Poetry captures both the personal and the political, and it allows for collective exploration of an internal psychic world. The poet shares an internal psychic world by clocking emotional forms into language. Poetry appeals to our need to understand ourselves and the universe by using an art form of metaphor and semantics in much the same way that a musician uses notes, chords, and harmonies. It is to this service of poetry that Lucille Clifton writes "The Lost Baby Poem." This poem reveals the confluence of the personal and the political in poetry. Contemporary poetry is unique in that it does not confine itself to formal structures. While poets are free to draw from the likes of the sonnet or the haiku, free verse has become and remains an equally valid form. "The Lost Baby Poem" is in free verse,...
The poet does not consciously impose rhyme or rhythm onto the verses, allowing her own voice to shine through. Used as a springboard for a classroom discussion, "The Lost Baby Poem" reveals the ways poets transcend structure in favor of imagery and semantics. At the same time, there are literary devices that stimulate classroom discussion. For example, Lucille Clifton uses repetition throughout "The Lost Baby Poem" for literary effect. It begins when the last word of the first line of the poem meets the first word of the second line: "down." Down also happens to have some assonance with "drown," which is the central motif in the first stanza of the poem. Repetition is also used in the fourth and fifth lines of the first stanza, which both begin, "What did I know about…" The poem then becomes an embodiment of the imagery of drowning, as the poet's words tumble forth without form or structure, allowing the reader to become unsure of which way is down or up. Toward the end of the poem, however, the reader finds air when the poet returns…
A common fear is incompetence, resulting in often-heard comments such as 'I can't draw,' 'I can't sing,' and 'I can't dance.' These fears are, to some extent, rooted in the mistaken belief that skills in the arts are innate and inherited rather than sets of component skills that can be learned and integrated into a whole skill" (p. 147). Notwithstanding the adage concerning old dogs and new tricks, though,
Poetry & Politics: Forché and Rich Introduction Carolyn Forché and Adrienne Rich are two female American poets whose work integrated the personal and the political into the poetry. Forché, for example, was responsible for coining the phrase “poetry of witness,” as she felt her poems were testimonies to the political events that were oppressing people around the world (Poetry Foundation, 2018). Rich likewise made her poetry into a type of testimony, though
Irish poetry is unavoidably shaped by its historical, social, and political context. The Troubles have infiltrated poets throughout several generations, permitting unique artistic insight into the conflict. Younger poets writing about The Troubles in Northern Ireland understandably have a different point-of-view than poets from a previous generation. Their personal experiences were different, and the historical events they witnessed or were surrounded by in the media likewise differed from their
Illiad Argue whether the poetry/text presents the author as pilgrim or as tourist on a wartime journey The distinction between the tourist and the pilgrim is one that invariably arises when analyzing texts that address war. While it is common for the hero (or author) to discuss war as a theme, a distinction must be made with regard to the way in which the author relates to the war and to the
Gloria Anzaldua captures the essence of the Aztlan homeland and its mestizo nature in "Wind tugging at my sleeve." Using diction conveying a strong sense of place and geography invokes the specific qualities of the land and climate necessary for anchoring the reader. The importance of geographic space is a core theme of the poem, as the speaker refers repeatedly to issues related to political borders and the artificial separation
Renaissance Art An Analysis of Love in the Renaissance Art of Sidney, Shakespeare, Hilliard and Holbein If the purpose of art, as Aristotle states in the Poetics, is to imitate an action (whether in poetry or in painting), Renaissance art reflects an obsession with a particular action -- specifically, love and its many manifestations, whether eros, agape or philia. Love as a theme in 16th and 17th century poetry and art
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