Regarded as one of Canada’s best-known living writers, Margaret Atwood is poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, and environmental activist. Atwood’s works have appeared in a broad range of scholastic material extending from high school anthologies to college university textbooks. Atwood’s works have also been widely translated into numerous different languages and published in more the twenty five countries, adding to her international reputation and popularity. Her work has earned Atwood sixteen honorary degrees and an impressive array of awards. In her poems “Elegy for the Giant Tortoises” and “The Moment”, Margret Atwood conveys the issue in the relationship between human beings and the environment. Margret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the second of three children of Margaret Dorothy, a former dietitian and nutritionist from Woodville, Nova Scotia and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. Atwood’s father’s occupation had a substantial affect his daughter’s eventual career. Thanks to her father, Margaret Atwood discovered her interest in nature and natural phenomena at a very early age due to being at her father’s research site which was often the woods in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec (Mannani). Atwood displays those interests of nature in many of her works, like her poems “Elegy for the Giant Tortoises” and “The Moment”. Through her works, she explains how humans are destroying the environment for their own benefit. In the poem “Elegy for the Giant
Author, Henry David Thoreau and Mary Oliver are both very passionate about nature and what it has to offer in life, as well as the symbolism behind nature and its creatures in their works of literature, in “Walden”, and “The House of Light”, Both authors discuss their views of nature and the beauty of the world that they want to make familiar to their audience. In this essay, I’ll provide my reasoning behind this statement.
Atwood displays her feelings about not only the art of creative writing, but also the equally artistic act of living one's life to the
So her trek into the woods was to kill an elk, like she had done with her father. However, it was the encounter with two older men, who assisted in gutting out the elk, that she had learned the most. “Did this make them somehow, distinctly like… fathers and daughter? The two men becoming the soil then, in their burial, as had her father- becoming as still and silent as stone.” Here, the connection between human interaction, and experiences with nature is shown vividly.
In her essay “The Obligation to Endure”, Rachel Carson alerts the public to the dangers of modern industrial pollution. She writes about the harmful consequences of lethal materials being released into the environment. She uses horrifying evidence, a passionate tone, audience, and the overall structure of her essay to express to her readers that the pollution created by man wounds the earth. There are many different ways that pollution can harm the environment, from the nuclear explosions discharging toxic chemicals into the air, to the venomous pesticides sprayed on plants that kills vegetation and sickens cattle. The adjustments to these chemicals would take generations. Rachel
Humanity is but a facet of the sublime macrocosm that is the world’s landscapes. In the relationship between man and landscape, nature is perpetually authoritarian. In her free-verse poems, The Hawthorn Hedge, (1945) and Flame-Tree in a Quarry (1949), Judith Wright illustrates the how refusal to engage with this environment is detrimental to one’s sense of self, and the relentless endurance of the Australian landscape. This overwhelming force of nature is mirrored in JMW Turner’s Romantic artwork, Fishermen at Sea (1796). Both Wright and Turner utilise their respective texts to allegorise the unequal relationship between people and the unforgiving landscape.
The Time Capsule Found on the dead Plant. A story of a dead planet. Explaining how the planet was built, thrived, and fell. The poet, Margaret Atwood launches herself into the future, to tell the story a dead planet’s life. The attention grabber, the planet the speaker talks about is Earth. In this essay I will explore the reason behind why Margaret wrote the capsule in five sections, who she was talking to, who she was writing as, the reason for money being personified, and the goal of the motif of flight.
Margaret Atwood’s “Death By Landscape” is a short story about the powerful of feelings guilt and regret. The author camouflages other underlying themes like fear and forgiveness by using the powerful landscapes in the Canadian wilderness.
Arguably his most powerful rhetorical strategy is a joint appeal to ethos and pathos. Louv calls readers to consider what “we'll someday tell our grandchildren” if the devaluation of nature continues. Parents respond to the ethical appeal by relating to Louv as he ponders his legacy and “our” grandchildren. They respond to Louv’s appeal to pathos by feeling a deep, personal pain that their childhood pastimes are as antiquated as a “nineteenth-century Conestoga wagon.” By causing readers to feel antiquated, to relate to him, and to question their legacy, Louv stirs them to teach their children the same appreciation for nature they grew up with, if only to preserve their heritage. Louv further rouses hours readers with imagery, describing “the empty farmhouse,” “steamy edges,” and “thunderheads and dancing rain” that his readers grew up watching out their car windows. Reminiscing with readers, painting images of their childhoods, reminds parents of the beautiful, wonderful things they learned and memories they made while observing nature during car rides. Expanding on readers’ pasts, Louv references the rapid technological changes that his readers went through during the globalization movement, changes that separated them from nature “in the blink of an eye.” Readers are invested in their parts and Louv uses their attraction to their childhood memories and dissatisfaction with the rapid
The authors Lydia Huntley Sigourney, and Henry David Thoreau, both demonstrate similarities and differences in their works. While comparing both essays, it is evident that both authors share similar views on environmental issues, and at the same time demonstrate great emotional journeys in their works. The extraordinary beauty of nature appears frequently in both pieces. Both authors focus their personal experiences, however, within different subject matters. The way in which the authors express their beliefs and feelings is demonstrated through personal life endeavors. It is apparent that the authors are expressing their perception of the atrocities committed to the environment by humans.
Atwood’s “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” perfectly grasps the life-altering heartbreak that occurs after the loss of a child by utilizing literary devices such as imagery, personification, simile, and metaphor. In the poem, an image of a voyage is used to characterize a child’s journey from life to death. “The dangerous river”, is used as a metaphor to describe the birth canal which the child victoriously navigates, but after embarking upon the outside world, the child goes into a “voyage of discovery” (4) that results in his death in the river. “On a landscape stranger than Uranus” (14) emphasizes the estrangement felt by the mother without having any knowledge of the environment. Comparing it to Uranus she describes it to be just as strange as a another planet. In the ninth stanza, the mother reminisces the death of her child as she says, “My foot hit rock” (26) which is a representation that she has hit rock bottom and her life will now never be the same. The final simile of the poem, “I planted him in his country / like a flag” (28-29) identifies the relationship between the dead child and the land. It ties the mother to the land in a way that had not been thought of, a way that is fraught with grief. An extended metaphor is developed throughout the poem, comparing the experience of giving birth that the character had, to a river and its contents. It helps to understand the different stages of birth by expressing the hurricane of emotions, and incidents that occurred with the use of waves expressing times of difficulty and pain.
Nature has played an enormous part in our lives. From the childhoods of unwanted or loved trips to the country to the issue of climate change, we have all had our part to play in the matter. And yet it affects us as well. Without the presence of nature, we would not be able to survive. Both Rachel Carson and Henry David Thoreau understand the necessity of nature and humanity's lack of love for it. However, they are not without any dissimilarity. Carson's "A Fable for Tomorrow" and Thoreau's Walden are both serious, persuasive pieces that consider the current habits of the American people to be harmful and use pathos as one of their methods to convey this message. However, the differences in time periods, messages, rhetorical effects, and approaches reveal a clear rift between the two works.
Everyday people all over the world try to improve the qualities of their lives. Nonetheless, they forget that what they do can have severe harms and damages on the environment and other organisms. In the excerpt “A Fable for Tomorrow” from the book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson describes the disastrous and horrific effects of pesticides on the environment and animals of the town. In the essay “Our Animal Rites” by Anna Quindlen, she shows the inhumanity of animal hunting by human. Furthermore, she argues how human migration is destroying the natural habitats that belong to the animals. In the excerpt “Reading the River” from the autobiographical book Life on Mississippi, Mark Twain describes how he loses the ability to perceive the
One can suggest that Atwood has demonstrated a light and informal tone. The poem is more informal in its writing, leaning more towards intimate entertainment. In her writing, the author is able to capture the attention of her readers by giving real-life situations that one may relate to.
Death by Landscape is a short story, written by Margaret Atwood in 1990. The Author is a Canadian novelist, poet and essayist as well as an environmental activist and feminist with many national and international awards for her writings and activities. She was born in Ottawa, Canada and started to write when she was six years old. At the age of 16 she already knew that she wants to become a professional writer. She grew up in the outback of northern Quebec, maybe that’s the reason for her love to nature and northern environments and this is what builds the frame of most of her works. The story was first published in 1991 and is a part of
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet and novelist. She was born in 1939 in Ottawa, Canada and has written over forty fiction books in addition to poems and critical essays (2013-17, Margaret atwood biography). Her book of poetry, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) was inspired by a dream Atwood had of Susanna Moodie. Moodie was an English writer who immigrated to Canada in 1832 with her husband in order to secure a better life for her growing family. Atwood had read Moodie’s book Roughing It In The Bush prior to her dream that inspired her to write her own book of poetry about the immigrant woman. Moodie’s book is centered around six various stories that she wrote at different points in her life. Similarly, Atwood broke her book of poetry