Author Archives
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Analysis of Stefan George’s Secret Germany
This poem forms the central piece of George’s last volume, Das neue Reich (The Kingdom Come, 1928), and combines the poet’s central themes: autobiographical recollection, a fierce critique of modern society, the invocation of poetic ancestors and heroes, allusions to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aleksandr Blok’s The Scythians
The Scythians is Aleksandr Blok’s last significant poem, composed from and for a particular moment in history. It forms part of the “January Trilogy” of 1918, together with The Twelve and the essay The Intelligentsia and the Revolution. Revolutionary Russia… Read More ›
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Analysis of Joyce Mansour’s Screams
Joyce Mansour’s first volume of verse, Cris (inarticulate expressions of pain, rage, or surprise; but also, cris de bataille, battle cries), brought her to the immediate attention of France’s literati—in particular to the attention of male surrealists who found in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tomas Tranströmer’s Schubertiana
Published in 1978, Schubertiana, a poem from Tomas Tranströmer’s eighth volume of poems, Sanningsbarriären (Truth Barriers), explores the ways in which music functions as an antidote to the fragmentation that often defines contemporary life. As typically happens in Tranströmer’s work,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Derek Walcott’s The Schooner Flight
This quest poem fuses Derek Walcott’s highly metaphoric style with distinctly Caribbean Creole speech patterns. The narrator, a poet/sailor named Shabine, speaks English Creole, declaring, “Well, when I write / this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt.” This… Read More ›
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Analysis of Else Lasker-Schüler’s Say It Softly
Published in her volume My Miracles, Leise Sagen (“Say It Softly—”) embodies Lasker-Schüler’s greatest expressionist achievements. She combines extraordinary, unconventional imagery with simplicity of form to render love as both spirited frisson and melancholic surrender. The title, along with its… Read More ›
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Analysis of Agostinho Neto’s Saturday in the Sand-Slums
This poignant and painful poem, one of Agostinho Neto’s longest, documents in stark detail the conditions of life for poor Africans in the shantytowns surrounding Angola’s capital city, Luanda. The poem Sabado nos musseques expresses the anxieties experienced by the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Paul Claudel’s The Satin Slipper
The Satin Slipper (Le Soulier de satin), subtitled “The Worst is Not the Surest,” is an epic verse drama by French poet, dramatist, and diplomat Paul Claudel. He began writing the play after a diplomatic assignment in Brazil in 1918… Read More ›
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Analysis of Georg Trakl’s A Romance to Night
A Romance to Night (Romanze zur Nacht) is a perfect example of Trakl’s preoccupation with the horrors of modernity in rural settings and its effects on the individual’s physical and unconscious existence. It showcases Trakl’s most characteristic poetic technique of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Dennis Brutus’s Robben Island Sequence
One of many poems by Dennis Brutus reflecting on the prison experience, Robben Island Sequence is fairly typical of the poet’s later work, in which Brutus sought to eliminate the tight verse structure and ornate diction of his earlier work… Read More ›
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Analysis of Tamura Ryūichi’s Research into Fear
During the 1960s, Tamura Ryūichi published two poems as separate, exceptionally slim volumes. One was Research into Fear (or A Study of Fear, 1963); the other was Decaying Matter (or A Perishable Substance, 1966). One of Tamura’s translators commented: “In… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem
Anna Akhmatova’s stunning song for the dead was written in stages, most of it between 1935 and 1940, with the epigram and opening movement added two decades later. As with her other poems that could invoke the wrath of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jayanta Mahapatra’s Relationship
Originally published in New York by the Greenfield Review Press in 1980, Relationship is a visionary poem of 673 lines divided into 12 sections, incorporating Mahapatra’s ambitious attempt to inscribe his Oriya roots and ancestry in a song that weaves… Read More ›
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Analysis of Novica Tadić’s The Red Locust
Novica Tadić’s The Red Locust is a key representative poem from this Montenegran (Yugoslavian) poet’s seminal 1981 collection Ždrelo (Maw). This poem has a majority of the hallmarks found in the poet’s oeuvre. The poem, much like the collection from… Read More ›
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Analysis of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Rain in the Pinewood
This is probably the most widely known of D’Annunzio’s poems and the one that is usually taken as most emblematic of his “panism,” the ability to experience the vibrant life of nature in one’s own body and soul. The poem… Read More ›
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Analysis of Imtiaz Dharker’s Purdah, 1
PURDAH (1) One day they said she was old enough to learn some shame. She found it came quite naturally. Purdah is a kind of safety. The body finds a place to hide. The cloth fans out against the skin… Read More ›
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Analysis of Blaise Cendrars’s The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and the Little Joan of France
La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and the Little Joan of France), published in Paris in September 1913, is in many respects a foundational text for modernism in literature and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet
The Prophet, a book of 26 poetic essays, has been translated into over 20 languages, has had 45 editions in America alone, and is Kahlil Gibran’s best-known work. In spite of its popular success, the book has received little critical… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aimé Césaire’s Prophecy
Like much of Aimé Césaire’s poetry, Prophecy possesses a stream-of-consciousness style in unrhymed, free verse with lines of varying length. The poet reminisces about Caribbean islands before European colonization, the fecundity of their vegetation, and the wonders of the animal… Read More ›
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Analysis of Chinweizu’s Professor Derrida Eshu
As a student of American literature and culture at the State University of New York (Buffalo) during the mid- and late 1970s, Chinweizu encountered the writings of Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionist literary criticism, because Derrida was making a… Read More ›
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