Kevin Stein: On "The Day Lady Died"
The tone at the opening of the poem is giddy and excited. After all, this is a somewhat glib speaker who is readying himself for dinner at the home of someone he doesn't know, who can smart-aleckly...
View ArticleFrank O'Hara's: A Step Away From Them
The structure of this poem may look random, the details--Coca-Cola signs, hours of the day, objects seen in store windows--are seemingly trivial, but in O'Hara's imaginative reconstruction of New York...
View ArticleMarjorie Perloff: On "The Asians Dying"
It is, I think, this blend of strangeness and a clear-sighted literalness that makes a poem like "The Asians Dying" memorable. Consider the linesRain falls into the open eyes of the dead Again again...
View ArticleEdward Brunner: On "Sun and Rain"
At its most effective, the caesura allows a degree of movement simply unavailable in verse with only one kind of pause within it. It allows for levels of activity within the activity promised by the...
View ArticleMarjorie Perloff: On "For The Anniversary of My Death"
What distinguishes a poem like "For the Anniversary of My Death" from the "undecidable" texts of a Beckett on the one hand, as from its modernist predecessors on the other, is the marked authorial...
View ArticleEdward Brunner on "The Asians Dying"
In the closing group, death is an occurence that links us with others. This realistic acknowledgment of death can appear with the old abstract concept in the same poem; it is one reason why the ending...
View ArticleThomas H. Johnson: On 258 ("There's a certain Slant of light")
[Emily Dickinson's] dread of winter [is] expressed in one of her remarkable verses, written about 1861 [,"There's a certain Slant of light"]. It is, like the somewhat later "Further in Summer than the...
View ArticleCaroline Rogue: On 465 ("I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--")
Emily Dickinson's "I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died" should be read, I think, with a particular setting in mind—a nineteenth-century deathbed scene. Before the age of powerful anodynes death was met in...
View ArticlePaula Bennett: On 465 ("I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--")
Like many people in her period, Dickinson was fascinated by death-bed scenes. How, she asked various correspondents, did this or that person die? In particular, she wanted to know if their deaths...
View ArticleDaniel Tiffany: On "In a Station of the Metro"
What difference would it make to the history of Anglo-American poetic modernism if we were to read Pound as a poet whose progress begins and ends in the realm of the dead, the author (and protagonist)...
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