The Unknown Citizen Poem Analysis

In “America the beautiful” the author’s use of diction creates an uplifting spiritual tone in the poem.The author uses the same words “oh beautiful for…”focusing not on America's flaws but on the beauty. For instance the start of stanza 4 she writes “o beautiful 4 heroes proved in liberty strife who more than self her country loved and marymor than life”.She apads for the people who believe in freedom of america by sacrificing their lives for their

Richard Blanco is a Cuban- American poet who was given the oppurunity to write an inaugaration poem for Barack Obama's second swearing-in. He wrote a poem titled "One Today" that praised the good and unique things about the United States and also the everyday people who's daily routines help to make America the proud country that it is.

Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.

Clint Smith is a writer, teacher, and doctoral candidate in Education at Harvard University with a concentration in Culture, Institutions, and Society. Smith Clint wrote a poem called “Something You should Know.” The poem is about an early job he had in a Petsmart. The poet allows the readers into his personal life, but before he had trouble opening up to people and his work. Moreover, Clint wrote an insight in the poem about relying in anything to feel safe and he says it is the most terrifying thing any person can do.

Native Guard is a poem that is built on a lot of passion and precision that makes this entire book of poetry stand out. From the beginning with the elusive imagery and foreshadowing of her childhood and her mother’s life we are easily engulfed in the lifestyle of being born in the south. The imagery continues on in the new memory of the pinnacle time of slavery and the Civil War, which shows the true nature of the south through repetition and metaphoric sentences of many gruesome and remorseful scenes.

The title itself alludes to “The Unknown Soldier,” almost parodying it. According to Georgia Virtual School, an unknown soldier died in battle, however, the body is unrecognizable. It is also known that soldiers are tagged. The fact that the title is the way it is and the subtitle mimics a tag implies that the lives of common folk is so insignificant and uneventful that they might just as well be unknown since they are just another face in the vast crowd of people. This relays a metaphor in the eyes of the reader.

The writing styles of Claudine Rankine and Colson Whitehead vary significantly, but both manage to address the issue of race in America in profound ways. In Citizen: An American Lyric, the former utilizes a combination of images and poetry to convey a sense of open-endedness, while the latter follows a traditional historical fiction narrative in his novel, The Underground Railroad. The books build on historical and modern events to evoke emotion and convey criticism. *Rankine uses an experimental style to allow introspection, and Whitehead’s traditional writing blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction.

This Social-Self manifest in Citizen: An American Lyric, “A friend argues that Americans battle between the 'historical self' and the 'self self’.”' (Rankine 2014). Citizen helps the reader understand that the small everyday acts of racism can accumulate and potentially become toxic, this includes: being skipped in line at the pharmacy by a white man, because he has failed to notice you in front of him; being told approvingly, as a schoolchild, that your features are like those of a white person; being furiously accosted by a trauma therapist who does not believe that the patient she is expecting could look like you. Written by poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine. Rankine discusses the microaggressions, which is defined as the

James Niigaanwewidan Sinclair’s poem Dancing in a mall discloses the plethora of excitement involved in participating in the “Idle no more” movement. The upbeat tempo manifests the enthusiasm conveyed by those involved in the crusade against the government of Canada’s mistreatment of reserve lands. As the movement gains support, the energy grows with it, demonstrating that the participants in this cause will not cease until the essence of their protest is fully embodied. The narrator of Dancing in a Mall communicates his passion for his indigenous culture and the “Idle no more” movement through symbolism, referring to Native folklore and by using repetition to convey his enthusiasm for the cause.

In life and in literary text hidden meanings are quite common. There is basic level of understanding by the majority and a concealed meaning that requires a deeper level of critical thinking and analysis. Terrance Hayes provides a “poetic style that resist style” which proves hard to interpret, but I conclude he provides a common theme many might mistake for just an element of poetry (Fabu 1). A common theme present within two of his poems “Lighthead’s Guide to Galaxy” and “Antebellum House Party” as well as ”Mausoleum” from his signature book Wind in a Box is the idea of symbolism and underlying meanings within itself and how individuals tend to look for something more in things even in life instead of being as it is.

Luis Carlos Najera Ruiz Mrs. Cummings English II 3 December 2014 REA 2 - Revision 2 In "democracy", W.R. Rodriguez plays with capitalization, punctuation, and syntax to intentionally make this piece harder to understand, set the piece apart from normal, and to re-emphasize a great problem with democracies. While this style of writing makes the piece harder to understand, the impact of the piece becomes much greater since it takes more work to find its meaning. Rodriguez wrote this to convey that Americans are greedy, war-thirsty, and destructive people. The author did this by making the piece hard to understand, therefore he conveys that American traditions are deviant from the normal and difficult to understand. With difficult to understand syntax and the repetition of the phrase "as it had become

Poetry can be divided up into different forms, more easily expressing an author’s emotions and intent with their poetry. For analyzing purposes I chose the poems Self-Help by Michael Ryan, Ghazal by Agha Shahid Ali, Psalm 150 by Jericho Brown, and Emergency by Michael Dylan Welch.

In his poem “Acquainted with the Night,” Robert Frost describes a character who spends his nights wandering the city streets. The reader can infer from both Frost’s tone, and the time of day in which the speaker chooses to walk, that the character is in a world of isolation. This is especially evident in the lines, “When far away an interrupted cry/ Came over houses from another street,/ But not to call me back or say good-by” (Frost 898). From this line, the reader understands that the poem’s speaker feels as if he is completely isolated in the world. In a similar way, E. E. Cummings poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town” expresses the loneliness felt by people of this era. Cummings creative use of pronouns gives the poem a double entendre. The characters, anyone and noone, can represent their literal meanings, or a single man and woman. Therefore, when Cummings writes that “noone loves him more by more,” he could mean that anyone is being loved greatly, or not at all. This loneliness is expressed yet again when Cummings informs the reader, “Women and men (both little and small)/ cared for anyone not at all” (Cummings 922). The works of both Frost and Cummings both portray the hardship that accompanied the feeling of loneliness during the modern

Poetry is a reduced dialect that communicates complex emotions. To comprehend the numerous implications of a ballad, perusers must analyze its words and expressing from the points of view of beat, sound, pictures, clear importance, and suggested meaning. Perusers then need to sort out reactions to the verse into a consistent, point-by-point clarification. Poetry utilizes structures and traditions to propose differential translation to words, or to summon emotive reactions. Gadgets, for example, sound similarity, similar sounding word usage, likeness in sound and cadence are at times used to accomplish musical or incantatory impacts.

Auden presents an allegory in The Unknown Citizen that begins even before the poem itself. The phrase “Unknown Citizen” appears only once—in the title. This term is an immediate allusion to and parody of the “Unknown Soldier,” especially considering the details of who the poem is dedicated to and the fact that it is found on a marble monument, much like those one might expect to see in Washington, D.C. where the United States is home to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The “Unknown Solider” is a soldier who cannot be recognized after being found in battle. This sometimes-controversial idea can be interpreted to mean that many people die as unknowns because they lived uninfluential lives. Aside from this large allegory, the poem uses only a few rhetorical devices. In line four, for example, “…in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint” is quite an exaggeration because being “one against whom there was no official complaint” is hardly saintly (2). Another