The Emperor Jones is the first international triumph of expressionism by an American playwright; with it, Eugene O’Neill single-handedly introduced experimental American theater to Europe and established his reputation as the United States’ pre-eminent playwright. The November 1, 1920, premiere… Read More ›
American Literature
Analysis of Jane Hamilton’s Novels
Jane Hamilton (born July 13, 1957) achieved early success with the publication of her first novel. In 1989, The Book of Ruth received the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, the Banta Award, and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for… Read More ›
Analysis of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing!
The Berger family are on the verge of the middle class and as such are especially vulnerable. To deny the reality of the American dream is ostensibly to condemn themselves to permanent deprivation. The constant image is one of flight,… Read More ›
Analysis of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles
I know The Heidi Chronicles was a controversial play among many feminists. It was a play where some people thought I had sold out, because she had a baby at the end and I was saying that all women must… Read More ›
Analysis of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is, perhaps, to this time, the most mature example of a myth of Contemporary life. The chief value of this drama is its attempt to reveal those ultimate meanings which are resident in modern… Read More ›
Analysis of Philip Whalen’s Poems
Although often considered experimental and sometimes obscure, the poetry of Philip Whalen (20 October 1923 – 26 June 2002) is marked by a directness of expression that matches his concern with directness of experience. The seemingly oblique or broken sentences… Read More ›
Analysis of Diane Wakoski’s Poems
Since Diane Wakoski (born August 3, 1937) believes that “the poems in her published books give all the important information about her life,” her life and her art are inextricably related. She states that the poem “must organically come out… Read More ›
Analysis of Jack Spicer’s Poems
Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) wrote a poetry of imagistic and conceptual juxtaposition reminiscent, at times, of Dadaist randomness. He considered true poetry to be “dictated,” and thus removed from the conscious control of the poet…. Read More ›
Analysis of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Poems
Although Gilbert Sorrentino (April 27, 1929 – May 18, 2006) is not usually identified with the Beat poets, he was contemporaneous with them and published many as the editor of Kulchur magazine from 1961 to 1963. Significantly, Sorrentino’s first published… Read More ›
Analysis of Gary Snyder’s Poems
Among many evocative statements about his life and work, a particularly crucial one is Gary Snyder’s (born May 8, 1930) claim that As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic;… Read More ›
Analysis of Marie Ponsot’s Poems
Marie Ponsot’s (April 6, 1921 – July 5, 2019) use of her personal experiences never degenerates into the maudlin, nor does she invoke the circumstances of her life simply for dramatic effect. In Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poets… Read More ›
Analysis of Kenneth Rexroth’s Poems
Kenneth Rexroth (December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982) wrote in the tradition of contemplative, mystical, visionary, philosophical, and prophetic poets such as William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Dante, Du Fu, Zeami Motokiyo, and Sappho,… Read More ›
Analysis of Charles Olson’s Poems
Charles Olson’s (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) poetry is political in a profound, not superficial, sense; it does not spend time naming “current events,” but rather devotes itself to defining “the dodges of discourse” that have enabled humanity… Read More ›
Analysis of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poems
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s (born March 24, 1919) poetry may be looked on as a kind of travelog in which he has subjectively recorded choice experiences or montages from experience, often in a jazzlike or free-associative manner. For Ferlinghetti, “reality” itself becomes… Read More ›
Analysis of Robert Duncan’s Poems
Of the many metaphors that Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) applied to his poetry—and very few poets have been so perceptive and articulate about their own practice—those dealing with limits, boundaries, and margins are numerous and… Read More ›
Fugitive/Agrarian School of Poetry
The Fugitives, a group of poets from Nashville, Tennessee, led the vanguard for modernist verse in the South in the 1920s. In contrast to the Imagist movement centered in England, the Fugitives emphasized traditional poetic forms and techniques, and their… Read More ›
Harlem Renaissance
Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later… Read More ›
An Introduction to the Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts movement was a controversial literary faction that emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic arm of the Black Power movement, a militant political operation that rejected the integrationist purposes and practices of the Civil Rights… Read More ›
Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s There’s a certain Slant of light
When Mabel Loomis Todd published this poem in the 1890 Poems under the rubric of nature poems, she set a precedent that would be followed by editors for more than half a century. Todd may have seen it as a… Read More ›
Analysis of Emily Dickinson’s Because I could not stop for Death
One of Dickinson’s most famous and widely discussed poems, Fr 479 appeared in the first 1890 edition of her poems, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson had given it the inappropriate title “The Chariot,” thinking, perhaps,… Read More ›
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