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The Art of Poetry (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)

At a glance:

The Poem

Formally, this short poem is free verse, divided into five uneven stanzas. On the surface it seems obscure, a mixture of statements and images without much connection. There is no identifiable speaker, even though there is a mention of “we.” The poem begins, not with any statement of subject, but with an assertion that “the mind” “feels bruised.”

This sentence mixing abstraction and image, “mind” and “bruised,” is followed by an image of light making white holes through black “foliage,” succeeded in turn by a line that is both abstraction...

[The entire page is 1460 words long]

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