Tennessee, lying midway between the fruitful Southern climes of Florida and the wintery North, represents a perfect location for Wallace Stevens to explore his attitudes toward the sort of creative identity he makes for himself in either location. The South, characterized by its warmth and wildness clashes with the “gray and bare” (10) industrial North on that hill in Tennessee in “Anecdote of the Jar”. Though the jar takes dominion, the poet does not necessarily place favor on either side of the conflict since Stevens was “of two minds… about this midway South” (Stevens, 208). Here we see that Stevens is in a place both geographically and poetically between the two extremes. He has not yet reached his destination on his poetic journey, but seems closer to the beginning of his trip than the end. Old images of nature and Keats’ Urn crop up here in Tennessee and though he has not yet finished “taking the leaves off the tree”, Stevens he has more than begun to strip it bare. “Anecdote of the Jar” reflects Stevens’ ambivalence about man’s ability to create order in a chaotic world and the role of the artist or poet in using old forms to create a new order.
The jar, a man made object, represents the power of human creation through art to control and confine natural creation. Stevens jar is more than a simple container, it is able to both define and confine the natural setting that it surrounds, since it “took dominion everywhere” (9). The order imposed by the jar is able to tame the wilderness which “rose up to it” (5), but is rendered “no longer wild” (6). The jar’s roundness is its defining characteristic and is indeed the first attribute ascribed to it (2). The sound of “round” dominates the poem just as the jar dominates nature...
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...oint of vivid contrast. The jar helps to create a locus of order in what is apparently a disorganized system, yet in reality, the wilderness too has its own sort of order. It has been one aim of art to reflect, imitate, or oppose that order. As a poet, Stevens is faced with the challenge of using the poetic form, the jar, in a way that is fresh and interesting. In order to do this, he must strip bare the urn left to him by Keats. When the urn is stripped of the images of Spring melodies and enraptured lovers, we are left with the form of the jar. The jar is lifeless and bare, but not necessarily barren. It is the medium onto which Stevens can develop his own poetic voice and identity. At this, the midpoint on his journey between South and North, Stevens has completed the task of cleaning out all the old images and is now able to begin to fill the jar with new ones.
In the poem The Glass Jar we witness the heart-wrenching episode in a little boy’s life, where he is made to discover a distressing reality. Putting his faith first in a monstrance and then in his own mother, he finds himself being betrayed by both. With the many allusions to nature (for example the personification of the sun and references to animals and woods and so on) Gwen Harwood constructs a dynamic backdrop which allow the responder to dwell on the subtle shifts in the child’s personality. The setting is the terrain of nightmares and dreams, where conscious will is suppressed and the reigns are handed to the subconscious mind.
In Terrance Hayes Book of poetry Wind in a Box, one can see that the poems are devoted to personal history, blues variation, prose poems, and attempts at getting to the core of defining one’s lineage. The blue poems in particular consider 20th century representations of race, culling wisdom, and impressions from many famous people. Hayes uses the word blue in many different titles of poems in order to show various themes throughout them that tie them together using popular cultural icons. It is obvious to see the significance the word blue plays throughout the Wind in a Box poetry collection. Hayes poems “The Blue Suess” and Booker’s Tomb” from the collection Upright Blues emphasize the times of tradition, rare and freedom in the most interesting ways.
Despite nature’s capacity to exist without humanity, ‘orchards would never be planted’. The high modality of the metaphor of an orchard and its fruit unable to be formed reflects the absence of human drive for a set goal nor its deliberately planned path of growth– bearing no ‘fruits’ or rewards in the long run. In comparison, when humanity’s rapacious attempts strip the landscape of its resources (Flame Tree in a Quarry), nature ‘springs up this scarlet breath’ where the sibilance and personification of the earth emphasises the sharp pain and loss. Furthermore, the symbolism of ‘scarlet’ as blood from a wound also exemplifies humanity’s self endangerment upon damaging the land, in spite of their temporary materialistic gain. Therefore, although both the land and humans may, at least momentarily, survive with the absence of the other, both have their progress capped. Accordingly, the River of Dreams illustrates humanity and nature’s reliance on one another in the ship on the luminescent blue ocean in the background’s centre of the River of Dreams. The ocean symbolises nature’s patience and gentle nurturing power being the medium of support for the ship that represents humanity. This conveys humanity’s striving intention for an advance to a pinpointed destination, sanctioned by nature’s serenity and stability to prevent society’s total submergence in greed
Ted Kooser is an American poet that draws readers for his simplicity and accessibility written within his poems. His use of metaphors within his verse describes images to the readers that normally wouldn't been seen. His simplicity, not the type that has no substance but simplicity where readers can understand what he is trying to say within the poem due to the realism Kooser writes with. The dicti...
...vocal statement about the ?organic? possibilities of poetry than optimistic readers might have expected. ?Mayflies? forces us to complicate Randall Jarrell?s neat formulation. Here Wilbur has not just seen and shown ?the bright underside of? a ?dark thing.? In a poem where the speaker stands in darkness looking at what ?animate[s] a ragged patch of glow? (l.4), we are left finally in a kind of grayness. We look from darkness into light and entertain an enchanting faith that we belong over there, in the immortal dance, but we aren?t there now. We are in the machine-shop of poetry. Its own fiat will not let us out completely.
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Writing, Thinking. 5th ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford, 1999. 1865-190
Poetry is a universe of subjectivity. When two poems are set up, side-by-side, to create discussion, results may vary. But it is clear in Sherman Alexie’s two poems, “Defending Walt Whitman” and “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel”, where the discussion must go. Alexie explores Native American culture and the effect that the Europeans have had on the native people of the United States. This feat is accomplished through the thoughtful use of several literary devices, including tone, simile, allusion, and metaphor.
People's lives are shaped through their success and failure in their personal relationships with each other. The author Sylvia Plath demonstrates this in the novel, The Bell Jar. This is the direct result of the loss of support from a loved one, the lack of support and encouragement, and lack of self confidence and insecurity in Esther's life in the The Bell Jar. It was shaped through her success and failures in her personal relationships between others and herself.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
Both Snyder and Stone make use of strong concrete images in their poems. In “The Bath” Snyder appeals to almost all of the senses by talking about the “crackle of waterdrops” and “the scent of cedar” and his wife entering the sauna, “letting in cool air.” In “Simplicity” Stone’s intense use of adjectives and figurative language creates strong images in the reader’s mind. She describes her surroundings as “wrinkled skin on a cup of boiled milk” an describes “the water’s muscular flow.”
‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ and ‘The Preservation of Flowers’: two notable poems, two very different styles of writing. This essay will look at their contrasts and similarities, from relevant formal aspects, to the deeper meanings hidden between the lines. We will examine both writers use of rhyme scheme, sound patterning, word choice, figurative language and punctuation. It will also touch a little on the backgrounds of the writers themselves and their inspirations, with the intention of gaining a greater understanding of both texts.
Ferguson, Margaret W. , Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. The Norton Anthology Of Poetry. shorter fifth edition. New York, New York: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2005. print.
Stevens’ message reveals itself as the poem unravels: there is never one true understanding of a reality outside of one’s interpretation. The author suggests that one can’t help but transfer their own beliefs and ideas onto what they see; in this case, the “listener” is projecting an impression of misery onto the scenery that lies before him. For example, the first two stanzas are filled with decorative language that serves to describe the visual image of a winter landscape. Using phrases such as “crusted with snow” (3) instead of “covered” with snow provides an evocative illustration of the snow’s roughness. Other phrases such as “shagged with ice” (5) and “rough in the distant glitter/Of the January sun” (6-7) force the reader to experience the miserable portrayal of winter. These are not the descriptions of an observer who “beholds nothing that is not there” (14-15), but rather the objective, poetic appreciation for the snowy
...storal” (45, p.1848). The urn’s eternity only exists artistically and does not reflect human life because only the urn “shou remain” forever (47, p.1848). Keats contrasts the ephemeral nature of human life with the longevity of the urn. In last two lines, Keats declares, “beauty is truth, truth beauty” (29, p.1848) embodying both sides of his perspective. By establishing a relationship between beauty and truth, Keats acknowledges that like truth, the beauty of the Grecian urn is unchangeable and that the ability accept reality is beautiful.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.