in "On the Road"?

Though Ginsberg was never a member of the Communist Party, Kerouac named him "Carlo Marx" in On the Road. This was a source of strain in their relationship.[20]

How did the influence of WC Williams affect Ginsberg's verse?

Though he disliked these early poems, Williams loved the exuberance in Ginsberg's letter. He included the letter in a later part of Paterson. He encouraged Ginsberg not to emulate the old masters, but to speak with his own voice and the voice of the common American. From Williams, Ginsberg learned to focus on strong visual images, in line with Williams' own motto "No ideas but in things." Studying Williams' style led to a tremendous shift from the early formalist work to a loose, colloquial free verse style. Early breakthrough poems include Bricklayer's Lunch Hour and Dream Record.[20][93]

Why did Milton decide to write a biblical epic instead of an Arthurian one, as he had originally intended?

Though he once considered King Arthur as the subject for his epic, he regarded only a universal, transnational topic worthy of his epic. Arthur was historical conjecture but Genesis was truth. Around the story, Milton wove an intricate cosmology that attempts to demystify the grounds of faith and to explain in a rational way the existence of evil.

Which collection includes many of Williams most famous poems? WHat year was it published, and why does that matter?

Three years later, Williams published one of his seminal books of poetry, Spring and All, which contained the classic poems "By the road to the contagious hospital," "The Red Wheelbarrow," and "To Elsie." However, in 1922, the year it was published, the appearance of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land became a literary sensation and overshadowed Williams's very different brand of poetic Modernism.

What did Williams say about poetry and painting?

Throughout his career, Williams, thought of his approach to poetry as a painterly deployment of words, saying explicitly in an interview, "I've attempted to fuse the poetry and painting, to make it the same thing....A design in the poem and a design in the picture should make them more or less the same thing."

What was 'the supreme fiction' that stevens spoke of?

Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a "Supreme Fiction," an idea that would serve as a fictive replacement for the idea of God, known to be fictive but willfully believed.[44]

What is the theme of "Mending Wall"?

Throughout the poem, the wall functions as a metaphor, indicating the necessity of simultaneous connection and separation between human beings. Although individuals long to connect with one another, a connection that is too close or boundaries that are indistinct can be dangerous. Yet, disruption of these boundaries is probably inevitable, since the "frozen-ground-swell" that damages the wall, though it occurs annually, is never observed. The neighbors can only maintain their relationship through conscious attention to the wall that separates them. Then, in "Mending Wall", Frost meditates on the role of language as a kind of wall that both joins and separates people.

How is Tithonus a counterpoint to Ulysses?

Tithonus's suffering is a reminder of the futility of attempting to "pass beyond the goal of ordinance" (30). It is a poignant expression of the inevitability of death and of the necessity of accepting it as such. Tithonus has to bear the consequences of varying from "the kindly race of men" (29). Though he succeeds in defying death, his youth and beauty desert him in his old age. He can only ask for release. But death does not come to him later even when he begs for it. He is destined to live forever as a "white-haired shadow" (8) and forever roam "the ever-silent spaces of the East" (9). In being immortal, Tithonus ceases to be himself, sacrifices his mortal identity.[8] Tennyson described "Tithonus" in a letter as "a pendent to the "Ulysses" in my former volumes."[9] Tithonus's character offers a strong contrast to that of Ulysses. The two poems are matched and opposed as the utterances of Greek and Trojan, victor and vanquished, hero and victim.[10] According to critic William E. Cain, "Tithonus has discovered the curse of fulfillment, of having his carelessly worded wish come true. He lives where no man ought to live, on the other side of the horizon, the other side of the border that Ulysses could only plan to cross.[10] According to Victorian scholar A. A. Markley, "Tithonus" offers a viewpoint opposite to that of "Ulysses" on the theme of the acceptance of death.[3] He writes that "while 'Ulysses' explores the human spirit that refuses to accept death, 'Tithonus' explores the human acceptance of the inevitability, and even the appropriateness, of death as the end of the life cycle. The two poems offer two extreme views of facing death, each one which balances the other when they are read together− clearly one of Tennyson's original intentions when he first drafted them in 1833. Nevertheless, reading 'Tithonus' purely as a pendant to 'Ulysses' has led to unnecessarily reductive readings of both poems."[3]

What was Wyatt's goal for the English language?

To civilize it, raise it to levels of other 'high' languages

What kind of poetic work did Lowell do in his book Imitations?

Translations of European poets

What is the subject matter of Wilfred Owen's Anthem for Doomed YOuth?

Trying to make meaning out of deaths he witnessed in WWI. both the octavce and sestet pose a question in teh first line, then respond to it

What is the subject of Wyatt's "They Flee from Me"?

Unrequited love, likely with Anne Boleyn, and a sense of resignation; the woman is attained but does not stay (unlike idealized Petrarchan lover)

What is the subject of Wyatt's "Blame Not My Lute"?

Unrequited love, but he starts the poem as a monologue to his instrument, then shifts to the lover.

what is visionary poetry?

Visionary Poetry is the art of pushing language past its ordinary expressional limits. It is the archaic poetic form of linguistically expressing and conveying transcendental states of consciousness. Since time immemorial Visionary Poetry has persistently served in linguistically linking together the common with the divine—the ordinary with the non-ordinary. Limitless examples of Visionary Poetry can be found in the poetic pages of the Vedas, the Tao Te Ching, the Bible, the Quran; or more recently in the western mystic works of Emerson, Whitman, Blake and Ginsberg.

What was the significance of the "Six Gallery Reading" for the Beat poets/

Wally Hedrick — a painter and co-founder of the Six Gallery - approached Ginsberg in mid-1955 and asked him to organize a poetry reading at the Six Gallery. At first, Ginsberg refused, but once he had written a rough draft of "Howl", he changed his "****ing mind", as he put it.[41] Ginsberg advertised the event as "Six Poets at the Six Gallery". One of the most important events in Beat mythos, known simply as "The Six Gallery reading" took place on October 7, 1955.[45] The event, in essence, brought together the East and West Coast factions of the Beat Generation. Of more personal significance to Ginsberg, the reading that night included the first public presentation of "Howl", a poem that brought worldwide fame to Ginsberg and to many of the poets associated with him. An account of that night can be found in Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, describing how change was collected from audience members to buy jugs of wine, and Ginsberg reading passionately, drunken, with arms outstretched.

What is the subject of Lowell's "for the union dead"?

We get to do some time-traveling in this poem. Lowell jumps around frequently and without warning. We begin in South Boston at the aquarium that's been closed and boarded up for what seems like a long time. Then we move back in time with the speaker to when he used to visit the aquarium and gawk at the fish. When he snaps out of that daydream, he recalls a more recent past ("last March" specifically) when he witnessed the construction of what would become an underground parking garage. Included in that same scene is the Civil War memorial for Colonel Shaw (we'll get to him in detail later), and his all-black infantry. Then Lowell sneakily segues into a little info about the Civil War, and later, the dedication at the memorial. He stays more or less on the track for a handful of stanzas: he talks about how New England continues to remember the Civil War in graveyards and tattered flags, but how that memory is diminishing. Then he sort of pops back into the present, with a somewhat critical eye. He talks about World War II and how there are no commemorative statues for that war. To wrap up, he winds the image of Colonel Shaw and the old aquarium's fish together, and sort of superimposes them over slow-moving traffic in present-day Boston.

What is the signifiance of the skunk at teh end of "Skunk Hour"?

What Lowell finds in the mother skunk is an image for the artist he is becoming. It is a rich and deeply ambivalent image: the poet as garbage-pail-swiller, rooting about in humanity's trash and finding nourishment there, bringing what is hidden to light. The metaphor seems both mocking and derogatory. There is something ridiculous about the image of the skunk with her nose plunged into the sour cream cup, and also something a bit disgusting. Yet what is most clear is that the skunk is entirely unconcerned with our reaction to her. We are beyond her notice—almost, one senses, beneath her contempt. And it is this, perhaps, that injects an element of potential liberation into the scene.

What does Lowell remember about his writing of "Skunk HOur"?

When I began writing 'Skunk Hour', I felt that most of what I knew about writing was a hindrance. The dedication is to Elizabeth Bishop, because re-reading her suggested a way of breaking through the shell of my old manner."[4] The poem was in part based on Bishop's poem "Armadillo" and Lowell wrote that "her rhythms, idiom, images, and stanza structure seemed to belong to a later century... Both 'Skunk Hour' and 'The Armadillo' use short line stanzas, start with drifting description, and end with a single animal."[5]

Why did Lowell then go to Kenyon?

When Tate and John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt for Kenyon College in Ohio, Lowell followed them and resumed his studies there, majoring in Classics. He settled into the so-called "writer's house" (a dorm that received its nickname after it had accrued a number of ambitious young writers) with fellow students Peter Taylor, Robie Macauley and Randall Jarrell.[22]

how does Milton create connections to dante?

When, for example, the narrator describes how the fires of Hell inflict pain but do not provide light, the allusion is to Dante. And the lines "Hope never comes / That comes to all," which describe the plight of the fallen angels, paraphrase the inscription on the gate to Hell in the Inferno: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

How did Bishop differ from the confessional poets like Lowell and Berryman?

Where some of her notable contemporaries like Robert Lowell and John Berryman made the intimate details of their personal lives an important part of their poetry, Bishop avoided this practice altogether.[25] In contrast to this confessional style involving large amounts of self-exposure, Bishop's style of writing, though it sometimes involved sparse details from her personal life, was known for its highly detailed and objective, distant point of view and for its reticence on the kinds of personal subject matter that the work of her contemporaries involved. And she used discretion when writing about details and people from her own life. E.g., "In the Village", about her childhood and mentally unstable mother, is written as a third person narrative, and so the reader would only know of the story's autobiographical origins by knowing about Bishop's childhood.[26]

What is the significance of the dive in "Diving Inot the Wreck"?

While there is a hero, a quest, and a buried treasure, the hero is a woman; the quest is a critique of old myths; the treasure is knowledge: the whole buried knowledge of the personal and cultural foundering of the relations between the sexes, and a self-knowledge that can be won only through the act of criticism.

How did Wordsworth develop his interest in the 'common man'?

While touring Europe, Wordsworth came into contact with the French Revolution. This experience as well as a subsequent period living in France, brought about Wordsworth's interest and sympathy for the life, troubles, and speech of the "common man."

Which poet really peaked GInsberg's interest in poetry in HS?

Whitman

Why don't elegies name the person that is their subject (usually)?

Whitman biographer Jerome Loving states that "traditionally elegies do not mention the name of the deceased in order to allow the lament to have universal application".[38]

How is WC WIlliams poetry mimetic?

William Carlos Williams is as magically observant and mimetic as a good novelist. He reproduces the details of what he sees with surprising freshness, clarity, and economy; and he sees just as extraordinarily, sometimes, the forms of this earth, the spirit moving behind the letters. His quick transparent lines have the nervous and contracted strength, move as jerkily and intently as a bird

What is the form of Wiliams poem, "Asophedel..>Greeny Flower"

William Carlos Williams' long, late poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" is remarkable in several regards. It is the fullest example of his work in the variable foot and in the triadic (or three-foot, stepped-down) line, a breakthrough form he discovered in Paterson, 2 ("The descent beckons...") and utilized for many of his poems from the 1950s

What was WC williams view of language?

Williams is strongly associated with the American modernist movement in literature and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. This was reaction against the internationalists like Pound and the lost generation

What ambiguous concept did Williams speak of in his poetic decision making?

Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh and uniquely American form of poetry whose subject matter centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He came up with the concept of the "variable foot" which Williams never clearly defined, although the concept vaguely referred to Williams's method of determining line breaks. The Paris Review called it "a metrical device to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse.

Which work really announced the advent of the Romantic age?

Wordsworth and Coleridges "Lyrical Ballads" (1798)

What claims does Wordsworth make in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads?

Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of verse, one that is based on the "real language of men" and avoids the poetic diction of much 18th-century verse. definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility," and calls his own poems in the book "experimental". argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric.

Which poetic work is is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism?

Wordsworth's Prelude

How did Wyatt's job contribute to his writing of poetry?

Work took him to France and Italy.

What makes Plath's "Lady Lazarus" postmodern?

Writing in postmodern style, Plath mixes her own mental anxiousness generated by depression and by the death of her father during her childhood with the human tragedy of the Holocaust in an indistinguishable whole. "

What is the form of "after apple picking"?

Written in a single stanza of forty-two lines, the poem is composed in a loose iambic pentameter (alternating stressed and unstressed syllables in a ten-syllable line). It is also written in rhyme, albeit loosely. The effect of this relaxed structure lends the poem a less formal and more conversational feel

What is the subject of Plath's "Daddy"?

a brutal and venomous poem commonly understood to be about Plath's deceased father, Otto Plath. She insists that she needed to kill him (she refers to him as "Daddy"), but that he died before she had time. She describes him as heavy, like a "bag full of God," resembling a statue with one big gray toe and its head submerged in the Atlantic Ocean. She also discusses how she could never find a way to talk to him. Even before she could speak, she thought every German was him, and found the German language "obscene." In fact, she felt so distinct from him that she believed herself a Jew being removed to a concentration camp. She started to talk like a Jew and to feel like a Jew in several different ways. She wonders in fact, whether she might actually be a Jew, because of her similarity to a gypsy. To further emphasize her fear and distance, she describes him as the Luftwaffe, with a neat mustache and a bright blue Aryan eye. She calls him a "Panzer-man," and says he is less like God then like the black swastika through which nothing can pass. In her mind, "Every woman adores a Fascist," and the "boot in the face" that comes with such a man. She promises him that she is "finally through;" the telephone has been taken off the hook, and the voices can no longer get through to her. She considers that if she has killed one man, then she has in fact killed two. Comparing him to a vampire, she remembers how he drank her blood for a year, but then realizes the duration was closer to seven years. She tells him he can lie back now. There is a stake in his heart, and the villagers who despised him now celebrate his death by dancing on his corpse. She concludes by announcing, "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through."

What is the subject of 'desert places'?

a desolate snow landscape, loneliness, ...concluding quatrain: They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars-on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

What is the subject of Bishop's "SLeeping on the Ceiling"

a dream in which the ceiling of the dreamer's room becomes the Place de la COncorde, her wallpaper the Jardin des Plantes, her photographs animals. The dream animates objects, inverts orders, and transforms the scale of the domestic space; the poem becomes a fairy tlae that idealizes the ceiling as an ideal space.

occasional poem?

a poem written about a specific event, public or private

Broadly speaking, how is Wordsworth remembered?

a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature. Wordsworth presents a fully developed, yet morally flexible, picture of the relationship between human beings and the natural world.

Critics praise Shakespeare's sonnets for offering...

a profound meditation on the nature of love, sexual passion, procreation, death, and time.

What is Thyrsis a reference to?

a shepherd in Virgil's Eclogues who lost a singing match

What is the imporatance of Lowell's "Waking in the Blue" in poetic history?

a striking, early example of confessional poetry. Of the handful of poems from Life Studies in which Lowell explored his struggles with mental illness, this poem was one of Lowell's most forthwright admissions that he was mentally ill. Though he doesn't discuss the exact nature of his mental illness in the poem, he does describe his hospitalization in a mental institution. Lowell's admission of having spent time in a mental institution was considered a brave one to make when he published the poem in 1959, when public disclosure about mental illness was a serious social taboo.

What about the structure of the argument in Milton's "Methought I Saw..."?

a tripartite structure: imagery in the sonnet moves from Greek history and mythology (the reference to Alcestis) through Jewish law (the purification mandated by the "old Law"), to Christian salvation, one critic describing the movement as "a progressive definition of salvation

what is the subject of wallace stevnees' 'the snow man'?

according to Stevens, reality is basically what you make of it. Sure, there are trees and cars and buildings and mountains—there's no debate about that—but how you see them, what you bring to them, and how they're real to you is entirely up to... you. Stevens believed that we create the world around us—that we make it what it is for our brains. And how do we do that? With a handy little tool called imagination. And everyone's imagination is, thankfully, wildly different from that of anyone and everyone else. Which is awesome because, if you think about it, the alternative is really, profoundly, horrifically boring. That's what "The Snow Man" is all about. The speaker of this poem holds two realities in his hands—the reality of winter (cold, bare landscapes that are nothing more than landscapes), and the reality we create when we bring our own perspective (miserable wind, bitter cold etc.). He describes the snow man, who can strip what he sees of his own emotional baggage and see that the world is, well, not much without that emotional baggage. If this is all a bit confusing, well, read on and you'll see what we mean.

What is the subject of Wilbur's "Advice to a Prophet"?

addressing a hypothetical prophet who needs to appear in reality to persuade the human race to eliminate the weapons of twentieth century warfare, which can annihilate life on earth. The poet imagines that the prophet, when he states this danger, will be "mad-eyed" from being ignored. Consequently, the prophet needs the poet's advice on how to tell the truth in effective language. he advises the prophet to draw people's attention to simple aspects of the natural world that make up our identities.

which personal struggle does bishop seem to reflect on in "the manmoth"

alcoholism: the unbroken draught of poison, runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease he has inherited the susceptibility to.

How have readers interpreted Plath's Daddy differently in the 60s and 70s?

amplified the context for "Daddy" and set the poem firmly inside Plath's life story. That poem and the book taken together made Plath an emblem of the conflicted intellectual woman simultaneously starved for and revolted by male affection. In the 1970s "Daddy" was celebrated perhaps more as a confessional anthem of female oppression, subversion, and resistance in a world dominated by male power and the power of male definition than it was celebrated as a poem.

Some critics say that in "The Phoenix and the Turtle" Shakespeare transforms a traditional funeral elegy into...

an Epithalamium, a poetic celebration of marriage, thus fusing two poetic forms through its use of a metaphysical paradox.

how are satan's experiences in PL similar to milton's?

an opponent of Stuart absolutism and the episcopacy of the Church of England. Under attack from his adversaries, Milton , from his perspective, was the advocate of a righteous cause that failed. The triumph of his adversaries, his solitude after the Restoration, and his struggle to understand how and why, under the sufferance of Providence, evil seemingly prevailed

What kind of thematic opposition does Milton's "Nativity Ode" establish?

conflict between the pagan gods—associated with darkness, dissonance, and bestiality—and Christ—associated with light, harmony, and the union of divine and human natures."

Hecht was often described as a ______.

as a "traditionalist." George P. Elliott contended in the Times Literary Supplement that "Hecht's voice is his own, but his language, more amply than that of any living poet writing in English, derives from, adds to, is part of the great tradition.

What is the subject of Wordsworth's "Nutting"?

at first appears to be a narrative poem concerning a leisurely romp through the woods. Culminates in the excited apprehension of the recollecting speaker of "A virgin scene," but relaxes as "The heart luxuriates with indifferent things, / Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones, / And on the vacant air." At this point, the poet suddenly turns to "merciless ravage," attacking the trees around him and rendering the woodland scene "Deform'd and sullied." The remembering poet posits a contradictory set of emotions arising on the completion of this ravaging, as his past self departs "Exulting, rich beyond the wealth of kings / I felt a sense of pain when I beheld / The silent trees and the intruding sky." The recollection of this violation causes the speaker to address a hitherto unintroduced listener, "Then, dearest Maiden! move along these shades / In gentleness of heart; with gentle hand / Touch, - for there is a spirit in the woods."

What is the poetic form and subject of Tennysons' "the lady of shalott"?

ballad based on arthurian legend...The first four stanzas of the 1842 poem describe a pastoral setting. The Lady of Shalott lives in an island castle in a river which flows to Camelot, but the local farmers know little about her. Stanzas five to eight describe the lady's life. She suffers from a mysterious curse and must continually weave images on her loom without ever looking directly out at the world. Instead, she looks into a mirror, which reflects the busy road and the people of Camelot who pass by her island.The reflected images are described as "shadows of the world", a metaphor that makes it clear they are a poor substitute for seeing directly ("I am half-sick of shadows").Stanzas nine to twelve describe "bold Sir Lancelot" as he rides by and is seen by the lady. The remaining seven stanzas describe the effect on the lady of seeing Lancelot; she stops weaving and looks out of her window toward Camelot, bringing about the curse.She leaves her tower, finds a boat upon which she writes her name, and floats down the river to Camelot. She dies before arriving at the palace. Among the knights and ladies who see her is Lancelot, who thinks she is lovely. nine line stanzas with consistent rhyme scheme

Countee Cullen's "Incident" uses _______ (poetic form) to tell about ___(experience)___ in ____(city)...

ballad meter...being called a ******...baltimore

What is the poetic form of PL?

blank verse

sestina?

blank verse, six stanzas with six lines followed by a three line stanza

What were some of the positive critiques?

called "Howl" "a powerful work, cutting through to dynamic meaning...It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit...Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love." Paul Carroll judged it "one of the milestones of the generation." Appraising the impact of "Howl," Paul Zweig noted that it "almost singlehandedly dislocated the traditionalist poetry of the 1950s."

How does "the map" explore perceptoin?

casually wonders, "Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?" These three observations suggest questions of perspective. For example, how one sees an object--such as this map--is a very personal experience. The poet's (unrevealed) conclusions are her own; there are not definitive answers, no "favorites." That is why the cartographer's representations and use of tools, records, and perceptions are "More delicate than the historians'." The historian attempts to deal with facts, and chronologies of events, objectively. Although she dares not distort truth, the mapmaker, unlike the historian, deals with possibilities imaginatively, for the artist celebrates the notion that to be completely objective is impossible.

what basic philosophy does Wilbur articulate in his verse?

changes in Wilbur's poetry have not affected the basic philosophy his verses have always shown: a belief that the "glorious energy" of the world tends toward "pattern and shape."

Milton dramatizes the effect of Christ's arrival through his integration of

classical, mythological allusions (like Typhon). he synthesizes a wide range of biblical and classical allusions

conventions of pastoral poetry?

conventions include the lament by a shepherd for the death of a fellow shepherd, the invocation of the muse, a procession of mourners, flower symbolism, satire against certain abuses or corruptions in society and its institutions, a statement of belief in immortality, and the attribution of human emotions to Nature, which, in effect, also mourns the loss of the shepherd."

Milton's "When I consider how my light is spent" sonnet is about what?

conveys the agony of his desire to serve his God, and his failure, as yet, to have produced poetry worthy of his goal.

Why have some readers regarded Lowell's poems as regionalism?

could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region.[1] The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.[2]

What is the significance of Moore's quote about imaginary gardens?

create a world in their minds that appears to be real. The toads, then, are the fabrications of the artist and are so highly refined by the artist's imagination that they have become tangible; the toads are the result of the artist's attempt to render the abstract into the concrete, Moore's own poetic goal, a goal that also allows her to draw directly into her poems the subversion that the abstraction serves to shield. This goal is, however, as Moore acknowledges, unattainable. The effort to reach it is poetry's only hope. As long as the poet maintains this effort honestly

What were some fo the negative critiques of "Howl"?

deemed "Howl" "an angry, sexually explicit poem" and added that it is "considered by many to be a revolutionary event in American poetry."The poem's raw, honest language and its "Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath," as Ginsberg called it, stunned many traditional critics. James Dickey, for instance, referred to "Howl" as "a whipped-up state of excitement" and concluded that "it takes more than this to make poetry."

What are the themes of Milton's works?

deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self-determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day

What is the subject of Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independnece"

describes Wordsworth's encounter with a leech-gatherer near his home in the Lake District of England. opening lines describe the poet's joy while taking a morning walk after a night of rain. then, the poet is suddenly beset by anxious thoughts and fears about his own future, as well as the future of all poets. last, the poet meets an old, poor leech-gatherer who endures the hardships of his life with patience and acceptance. The poet recovers from his dejection, and views the man as having been sent

What famous line does Satan use to describe his own character?

describes himself with the now-famous quote "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

Together, Allegro and Penseroso create a productive ____ that is characteristic of his later works too

dialectic

What about ehf orm of "snapshots...daughter in law"

distinct images in each stanza. the first few stanzas are all 14 lines, then it varies alot

Whose feedback did Lowell seek out while at Harvard?

e visited Robert Frost in Cambridge and asked for feedback on a long poem he had written on the Crusades; Frost suggested that Lowell needed to work on his compression. In an interview, Lowell recalled, "I had a huge blank verse epic on the First Crusade and took it to him all in my undecipherable pencil-writing, and he read a little of it, and said, 'It goes on rather a bit, doesn't it?' And then he read me the opening of Keats's 'Hyperion,' the first version, and I thought all of that was sublime."[18]

anapestic?

each foot consists of two unstressed then stressed

dactylic?

each foot: stressed followed by tow unstressed

How did Frost teach his students to think about poetry?

encouraging his students to account for the myriad sounds and intonations of the spoken English language in their writing. He called his colloquial approach to language "the sound of sense."[9]

How have John Ashberry's works often been deecribed?

enowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery has stated that he wishes his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself.[2][3] At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism."[4]... Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible".[6]

How is the swain speaker in Lycidas experiencing a crisis of faith?

experiencing a "loss of faith in a world order that allows death to strike a young man".[7] S

How does the moon appear different ot the man-moth than it does to the man?

for the man-moth, the moon is a hole in the sky

how many books in PL begin with invocations?

four, including the first book obviously

What are some thematic patterns in Dickinson's poetry?

gardens and flowers, the "master" poems, morbidity, mortality, gospel poems,

Which poetry collection made Larkin come to prominence?

he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived,

how did epics before PL depict heroism?

he epic traditon of Greco-Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Earlier epics developed ideas of heroism that celebrate martial valor, intense passions such as wrath or revenge, and cunning resourcefulness.

What ist he gist of Pound's "How to Read"?

he explains in How to Read, "English literature lives on translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of transla- tions" (LE 34-5). Naturally, he, too, undertook translations, which had varying success. Pound essentially understood translation as a creative endeavor...In "How to Read," Pound outlines a program of study in order to form sound judgments. The authors are characteristically few: Homer, Sappho, Cat- ullus, Ovid, Propertius and Horace, in limited dosages. As always, Pound is opinionated and clear: I am chucking out Pindar, and Virgil, without the slightest compunction. I do not suggest a "course" in Greek or Latin literature, I name a few isolated writers; five or six pages of Sappho. One can throw out at least one-third of Ovid. That is to say, I am omitting the authors who can teach us no new or no more effective method of "charging words."Art for Pound has become - no, it always was - something practical and useful, as he outlined in "How to Read" (1929)

What is the subject of "Diving into the wreck"?

he poem narrates the speaker's quest as she explores a sunken ship to discover the cause of the disaster and to salvage whatever treasures remain. The sea is a traditional literary symbol of the unconscious. To dive is to probe beneath the surface for hidden meanings, to learn about one's submerged desires and emotions. In this poem, the diver is exploring a wreck—a ship that has failed. Preparing to dive, she reads the "book of myths" for guidance, but she must leave the book behind in order to gain direct knowledge without the intermediaries of history and language: the thing I came for:the wreck and not the story of the wreckthe thing itself and not the myth. She is alone in her journey. Unlike the French underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau with his many helpers, she must be alone, for the scientist may work with a team, but the quest requires isolation. The poem is the story of a descent into the ocean to discover important knowledge of the past, to examine a wreck and to salvage the cargo. The poet describes the tools that are needed for the dive and the diver's transformation as she descends. By the time she reaches the wreck, she has become a new kind of creature, a "she/he." As the diver learns, the myth that was the starting point of her journey is incomplete and inadequate: It does not tell her story. She must, therefore, return to tell her own tale.

What has so interested readers about Syliva Plath's "Daddy"?

he relative popularity of "Daddy" can be attributed to Plath's vivid use of imagery and controversial use of the Holocaust as a metaphor.[2] Critics have also viewed "Daddy" as a response to Plath's complex relationship with her father, Otto Plath, who died shortly after her eighth birthday as a result of undiagnosed diabetes.[3][4]

What is the gist of Hartman's Romanticism and Anti SElf consciousness?

he reminds us that "Romantic art has a function analoguous to that of religion. The traditonal scheme of eden, fall, and redemption merges with the new triad of nature, selfconsciosness, and imagination; while the last term in both involves a kind of return to the first..." In other words, if self conssiousness marks a fall from nature, then the only kind of return that would not be a regression to the immediacy of mere self consciousness would be the return by way of yet another turn of self consciousness. "Antiselfconsciousness" is not UN self consciousness but rather self consciousness of self consciousness

What are the themes of Plath's most famous works?

her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. The Colossus is shot through with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests

What is an obvious secondary theme of Milton's "When I consider how my light is spent"?

his blindness

Which collection of verse really established Hecht, and what is the great paradox of his verses?

his collection The Hard Hours (1967) is generally seen as his break-through volume. In that book, Hecht begins to use his experiences as a soldier in Europe during World War II. The often unsettling and horrific insights into the darkness of human nature told in limpid, flowing verse that characterize the poems in the collection would become Hecht's trademark. According to Dana Gioia: "Hecht exemplifies the paradox of great art...He found a way to take his tragic sense of life and make it so beautiful that we have to pay attention to its painful truth."

What is the familial context for "The Negro Speaks..."

his father, of mixed race but always identified as black, despised the Negro and left the United States to become highly successful in Mexico. In fact, Hughes was on his way there to ask his father for college tuition when he wrote this poem. Although Hughes would soon hate his father for his views, when he wrote this, his hatred had not surfaced yet. This poem was most likely an anticipated reply to his father's criticism. In that case, out of anxiety and suppressed anger, a positive and stately poem emerged.

What are the major thematic concerns of James Wright's verse?

his themes—loneliness and alienation—remained constant. "Perhaps the most pervasive general theme in Wright's poetry . . . is that of separation," Stitt suggested. "Separation appears in two guises—as the result of death and as the result of being at odds with one's society." James Seay, writing in the Georgia Review, agreed and elaborated: "His most abiding concern has been loneliness. It is the one abstract word that recurs most frequently in his work. In a sense the theme of loneliness gives rise to, or is somehow connected with, most of Wright's other thematic concerns." The critic named death and "Wright's compassion for what Auden . . . called 'social outsiders'—criminals, prostitutes, drunks, and social outcasts in general" as the poet's other concerns. Seay continued, "In Wright's poems these people are almost always lonely and damned."

What is the theme of Milton's sonnet "How Soon Hath time..."

how quickly time passes and whether or not he will accomplish what he wnats in his poetic vocation; connects with Edward King and Lycidas

What is a possible theme of Wordsworth's "Nutting"?

implicitly offering a positive ecological outlook, cautiously suggesting rather than dogmatically asserting connections between the human and the natural. Furthermore, the poet acknowledges the necessity of human contact with the natural - the poet and the maiden must touch the trees - but nonetheless calls us to be aware of fragility and avoid harm as much as possible

What is the subject of William's poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"?

in 'Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.'" In this "elegiac epithalamian," Williams confesses his infidelities to his wife and asks for her forgiveness; "he seeks new life on the very edge of death," said Whitaker. While Williams proclaimed his life as a husband in his love poem, his strength as a poet was evident, too: "Asphodel" received some very complimentary reviews, including W. H. Auden's praise as "one of the most beautiful poems in the language."

what is the poetic form of Milton's "L'Allegro and Il Penseroso"?

in couplets of iambic tetrameter, for the most part

Who is Moloch in Howl?

in fact Ginsberg makes clear throughout the section that Moloch is ultimately interior: "Mental Moloch!" "Moloch whose name is the Mind!" The societal face of Moloch emerges from the potential Moloch in each person, including the poet:

what is the gist of helen vendler's "on the function of criticism"?

in her essay on "the function of criticism," helen vendler reaffirms what i've been saying all along: "but the second origin of criticism is the truer one. the pleasure here lies in discovering the laws of being of a work of literature. this pleasure of poetics is not different from the pleasure of the scientist who advances, at first timidly and then with increasing confidence, a hypothesis that makes order out of the rubble of data. [...] the enlargement in being able to hear a new voice, or see a new law of being, seemed to keats like discovering a planet or an ocean, a revelation comparable to the ecstatic moments known by astronomers or explorers. if discovering neptune or the pacific ocean has a social function, so does discovering (to the public gaze) the poetry of a new poet; or new aspects to the poetry of an old poet. texts are part of reality, and are as available to exploration as any other terrain."

How is "Immortality Ode" also elegiac?

it mourns the loss of childhood vision... Wordsworth's use of the elegy, in his poems including the "Lucy" poems, parts of The Excursion, and others, focus on individuals that protect themselves from a sense of loss by turning to nature or time. He also rejects any kind of fantasy that would take him away from reality while accepting both death and the loss of his own abilities to time while mourning over the loss

Who famously criticized Lycidas and why?

it was detested for its artificiality by Samuel Johnson, who found "the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing" and complained that "in this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new."[25]

What is teh subject of Moore's "In Distrust..."

it's about the horrors of war, unsuual for moore

What is Geography III (and Bishop) known for?

its carefully considered and perfectly rendered images, Bishop's descriptive powers

How does the Prelude represent a departure from epic like that of Milton?

its focus and mood present a sharp fundamental fall away from the neoclassical and into the Romantic. Whilst Milton (mentioned by name in line 181 of Book One) in Paradise Lost rewrites God's creation and The Fall of Man so as to "justify the ways of God to men," Wordsworth chooses his own mind and imagination as a subject worthy of epic.

What else distinguishes Dickinson's verse?

its startling metaphors and images, its strange ambiguities and missing parts (deletions both recoverable and not), its singular precision and eager haste, its general applicability and peculiar idiosyncrasy, the chances it takes with syntax and diction that are so pronounced and so characteristically her own

How do we describe Milton's poetic style?

known as Miltonic verse, Miltonic epic, or Miltonic blank verse,

When was Wordsworth writing?

late 18th early 19th c.s

Lycidas opens with images of ___

laurels and myrtles, symbols of poetic fame

Adam and Eve experience shame and guilt for the first time after doing what?

lustful sex

HOw did pound describe the tenets of imagism?

magisme, Pound would write in Riposte, is "concerned solely with language and presentation".[44] The aim was clarity: a fight against abstraction, romanticism, rhetoric, inversion of word order, and over-use of adjectives. They agreed in the spring or early summer of 1912 on three principles: 1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.[45] Superfluous words, particularly adjectives, should be avoided, as well as expressions like "dim lands of peace", which Pound thought dulled the image by mixing the abstract with the concrete. He wrote that the natural object was always the "adequate symbol". Poets should "go in fear of abstractions", and should not re-tell in mediocre verse what has already been told in good prose.[45]

Donne is considered a master of the ________, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery.[8]

metaphysical conceit

Which poetic movement does Donne exemplify?

metaphysical poets

How do some scholars see L'Allegro and Il Penseroso as parodies?

may have been intended as poetic versions or parodies of the prolusions, the academic exercises at Cambridge that sometimes involved oppositional thinking.

Donne's poetry is distinguished often by his inventive use of...

metaphor

Which collection of poetry drew intense criticism from Williams' poetic peers?

n 1920, Williams was sharply criticized by many of his peers (such as H.D., Pound, and Wallace Stevens) when he published one of his most experimental books, Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Pound called the work "incoherent" and H.D. thought the book was "flippant."[6

Which poet did Larkin read, admire, and mimic in some ways?

n 1946, Larkin discovered the poetry of Thomas Hardy and became a great admirer of his poetry, learning from Hardy how to make the commonplace and often dreary details of his life the basis for extremely tough, unsparing, and memorable poems.

Where did Ginsberg travel after SF?

n 1957, Ginsberg surprised the literary world by abandoning San Francisco. After a spell in Morocco, he and Peter Orlovsky joined Gregory Corso in Paris. Corso introduced them to a shabby lodging house above a bar at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that was to become known as the Beat Hotel. They were soon joined by Burroughs and others. It was a productive, creative time for all of them...During 1962-3, Ginsberg and Orlovsky travelled extensively across India, living half a year at a time in Calcutta (Kolkata) and Benares (Varanasi). Also during this time, he formed friendships with some of the prominent young Bengali poets of the time

How were the 1960s a period of great chagne for Adrienne Rich?

n 1963, Rich published her third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which was a much more personal work examining her female identity, reflecting the increasing tensions she experienced as a wife and mother in the 1950s, marking a substantial change in Rich's style and subject matter. In her 1982 essay "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity", Rich states: "The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me." The book met with harsh reviews. She comments, "I was seen as 'bitter' and 'personal'; and to be personal was to be disqualified, and that was very shaking because I'd really gone out on a limb ... I realised I'd gotten slapped over the wrist, and I didn't attempt that kind of thing again for a long time."[9]

What is the gist of Stevens' "Imagination as Value"?

n Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. ...As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", "The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."[42] The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.

What did Lowell say about the Beat poets influence on his conception of poetry?

n his acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Lowell famously divided American poetry into two camps: the "cooked" and the "raw."[71] This commentary by Lowell was made in reference to the popularity of Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation poets and was a signal from Lowell that he was trying to incorporate some of their "raw" energy into his own poetry.[13][72]

Which three kinds of diction does Ammons employ in his poems?

n many poems Ammons combines three types of diction: A "normal" range of language for poetry, including the standard English of educated conversation and the slightly rarer words we expect to see in literature ("vast," "summon," "universal"). A demotic register, including the folk-speech of eastern North Carolina, where he grew up ("dibbles"), and broader American chatter unexpected in serious poems ("blip"). The Greek- and Latin-derived phraseology of the natural sciences ("millimeter," "information of actions / summarized"), especially geology, physics, and cybernetics.

What is the genre of Whitman's ""When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" ?

pastoral elegy

what is the primary conceit in donne's "to his mistress going to bed"?

one erotic metaphor: he calls his mistress "My America", a new continent to be explored "Behind, before, above, between, below". As well as referring to the contemporary theme of adventure and discovery, this alliteration heightens his celebration of earthly pleasures, conveyed by the pun that he is "tired with standing".

What is the subject of Frost's "Design"

one of the century's most explosive poetic statements on the metaphysics of darkness. Indeed, historically "Design" can be located somewhere between the visionary expanse of "The Waste Land" and the mind-stretching speculations of Herman Melville's chapter "The Whiteness of the Whale" in Moby-Dick (1851). In paradigm, "Design" expresses the perplexing fears that respond to evidence that (1) human existence continues without supportive design and ultimate purpose and (2) human existence is subject to a design of unmitigated natural evil. In its details the poem appears to sustain both of these complementary interpretations. he begins with the image of a spider

What is the subject of William's "Asphodel, Greeny Flower" ?

one of the most beautiful affirmations of the power of love in--and against--the nuclear age, and one of the few memorable love poems in English written not for a mistress but for a wife: his spouse of 40 years, Florence Herman Williams, or Flossie...The threats of both physical death and the death of love are right at the center of "Asphodel"--and not just at the personal level, but also at the level of global destruction. The poem has a strong dimension of public, as well as private, utterance. Throughout, it confronts what Williams calls "the bomb," both the nuclear threat itself and all forms of "avarice / breeding hatred / through fear," all forms of cruelty, oppression, and repression. But against thanatos, the death instinct, again and again the poet sets eros; whether it take the form of art, medicine, discovery, or desire, eros is the force that drives the imagination, the force that counters death

Milton's "L'Allegro" is a ____ poem that describes____

pastoral...perfect day and idealized images in a country setting

trochaic?

opposite of iambic

What is the subject of Larkin's "This be the verse"?

parents **** up kids, you'd **** up your kids. don't do it.

What are the four sections to Life Studies?

part 1. formally polished poems like those he had already published, but distancing himself from catholicism 2. "91 Revere Street" - a prose reflection on his childhood prompted by a therapist's request to wirte abotu it 3. Odes to four writers including Hart Crane 4. "Life STudies" -- where his famous confessional poems are

Although Milton's "Nativity Ode" is an ode, it has ____ qualities

pastoral

What genre is "The Scholar Gypsy"?

pastoral elegy

What is the genre of "Thyrsis"?

pastoral elegy

How can Frost, like Arnold, be seen as bridging two poetic movements?

placing Frost's work "at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry [with regard to his use of traditional forms] and modernism [with his use of idiomatic language and ordinary, every day subject matter]." They also note that Frost believed that "the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form" was more helpful than harmful because he could focus on the content of his poems instead of concerning himself with creating "innovative" new verse forms.[26]

When was Howl published and to whom was it dedicated?

published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems, and dedicated to Carl Solomon.

What is the poetic form of Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"?

quatrains

What is the poetic form of Frost's "Desert Places"?

quatrains AABA

What is the poetic form of frost's "Neither out far not too deep"

quatrains ABAB

What is the poetic form of the "storng are saying nothing"?

quatrains ABAB

What is the poetic form of Wilbur's "A Baroque Wall-Fountain..."

quatrains of ABBA, like "In Memorium", yet the content enjambs constantly across lines and stanzas

What is the poetic form of roethke's "my papa's waltz"?

quatrains of iambic tetrameter, ABAB, but the second and fourth lines have feminine endings

What is the poetic form of "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things"

quatrains with rhymes

What is the poetic form of "high windows"?

quatrains: abcb, often slant rhymes, similar to dickinson

What is the form of Moore's COmbat cultural?

quintains with rhymes on the third and fifth lines; 9 beats per line

What is the subject of Bishops "roosters"?

read as a description of a Nazi Blitzkrieg bombing during WWII and partly as an allusion to aerial "dogfights" of WWII..

Milton insisted that individual conscience should...

remain unmediated in its relation to God and that man's service to God should be based on "humane reason."

How is Donne's "The Flea" a response poem?

response to an earlier poem, Christopher Marlowe's "A Passionate Shepherd to His Love." That poem is as flowery and lovey-dovey as they come, the young, besotted shepherd making a simple, beautiful declaration of love and a request that his beloved return his feelings. "Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove...." Donne is darker than that, less into the gold, myrtle, and flowers of love, but more interested in the painful yet delicious ensnarement that we all subject ourselves to when we fall in love.

What is ironic about her choice of roosters as metahpors for planes in dogfights?

roosters don't fly

Just as King's (Lycidas) death is untimely, so too is ...

the writing of the poem; the opening lines suggest he's not ready for such a task

What is the subject of Dickinson's "I Felt a Funeral in my brain"?

she imagines her own funeral, and then the experience of losing consciousness as she dies...many readres have said this is about a mental breakdown...W final stanza: And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down — And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing — then —

What is the subject of "Because I could Not stop for death"?

she is busily going about her day when a polite gentleman by the name of Death arrives in his carriage to take her out for a ride. the third passenger in the coach is a silent, mysterious stranger named Immortality. Death takes the woman on a leisurely, late-afternoon ride to the grave and beyond, passing playing children, wheat fields, and the setting sun--all reminders of the cyclical nature of human life--along the way. Eerily, the woman describes their journey with the casual ease one might use to recount a typical Sunday drive. They pause a moment at her grave, perhaps Death's house, which "seemed / A Swelling of the Ground," and then continue their never-ending ride "toward Eternity." In the end, through a brilliant use of hyperbole, or intentional exaggeration, the woman insists that all the centuries that have since passed have felt "shorter than the Day" that she took that fateful carriage ride which revealed to her for the first time the true meaning of Immortality.

What are the words to "Red Wheelbarrow"?

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

What ist he poetic form of "once by the pacific"?

sonnet with couplets all the way through

What is the poetic form of Shelley's "lift not the painted veil"?

sonnet, but its a sestet followed by an octave. in the opening sestet he sets upa plato's cave description of life; in the octave he described one man who lifted the veil

What is the form of Robert Hayden's "Those winter sundays'?

sonnet, but no regular meter or rhyme, just 14 lines

what about the writing style (epic convention)?

style of Paradise Lost, including the extended similes and catalogues, is a sixth epic convention. In book 1 Satan, who had plummeted from Heaven into Hell, is prone on the fiery lake. Across several lines, the narrator compares Satan's enormous size with that of the Titans. Later in book 1, as the fallen angels file from the burning lake, an epic catalogue is used to cite their names as false gods whose idols were worshiped in infidel cultures, particularly in Asia Minor. grandeur...sublimity...

Where was the american poet wallace stevens educated and employed?

t. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

What is the poetic form of Bishop's "roosters"?

tercets, all three lines rhyme, and each line increases in length proportionately

what is the conceit in "the bait"?

the beloved is a "bait" that is pure without deceit and which he cannot resist

how does the form of 'snow man' contribute to its content?

tercets...one sentence...The poem is a single sentence divided into syntactical units by semi-colons. As the poem is read and we arrive at the end of each unit, the mind renders the unit a completion. However each persistent 'and' necessitates the reassessment (the re-view) of what was read before and so through the apprehension of the unit, we try to reach the whole. In this way, reading 'The Snow Man' is in fact like watching a snowstorm: the eyes follow a portion of flakes down until they reach their supposed journey's end, the eye then lifts, gathering another segment in its gaze and repeats in an attempt to witness the power of the storm. It is a wonderful analogy for the process of reading and re-reading—a necessary part of loving poetry.

What is the poetic form of Shelley's "ode to the west wind"?

terza rhyma; iambic pentameter

How did WC WIlilams think of imagination?

that "imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it a description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it—It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but—."

Who along with Ginsberg was parrt of the Beat generaiton?

the Beat Generation, which included famous writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

What was Ginsberg's "New Vision" that he spoke of?

the Beat movement. The group led Ginsberg to a "New Vision," which he defined in his journal: "Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art."

What is the narrative depicted in PL?

the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is an allegorical poem about...

the death of ideal love

Politically, Milton advocated for and defended...

the Commonwealth

Which school of poetry was Asbuerry a part of?

the NY school along with o'hara an dothers

Which two Christian paradoxes does Milton's "Nativity Ode" address?

the Virgin Birth and the two natures of Christ. By using oxymoron or succinct paradox—"wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother"

At Cambridge, Milton prepared for a career as ___ like __ and ___

the clergy, a choice not at odds with his literary ambitions if one considers that his contemporaries John Donne and George Herbert had blended lives as priests and poets

how is donne's "the flea" and his other poems comic?

the conspicuous logical flaws that mark love poems such as Donne's "The Flea," in which the poet stages a comical struggle to reason his way into bed with someone. In that case errors are the source of charm. They invite compassion for the poet, the very certainty of whose defeat at the game of logic may serve to win the heart of the beloved—or at least of the reader—through empathy.

which poets in the early 20th c. really loved donne and why?

the cult figure he became in the 1920s and 1930s, when T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, among others, discovered in his poetry the peculiar fusion of intellect and passion and the alert contemporariness which they aspired to in their own art.

Which poets took a great interest in Wiliams? Why?

the cult of third generation poets did when they adopted him as their father in poetry. " Paterson is our Leaves of Grass," announced Robert Lowell. "The times have changed." And indeed they had. The dominant school of poetry, the academic school of Eliot and Allen Tate, was giving way to what Whittemore called the fifties' "Revolution of the Word." Such poets as Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Cid Corman found in Williams an alternative to the academics.Williams "withstood the influence of Eliot, ignored the New Critics and the academic poets who followed their lead, and simply went his own way, his lines growing shorter, more austere, more pointed with each poem." With this style, reported James Dickey, he appealed to many aspiring writers who looked at his work and said, "Well if that's poetry, I believe I might be able to write it too!" But while the younger poets, including the Beats, found a prophet, a father, and a personal friend in Williams, the old master was no easy critic. "It was Williams who told Ginsberg that 'Howl' needed cutting by half," disclosed Linda Wagner.

Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" can be regarded as the first _____

the first great published metaphysical poem

"The Phoenix and the Turtle" describes...

the funeral for the deceased Phoenix and Turtledove, whose love transcended logic.

What was the goal of the traditional modernist poets?

the great modernists—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore—who began publishing in the 1910s and 1920s. The modernists had had large ambitions for poetry—their subject matter included mythology, history, art, culture, economics, philosophy, and other related topics, rather than the details of ordinary life. They rejected the Romanticism of Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, which focused on the individual personality. Instead of shaping the poem as the speech of one person, presumably the poet, modernists used personae, or masks, and techniques from collage, cubism, and drama.

What is the conceit in Wilbur's poem "Mind"?

the mind is like a bat

What are some political causes that Milton supported?

the morality of divorce, the freedom of the press,

What is the subject of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"?

the product of Dorothy and William's trip through the Wye Valley in the summer of 1798, Wordsworth produced a nature poem which is not really a nature poem but a profound and anxious meditation on loss and desperately sought consolation. In typical Wordsworthian fashion, the poem focuses not on the present visit of 1798 but on the memory of the 1793 visit and on all that has gone between: the poem celebrates not a visiting but a re-visiting, not vision, but re-vision.

what happens at the en dof the man-moth?

the speaker explain show the man-moth will offer you his tears " pure enough to drink."

What is the subject of Ammons' "So I Said I Am Ezra"?

the speaker is whipped over the landscape, driven, moved by the natural elements. He is at once ordered and disordered, close and far, balanced and unbalanced, and he exclaims, "So I Ezra went out into the night/ like a drift of sand." The line is representative of Ammons's entire body of work, for it announces a search through language in an attempt to mean and to be clear, and failing to succeed completely in such clarity, the line ends by affirming a presence of radiance. the speaker seems to be trying to maintain his own identity in the forces of nature, thus repeating the title phrase

What kind of imagery does Donne use in "The Canonization"?

the speaker likens himself and his lover to candles, an eagle and dove, a phoenix, saints, and the dead.

which poets did m. moore influence?

then from 1925 to 1929, she edited The Dial magazine, a literary and cultural journal. This position in the literary and arts community extended her influence as an arbiter of modernist taste; much later, she encouraged promising young poets, including Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, and James Merrill.

Which work did Pound never finish?

the unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917-69).

How does Wordsworth's "Nutting" depart from some romantic conventions (seemingly)?

this poem does not explicitly move us to a universalized message (the address is to an individual), and it does not use revelatory language or invoke a global stage. Neither does this poem aspire to confront the whole of nature or to express the whole mind of man in relation thereto.

What is the poetic form of "This be the verse" by larkin?

three quatrains of iambic tetrameter: abab

What is the primary structure of Donne's "the flea"

three stanzas of couplets, with triplets concluding each stanza

how in the poem does Milton usually 'justify the ways of god to men'?

through dialogue between the son of God and the father

Il Pensero ends with the speaker's hope that

through his experience of melancholy, he can come to a divine vision

How does Milton's "Nativity Ode" foreshadow the concerns of this later works:

through the allusions to mythology and their assimilation to the Hebraic-Christian tradition, the conflict between the godhead and numerous adversaries, the emphasis on voluntary humiliation as a form of Christian heroism, the paramount importance of the redemptive ministry of the Son, and the Christian view of history."

What is the subject of cummings' poem -r-p-ohessag

ti's all junbled and mispelled with parentheses and shit but reads grasshopper who as we look now upgathering into himself leaps arriving to become rearrangingly grasshopper I would argue that it doesn't mean so much (unless you're just talking about what the jumble winds up reading) as it illustrates — through just the superficial reading, through the various rearrangements of GRASSHOPPER, through the contortions it forces the reader to take — the effect of the grasshopper's leaping: the upgathering, leaping, disintegrating, rearranging. It also illustrates an aesthetic that believes in the seamlessness between art and experience, where reading it and experiencing it are brought closer together (maybe more like what you have with visual arts).

What did Whitman say was teh goal of Leaves?

to produce an "epic of Democracy" (429), and that the work was "the song of a great composite Democratic Individual, male or female" (432).

What is the poetic form of Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independnece"?

twenty stanzas written in modified rhyme royal,

What is the poetic form of Lowell's "Beyond the Alps"?

two 14-line stanzas, one 12-line stanza and a final couplet...he made minor changes in several revisions

What are the formal characteristics of Milton's "Nativity Ode"?

two sections, the induction and the hymn. The induction is composed of four stanzas in rime royal, a seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter; the hymn consists of twenty-seven stanzas, each eight lines long, combining features of rime royal and the Spenserian stanza.

For which reason is Adrienne rich most celebrated as a poet?

was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."

How did Williams see Eliot's work as contributing to his own poetic projects?

while the Eliot wave undoubtedly sank his spirits, at the same time it buoyed his determination: "It was a shock to me that he was so tremendously successful," Williams admitted. "My contemporaries flocked to him—away from what I wanted. It forced me to be successful."

What is the publication history of "When Lilacs..." ?

written after the CW and added to late editions of Leaves

protest poem?

yes

The speaker in Lycidas describes their early life together as

young shepherds together "in the 'pastures' of Cambridge."