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Death And Dying By Isaac Asimov

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In the words of Isaac Asimov, “Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome”, and poetry has been used as a way of attempting to understand this transition. Poetry is often utilized because it encapsulates more than the literal meaning of the words, and can evoke more through certain stylistic devices and imagery. As a form of art, it even predates literacy, and there are many known genres that are employed to make certain points, express a state of mind, or even to tell a story. Among these we find narrative poetry, epic poetry, satirical and lyrical poetry, but perhaps the one that applies to the theme of death and dying is the elegy. An elegy is a mournful, melancholy, or plaintive poem, which is normally used as a means of dealing with death or as a consolation.
We are looking to find how death and dying have been treated in poetry, and compare and contrast how the idea is perceived. Since the dawn of literacy, death and dying have been an omnipresent theme, which can be explained by the importance that death takes place in everyone’s life; death is universal, and some say that it is the fear of death that induces people to write about it. This brings us to trying to understand death, or rather understanding the technicalities that are associated to death.
We will first focus on two poems that were produced during wars, and use similar methods to try and express the atrocities and horrors of war, and the deaths that ensued from them. The

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