... 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

... 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

... . 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

... 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

... 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

... her youthful days sitting quietly and listening to charges brought against her color without a chance to say anything in defense (1). When Angelou finally broke her silence after those years of reading and listening, she launched her career in different areas in various linguistic styles, basing her writing skills on her experience and that of other black Americans. It is easy for ... ...

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

... time prove his undoing as an artist. (Packer 8) To say that Alfred, Lord Tennyson was "anxious about his proper public role" (Stevenson 625), would be an understatement. When reading and analysing his poetry, it very rapidly becomes clear that his function as a public figure and his place as a poet in society were his chief preoccupation and the leading thread ... ...

• Word Count: 2449
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... introduces the poem as a "reflection on a gift of 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 ... ...

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

... 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 each new reading. Doing this, each author asks to the reader to get to know the author himself, who is a whole whit his/her own work. Furthermore, it's relevant the simile between poetry ... ...

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

... features to stir our emotions, which means that readers won't only understand the poem, but they can also interact with it too, which I think is important because a main reason for reading fiction is so we can be able to empathise/sympathise with the characters and their struggles/triumphs. Carol Ann Duffy's poems celebrate both famous men in history and literature and ... ...

• Word Count: 1489
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... drowning" and "Blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs". Repetition of the letter 'l' is present as we roll our tongues to make the experience of reading the lines seem elongated; "Many had lost their boots, but limped on blood-shod." Similarly, the alliteration in line 20 "devil's sick of sin" illuminates the ... ...

• Word Count: 1027
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... fascinated by legends, myths, and folktales narrated and adapted to him by his grandmother. The use of myth has not been of a sudden chance to Al-Magaleh, in fact after reading the folk biographies of Antar Ibn Shadad, Saif Ibn Dhi-Yazan, and Abu-Zaid Al-Hilali, he discovered the richness of poetically using myths and tales. But out of many ... ...

• Word Count: 1102
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... a trochaic foot instead of iamb, especially at the beginning of a line. The example taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 demonstrates that one may expect some typical alterations in the form while reading a poem of the Elizabethan age. Milton's Sonnet Form John Milton was an English Sonneteer of the 17th century who borrowed heavily from the traditional Petrarchan form but converted it by ... ...

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

... the people who are suffering with him, his race, and it urges him to grow beyond this suffering. Thus, one can see why it is inappropriate to associate, especially within a reading of The Birth of Tragedy, Apollo with reason and Dionysus with simple excess. The popular identification of the two is misleading reduction. To Nietzsche, the Apollinian factor is more like ... ...

• Word Count: 1180
• Approx Pages: 5
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... when creating a tragic hero, he or she should always be, in some ways, larger than life, a decisive person whose decisions determine the fate of others. However, one can see by reading his Poetics that Aristotle does not necessarily mean the character has to be a prince, king, or someone in that type of position or social class. In fact, he believes that ... ...

• Word Count: 1068
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... of her poetry. As Perry Miller explains, in an era that subordinated women to men and men to God "women who stepped beyond their domestic defines through literature "by reading or writing "were considered dangerous to themselves and to society Puritans expressed considerable scorn for women who wrote or published- (360-61). On the other hand, Elaine Showalter offers ... ...

• Word Count: 886
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... of her poetry. As Perry Miller explains, in an era that subordinated women to men and men to God "women who stepped beyond their domestic defines through literature "by reading or writing "were considered dangerous to themselves and to society Puritans expressed considerable scorn for women who wrote or published- (360-61). On the other hand, Elaine Showalter offers ... ...

• Word Count: 887
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... Eliot's conversion to the Anglican faith, therefore their treatments are discernibly different. In his essay "Religion and Literature," Eliot argues that it is necessary for a religious reader to "scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards (Elliot 149)." Therefore it is not surprising that it is possible to find in Four Quartets started in 1935 ... ...

• Word Count: 1198
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate