Recent Posts - page 9
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Analysis of Pablo Neruda’s Ode with a Lament
A speaker praises his loved one, yet finds he is unable to satisfy her: this is not an unfamiliar trope in Neruda’s work. But in Ode with a Lament, from the second volume of Neruda’s somber Residencia en la Tierra… Read More ›
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Analysis of Federico García Lorca’s Ode to Walt Whitman
The central poem of the Poet in New York (Poeta en Nueva York) cycle, “Ode to Walt Whitman” is one of Federico García Lorca’s lyric landmarks in which the poet uses avant-garde form (including free verse and surrealist imagery) to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Andrei Voznesensky’s Ode to Gossips
Andrei Voznesensky first published Ode to Gossips in his second collection of verse, Parabola, published in Moscow (1960); he then slightly altered the poem when he republished it in Antimiry (Antiworlds, 1964). Stanley Moss’s excellent translation preserves the work’s eclectic… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sakutarō Hagiwara’s The Octopus That Does Not Die
Composed as a prose poem and narrated from an omniscient point of view, this piece by Sakutarō gives an account of the sad life of an octopus neglected for a long time in “a certain aquarium” (281). The poet delicately… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land
The poem—divided into stanzas of varying length and written in unrhymed free verse—begins with the refrain, repeated throughout, “At the end of the wee hours . . . ,” as the speaker wakes from a troubled sleep to survey the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Imtiaz Dharker’s No-man’s Land
Imtiaz Dharker calls herself a Scottish Muslim Calvinist and writes in English. Her No-man’s Land first appeared in her second volume of poetry, Postcards from God. This poem begins with a stark visual image and a hair-raising auditory one: “A… Read More ›
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Analysis of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Nocturnes
The fifth independent collection of poetry by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Nocturnes was published in 1961, the year after Senghor became president of Senegal, and it was awarded the International Grand Prize for Poetry from the Poets and Artists of France…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Nocturne
“Nocturno” (Nocturne), from the collection Diario de un poeta recién casado (Diary of a Newlywed Poet), is an excellent example of Jiménez’s “naked poetry.” Employing simple language and rhythmic free verse, “Nocturno” is a meditation on the traveler’s longing for… Read More ›
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Analysis of Nazim Hikmet’s 9–10 P.M. Poems
Nazim Hikmet’s series of 32 free-verse poems addressed to his wife, Piraye, from Bursa Prison in Turkey in 1945 constitutes a significant contribution to the tradition of the love lyric as it powerfully synthesizes authentic expressions of love, longing, and… Read More ›
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Analysis of J. P. Clark-Bekederemo’s Night Rain
This is one of the earliest poems of John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo and has been widely anthologized. One of the most successful of his poems, it was first published in Poems (1962) and reprinted in A Reed in the Tide (1965)…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Nissim Ezekiel’s Night of the Scorpion
Perhaps the most frequently anthologized of Nissim Ezekiel’s vast oeuvre of poetic works in English, “Night of the Scorpion” is also most evocative of the cultural traditions of India, the country of his birth. The poem presents a scary scenario… Read More ›
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Analysis of Les Murray’s New Hieroglyphics
New Hieroglyphics is representative of Les Murray’s later creative works. In the preface to The Paperbark Tree (1992), in which this poem first appears, Murray writes: “Poetry is the principle that controls reality.” The pronouncement is significant in suggesting the… Read More ›
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The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda loved the rural, claiming that his poetry “gathers up earth and rain and fruit.” Yet he also loved the energy of cities, the music of busy marketplaces. He was loyal to his people of Chile even as their… Read More ›
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Negritude Movement
Emerging in France in the 1930s and 1940s, the Negritude Movement comprised French-speaking Caribbean and African writers who sought to challenge European dominance and create Black consciousness. Its principal founders include Aimé Césaire of Martinique, who coined the term négritude… Read More ›
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Analysis of Boris Pasternak’s My Sister, Life
Pasternak said that the 50 poems that My Sister, Life comprises should be read and understood as a whole. The book describes a time both in the life of the poetic speaker and in the life of his country. The… Read More ›
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Analysis of Myres, Alexandria, A.D. 340 Constantine P. Cavafy
Myres, Alexandria, A.D. 340 is one of Constantine Cavafy’s longest and most dramatic poems, centered around the elusive character of Myres, whose appropriation by different systems of signification—the pagan-cultivated, homosexual hedonism of Alexandria and the emerging, puritanical austerity of Christianity—is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Lorna Goodison’s My Last Poem
This is the first of Lorna Goodison’s poems on her relation with poetry, and it is also the first of her second collection, I Am Becoming My Mother (London: New Beacon Books, 1986). The contradiction between the poem’s title and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s Mourning on the Washing-Line in January
This poem from his best-known collection, written shortly before his death in 1975, depicts “a / freshly washed pair of / black tights” hanging on a wire “between two / bare trees.” The poem exemplifies many of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann’s… Read More ›
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Modernism and Poetry
Modernism, poetry and the term modernism, with or without capitalization, has inspired a vast literature of definition, commentary, and contentious discussion. Nuanced, scholarly distinctions dividing proto- or early modernism from high modernism and from spin-offs like Anglo-American modernism fill library… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ivan Lalić’s Mnemosyne: An Ode to Memory
The consequence of history—erasure—is a common theme in Ivan Lalić’s oeuvre. But instead of wallowing in what is lost, he focuses on the remains, which most often take the form of memory. As such, it is fitting that of all… Read More ›
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