potery research paper
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TermPaper.docxRepresentations of Nature in Sarah Teasdale’s “Spring in War-Time” and “There Will Come Soft Rain.”
Abstract:
All over the world, the study of the environment is a hot topic in the twenty-first century. Literature has dealt with environmental awareness strongly by depicting nature and therefore critical theory addressed this representation through the establishment of the ecocriticism theory. Ecocriticism is “the study of the relationship between literature and environment” (Glotfelty xviii) from an interdisciplinary point of view. This paper will provide an ecocritical study of two of Sarah Teasdale’s poems: “Spring in War-Time” and “There Will Come Soft Rain.” Sarah Teasdale is an American lyric poet who wrote most of her poems using elements of nature. In these two antiwar poems there is a sharp contrast in the way she depicts nature. In one poem, she empowers nature while in the other, she represents nature as something gloomy, depressed, victimized and unimportant? I will compare the two poems to reveal how Teasdale manages to utilize the figurative language to represent nature differently. Comment by Ashwaq Basnawi: This sentence is weak
You can make it stronger if you say something like:
Teasdale’s poetry predominantly depicts nature imagery to evoke ….. Comment by Ashwaq Basnawi: This should be a very strong sentence. We’ll revise it later based on your analysis. This sentence must come before the previous one because you discover the different representations through figurative language.
Introduction:
The American poet Sara Trevor Teasdale was born on August 8, 1884, in St. Louis, Missouri, to an old pious family. Until the age of nine, she had a home school education. Afterward, she traveled regularly to Chicago, and she eventually became part of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine circle. She published her first poem in the St. Louis, Missouri, weekly Ready’s Mirror in May 1907. Later in the same year, she published Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems, which is her first volume of verse. Her second volume, Helen of Troy and Other Poems, succeeded in 1911. After rejecting several other suitors, including Vachel Lindsay, Teasdale married Ernst Filsinger in 1914. She published her third collection, Rivers to the Sea, a year after her marriage. In 1916 she moved to New York City with her husband. She was awarded the Columbia University Poetry Society prize (the old version of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry) in 1918. She also won the annual award of the Poetry Society of America for her collection Love Songs (1917). Through this time, she manages to edit two anthologies, The Answering Voice: One Hundred Love Lyrics by Women (1917), and Rainbow Gold for Children (1922).
Teasdale’s poems are known for their classical style. She wrote technically exquisite, perspicuous, explicit lyrics usually in conventional verses such as quatrains or sonnets. She is renowned for her passionate and romantic subject matter. Her prosperity as a poet nevertheless is evident in her three collections, Flame and Shadow (1920) Dark of the Moon (1926), and Star To-night (1930). The poems of theses collections prove growing delicacy and economy of expression. Her marriage failed and ended in divorce in 1929 and lived as a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. She committed suicide on January 29, 1933, with an overdose of barbiturates. Teasdale’s last and most exceptional collection, Strange Victory, appeared that same year posthumously.
All over the world, the study of the environment is a hot topic in the twenty-first century. Literature has dealt with environmental awareness strongly by depicting nature and therefore critical theory addressed this representation through the establishment of the ecocriticism theory. Ecocriticism is “the study of the relationship between literature and environment” (Glotfelty xviii) from an interdisciplinary point of view. It has other names such as green (cultural) studies, ecopoetic and environmental literary criticism. Ecocritics endeavor to explore the hidden environmental qualities and concern. They are concerned about finding the significance of the word 'nature' and whether the examination of "place" should be a separate category like class or race.
William Rueckert was the first to coin the term ‘ecocriticism’ in his essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” which he published in 1987. He aimed to stress on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.” Later, it was studied by other works such as Raymond William’s The Country and the City (1973) and Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival (1974).
Raymond William contributed a great deal in this field by composing his book Country and the City (1973). It is considered as a brilliant work mirroring many years of doubt and ideological avoidances of this genre. He proceeded to maintain unambiguous green socialism.
Joseph Meeker's is an author who is considered as another antecedent of ecocritical writing. He composed an ecocritical text, The Comedy of Survival (1974), which is likewise a new content in this field. In his book, he argues that the reason behind an environmental crisis is the cultural tradition in the west of the separation of culture from nature.
So, there are many authors who have contributed in this field and Sara Teasdale is one such poet who has demonstrated her concern for nature. Teasdale’s poetry predominantly depicts nature imagery to evoke emotions. She wrote two anti-war “Spring in War-Time” and “There Will Come Soft Rain” in which she uses nature to represent her ideas. There is no in-depth study that look at these two poems as an ecocritical texts. ….
Therefore, this paper is going to do a comparative ecocritical analysis of the two poems “Spring in War-Time” and “There Will Come Soft Rain.” The analysis will be focused mainly on the poet’s figurative language. ….
Section 1: Representations of Nature in “Spring in War-Time”:
Section2: Representations of Nature in “There Will Come Soft Rain”:
Work cited
“Sara Teasdale.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sara-teasdale.
Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, editors. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. The University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Clarke, George Herbert. A Treasury of War Poetry. Mifflin, 1917.
Teasdale, Sara. Flame and Shadow. Macmillan Company, 1925.
Girard, Melissa. “‘How Autocratic Our Country Is Becoming’: The Sentimental Poetess at War.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, pp. 41–64., doi:10.2979/jml.2009.32.2.41.
