Poetry for Students, Volume 31

The child’s confused speech mirrors the pre- dicament of one who, like Rilke’s dead children, is a stranger in the world inhabit ...

of course, an opportunity to observe the observer, to gain insight into the poetic consciousness caught in the act of transformi ...

Jarrell’s poetry is self-consciously modern, with all the up-to-date objects of the contemporary war- world—gun-turrets, flak, J ...

There is a less hysterical ‘‘realism’’ in the careful observation of these details than in the more violent war poems. Unfortuna ...

can create poetry. I would be the last to deny that learning, sensitivity, good taste, and understand- ing of the tradition may ...

The two marks by which we most readily recognize a poet, I presume, are first an ability to grasp and objectify a particular sub ...

Sources ‘‘The Air Force in Facts and Figures,’’ inAirforce- magazine.com, May 2008, http://www.airforce-magazine .com/MagazineAr ...

A Noiseless Patient Spider ‘‘A Noiseless Patient Spider,’’ by the nineteenth- century American poet Walt Whitman, was first publ ...

Whitman was three, the family moved to Brook- lyn, where his father speculated unsuccessfully in real estate. Whitman attended s ...

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. 5 And you O m ...

fisherman finally making a catch (although the poet does not use this image), his effort will be rewarded. However, there is no ...

also found in the section ‘‘Whispers of Heavenly Death’’), but it is particularly appropriate here, because the repetition echoe ...

earliest practitioners. As M. H. Abrams notes in A Glossary of Literary Terms, Whitman ‘‘startled the literary world... by using ...

other land than democratic America’’ after the triumph of the Union forces in the Civil War. Traditional Nature Poetry Whitman’s ...

In the United States, the tradition goes back at least far as the New England minister Edward Taylor (1642–1729), whose poem ‘‘U ...

poem as like a solitary writer trying to connect with his audience. Like Spider Woman, the poet sends filaments from the root of ...

return to the worm image (the brackets he placed around the word in his notebook suggest that he was not entirely happy with it) ...

the soul now seeks an unspecified connection with the vastness of its environment. This ver- sion of the poem was the first one ...

‘‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’’ is an expression of the pain that results when that connection is obscured, lost, or doubted, and ...

component of his political vision. At numerous crucial periods of his writing career, his poems strive to cultivate the individu ...