by Michelle Lewis | Poetry & Poetics |
Emily Dickinson wrote that the speaker in her poems is not the poet herself but “a supposed person.” The degree to which a poem’s persona or “supposed person” is a reflection of the poet herself is largely left to biographers, but the question does have an allure....
by Michelle Lewis | Poetry & Poetics |
Variation is predicated upon pattern: once a pattern is established, it can be varied. Giving shape to chaos is one of the multitude effects of this compositional technique. Whitman gave shape to the chaos of his catalogues through a patterning anaphora; Eliot gave...
by Michelle Lewis | Poetry & Poetics |
It is hard to separate Lynda Hull from her fraught biography of addiction and her early death. Her praise is never without darkness, her confusion never without an attempt at clarity, her triumphs of clarity never without a subtext of chaos. The complexity of emotion...
by Michelle Lewis | Poetry & Poetics |
Gregory Orr has described the lyric poem as the I’s perception of a single incident in which the poet was overwhelmed by extreme emotion and disorder. (Wordsworth also refers to the lyric as a “spontaneous overflow of feeling”, but I appreciate Orr’s addition of...
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