Fatma Eren
Assist.Prof.Dr.Z.Ayça Germen
American Poetry
January 11, 2016
Final Paper
Ordering the Disorder in Canto LXXIX
Bearing a personal and autobiographical dimension, the Pisan Cantos involves a list of names, places, fragments of images, conversations, quoted lines, and phrases from diverse languages along with the ideograms by Ezra Pound himself. Pound wrote those Cantos at the Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) that he was kept by the US Army, incorporating his views on economics, politics, and government with memories from his past in an unstable state of mind. In his Ezra Pound: A Literary Life, Nadel, Ira B. conveys that; In reading The Pisan Cantos what is important is not the philosophical program, which can be read many different ways, nor knowledge of the exact provenance of the particulars of Pound's razor sharp recollections and perceptions, but
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Bearing this in mind, we see that he inserts those mythical figures into the political contexts. As Jean-Michel Rabaté puts it in his Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound's Cantos, he “connects the world of ancient myth with the actualities of political synthesis. For Pound needs the concept of ‘gods’ and ‘myth’ precisely because he wants to avoid of the fate of Sordello; gods reconcile time and eternity’s concern” (63). Moreover, his allusions to Dante and Homer shouldn’t be overlooked in his search of order of values as Perkins states that “He was Odysseus, but he was voyaging in order to choose the purpose of his voyage. He was Dante in the dark wood and he hoped that if he went through the chaos of experience and history, he would gradually see that it had a structure” (232). In this regard, we can infer that he attempts to produce an order on the page or rather in his mind through his method of putting various people, incidents, and civilizations side by
Order and chaos are two events that inhabit the world that surrounds us. Natural events, such as gravity, create order where our world has laws and principles. One the other hand, war, fighting, and disasters make up the chaotic aspect of our world. How both are found in this world we live in, the same two ideas of order and chaos, are found in Eamon Grennan’s “One Morning.”
When reading a story or a poem, readers tend to analyze, and develop their own opinions. Any content an author or poet produces is up to the reader to question, and identify what the story is trying to say. The point that I am stating is that, stories are like maps that we readers need to figure out. We have to find the starting point, and get to the destination of our conclusion, and the thoughts we have about the story or poem. In the stories that we have read so for throughout the semester, they all have different messages of what they are trying to convey to the reader in a way that can be relatable. Among all the author’s and poet’s works we have read, I have enjoyed Theodore Roethke’s poems. Roethke has developed poems that explore emotions that readers can relate to. I would like to explain and interpret the themes that Theodore Roethke expresses in the poems “My Papa’s Waltz”, “The Waking”, and “I Knew a Woman”.
One poet who was found immense success in the last twenty years in Elizabeth Alexander.An African American woman, Alexander published her first collection of poetry in 1995 and has continued to produce outstanding works since then. Elizabeth Alexander is well known for her poems because of the skillful use of techniques such as diction, enjambment, and asyndeton. In addition, Alexander has garnered attention by adhering to traditional topics such as family, motherhood, and love. Yet, her work does not fit all of the conventional expectations of poetry. Alexander defies expectations by the lack of rhyme or consistent structure in her poems. Nevertheless, I personally find Elizabeth Alexander’s poems of witnessing and stream of consciousness
Question 1, page 305 In the poem Commitments by the author Essex Hemphill, the speaker begins with the announcement “I will always be there” and yet later he says “I am the invisible son”. These two statements can be reconciled because the first statement refers to the speaker’s physical presence and the latter one refers to his physiological state of mind. So when the speaker says “I will always be there”, he is very much referring to the fact that he’ll always attend family events, and will fulfill his commitments, if we look at the family picture everything appears to be normal it pretty much appears as a normal American family, as the speaker tells us “nothing appears out of character” (line 34). However, the speaker also feels like he is the invisible because on the inside, his family will never know how he feels. The speaker knows that he’ll never get married and he knows his family wouldn’t understand his reason for not getting married, therefore invisible in that sense, his family doesn’t know how he feels.
The question is: What do you think the grandmother meant when she said to the Misfit, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” Why do you think the Misfit killed her when she said that? Since the question is two parts, I’ll answer it in two parts.
This darkly satiric poem is about cultural imperialism. Dawe uses an extended metaphor: the mother is America and the child represents a younger, developing nation, which is slowly being imbued with American value systems. The figure of a mother becomes synonymous with the United States. Even this most basic of human relationships has been perverted by the consumer culture. The poem begins with the seemingly positive statement of fact 'She loves him ...’. The punctuation however creates a feeling of unease, that all is not as it seems, that there is a subtext that qualifies this apparently natural emotional attachment. From the outset it is established that the child has no real choice, that he must accept the 'beneficence of that motherhood', that the nature of relationships will always be one where the more powerful figure exerts control over the less developed, weaker being. The verb 'beamed' suggests powerful sunlight, the emotional power of the dominant person: the mother. The stanza concludes with a rhetorical question, as if undeniably the child must accept the mother's gift of love. Dawe then moves on to examine the nature of that form of maternal love. The second stanza deals with the way that the mother comforts the child, 'Shoosh ... shoosh ... whenever a vague passing spasm of loss troubles him'. The alliterative description of her 'fat friendly features' suggests comfort and warmth. In this world pain is repressed, real emotion pacified, in order to maintain the illusion that the world is perfect. One must not question the wisdom of the omnipotent mother figure. The phrase 'She loves him...' is repeated. This action of loving is seen as protecting, insulating the child. In much the same way our consumer cultur...
Black Swan Green and Letters to a Young Poet are stories with a central idea on the many aspects of beauty. Both of the works of literature share a character with a love for poetry. Black Swan Green and Letters to a Young Poet share a central idea but refine it differently. Each of the stories has characters who have a different opinion on the concept of beauty itself.
Sylvia Plath was known as an American Poet, Novelist and Shorty story writer. However, Plath lived a melancholic life. After Plath graduated from Smith College, Plath moved to Cambridge, England on a full scholarship. While Plath was Studying in England, she married Ted Hughes, an English poet. Shortly after, Plath returned to Massachusetts and began her first collection of poems, “Colossus”, which was published first in England and later the United States. Due to depression built up inside, Plath committed suicide leaving her family behind. Sylvia Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work, which is how “Mirror” came to be. Although this poem may seem like the reader is reading from first person point of view, there is a much deeper meaning behind Plath’s message throughout the poem. Plath uses several elements of terror and darkness to show change to the minds of the readers.
Helen of Troy, known as the most beautiful woman of ancient Greek culture, is the catalyst for the Trojan War. As such, she is the subject of both Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” and H.D.’s “Helen”; however, their perceptions of Helen are opposites. Many poets and authors have written about Helen in regards to her beauty and her treacherous actions. There is a tremendous contrast between the views of Helen in both poems by Poe and Doolittle. The reader may ascertain the contrast in the speakers’ views of Helen through their incorporation of diction, imagery, and tone that help convey the meaning of the work.
What did people think of Pound’s support of Nazism and fascism and how did it impact their perception of who he was? Looking into the pre- and post-war opinions of critiques regarding Ezra Pound and his work to determine how his acts of collaboration changed the way that people thought and wrote about him. Additionally, studying the ways in which scholars’ perceptions of Ezra Pound have changed as time has passed. Has his literary influence changed the way scholars and critiques analyze his actions during the
Ezra Pound’s words portray a moment frozen in time. The poem, “In a Station of the Metro,'; is a poem of imagery. Through imagery, Pound imbues his vision and thoughts of his surroundings while on a subway train.
Robert Lee Frost was a famous American poet who was always acknowledged for his vivid and unique writing style, which contributed tremendously into him becoming one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Throughout his life, Frost has written many amazing poems but like the majority of poets at that time, many of his poems from his early writings went unnoticed. He was known for following a very well organized structure for his writing, a great example for this would be: “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, which are two of Frost’s greatest pieces as they bring to the table all of his writing characteristics, ranging from the dominant figurative language that makes the poem vivid, to his flexible idealistic
in his poems. There is also the view that war has turned into a cycle,
“The Spring and the Fall” is written by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poem is about two people, the poet and her significant other that she once had love for. The poem integrates the use of spring and fall to show how the poet stresses her relationship. Of course it starts off briefly by having a happy beginning of love, but the relationship soon took a shift for the worst, and there was foreshadow that there would be an unhappy ending. “I walked the road beside my dear. / The trees were black where the bark was wet” (2-3). After the seasons changed, the poet begins to explain why the relationship was dying, and all of the bad things she endured during the relationship. So, to what extend did the poet’s heart become broken, and did she ever
A poet Ezra Pound, by translating 15 Chinese poems written by Li Po into English, made a great contribution to the Chinese literature becoming famous in the Occident. The name of the collection was Cathay (1915), and The River Merchant’s Wife was one of those. The original version of it, 《长干行》 by Li Po will be followed first before the English translation of Ezra Pound.