American Poet Research Articles

Lady Lazarus: An Insight into the Suicidality of Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was an American author and poet, perhaps best known for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Her poetical oeuvre was filled with challenging themes of suicidality, mental illness, and a budding feminism, particularly in the poems composed toward the end of her tragically short life. One of these poems, "Lady Lazarus," pushes the bounds of expectation and, some would say, propriety. This short reflective Poet's Pen focuses on Sylvia Plath and the many themes-feminism, suicidality, self-rebirth-for which she would later be known. The poem itself is a melting pot of imagery, drawing themes from the Judeo-Christian perspective, cycles of death and rebirth, and the mythology of the phoenix rising from the ashes.

A Comparative Study of Postwar Literature (Iranian Defense and Vietnam’s War) a Komunyakaa’s and Aminpour’s Poems

The comparative study tries to find the common points in two different authors’ works and in this kind of studying so many other common but the hidden points may be revealed. Postwar literature is somehow one of the best literary genres for finding the common factors and features that the poets have tried to present in their works elements such as desire to be winner, cruelty, inhumanity, and absurdity of the war. The Iranian poet late Qaisar Aminpour(1961-2007) and Yusef Komunyakaa ( 1947) from Bogalusa, Louisiana, are among the great American and Iranian poets whose works so many times have been interpreted and analyzed. The finding the outstanding and the most important points and themes in the postwar poems of these two poets is the main aim of this literary comparative study.

“The wrong side of the desk”: Material and Discursive Struggle in Bud Osborn’s Downtown Eastside

Abstract Bud Osborn (1947-2014) was an American poet and activist who arrived in Vancouver, Canada in 1986. He landed in Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside (DTES), while struggling with heroin addiction. The DTES is a complex and politically active neighbourhood and site of intersecting social crises. Osborn would spend the remainder of his life capturing this community in his poetry, which is often understood solely through activism for harm reduction and against gentrification. In this article, I engage with his poetry to understand the politics which motivate his activism. This exploration will include a variety of textual mediums, voices, and analytic perspectives to capture the complex politics contained in his words. I believe that by reading his words we can examine his complicated self-positionality as a PWUD (people who use drugs) and a member of the lumpenproletariat who occupied sociocultural spaces that often excluded those from his social standing. This examination shows how he constitutes the DTES as a space of material and discursive struggle. What emerges from this examination is how his poetic resistance at the level of the signifier intertwines with his street-level resistance. That is, how the act of writing and reading poetry can be an act of defiance.

Verses of Despair (Robert Bly’s Poetics between Idealism and Naturalism)

The Vietnam War generated a major outpouring of American antiwar poetry that served as a powerful medium of expressing dissent and disillusionment with the war. One of many American poets who extensively contributed to the antiwar poetry movement during the war is Robert Bly. While Bly’s poetics are often appreciated for their revolutionary fervor, there exists a subtle and concealed naturalist streak in his poetry that deserves further exploration. The scholarly marginalization of such an aspect of his literary legacy undermines the richness and complexity of Bly’s poetic vision. This paper seeks to identify moments of rupture that challenge Bly’s idealized poetics of antiwar stance, moments that strike a naturalistic chord that capitalizes on the pessimistic belief that the world and politics are outside of one’s own control. Through a naturalistic theoretical framework, the paper looks closely at two of Bly’s lesser-known poems: “The World is a Confusion of Three Worlds” (1960) and “The Approaching War” (2003), written respectively in reference to the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. The significance of this study lies in deepening our understanding of the breadth and width of Bly’s poetics and politics, illustrating the potential and limitation of his antiwar stance and rhetoric. It also helps rectify the prevailing misconception that naturalism is irrelevant in the late twentieth century’s evolving literary styles of expression.

The Interweaving of Humanity and Animality-Animal Narrative at Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry

Alan Dugan was a contemporary American poet. His last volume, entitled Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, was published in 2001 and won Dugan a second National Book Award. This paper is based on Alan Dugan’s narration of animals in his new poems and Dugan’snarration of animals, which conveys his profound thinking and care about human beings and the life form of existence. “Human beings” are often closely related to animals. The animal narration in Dugan’s literary works expresses a hidden human world “behind his back.” Therefore, “animals” is one of the keys to interpreting Dugan’s complex, mysterious, and bizarre narrative world. The expression and writing of animals can be used as a breakthrough point of Dugan’s research so as to dig deeply into his spiritual world and artistic characteristics in order to achieve a new understanding and thinking of his literary creation.

Translation and Bildung: siting translation in nation-based anthologies

ABSTRACT This article examines the effects of chronologization on translation in nineteenth-century nation-based anthologies, focusing on the work of two prolific anthologizers, the British John Bowring (1792–1872) and the American poet Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908). While Bowring anthologized the literatures of mostly Eastern European nations in the first half of the nineteenth century and Stedman anthologized US literature in the second half, both men worked within the framework of the monolingual nation-state, leading them to exclude translations, relegating them to the “infancy” of the national cultural as symbolizing dependency and foreign influence.

Wallace Stevens and Zen Buddhism

American poet Wallace Stevens describes nature in his poetry, discussing the relationship between poetry writing and nature, and expresses his ecological poetics to the world. The poet also integrates the concepts of Buddhism into his ecopoetry, advocating that humans should control the constantly expanding material desires, being indifferent to fame and wealth, and form a peaceful state of mind, thereby reducing human damage to the environment and nature, and constructing a deep ecological view which advocates all creatures are equal.

Il ritmo del senso

The task that awaits those who have noticed the devastation of the truth prevailing today lies in coming to terms with the illusory nature of the political proposals that European leaders formulated during the 20th century and which, despite their diversity, are based on a single interpretation of the sense of Being in terms of “nihilism”. Now, we do acknowledge that ample space has been reserved in the last fifty years to show the criminal nature of the fascist and Nazi projects, as well as the alienation that emblematically characterizes the liberal model, particularly in its American version. That is why it now proves extremely urgent to clarify the spiritual presuppositions that favored the disastrous advent of Bolshevism in the Soviet Union. Here is what E.E. Cummings set out to do during a trip made in the 1930s to Stalin’s Russia and whose ripest fruits the American poet collected in a very precious diary emblematically entitled Eimi (I am). Awakening a sense of Being thus becomes the escape route Cummings devised to bring Western man back into that dimension capable of renewing in each of us that need for rootedness, which guarantees the possibility of an authentic existence.

Kenneth Rexroth’s Translation of Du Fu Poetry from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory

Kenneth Rexroth, a well-known American poet and translator, has contributed to Du Fu poetry translation in the Western society. From the perspective of Nida’s functional equivalence theory, this research takes Rexroth’s English translations of Du Fu poems as a case to study the translation strategies adopted by Rexroth. This explores translation strategies of Du Fu poetry from the perspective of functional reciprocity theory, and is supposed to provide references for the English translation of the ancient Chinese poetry in the future. The above examples all reflect the faithfulness and accuracy of the free translation under the theory of functional equivalence, and accurately express the connotation of the original poem. Above all, the translator has adopted literal translation when translating the above verse. in order to achieve the requirement of the theory of functional equivalence, which enabled the target readers to have the same experience as the original readers. This was the most fundamental purpose of using the literal translation here.

Writing in the machine: Two books on the sociology of literatureThe American poet laureate: A history of U.S. poetry and the state By AmyPaeth, New York: Columbia University Press. 2023. pp. 328. ISBN: 0231194390Big fiction: How conglomeration changed the publishing industry and American literature By DanSinykin, New York: Columbia University Press. 2023. pp. 328. ISBN: 0231192959

Writing in the machine: Two books on the sociology of literatureThe American poet laureate: A history of U.S. poetry and the state By AmyPaeth, New York: Columbia University Press. 2023. pp. 328. ISBN: 0231194390Big fiction: How conglomeration changed the publishing industry and American literature By DanSinykin, New York: Columbia University Press. 2023. pp. 328. ISBN: 0231192959

Cinebiographed lives

This excerpt deals with the interdialogical relationships between the book Flores raras e banalíssimas (1995), by Carmem L. Oliveira, and the film Flores raras (2013), by Bruno Barreto, having as comparative guidance the considerations of Arfuch (2010) and Ricoeur (2010) on biography and writing of subjective discourses, as well as the questions by Green (2000) and Miskolci (2006) regarding the closet in which the desires and affections between people of the same sex were forcibly placed in most cultures. We seek to point out the proximity and distance between the two works book and film, analyzing the strategies used by both Oliveira (1995) and Barreto (2013), for the biographical composition of the love story between the Brazilian architect Maria Carlota Costallat de Macedo Soares (1910-1967) and the North American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). The selection, interpretation and narration of this lesbian marriage, against the background of Rio de Janeiro in 1950-70, engender many symbolic and cultural issues, for which we adopt the perspective of free listening, avoiding judgments and projections, and trying, always, follow the comings and goings of the artistic reports themselves.

„W lesie, w drewnianym domku": o cnocie radości i szczęścia w najnowszym tomie Michaela Krügera

Michael Krüger is one of the most important poets of contemporary Europe, combining in his works many traditions of the old continent’s literature, from ancient Greece to twentieth-century Poland. In addition, strong American influences surface in his verse. While Krüger’s early work was a search for his own mode of expression through more or less faithful imitations of very different Polish and American poets, in his mature poems from the 2021 volume In the Forrest, in the Wooden House the Munich poet finds a highly original solution to the seemingly insoluble dilemma faced by all prominent artists since the beginning of the twentieth century: whether to depict the world realistically or, on the contrary, by means of aporia and abstraction? Krüger skillfully combines the “scenic mode” rhetoric typical of post-symbolic literature and the “poetics of indeterminacy” characteristic of postmodernism to create the autonomous poem. It is a realist work that resists interpretation because it contains elements that cannot be read in the realist plane. This peculiar Krüger’s late style is combined with his ostentatious predilection for Epicureanism, references to the poetry of Hesiod and his resort to a broad phrase, reminiscent of hexameter.

Subverting Anthropocentric Mythic Elements: Animal Representations in the Select Poems of Louise Glück and Mary Oliver

The representation of animals in literature has long been dominated by anthropocentric perspectives that prioritize human experiences and values. Animals were relegated to metaphors and narrative accessories, neglecting their inherent rights and treating them primarily as reflections of human qualities. This paper examines the works of contemporary American poets Louise Glück and Mary Oliver, focusing on how their selected poems reconsider conventional anthropocentric patterns of animal representations in poetry. The analysis centers on the poets’ strategies to blur rigid boundaries between the human-animal divide by challenging conventional depictions where animals are frequently assigned peripheral roles. The study explores how these poems cultivate powerful connections with the natural world, fostering a sense of communion and interconnectedness with nature. Additionally, the research highlights the deliberate efforts by the poets to reconfigure hierarchies, challenge value dualisms, and question anthropocentric narratives that sanction oppression. Lastly, the paper contributes to the broader discourse on ecocritical thought, enriching discussions on literature and environmental activism.

Sidewise Looks: Asian American Poets Revisit Wallace Stevens

Abstract: While common knowledge on Wallace Stevens suggests that he influenced only one Asian American poet (his friend, the scholar Peter H. Lee), a fuller investigation into Stevens's legacy reveals that he very well may be the Anglophone modernist with the most widespread and enduring influence on the past eighty years of Asian American poetics. In this essay's first half, I retell the history of Stevens's reception by Asian American poets, distinguishing it from his reception by Black poets (on the one hand) and from Asian American poets' responses to modernist orientalism (on the other). In the essay's second half, I offer a flexible argument about the indispensability of Stevensian abstraction to two of the most celebrated poets of their generation, Arthur Sze and Vijay Seshadri.

Madness and Resistance under the Flashback and Juxtaposition—Spatial Narration in The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar, the only novel by American poet and writer Sylvia Plath, vividly portrays the marginalized experience of American women in the mid-20th century and depicts the struggles of female intellectuals in constructing their own identities.This paper, by using the concepts of flashback and juxtaposition in spatial narration theory, explores three key aspects: the physical spatial changes in the whole story, the interplay between psychological and physical spaces under flashbacks and juxtaposition, and the protagonist Esther’s resistance against the male-dominated society and her awakening of female consciousness in the bell jar. It analyzes how Esther’s psychological space evolves within the ever-shifting physical spaces, leading to her feelings of helplessness, despair, and madness. Furthermore, it examines how through her rebellious madness, Esther achieves her awakening of female consciousness, constructs her own identity as a female intellectual, and raises her voice in a male-dominated society oppressive at the time.

에이드리언 리치의 시

Adrienne Rich, an American feminist poet and essayist of the late twentieth century, has influenced contemporary women’s movement. Her early poems started with traditional and restrained voices as male poets. But through marriage, she has experienced patriarchy in person and afterwards her poem has gone through continual changes. She offers women the knowledge they need to overcome the unreasonableness of their lives, thus allowing them to change the future of their own lives as well as the world. Rich as a feminist delineates the ideal community for women as a means for survival in a patriarchal world. In this paper, we will consider the development of re-reading and re-writing, namely “re-vision”, which Rich worked on as a feminist. She writes that “re-vision is the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction. For women, re-vision is more than a chapter in cultural history; it is ‘an act of survival’.” The re-visioning woman works to reconstruct conventional symbolic representations in a new and meaningful way. The transformative and flexible power of re-vision can change every reality, every myth, and every structure. Through this attempt, we also consider the various effects that Rich has given to all women and her readers will participating in building the communal society.

Theme of fate and destiny in the “Birthday Letters” poetry collection by Ted Hughes

The article is devoted to the analysis of “Birthday Letters” poetry collection by Ted Hughes. The book was published in 1998 and was at the top of the British bestseller list very soon. It is based on the story of the relations between Hughes and the American poet Silvia Plath. In 1956 they got married and in 1963 Silvia killed herself. Hughes hadn’t commented on the death of his wife for a long time, although many people blamed him for her suicide. After 35 years in “Birthday letters”, he tried to define the causes which led to her tragic end. Hughes sees the main reason in the predetermination of her fate that was aimed at such an outcome.

An Undetected Echo of Tennyson's "Ulysses" in Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"

This discovery article explores the previously unrecognized semantic resonance between the concluding verses of Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "Ulysses" and Walt Whitman's poem "The Untold Want." The English and American poets were not only contemporaries but also friends who admired each other's work and corresponded over the course of two decades. In pursuing a daring Ulysses-like voyage "to seek and find," Whitman was paying tribute to his fellow poet's questing spirit. 

An analysis of figurative language in the interpretation of contemporary English poetry

This article examines the various facets of figurative language. This study considers figurative language from a traditional perspective as an embellishment of language and compares it with contemporary theory in literature especially in poetry. The main material for the analysis of figurative language in poetry is poetic texts of contemporary American poets like William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Charles Bernstein. We selected 15 poems that contain a lot of figurative expressions and analyzed them namely “The Red Wheelbarrow”, “This Is Just to Say”, “To a Poor Old Woman”, “The Road Not Taken”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “Fire and Ice”, “Mending Wall”, etc. The authors conducted about evaluation of the use of metaphors, hyperboles, idioms, and similes. The most used figurative language in all the analyzed poems is metaphor. It occurred in all 15 poems. Figurative language adds an element of beauty and artistry to poetry. Metaphors, similes, and other figurative expressions infuse the language with color, imagery, and creative aesthetics that captivate the reader's senses.

Introduction: Stevens and Germany, Stevens in (West) Germany

ABSTRACT: This first of two special issues on "Stevens and Germany" addresses a neglected topic. Five contributions by Philip McGowan, Gül Bilge Han, James Dowthwaite, George Kovalenko, and Christoph Irmscher explore the broad contours of Wallace Stevens's relation to Germany, spanning from youthful identification to tempered wartime and postwar reflections. The contributions also highlight moments in the poet's life and writing, including his visit to a German art exhibition in 1909 and his later genealogical research into the maternal, German side of the family. A related topic of scholarly neglect, at least in the United States, has been the postwar (West) German reception of Stevens. Not until the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall was his poetry able to slough its initial reputation as elitist and conformist. A series of new translations, most of them appearing in the twenty-first century, have helped revitalize German interest in the American poet.