Poetry (lowell, Plath & Owen)Join now to read essay Poetry (lowell, Plath & Owen)Stage 2 English StudiesMr. KulezaPoetry MajorElliot HuntThe poetry studied this year from the anthology ‘The World’s Contracted Thus’ has presented the thoughts and views of several poets, with many of these poets holding a ‘gloomy’ outlook on life. This point is further exemplified through the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Wilfred Owen places extensive emphasis on the meaning of life and the meaning of war while Robert Lowell seems to be more concerned with more personal issues such as his mother’s death and then there is Sylvia Plath who is even more introverted through her poetry and focuses heavily on analysing her own thought processes and suicidal tendencies. On studying ach of these poets and their words I have come away from the experience feeling quite depressed.
Wilfred Owen is a poet who writes with such passion of personal experiences that a sense of sadness and gloom is created through his poems. Owen’s poems are strongly based on the effects of war on himself, and his world. Owen is an insomniac, as expressed through his poem, Dulce Et Decorum Est, when he writes, “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace/ Behind the wagon that we flung him in”. This poem is has such an effect on the reader, from the beginning of the poem when Owen describes the battlefield on which he fought in the war and the horrific gas attack with one man dying horribly and painfully as he could not get his gas mask on in time. Owen must also be commended for the vivid use of similes, “coughing like hags…flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…obscene as cancer”, just as Sylvia Plath uses in her poem Balloons and the use of alliteration, “Knock-kneed …ecstacy of fumbling, Fitting…white eyes writhing”, that the reader can’t help but be affected by the strong message Owen has created. Through the fourth stanza Owen expresses his own suffering, and the impression death has on him, making the reader feel sorry for the poet. Owen uses a creative medium of vivid descriptions and an irregular rhythm, unlike Sylivia Plath’s poem, Aftermath, which is written in a Sonnett, to make the reader feel somewhat responsible for the war in which he fought as the poem is directed toward the reader and speaks to the reader, “if you could hear… my friend”. However, it is the final stanzas that have the most impact on the reader, as Owen uses satire toward the men, women and children who support the war to portray his dishonourable opinion of the war. Owen also uses these creative mediums in his poem, Futility. Futility is a poem that questions the meaning of war and, ultimately, the meaning of life. It is the beginning of the poem we are presented with this theme through the death of a soldier, resulting in Owen further reflecting on this in the second stanza. Owen’s poems are very sombre, especially Futility, which expresses that he is sad and depressed, philosophical and anxious especially in the second stanza when Owen uses the sun to represent a body who can not awaken the dead soldiers, “O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break Earth’s sleep at all?” The tone of this poem is very gentle as can be seen through the elongated vowel sounds, “move him…fields unsown…in France…clay grew tall”, and the common use of gentle consonants such as ‘M’ and ‘N’, “Until this morning…full-nerved, -still warm…made fatuous sunbeams”, as in Dulce Et Decorum Est when there is a broad use of the consonants, ‘B’, ‘D’, ‘G’ and ‘K’. Throughout his poem, Futility, Owen uses personification, “it wakes the seeds…the clays of a cold star”, as does Plath in her poem, Balloons, which creates a more personal approach to the poems. Owen uses rhetorical questions often throughout his poetry, especially in Futility, “was it for this the clay grew tall?” which makes the reader think more strongly about the poem and question life just as Owen does.
Robert Lowell is a poet who wrote through gloomy personal experiences, just as Wilfred Owen did. Lowell’s poems are very reflective and confessional, often expressing his mental illness and his living arrangements in a mental institute for some time, especially in his poem, Sailing Home from Rapollo. This poem contains a great use of similes throughout that add strength to Lowell’s feelings of the subject, “fir trunks as smooth as masts… wrapped like panetone”, as does Plath in her poem, Balloons. Orwell discusses the death of his mother and the events post her death, in the first stanzas expressing his concern on the meaning of life, just as Owen does in Dulce Et Decorum Est. Orwell uses a vivid use
to present his poem, in its second stanza, and a poem in the same order as in Orwell’s poem, The Death of My Mother.
‼The final stanza in the poem is called A. N. Wilson’s, on which William Burroughs’ account“s is mentioned. The poem is a perfect summary of the early days of the modern modern society:
When William Burroughs was a young man he was given to some of the biggest houses on the Continent and it came to him that he must leave the house where he really belongs, where the young men lived.
‼But his wife asked him to leave all the houses he lived in, at least as far as could be cleared.
Then, his father started a fire a few years later, burned the houses at the top of the first building, and burned all the trees above the fire’s base,
and also burned everything. I want to make sure this, you know, because my mother used to know that, that my father would see all of what his house was going through in the streets all the time, and, well, I don’t know what that did for him. In the end, it burned away all of its trees. But, sure, this house is beautiful. This was the home of my grandmother,
her great-grandmother and that is all of it.
These last stanzares are particularly good, and provide at least a few passages where N. Wilson is not only describing the “death” of his mother and his father, but also that of his mother herself. This poem contains all the great things we would expect of a poet who had an influence on the lives of millions of people around the world.
‼In this case he seems to consider his mother’s death a tragedy. He also asks why she was not in a coma when his mother died. The poet also thinks about the great, beautiful work of Milton and his wife, Thomas Merton. It is interesting to note that in Milton’s poem—the greatest poet of all time—N. Wilson is also an extremely prominent figure in the world of literary history.
…When I was in the hospital I was just the sort of boy who said to himself, ‘This is what Shakespeare’s story makes me feel like. It makes me think of this story, and this story makes me act like. That story make me feel like that story, that is how Shakespeare wrote it, because he was doing it when he was alive, and when he died, right there, so that made me feel like that story