Anne Sexton Anne Sexton became one of the best known of the often-controversial Confessional poets. Anne Sexton wrote openly about menstruation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when these topics were forbidden in poetry. There's possibly no other American in our time that ha...

Mafika Gwala's 'We lie under Tall Gum-Trees' explores a new level of sexual intercourse. In this essay Gwala's ironic ideas of love, union, emotional wars and sexual activities will become apparent throughout his poem by exploring his past and splashing into the deep end of his ...

The play \"Cabaret\" provides an animated a uniquely exciting dramatization of Berlin, Germany just before the Second World War. The story of many Germans living in an uncertain world is shown through just a few characters. Life is a cabaret, or so the famed song goes. After watching \"Cabaret,\" y...

Emily DickinsonEmily Dickinson is known as one of the greatest poets of all time, writing 1,775 brief poems in her lifetime! She is famous for her vast sense of style and theme. Author David Porter said, "by mapping the themes in a poet's oeuvre we seek in a standard way to classify and thereby br...

The Nature of Lucy William Wordsworth is a revered romantic poet who believed that the meaning of romanticism is best illustrated when using everyday life events and familiar speech. Wordsworth's explicit love of nature and mastery of the language allowed him to bring such emotion and powe...

The so-called Love Song The ironic character of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," an early poem by T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) in the form of a dramatic monologue, is introduced in its title. Eliot is talking, through his speaker, about the absence of love, and the poem, so far from being a "song...

John Donne's importance as a poet is founded upon his contribution to what is known as 'metaphysical' poetry. Metaphysical poetry was originally a style of poetry to describe the poet John Donne's work, but then it later extended school of 17th Century poets such as Andrew Marve...

Discovering Fire "After man has mastered the winds the waves and the tides, some day he will harness for God the energies of love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire" (Teilhard de Jardin...

The realistic setting of the time and place in the three first paragraphs enables the reader to identify with the protagonist of the story, the young boy. In the opening of the story, James Joyce carefully described the protagonist's neighborhood and surroundings with the use of real names like "No...

Storytelling is as old as time itself; many of the first societies were said to be uncivilized and the people savage because they had oral traditions instead of written histories. Tales of great heroes, of love, and of war can be filled with fact and fiction depending on who is telling the story. ...

The Color Purple: Subjugation of Women and Sexual AbuseSubjugation of women and sexual abuse in Alice Walker's The Color Purple are important issues because that was a major controversy in the rural south in the early 20th century. The main character Celie was abused, raped, and mistreated in so man...

Alice Walker's novel, The Color Purple, follows Celie down the winding road of her life. As a poor black girl living in the South, Celie endures and overcomes many hardships. As the novel opens, the readers learn that she has been raped repeatedly by her father, then later is forced into a loveles...

F. Scott FitzgeraldIntroduction to F. Scott FitzgeraldThis Side of ParadiseBook I Many critics have complained, with justice, that a great flaw in This Side of Paradise (aside from its loose, rambling structure) is the fact that the author seems uncertain as to his own attitude. He mocks the roma...

F. Scott FitzgeraldIntroduction to F. Scott FitzgeraldThis Side of ParadiseBook I Many critics have complained, with justice, that a great flaw in This Side of Paradise (aside from its loose, rambling structure) is the fact that the author seems uncertain as to his own attitude. He mocks the roma...

F. Scott FitzgeraldIntroduction to F. Scott FitzgeraldThis Side of ParadiseBook I Many critics have complained, with justice, that a great flaw in This Side of Paradise (aside from its loose, rambling structure) is the fact that the author seems uncertain as to his own attitude. He mocks the roma...

William Shakespeare's classic Romeo and Juliet is a story of two star-crossed lovers. Though Romeo and Juliet is a triumph of dramatic lyricism, its tragic ending usurps most other aspects of the play and abandons us to unhappy estimates of whether, and to what degree, its young lovers are res...

The United States of America is the most powerful, wealthy, and attractive country in the world. The varieties of class, individuality, religion, and race are a few of the enrichments within the "melting pot" of our society. The blend of these numerous diversities is the crucial ingredient to our ...