... who used various techniques to make their works more attractive and readable. The sonnet is among the most limited poetic forms with its long list of requirements that can be discouraging. Nevertheless, flexibility and originality are acceptable, as it has been proved by several writers. The strictness helps ... the sympathy may turn into love in line 3-5. This means that he is only interested in winning the sympathy of Stella. In lines 12-13, the poet becomes emotional and tortured at the climax of the sonnet and describes his state as painful as giving birth to a child ... acquainted ...

• Word Count: 4910
• Approx Pages: 20
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... of his lover, presumably a girl, and eternalizes it to a great extent. Through the technique of personification in "thy eternal summer shall not fade" and "Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade," Shakespeare's lover embodies summer itself implying that her beauty will never "fade" and even death cannot cease it. Love, as a theme exists ... religion and God's consent is insignificant to Shakespeare, although nature plays a significant role in his language. He immediately compares his loved by a rhetorical question – "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" and deems her as ...

• Word Count: 1172
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... watermelon pickle." The reader is instantly thrown off at first read of this title and is therefore inclined to continue reading in order to make sense of the title. "During that summer" is a popular opening line to the stanzas in the poem, which is repeated in order to create a ... reminiscent tone. The use of the subordinating conjunction "that" in this context lets the reader make a distinction between "that summer" from every other summer. The first two lines also establish heavenly dreamlike scenery, like that in the eyes of a child who believes that "unicorns are[were] ... stanza, ...

• Word Count: 809
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... as Klammer argues, representative of an egalitarian democracy where all peoples []receive equal treatment from the poet"(cited in Cortiel,2008): through a list of synecdoche, Whitman claims that grass can grow anywhere, even in the most unfavorable environment and among diverse human species, such as " ... ), "Congressman" (any member of the upper political classes; in Cortiel opinion, this word seems out of place in this list of jocular and derogatory colloquialisms, stressing that word can embody social and linguistic difference in several different ways, even in a political system ...

• Word Count: 2619
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... more general American experience as many of his poems are explicitly about his grave desire for the return of his dead beloved wife. It is in reading his sad yet hopeful poems that "speak to an unappeasable yearning for tangible security, acceptance, and happiness" (Axelrod 298) that one can see ... certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Stanton). The Declaration went on to charge men with a list of inequalities they enforced upon women. "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man t...

• Word Count: 2199
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... . The Odes themselves reflect a development of his thoughts and emotions; and hence are pliable to accommodate differing significances. They are, it can be said, a contemplation and overtly subjected response to a reading of a particular human condition. Keats hence goes about teaching the reader of his own humanity and identity, which can be grasped, from his own experience. As a group, the Odes show ... a mundane reality. He has to subsequently take a step back from his contemplation and realise that although they run side by side his earlier imagery is incomplete. What becomes obvious...

• Word Count: 2837
• Approx Pages: 11
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... his daily tasks by himself. Slip into this man's shoes and wonder how it would feel to live a life such as his. Such is this emotion a reader goes through from reading Alone by Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou is a prominent contemporary poet that was well-known for poems such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and On the Pulse of Morning ... to society when she says "While Maya Angelou's poetry may not have taken us into every nook and cranny of her long and complex life starting with the Lafayette County Training School--its various movements and insights have nonetheless helped us understa...

• Word Count: 1766
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... many things through the story that act as symbolic insights into his character, techniques that Joyce as a writer employs to give a detailed description of him without making a psychological and physical list of description. One of these is the way he takes his whiskey. The fact that Joyce makes sure the reader is aware of the way he takes his whiskey is ... he does not own the privilege of frivolous fantasies of poetry and excitement and emotion, since he has the drudgery of responsibilities to attend to. As he attempts to continue reading, but realizes that he cannot emanate the prope...

• Word Count: 3141
• Approx Pages: 13
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... as obvious in within the text. The narrator says that the music is fled, perhaps the music he remembers from Southern summer life, but the fleeting music might just as easily be directed towards the nightingale as he "Singest of summer in full-throated ease."(10), which contrasts with the narration consisting of the slighting difficulties of forgetting, loss, pain, and envy ... world he remembers, "Fast fading violets"(47) and "pastoral eglantine"(46) are once again brought to the foreground with pleasure, but just like the "Provencal song" bringing the remembrance of summer mirth not w...

• Word Count: 1517
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... reality where time has no boundries on the beauty in question. When the beautiful person is compared to a summer's day, they are explained as being highly superior, as "summer's lease hath too short a date". In this same manner, it is said that the "eternal summer" of the person adored shall not fade. "Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When ... ...

• Word Count: 1243
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... historically because the literary canon has taken on a similar nature to the biblical canon. The word originates from kanon' a Greek word meaning instrument of measure and has developed to connote a list of important authors and their works, concerned with sorting the "orthodox from the heretical- . If this metaphor is applied to the literary canon it would suggest, sorting the wheat from ... of time, whilst the text that is slightly lacking or weak in substance is left behind. It would not be possible or desirable to produce a list that simply contained all the works of authors over ti...

• Word Count: 2215
• Approx Pages: 9
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... fighting for something so important, so necessary, that dying very well may be the end and irreparable result. But upon reading this poem, I wondered to myself, " was it a needless death after all?" After reading the entire poem several times, I wasn't so sure. But after listening to three readings of this emotionally charged poem, ... "call" and "all." This part of Levine's recitation is what I feel to be the most powerful moment of the entire reading, ending the third stanza with a subtle yet effective authority that truly relays the ultimate power of Yeats's words. Peter Davison took...

• Word Count: 1069
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... African American literature is 20th century, and that would include authors such as Sterling A. Brown, Jean Toomer, Zora Neal Hurston, Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou and the list goes on to include newer African American authors and scholars such as Cornell West, Toni Morrison and Nikki Giovanni. All of these novelists, playwrights and poets have created a historical journey ... century. Sterling A. Brown who began his career as one of America's astounding poets with his first collection called Southern Road in 1932. Brown paved his way into the continuall...

• Word Count: 2200
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... in the study of literature as independent of historical or authorial origins. The New Critics believed in this idea of the text in itself'. Richards tries to explain literary reading in terms of modern semantics and psychology. His new criticism is psychological criticism which is not spontaneous response, but psychological response. It is practical criticism. In Practical Criticism ... Eagleton, Ransom's ontology, text has ontological meaning, is myth. Phenomenology Phenomenological criticism, an idealist, essentialist, anti-historical, formalist and organicist type of criticism, aims at...

• Word Count: 3510
• Approx Pages: 14
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Meaning in poetry is created from the reader making the connection between the literal and the metaphorical, and in doing so, "reading between the lines." At first glance, Yeats" poetry may seem to be merely spontaneous emotion, however, after close literary analysis, it is clear that Yeats" poetry is often fairly systematic ... " often drew parallel's between ideas within his poems, and also, between poems. These regularly reiterated ideas are clearly uncovered when analysis is applied to Yeats" poetry, which indeed, on first reading appears to be predominantly spontaneous emotion. As part o...

• Word Count: 823
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... shall I call thee?'" (Line 3), " 'Sweet Joy befall thee!'" (Line 6), " 'Sweet joy I call thee'" (Line 9), and " 'Sweet joy befall thee.'" (Line 12) This pattern of repetition emphasizes the joy that the parent wishes upon the child. Contrastingly, the child in "Infant Sorrow" is the only one speaking and is describing ... plight, and understands that his parents and society are to blame for his situation since he described them as people "who make up a heaven of our misery" (Line 12). The harsh conditions that the boy is living in are caused by a social system that perpet...

• Word Count: 1939
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... a text which is likely to differ significantly from another's interpretation. In this sense, a sonnet will always be in the eye of the beholder as it lays with whom ever is reading and their viewpoint on the text. However, it is also questionable whether or not the reader has much room to take any individual meaning from a sonnet as they would be ... a sonnet means to them. Traditionally, as coined by Petrarchan, a poem about love, the sonnet holds certain connotations to a reader that leads their expectations of what they are looking for when reading one. More recently than Petrarchan,...

• Word Count: 1540
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... ), Wright was ever conscious of the attacks on the environment which families such as her own pastoral family inflicted. From this scene of chaotic struggle, there is a yearning for "summer" and its "wave of rambler roses". While the European imagery represents an incursion on the natural order of things it is also a consciousness on the part of ... ...

• Word Count: 1047
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Sound patterning is a feature of most poems, and only in the last few centuries have readers become accustomed to silently reading a printed text. Poems were first written for performance, and only committed to paper subsequently, if at all. Poetry indeed derives from oral traditions, most spectacularly in the case of Homer, ... , bearing witness to our impressions, our thoughts and our feelings. It clarifies, intensifies and enlarges our experience of life. With a good poem we feel a rapt attention to what we are reading, apprehending its nature immediately and as a whole. We gain a heighten...

• Word Count: 675
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... exploration of the thin divide between pain and joy. The speaker addresses her lover as "my dearest", suggesting a deep and genuine love between them. Therefore, when the speaker goes onto list in detail the traditional acts of mourning they come as a stark contrast to what is evidently a love which is alive and passionate. Irrespective of the nature of the death of ... ...

• Word Count: 2526
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... the bourgeois morality of the Victorian Age, rejecting 19th-century optimism and presenting a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. From 1911 to 1914 Eliot was back at Harvard, USA, reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit, but then he returned to France. After several years of residence in Europe and studies in Paris, in Munich, and at Merton College in Oxford ... , life, motion, energy, etc. Eliot's study of the works of Henri Bergson in Sorbonne helped him a lot to form an opinion concerning these subjects. The Four Quartets deeply impressed the reading publi...

• Word Count: 1915
• Approx Pages: 8
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... or forgiven. Certainly Hope's poems have not been as widely loved as Wright's, nor have they been so readily conscripted to the nationalist poetic canon. Some years ago I chaired a poetry reading at Sydney's Parliament House. As a fund-raiser for the May Gibbs" House, Nutcote, members of parliament were asked to read their favourite Australian poem. Top of the pops were poems ... by Judith Wright and John O"Brien. I don't remember anyone reading a poem by A D Hope. For Wright, the fact that some of her earlier poems, such as Bullocky or South of My Days could be fitted so readily into a...

• Word Count: 968
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... 's poem "Harlem" (later titled "Dream Deferred") one sees only its obvious simplicity. It asks, and provides a series of disturbing answers to, the question, "What happens to a dream deferred?" (line 1). A closer reading reveals the essential disunity of the poem. It is a ground of unresolved conflict. Various elements of its outer body, its form, contend with each other as well as with various ... ...

• Word Count: 567
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... , of nature, and of inner anguish. In his view of nature, the world is like a book written by God. In this book God expresses himself completely, and it is by reading the world that humans can approach God and learn about Him. Many of his poems are about man's destruction of sacred natural and religious order. The poet had an acute ... interest in the scientific and technological advances of his day. Upon reading any of his poetry, it is quite simple to testify that the vocabulary which Hopkins uses contains a quite eccentric musical quality. A book of his selected works enabled me to re...

• Word Count: 1414
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... limited and will have consequences: those who lift the veil will find themselves incapable to communicate meaningfully with others, in Shelley's words, they will become "splendor(s) among shadows" (12). Due to the impossibility to communicate what they have perceived, truth will remain an illusion for those who did not lift the veil. Truth, Shelley suggests, lies beneath the veil ... ...

• Word Count: 1524
• Approx Pages: 6
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate