Poetry for Students

202 Poetry for Students of the work and whether Blake’s genius was al- loyed with madness that there was disagreement. The oppos ...

Volume 24 203 since Blake’s time that its meaning has degener- ated and the word is commonly used to represent the capacity for ...

204 Poetry for Students Two principles lie at the root of Blake’s imag- inative intelligence, are the basis for his belief sys- ...

Volume 24 205 poem, Blake has inverted the values that governed the morality of his time. The same moral inversion is at the roo ...

206 Poetry for Students A Poison Tree ...

Volume 24 207 A Poison Tree ...

208 Poetry for Students A Poison Tree ...

Volume 24 209 A Poison Tree ...

210 Poetry for Students A Poison Tree ...

Volume 24 211 Source:John Brenkman, “The Concrete Utopia of Poetry: Blake’s ‘A Poison Tree’,” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Crit- ...

212 Poetry for Students Further Reading Bentley, G. E., Jr., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biogra- phy of William Blake, Yale Un ...

Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End “Portrait of a Couple at Century’s End” contrasts the private pain of contemporary life to ...

214 Poetry for Students Author Biography Santos was born on September 9, 1948, in Greenville, South Carolina. His father was a p ...

Volume 24 215 Poem Summary Lines 1–5 The first stanza of “Portrait of a Couple at Cen- tury’s End” establishes a commuter traffi ...

216 Poetry for Students sharing, and the work they do. Presenting the top- ics of dinner conversation in a list such as this tri ...

Volume 24 217 The poem counts on the fact that readers will empathize with the couple described. Unlike sym- pathy, which entail ...

218 Poetry for Students doomed to stay dissatisfied forever. The images that Santos uses to imply this state of suspended animat ...

Volume 24 219 when old troubles can be left behind and a better life can begin. The interest in the change of the cal- endar is ...

220 Poetry for Students extinction. His poems avoid stating the obvious and strip tragedies bare of their most hideous details.” ...

Volume 24 221 made of “clapboards,” a word seldom used in the early twenty-first century but familiar to earlier gen- erations. ...