Margaret Atwood

Themes of regret and loss permeate the poem "Morning in the Burned House." In fact, the title cleverly capitalizes on the homophone, and readers can understand the lamentations of "mourning" in the...

Bats are frequently misunderstood creatures, and Margaret Atwood celebrates the lives of bats in her short story "My Life as a Bat." More importantly, she juxtaposes bat behavior with human...

The speaker of the poem is one of the mythical sirens, immortalized by Homer in The Odyssey. The sirens are bird/women who sing a beautiful song that lures men to their death. In Homer's version,...

Throughout the story, by positing the narrator as a reincarnated bat, Margaret Atwood calls attention to the differences between bat and human behavior. The narrator, while straightforward in...

Margaret Atwood’s poem “The City Planners” uses a variety of poetic devices to achieve poetic effectiveness. The first two lines, for instance, open with a very heavily emphasized verb in which...

Margaret Atwood is perhaps the leading figure in contemporary Canadian literature and the one with the most significant reputation outside as well as within Canada. She has written important works...

The sentiments and topics of Margaret Atwood's speech "Attitude," given more than thirty years ago, are still applicable today. Seemingly light and humorous in tone, "Attitude" starts with...

This is rather a broad question to answer as you haven't really identified any poems specifically to respond to or if there are certain issues that you would like us to focus on. I have included...

The tone of a poem is emotion or overall impression it conveys. Margaret Atwood's poem, "At the Tourist Centre in Boston" conveys a tone of cynicism and disgust at a tourist display about Canada....

In her novels and poems, Margaret Atwood often addressed themes concerning the lives of Native Americans in her home country of Canada. "The Poor Woman Learns to Write" would seem to be another...

When we paraphrase poetry, we take a section of text and translate it into our own words, often trading figurative language for literal language. Typically, paraphrases are nearer the length of the...

Atwood uses indirect characterization of Gertrude to portray her as a funny, modern, discerning, and determined woman. Indirect characterization occurs when the author allows readers to come to...

It is not clear what happened to Lucy. She was separated from the other cabin mates along with Lois, who went back to camp to get the other cabin mates to help her find her friend. They ended up...

Margaret Atwood's poem "The Immigrants" describes the ways immigrants to a new homeland attempt to "belong" to that new place, but the poem seems to indicate that immigration can lead the...

Margaret Atwood's "It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers" is an examination of the contrast between the speaker's everyday life and the atrocities reported in newspapers each day. Early in the poem,...

Psychoanalytic criticism, which derives from the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, has traditionally emphasized the conflict between three elements of the human mind. These elements are the...

In Margaret Atwood's poem "You Begin," she explores the concepts of language and metaphor through the lens of teaching/learning them. The speaker of the poem seems to be talking to a young child as...

Mood is difficult to define for any given work given mood in a subjective topic. Any text appeals to the emotions of any reader on different levels. Mood, from the Hunter College Glossary of...

Let's compare Atwood's story "Happy Endings" with Alice Munro's story "Boys and Girls." What the female protagonists in both stories have in common is the sense that their lives have been...

While both of these essays touch on feminist issues, they certainly have their distinct differences that make for some interesting comparison possibilities! "My Body is My Own Business" is a very...

Margaret Atwood`s poem, “Siren Song” is a retelling of the siren episode from Homer’s “Odyssey” from the point of view of the sirens. The key to understanding the poem is to realize that there is a...

Penelope's relationship with both her mother and father in The Penelopiad is very complex, and it's a topic that even in the afterlife she still cannot make sense of. After her death, Penelope is...

The speaker tells us what the secret is herself: I will tell the secret to you,to you, only to you.Come closer. This songis a cry for help: Help me!Only you, only you can,you are uniqueat last....

"True Trash" takes place in two different time periods, neither of which is explicitly identified. However, based on the described fashions (long-skirted dresses in the earlier time period, beards...

"Death by Landscape," by Margaret Atwood, is a story that takes place in the past and in the present. Lois, the main character, is sitting in her apartment in the present day looking at her...

Margaret Atwood's poetry collection "The Journals of Susanna Moodie," can be read as an expression of one woman's transformative experience as she journey's through Jungian archetypes and "meets"...

Margaret Atwood's poem "Siren Song" is a modern take on an ancient Greek myth. An alluring female (appearing at least partially human) sings an irresistable song that leads men to their deaths. The...

Flowers appear at frequent intervals in the story and are important symbols. Joseph grows calla lilies in his basement. He also gets very angry as a child when another child picks the one stunted...

Margaret Atwood's The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), is a poem cycle based on Susanna Strickland Moodie's (1852), a non-fiction work about Moodie’s experience as immigrant and pioneer in the...

The Atwood "story" does several things at once. It is a guide of sorts, a kind of lesson to aspiring writers about how plot works, and about how stories end. Her point, given at the end of the...

Atwood’s poem establishes a contrast between how she and her lover relate to the word love versus how others do. The poem begins by discussing some common usages. Atwood refers to the...

Margaret Atwood's "Siren Song" is addressed directly to the reader, and with the first stanza, the speaker creates the dramatic situation: This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the...

A poetry analysis is a far more extensive task than can be done on eNotes, but I can help get you started in the right direction. Poetry analysis includes identifying poetic elements like...

Yes there are examples of all three elements in this poem. To review, a metaphor is comparing two unlike things wherein one thing is said to be the other. Examples of metaphor in this poem...

Margaret Atwood’s poem “The City Planners” presents an unappealing picture of a city that seems so rigidly planned that it is monotonous and boring. The neighborhoods the poem describes seem too...

In The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), Margaret Atwood attempts to engage with the experience of the Canadian landscape as a defining characteristic of the Canadian imagination. She does this...

Attempting to develop a style of writing evocative of a specific author without reading that author's works is an exercise in futility. The identifiable attributes of a particular author, such as...

This is a very broad question, and you might want to think about what specific poems you want us to compare. Atwood is certainly a prolific writer, and as a result has published successful books of...

While many would consider it obvious to state that the attitude in a poem illustrates the attitude of the poet, it is most appropriate to assign the attitude presented in the poem to the narrator....

A quick survey of some of Atwood's poetry reveals that they are rich and fecund texts and particularly suitable to a psychoanalytical approach. This is because so many of Atwood's poems develop the...

Stories lie at the heart of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad. Penelope's first foundational memory is a story: the story of her father trying, but failing, to drown her. The story (but was it...

Margaret Atwood has not only reimagined The Tempest in a contemporary setting, she has created a frame with a Tempest-like plot in which staging a production of the play itself occurs. This...

Although the poem is certainly open to interpretation, what Atwood is doing is drawing contrasting images between what is expected and what is reality. This occurs both through the language of the...

Margaret Atwood's poem "This is a Picture of Me" is a poem which can weigh very heavily upon a reader. Her choice of words bring about a sense of melancholy and sadness. The opening of the poem...

Margaret Atwood's writings tend to speak to science fiction, nature, or feminism (as a whole, but not limited to). Her works which include images of nature tend to elevate the importance of nature...

Some Margaret Attwood quotations from 'The Year Of The Flood' and effects on society might be : “What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Year of...

Atwood uses several poetic devices in her concise poem “You Fit Into Me” to portray the two sides of a relationship. Although it is only four lines long, the poem is an example of extended...

I don't believe that gender is the sole reason for determining whether they would be a better leader than someone else. It depends on the individual and their believes and morals as to what kind of...

Margret Atwood is most noted for her novels and the many awards, including a Booker Award, that they have won. Yet Atwood began her writing career as a poet in the 1960s with her first poetry...

This is a very interesting hypothetical question to consider. Clearly both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood cover similar themes regarding the dystopian end of the world thanks to man's...