Preview

Poetry Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1291 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Poetry Essay
Chantal Froystein Froystein 1
H English 102
Prof. Wyman
March 4, 2013
Poetry Essay
“Why I am not a painter” by Frank O’Hara and “Dedication” by Czeslaw Milosz could not be any more different on the surface, but they have several similarities especially when analyzed in the context of Emily Dickinson’s “Untitled”. In her poem, E.D. describes what a poet means to her—that they take ordinary situations and make them beautiful and when they do, we think how obvious it seems and then “We wonder it was not ourselves/ arrested it—before—.“ This is the equivalent of wondering, “Why didn’t I think of that??” She feels that a world without poetry would rob the rest of us from seeing the beauty of another’s life experience and that the poet himself is so wealthy in intelligence that he has no concept money or intellectual property. This becomes clear by, “Of portion—so unconscious--/The robbing – could not harm--/ Himself to Him a Fortune—“ (4)
Looking beneath the surface of each poem, we learn about a friend of O’Hara’s whom he references in the poem, Mike Goldberg, the abstract painter. I learned that O’Hara was an American who had served in WW2 as a sonarman on a destroyer—safely out of direct combat. After the Navy, he went on to Harvard and eventually became the curator for the Museum of Modern Art, where he could hobnob with the likes of Goldberg and Pollack in the height of the “abstract” craze. (David Lehman) Milozs’s story was a bit different. As a young man in Poland, he was drafted in to the Tsar’s Army where he was a combat engineer on the front lines in WW1. After the war, he earned a degree as Master of

Froystein2
Law and spent WW2 in Warsaw working for underground media. (Poets.org) A brief history is given because the highlights of the men’s lives’ presented here tie so deeply into the poems in question.
Emily Dickinson begins her poem with, “This was a poet”. All three poets use their first line to describe who they are and/or



Cited: Butterick, George F. "Frank O 'Hara." : The Poetry Foundation. Poetry Magazine, 2013. Web. 04 Mar. 2013. "Czeslaw Milosz." - Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 04 Mar. 2013. Lehman, David. "On "Why I Am Not a Painter"" On "Why I Am Not a Painter" Modern American Poetry, 2000. Web. 04 Mar. 2013.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Eng 102 Poetry Essay Example

    • 4292 Words
    • 18 Pages

    Reflections Within is a non-traditional stanzaic poem made up of five stanzas containing thirty-four lines that do not form a specific metrical pattern. Rather it is supported by its thematic structure. Each of the five stanzas vary in the amount of lines that each contain. The first stanza is a sestet containing six lines. The same can be observed of the second stanza. The third stanza contains eight lines or an octave. Stanzas four and five are oddly in that their number of lines which are five and nine.…

    • 4292 Words
    • 18 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Engl. 102 Poetry Essay

    • 1007 Words
    • 4 Pages

    1. Does the horse think, or is the writer using this to postpone his thoughts…

    • 1007 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Poetry Essay Prompt

    • 2536 Words
    • 11 Pages

    Prompt: Write an essay in which you discuss how the poem's diction (choice of words) reveals his attitude toward the two ways of living mentioned in the poem.…

    • 2536 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Poetry essay

    • 589 Words
    • 3 Pages

    How does Owen Sheers use language, form and structure to explore ideas about separation and division in ‘Winter Swans’?…

    • 589 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Comp 111 poetry essay

    • 1001 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In Emily Dickinson's poem "I Felt a Funeral in My Brain", Dickinson describes what seems to be a funeral in her mind. When one thinks of a funeral, they usually think of a ceremony for a person who has died. This funeral that Dickinson is experiencing in her brain, is actually a funeral for the death of her mind. Emily Dickinson describes events that usually take place at a funeral but the ideas she pitches to the reader doesn't exactly exemplify your ideal funeral. She tells the reader how there are mourners, a service, lifting of a box implying it is a coffin and nobody is being burried. In Emily Dickenson's poem, the reader can elaborate upon elements of poetry such as imagery, symbolism, diction, and metaphor that create a better sense of understanding.…

    • 1001 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    First Poem for You Essay

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Tattoos are permanent symbols that last forever, while relationships can’t be guaranteed permanent now a days. Kim Addonizio chooses tattoos as a symbol in this poem “First poem for you.” Water and lightning is what makes the poem most symbolistic. “Lines of lightning pulsing just above your nipple can find as if by instinct the blue swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent twists facing a dragon.” Though symbols can have more than one meaning to them the poem helps to point of the specific meaning of these symbols.…

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The great Emily Dickinson is known for her inquisitive and powerful poems, but what made her poems so notable? Emily lived a simple life, mostly secluded, so why would some simple poems change how people thought about such difficult subjects? The answers are in her style of writing. Her seclusion allowed her to “meditate on life and death” and write about such controversial themes and topics that are still being discussed today (Allen 546). Her ability to highlight important words or phrases or cause a short pause or accentuate a certain phrase cause people reading her work to entirely stop and think about what they had just read. Emily Dickinson’s style, involving odd punctuation, unusual capitalization, and meticulous figurative language,…

    • 1463 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    The language present in Emily Dickinson’s poetry is at times unclear, sometimes ungrammatical and can be found to be disjunctive. Dickinson wrote in distinct brevity, irregular grammar, peculiar punctuation and hand picked diction. Her poems were written in a circular manner, where she took the reader to one place and them swept them back to the beginning always relating one metaphor to the next. Dickinson was an intimate person throughout her life, and her poems reflect that lifestyle. Like her poems, she was never quite figured out. Dickinson wrote not for the audience to understand but for her own self expression by writing down the words as they came to her, with little regard to the conventional syntax or diction. In this poem Dickinson coveys a metaphorical description of hope through simple language to explain a complex idea present in everyone’s life.…

    • 1320 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poet 's Grammar. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987. N. Pag. Print.…

    • 1044 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Poetry essay

    • 1113 Words
    • 5 Pages

    How does the poet vividly convey ideas concerning the influence that nature has upon man?…

    • 1113 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Poem Essay

    • 2199 Words
    • 9 Pages

    A Word from the Fat Lady Gabrielle Calvocoressi It isn't how we look up close so much as in dreams. Our giant is not so tall, our lizard boy merely flaunts crusty skin- not his fault they keep him in a crate and bathe him maybe once a week. When folks scream or clutch their hair and poke at us and glare and speak of how we slithered up from Hell, it is themselves they see: the preacher with the farmer's girls (his bulging eyes, their chicken legs) or the mother lurching towards the sink, a baby quivering in her gnarled hands. Horror is the company you keep when shades are drawn. Evil does not reside in cages.…

    • 2199 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Poetry Analysis

    • 912 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In the poem “An Echo Sonnet”, author Robert Pack writes of a conversation between a person’s voice and its echo. With the use of numerous literary techniques, Pack is able to enhance the meaning of the poem: that we must depend on ourselves for answers because other opinions are just echoes of our own ideas.…

    • 912 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Emily Dickinson might be called an artisan, since most of her poems have fewer than thirty lines, yet she deals with the most deep topics in poetry: death, love, and humanity’s relations to God and nature. Her poetry not only impresses by its on going freshness but also the animation. Her use of language and approachness of her subjects in unique ways, might attribute to why “Hope is the thing with feathers” is one of her most famous works.…

    • 1259 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Poetry Essay

    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” by William Carlos Williams is a lovely poem that goes straight to the heart of anyone that has lost a loved one. Death is a physical energy that can drain and change an individual’s entire outlook on life as well as any joy that has been experienced. Some people are so affected that they see no relief in sight and want nothing more than that relief. What is amazingly captured by the author of this poem is the woman’s separation from her husband. She feels devastated and not sure she can go on without him. She lament’s sorrowfully even as her surroundings are coming to life. The poet uses the element of alliteration. This is evident in the words flames, flamed and fire; and later in the poem feel, fall and flowers. Assonance is also very visible as is reflected later in the poem with words like they, today and away. Symbolism and pathos add to the poem making it a very poignant story.…

    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cited: "Frank O 'Hara." - Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013.…

    • 808 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays