WCW Lit Crit

Literary Criticism on WCW's can be found in a few places on line. Commentary on "Overture to a Dance of Locomotives" can be found here ; commentary on "Love Song" (by BU prof & former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky) can be found here ; commentary on "Portrait of a Lady," "Queen-Anne's-Lace," "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," and "The Great Figure," can be found here.

Read & respond to three of the commentaries. The purpose of this activity is for you to get a sense of how people write about poetry. There's a great range from formal to informal, from focus on sense to focus on sound, from abstract discussion of theme and purpose to concrete focus on word choices and line breaks. The best commentaries on WCW attempt to take on the poem as a whole comprise of parts; after all as WCW says a poem is a "machine made of words."

Be prepared to talk about the following on Friday (12/14):
1. How did the critical commentary help you understand particular aspects of the poem and/or the overall meaning? (Show that you have understood what the reader-critic is saying and then apply that understanding to your own take on the poem.)

2. What interpretations and analysis in the critical commentary are you skeptical about or do you disagree with? Explain. (Show an understanding of the critic's point; offer a counter argument.)

3. Discuss the language used in the commentary. Think about the word choices (diction) and sentence structure (syntax). Evaluate the writing: clear? sophisticated? stylish? Cite examples.

4. What references, allusions, terms, etc. would you like to know more about in order to better understand the commentary, the poem, the cultural and historical context of the poem, etc.?

(WCW's poem "The Great Figure" became the basis for a well-known modernist painting by WCW's friend Charles Demuth. You can see the painting off on the right of the blog. I've also put the Jean-Honore Fragonard painting that WCW seems to refer to in "Portrait of a Lady" over on the right side of the blog.)