After one collaboration, two volumes of poetry, and a memoir, Garrett Hongo is an established voice in Asian American literature. His postmodern style variously utilizes different techniques, voices, sources, and forms. Hongo is more concerned with exploring and voicing his personal experience and the collective experience of Japanese Americans than he is with adhering closely…
Tag: Analysis
Upon the Burning of Our House – Analysis
Bradstreet’s ‘‘Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666’’ swings like a pendulum between Bradstreet’s Puritan beliefs and her deep emotional turmoil regarding the loss of her home. While it is tempting to try to assess whether or not Bradstreet’s sorrow is successfully mitigated or addressed by her faith, such an exercise would not…
Two Eclipses by Shmuel Hanagid: Analysis
The version of ‘‘Two Eclipses’’ reproduced here is a modern English translation of a poem written by a Spaniard in Hebrew a millennium ago. Any translator of such a poem has to make a number of decisions and compromises in making it accessible to a modern reader while retaining essential qualities of the original. One…
Sympathy by Paul Lawrence Dunbar: Analysis
Dunbar was often called the Negro Poet Laureate at the beginning of the twentieth century, but by the 1950s he was seen as an embarrassment to many readers because his dialect poems called up plantation stereotypes of African Americans. In his day, white readers embraced his dialect poems (‘‘The Party,’’‘‘When Malindy Sings’’) as the authentic…
Shoulders by Noami Shihab Nye – Analysis
In addition to being a poet, Nye is a songwriter and singer. In her poem ‘‘Shoulders,’’ Nye employs several musical devices to develop the tone and message of her words. Upon a first read, Nye’s poem seems to be very simple—little more than a thought jotted down on paper. But even the simplest poems are…
On My First Son by Ben Jonson – Analysis
David Riggs, in his fine biography of the playwright and poet Ben Jonson, Ben Jonson: A Life (1989) writes, ‘‘By the time of [Jonson’s] death . . . he had become the most celebrated poet of his age, a man who outshone even Shakespeare and Donne in the eyes of his contemporaries.’’ Jonson’s popularity in…
The Old Stoic by Emily Bronte: Analysis
The main unanswered question about Bronte¨’s ‘‘The Old Stoic’’ is how it is to be understood in relationship to Gondal, the fantasy realm created by Emily and her sister Anne. The problem concerns all of her poetry, the bulk of which comes from two manuscript notebooks in which she made fair copies in 1844 of…
Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath – Analysis
A birth myth or birth tale is a story about the often miraculous birth and infancy of a hero or, in some cases, an entire race of people or a nation. In the case of a hero, the baby is deprived of his true parents and heritage and is cast by fate into a different…
The Lotus Flowers by Ellen Bryant Voigt – Analysis
Textually, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s ‘‘The Lotus Flowers’’ is a rich poem. Its diction (use of language) reveals its underlying themes, and its structure shapes its meaning. Although the poem is written in free verse, it is divided into two long stanzas of almost identical length (the first stanza is twenty-nine lines; the second is thirty)….
Jazz Fantasia – Analysis
Langston Hughes has been widely acclaimed as the first true jazz poet, and there is little argument among critics that this is true. Hughes, a black poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote poetry unrivaled in its proliferation and depiction of jazz in the early 1900s. Hughes came upon the heels of Sandburg, encouraged by the…