Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Simic, Charles (Vol. 130) - Philip Miller (essay date Summer 1993)

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Philip Miller (essay date Summer 1993)

SOURCE: “Simic's ‘Cabbage’,” in Explicator, Vol. 51, No. 4, Summer, 1993, pp. 257-58.

[In the following essay, Miller analyzes similarities between Simic's poem “Cabbage,” Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” and John Donne's “The Flea.”]

Charles Simic's recent book Gods and Devils, itself a kind of Dantean parody, contains poems that displace a number of other literary myths. One poem, “Cabbage,” for example, comes nicely into focus when we see its subtle parody of two well-known seventeenth-century carpe diem love poems: Andrew Marvell's “To My Coy Mistress” and John Donne's “The Flea.”

The “mistress” of Simic's poem is about to “chop the head” of cabbage “in half,” just as the mistress in Donne's poem prepares to kill a flea. The cabbage is Simic's emblem for love, like Donne's conceit, but also brings to mind the “vegetable...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Hayden Carruth (review date Summer 1971)
   2. James Atlas (review date February 1975)
   3. Richard Jackson (essay date Winter 1980)
   4. Peter Schmidt (essay date Fall 1982)
   5. Bruce Bennett (review date 12 March 1983)
   6. Charles Simic with Sherod Santos (interview date 1984)
   7. Kenneth Funsten (review date 16 March 1986)
   8. Peter Stitt (review date Spring 1987)
   9. Marci Janas (review date Spring 1991)
   10. Steven Cramer (review date January 1992)
   11. Ileana A. Orlich (essay date Spring 1992)
   12. Edward Hirsch (review date 21 December 1992)
   13. Lisa Zeidner (review date 21 March 1993)
   14. Tam Lin Neville (review date Spring 1993)
   15. Philip Miller (essay date Summer 1993)
   16. Scott Edward Anderson (review date November-December 1993)
   17. Judith Kitchen (review date Winter 1995)
   18. Christopher Merrill (review date 19 March 1995)
   19. Helen Vendler (essay date 1995)
   20. Charles Simic with Molly McQuade (interview date 1995)
   21. David Sofield (review date 13 January 1996)
   22. David Bafer (review date April 1996)
   23. Paul Breslin (review date July 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright