Literary Theory and Criticism

“Life-Hook” (“Vida-garfio”), called “Clinging to Life” in another translation, from Juana de Ibarbourou’s first poetry collection, Las lenguas de diamante (1919), shows themes and modes of expression that recur in her popular early work. The playful, almost flirtatious attitude of… Read More ›

Analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Letter to a Poet

Published in his first collection of poetry, Chants d’ombre (Songs of Darkness or Shadow Songs), “Letter to a Poet” is a short praise poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor to Martinican poet and statesman Aimé Césaire, to whom the piece is… Read More ›

Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet

Many readers have called Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet life-altering, and many writers of all ages have felt as moved as the original recipient must have been by reading these letters. The 10 letters have been called… Read More ›

Mahmoud Darwish’s Lesson from the KamaSutra

Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry partakes of different cultural and mythological traditions. We find in his poems allusions to seminal texts from ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, pre-Islamic Arabia, Persia, and India. In this poem, the title is taken from an Indian classic on… Read More ›

Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Leda

Leda And when the god possessed the swan, from need, and found it beautiful, that terrified him. Wholly shocked, he disappeared inside it, but his trickery drove him toward his deed before he could explore what that life must have… Read More ›

Analysis of Edoardo Sanguineti’s Last Walk

This poem by Edoardo Sanguineti was originally published as part of the proceedings of a conference in 1982 devoted to the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli, one of the founders of modern Italian poetry, known for his innovative and musical verses… Read More ›

Analysis of Andrée Chedid’s Landscapes

The poem Landscapes has been taken from Selected Poems of Andrée Chedid. The piece was originally published in Textes pour une figure (Texts for a Figure), Chedid’s first book of French poetry, which dates back to 1949. It also reappears… Read More ›

Analysis of John Yvan Goll’s Landless

Yvan Goll’s Jean Sans Terre is a collection of five books of interrelated poems written over eight years (from 1936 to 1944). Goll maps the anguish of dispossession, the suffering and distress of the alienated human individual suffering the worst… Read More ›

The Poetry of Arun Kolatkar

Arun Kolatkar is considered one of the most influential writers of India’s post-independence period. A bilingual poet who wrote in English and Marathi, he is most famous for his two early volumes of poetry: Jejuri (1976) in English and Arun… Read More ›

Analysis of Kōtarō Takamura’s Journey

Kōtarō Takamura’s 1914 book Dōtei (Journey) may be the single most important poetry collection to the development of 20th-century Japanese poetry. In Dōtei, Kōtarō Takamura showed himself to be the first Japanese poet to break effectively with traditional poetic convention…. Read More ›

Analysis of Andrew Salkey’s Jamaica

Andrew Salkey’s long poem Jamaica bears the subtitle An Epic Poem, Exploring the Historical Foundations of Jamaican Society. Published in 1973, after more than two decades of work, Jamaica sprawls across centuries of Jamaican history and includes a wide range… Read More ›

Analysis of Aimé Césaire’s It Is the Courage of Men Which Is Dislocated

In this unrhymed prose poem, Césaire develops the central image of torrential rain and its effects—both destructive and cathartic—on island cultures: “The rain, it’s the testy way here and now to strike out everything that exists, everything / that’s been… Read More ›

Analysis of Anna de Noailles’s It is After the Moments

This poem by Anna de Noailles, from Les Forces éternelles (1921), explores themes of betrayal, isolation, and renewal. Its persona, or narrative voice, expresses frustration at finding oneself, after an implied moment of intimacy, alone beside a now somnolent lover…. Read More ›

Analysis of Bernard Binlin Dadié’s I Thank God

This 13-line free-verse poem starts with gratitude, “I thank you, my God, / for having created me black,” and establishes a mood of celebration. The next line, a continuation of the initial thought, creates a startling counterpoint: “for making me… Read More ›

Analysis of Constantine P. Cavafy’s Ithaka

“Ithaka” is Constantine Cavafy’s best-known poem, having won him his first international acclaim when T. S. Eliot published a translation of it in The Criterion in 1924. One of the few “second-person” poems Cavafy wrote (along with “The City” in… Read More ›

Analysis of Niyi Osundare’s I Sing of Change

I Sing of Change— Niyi Osundare I singof the beauty of Athenswithout slaves of a world freeof kings and queensand other remnantsof an arbitrary past Of earthwith nosharp northor deep southwithout blind curtainsor iron walls of the endof warlords and… Read More ›

Analysis of Kamala Das’s An Introduction

Easily the most candid of her self-confessional poems, An Introduction by Kamala Das, while seemingly simplistic, is an attempt to review her life in verse. This poem might well be said to have started a trend among Indian women poets… Read More ›

Analysis of Constantine P. Cavafy’s In the Month of Athyr