A Note on Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” and Other Poems from Ariel
Sylvia Plath’s biographers and literary critics all but unanimously believe that Ariel‘s introductory poem, “Morning Song”, recounts the birth ofContinue Reading
Category: Literary Criticism
Poetry and Literary Criticism
Reading “Privacy” by C.D. Wright
Reading “Privacy” by C.D. Wright[i] Prompted by the enforced isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I was moved to returnContinue Reading
Reading Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl by Diane Seuss
This collection has everything to recommend it to the serious poetry reader. A complexity of thought and feeling subtly winds its way into your subconscious and, like her realization of Rothko’s work, finally infuses itself into the world we see.
Ms. Prufrock in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips”
The narrator in “Tulips” is quite like a J. Alfred Prufrock in feminine guise, a Ms. Prufrock whose frustrated life causes a complete collapse of the romantic instinct and whose ensuing observations verge on the pathological.
Girl Talk: The Code of Sylvia Plath’s “Cut”
Given her Swiftian bent in “Cut,” Plath fantastically extrapolates Freud’s castration complex and imagines the female anatomy in ludicrous male personas, each with its own abject place in history, while the poem serves, at once, as a celebration, social satire and lament about female gender.
Whistling Past the Graveyard in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
“The Road Not Taken,” while admittedly the most popular of Frost’s work, is not his most misunderstood poem. That honor belongs to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appears to be a Janus-faced coin: on one side is a charming poem about a man caught up in the wonder of an evening snowfall in the woods; on the other is a momento mori poem with, perhaps, a suicide subtext. How do we reconcile the two?
Robert Frost: Allegory, Spiritual Crisis and Punxsutawney Phil in “After Apple-Picking”
The common mistake that readers and critics have made with Frost’s work is to read metaphor and symbol out of the poetry and attempt to render it as stark realism. It is Frost’s ulteriority, often revealed through the unconventional use of familiar poetic figurations, that compels us to explore the agons inherent in his work, otherwise we’d have very few reasons to return to the poems as often as we do.
Some Modern Versions of Pastoral
Ann Marie Mikkelsen’s extensive research has yielded a very informative book on the use of pastoral themes in twentieth century poetry. Her prime exhibits are select poems by Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, but she also briefly covers works by Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson.
Notable Poetry Books of 2016
In no particular order, here are the notable books of poetry published in 2016 that are, in whole or inContinue Reading
Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Notwithstanding the naive premises of the popular form of pastoral, however stretched and strained, the genre remains remarkably durable, even if it is increasingly used as a touchstone more than a framework. In modern and contemporary poems we witness the popular pastoral portrait with its cracked varnish juxtaposed to modernism’s industrial high tech, conflicted morality and garish breaches of decorum; when they are combined, we have a distinctive form of irony.
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