The War Against the Trees | A Look at the Structure of Kunitz's Work
In the following essay the author examines the structure of Kunitz’s “The War Against The Trees.”
In “The War Against the Trees,” Kunitz weaves together two ancient poetic forms using metrical lines that depend in every stanza on at least one set of rhymes. First, he engages the ancient pastoral tradition that depends on the opposition between mechanized civilization and the agrarian life of farms, and pastures. Second, he sets his pastoral poem into a prophetic context: he uses his poem as an occasion to charge his readers with moral, even theologically based fervor about a grave injustice, a terrible transgression.
The pastoral element of the poem is the most readily...
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