Pre-Morning (Predutro) is the title poem of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s first book of poetry published after his Collected Poems in 1991. The 11 quatrains that make up the poem are set in a liminal time, when the day is coming into… Read More ›
Black identity in poetry
Analysis of René Depestre’s Prelude
Prelude (Prélude) is the first poem in René Depestre’s best-known collection, A Rainbow for the Christian West (Un arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien, 1967). It is written in unrhymed free verse and divided into four parts, the last of which is… Read More ›
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 ›