Recent Posts - page 8
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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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Analysis of Hilde Domin’s Only a Rose for Support
This poem, Nur eine Rose als Stütze, appeared in 1959 in a revised version as the title poem of Hilde Domin’s first collection. The poem consists of four stanzas of five lines each. The first two stanzas speak of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Syl Cheney-Coker’s On Being a Poet in Sierra Leone
First published in The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, “On Being a Poet in Sierra Leone” is an example of Syl Cheney-Coker’s self-referential—one might almost say egocentric—style. This 34-line free-verse poem—which contains minimal punctuation (only two exclamation points and six commas)—is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Marina Tsvetaeva’s On a Red Steed
“On a Red Steed” (Na krasnom kone) first appeared in Tsvetaeva’s Remeslo (Craft) in 1923. In this poem, the female speaker traces the development of a woman poet, explores her source of inspiration, and identifies the sacrifices she has to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Derek Walcott’s Omeros
Omeros is Derek Walcott’s longest and most ambitious poem, evoking the tradition of epic poetry through its stylistic features. The title is a variation on the modern Greek pronunciation of “Homer.” Various characters have Homeric names: Helen, Achille, and Hector…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Joseph Brodsky’s Odysseus to Telemachus
Like many of Joseph Brodsky’s poems, Odysseus to Telemachus examines the corruptive effects of empire on the individual. In Torso (1977), the subject is the Roman Empire, described as “the end of things,” a place where a person finds the… Read More ›
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