Category: Poetry

Barbie doll as a popular icon in American culture has been carried with a long history. However, it is also a controversial toy that often critic by its unrealistic body image and the women stereotype imposed on her. Marge Piercy’s poem presents the theme about women’s loss of self-esteem and the coercion of external forces…

Encountering a dead deer on the road is not an unusual occurrence; oncoming drivers see the road block and handle the situation accordingly. Some drivers will swerve to miss the animal — it is safe to say that most drivers will swerve — but a select group of drivers will stop to move the deer…

William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Last Words of My English Grandmother” departs from traditional elegies in many ways. The composition does not follow elegiac meter or structure, though normally a poem with elegiac meter should consist of four iambs and have elegiac couplets. (For its part, the elegiac couplet should consist of dactylic hexameter followed…

Memories, the good and the bad, shape the character of the people that we become, as Mark Jarman demonstrates in his 1997 poem, “Ground Swell.” The author effectively recreates his chilly summer mornings of surfing for the reader, through use of visual and tactile imagery, vividly spoken with carefully selected expressions. Ideal use of informal…

He claims that it is better to have loved and lost. She claims that it is better to never have loved at all. He spends his free time pining for her. She spends her time with him longing for freedom. While modern stereotypes tend to portray men as standoffish rogues, clinging tirelessly to independence, and…

The poem “The Secretary Chant,” by , holds many characteristics that are meant to pull the reader in. As with any poem, the words mean more than they appear to. Each line is written with a purpose. Every word is there for a reason; otherwise, the poem would not be the same. “My hips are…

Charles Baudelaire uses his works to describe his idea of the spleen, or “the restless malaise affecting modern life” (Bedford 414). The spleen is an organ that removes toxins from the human body, but to Baudelaire it is also a symbol of melancholy, moral degradation, and the destruction of the human spirit, brought on by…

The new sensibility that characterizes Romantic literature often leads to the recurrence of melancholy as a powerful and recurrent motif, especially in poetry. Romantic poets recur to their poems to express personal feelings and anxieties and in order to capture this, poets use the imagination. As Addison and Shaftesbury put it, `the imagination must not…

Although the majority of Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Untitled Blues” portrays descriptive and vivid scenes of music, dancing, and joy, these images are merely distractions from the deeper message that hides within the lines of the piece. Images of “tap dancers [who] hold / to the last steps” (32-33) as people who “jive / down on…

In an interview, Charles Simic said, “My early life seems like a dream…There’s an element of unreality about it.”[i] Simic’s early life was spent attempting to flee World War Two bombs in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he “could easily have been a casualty of war.”[ii] The “unreality” of his circumstances tainted Simic’s innocent experiences of childhood,…