Category: Poetry
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The Poetry of G. M. Hopkins: The Symbolism of Nature
During the Victorian Era, most poets did not focus on nature and the divine world, but instead on cultural and societal issues occurring in England during that time. But Gerard Manley Hopkins chose to not pursue the path of his fellow poets, and took more of a romanticism-inspired route while writing his poetic masterpieces. Gerard…
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Childbirth in The Poetry of Gillian Clarke and Tishani Doshi
Doshi’s ‘The Deliverer’ is set in Kerala in a centre designed to help the children that have been rejected by society due to their gender, deformities and skin. The immorality of the scene depicted by the description of ‘naked in the streets’ and ‘stuffed’ into bags (referring to children) creates the semantic field of carelessness.…
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The Portrayal of War in ‘attack’ and ‘anthem for Doomed Youth’
Both the poems ‘Attack’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (AFDY) portray Word War 1 from a negative perspective. Although they are written in slightly different ways, the two create a clear image about the indignity of death in battle. In ‘Attack’, Sassoon focuses more on the environmental factors – as he describes what can be…
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Testing One’s Faith in The Poetry of Hopkins
The central role of religion in Hopkins’ life gives it a similar significance in his poetry. The later poems by Hopkins, collectively generalised as the ‘Terrible Sonnets’, emphasise how religious doubt and faith, affected largely by personal circumstance, formed the foundation of Hopkins’ late work. As the ‘Terrible Sonnets’ were mostly written at a time…
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“Binsey Poplars”: Elegy and Echo
Elegy is a poetic form to which Hopkins continually returns. In one of his most famous poems about death, “Spring and Fall,” Hopkins’s speaker uses the occasion of “Goldengrove unleaving” to teach a child about her own mortality (2). In an earlier poem, “Binsey Poplars,” Hopkins also writes about trees to reflect on the nature…
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Hilda Doolittle as a Modernist Poet
Hilda Doolittle, (September 10, 1886 – September 27, 1961) was an avant-garde American poet, novelist, a translator, and a memoirist, who took an active part in the imagist and the feminist movements and eventually in the psychoanalytical areas. She came to be popularly known as “H.D.” when Ezra Pound sent her first published poems to…
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Admittance into Afterlife in Walter De La Mare’s Poem The Listeners
As humans, we are configured to strive to get the most out of our lives, no matter how that may be. However, that often means we succeed at the sacrifice of others. Humans are not perfect, however the mistakes that many people make at some point in his or her life are unforgivable. Many believe…
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Inner and Outer Worlds; The Internal and External in James Joyce’s ‘ulysses’ and The Poetry of T. S. Eliot
In the novel Ulysses, a hallmark of modernist writing, James Joyce presents to the reader a particular relationship between inner and outer worlds, blurring the distinction between the internal consciousness’s of his characters and the externality of the world around them. The two become intrinsically connected and almost indistinguishable due to their mutual dependency on…
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The Unreachable Prufrock
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is at once a comic poem as well as a trenchant satire on the low aspects of urban life. Its speaker, a man going bald and self-conscious about his every gesture, represents a sexual as well as spiritual sterility that, by the end, the audience realizes is impossible…
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Prufrock, Paralysis, and Pieces of The Modern City
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” depicts an image of the modern city that is marked by paralysis, alienation, decay, and repression. Prufrock is a modern man who can see the superficiality of the social values of middle class society, and yet lacks the will to break away from them and act on his…