Victorian poets

Two poets describe the American plight and experience of the 19th and early 20th century in more detail and emotion than any other poets – Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg. From two different generations, the younger writer’s content and style is very much an extension of his elder, Whitman. Both write, in a very casual style, about the suffering of the common man that they saw firsthand; Whitman’s “I Sit and Look Out” and Sandburg’s “Chicago” provide great examples of their observations of the…

Ingrid Lam Mrs. Quick Advanced English 10 17 April 2016 The year, is 1842, or thereabouts, at the height of the Victorian Era in England. Newsboys wave around papers, on which a newspaper headline spirals in black ink newsprint: CHILDREN ABUSED IN FACTORIES? Truthfully, by the 1800s, this increasing publicized news, however shameful and shocking, was not cataclysmic, nor a big reveal to many. The practice of child labour had become so commonplace that it was regarded as practically a social…

Introduction to Author Oscar Wilde was a Anglo- English author, playwright, novelist, critic and poet. He was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England, known for his brilliant wit, flamboyant style. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism which emphasized aesthetic values more than moral or social themes. This doctrine can be clearly summarized by the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’. In 1890, he…

Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti illustrate women’s oppression by men in Victorian society within their poems, “My Last Duchess” and “Goblin Market.” The Duchess, Laura, and Lizzie all act against the expectations set for them with varying ramifications. The poets use different narrative perspectives and careful word choice in order to depict the subjugation of these women, their rebellion against it, and the punishment they face for rebelling, calling public attention to the mistreatment…

Wilde is not the only writer who employs the trope of a woman’s sexual prowess being a negative. Arthur Symons, another Aesthetic poet, also uses this ethereal, vampire woman in his poem “White Heliotrope.” The effect of the woman in Symons poem is similar to the effect the women in Wilde’s. The speaker in “White Heliotrope” laments a past love that seems never to go away. She has a strong and undeniable influence over the male speaker. He writes that if his handkerchief ever smells of white…

Milestone Two The two poems being used for this assignment are Sylvia Plath’s “mad girls love song” and Nikki Giovanni’s “balance.” Mad girls love song is about a girl that feels like the man she fell in love with isn’t real, but just something she created in her own head because he suddenly disappeared and never returned. Balance is about the balance of black and white, truth and lies, love and loneliness. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the linguistic principles demonstrated in each of…

Bambara does not explain what kind of neighborhood this is but the reader is able to get an image of it through the language. "And the starch in my pinafore scratching the shit outta me and I'm really hating this nappy-headed bitch and her goddamn college degree" (Bambara 136). This sentence gives the image that this is a poor, low class neighborhood. The reader is able to identify that this is not a high-class place, but one possibly in the slums. The language is symbolic because it represents…

2nd Essay: Responding to Poetry Poetry mainly describes love, loss, and regret. However, every writer adds his or her own twist. For example, “Last Night” by Sharon Olds and “Cherrylog Road” by James Dickey deals with the same theme but are two different pieces of writing. They explore the theme of forbidden love and use imagery to show the lust between the two characters. In this essay I will compare and contrast the two poems by presenting different examples. Titles can say a lot about a…

Samuel Coleridge used figurative language and unorthodox verse structure to describe the tragic, lesson-filled past of a sailor and portray literary elements of Romanticism and its ideals. By using a non-traditional approach to verse structure, it shows Coleridge's choice to not compromise the meaning and thought process of each stanza by following a set pattern. This demonstrates the versatility and story-like dynamic of the poem making it all the more captivating to the reader. Through his use…

Metaphor and Symbolism in Langston Hughes’s My People My people is one of Langston Hughes’ poems which is about working class black African American people. In this poem, he compared the beauty of nature to the beauty of his people. My people is a very short poem, built in three stanzas which consist of two lines in each stanza. This poem was written in simple language, therefore, the readers can easily understand what he is trying to convey. I believe, beneath its simple words, this poem…