Poetry

Looking into the poet’s mind and soul is often as simple as looking into the speakers that he or she places directly between themselves and the reader. This voice serves as a buffer as the author is able to relate to the reader without exposing their ownself as being vulnerable....

Dreams, ambitions, hope and desires are common themes that define human nature. These dreams and yearnings of the soul have inspired poets for many millennia. This theme has endured through time and can still be found in the poetry of today. This research will explore the theme of dreams, hopes,...

Introduction Poet Anne Sexton’s “Cinderella” is a cynical and detached interpretation that relies on the fable as legendary, and known to all. While Sexton details all the events of the tale, she does so in a humorous way using modern language, for contrast. The theme is essentially understated; no matter...

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) was at various times in her life the first African American female cable car conductor in San Francisco, a dancer, a singer, an actress, a television producer, a civil rights activist, and a writer whose autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, became a best-selling classic...

In considering what might best represent the themes of Margaret Atwood's “The City Planners,” the idea of a doll's house seems very appropriate. Atwood's poem is not “small,” and she is writing about issues as large as the landscape she studies. At the same time, however, she has several points...

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” poem has a title which immediately reveals and invokes images of compassion and sorrow. The characters of the poem are a caged bird, Paul Laurence Dunbar, enslaved African Americans, and anyone being held against their will. The setting is one of a bird in a cage...

All great cultural eras, by virtue of their magnitude and the force of massive shifts in aesthetic considerations, are inevitably complex. Certainly, the minds and writers prominent in them choose to explore varying aspects of the arts, and this is true of the Neo-Classical period in Europe. At the same...

After reading Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman,” it has become clear that the poet supported the historical path of Moscow rather than Petersburg. This idea is also based on the observation of Pushkin’s view of Moscow in his poem “Eugene Onegin.” Pushkin’s view of Petersburg in “The Bronze Horseman”...

Introduction In Act I of Arthur Miller’s play, A View From the Bridge, Eddie Carbone says to the lawyer, “The guy ain’t right, Mr. Alfieri.” The reference is to Beatrice’s cousin, Rodolpho, who has illegally come to Brooklyn (along with Marco, his married brother) to live with Beatrice, Eddie and...

Though it is difficult to summarize all ideas that Whitman presents the reader in “Song of Myself,” there are main ideas that link together under a few unifying themes. Whitman discusses the important idea of the universality of all things, believing that there are similarities and connections between all things...

From the years 1593 to 1601, English poet and playwright William Shakespeare wrote a series of 154 sonnets. The sonnets were broken up into two sets, 126 of them were about an unnamed young man referred to as “Fair Youth” and the others were about whom Shakespeare referred to as...

Literature is a mirror of life. The different aspects of issues encountered in everyday lives are reflected and commented upon in literature. Literature therefore employs a range of versatile stylistic and literary devices to achieve this purpose. One such example of literary devices includes the use of symbols. Symbols represent...

In Cynthia Rylant’s poem, “God Went to Beauty School” (2013), there is a surface meaning that it is important to appreciate the little things in life, and not to take everything so seriously. This is not to say that the poem is contrary to God, but it is more to...

The poem is a dramatic monologue by Robert Browning. Notably, the poem revolves around the speaker and his fallen lover, Porphyria, who he just killed. To begin with, the poem accentuates the tumultuous weather of the previous night when he was expecting his lover to pay him a visit in...

The poem The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop is an example of poetic literature that is intended for raising ecological awareness of the reader. The narrator goes fishing, and the narration dwells on the situation that occurred on a specific day when she caught a big old fish and was reviewing...

The speaker of W. H. Auden's poem “The Unknown Citizen” gives recognition and admiration to an unidentified and nameless national who is described as a “saint”. In contrast to the aforementioned, W.H. Auden ridicules the speaker and his values by making clear and direct implications that through his lifetime of...

In the most commonly accepted versions of the poem “Barbara Allan,” there are several characters in the poem, all of whom have roles, albeit small in some cases, to play in the poem. However, the two main characters, Barbara Allan and Sir John, do more than play the most important...

This paper will focus on two poems by Amiria Baraka / Leroi Jones. It will demonstrate how they can be used in order to trace Baraka's own development from a poet influenced by the Beat and bohemian tradition of New York's Lower East Side to a much more radical aesthetic...

The most striking quality of Gwendolyn Brooks's “The Bean Eaters” is a sharpness fused with the poetic. The three stanzas present a point of view that is pointed and hard, even as the poet finally embraces the lyrical. The hardness exists through approach and tone; it is as though Brooks...

While reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”, it is easy to picture an older woman sitting in a rocking chair with warm tea and a ball of yarn for knitting. She has been to so many places and seen so many things. Instead of talking about those things while sharing...