Christina Rossetti grew up in London, England with her three siblings. She grew up with a religious family who influenced her writing dramatically. Growing up, Christina was exposed to her parents’ opinions and the wealthy lifestyle. She didn’t know much about other people and their beliefs. When she began to fall in love, her beliefs stood in the way of following her heart. Christina based her love life around her family’s religious beliefs and she was not able to express her feelings to those whom she loved. Christina Rossetti expressed feelings in her poems about the absence of love throughout her life.
Rossetti was born in London, England. She was accompanied by her mother and father and three siblings. When she was young, her father got deathly ill with cancer and could not work. Rossetti and her mother opened up their own school in order to help support the family once her father became ill. When Christina was growing up, she was never exposed to the poor lifestyle and she was mostly exposed to the richer side of living. When she was a small child, Christina never had good health. She was always getting sick and was never fully healthy. Since Rossetti was influenced greatly by her family’s decisions, her poetry was also influenced by them. Because Christina’s family was so religious, her poems reflected her father’s beliefs. “For Rossetti, the imagination is subject to the will and wisdom of God.” (Glenn Page: 65). Mr. Rossetti was so fond of God that Christina followed in her father’s footsteps and loved God with all her heart. The Rossetti family was very religious, her father and mother enforced all of her religious beliefs. When Rossetti began writing, she started writing religious poetry. Rossetti’s religious beliefs...
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... back to mind the way the two touched when they held hands, “If only now I could recall that touch, First touch of hand in hand! - Did one but know!”
Christina Rossetti was a very successful poet who had a wide variety of poetry. She grew up just like a normal girl would, who had a talent that was discovered at a young age of eighteen. Rossetti was greatly influenced about the different chapters that happened throughout her life. When readers read her poetry she has an amazing talent by having the readers imagines what she was imagining when she wrote the poetry. Christina based her love life around her family’s religious beliefs and she was not able to express her feelings to those whom she loved. Throughout her life she wrote poems that ranged from love to death. Christina Rossetti expressed feelings in her poems about the absence of love throughout her life.
Diana Ross was born in 1944. Emerging from the housing projects in Detroit to become an international superstar, she gained prominence first as a member of the supremes, then as a solo artist. The mention of her name evokes the indelible image of the broadly smiling diva, the long hair, sequined gowns, etc.
While Anna Williams views escaping the confines of marriage as a desirable thing, Charlotte Lennox’s greatest lament, as expressed by her poem “A Song,” is merely to have the freedom to love who she pleases. Although Charlotte Lennox has a more romantic view of men and love than Anna Williams, neither woman denies the need for companionship. Charlotte Lennox’s opinion towards love is expressed clearly in her piece “A Song.” The poem’s female speaker is experiencing unrequited love.
Comparing Christina Rosetti's Approach to the Subject of Death in After Death, Remember, Song and Dream
Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. After graduating from Stanford she moved east to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. Olds describes the completion of her doctorate as a transitional moment in her life: standing on the steps of the library at Columbia University, she vowed to become a poet, even if it meant giving up everything she had learned. The vow she made--to write her own poetry, no matter how bad it might be--freed her to develop her own voice. Olds has published eight volumes of poetry, includes The Dead and the Living (1984), The Wellspring (1996), The Gold Cell, (1987) etc. As in her earlier works, she has been praised for the courage and emotional power of her work which continues to witness pain, love, desire, and grief with persistent courage. "Sex Without Love," by Sharon Olds passionately describes the author's disgust for casual sex and her attitude toward loveless sex as a cold and harmful act. She brilliantly uses various poetic techniques to animate the immortality of loveless sex through her words and her great description evoke clear image in the reader mind.
Catherine of Siena was born in Italy in 1347 at a time when political and religious changes were affecting the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Dedicating her life to the Holy Spirit from a very young age, Catherine pursued a life of purity and simplicity that served as a background to her great literary work, The Dialogue of the Divine Providence . Her work focuses on the importance of prayer and its transcendent power in human life.
Often, the reader cannot help but feel a bit disheartened after reading a collection of Anne Sexton’s poems. Sexton herself was disheartened with the prospect of life, killing herself at the age of 45 after years in and out of mental facilities. Her poems certainly take cynicism to an extreme, but they remain the type of extreme valuable to the literary canon. Her poetry leaves the reader questioning the world around him, now able to see stories and past experiences in a new light. And although in the case of Sexton this light may be a shadow, the new depth it adds highlights to us that which we hold truly pure.
The third decade of the twentieth century brought on more explicit writers than ever before, but none were as expressive as Anne Sexton. Her style of writing, her works, the image that she created, and the crazy life that she led are all prime examples of this. Known as one of the most “confessional” poets of her time, Anne Sexton was also one of the most criticized. She was known to use images of incest, adultery, and madness to reveal the depths of her deeply troubled life, which often brought on much controversy. Despite this, Anne went on to win many awards and go down as one of the best poets of all time.
The verbose use of imagery in this poem is really what makes everything flow in this poem. As this poem is written in open form, the imagery of this writing is what makes this poem poetic and stand out to you. Marisa de los Santos begins her poem with “Its here in a student’s journal, a blue confession in smudged, erasable ink: ‘I can’t stop hoping/ I’ll wake up, suddenly beautiful’” (1-3). Even from the first lines of this story you can already picture this young girl sitting at her desk, doodling on her college ruled paper. It automatically hooks you into the poem, delving deeper and deeper as she goes along. She entices you into reading more as she writes, daring you to imagine the most perfect woman in the world, “cobalt-eyed, hair puddling/ like cognac,” (5-6). This may not be the ideal image of every person, but from the inten...
The 20th Century American poet, Anne Sexton once said, “Poetry should be a shock to the senses. It should almost hurt.” Sexton displays this belief through her writing style and set of controversial themes, which unquestionably shocked critics at times. Many of Sexton’s poems reflect on her personal struggles with mental illness and her numerous encounters with suicidal feelings. Sexton became known as a confessional poet because of her autobiographical style of writing. The main themes of her poetry are depression and death. “Wanting to Die”, “The Truth the Dead Know”, “The Abortion”, and “The Starry Night”, are all examples of Sexton’s writing that portray her central poetic themes. Through the use of vivid visual imagery, especially natural
Five years later her father retired from his job to take care of all of the children and happened upon Lazarus’ poetry notebooks. After reading them and taking a great liking to them, he carried the poems off without Lazarus’ consent and had them published for private circulation. When Lazarus was informed, her poems had already received much praise so, adding t...
Anne Gray Harvey Sexton was a famous poet and playwright of her time. She was born in Newton, Massachusetts. Her father was Ralph Harvey who was a successful woolen manufacturer. Her mother was Mary Gray Staples. She was an unwanted third daughter in the family. She was raised in a middle-class environment. Her life remained uneasy due to the fact that her father was alcoholic and her mother has been frustrated by family life. Fighting with her tough family environment, Anne found peace in tying a close relationship with her maiden great-aunt, Anna Dingley, whom she used to call ‘Nana’. Whatever Anne could not share with her parents, she used to discuss with Nana. Anne went through difficult situations because of her parents. She faced a hostile behavior from them and feared that they might abandon her. Later, Nana’s death also gave Anne a big trauma (Sexton 3).
Many great literary and artistic geniuses have been troubled with deep depression and mental illness. Anne Sexton is an example of a poet with such problems who used her personal despair to inspire her poetic works. Not all of Sexton's work is based solely on her mental health; but a good portion of her work is influenced by her constant bouts with depression. As she struggled to deal with her own marital infidelity and the problems associated with being a female poet in a male dominated genre, she combined the theme of depression with one based on the roles of women in society. In turn, she gained a wider audience and received recognition for her work. But all the fame and fortune were not enough to compete with her lack of mental stability.
...for another man, and he still loved her with all his heart, that shows how much passion he had in his life. He transferred this passion throughout all of his work. This passion in my opinion is what made his poems as good as they are. Without that passion, and how devoted he gets to people and things, he never would have been as successful of a poet as he was, and still is to this day.
Despair was the central theme of many of her poems, and whether she intended for readers to feel what she was feeling or not, readers were able to connect with her; this is especially seen in her poem, “There’s a certain Slant of light.”
Rossetti shows us the woman being painted as many different things. Although she is just a painting, the woman symbolizes how the artist views women in real life: as objects. Irony is used when the woman is painted as “a queen”(5). She is put on a pedestal in a position of power, yet she is only described as being “in [an] opal or ruby dress”(5), cementing her role as an ornament. The ruby symbolizes passion and perhaps promiscuity. Opal is a white stone that reflects many colors. White symbolizes purity; while the different colors reflected symbolize how her meaning can change, and how the artist controls her identity and can make her fit any persona he desires. The woman is also depicted as a “nameless girl”(6), indicating her identity is not important to the artist. It also shows that he does not personally know the women he’s painting, but only their looks, affirming that he bases their value off of their appearances. Lastly, the artist portrays a woman as “a saint [and] an angel”(7) and compares her to the “moon”(11), an allusion to Artemis, the goddess of virginity. In this painting, she is established as a pure virgin, which was a requirement of the time period Rossetti lived in. However, because it is one of the fantasies the artist creates, and the poem antagonizes him, this line also expresses the idea that a woman’s purity should not define her. He makes the innocent virgin and the licentious queen the only ways women can be viewed. Yet, they are the same to him. Lacking depth, their physical description is the only thing giving them any meaning. Rossetti describing the portraits conveys the idea that no matter the position in society; or what their actual personalities are like, women are just blank canvases for men to project their fantasies onto. Uninterested in a real person, the artist worships the idea of a