Word: poetically
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...READ Margaret Atwood's own voice--as opposed to one of the many voices of her fictional and poetic personae--is to see the feminist motto "the personal is political" in a new light. Atwood once described herself in an interview as a "de facto feminist," taking the position that every intelligent woman is a feminist--but she can also argue from the standpoint of a crusader for women's rights, a poet, a novelist, a pioneering critic of Canadian literature, a Canadian nationalist, and an Amnesty International activist. The essays in Second Words emanate from all these Atwoods...
...Poetic technique, however, is difficult to pin down. Lowell's language sometimes becomes clunky and almost anti-lyrical. But Williamson argues that this quality mirrors a disintegration of consciousness--or, more appropriately, a new realization of the discontinuities of consciousness. It is refreshing that Williamson distinguishes between the deliberate use of anti-lyricism as a technique and the recurrent inattention to poetic technique that characterizes the poets of bad surrealism. Clumsy diction can illustrate the disintegration of consciousness and some poets even use language as a weapon against itself, as James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and Robert Bly do at times...
...immediately, because that argument has often been used as a basis for pot-shots at poets of all types. But Williamson sees no need to go on the defensive, and the assumption that underlies his refusal "to apologize for regarding the self as one of the great human and poetic subjects," is a correct one. As Williamson points out, such poetry is less susceptible to vague abstraction since it less often presumes to make universal generalizations. He does not need to add that critiques of a poem's subject matter are often a substitute for proper scrutiny...
...transcends his isolation by projecting himself outwards, at the same time engaging the reader in the transformation. Lapses in personal poetry, then, can be either failures at any step of this ritual--such as the unquestioning immersion in narcissism which leads to psychic laundry lists--or simple failures of poetic technique...
...American dream they have not quite assimilated. By touching this language with the accents of Brooklyn's old ethnic neighborhoods, this company simultaneously grounds the dialogue in the reality that formed Miller and his play, and grants his rhetoric, at last, the full weight, color and, yes, poetic power one sensed was waiting to be unlocked...