All the years combine
they melt into a dream
A broken angel sings
from a guitar
In the end there's just a song
comes crying like the
wind
through all the broken dreams
and vanished years...Stella Blue, The Grateful Dead
Poetry and Songs
The poems presented here are offered
not as a compilation of the "best" of American verse. Rather they are meant to
show that there is a range of material that could be considered poetic.
Additionally, we want to demonstrate that these "poems" are less self-contained
than one might expect an aesthetic work to be. The Grateful Dead lyric, "Stella
Blue," for instance relies on an understanding of Wallace Stevens' "The Man with
the Blue Guitar," which relies on an understanding of a Picasso painting. These
works converse with each other as a way of creating their meanings and complicate
our thinking about poetry. We've included
- A comparison between Allen Ginsberg and Walt
Whitman
- J.R. Timmer
- A comparison between Wallace Stevens' The Man With
the Blue Guitar and the Grateful Dead's Stella Blue
- Tatjana
Terauds
- An analysis of James Dickey's Sled Buriel Dream
Ceremony
- Tatjana Terauds
- An analysis of Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus
- Allie Tichner
- An analysis of Adrienne Rich's Diving Into the
Wreck
- Cynthia Marichilar
- Discusion of Langston Hughes' Poems
- Belinda Chow, David B. Freeman, Erick Secker
9/3/96