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To Helen Compare And Contrast

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Beauty is defined as physical or mental characteristics that are pleasing to a person’s senses. Although beauty is often defined as pleasing, others may find the beauty in a person repulsive. “One man’s loss is another man’s profit,” is an appropriate quote that similarly describes the contrasting poems. Both of the poems aren’t only focused on beauty, but one is describing Helen as their savior or hope and the other is describing her as their destruction. The poems “To Helen,” by Edgar Allan Poe and “Helen,” by Hilda Doolittle convey different ideas of feminine beauty and romantics characteristics through the use of imagery, figurative language and tone to contrast the clashing views of beauty. The differences in these poems might be quite …show more content…

For instance, the poems, “To Helen,” by Edgar Allan Poe and “Helen,” by Hilda Doolittle write about Helen and her beauty, but are actually written in two completely different ways. Poe’s poem, “To Helen,” has many characteristics of American Romantics literature because he values nature, individuality and the authors sense of emotion to express his love and admiration for Helen. In the first stanza of the poem, Poe was comparing Helen’s beauty, in the form of similes and metaphors, to nature, “Like those barks of yore, That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,” (Poe 1 - 3) to express the traveler’s essence for Helen. Throughout the rest of the poem Helen’s beauty is seen as a way home or, “The light at the end of the tunnel,” to guide the traveler back home. Helen and her faultless beauty are the traveler’s hope and savior, but are far from that in the eyes of …show more content…

Edgar Allan Poe and Hilda Doolittle have very different writing techniques, but still manage to use similar figurative language to illustrate the beauty of Helen, who was thought to have been the most beautiful woman in the world. The speaker in Poe’s poem, “To Helen,” sees Helen and thinks of her with admiration and love and as a symbol for aspiration and salvation. As opposed to Poe’s poem, the speaker in Doolittle’s poem, “Helen,” is expressing the thoughts and views of Greece’s people about Helen as an extreme animosity. Although the poems were written in completely different forms, they both still portrayed Helen as a beautiful woman, but “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and these poems are a clear example of that. Works

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