Poetry Reading Club
ENGLISH READING CIRCLE ON POETRY AND PROSE POETRY – POEM OF THE MONTH ANALYSIS: “BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON” BY EMMA LAZARUS
Our first poem for 2016 is “By the waters of Babylon,” by Emma Lazarus. It’s a long poem, broken up into different sections, and each section is written in prose. This makes it not quite an epic poem, although it does share the epic’s mythologizing impulses. The poem is a wonderful blend of tradition and
Poetry Reading Club: second poem of the month
Our second poem for this month is “The Operation” (1962), by Anne Sexton. Like “Tulips” (1961), by Sylvia Plath, this poem is set in a hospital and records the speaker’s heightened emotional response to a surgical procedure. Like Plath, Sexton is associated with the confessional school of poetry, and many of the questions we asked
Poetry Reading Club: First poem of the month
March brings us “Tulips” (1961) by Sylvia Plath. In this poem, color and nature imagery are used to great effect, just as in last month’s poem, “Colors passing through us” (1999), by Marge Piercy. But while Piercy’s poem dazzled us with its sensuous depictions of earthly delights laid out in “all the colors of the