Author Archives
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Analysis of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Marvellous Grass
Marvellous Grass There you were in your purple vestments half-way through the Mass, an ordained priest under your linen alb and chasuble and stole: and when you saw my face in the crowd for Holy Communion the consecrated host fell… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anja Utler’s marsyas, encircled
The long poem marsyas, umkreist (marsyas, encircled) from Anja Utler’s volume münden—entzüngeln (merging—untonguing, 2004) evokes and reinvents a mythological protagonist’s execution by gradual skinning. According to classical Greek mythology, the satyr and flute player Marsyas challenges the god Apollo to… Read More ›
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Analysis of César Vallejo’s A Man Walks by with a Loaf of Bread on His Shoulder
At a time when the arts in European capitals tended toward “art for art’s sake,” not realism or social concern, César Vallejo delineated the paradox of conscientious intellectuals whose life of the mind involves metaphysical concerns, while their daily lives… Read More ›
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Analysis of Thomas Kling’s Manhattan Mouthspace Two
During an unpublished conversation in Cologne, Germany, in 2003, two years before his premature death, Thomas Kling, who had visited New York City briefly a decade before and who planned to visit the United States for a series of poetry… Read More ›
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Analysis of Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s Looking for Poetry
In Looking for Poetry, from A rosa do povo (Rose of the People, 1945), Carlos Drummond de Andrade investigates the writing process through a succession of negations. As the title suggests, patience and the ability to respect poetry’s caprices are… Read More ›
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Analysis of José Emilio Pacheco’s A Linear Equation with This Single Unknown Quantity
This poem from José Emilio Pacheco’s volume Los trabajos del mar (The Labors of the Sea, 1978–83) describes urban pollution. Mexico City has only one river that has not been turned into a sewer and covered by concrete. That river,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Louis Aragon’s The Lilacs and the Roses
Louis Aragon’s collection Le Crève-cœur (Heartbreak, 1941) contains 22 poems written between October 1939 and October 1940, the last nine of which express the heartbreak caused by the calamity of the German invasion of France and the subsequent occupation. The… Read More ›
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Analysis of Juana de Ibarbourou’s Life-Hook
“Life-Hook” (“Vida-garfio”), called “Clinging to Life” in another translation, from Juana de Ibarbourou’s first poetry collection, Las lenguas de diamante (1919), shows themes and modes of expression that recur in her popular early work. The playful, almost flirtatious attitude of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Shushanik Kurghinian’s Let Us Unite
One of Kurghinian’s famous poems calling women to solidarity in their struggle against oppression, Let Us Unite was first published in the volume Ringing of the Dawn. In this poem, Kurghinian tries to raise women’s self-consciousness to defy the patriarchal… Read More ›
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Analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Letter to a Poet
Published in his first collection of poetry, Chants d’ombre (Songs of Darkness or Shadow Songs), “Letter to a Poet” is a short praise poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor to Martinican poet and statesman Aimé Césaire, to whom the piece is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet
Many readers have called Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet life-altering, and many writers of all ages have felt as moved as the original recipient must have been by reading these letters. The 10 letters have been called… Read More ›
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Mahmoud Darwish’s Lesson from the KamaSutra
Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry partakes of different cultural and mythological traditions. We find in his poems allusions to seminal texts from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, pre-Islamic Arabia, Persia, and India. In this poem, the title is taken from an Indian classic on… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Leda
Leda And when the god possessed the swan, from need, and found it beautiful, that terrified him. Wholly shocked, he disappeared inside it, but his trickery drove him toward his deed before he could explore what that life must have… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edoardo Sanguineti’s Last Walk
This poem by Edoardo Sanguineti was originally published as part of the proceedings of a conference in 1982 devoted to the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli, one of the founders of modern Italian poetry, known for his innovative and musical verses… Read More ›
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Analysis of Andrée Chedid’s Landscapes
The poem Landscapes has been taken from Selected Poems of Andrée Chedid. The piece was originally published in Textes pour une figure (Texts for a Figure), Chedid’s first book of French poetry, which dates back to 1949. It also reappears… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Yvan Goll’s Landless
Yvan Goll’s Jean Sans Terre is a collection of five books of interrelated poems written over eight years (from 1936 to 1944). Goll maps the anguish of dispossession, the suffering and distress of the alienated human individual suffering the worst… Read More ›
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Analysis of Federico García Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías
Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, considered Federico García Lorca’s masterpiece, describes the tragic death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, a famous bullfighter and García Lorca’s close friend. A professional torero who loved literature and music and wrote poetry, Sánchez Mejías retired… Read More ›
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The Poetry of Arun Kolatkar
Arun Kolatkar is considered one of the most influential writers of India’s post-independence period. A bilingual poet who wrote in English and Marathi, he is most famous for his two early volumes of poetry: Jejuri (1976) in English and Arun… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kōtarō Takamura’s Journey
Kōtarō Takamura’s 1914 book Dōtei (Journey) may be the single most important poetry collection to the development of 20th-century Japanese poetry. In Dōtei, Kōtarō Takamura showed himself to be the first Japanese poet to break effectively with traditional poetic convention…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Andrew Salkey’s Jamaica
Andrew Salkey’s long poem Jamaica bears the subtitle An Epic Poem, Exploring the Historical Foundations of Jamaican Society. Published in 1973, after more than two decades of work, Jamaica sprawls across centuries of Jamaican history and includes a wide range… Read More ›
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