Author Archives
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Analysis of Shaul Tchernichovsky’s Boiled Dumplings
Shaul Tchernichovsky’s first idyll, Boiled Dumplings (Levivot Mevushalot), was composed in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1902 and has been celebrated for its coherence, vibrancy, bittersweet humor, and multiplex form, as well as for its engagement with weighty matters significant at the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Black Woman
Black Woman Naked woman, black woman Clothed with your colour which is life with your form which is beauty! In your shadow I have grown up; the gentleness of your hands was laid over my eyes. And now, high up… Read More ›
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Analysis of Nancy Morejón’s Black Woman
One of Cuban writer Nancy Morejón’s most anthologized and best-known works is Mujer Negra. According to the author, this compelling poem came to her in a dream of a woman appearing at her bedroom window. The next morning, Morejón recorded… Read More ›
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Analysis of Raul Bopp’s Black Snake
Cobra Norato, written in 1928 and first published in 1931, is considered not only Raul Bopp’s masterpiece, but also one of the most important literary works of Brazilian modernism. In this long poem, Bopp develops a dramatic epic with fairy-tale–like… Read More ›
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Analysis of César Vallejo’s The Black Heralds
The Black Heralds (also published as The Black Messengers) expresses the metaphysics of human pain and suffering that informed much of César Vallejo’s poetry. In contrast to Romantic writers who considered poetry a means to commune with the sublime, Vallejo… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alfredo Giuliani’s Birthday
Alfredo Giuliani’s unrhymed free-verse poem Compleanno (Birthday) was first published in I novissimi: poesie per gli anni ’60 (1961), the famous and influential anthology of neo-avant-garde poetry that Giuliani himself edited, containing his own poetry and that of four other… Read More ›
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Analysis of Suh Jung-ju’s Beside a Chrysanthemum
“Beside a Chrysanthemum” (1947) is one of Suh Jung-ju’s most famous poems. It was originally published in his third collection of poetry, Selected Poems (1955), in which Suh tries to revisit traditional Korean sensibility, distancing himself from the Baudelairean art-for-art’s-sake… Read More ›
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Analysis of Léon Damas’s Bargain
“Bargain” (“Solde”), from Damas’s first collection, Pigments (1937), reveals the effects of centuries of exploitation by white European colonials. Damas’s message is even more direct in this poem than in Hiccup; the speaker is an adult who has fully assimilated… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aimé Césaire’s Barbarity
Initially, one might read the opening line of this four-stanza poem as a reference to Aimé Césaire’s own recourse to barbarity as a means of violent rebellion: “This [barbarity] is the word that sustains me / and smacks against my… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jibanananda Das’s Banalata Sen
Jibanananda Das’s famous love poem Banalata Sen was first published in the journal Kavita (Poetry) in 1935 and later anthologized in a 1942 collection to which it gave its name. It is widely regarded as one of Das’s finest poems… Read More ›
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Analysis of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Backbone Flute
Written shortly after Mayakovsky’s first meeting with Lily Brik in 1915, this poem takes its tone from Catullus’s “I love, and I hate” and its mood from the gothic tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, to whom the poem alludes… Read More ›
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Analysis of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar
This poem begins with the observation that no marker preserves the memory of the Jews and others whom the Germans killed at Babi Yar, a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, on September 29, 1941. Yevtushenko’s words (and the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Autumn Maneuver
I’m not saying that was yesterday. With worthless Summer money in our pockets we are again on the chaff of scorn, in the autumn maneuvers of time. And the escape route to the south does not come to us, like… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Autumn Day
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Autumn Day After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials and in the pastures let the rough winds fly. As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness. Direct… Read More ›
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Analysis of Dennis Brutus’s At a Funeral
AT A FUNERAL – DENNIS BRUTUS Black, green and gold at sunset: pageantry And stubbled graves: expectant, of eternity, In bride’s-white, nun’s-white veils the nurses gush their bounty Of red-wine cloaks, frothing the bugled dirging slopes Salute! “hen ponder all… Read More ›
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Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Ars Poetica
Ars Poetica – Pablo Neruda Between shadow and space, between harnesses and virgins, endowed with a singular heart and fatal dreams, impetuously pale, withered in the forehead and in mourning like an angry widower every day of my life, oh,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Vicente Huidobro’s Ars Poetica
Ars Poetica Let poetry be like a key Opening a thousand doors A leaf falls; something flies by; Let all the eye sees be created And the soul of the listener tremble. Invent new worlds and watch your word; The… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants
Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy, The Arrivants (1988), consists of three previously published long poems: Rights of Passage (1967), Islands (1968), and Masks (1969), each comprised of many constituent parts. Critic Pamela Mordecai labels the trilogy’s structural elements in descending order… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo
Archaic Torso of Apollo We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all… Read More ›
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Arab Rap and Hip-hop Culture
Since the 1990s, with the seemingly unending cycle of violence that has defined the Second Palestinian Intifada and the ‘War on terror’, Western media outlets have bombarded their viewers with the stark imagery of disaffected Arab youth. Terms like jihadi,… Read More ›
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