Author Archives
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Analysis of Miyazawa Kenji’s Proem: The Hard Keyura Jewels
Miyazawa wrote his Proem poem The Hard Keyura Jewels… (1922) as a supplement to his first collection, Spring and Asura (1924). While the first two lines or so of the manuscript seem to be missing, the poem clearly expresses the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s Pre-Morning
Pre-Morning (Predutro) is the title poem of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s first book of poetry published after his Collected Poems in 1991. The 11 quatrains that make up the poem are set in a liminal time, when the day is coming into… Read More ›
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Analysis of René Depestre’s Prelude
Prelude (Prélude) is the first poem in René Depestre’s best-known collection, A Rainbow for the Christian West (Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien, 1967). It is written in unrhymed free verse and divided into four parts, the last of which is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Karin Boye’s Prayer to the Sun
This poem, Bön till solen, appeared in Karin Boye’s fourth and final collection of poetry, För trädets skull (For the Tree’s Sake, 1935). (A fifth collection, De sjudödssynderna [The Seven Deadly Sins], was published posthumously in 1941.) This poem is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jorge Guillén’s The Power of Pérez
Potencia de Pérez (The Power of Pérez) was published in Maremágnum (1957), a collection of poems that is part of Clamor. Jorge Guillén’s attitude toward the world is less positive in Clamor than in Cántico. The recurring topic is contemporary… Read More ›
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Performance Poetry
Poetry beyond the page, or performance poetry as it is commonly called, refers to poetry that is performed, recorded, spoken, or published in multimedia formats. It involves the creation, activation, enactment, or engineering of a poem in a space outside… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anna Akhmatova’s Poem Without a Hero
Scholars consider this complex autobiographical triptych an exceptional achievement. In it, Anna Akhmatova revisits pre–World War I St. Petersburg with the hindsight of several decades and from the perspective of Tashkent and Moscow. The cycle, “the work that would crown… Read More ›
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Analysis of Boris Pasternak ‘s The Poems of Dr. Zhivago
Published as if an appendix to Pasternak’s novel, Dr. Zhivago, these poems highlight the novel’s theme of suffering and may serve as the key to understanding the work as a whole. Several poems contain explicitly Christian images: even “Hamlet,” the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jaroslav Seifert’s The Plague Column
The title poem in Seifert’s collection Morový sloup (1977, Cologne; 1981, Prague), composed as a free-verse narrative, uses a 300-year-old Prague monument as a symbol for Czech fate and history. Plague columns were erected in nearly every town throughout Europe… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rafael Alberti’s Picasso
This poem is a homage to the work of Rafael Alberti’s friend, the famous painter and fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Alberti met the artist in 1933; in the following decades, they collaborated on various projects and remained close until… Read More ›
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Analysis of Gabriel Okara’s Piano and Drums
This work, first published in The Fisherman’s Invocation (1978) but written much earlier, is the best-known and the most anthologized of Gabriel Okara’s poems. It is also representative of his poetry because it engages the conflict of cultures, a major… Read More ›
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Analysis of Claribel Alegría’s Personal Creed
Beliefs expressed in Personal Creed shaped Claribel Alegría’s writings after the 1959 triumph of the Cuban revolution and forced her admitted “awakening” to the world around her. A second major jolt was the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, just… Read More ›
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Analysis of Zbigniew Herbert’s Pebble
Pebble (Kamyk), first published in Struna światła (A Chord of Light, 1956), is a poem that many readers consider a quintessential example of Zbigniew Herbert’s modernism. It is concrete while also allusive; it is clear and simple on the surface,… Read More ›
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Analysis of André du Bouchet’s Painting
One of du Bouchet’s most challenging palimpsests of synesthetic theory and praxis, his book-length poem Peinture (1983) at once discusses and inhabits creative processes of unwriting and unpainting. Examining fluid thresholds between “painting,” disappearance, and the open, the text performs… Read More ›
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Analysis of Olive Senior’s Over the Roofs of the World
Over the Roofs of the World (2005) is Jamaican poet Olive Senior’s third collection of poetry. In her second collection, Gardening in the Tropics, a cycle of poems is connected by themes of cultivation and a repeated opening line. In… Read More ›
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Analysis of Nelly Sachs’s O the Chimneys
In her study Keepers of the Motherland: German Texts by Jewish Women Writers, Dagmar C. G. Lorenz comments that Nelly Sachs wrote In den Wohnungen des Todes (In the Dwellings of Death), the collection of which O the Chimneys is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jaroslav Seifert’s On the Waves of the Wireless
On the Waves of the Wireless (1925) can be called Jaroslav Seifert’s first mature collection of poetry, although he was only 24 when it was published and although, as he recollects in his memoir All the Beauties of the World,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Eugenio Montale’s On the Threshold
“On the Threshold” (“In Limine”) was originally published in Eugenio Montale’s first volume of verse, Cuttlefish Bones (Ossi di seppia, 1925). It is a short poem in four stanzas: the first and third stanzas have five lines each; the second… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aimé Césaire’s On the State of the Union
“On the State of the Union” is indicative of how Aimé Césaire’s vision of négritude had evolved from the concerns of being a Martinican struggling for racial equality with white Europeans into a universal view of civil rights for Blacks…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Hayim N. Bialik’s In the City of Slaughter
At the same time that Zionism was crystallizing as a political movement, Hayim Bialik’s poetic output was coming into the limelight. Many of his readers believe that Bialik reached his artistic apex with his Poems of Wrath series, a shockingly… Read More ›
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