Starlight | Happiness as Seen in "Starlight"
In the following essay, Barron shows how "Starlight" explores the complex emotion that is happiness and, in so doing, risks being too sentimental and nostalgic.
In her textbook Poems Poets Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (1997), Helen Vendler, professor of poetry at Harvard, singles out one distinctive element common to the best poetry everywhere. She tells her readers that good poetry "manages to avoid cliche." What Vendler means is that good poetry is determined to combat both the language of cliche as well as the attitudes, sentiments, and thoughts that have also become cliche. Poetry, in short, is that which is surprising, fresh, new, and unusual both in terms of the language and words used and in terms of the ideas, attitudes,...
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