... 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. ... take a step back from his contemplation and realise that although they run side by side his earlier imagery is incomplete. What becomes obvious in reading these poems is Keats's exploration of creative expression and morality within human life. Life and tra...

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

... 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 elements of its inner body, its structure: that "sequence of IMAGES and ideas which unite to convey the meaning of the poem" (Thrall 473). Five of the six answers ... up to a point. The first and last lines, origina...

• Word Count: 567
• Approx Pages: 2
• 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

... "uses the question to pursue a different method of inquiry, demonstrating a poet's process of thinking through figurative language and sensory imagery" (Mullen,2011): the catalog of the several possible answers, one per each subsequent stanza, built the whole poem, that is not metrical nor does it rhyme, on Whitman's typical accumulation of poetic comparison through the use of anaphora. The ... approach, more or less explicitly, a metapoetic address establishing a direct relationship with the reader, who is invited to interpret the hidden meaning of the text, which results deeper at eac...

• Word Count: 2619
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• 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

... 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

... 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

... 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

... 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

... tool in understanding the 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 a reflection of women's experiences of the time ... women of ever being accepted by men, there can and will be no change in the "loaded gun" when one lacks desire and accepts a life of living forever powerless. While reading "My Life had stood a loaded gun" as an opposi...

• Word Count: 2199
• Approx Pages: 9
• 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

... ), 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

... , that is, why imitate at all and can we obtain knowledge and/or pleasure through it Both Plato and Aristotle, the foremost philosophers of their time, arrived at widely different answers to the questions above. This is because art was held to be an imitation of nature or reality, and Plato and Aristotle's theories on nature and reality were widely different ... ...

• Word Count: 5585
• Approx Pages: 22
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... when mankind could reform his outlook on life so that he was able to reach new heights of intellectual and political awareness. In the process of doing so, he found answers to practical problems by simply using his heart and searching his soul....

• Word Count: 620
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... speaker's true intentions. The poem's turning point relates directly to the poem's structure. As the speaker asks "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?" (7), instead of God's response, the speaker answers his asked question. "But Patience, to prevent / That murmur, soon replies"(8-9) is the actual turning point, revealing that the speaker has decided that he does not need God. The capitalization ... ...

• Word Count: 1129
• Approx Pages: 5
• 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

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

... 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

... , 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

... my milk" (NIV, Song of Songs 5:1). These images continue to breathe and grow throughout the remainder of the piece as the lovers' journey continues to be put under the test of separation and temptation. This love-wooed with relative restraint, had and flourished within the context of marriage-is idealized with such evocative and appealing imagery that its message speaks ... ...

• Word Count: 1123
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... and illustrates the meaning behind the words that he uses. Through the life of a solider, healthy, young men are transformed through their strength and their abilities are put to the test. Through this, they become weary, "drunk with fatigue," with their "clumsy helmets." The assonance aids in further description of the diction as well as it further ... ...

• Word Count: 801
• Approx Pages: 3
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... rather deceitful because Shakespeare's pattern from previous sonnets continues with either an explanation of the persona's blind love that goes beyond physical beauty or the persona's love which withstands the test of time and aging beauty; however the second line unexpectedly continues by the persona stating that his lover has "a thousand- faults. The word used is "errors,"" and when read one ... ...

• Word Count: 692
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The literary canon, a historical body of masterpieces and classics, is considered the best of the best; literary works that withstood the test of time. Many of the authors whose works have been included in the canon are white males like William Shakespeare and Mark Twain. The general exclusion of women and other ... ...

• Word Count: 510
• Approx Pages: 2
• 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 ... ...

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