Category Archives: CloseRead

  Claude McKay’s The Harlem Dancer is a perfect example of poetry that creates incredibly vivid imagery.  This poem follows the form of the traditional Shakespearian sonnet, with a rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g.  The poem starts quite abruptly, setting up … Continue reading →

Marianne Moore’s poem, “To a Steam Roller”, is strange. The language lets you in, like peeking through a hotel door chain-locked open to a supposed image of a steam roller, but like watching a deft illusion, is it really a … Continue reading →

As Ramazani’s warned readers in his headnote on T.S Elliot, it is evident that The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one situated in beautiful and detailed imagery, but laced with a negative and pessimistic perception of reality. Ramazani explaines … Continue reading →

  The universal theme of isolation is shaped by many elements that surround the central figure in literary works, including the influence of sociological or cultural elements of his or her time.  As a result of industrialization, which encouraged greed … Continue reading →

Walt Whitman was one of the nineteenth century authors to pave the way from contemporary to modernism writings. He introduced new styles and themes while keeping some formality of the traditional style of writings. In his writings, Whitman address important … Continue reading →

In Charles Baudelaire’s poem from Les Fleurs du mal entitled “Au Lecture,” plenty of daring and controversial ideas are laid out for the reader. Baudelaire begins the poem by pointing out humanities sinful nature. He does this in the first two … Continue reading →

In his poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, William Butler Yeats develops a curiously mournful ode that captures an idyllic space of respite and peace yet imbues this space with a sense of tragic elusiveness whose primary value is vested in its myth … Continue reading →

Walt Whitman’s poem, “One’s-Self I Sing” embodies the Good Gray Poet’s obsession of being a “separate person” as well as “en-Masse.”  What is unique about this poem is its brevity.  Whitman is most celebrated as creating the American epic, Leaves … Continue reading →