Explaining Ideas of Poems

Answer the following. Each question is to be two paragraphs at least The Modernist dilemma involves a crisis of universally understood meanings. What underlies, or at least attends, that crisis is what Nietzsche’s allegorical character Zarathustra calls the death of God. What Nietzsche observes, through his character, is that Western Civilization has, by the end of the 19th century, stopped looking to religion for value—it finds value in money; and that same civilization has stopped looking to religion for truth: science verifies what is true. Explain. Then using examples of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” “William Carlos Williams’ “To Elsie” and Wallace Stevens’ “Emperor of Ice Cream,” explain how these Modernist writers/poets responded. The Beat Generation poets and writers William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg careen into American literature—particularly Kerouac—in the middle of the 20th century. They reject American materialism as a kind of cage with golden bars. Their search for resonance and meanings called for individuals to be free to explore their desires, needs and possibilities unencumbered by the strictures which come with financial indentureship to houses, cars, appliances and clothes. Not merely rebelling against the setting such luxuries afforded many Americans, the Beats were searching for spiritual and creative happinesses, inner powers, which could not be bought at department stores. Using examples from Allen Ginsberg’s “America” and “Howl,” explain. Robert Bly and James Wright publish, in the 1950’s, an important volume of translations of the poets Pablo Neruda, of Chile, and Cesar Vallejo, of Peru. Bly and Wright both found inspiration for their own poems, too: metaphors and images arise spontaneously from the subconscious, Neruda had said. Using the example of James Wright’s “Minneapolis Poem,” explain. Robert Pinsky and Louise Gluck are distinctly different poets. Pinsky combines Elizabethan virtuosities with a sonic deftness and delight in improvisation which echo the jazz of, say, Charlie Parker. Gluck goes deeper than almost any American poet, surprising and delighting (or scaring) the reader, while using unpretentious American speech. Using any of Pinsky’s poems, and “The Sensual World” by Gluck, explain. David Ferry and Rosanna Warren, both startlingly original American poets, seem almost to inhabit several histories. Each uses their own poetic resources to translate into American English poems written in other languages, and at other times in history. Using Ferry’s “excerpt from Virgil” and “Cavafy: Thermopolae” and Rosanna’s “Il me par” and “The Twelfth Day,” explain.