Lakoff's Poems

The confessional mode of poetry delves into the inner struggles of the persona as she seeks creative independence, free from the constraints of her role as mother and daughter. The juxtaposition between the two settings, “the lit house and the town,” symbolises the persona’s desire for isolation as she contemplates her filial responsibilities relative to an innate desire for solitude, “wanting to be myself alone.” Dobson’s biblical allusion to Peter’s betrayal of Jesus in “Three times I took that lonely stretch,/ Three times the dark trees closed me round” utilises anaphora to indicate her prolonged attempts to embrace her creative potential. Writing in a period of social and gender re-evaluation during the 1960s, Dobson gives us insight into the way women were struggling to balance career against the patriarchal expectations of motherhood. The night, free from daily pressures metaphorically “absolves me of my bonds” creating a lighter sense of being, which is reinforced in the synecdoche “only my footsteps held the ground.” However, the use of conduplicatio in “One life behind and one before” represents her feeling of entrapment, as he remains in a conflicted state. The emotive language in “cut off… from love that grows about the bone” captures the confronting nature of her discovery by examining the

In Anne Sexton’s poem “The Abortion”, she uses literary devices to reflect her heart wrenching decision of whether or not to abort one of her children, which reflects the style of confessional poetry because she is sharing her personal feelings and experiences. Anne Sexton was a famous poet of confessional poetry, where the poets write about their private experiences with feelings about death, trauma, and depression in their lives. Anne Sexton wrote from the point of view of an upper middle class woman. She had two children, and the stress of having them, gave her life long depression. Sexton was sent to a psychiatric hospital after the birth of her second child. “The Abortion” displays all of Sexton’s feelings that she has about her abortion.

Today you must elect a poet from the group of finalists to be Australia’s official Poet Laureate. Although the position of Poet Laureate is commonplace in other countries, including England and New Zealand; Australia’s last Poet Laureate was a convict turned freeman by the name of Michael Massey Robinson. To be poet laureate the poets writing must be influential and meaningful. The role of a Poet Laureate is important as they raise awareness about important social and moral issues in their own unique way . The poet I know is the best for the position is Luke... more commonly known as Luka Lesson; he is a young slam-poet born in Brisbane to

Sylvia Plath and Gwen Harwood tell two very different stories of parental relationships, Mother Who Gave Me Life praising Harwood’s mother and speaking with love and affection, whereas Plath’s Daddy is full of hate for her father. These reflections on the poet’s parental relationships are made using imagery, symbolism and tone.

Sonja Livingston is a talented and unique young writer who uses an unusual structure in her work. Structure is the form that an author’s writing takes; how the sentences are formed and how they are placed together to create the work. In Ghostbread, her award-winning novel, Ms. Livingstone uses a freeform chapter structure that, while roughly in chronological order, is not necessarily linear. In chapter 3, Ms. Livingston speaks of her father, “I had no father” (6), and then in chapter 4 she speaks of a childhood friend, “My favorite person should have been Carol Johnson.” (7) Through the course of the book, Ms. Livingston chronicles her life from birth to age 18, but it is not a strict telling; she meanders and explores events as they are remembered, not bound by a rigid timeline. The structure of her work is unconventional and through that unconventional structure she gives the reader an experience that is more like poetry than a conventional novel. Towards the end of Ghostbread, Ms. Livingston contemplates the effect that her miscarriage and the revelation of her sexual activity will have on her relationship with her mother with this passage, “Sex. Pregnancy. Men. What were they to her? Failure? Freedom? Power? Paths she followed, but did not prescribe. At least not aloud.” (212). The use of partial sentences and imagery are elements commonly associated with poetry and it gives

In the opening line of “The Author to Her Book”, Bradstreet makes use of a metaphor, in which the “ill-form offspring” (1) emblematizes her book, “The Tenth Muse”, and to create a mother-child relationship between her and the book. The child metaphor allows readers to know that she is not satisfied with her writing skills, but has a devotional bond with it. She points out that her book should never be read by a literature expert due to the wide amount of errors that can be found in her work “made in raggs” (5). She expresses she “wash´d thy face” (13), trying to improve her work, but fails to observe any changes in it and fails in the process. These serve as examples to expose how Puritan women underrated and depreciated their skills, making Puritan community believe that they are inferior to

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet, “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed,” serves as an excellent example of a multi-faceted piece. From one angle, it is simply a Petrarchan sonnet, written with a slight variation on rhyme scheme – but that variation, taken deeper, reveals new layers of meaning. Added to Millay’s choice of meter and end-stop, along with a background of Millay’s person, this sonnet seems not so “simple” after all.

Every author, poet, playwright has a subtle message that they would like present to their audience. It may be a lifelong struggle that they have put into words, or a multiple page book that took a lifetime to write. A poet by the name of Anne Sexton sought out to challenge society’s views of women by writing “Her Kind”. A poet, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, Anne Sexton writes about the conflicts of a social outcast living in modern times. She voices the hardships she faces through three different speakers in her poem. At the end of the poem, the woman is not ashamed nor afraid of whom she is and is ready to die in peace. In Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”, the main idea the speaker is depicting is the multiple stereotypes placed on a woman, by society. Sexton’s vivid use of imagery paints a picture of the witch, house wife, and mother cliché, while also implying the poem is autobiographical as Sexton went through her own personal struggles during her life.

Another useful tool in analyzing a poem is to identify poetic devices, meter, and a rhyme scheme. Through her deft use of extended metaphor, Bradstreet weaves an intricate web of parallels between parent and author and between child and book--both relationships of creator to creation. This use of metaphor allows the reader to relate emotionally to Bradstreet’s situation. In line seven, we see the uses of litotes, “At thy return my blushing was not small,” to express the depth of her embarrassment. She also uses metonymy in line eight to express her pain more clearly, “My rambling brat (in print) should mother call.” The simile used in line nine stresses her objection to the published work, “I cast thee by as one unfit for light.” Then in line 19, the poetic device of consonance is used which provides emphasis on her warning, “In this array ‘mongst vulgars may’st thou roam.” In this poem, through the use of personification and apostrophe Bradstreet conveys her feelings and emotions. Anne Bradstreet ensures her poem’s success by linking the triumph and tragedy of authorship with the pain and pleasure of creating and nurturing human life. The meter used is

Another poem titled “The Author to Her Book” gives the reader the image of a baby being born. Bradstreet critics her works again and again seemingly portraying her works are not good enough. She refers to the “child” having blemishes and crippling handicaps that represents the deep faults and shortcomings in her work. Washing the child, rubbing off a blemish, and stretching its joints but failing to improve his imperfections all contribute to an image of Bradstreet rewriting her book. Dreadfully trying to increase the quality and standards in her work, the more imperfections she found. Towards the end of the poem Bradstreet talks about how she would give her ugly “child” new clothes and it just appears that her real life actions contradict her poem. She is actually very poor in life and could not afford new clothes thus sending her children away from the house.

In this stylistic analysis of the lost baby poem written by Lucille Clifton I will deal mainly with two aspects of stylistic: derivation and parallelism features present in the poem. However I will first give a general interpretation of the poem to link more easily the stylistic features with the meaning of the poem itself.

It is possible that the narrator is trying to reassure herself in this passage by claiming that the child was never made, but then why write the poem to her unborn children?

While reading both “On Growing Up Between Genders”, by Stephen Burt and “The Female Body” by Margaret Atwood, I was so moved by both poets writing that I felt as though I was living their experiences with them. Throughout the course of both pieces, I felt emotionally drawn to obstacles of both writers, while understanding their wants of an experience very different from the ones previously given to them.

As is inherent within the tradition of confessional poetry, a subgenre of lyric poetry which was most prominent from the fifties to the seventies (Moore), Sylvia Plath uses the events of her own tragic life as the basis of creating a persona in order to examine unusual relationships. An excellent example of this technique is Plath’s poem “Daddy” from 1962, in which she skilfully manipulates both diction, trope and, of course, rhetoric to create a character which, although separate from Plath herself, draws on aspects of her life to illustrate and make points about destructive, interhuman relations. Firstly that of a father and daughter, but later also that of a wife and her unfaithful husband.

When Anne Sexton writes her poetry she writes to make the reader feel what she is writing. Sexton tends to write about her own experiences and events in other women's lives. In Anne Sexton's Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward, she uses a language to express a mother's pain and anger after she gave birth to her fatherless child: