Author Archives
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Analysis of Johannes Bobrowski’s Experience
One week before its first publication in Germany’s leading weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, in November 1962, Johannes Bobrowski recited Erfahrung at a literary meeting of the legendary Gruppe 47, an informal alliance of German postwar authors that included the novelists… Read More ›
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Analysis of Taslima Nasrin’s Exile
The poem Exile appears in the Love Poems of Taslima Nasrin It expresses the emotional pain of this exiled writer and her yearning for her homeland. Exposing her innermost vulnerability and loneliness, the poet addresses her country as would a pining… Read More ›
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Analysis of Fadwa Tuqan’s Enough for Me
Enough For Me Enough for me to die on her earth be buried in her to melt and vanish into her soil then sprout forth as a flower played with by a child from my country. Enough for me to… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Seferis’s Engomi
First published in the slim volume …Cyprus, Where It Was Ordained for Me…, Engomi is considered one of George Seferis’s most characteristic poems. It is a free-verse ode in five uneven-length stanzas, the last one of which contains two lines… Read More ›
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Analysis of Czesław Miłosz’s Encounter
Encounter We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Édouard Glissant’s Elited Prose
In Elited Prose, from his collection Yokes (1979), we see an example of Édouard Glissant’s broader creative view. Whereas in Gorée, his condemnation of slavery is clear and direct, Glissant does not repeat a militant Négritude sensibility in all his… Read More ›
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Analysis of Christopher Okigbo’s Elegy for Slit-Drum
Christopher Okigbo’s “Elegy for Slit-Drum,” a poem in the unfinished sequence Path of Thunder: Poems Prophesying War, is emblematic of his late work, in which the escalating political crisis in Nigeria plays a crucial role. In the mid-1960s, ethnic tensions… Read More ›
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Écriture
The poetic writing that is here identified as écriture shares a provenance with language-centered writing in the United States and Canada: the “language games” of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s logical positivism and the objectivist heritage in poetry associated with Louis Zukofsky among… Read More ›
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Analysis of Octavio Paz’s Eagle or Sun?
The slim surrealistic volume of prose poetry ¿Águila o sol? (1951) takes its title from a Mexican coin with an eagle and the sun on opposing sides. The phrase, equivalent to the English “heads or tails,” underscores a characteristic theme… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies
Many readers consider Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien), which Rilke completed in 1922, not only his most accomplished poetry, but also, plausibly, the most perfect lyrical sequence of the 20th century. So well crafted are the 10 poems… Read More ›
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Analysis of Yvan Goll’s Dream Grass
Yvan Goll’s Dream Grass (Traumkraut) celebrates the poet’s love for his wife, Claire. The emotional pitch of the collection, published a year after his death, reflects the trauma of the poet’s struggle with leukemia, which took his life in 1950…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again
This most famous poem of Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Mujh Se Pehli Si Muhabbat) appears in his collection Naqsh-e-Faryadi (The Picture of a Dissenter), published in 1941, the year that Faiz married Alys George, an English journalist and human rights campaigner… Read More ›
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Analysis of Chris AbanI’s Dog Woman
One of Chris Abani’s several books of poetry, Dog Woman is a series of persona poems (poems voiced through characters other than the poet) employing the conventions of language poetry and elegy to explore the intersection of race, gender, and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Dis Nigeria Sef
Dis Nigeria Sef is the longest poem in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Songs in a Time of War. This poem does not belong among the war poems; the writer acknowledges in one of his memoirs that it was written in 1977, long… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mahmoud Darwish’s Diary of a Palestinian Wound
In the original Arabic of this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, there are 24 numbered stanzas representing the journal of a “wound,” specifically Palestinian. It is the diary of the violated and wounded, of the dispossessed and occupied. “Wound” here is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Adonis’s Desert
The Desert includes selections from the poetic diary of Adonis during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the siege of Beirut. The poem is dated “June 4, 1982–Jan. 1, 1983.” It is made up of 35 numbered… Read More ›
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Analysis of Hafez Ibrahim’s Describing a Suit
One of the few poems by Hafez Ibrahim available in English translation, Describing a Suit is an excellent illustration of Ibrahim’s famed use of irony and sarcastic humor to call attention to social issues. A leader of the neoclassical movement… Read More ›
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Analysis of Czesław Miłosz’s Dedication
“You whom I could not save,” Czesław Miłosz implores, “Listen to me” (ll. 1–2). In classical tradition, a dedication is a formal act, a delineation of space in response to loss. The poet offers up Warsaw to the memory of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Paul Celan’s Death Fugue
There is little question that Death Fugue (Todesfuge) is Paul Celan’s most celebrated and anthologized poem, a work that, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi avers, has become “as much an icon of the Holocaust as the photograph of the little boy… Read More ›
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Analysis of Constantine P. Cavafy’s Days of 1908
Among Constantine Cavafy’s latest compositions, Days of 1908 (Mεpες τoυ 1908) is one of a series of poems that name specific years in their titles and that, as such, may be called “memory poems.” The tone is suggestively autobiographical, as… Read More ›
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