Wharton died at her villa near Paris in 1937 (Wharton’s authors note). Edith workings novel titled Ethan Frome has an engaging story line due to the literary devices of imagery, symbolism and atmosphere. To begin with, Edith Wharton’s (1911) novel titled Ethan Frome has an engaging story line due to the literary device of imagery. According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary imagery is defined as, “the use of vivid or figurative language to represent objects, actions or ideas.” In other words, imagery is when the author uses words to create a picture while reading. The first example of imagery is, when they describe the farm houses, “beyond the archard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the Landscape lonelier”(Wharton 17).
The short story collection ‘Viajeros Perdidos’ comprises twelve works by pre-eminent Spanish writers which explore in different ways the theme of travel and associated ideas of loss and alienation. ‘Lost travellers’, as the title literally translates, people these stories, and one writer who takes a very unique approach to the subject is Paloma Díaz-Mas. In her story, ‘La infanta Ofelia’, she successfully blends the traditions of Spanish Moorish ballads with the stories of Shakespeare in an exploration of the psychological, rather than physical, escape and alienation of its protagonist, symbolically named Ofelia. With its brevity lending the language a poetic feel, the story is deliberately resonant of the ballads which inspired it, and as a piece of writing it has the humorous, ironical insight of an epigram, given its witty ending. It is an adventurous piece, using intertextualisation to recreate a traditional literary ambience and in this way to effect parody and make a comment about romanticism and love.
Compare the ways controlling characters are used in Les Grands Seigneurs and My Last Duchess Dorothy Molloy and Robert Browning, the poets of Les Grands Seigneurs and My Last Duchess respectively, both create a significant and controlling character in their poems; using similar techniques and themes to illustrate the power and dominance to portray a specific message. Firstly, both Malloy and Browning frequently embed the personal pronoun ‘my’ into their controlling characters narrative. For example, the controlling character in Les Grands Seigneurs quotes ‘men were my buttresses’ in the opening line, whilst similarly, in the opening line of My Last Duchess, ‘that’s my last duchess painted on the wall’. This use of ‘my’ enables both characters to develop a sense of possession over their loved ones to the readers immediately; thus allowing their retelling of love to their audiences to be easier. This sense of control is only further strengthened by another technique used by both poets, the regular inclusion of caesuras.
The poetic techniques employed by Harwood effectively communicate distinctive aspects of her themes while allowing them to remain universal. Harwood captures ubiquitous tensions through her use of contrasting imagery and makes them familiar with vivid detail and a dramatic use of dialogue. It is Harwood’s unique ability to combine the philosophical and the emotive which allows for the continuity of her poetry. In “Triste, Triste”, Harwood explores the tensions between the creative spirit and the limitations of the earthly. The concept of the artists’ imagination as a separate entity, able to transcend the physical is a rather Romantic one.
“Pretty” Commentary ‘Pretty’ by Katie Makkai is a poem written in first person, targeted mainly at female adults, that leaves a meaningful message with great impact. It is a poem about Makkai’s opinion on women that are obsessed with appearance, and about her belief that they should not care so much about being ‘pretty’ and instead on the more meaningful things in life. A lasting impression is left, and this was done by the literary devices Makkai used in her writing; repetition, foreshadowing, imagery, personification, figurative language, and pun, in addition to the diction and other techniques she utilized. The use of these devices consequently evokes sensorial, emotional and intellectual reactions from the readers, giving the text a deeper meaning. A point that stands out in the poem ‘Pretty’ is the connection Makkai made with the famous song by Doris Day called Que Sera Sera.
Both poets have a woman who is their muse for writing the sonnets. Their love for the woman is the driving force for writing the poetry. The poets, Edmund Spencer and Sir Phillip Sidney, bestow their poems in different ways. Spencer’s sonnet 65 from Amoretti and Sidney’s sonnet 107 from Astrophil and Stella use different sound devices. Edmond Spenser uses alliteration in sonnet 65 from Amoretti.
Emily Dickenson is notorious for her exceedingly extraordinary style of poetry. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she did not concentrate on conventional punctuation or word meanings, but rather focused on the school of thought known as deconstructionism. It is the natural progression from structuralism, where the writer takes a piece out of all historical, social, and political contexts in order to further examine the true meaning of a piece. Deconstruction is the paring down of the written word to its simplest form, consisting of just lines on the page and leaving the meaning open to the reader’s interpretation. This ideology of writing is an attempt to establish a secure or ultimate meaning of a text.
Sharon Olds’ Poetry Explained Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco and received education from Stanford and Columbia University. She married a man in the late 1960s and is the mother of a son and daughter. That marriage eventually ended and the painful breakup has influenced her poetry heavily. Olds writes continuously, and only after an extensive amount of time has passed she feels the need to put together poems that comprise a book. She is one of a few poets in the United States whose books of poetry sell in large quantities.
Reason and enlightenment played a dominant role during the period of the age of reason. Satirical and skeptical were the mode of their writing style. Emotions, feelings, instinct and idealism are key for the writer those emerged during the Romantic and Gothic period in American literature. Imagination and autobiographical elements dominate in the works whereas supernatural elements are blended in the works of the Dark Romantics. Autonomy and individualism are given preference by the transcendentalists.
Changed in a way that makes it modern; makes it worth reading. But this revolution of poetry has already begun. Please suppress your surprise. Lisa Ann Sandell author of Song Of The Sparrow wrote her book completely in poetic/lyrical form. One could say that her novel is an epic poem.