In order to discover the wonders of the ocean, one must dive deep into the vast, blue waters of the sea. Poet Dreamer urges readers to dive into these water. By combining metaphor, imagery, and symbolism, the poet portrays that like the wondrous ocean, everyone has a secret world inside them. Dreame...

The readings "Letter to a Young Poet" by Ranier Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse's "Siddhartha," do much to advance their readers' understanding of the question "What is the Good Life?" Taken together, they suggest a certain path to attaining the Good Life that is centered around th...

Maya Angelou's poem "Phenomenal Woman" is a response to the abusive events experienced by the writer, which is displayed through the image and tone of the poem. Instead of feeling ashamed and blaming herself, she used the experience as motivation to gain hope. Her poem illustrates the...

I found it difficult to understand most of Walt Whitman's poems as I do to most poems in general. So I narrowed them down to two of the poems that I liked. In the first poem I read, "Song of Myself", Whitman jumps from topic to topic in almost every other line. The poem gave me a problem unde...

"Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town" is a poem written by E.E. Cummings that uses a play with words to show the live of the everyday person in a town. Cummings uses the word anyone to describe a man and the word no one to describe a woman. While writing about the lives of these people in t...

'Hotel Room, Twelfth Floor' is a very thought provoking poem that the poet, Norman Macaig successfully identifies what he believes is wrong with human nature. In this poem the poet describes how he views one of the largest cities in the world, New York. He believes that mans evolution in ...

Racism is a major issue in America. Racism is still present today; even those would not consider himself or herself racist have used some sort of racist remark or gesture. Racism does not only affect a person with more or less melanin, but can also affect people with different religious backgrounds ...

Fear is an incredible emotion in that it has both emotional as well as physiological effects on the human body. In specific instances of extreme fear, the mind is able to function in a way that is detached and connected to the event simultaneously. In "Feared Drowned," Sharon Olds presents, in six b...

?With the start of the modernization process and the capitalist era, people become alienated and question their existence. Many things which we can describe as "old school" changed with the advance of industrialization and its derivations: the modernization and capitalism. As they advance, the react...

At the young age of ten William Blake entered a drawing school and studied at the school of the Royal Academy of Arts. When Blake was fourteen he then decided to try his hand at poetry. The contemporary world and the war that was going on led him to write about the religious, moral, and political op...

Whereas someone once claimed, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," famous twentieth century poet, Robert Frost, proved it. Regardless of whether it was "The Road Not Taken," "Home Burial," or "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," it is clear that Robert F...

As the subtitle suggests, Herman Melville honors the dead in this "Requiem", both blue and gray, who fought at the Battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Melville writes a modernized poem for the time period and, both in tone and sentiment, Melville gives the fata...

Throughout the history of man, many have pondered that their God seems to work in mysterious ways. Many believe that God has a larger plan than what any mortal can comprehend. This is evident in his creation of beings that are wholesome and virtuous and his creation of dark and evil beings as well...

Richard Wilbur's poem "A Barred Owl" consists of 2 stanzas each made up of 6 lines of about the same length and one sentence each. Each stanza consists of a rhyming pattern of AABBCC. In the first line the "B" in "boom" recalls the "B" in "brought&q...

The writing styles of Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes are very similar, evident in Angelou's poem, "Africa" and Hughes's poem, "Negro". Even from the titles, you can see that these poems will be about African Americans, unsurprising considering the authors. Both are a...

In his poem "Grass", Carl Sandburg emphasizes the need to remember the people who have died in war for the cause of freedom and chastises those who go about their daily lives taking their freedom for granted. The straightforward statements in the poem portray the author's disappointment of those who...

Jimmy Santaiago Baca's life was no walk in the park to say the least. As a child, he was born in Santa Fe of Chicano and Apache descent. At age thirteen, his parents had already abandoned him which resulted in his escape from the orphanage where his grandmother had placed him and was convicted of dr...

Rhyming words, rhythmic actions, alliterative tone, and music in the mind's eye are all components of some descriptions of beautiful poetry. When the reader can imagine the setting or the scenario being described by the poet then the poet has made his or her mark by employing those compon...

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor are two of the most recognizable early American poets. In addition to this contemporary similarity they are also both American Puritans, with significant opinions and beliefs that reflected the ideal of the puritan, with respect to God in history, the importance of ...

These two poems, "Children's Camp" by Dorothy Livesay and "Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies" by Edna St. Vincent Millay show two very different views of childhood, or adulthood. "Children's Camp" talks about the joys of childhood that are lost as children grow up. Millay's poem does the ...

Following the Second World War, the art of literature has been one of the most important environments for the expression of the human nature and human thought. It stood out as a framework for personal analysis and contemplation despite the fact that there were numerous political elements which in th...

Billy Collins' "The Lanyard" is a perfect Mother's Day poem. The narrator reflects on a lanyard , a simple woven bracelet, he made for his mother one year while away at summer camp. His memory was triggered by a simple daily event: he stumbled upon the word "lanyard" while leafing through a dictiona...

Both Aretha Franklin's song "Respect" and Langston Hughes' poem "A Dream Deferred" are eloquent statements for the need for people, specifically people of African-American origins, to receive respect from others for their accomplishments, their contribution to society ...

In 1846, American author and poet Edgar A. Poe wrote in "The Philosophy of Composition" that the most melancholy of all topics, "according to the universal understanding of mankind" which serves as the foundation for poetry is death. Poe then asks himself, "And when is this...

Love is, not surprisingly, one of the most frequent themes in all literary creations and especially in poetry. As such, throughout the centuries, love has been represented in many different ways in poetry, according to the specific aspect that the poets were trying to communicate. The two chosen poe...