Sonnet 130

“Personism” by Frank O’Hara and “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo Emerson are two texts that convey a theme surrounding poetry and its importance. O’Hara’s text mainly targets those that question poetry whereas Emerson’s text points out that poetry expresses nature and its not the reader but the person who is writing that is able to express what they truly feel. The question that I have for these two texts is during the time period of when O’Hara and Emerson wrote poetry, was there a lot of criticism…

The artworks in this discussion are Au Natural by Sarah Lucas and Praying Hands by Albrecht Dürer. Au Natural is a composition of an old mattress, with a water bucket, a cucumber, two oranges and two melons in a space like a room or gallery. The objects are depicting male and female private parts, where the female body part is on the left hand-side and male body part is located on the right. The old mattress used has some grooves on it and some holes were made to hold the melons. Meanwhile, the…

Sound is an important property of poetry. There are different elements that help make up the sound of a piece of writing. The most important piece I believe is relevant to the teachings this week would be the use of rhyming and rhythm in poetry. A rhythm is, the regular recurrence of sounds – is at the center of all natural phenomena (Kizner & Mandell, 2012, p.427). Poets utilize rhythm by sometime repeating words, and utilized words that rhyme. Meter is another large aspect of sound and…

Does poetry matter? One of the most debated questions in American literature, a question that even among poets seems to be unable to answer. Poetry is one of the multiple ways that we have to express our emotions and ideas to people, creating a connection in between the reader and the poem. Poetry was one of the most common ways to express our thoughts to the public, and throughout the years, the percentage of Americans that read and write poetry has fallen. Since we have the opportunity to…

Throughout this unit I read several poems that portrayed freedom in various different ways. These poems all showed aspects of freedom in one way or another. To be more specific, the poems that I really thought depicted freedom are “Dream variations” and “I too” by Langston Hughes. In addition to those is the poem “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poem “Dream Variations” written by the poet Langston Hughes shows many examples of the desire for freedom. For instance, this poem mainly is…

Virgil’s Aeneid provides intense passages that, when broken down, help explore the story in a new way. D. E. Eichholz addresses numerous people who interpret the Aeneid in different ways’ all of whom see the epic as a collection of symbols. Virgil’s language can help discover simpler explanations for bigger meanings. Michael C.J. Putnam along with Robert A. Brooks, provide warnings about clarifying the poet’s symbolism. The shield, made by Vulcan, provides an impressive example of a symbol.…

uan Ramon Jimenez was an inspiring short and intense personal poet. They were a great inspiration to a generation of spanish writers in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Born in Spain, he went to college, but quit to devote himself to the love and joy of writing. His poems began appearing when he was just 17. He was a master of the new generation of poets. In “I Am Not I”, Juan Ramon Jimenez writes about how there is a real self as well as an illusory self. Juan Ramon Jimenez writes about the self who he…

In the article “The Language of Speakers in Songs of Innocence and of Experience” by Harriet Kramer Linkin, the author states that William Blake uses idiolects that demonstrate how characters organize their way of thinking. He believes that Blake’s use of linguistic patterns were interrupted by verbal differences that made up an ironic tension that inspires us to look at the bigger picture and reality of it all. In “The Chimney Sweeper” (of innocence), Blake uses imagery to represent biblical…

This poem is a revelation. When beginning to read this poem, you are hit early on with many questions just after reading the title, We wear the mask. You begin to ask, who is we? What is significant about this mask? Why are they wearing a mask? I’ve read this poem numerous amounts of times and I believe I have finally developed my meaning of it. Dunbar’s poem has many themes and symbols, such as hypocrisy, pain and suffering, society, race, and lies. This is a rondeau poem written in iambic…

Elizabeth Gilbert states, “Depression on my left, and loneliness on my right. They don’t need to show me their badges. I know these guys very well.” Similarly, in Robert Frost’s poem “Acquainted with the Night,” he uses effective figurative language such as repetition, metaphor, and personification to underscore the constant loneliness and depressed feelings of the speaker. One way the constant loneliness and depressed feelings of the speaker is conveyed through repetition. This is evident…