Dorothy Parker: The Challenges of Life and Love
When sorting through the Poems of Dorothy Parker you will seldom find a poem tha¬t you could describe as uplifting or cheerful. She speaks with a voice that doesn’t romanticize reality and some may even call her as pessimistic. Though she doesn’t have a buoyant writing style, I can empathize with her views on the challenges of life and love. We have all had experiences where a first bad impression can change how we view an opportunity to do the same thing again. Parker mostly writes in a satirical or sarcastic tone, which can be very entertaining to read and analyze. It is apparent in Parker’s poems that she has had plenty of damaging experiences, and she has turned these into her life’s
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With this the gist and sum of it,
What earthly good can come of it?” (Kirszner, Mandell 907) She depicts men in a blunt way, and although not all men are like this it does not make it untrue in the slightest. This poem has a very nonchalant tone in the sense that I don’t think Parker cared if this offended anyone. This poem illustrates her use of satire perfectly. She mocks an entire gender without batting an eye, knowing she is bound to irk someone, which I find to be pretty humorous. Another of Parker’s poems “News Item”, only two lines long, reads, “Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses.”(Kirszner, Mandell 837). When Parker says “glasses” she doesn’t necessarily mean that all women who wear glasses aren’t appealing to men. She is referring to a studious or bookworm personality as opposed to an outgoing and flirty personality that most men are drawn to. Parker’s satirical writing style allows her to inject a lot of humor into the poems she wrote; when she was challenged with an in her life she tended to voice herself through her
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She does not hint as to whose dream it is, or what the dream is. This being said the dream could be applied to just about anyone experiencing these same feelings. This is what is so magical about Parker’s poems; they are abundantly relatable. She tells the reader to let go once the dream has died, and in the fourth and fifth lines Parker writes, “Walk not in woe, But, for a little, let your step be slow.” (Poemhunter). In these lines she is telling the reader to not become saddened over the death of their dream, however they should not immediately dispose of that dream and move slowly when forgetting their former dream. She goes on to say in lines six-eight, “be not sweetly wise With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies. A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:”(Poemhunter). In these lines Parker warns the reader to not become too foolish with their hope, because their dream is still dead. If you were searching for help with this challenge in your life and read this poem, it may either help you move on or result in an ever more depressed state of mind. The way Parker writes her poetry is very personal which gives her writing style so much more emotion and
Dorothy Rothschild, later to become the famous writer Dorothy Parker, was born on August 22, 1893 to J. Henry Rothschild and Eliza A (Marston) Rothschild in West End, New Jersey. Parker’s father, Mr. Rothschild, was a Jewish business man while Mrs. Rothschild, in contrast, was of Scottish descent. Parker was the youngest of four; her only sister Helen was 12 and her two brothers, Harold and Bertram, were aged 9 and 6, respectively. Just before her fifth birthday, Dorothy’s mother became very ill and died on July 20, 1897. Three years later in 1900, Mr. Rothschild remarried to a 48 year-old spinster widow, Eleanor Frances Lewis, who Dorothy referred to as “the housekeeper.” The new Mrs. Rothschild entered Dorothy in the Blessed Sacrament Convent School, where the Catholic ways of thinking were instilled in her. Fortunately or unfortunately, in 1903 Dorothy’s stepmother dropped dead of an acute cerebral hemorrhage and consequently Dorothy did not have to continue at the Blessed Sacrament Convent. A few years later, in the fall of 1907, Dorothy entered Miss Dana’s school, a junior college, where she studied several different disciplines and was exposed to current events and cultural activities. This environment nourished Dorothy’s intellectual appetite, but this too was short-lived; Miss Dana died in March 1908. Dorothy, now aged 14, was only at the school for one year, the fall of 1907 to the spring of 1908 (Miss Dana’s school had to file for bankruptcy). In 1913, Mr. Rothschild died leaving Dorothy, age 19, to find her own way and support herself.
Her written words expresses the jumbled thoughts that raced through my mind the night I felt most vulnerable. Cars sped by on the dark streets as I wondered what life truly meant. I was so caught up in this fantasy of a perfect world and for a long time of period I believed all was well. But like all wonderful dreams, my world of happiness all came to an end when reality came knocking at my door just to rip my heart out. Reality gave me a check and left me with an emptiness that I did not know how to fill. I wondered where life was taking me and I questioned every detail just to find an answer as to what sort of path is life leading me down to. I became destructive as the answers I was looking for was never straightforward and this lead me down a spiral of despair. WIthout realizing it the first few times of reading Sexton’s poem, I was able to connect my past with her words and it brought a deeper meaning to
“Silence is a sounding thing, to one who listens hungrily.” Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an author, journalist, educator, and artists. She was a woman of the Harlem Renaissance. But despite all the struggles of being an African American woman, Gwendolyn B. Bennett made herself into the woman she was in the 1900s. Therefore, the strong woman she became is shown through her work.
One of the great things about Composition and Literature is that the readings can relate to many other topics outside of the class. The poems and the stories read in this class give a more in depth look at a specific subject and give a clearer picture of what life was like and how people lived at that time. In most classes about U.S. History, the sections taught on segregation don’t give specific examples of how people were treated or the perspectives of the people who were mistreated. However, reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry in the Composition and Literature course gives students an opportunity to learn greater details about segregation through the perspectives of the people most affected by it and the
Patricia Young’s poem Boys is a representation of implied heteronormacy in society. Young uses tropes and schemes such as allusion, metaphors and irony to convey the ways in which heterosexuality is pushed onto children from a young age. Poetry such as Boys is a common and effective medium to draw attention to the way society produces heteronormativity through gendered discourses that are typically used to understand sex. Boys does an excellent job at drawing its readers to the conclusion that it is an ironic poem trying to emphasize the over-excessive ways in which we express heterosexuality in daily life.
Sometimes knowledge of someone’s life can be taught by stanzas. It is not always simple being honest and open to discuss past troubles, but it is important that those negative thoughts do not stay bottled inside you. Expressing these feelings can help aid in recovering. Lucille Clifton uses poetry as her therapy to bring out all the shadows in her life. From the beginning of her career with the publishing of Good News About the Earth in 1972 to the most recent addition, Mercy in 2004, we see how Clifton relies on her writing to capture her past. Lucille Clifton’s poetry traces the life of a strong woman imprisoned by loss and disease, but eventually frees herself by living each moment as if it were her last.
Dorothy Parker, an accomplished American poet, exposes the darker side of human behavior through her epigrammatic style of poetry. She believed that a writer must say what he feels and sees. She specialized in the hard truths, particularly about death, in both life and love. Some major motifs present in Parker’s work include loneliness, lack of communication between men and women, disintegration of relationships, human frailties, and the affectations and hypocrisies of a patriarchal society. Parker’s wit is largely autobiographical reflecting the tumultuous years of her youth that included alcoholism, romantic disasters, and attempted suicides. The three poems provided in the text exemplify how Parker utilizes poetic devices such as irony, satire, and sarcasm to address the human frailties involved with searching for meaningful relationships and suicide.
Dorothy Parker was a female writer in the 1920’s and is still known all around the world for her wit. Parker was a member of one of the most affluent groups in New York City at the time, the Algonquin Round Table. Besides her wit Parker also was known for her drinking problem, many suicide attempts and string of failed relationships. The most popular and prized of Parker’s works is a short story entitled “Big Blonde.” This story won the O’Henry Prize for best short story in 1929. In this story Parker creates a character who is tapped a society that revolves around a woman’s need to be nothing more than a pretty face who is always having a good time. Parker went above and beyond of showing the irony of the ideals women are held to and how they can eventually lead to the destruction of who they are. She does not write about a woman who are liberated or free, she instead shows a woman who are trapped and vulnerable. She took a very different stance then a lot of women of her time on women’s new found position in pro-suffrage society. She focuses much more on the way men saw women an amusement. In fact Parker creates women who are trapped as being a means of entertainment for the men. They are to live up to that idea and if they do not they are easily replaced with another.
Robert Creeley, a famous American poet, lived from 1926 to 2005. Creeley was normally associated as a Black Mountain poet because that is where he taught, and spent most of his career. Throughout his life, Creeley wrote many different pieces of poetry. Four great poems by Robert Creeley are, “For Love”, “Oh No”, “The Mirror”, and “The Rain”. The poem “For Love”,was written by Creeley for his wife. In this poem Creeley explains, the love someone has for another person, and how complicated it is making his life because the person doesn’t know how to explain their love. “Oh No” is a poem that is literally about a selfish person who ended up in hell, but this poem has a deeper meaning. Part
In the world of teenagers everything seems to come and pass by so quickly. For instance the beginning of senior year. In Spite of being happy and excited were also generally nervous and anxious to see what our future holds. As senior year comes to an end, It then becomes as temporary as the summer sun but also the boundary of our life before we enter adulthood. Even then our future is still undefined.
Poems are a way of expressing the feelings and emotions that the writer chooses to describe, usually using symbolic objects and comparing it to another thing using figurative language. There were many poets that came and went throughout history and there are still a lot today, one of which really caught my attention and her name is Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou is a very astounding poet with her 166 poems, but one really stood out to me and that was The Lesson. Maya Angelou had a very difficult life with the many challenges she faced being an African American during the timeframe of her life and she outlined these troubles in most of her writings. With her circumstances she just kept moving forward and giving it her best without giving up; she is a great model for anyone to follow.
While other writers use their poetry to decipher the meaning of life, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea was busy writing about how to live it. Five of her poems, “Jupiter and the Farmer,” “The Tree,” “The Shepherd Piping to the Fishes,” “Love, Death, and Reputation,” and “There’s No To-Morrow,” convey strong messages to the reader about how to live their lives. In her poetry, Anne Finch uses anecdotes to help illustrate the validity of her statements, thereby providing the reader with a strong, meaningful, and important message about how life should be lived.
“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
Reveals and proves how free spirited and understanding she was. It conveys that people in your life can be influential, but only to a certain extent; then, it is up to the individual, to find the beauty and love in your life, and to find that in another human being is beautiful. Plath’s life was everything but easy. Plath conveys a myriad of themes in her poems from deaths to upbeat random ideas, which she demonstrates in her poems “Daddy,” “Fever 103,” and “Fiesta Melons.”
October 27, 1932 is the exact date that the one and only Sylvia Plath was born on. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She kept a journal of her poetic work that she started at an early age. As she grew older and wiser, she worked at Mademoiselle magazine as a guest editor while she was attending college. She found her self in a rough obstacle during that time and tried to take her life by overdosing on sleeping pills. After getting the proper treatment at a mental health facility, she went back to school to finish her degree in 1955. “Plath herself had suffered a serious breakdown and attempted suicide between her junior and senior years in college”(Baym). She met Ted Hughes, who she married in 1956, at Cambridge University in England.