Critical Analysis Of Jana Harris's 'Don T Cheapen Yourself'

'Larkin strips away the facades and exposes the empty reality of social ideals. ' To what extent do you agree with this statement?

Living life everyday in a monotonous mechanical fashion is considered a subpar style of life for many. In Small Frogs Killed on the Highway By James Wright, Wright conveys a message perfectly touching on the issue of taking chances. The speaker of the poem reflects on his past choices through describing frogs optimizing their opportunities by deciding to risk death and attempt to cross a road. Throughout the poem Wright uses objects riddled with either deeper meanings or dual meanings. Why are frogs latently compared to humans? What is the purpose of all the contrasting, descriptive imagery? What elements underlyingly stand for other items?

The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is a narrative poem which tells a story of a young man, wallowing in melancholy, as he grieves for the death of his lover named Lenore. With the death of a great love as its theme and key image, the poem was able to satisfy some key points from the two great literary critics, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which will be discussed in detail throughout this paper, respectively.

What would one expect from a father who kept his daughter locked in a cell for decades to Abu Ghraib? Tracy K Smith, in Life on Mars, shows herself as the poet of extraordinary ambition and rage. In No-Fly Zone, Smith has ambiguously talked about a girl (can be the poet herself) tracing a growth of African-American girl who must learn hard lessons of puberty and early adulthood and linking it to the history of America by depicting what it meant to be a black woman. With the use of elegy, figurative language, socio-political commentary, and metaphors in the third section of her collection, mainly in No-Fly Zone of Life on Mars, she talks about the ambiguity of what a girl has to fear in the society, her loneliness without parents, and why a girl has to save herself for her husband.

The vivid imagery contrasts considerably with the speaker’s identity, highlighting the discrepancy between her imagined and true personas. The speaker undergoes a symbolic transformation into a boy, but in order to do so, she must cast away her defining features as a woman. One way she does this is by repositioning

The poem "Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye speaks about how you experience kindness and what it really is. The main point in this poem is that in order to experience people's kindness you need to experience hurt, sorrow, and loneliness. The author says that when you loose everything and have no one or thing that when kindness comes along it lifts you up "and then goes with you everywhere/ like a shadow or a friend" (33-34). When portraying this message the author uses a sad but hopeful tone to send the message she wants to say. This tone helps portray the message because you can feel how sad someone is when they are lonely and they have nothing. Then when the author changes the tone at the end of the poem in the last stanza to hopeful tone the reader can feel the hope and happiness that a person feels when they are down and they are given kindness.

“Black Rook in Rainy Weather” is focused on her feelings and thoughts, her lack of inspiration – although it appears as if she is writing about the outside world. She uses her nearby surroundings as a metaphor for her feelings and ideas. Plath feels empty and longs for nature and her mundane surroundings to ‘speak’ to her, to provide her with inspiration for her poetry “A minor light may still lean incandescent out of kitchen table or chair as if a celestial burning took possession of the most obtuse objects now and then…” She is in a state of desperation, and describes her life as a “season of fatigue” with “brief respites from fear of total neutrality.” The poem is suffused with her fear of failing.

In the first stanza’s, the narrator’s voice and perspective is more collective and unreliable, as in “they told me”, but nonetheless the references to the “sea’s edge” and “sea-wet shell” remain constant. Later on the poem, this voice matures, as the “cadence of the trees” and the “quick of autumn grasses” symbolize the continuum of life and death, highlighting to the reader the inevitable cycle of time. The relationship that Harwood has between the landscape and her memories allows for her to delve deeper into her own life and access these thoughts, describing the singular moments of human activity and our cultural values that imbue themselves into landscapes. In the poem’s final stanza, the link back to the narrator lying “secure in her father’s arms” similar to the initial memory gives the poem a similar cyclical structure, as Harwood in her moment of death finds comfort in these memories of nature. The water motif reemerges in the poem’s final lines, as “peace of this day will shine/like light on the face of the waters.” as in her final moments the narrator recalls her earliest connection to the landscape. A key theme throughout the poem is the importance of embracing nature, emphasized by the metaphor of the “fine pumpkins grown on a trellis” which rise in towards the “fastness of light”, which symbolizes the narrators own growth, flourishing as a fruit of the earth. Through her metaphors and complex conflagration of shifting perspectives, Harwood illustrates the relationship that people can develop with landscapes, seeing both present and past in

obsessive nature that one poem can have on the mind. The poem, circulating, round and round in

Although Coleridge reflects on nature as being that “one Life within us and abroad “in most of his other poem, but coming In “Dejection: An Ode” we see more of the dialects between the imagination’s role in creating perception and nature guiding the soul. In the opening stanzas of “Dejection” the flipside to the romantic celebration of nature –the romantic emphasize on subjective experience, individual consciousness, and imagination. If our experience derives from ourselves, then nature can do nothing on its own. Beginning with the fifth stanza, Coleridge suggests that there is a power –personified joy that allows us to reconnect with nature and for it to renew us and that comes both from within and from without: “the spirit and the power, / Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower / A new Earth and new Heaven” (67–69). That reconnection with nature will renew the world for us. The speaker in the next stanzas reflects how he has lost this connection, as his “afflictions bow me down to the earth” (82) and his “viper thoughts” have stolen his “shaping spirit of Imagination” (86). Coleridge speaks of the wind’s inability to raise him out of his

The first type of metaphorical language Erin uses is metaphors. Comparing perfection to flaws. One example is “People are not poetry,” (line 4). With this metaphor, Erin is comparing two very different objects; people and poetry. In the poem she depicts poetry as being perfect and well put together which she later contrasts to people. People are described as being messy and scattered. Erin, with the use of metaphors, si able to convey that people are not perfect. Another example of her use of metaphors is the line,“Through a poem once complete is eternal, You have the freedom to change overtime,” (line 23 and 24). This metaphor reminds the reader that no matter how much someone tries, perfection is unrealistic and unnecessary. People should not strive to achieve perfection because the idea of perfection is what society has planted into our minds. Instead people should strive to be unique and the best version of themselves. This idea is also backed up by Erins use of personification. After demonstrating the frustrating aspects of being human, Erin offers some reassurance. “Your hair doesn't always sit neatly, the way a poem sits so neatly in lines,” (line 13 and 14). Now hair and poems don’t actually sit, but what she is trying to convey is that again, self confidence is not about fitting in, it should be about standing out. No one should strive to be perfect, rather, to be

This explication is on the poem “Africa” by Maya Angelou. In the poem, the speaker shows the suffering of Africa by personification, imagery, and wordplay to result that Africa is moving forward to regain herself to give us all the world has done to Africa. The speaker is a knowledgeable person who is passionate and knows well about Africa. The poem takes the setting of Africa and in the time period around the 1400s - 1500s. The poem is an ABAB pattern with three stanzas. The first stanza of the poem personifies Africa as a woman of her beauty. The second stanza shows the history of Africa crippled of her powers. The third stanza shows Africa is rising from the suffering of her past.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an emigrant American poet and critic who was a key figure of the early modernist movement. Pound promoted, and also sporadically helped to shape, the work of different poets and novelists such as William Butler Yeats, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, and T.S. Eliot. His influence on poetry began with his development of “Imagism”, a movement stressing clarity, carefulness and conciseness of language.

The poem that stood out the most while reading this assortment of Emily Dickinson poems, was her poem numbered 656/520. This poem used imagery in numerous ways throughout in order to show the audience the important themes and the overall meaning of this work of literature. The poem’s main theme was about a walk on the beach that the poet encountered in the early morning. Although the poem is about a beach it can also give the audience contextual clues into other aspects of life.

M.H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp: romantic theories and the critical traditions is one of the most influential books in the field of western criticism. It was published in the year of 1953. The title of the book refers to the two contradictory metaphors used to portray the artist – one comparing the artist to a mirror which reflects nature as it is or perfected whereas the other compares the artist to a lamp that illuminates the object under consideration. Professor Abrams in his book illustrates the transition of the perspective of the theorists on the artist from one to the other and the ramifications of the latter in aesthetics, poetics and practical criticism. The essay “Orientation of critical theories” is the first chapter of this book. It provides a condensed history of the evolution of critical theories and discriminates between them with the aid of a simple diagram.