The Road Not Taken (1916) Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in… Read More ›
Poetry
Analysis of Robert Frost’s After Apple-Picking
After Apple-Picking (1914) My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. But I… Read More ›
Analysis of Robert Frost’s Acquainted with the Night
Acquainted with the Night (1928) I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed… Read More ›
Analysis of Robert Frost’s Acceptance
Acceptance (1928) When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud And goes down burning into the gulf below, No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud At what has happened. Birds, at least must know It is… Read More ›
Analysis of Rubén Darío’s To Roosevelt
Poem Text It is with the voice of the Bible, or verse of Walt Whitman, that we should reach you, Hunter! Primitive and modern, simple and complicated, with a bit of Washington and a bit of Nimrod. You are the… Read More ›
Analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s New York
I New York! At first I was bewildered by your beauty, Those huge, long-legged, golden girls. So shy, at first, before your blue metallic eyes and icy smile, So shy. And full of despair at the end of skyscraper streets… Read More ›
Analysis of Wole Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation
Paradoxically apologetic and bitingly sarcastic, Soyinka’s Telephone Conversation is a 35-line poem dealing with bigotry and the absurdity of racist hierarchies. Written in free verse, the poem portrays an African’s attempt to rent an apartment in London. Describing a conversation with… Read More ›
Analysis of Dante’s Divine Comedy
Dante’s crowning achievement, one of the most important works in Western literature and undisputedly the most important poetic text of the European Middle Ages, is the great poem he calls his Comedy, or Commedia (ca. 1307–1321). This seems an odd… Read More ›
FIELD POETICS
Field poetics may be defined by a systematic integrity that overrides individual authorial intention. The system in play is usually a form of language, purely acoustic, or purely visual, often scored speech or another verbal matrix. Among the most uncompromising… Read More ›
ECOPOETICS
Poetry aspires to reveal the world for what it is. Ecopoetics reaffirms the world in its complexity and proposes an engagement with—or attunement to—an original world: one dynamic and rich and devised of a continuum of interrelations, an overlooked/missed world… Read More ›
Analysis of Shelley’s Mont Blanc
On July 21, 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his companion Mary Godwin (who would subsequently marry him), and her half sister Claire Claremont, first saw Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in Europe. The sight impressed them mightily, so much so that… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters
The Lotos-Eaters represents one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s most extended experiments in, and demonstrations of, the sensual nature of poetry. Tennyson—heavily influenced by John Keats—was interested in testing the limits of poetic expression, and thus, more than most poets, he… Read More ›
Analysis of William Blake’s London
London is one of the grimmest of William Blake’s songs of experience (see Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Like “The Tyger” and the “experienced” version of “Holy Thursday,” this is one of the comparatively few songs that seem to be… Read More ›
Analysis of Shelley’s The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is often read in conjunction with “Mont Blanc,” written at about the same time in summer 1816, when Percy Shelley was in Switzerland. The two poems have many things in common, but “The Hymn to… Read More ›
Analysis of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The crucial fact about Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is that it is a poem. In many ways it is the archetypal first approximation of a romantic poem, both for Lord Byron’s contemporaries and disciples and for an understanding of English romanticism’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s Ulysses
Ulysses, a perennial favorite and one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s greatest poems, appeared in the 1842 volume of Poems that made Tennyson’s name. However, it was written at age 24, nine years earlier, after the death in 1833 of Arthur… Read More ›
Analysis of William Blake’s The Tyger
The Tyger is the terrifying pendant to The Lamb in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience as its climactic rhetorical question makes clear: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Like “The Lamb,” it takes the form of… Read More ›
Analysis of Keats’s To Autumn
The last of the great series of odes that John Keats wrote in 1819, this one was composed on September 19 and therefore on the cusp of autumn rather than early summer, like the others. Although it is like the… Read More ›
Analysis of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey
More properly called Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, 13 July 1798, this is one of William Wordsworth’s greatest poems, second perhaps only to the Intimations Ode in its… Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
Along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Kubla Khan is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s two most famous and most-quoted-from poems. Originally written in either 1797 or 1798, it was not published until 1816 (along with Christabel). The long… Read More ›