Carol Ann Duffy Poem For Our Times Summary

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Commentry on Poet for our times Poem For Our Times by Carol Ann Duffy is a poem about a tabloid journalist that writes headlines and is in the pub exchanging his story with another person. The speaker seems to be an arrogant and self-centered. One theme of the poem is that poetry is about ordinary common things, and the poem shows that scandals are ordinary thus poetry being about the scandals. When looking at the form of the poem it becomes obvious that the author has a recurring form. At first there are four lines of the narrative, and that the last two lines are two headlines highlighting the scandals. The only exception is the last stanza. In the last stanza there are two narrative lines, then two headlines and then two narrative lines once again. The poet chose this form to add focus on the headlines and make them noteworthy.…show more content…
For example in the poem, “It’s just a knack one’s born with..”. This quote shows that the speaker is saying that making headlines is a talent you’re born with rather than a skill you can learn, hence being arrogant of his skills. Later in the poem in stanza three the speaker says, “I like to think I’m a sort of poet for our times.” Thus showing that the speaker thinks his headlines are a form of poetry and relates back to the title. Duffy could have chosen the title Poet For Our Times because it shows the arrogance of the speaker and the fact that the headlines are a form of poetry. “And, yes, I have a dream…that kids will know my headlines off by heart.”, this line represents the arrogance once again. It is also an allusion to the famous speech of Martin Luther King Jr. which starts with ‘I have a dream.’ Carol Ann Duffy uses this allusion to satirize the speaker and his arrogance but also the idea that the context of the headlines seem so important yet at trivial compared to why Martin Luther King Jr. made the
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