Author Archives
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Analysis of Edith Södergran’s The Day Cools
This poem appeared in Södergran’s debut collection, Dikter (Poems), and it is perhaps the best known and most quoted of all her work. As with most of her poetry, it is written in free verse. At the time, so free… Read More ›
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The Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish was born in Palestine when it was a British mandate. At the age of six, he experienced the dispersal of his people upon the birth of the state of Israel (1948). The Palestinians had to flee or accept… Read More ›
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Analysis of Enrique Lihn’s The Dark Room
The title poem of Enrique Lihn’s 1963 collection La pieza oscura (The Dark Room) uses dense description and rich symbolism to communicate the problematic division between childhood and adulthood. The setting of La pieza oscura gives the poem its title…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Paul Éluard’s The Curve of Your Eyes
Paul Éluard was not only one of the major proponents of surrealism, but also one of the greatest love poets of the 20th century. His poetry stands in a long tradition of adoration of the beloved woman, indebted to the… Read More ›
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Analysis of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s Culling Beans
The poem Catar feijão (Culling Beans) from Educação pela Pedra (Education by Stone, 1966) is one of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s various poems that explore the process of writing. Dedicated to the Portuguese poet Alexandre O’Neill, this poem reaffirms… Read More ›
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Analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Correspondence
“Correspondence,” a short poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor, was first published in Poèmes perdus (Lost Poems), included in his final collection of original poetry, Oeuvre poétique. However, “according to the author’s preface, these poems are not new as such, but… Read More ›
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Analysis of Forugh Farrokhzad’s Conquest of the Garden
Conquest of the Garden (Fath-e Bagh) appeared in Farrokhzad’s fourth collection, Another Birth. An early translator and proponent of Farrokhzad’s poetry, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, argued that this publication was “perhaps the most significant single document of contemporary Persian letters” (An Anthology… Read More ›
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Poetry and Colonialism
The term colonialism has been variously defined, but most definitions agree that the word refers to processes for the extension and safeguarding of control by one nation or empire over the land, economic resources, and culture of another (and often… Read More ›
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Analysis of Miroslav Holub’s Collision
Miroslav Holub’s (1982) Collision was first published in a collection of poems—Interferon, or on Theater (1982, United States; 1986, Czechoslovakia)—that, as the title suggests, takes immunology and theater as the central realms from which the poet draws his metaphors. The… Read More ›
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Analysis of Michelle Cliff’s Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise
Michelle Cliff’s first book, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, is a collection of what can best be described as “proems” in both the intuitive and the official meanings of the word. The pieces combine prose and poetry… Read More ›
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Analysis of Vicente Aleixandre’s City of Paradise
Ciudad del paraíso (“City of Paradise”), from the collection Sombra del paraíso (1944), typifies the style that established Vicente Aleixandre as the seminal poetic voice in Spain after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). An homage to Málaga, where the poet… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mongane Wally Serote’s City Johannesburg
In this justly famous poem, which runs to nearly 40 lines, Mongane Serote ironically pays tribute to the city of Johannesburg, where Black South Africans were allowed to work but not live during the apartheid era. Like much of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Chinua Achebe’s Christmas in Biafra
This is the title piece for Achebe’s collection Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems, a joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1972). The poem graphically depicts the suffering endured by civilians during the bloody Nigerian civil war (1967–70)… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kofi Anyidoho’s Children of the Land
Children of the Land (A Sequence for African Liberation) is from Kofi Anyidoho’s third collection of poems, Ancestrallogic and Caribbeanblues (sic). It is representative of his freedom poetry and was composed at the request of the Ghana Commission on Children… Read More ›
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Analysis of Czesław Miłosz’s Child of Europe
When accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, Czesław Miłosz said, “I am a child of Europe, as the title of one of my poems admits, but that is a bitter, sarcastic admission.” Miłosz composed Child of Europe during… Read More ›
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Analysis of Takamura Kōtarō’s The Chieko Collection
Chieko Shō is Takamura Kōtarō’s best-known book. The collection consists of 31 poems and three essays. Chieko Shō is a unified collection and a poetry sequence in the true sense, chronicling Takamura’s life together with his wife, Chieko. The sequence… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henrik Nordbrandt’s Catamaran
This poem appeared in a poetry collection titled Worms at the Gate of Heaven (Ormene ved himlens port) in 1995, four years following a deep personal tragedy in Henrik Nordbrandt’s life that had an indelible impact on his poetics. Nordbrandt… Read More ›
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Analysis of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes
As the title indicates, the series of poems published in Calligrammes was written over several years, but the volume was not published until after the author’s death. As one of France’s avant-garde writers, Apollinaire experimented with new forms of expression,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s Buckow Elegies
The Buckow Elegies are 22 poems that Bertolt Brecht wrote during the summer of 1953, when he was staying at a country house that he had bought early the previous year. The poems were published gradually over the next two… Read More ›
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Analysis of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Brooklyn Bridge
A hymn of praise to the Brooklyn Bridge, Mayakovsky’s poem (Bruklinskii Most) expresses the awe that he, as an artist and a technophile, feels when he experiences the sight of this symbol of New York City and American ingenuity. The… Read More ›
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