Cruellest Month Research Articles

April

April, they say, is the cruelest month. It is the time of wild barometric swings and violent meteorologic wars. Ulcers bleed and tornadoes hopscotch across the prairies. In England, April is Chaucer's tale and Browning's sickness. Here, April is, as all Americans know, the time to pay their taxes. It is the time to sign the lease for May, or pack up and move. It is the time to be wherever, at this point in time, one is not. April is the only month with an entire day set aside especially for fools. April is brilliant and loud and unpredictable. It is pregnant with showers and snow. In April one goes to work on a spring morning and comes home through the heaviest blizzard of all the winter. April is the new winter coat gone suddenly shabby. It is the saucy crocus in the compost pile who doesn't believe it's

April is the Cruellest Month

April is the Cruellest Month

September is the Cruelest Month

September is the Cruelest Month

Further Allusions and Debts to John Donne

One telling indication of a poet's influence in his own time is the extent and degree to which his phrasing and imagery have permeated the imagination of his readers, so that this phrasing, this imagery, reappear in readers' comments, quoted casually or adapted to other contexts. Not all twentieth-century readers write poems in the manner of Eliot; but I do not think that they will sing to me, April is the cruellest month, Not with a bang but a whimper, the unstilled world still whirled / About the centre of the silent Word, have become common coin of the literate. In like manner, the phrasing of John Donne permeated the minds of a wide variety of readers in the first half of the seventeenth century.