Stanza 1 ‘‘Fully Empowered’’ is a poem about how the poet writes, how he mines the material for his work. It is also a celebration of the entire range of his life as a human being. The poem must be understood metaphorically, since there is no literal meaning to many of the phrases he uses….
Tag: Poetry
Elena by Pat Mora: Analysis
Pat Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ is a work in which the narrator expresses her sense of isolation from her children. Elena pinpoints language as the source of this growing divide, faulting her Spanish as insufficient, and demonstrating the problems in understanding that the English language generates in her household. Her children speak English well; she does…
Elena by Pat Mora: Themes
Language and Languages Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ is concerned with the narrator’s native language of Spanish and the English language of her adoptive country, the United States. For Elena, these two languages are symbolic of the conflict between the familiarity of her native land and the challenges posed by relocating to a new country. The Spanish…
Elena by Pat Mora: Poem Summary
Lines 1–7 Mora’s poem ‘‘Elena’’ does not follow any patterns in terms of formal structure and is not divided into stanzas (a stanza is a unit of poetry, or a grouping of lines that divides the poem in the same way that a paragraph divides prose). There are, however, lines that are linked in terms…
Classic Ballroom Dances: Analysis
‘‘Classic Ballroom Dances’’ consists of four four-line unrhymed stanzas. The poem has no strict metrical form. It consists of a single incomplete sentence, using semicolons to link together a series of images that, together, form a gloss (an interlinear explanation, or a description inside the poem’s lines) on the poem’s title. The title itself is…
Margaret Atwood: Biography & Books
ATWOOD, Margaret (born 1939) Canadian writer of novels, short stories and poems Atwood is a poet as well as a novelist, and her gifts of precise observation and exact description illuminate all her work. She is fascinated by the balance of power between person and person, and by the way our apparently coherent actions and…
Kingsley Amis: Biography & Books
AMIS, Kingsley (1922–95) British writer of novels, poems and non-fiction In the 1950s, when Amis’s writing career began, British writers of all kinds – the ‘angry young men’ – had begun to rant in plays, films and novels about the unfairness, snobbishness and priggishness of life. Whingeing became an artistic form – and Amis’s novels…
Surrealism in Charles Simic’s Classic Ballroom Dances
The word surreal has entered the everyday vocabulary of English and is often used to mean ‘‘odd,’’ ‘‘unusual,’’ or ‘‘unexpected.’’ Originally, however, it was derived to denote an artistic movement called surrealism. The word joins realism to the prefix ‘‘sur-,’’ which generally means something like ‘‘over’’ or ‘‘above’’; thus, the word surmount means ‘‘to overcome.’’…
Grammar & Style in Charles Simic’s Classic Ballroom Dances
Normally, readers do not think about traditional grammar when they read poetry. Poetry routinely bends the rules of traditional grammar to create new and interesting verbal effects. Such is the case with Simic’s ‘‘Classic Ballroom Dances.’’ The poem, consisting of four four-line stanzas, comprises a single sentence, but the sentence is incomplete, for it lacks…
Major Themes in Classic Ballroom Dances by Charles Simic
Old Age ‘‘Classic Ballroom Dances’’ is a poem that does not lend itself readily to thematic analysis. In the first place, the poem consists of just a single sentence, and the sentence is not even grammatically complete. Thus, it never really makes a statement. Rather, the poem consists of a series of images. Nevertheless, it…