Category Archives: Poetry

Carl Phillip’s “Speak Low” and Confession

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Carl Phillips Reading © by WashULibraries

Easily missed, the epigraph by Danial Defoe to Carl Phillips’s book “Speak Low” seems to sum up the experience of reading Phillips: “and I could feel my self carried with a mighty Force and Swiftness towards the shore a very great Way.” Phillips’s poetry is all about the duality of existence as one seeks to find their own place and their own power. The feeling of being pulled by water in the epigraph endures, but one sees that the poems do not force a single definition and the inherent internal struggle within them allows one to see this pulling force of water as both helpful and harmful: the water is just as likely to pull one to shore as out to sea. This back and forth of the poems in “Speak Low” is not incoherent, but rather, it reveals the struggle for one’s place in the world, and, more importantly, reveals the internal struggles of the poet as he moves through ideas.

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Byron’s “The Corsair.”

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Byron, intentionally or unintentionally, weaves himself into his poetry stamping it with his entire persona. His characters are part of himself; the poems are pieces of his mind; the events are based on experience. Byron’s poetry is an amalgamation of all aspects of Byron. This is truer in some poems than others: some are nearly biographical and others skillfully manipulate other’s perceptions of Byron. His poetry reveals the inner workings of his mind . Because of this, the voices in Byron’s poetry are not just the voices of Byron’s characters: they are the intermingling of the poet with the poem. One of the most pervasive and recognizable aspects of Byronic poetry is the Byronic hero who is a manifestation of parts of Byron’s own personality and thoughts. Byron’s “The Corsair” introduces the most Byronic of Byron’s heroes: Conrad. He then proceeds to emasculate him and proposes Gulnare, a former sex slave, as an alternative hero.

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Responding to “This Compost” by Walt Whitman

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Yes, the Earth is “work’d over and over with sour dead”, but the earth is the symbol of renewal, so why should they poison it? The earth and its environs are incorruptible. Like a body, the Earth can renew itself, but unlike a body, it can heal from any injury or poison. When “normal” plants first evolved, they took over the earth and corrupted its atmosphere with their toxic breaths. The Earth embraced this change and it and all its life adapted to these changes giving rise to our everyday world. Humans have become the plants poisoning the air, water, and soil without realizing that it is not the earth they are killing but themselves. The Earth can survive everything from nuclear war to asteroid impacts; however, those whom live on its surface are vulnerable to being brushed away like a proverbial insect.

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“There Was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman

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“There Was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman illustrates his position as part of the new American Tradition and his desire to fulfill the call for a poet who “sings the materials of America” by Emerson. The poem is earthy and real: the emotion, events and perceptions are that of the average person. The lofty ideas presented within are approachable because they are part of the every-man’s perception and life.

Walt Whitman’s language is loose yet precise, varied but common, and it illustrates a perfect balance between the real and the artistic. The structure flows coalesces and begins to flow again while all the while remains a simple list-like form.

However ,within this list, he pulls and plays with emotions and moves from excitement into doubt and then to resolution to rescind all doubts. Doubt begins as the child moves from the pleasant natural world into the human world he is subjected to.

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Wordsworth and Keats: For the birds.

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Wordsworth and Keats both wrote poems about birds, and both imbue their birds with a mystical nature, but where Keats sees the bird as a representation of a better life, Wordsworth sees it as a mysterious presence that represents the disembodied spirit of nature.

In Wordsworth’s “To the Cuckoo” he never sees his cuckoo and had long since stopped looking for it, so the bird had become a spirit that represents the rest of nature, and like the daffodils it transcends itself. In an “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats speaks to the nightingale as the representation of his desire for happiness — Keats feels a “numbing pain” because he is so happy that the bird is happy that it begins to work on him like a drug. He sees the nightengale, at first, as the essence of summer and the chance of a new life.

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Andrea del Sarto: Precise but Passionless

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Andrea del Sarto, in the poem of the same name by Browning, has all the basic elements of a happy life, but he accepts all the aspects of his life that drain him and leave him passionless; thus, accentuating his lack of an artist’s soul. Some, including Andrea, blame his unhappiness and inability to achieve fame on his wife, Lucrezia, but his unhappiness and lack of fame come from his disconnection from the passionate aspects of the world, something that evidences itself in his method of speaking, his paintings, and his marriage. This passionless existence leaves his tone subdued, his artwork is a “silvery gray” duplication of reality, and his marriage empty and unfulfilling. Although he lacks passion, he could be a great painter, but he resigns himself to his fate and is unable to force himself to move beyond the fetters with which he believes God has burdened him.

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