At this point, the emerging women's movement during the 1960s provided Rich with the ratification she needed. The movement articulated the very feelings of conflict she was experiencing on a personal, sexual and cultural level. This also allowed her to participate in a dialogue with her environment via the platform developed by the social movements arising during this time. Whereas her first poetry was therefore formal and unemotional, both her own development and that in the society of time allowed her poetry to become more uniquely her own than it ever was before. It is from this platform that Rich was able to begin writing poetry not only to voice her own experiences and feelings, but also to inspire others to abandon social complacency.

Another important development in Rich's life is her family's movement to New York in 1966. Here she began to teach in a remedial English program for the…...

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Sources

Academy of American Poets. "Langston Hughes." 1997-2007.  http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/83 

Academy of American Poets. "Adrienne Rich." 1997-2007.  http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/49 

Books and Writers. "Langston Hughes (1902-1967). http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lhughes.htm

Pope, Deborah. "Rich's Life and Career." From the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Copyright © 1995 by Oxford University Press. Available online:  http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rich/bio.htm

Poetry captures both the personal and the political, and it allows for collective exploration of an internal psychic world. The poet shares an internal psychic world by clocking emotional forms into language. Poetry appeals to our need to understand ourselves and the universe by using an art form of metaphor and semantics in much the same way that a musician uses notes, chords, and harmonies. It is to this service of poetry that Lucille Clifton writes "The Lost Baby Poem." This poem reveals the confluence of the personal and the political in poetry.
Contemporary poetry is unique in that it does not confine itself to formal structures. hile poets are free to draw from the likes of the sonnet or the haiku, free verse has become and remains an equally valid form. "The Lost Baby Poem" is in free verse, and is therefore quintessentially modern. The poet does not consciously impose…...

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Work Cited

Clifton, Lucille. "The Lost Baby Poem."

" (lines 20-21) the journalist, the activist... must be the observer and not make the news. Lastly the point-of-view of the unnamed dead, "enemy" whose ears were cut off to use an example of cruelty and to elicit fear, "Some of the ears on the floor/caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on / the floor were pressed to the ground." (lines 31-33) Perhaps the ears were still listening to the messages of their cause, while others were either deaf to it, blocked by the arbitrary falling upon the floor or even listening for the future. hen one places an ear to the ground, he or she is listening intently and with every shred of his or her being for coming danger or change, yet the disembodied and now personified ears could not have realistically been listening, they were symbols in a small grocery sack and now…...

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Works Cited

Forche, Carolyn "The Colonel" in the Country Between Us, New York and London, 1981.

Forche, Carolyn. "6 the Poetry of Witness." The Writer in Politics. Ed. William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. 135-161.

Hamilton, Ian. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Heaney, Seamus "Punishment" in North London 1975.

Poetry is often used to express emotion at its most romantic and infatuated, but sometimes it is used to describe the pillars of life behind that romance -- the sexuality, insecurity, devotion, and fidelity. Dorianne Laux, Anne Bradstreet, and Barbara Greenberg explore their very different relationships through poetry, examining this causal underpinnings through poetry. Using careful word choice, expressive imagery, and specific audience, each poet expertly wields her tool to limn the life of the relationship inside the life of a partner.
Dorianne Laux treats the elaborate prose of "The Shipfitter's Wife" as a rosetta stone to the relationship she and her lover share as an escape from and culmination to the demands of the hard day's work that characterizes life tied directly to the ocean. Her meter is perpetually changing, but a constant alliteration and consonance carries the reader through the caesura distinguishing the stream of descriptions, one from the…...

Poetry by Knight and Groddeck
There are facets of Etheridge Knight's poem, "A asp oman Visits a Black Junkie in Prison" that both participate in a dying tradition as posited by Groddeck and which also attest to a variation of the notion of democracy -- which is far from ideal. In that respect, one can successfully defend the notion that this work of the author actually embraces more of the former concept than the latter. An examination of the language, its connotations, and the events that take place in the poem readily attest to this fact.

One of the aspects of this poem that is most enjoyable to the reader is the fact that it is highly realistic in its depiction of the conventional relations between African-Americans and Anglo-Saxons, particularly during the fiery time period in which the poet was composing this and other works that deal with a similar theme. The…...

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Works Cited

Knight, Etheridge. "A Wasp Woman Visits A Black Junkie in Prison." www.poetryfoundation.org. 1986. Web.  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181863

The horse race that Bukowski remarks upon as meaningless acts as a metaphor for life in general. We are all racing to win, but against the light of eternity, what does any of it mean. Are there any winners in life? This defeatist thinking is something everyone does; it is something that I have done, but when I step back and see that for myself the horse race is against myself and the race is one when I've reached my own goals. I'm young, however, and the weariness that I've experienced would most likely pale against what Bukowski alludes to throughout the poem in his experiences working in menial jobs for twenty years.
With the conversation between the motel clerk and Bukowski he remarks that he is leaving the horse race because he finds it boring to which the clerk responds, "If you think it's boring / out there," he…...

For example, in the third stanza, he describes the dawn as " yellows bright as wood -columbine (8)
The metaphor used in the following line also attests to the beauty and mystery of nature

or was only a fuzzed moth in a flannel storm (9)

Note as well the use of alliteration in the above line, which adds to the harmony and depth of the metaphor. In his search for meaning through the encounter with nature the protagonist encounters a mysterious of communication between things in the wilds.

ut he found the mountain was clearly alive (10)

This aliveness and energy in nature is emphasized by words like "whizzing" and "booming," which communicates the intensity and the activity that is alive in nature. His vision of nature increases and includes mythological connotations; for example, the comparison of ospreys with Valkyries in line 16. Valkyries means "Choosers of the Slain" in Norse legend and also…...

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Bibliography

Geddes, Gary. 20th Century Poetry & Poetics. 4th edition. Oxford.

Poetry during the 17th century often shared similar themes, narratives, and messages. These topics often revolved around concepts of innocence, romance, loss, temptation, and desire, especially when it came to courtship. Andrew Marvell, a prominent English metaphysical poet and politician, whose "To His Coy Mistress," thought to have been written during the 1650s, explores themes of innocence and temptation, especially in terms of courtship. Moreover, "To His Coy Mistress" can be categorized as a carpe diem poem, as the narrator attempts to convince his mistress to lower her inhibitions and give in to his desires. "To His Coy Mistress" explores the conflict the narrator perceives between innocence and temptation through a detailed use of imagery and metaphors that allow Marvell to elaborate on the narrator's urgency.
"To His Coy Mistress" can be classified as a carpe diem poem because of the demands the narrator makes of his mistress. In the poem,…...

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Works Cited

"Carpe Diem: Poems for Making the Most of Time." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets.

Web. 11 June 2013.

Marvell, Andrew. "To His Coy Mistress." Ca. 1650. Web. 11 June 2013.

A common fear is incompetence, resulting in often-heard comments such as 'I can't draw,' 'I can't sing,' and 'I can't dance.' These fears are, to some extent, rooted in the mistaken belief that skills in the arts are innate and inherited rather than sets of component skills that can be learned and integrated into a whole skill" (p. 147). Notwithstanding the adage concerning old dogs and new tricks, though, the elderly are certainly capable of acquiring the skills they need to actively participate in a therapeutic treatment setting using poetry as the focal point. The quality of the poetry involved, of course, is not the issue, but rather the manner in which these works are used. In this regard, Ziff and Beamish also note that, "The arts are powerful tools in counseling. Like many counseling techniques, the arts have the potential to remove barriers, create intimacy, and promote self-discovery"…...

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References

Bolton, G., Field, V. & Thompson, K. (2006). Writing works: A resource handbook for therapeutic writing workshops and activities. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Bolton, G. (1999). The therapeutic potential of creative writing: Writing myself. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Furman, R., Langer, C.L. & Anderson, D.K. (2006). The poet/practitioner: A paradigm for the profession. Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 33(3), 29-30.

Hynes, a.M., & Wedl, L.C. (1990). Bibliotherapy: An interactive process in counseling older persons. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 12(3), 288-302 in Thompson at p. 129.

This is evident from the first as the poet writes,
I am inside someone -- who hates me. I look out from his eyes (1-3).

This approach allows him to take a jaundiced view of himself and criticize his own shortcomings, as if they were those of someone else. He says he hates himself, meaning more that he hates some of the things he has done and that he may expect more from himself than he has been able to deliver. The way he pauses at the end of the first line emphasizes the next part of the sentence, that he is inside someone who hates him, meaning himself. He observes himself and does so as if observing the act of observing as well, creating a double distance between himself as poet and himself as man. The poet writes, "I look / out from his eyes" (2-3), again seeing himself watching…...

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Bibliography

Amiri Baraka, "An Agony, as Now" in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2, Third Edition, Baym, Nina et al. (eds.), 2746-2747. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

Louise Bogan, "Women" at  http://www.web-books.com/classics/Poetry/anthology/Bogan/Women.htm .

Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool" at  http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1627.html .

Christopher Buckley, "Why I'm in Favor of a Nuclear Freeze" in Bradley, John. Atomic Ghost: poets respond to the nuclear age. Coffee House Press, 1995.

Among the many other literary devices used in the poem is alliteration. Alliteration is used to add to the central meaning of the poem and in line three, for example, the alliteration " wanted wear" is intended to stress that it is important to take the route or road less traveled and not simply to follow the conventional choice. In the final line of the poem, the poet clearly states that taking an unusual and alternative route in life l has "made all the difference."

3. 'Shall I Compare Thee to a Summers Day' and Howard Moss' ironic takeoff.

This famous sonnet is in fact an extended metaphor. The poet compares his love to a summer's day. A central poetic device used in the poem is a form of wit known as a "conceit." This is where seemingly extravagant and exaggerated claims or views are espoused, which the poet justifies by poetic…...

Poetry That Grabs Your Attention
I agree with you that poetry, by virtue of its compressed form, needs to grab the reader's attention immediately in the way that prose does not. While readers of a novel might be willing to read a book for thirty or so pages if they are assured that the action will eventually 'pick up,' a poem needs to use intense images and arresting language from the first line onward. Every word must be special, and perhaps this is even truer of poems like Dorianne Laux's poem "The Laundromat" which is about an apparently mundane subject. I agree with you that the Laux poem brings out the apparently animalistic, tumultuous side of this ordinary environment, and as a result of reading the poem, I will never look at the Laundromat in the same way.

I also agree with you that what is so wonderful about this poem is…...

Poetry is used by writers and authors to convey their feelings, beliefs, and thoughts in a concise manner. Throughout the ages, poetry has developed into an art form, one in which every country, culture, and generation has been able to contribute to it. American poets such as Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes have contributed to the genre, each in their respective time periods. Regardless of when these poets wrote their works, they continue to influence people today. Among the most recognizable pieces written by Whitman, Frost, and Hughes are "A noiseless patient spider," "Birches," and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," respectively. Each poem differs in narrator and perspective, imagery, and message.
Walt Whitman's "A noiseless patient spider" is told from a first-person perspective. An unnamed narrator observes how a spider is isolated from its surroundings, but has the power to connect itself to these surroundings by launching "filament, filament,…...

.." The imagery of these two stanzas has a two-fold meaning. First of all, under the force of love, the self goes forth or withdraws into its own core again. Moreover, the alternating seasons of spring and winter hint to the life and death power that love holds over the poet. The force of love is thus pulsating with the rhythms of life itself.
Through the beauty and intensity of love, one can have a taste of death, intimated by the fragility of the poet's beloved, as well as a taste of immortality or infinite power. As the poet states, love is not comparable with any other power existent in the world: "nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals / the power of your intense fragility..." The poet's beloved, although very fragile, is able to compel and to fascinate the beholder: "[fragility] whose texture / compels me with…...

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Works Cited cummings, e. e. somewhere I have never traveled.

Poetry about struggle: The African-American experience
Poetry is a medium which naturally lends itself to dealing with the topic of oppression. It enables members of historically-marginalized groups, such as African-Americans, to express themselves in covert ways that challenge the dominant paradigms of the societies in which they live. Through the use of the techniques of metaphor and simile, symbolism, and other literary methods, authors such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the author of "e ear the Mask: and Langston Hughes, the author of "A Dream Deferred" could speak the unspoken truths about the racial obstacles which they were forced to deal with on a daily basis. The modern African-American poet Rita Dove's work is more elliptical and less explicitly referential to politics in her works like "Persephone, Falling -- " than that of Dunbar's and Hughes' but still touches on common themes of struggle, namely how one 'fall' from purity can result…...

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Works Cited

Dove, Rita. "Persephone, Falling." From Mother Love W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1995.

  [21 Sept 2012]http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19856 

Dunbar, Paul. "We wear the mask." From Literature: The Human Experience. Shorter Fourth

Edition with Essays. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.   [21 Sept 2012]http://www.potw.org/archive/potw8.html 

....

Shakespeare may be the most popular broad topic for essays in English classes.  He wrote some of the most well-known works in the English language and, while he is known for his plays, he is also known for poetry.  English essays may focus on his works, but it is also possible to write compelling essays about Shakespeare’s life, including the enduring popular topic of whether Shakespeare was the true author of the works credited to him. 

Here are some essay title suggestions:   

1. Bringing Home the Bacon: Questions About the Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays
2. The Real Tragedy of....

Genre theory refers to the use of familiar themes and ideas as a way of signaling to the audience what to expect from a work of fiction. Genre theory can be used in various types of fiction and is often discussed when talking about both literature and movies. Genre theory can provide a good springboard for analysis of a particular work, because works can exemplify genres, deviate from genres, or even flip genres completely upside down.  As fictional works have developed, genres have become more specific.  Genres were initially very broad, both....

Certainly! Here are a few unique and fresh essay topics on Japanese internment:

1. Exploring the Role of Japanese American Women during Internment: Discuss the experiences, contributions, and resilience of Japanese American women during the internment period, highlighting their role in preserving their communities and influencing social change.

2. The Psychological Impact of Internment on Japanese American Children: Analyze the long-term psychological effects that internment had on Japanese American children and how their experiences shaped their identity, relationships, and future aspirations.

3. Artistic Expression and Resistance in Internment Camps: Examine how interned Japanese Americans utilized various art forms, such as poetry, drawing, and....