Essays on Poetry and Poets

... from the Trojan's side. We are regaled with story upon story of the Greeks, their heroes, and their exploits, while the Trojan's are conspicuously quiet, sans Hector of course. It could almost be assumed that throughout time most of the knowledge of the battle from the Trojan side had been lost. Considering the ability to affect feelings with similes, and the one-sided view of history, Homer could be using similes to guide the reader in the direction of his personal views, as happens with modern day political "spin". These views that Homer might be trying to get across might be trying to favor Troy. It could easily be imagined that throughout time, only gr ...

... got from the poem were, 1) the dilemma of making a choice, and the danger of not knowing where that decision will take you, and 2) a tale telling the reader to be different, and to take the road “less traveled”. “And sorry I could not travel both…” It is always hard to make important decisions because you are always going to wonder what might have happened if you had chosen the other path. The speaker has no way of knowing what awaits him at either of his destinations, but he still must choose between the two paths. The most common literary technique in “The Road Not Taken” is symbolism. The whole poem is very symbolic because the speaker reflects ...

... sent from relative to relative, all of whom thought of him only as a burden. It has been pointed out by biographers that Wordsworth's unhappy early life contrasts with the idealized portrait of childhood that he presents in his writings (Wordsworth, William DISCovering). Wordsworth went to college at St. John's College in Cambridge and later wrote that the highlight of those years was his walking tour of France and Switzerland taken with his friend, Robert Jones (Watson 1421). He graduated in 1791 when the French revolution was in its third year, but, even though he had showed no prior interest, he quickly supported the Revolution's goals. After Wordsworth was ...

... sounds like the scrunch of teeth through an apple releasing the sharp flow of juice (line 5). The next line curves with the lushness of “swell the ground,” but any excess is checked neatly by the astonishing “plump” appearing as a verb and wonderfully solid and nutty to touch (line 7). The last three lines in the first stanza move heavily and lazily to that most summary of the sounds; the distant buzzing of bees, “later flowers for the bees” (line 9). The low sibilants and thrice repeated the sound of “mm” of the last line bring hearing activity into play, along with the sight, taste and touch are mobilized by the stanza, so that all ...

... his poem `Endymion', which was published in the spring of the following year. Keats toured the north of England and Scotland in the summer of 1818, returning home to nurse his brother Tom, who was ill with tuberculosis. After Tom's death in December he moved into a friend's house in Hampstead, now known as Keats House. There he met and fell deeply in love with a young neighbour, Fanny Brawne. During the following year, despite ill health and financial problems, he wrote an astonishing amount of poetry, including `The Eve of St Agnes', `La Belle Dame sans Merci', `Ode to a Nightingale' and `To Autumn'. His second volume of poems appeared in July 1820; soon afterward ...

... nature of the poem, through Heaneys choice of unemotive words. This simplicity is seen throughout the poem, where the reader initially could perceive the poem to solely be about the life, and appearance of a 'bog woman'. However at a deeper level, Heaney looks at the very human society functions, both in ancient and present times. This us summed up at the end of the poem; "who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge" (Stanza 11) Heaney here, writes that he does not only feel empathy and sympathy towards the "little Adulteress", but is also able to detach himself from his emotions and look at her death ...

... and auditory images to mainly help the romantic, fantasy-like place. “The sea is calm, the tide is full” and “Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,” is an example of images that appeal to the visual sense. While “ Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land” and “With tremulous cadence slow, and bring...” uses an auditory sense. “Come to the window, sweet is the night air,” can apply to both senses. Sweet can mean angelic or precious to qualify to be an visual image, or it can mean almost like a melodious tune. Illusions are used in this poem as deception for the girl that the man is trying to hold a non-romantic conversation ...

... and is believed to have been composed between 700 and 750. "No one knows who composed Beowulf , or why. A single manuscript (Cotton Vitellius A XV) managed to survive Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, and the destruction of their great libraries; since his name is written on one of the folios, Lawrence Nowell, the sixteenth-century scholar, may have been responsible for Beowulf's preservation."(Raffel ix) An interesting fact that is unique about the poem is that "it is the sole survivor of what may have been a thriving epic tradition, and it is great poetry."(Raffel ix) The poem was composed and performed orally. "Old English bards, or scops, mo ...

... - in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, it is the perfection of beauty as art - transfixed and transfigured forever in the Grecian Urn - and in the Ode to Autumn it is the exquisiteness of the season - idealised and immortalised as part of the natural cycle - which symbolise eternal and idealistic images of profound beauty. In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats uses the central symbol of a bird to exemplify the perfect beauty in nature. The nightingale sings to the poet's senses whose ardour for it's song makes the bird eternal and thus reminds him of how his own mortality separates him from this beauty. The poem begins: "My heart aches, and a drowsey numbness pains" ...

... of flesh, were ever-present disciplines in Emily's life (Sewall 22). Despite her stubborn denials to be labeled, she was very much of a “New Englander”. Cynthia Griffen Wolff, author of Emily Dickinson, points out that Emily “knew every line of the Bible intimately, quoted from it extensively, and referred to it many more times than she referred to any other work... yet in this regard she was not unusual by Amherst's standards” (72). The most prominent figure of religious virtues in her life was her father, Edward Dickinson. Reading the Bible to his children and speaking in town of religious ethics were daily events in his life. At home, he tried ...