Much of Adrienne Rich’s poetry is applauded for its rhythm and form, which helps emphasize the meaning of each poem. The freely placed lines and unique structure do not break up the poem, instead they bring power and significance to the unique features of her individual poems, stressing the meaning of the poem to the reader. Concretely, her poems have much imagery, and, also, most of the time, lack comment or conclusion to the emotions and purpose of her work. The structure, form, and rhythm of Rich’s poetry work together flawlessly to help portray the meaning of the poem, separate from just the images themselves. We can see Rich’s conscious effort to use form to portray meaning in many of her poems, but more specifically in Planetarium, Power, and For an Occupant.
As flawless and dynamic as Rich’s poetry seems to be on paper, the struggle of finding a balance between what is chemically formulated and what is actually linear freedom is constantly the focus in her work. In other works, specifically in her 1993 published book What Is Found There, Rich describes this “poetic power” and how she uses power to allow freeness in her lines. “Poetic forms – meters, rhyming patterns, the shaping of poems into symmetrical blocks of lines called couplets or stanzas – have existed since poetry was an oral activity. Such forms can easily become format, of course, where the dynamics of experience and power are forced into a fit pattern to which they have no organic relationship… But a closed form like the sestina, the sonnet, the villanelle remains inert formula or format unless the “triggering subject”… acts on imagination to make the form evolve, become responsive, or works almost in resistance to its form. It’s a struggle not to let the for...
... middle of paper ...
...otions, important themes, and the soft-spoken, but evident meanings of each poem. Rich was ‘trying to drive a tradition up against the wall’, ‘looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations’, gritting her teeth and asking where she should go.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Late Style in Beethoven. Essays on Music. Berkley: University of
California Press, 2002, p. 564-568.
Cooper, Jane R. Reading Adrienne Rich. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1984. Print.
Rich, Adrienne. That Is Found There. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2003, 1993.
Print.
Rich, Adrienne. Arts of the Possible. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.
Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984. New
York: W.W. Norton, 1984. Print.
Stephen, Burt. No Scene Could Be Worse. 3rd ed. Vol. 24. London: London Review of,
2012. Print.
When I read poetry, I often tend to look first at its meaning and second at how it is written, or its form. The mistake I make when I do this is in assuming that the two are separate, when, in fact, often the meaning of poetry is supported or even defined by its form. I will discuss two poems that embody this close connection between meaning and form in their central use of imagery and repetition. One is a tribute to Janis Joplin, written in 1983 by Alice Fulton, entitled “You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain.” The second is a section from Walt Whitman’s 1,336-line masterpiece, “Song of Myself,” first published in 1855. The imagery in each poem differs in purpose and effect, and the rhythms, though created through repetition in both poems, are quite different as well. As I reach the end of each poem, however, I am left with a powerful human presence lingering in the words. In Fulton’s poem, that presence is the live-hard-and-die-young Janis Joplin; in Whitman’s poem, the presence created is an aspect of the poet himself.
“I look to poetry, with its built-in capacity for compressed and multivalent language, as a place where many senses can be made of the world. If this is true, and I’ve built a life around the notion that it is, poetry can get us closer to reality in all its fluidity and complexity.”
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
The first poem I will discuss is from the first portion of the book and as I analyze the piece, it is easy to see the distinction between the tone of the two poems. “The Eye” begins by saying: “Bad Grandfather wouldn’t feed us. He turned the lights out when we tried to read”(19).
In this paper, I plan to explore and gain some insight on Audre Lorde’s personal background and what motivated her to compose a number of empowering and highly respected literary works such as “Poetry is Not a Luxury”. In “Poetry is Not a Luxury”, Lorde not only gives voice to people especially women who are underrepresented, but also strongly encourages one to step out of their comfort zone and utilize writing or poetry to express and free oneself of repressed emotions. I am greatly interested in broadening my knowledge and understanding of the themes that are most prominent in Lorde’s works such as feminism, sexism and racism. It is my hope that after knowing more about her that I would also be inspired to translate my thoughts and feelings
69. Print. Strand, Mark, and Eavan Boland. The Making of a Poem: a Norton Anthology of Poetic
Aesthetic form in modern poetry, then, is based on a space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in the reader's attitude toward language. Since the primary reference of any word-group is to something inside the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.
The speaker begins the poem an ethereal tone masking the violent nature of her subject matter. The poem is set in the Elysian Fields, a paradise where the souls of the heroic and virtuous were sent (cite). Through her use of the words “dreamed”, “sweet women”, “blossoms” and
I do not know how without being culpably particular I can give my Reader a more exact notion of the style in which I wished these poems to be written, than by informing him that I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject; consequently, I hope that there is in these Poems little falsehood of description, and my ideas are expressed in language fitted to their respective importance. Something I must have gained by this practice, as it is friendly to one property of all good poetry, namely, good sense; but it has necessarily cut me off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets.
Lisa Parker’s “Snapping Beans”, Regina Barreca’s “Nighttime Fires”, John Frederick Nims’ “Love Poem”, and John Donne’s “Song” all demonstrate excellent use of imagery in their writing. All of the authors did a very good job at illustrating how the use of imagery helps the reader understand what the author’s message is. However, some of the poems use different poetic devices and different tones. In Lisa Parker’s “Snapping Beans” and Regina Barreca’s “Nighttime Fires”, both poems display a good use of personification. However in John Donne’s “Song” and John Frederick Nims’ “Love Poem, they differ in the fact that the tone used in each poem contrasts from each other.
Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California, 1998.
Marianne Moore’s most popular poem, which is also her most ambiguously titled poem, is called “Poetry.” In this poem Moore decisively strayed away from her conventional writing style of contrariety and the bizarre, but it does seem to share other characteristics of her earlier poetry. Moore’s apparent purpose in writing “Poetry” was to criticize the present social outlook on the entire idea of poetry, to come up with a universal definition of poetry and of genuine poetry, and ultimately to convince those who dislike poetry of its benefits. She attempted to present this criticism and definition by means of blatant irony, and even though she desperately wants to describe the seemingly trivial activity of poetry, she fails to provide a definition that is not caught up in the negative.
In all of Bradstreet’s works she is constantly expressing herself through her figurative language that whoever reads the poetry can’t help but sense the feelings through any piece. An...
...’s argument, that readings of a text are culturally constructed. Being an English major, I am thrust into an English student’s interpretative community, which enables to see or pushes for me to look past the simplicity of a work (surface meaning) and search for a deeper meaning. Enabling me to understand gaps that implied that Stella made it known that she did not feel the way Astrophil did but she was, in the least intrigued by Astrophil, as she is the one who tells him to just say what’s in his heart. With the eyes of a college English student and writer I looked deeper to find that Sidney was portraying a writer plagued by writer’s block and the solution to counter this evil. As I have faith in my interpretation of this poem I understand that even in my attempt at being impartial I am biased. I implore you to take this into account; I looked in my heart and wrote.
The three main metaphors in the specific in the passage above would be considered the wreck, the myth, and the drowned face. If you take into consideration that Rich was one of the greatest feminine writers in the 1970’s, you can begin to understand how the wreck is more than just a sunken ship, how the myth is more than just a book, and how the drowned face is more than just one person submerged in water. The wreck is a metaphor for everything that has been suppressed and devalued in women in history, and even at the time the poem was written. Rich uses the wreck to symbolize the oppression of women in a patriarchal society, and all the value that women could have added to society that has been lost and “left to rot” by the oppression of the female species, casting them out as ‘the others’ (line 82). The use of this metaphor has a great deal of impact. I believe Rich is trying to show that oppressing women has caused a great loss of knowledge, power, and riches that could’ve contributed to society in the same way that the loss of a great ship with loads of treasure and precious cargo would have been a loss to society as well. When Rich writes, “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck”, she is saying the narrator was searching to represent the women who have been oppressed. She is fighting for the female species, and wasn’t interested in the false histories written