Tag: poetry
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Emily Dickinson is famous for her idiosyncratic grammar, liberal use of the hyphen, and seemingly random capitalization of words. Despite using typical poetic devices such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration in her works, her poems take unique forms with layouts often making them a bit cryptic. Are these idiosyncrasies in her poetry a sign of…
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Is Langston Hughes a Modernist poet? That question, once handed to me in a college classroom, now strikes me as too small for the man who so clearly saw poetry as a public force. Labels like “Modernist” tend to flatten voices into movements. But Hughes resists neat categorization. Yes, he wrote in free verse. Indeed,…
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What makes a poem a poem? Is it the line breaks, the rhythm, or the imagination? Or is it the weight of lived experience sculpted into something sharp enough to cut through memory? For poets Michael Palmer and Philip Levine, the answer differs—not in opposition, but in intention. Both are celebrated figures of contemporary American…
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If Elizabeth Bishop is a cartographer of the visible, then Robert Creeley is a geometer of the felt. One sketches every ridge; the other just the angle of the slope. Their poetic modes may seem like opposites on the surface—Bishop’s obsessive clarity versus Creeley’s elliptical sparseness—but together they reveal something crucial: the power of poetic…