Reflection Of Scientific Language In The Poetry Of Juliana Spahr, Nuclear, Responses

Anne Bradstreet’s and Phillis Wheatley’s poems both share the themes of death and religion, but Bradstreet explores these themes by tying them to nature and her personal struggles with simplicity and a religious lens, while Wheatley incorporates race using a sophisticated, Christianity-saturated perspective often bordering on impersonal.

BibliographyRomantic Writings: An Anthology, edited by W.R. Owens and Hamish Johnson (1998), The Open UniversityApproaching Poetry, Sue Asbee (2001), The Open UniversityRomantic Writings, edited by Stephen Bygrave (1996), The Open University

Her writing style has double meaning to it. The serious tone hides between the lines of humor. Now that we have established a foundation for our argument let’s move on to analyzing Cope’s poem by looking at what is happening within it.

Gwen Harwood’s poetry explores the reality of human existence, utilising a number of personal experiences in order

This reflects the main focus of the poem: how hard it is to comprehend a tragedy such as ‘9/11’ for the people who are watching the events unfold on TV screens. Armitage uses contrasting language between the ordinary and the extraordinary to express how the brain cannot yet comprehend what the eyes can see, as well as strange imagery to suggest how unreal the experience of conflict is. However, the fact that the narrator is addressing the viewer directly is aimed to remind the readers that each dot on the TV screen was not just an abstract image, but a real person about to become one of the statistical 2,976 who died.

The notion of truth being a defined reasoning and represented as a one sided argument is unmistakably how most audiences visualize it. The concept cannot be interpreted in such close mindedness, as to tell the truth is to speak what appears “truthful” to “you”. Conflicting perspectives arise when the visualization of how feasible or veracious something is differs between individuals. The controversy surrounding Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, contentious poets of the twenty first century portray their own reality through their semi-confessional poetry. Sylvia Plath frequently extends her cereal obsession with her dead father as

In the poem “Stars Over the Dordogne” by Sylvia Plath, the author illustrates a message by using disparate techniques. It slowly develops as the readers go throughout the piece, however all the techniques are effective and leave an impact on the audience. Moreover, it causes the audience to have various views throughout the piece. The sense in this poem is about how everyone has a divergent outlook on the world. The author shows this, by using imagery, personification, and shift to develop a message.

The criterion used to determine whether or not artistic works can be considered poetry or not are, at best, esoteric. As poetry has evolved from rigidly-structured sonnets of the Renaissance to the plethora of imaginative, free verse pieces being produced today, the scope of what the artistic public defines as “poetry” has been stretched to encompass a great many things. This new freedom of form does have its limits, however. Take, for example, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Rankine incorporates a number of images and collages into Citizen to help augment the messages being put forward by her writing, while Goldsmith’s work is composed entirely of transcriptions of

Dorothy Livesay’s work expresses her identity as both woman and poet. In integrating female experience into her work, Livesay challenges patriarchal views of “the poet” as an archetype and the connection between male and female and nature and culture. Livesay states “I have always been fascinated by the role of woman as writer” (Livesay 2), in examining Livesay’s poetry from 1926-1944 the role of “woman as writer” speaks on women’s issues through connecting the identity of woman to nature and the patriarchy to culture. Livesay’s work holds radical feminist thought, through examination of her nature imagery and the conflicts presented between nature and culture her poetry can be viewed through a radical feminist lens as “ecofeminism”. Ecofeminism links feminist ideology with ecology and suggests that paternal-capitalistic society has “lead to a harmful split between nature and culture”(Cirksena and Cuklanz 29), linking “the treatment of women to the treatment of the environment.(Cirksena and Cuklanz 30). Although Livesay identifies with nature, she still holds a place in culture as a citizen and a writer and through "identifying herself with both nature and poetry she creates for herself a unique female poetic role: that of mediator between culture and nature" (Relke 219). Livesay challenges the patriarchal views of "the poet", the treatment of women in society and the connection between culture and nature. Taking on the role of "poet mediator" between culture and nature,

Both Judith Wright and Sylvia Plath explore different feminist views in their poetry in order to highlight the freedom that comes with the empowerment of women and the escapement from the boundaries of social expectations. Wright uses stylistic devices such as punctuation, oxymoron, metaphor, and personification to discuss the insecurities she has with her body in her poem ‘Naked Girl and Mirror’. The oxymoron, “I see you are lovely, hateful naked girl”, depicts the internal struggle she deals with that centres on her self-image. The world has metaphorically detached Wright’s mind from her body and this encourages her to write with a more feminist view in order to remind her listeners that she has a soul and her gender is not all she is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “The Poet” in order to explore the role of a poet in modern day society. Educated at Harvard University, Emerson was a transcendentalist, meaning that he believed a higher truth beyond the physical reality experienced in everyday life. This carries on in his writing, as he frequently speaks of the connecting physical and metaphysical world. He describes the modern poet as a voice box for the people, who connect the physical and metaphysical aspects of life into prose for the common man. The modern poet is providing a service to the layman by translating symbols and spreading the transcendentalism movement. These actions in many ways mirror the role of the media currently, as they seek the truth for the people. The media today is a collective means of informing citizens of the state of the world in real time. This service has become especially vital as the general public have gotten more involved in politics and social issues with the spread of technology. The media is the last line of defense for holding public figures accountable and has recently become far more effective due to the ease of distribution of news with technology. The media now has the power to swing an election or turn an entire country against one person. In doing this, they overlay their bias on any information passed on, much the same as Emerson does throughout this essay. In Emerson’s essay “The Poet”, he describes the role of a poet in society as someone who can explain nature

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a Pulitzer-Prized poet whose poetry reached a generation of readers that had been traumatized by the effects of World War I. Her poetry consists of free verse and romantic passionate sonnets. Millay also details deeply personal themes in her artistry. Many of these themes are visual elements described through nature’s foundations. Various themes present themselves within a poem, such as nature, death, love, and travel. Millay uses her poetry to express a generation fraught with death from a world war by using nature’s endless need to continue moving on with life. In Second April, Millay’s poetry collection from 1921, she is consistent with nature’s theme by celebrating her passion for nature’s beauty and yet mourns life’s inescapable passing.

It is human nature to interpret and reinterpret life and find meaning of one’s place in the world. Without such knowledge, or belief for that matter, any possibility of humanity is lost. Hence, humans are plagued with the necessity to interpret themselves and their connections to their surroundings—both human and physical. Because one’s connections and contexts for interpretation are endless in some sense, humans are inherently a divided self—the culmination of all given interpretations they make for themselves and interpretations from others. In addition, this totality of interpretations through the lens selves as being what is around you, it follows that poetic-rhetorical language is necessary in discussion of the divided self.

“The relationship between the energies of the inquiring mind that an intelligent reader brings to the poem and the poem’s refusal to yield a single comprehensive interpretation enacts vividly the everlasting intercourse between the human mind, with its instinct to organise and harmonise, and the baffling powers of the universe about it.”

This essay examines the effects that poetry has on society, both socially and politically. Poetry has been around for centuries, and it is a common misconception that it serves no purpose. One critic in particular, W.H Auden claimed, “poetry makes nothing happen”. However poetry awakens the reader’s eyes and gives an insight to the society in which we live in today, and which has been before us. As evident in Ezra Pound’s work, as he explored the use of imagism to critique modernism and twentieth century, forcing the readers to think more about society as a whole. The purpose of this essay is to show that poetry does make something happen and can have instrumental effects on society, whether it is a poet critiquing society, or simply providing another interpretation. Poetry is a code than needs to be cracked, it is a riddle that makes the reader bring out their true creativity, which is why I disagree with W.H Auden in saying, “poetry makes nothing happen.”