Poetry Key Quotes Flashcards
John Donne Criticism
We become aware of the artifice of the metaphor and realise our bodies aren’t pieces of land’- Andrews
‘The metaphor suggests that if something can be mapped it can be claimed or owned’
‘The reduction of the female body to private property’- Luft
‘Religious poems…seem designed for an age of doubt and DNA’- Brownjohn
The Love Poem Criticism
‘The politics is in the poetry. The politics is feminism’- Winterson
‘attention to repetition and wordplay’- Reynolds
‘apparent simplicity of her work, however, do not prevent Duffy from addressing complex philosophical issues’
‘attempt to appropriate the great tradition which she subverts’- Jones
Punishment Criticism
‘It’s a poem about standing by as the IRA tar and feather these young women in Ulster’- Heaney
‘transformed the bogs into a pagan, Celtic underworld where the souls of the victims of all the Irish killings through the centuries could find their own resting place’- Famagalli
‘general spirit of reverence toward the past’- Morrison
For My Lover Criticism
‘her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subject’- Jong
Female sexuality – Sexton’s other major theme – was just trivial and embarrassing’- Pollit
‘Like other so-called confessional poets, Sexton reworked her life to suit artistic purposes’
One Flesh Criticism
‘Willingness to tackle uncomfortable subjects’- Lindoop
‘as traditionalist rather than an innovator’- Vassivel
‘Her deeply held Roman Catholicism coloured much of her work’
A quoi bon dire Criticism
‘Mew’s poetry is less bleak, less absolute in desolation of spirit than other fin-de-siecle poets’- Bristow
‘So much loss and death that is defies containment’
‘Death and ecstasy are inextricable’- Schneck
I, being born a woman Criticism
‘The subjects matter obviously proclaims a feminist philosophy’
‘The liberated women’s view’
‘Devoid of romanticising or rationalizing’- Klemans
Love and a question criticism
‘no other living poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men’- Jarrell
‘The dark Frost who was desperate, frightened and brave’- Leithauser
‘A bleak and unforgiving modernist’- McGrath
Meeting Point criticism
‘It marries various literary devices – narrative and song, realism and fantasy’- Rumen
‘the relation between self and other, coherence and flux, expression and time’- Peter Mcdonald
‘the protest of the organic and organising imagination against the chaos of approaching war’- Rumen
Phillip Larkin criticism
‘The characteristic feature that pervades most of Philip Larkin’s poems is its gloomy atmosphere’
‘in his poems men are usually seen as victims, while women are powerful and able to control them, though he considers them insignificant and inferior to men’
‘his inability to avoid the pain of love, by finding it impossible to say why it never worked for (him)’- Kaiter
Vergissmeinnicht criticism
‘Account of both civilian and soldier within a vast, kaleidoscope confusion, of which battle forms the smallest part’
‘Sense of personal isolation to include the fragmentation and alienation of those felt at war’
‘Puts up ugliness or the starkly direct as his weapon of choice’- Goldensohn
After the lunch criticism
‘ruthlessly mocking literary pretensions and absurdities’- Reid
‘Fresh female perspective on contemporary social issues’- Archive
