Beaming Notes
Your Guide to Literature
The New Poetry Handbook by Mark Strand, he is a Canadian- born American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. He received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English in Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until… Continue reading “The New Poetry Handbook” Analysis by Mark Strand: 2022
Martin Espada is a Brooklyn-born professor at the University of Massachusetts who writes poetry in an attempt to humanize the abstract in life and “make the general specific and particular.” He writes about things he has experienced in life, such as the suffering he pens in his poem “Imagine the Angels of Bread.” Espada uses… Continue reading Analysis of “Imagine the Angels,” by Martin Espada: 2022
Written in 1776, at a time of extreme change in both Great Britain and America, “The Crisis” is a perspective on the morale in the United States during the time of the Revolutionary War, written by a man transposed from London to the United States, Thomas Paine. Paine’s insightful, yet disarmingly and painfully honest, writings… Continue reading Analysis of Excerpt from “The Crisis,” an Essay by Thomas Paine: 2022
Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the book “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” which contains this biographical essay. Williams uses the theme of nature and people being linked together throughout her writing. In “Clan of One-Breasted Women,” she uses her statistics and facts and details from her own family history of… Continue reading Analysis of “Clan of One-Breasted Women” by Terry Tempest Williams: 2022
“The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from “The Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer is a robust, playful satire written in the 14th century. This humorous story picks out the bawdy and inappropriate behavior of the time-period and uses a story inside a story inside a story to poke at the hypocrisy inherent in topics that might… Continue reading Analysis of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” by Geoffrey Chaucer: 2022
“Ile,” a story written by Eugene O’Neill in 1817, is a play set in one act about Captain David Keeney, a man obsessed with finding oil, and his wife, who joins him on his ship for what ends up being a two-year voyage in the middle of the ocean that tests the limits of everyone… Continue reading Ile: Analysis: 2023
