Ashley Blocker
Dr. Jeffrey Newberry
English Composition II
September 28, 2015 A Reader’s Guide to Edna ST. Vincent Millay’s “Love is Not All”
Title and Author I’ve chosen to research Edna ST. Vincent Millay, and analyze her poem “Love is Not All”. Edna ST. Vincent Millay was born o February 22, 1892 and was the eldest of three daughters. Millay’s parents were Henry and Cora Millay; Millay was named after ST. Vincent’s Hospital. At the age of eight, Millay parents divorced and her father never paid the five dollars a week for child support. Millay first fell in love with poetry after flipping through the pages of her mother’s volume of William Shakespeare’s plays. Millay published her first poem in 1906. In 1911, she began “Renascence”,
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According to “On July 18, 1923 she entered into an open marriage with a debonair Dutchman, Eugen Jan Boissevain”. They did not have any children, so they toured Asia together and came back to Austerlitz, New York to live the rest of their lives. A few years later, Eugen died; which was a bit too much for Millay, so she died one year later of heart failure.
Summary of the Work “Love is Not All”, is about how the word love is used. It speaks on what love is not. Edna has been hurt so many times throughout her lifetime, and no matter what she try to do, she couldn’t find a physical thing to replace love with. Love has to come from the heart and not from material things. Love cannot heal nor can it shelter a person. Line 12 says, “I might be driven to sell your love for peace”; which is more important love or your peace of mind?
Form
“Love is Not All” is a rhymed and fixed form. As reading this poem you may think it has a stanza, because you can break it up into a stanza of four lines. When taking a closer look, the poem doesn’t have spaces between the lines or groups of lines. “Love is Not All” is a rhymed poem as well, because every other line rhymes. Take a look at the first four lines in her
Edna developed a yearning for the pursuit of passion and sensuality, two major qualities that were absent in her marriage and home. She became enchanted with the idea of passionate love. This is shown by her relationship with Robert and with Alcée. These relationships resulted in a sexual awakening in Edna’s life. Mademoiselle Reisz 's piano performances brought an emotional awakening in Edna and fed her need for some drama in her life.
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Can love even be measured? It is such an intense feeling that can entirely transform the way that people view the world. It can be experienced more intensely for some compared to others.
“Nikki-Rosa” Poem Analysis In the poem “Nikki- Rosa,” Nikki Giovanni writes with diction and imagery to prove that’s she had a happy childhood in spite of her family’s hardships. Giovanni creates a poem, that although short in words, provides a lasting effect on the reader. Giovanni’s creative use of language and descriptive words, the distinction of black culture from white culture, and memories of average times that made her childhood unique and happy made this poem distinct and exceptional. Giovanni frequently references to her happy childhood in her poem using words and phrases that create an image in your mind showing you that her childhood was in fact a happy one.
Love is life and if you miss love, you miss life. The Petrarchan sonnet “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay is a perfect example of a woman who has missed out on love. She has spent years with different men in her bed. She has been left heart broken and lonely. She will spend last years of her life cold and alone.
Agnes Martin was born in 1912 in Canada, the same year as Jackson Pollock (“Agnes Martin”). She died of pneumonia in 2004 at the age of 92 (Laing). She grew up on the open plains of Saskatchewan in Vancouver, Canada (“Agnes Martin”). She claimed to have been able to remember her birth saying she was happy until her mother held her. In an interview with Jill Johnston in 2002, Martin said her mother emotionally abused her saying that her mother “liked seeing people hurt”.
How to Live According to Irving Singer Throughout Irving Singer acclaimed trilogy, The Nature of Love, the viewer can observe how he unveils rich insight into fundamental aspects of human relationships through literature, the complexities of our being, and the history of ideas. In his sequel, The Pursuit of Love, Singer approaches love from a distinct standpoint; he reveals his collection of extended essays where he presents psychological and philosophical theories of his own. The audience can examine how he displays love as he systematically maps the facets of religion, sexual desire, love from a parent, family member, child or friend. Irving explores the distinction between wanting to be loved and wanting to love another, which ultimately originates from the moment an individual is born.
Do we really love what we do? In the article “In the Name of Love,” Miya Tokumitsu covers the issue that doing what you love (DWYL) gives false hope to the working class. Tokumitsu reviews how those who are given jobs ultimately cannot truly love what they do because of the employers who make jobs possible. These same employers keep their employees overlooked.
The author uses a list of her ordinary life events and moments to express that hatred feels are more about love during mundane events. The ironic tone of Julie Sheehan’s “Hate Poem” reveals that love and hate are closely related. The theme of this poem is, “The relationship between hate and love.” Through out the poem, readers may wonder what is the object or who is the person that author hates so much.
The essence of great poetry lies with the author’s ability to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Most poets use universal themes to connect their audience through emotion and experience, making the written theme relatable. But it is only when combined with the use of carefully placed literary techniques that this connection is enhanced and the work transforms from simple words on paper to an art form. Gwen Harwood uses a number of her poems to connect us with the universal journey from childhood innocence to experience and adulthood. Harwood also weaves the idea of memory into her writing, as a way to trigger emotion through a connection to the past, a connection to feelings that transcend through time.
Romance comes in all different forms and sizes, and Calbert understands that along with these she apprends why people fall in and out of love. Falling in love has a sense of vulnerability that requires taking risks that people are “willing to fail, / why we will still let ourselves fall in love,” in order to sustain real love. Calbert ends her poem with listing the romances with her husband and vows, “knowing nothing other than [their] love” because that is all that matters to her
This poem does not consist of any particular rhyme schemes and is free verse. This poem is also a narrative that is told by a young girl
Helena, one of the main characters of this Shakespearean comedy, expresses her thoughts on love through a soliloquy. This soliloquy is written in verse and in “iambic pentameter” - five unaccented syllables, each followed by an accented one - as the rest of the play is, but with the characteristic that it rhymes. The soliloquy is composed of “heroic couplets” - rhyming verse in iambic pentameter- in opposition to “blank verse” - unrhymed iambic pentameter- which is the predominant type of verse in the play. Helena’s soliloquy, formed, as mentioned before, by heroic couplets, follows the rhyme scheme AABBCC as can be seen in this extract: “Things base and vile, folding no quantity, (A) Love can transpose to form and dignity: (A) Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; (B) And therefore is wing 'd Cupid painted blind: (B)
When the reader goes to find deeper meaning in her poems, it comes out to be a very personal and emotional piece of writing. Her poem “Sex Without Love” can connect the reader personally with society. A lot of people in the world are obsessed with the act of having sex. Olds shows the contrast between coldness and physical heat. (McGiveron).
The poem, in brief, is about the struggle the speaker faces as he prepares for war and attempts to explain to his lover how important honor is to him, surpassing even his feelings for her. It is written creatively, with a unique style. The poem is also personal and temporal, a trait of poems of this era. The poem is written in a conversational tone and is read as if by a male writer to a female lover. Lovelace weaves poetic techniques such as assonance, and metaphor together to create a good rhythm, and a theme based upon honor.
One of the most significant works of feminist literary criticism, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One`s Own”, explores both historical and contemporary literature written by women. Spending a day in the British Library, the narrator is disappointed that there are not enough books written by or even about women. Motivated by this lack of women’s literature and data about their lives, she decides to use her imagination and come up with her own characters and stories. After creating a tragic, but extraordinary gifted figure of Shakespeare’s sister and reflecting on the works of crucial 19th century women authors, the narrator moves on to the books by her contemporaries. So far, women were deprived of their own literary history, but now this heritage is starting to appear.