Bean’s Weblog

#1

Prose vs. Poetry eh? I’m rooting for prose! I believe the main differences between prose and poetry is that prose tend to state its “point” fairly explicitly and tend to be more like regular speech, whereas poetry can be far less easy to interpret and sometimes seems almost as though the author has simply vomited the words onto the page. That’s not to say I don’t like poetry or anything like that… I just like prose better. I believe McKay switches over to prose because it simply made more sense to do so! McKay clearly didn’t see the need to make the reader deeply analyze the stanzas describing Icarus’ flight, and chose a simpler way to do so. And he did a good job too!

#2

Wikipedia says:

A dystopia is the vision of a society that is the opposite of utopia. A dystopian society is a state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad, characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/or pollution.

P.S. Sorry these last 3 entries were late! The end of the term is always pretty hectic and I lost track of what I needed to do!

Almost done…so close!

#1

Okay…I can’t seem to find anything about the poem’s inspiration on the internet, and I was told by another student that we went over it in class…apparently I was absent. Shame on me! BUT, from reading other people’s blogs I have come to the conclusion that the poem was inspired by the actual experiences of Susannah Moodie, whos son died by drowning.  I also found that the poem expresses Moodie’s resentment for losing her son and her resentment towards the country that took his life (canada?).

#2

I believe that Auden uses the myth of Icarus to show how life doesn’t stop every time something tragic happens to someone, and furthermore that something tragic to one person may not be tragic to another. The poem shows how Icarus’ plunge into the ocean wasn’t a huge tragedy to the sailors or people who saw it happen. It’s an exageration to say that today people wouldn’t care about someone falling from a great height into the ocean…but certainly some people find some things more tragic than other. As far as Icarus being associated with male experience…that’s a tough one! Perhaps the myth of Icarus could represent how young males can be very eager to do things and be free, but must learn not to get too carried away with life, and need to learn the limits of their abilities.

Sorry these are so late!

#1

The title “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is very misleading, and is quite apparent from the start of the poem. The title makes the reader believe the poem will most likely be a happy poem about love, but from the first stanza it is quite obvious that this isn’t your average love poem, or perhaps not a love poem at all. The wording used in the poem creates very dark and dreary imagery, again not very common in poems about love. The language also seems to be set up almost is if it has no set path, like how people think. Lastly, there is not much of a rhyming scheme, which isn’t a very common occurrence in love poems. After reading the poem, the reader is left thinking “Is this a love song?”. Even after a second reading the answer still isn’t known, and only after much analyzing does the reader get begin to understand what the poem represents.

Hmmmm…interesting!

#2

I imagine that the poem could be about Margaret Atwood’s son drowning perhaps, but that’s obvious.  Perhaps it could have been about someone else’s son…who happened to be a lumberjack? More than that…I don’t really know! some of the lines of the poem don’t really seem to agree with my theories, such as “on a landscape stranger than Uranus / we have all been to and some remember.” We obviously haven’t all be lumberjacks…so this is somewhat strange. I suppose I’ll figure out what its about soon enough!

1)

Whoa! call the poetry police! The accuracy of the poem is under dispute! Pssshhh…who cares?! Who ever said poetry had to be filled with facts? If you want to read facts, go read an essay. So Plath stretched the truth in “Daddy.” So what? As if Picasso’s paintings looked like what they were supposed to be! An artist or author shouldn’t be forced to adhere to reality or facts. So she lied about her age, and her father wasnt a vampire… Plath used specific wording and misinformation deliberatly in her poem, and who are we to question that? Now, as far as why she misinforms the reader…who knows? She might have intended for us to sympathize with her, not just think she was some crazy old bat with issues about her daddy, and deliberatly making things seem extra crappy for her might just make that happen.

2)

Modernism…damnit, I hate defining ‘isms, there are too many! Modernism essentially sought to break free of the realist thought pattern that had prevailed for the majority of the 19th century. Essentially they attempted to rebel against some aspect of tradition or the status quo (thank you Wikipedia!). Stream on conciousness writing essentially mimicks the helter-skelter thought patterns of the human mind. It tends to be somewhat like…well your stream of concious thoughts! In “Prufrock” the lines read almost as if they are our own thoughts. I guess this is different from other forms or narrative in just that, the narration reads much like it is our own thoughts, not so much a story being told to us. Hmm…interesting stuff…

Sorry its late! But as they say, better late then never…

1)

Does Oedipus the King teach us an important lesson? Besides the obvious don’t sleep with your parents lesson, I believe that the story does contain some fairly important lessons that can still be applied in everyday life. For one, a sort of Murphy’s Law (Oedipus’s Law?!?!) is introduced. Not so much that if something can go wrong that it will, but more that things can be more than they seem to be…so its a good idea to not get cocky and proclaiming that you shall avenge the death of your city’s dead king by bringing his murder to justice, because in the end the gods could play the ultimate prank on you and you could end up being the murderer. Another good lesson in Oedupis the King is that sometimes the truth hurts, so suck it up and deal with it. Throughout the play Oedipus has several opportunities to learn the truth, but he chooses to ignore it. Then when he is out of options, and all clues point towards the truth which was right in front of him the whole time, then the truth stings just that much more. So, lesson learned: don’t lie to yourself because you don’t want to believe the truth.

2)

Sylvia Plath was born in massachusetts and raised by her mother and father. Her father died just after she was eight, and his death obviously scarred her quite a bit. she attempted suicide in her college years. She later married Ted Hughes, had a not so happy marriage and divorced him after a few years. She then attempted suicide in her 30s and this time succeded.