Archive for August, 2002

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Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Thursday, August 1st, 2002
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” is one of Whitman’s most anthologized works, and not without good reason. It is one of the shortest, most succinct statements of his poetic vision, but it can also be read as a justification of art itself. It attempts to show how common experiences and our perception of those experiences, as conveyed [...]

Posted in Poets, Walt Whitman | 4 Comments »

Counterpoint to Walden Pond

Thursday, August 1st, 2002
Poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature was born in County Derry, 30 miles northeast of Belfast. The eldest of nine children, he became a teacher and a writer who now lectures at Harvard. Heaney earns much praise from fellow writers. American poet Robert Lowell called him the most important Irish poet [...]

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What Agony Lies in a Choice

Friday, August 2nd, 2002
In Catholicism limbo is the temporary place of souls which are purified of sin. It is also the permanent place of the souls of unbaptized children who are excluded from the vision of Christ. After reading this poem it would be easy to rail against the Catholic Church for its stern and dispassionate rejection of unbaptized [...]

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So Much Depends Upon…

Sunday, August 4th, 2002
Whitman’s use of the term “dumb ministers” in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” to describe objects that contribute to our soul, and Jonathan Delacour’s ongoing discussion of “objective description” and “subjective description” somehow reminded me of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a poem students often found “dumb,” though not in the sense Whitman used it. “The Red [...]

Posted in William Carlos Williams | 5 Comments »

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