Literary Analysis of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Critics feel that ‘Woods’ by no means the most psychologically rich poem Frost ever wrote, yet in its elegance it has no match. Perhaps the first thing that the reader notices is that the poem is an interior monologue. The first line establishes the tone of a person musing quietly to himself on the situation before him: "Whose woods these are I think I know." He pauses here on "the darkest

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Robert Frost: A Critical Analysis of 'Mending Wall'

Editor's Note: The following essay critically evaluates Robert Frost's famous poem "Mending Wall" and describes how "Mending Wall' is much more than mere annual ritual of repairing a wall that routinely gives in to the onslaught of severe winter and ice."Mending Wall"' is the opening poem of Frost's second volume, North of Boston. "Mending Wall" dramatizes the emancipating imagination in its

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A Psychoanalytical Interpretation of The Catcher in the Rye

Editor's Note: The following treatise presents an Adlerian psychoanalytical interpretation of the J.D. Salinger’s play 'The Catcher in the Rye'. It attempts to demonstrate the neurotic behavior of Holden Caulfield along with his aim for social superiority. It also takes into account the factors influencing the feelings of inferiority in him. "The great authors succeed in creating their

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Walt Whitman: The Poet Electric

The Electric WhitmanOn March 5, 1842, a twenty-two-year-old reporter for the New York Aurora attended Ralph Waldo Emerson's well-traveled lecture, "The Poet." The journalist, Walt Whitman, praised the speech, calling it "one of the richest and most beautiful compositions ... we have heard anywhere, at any time." When Emerson expanded and published the lecture as an essay in 1844, Whitman pored

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G.B. Shaw’s Saint Joan as a Tragedy

"This shows how dangerous it is to be too good," is Shaw's legendary comment on the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Undoubtedly, the same can be said of Joan of Arc.In his detailed Preface to St. Joan, Shaw argues that "an irresistible force" in Joan met "an immovable obstacle" in the Church and "developed the heat that consumed poor Joan." Further, he states that he has tried to maintain his

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Walt Whitman: Science and Mysticism

Walt Whitman was the first important American poet to extol science. In 1855, when the first edition of Leaves of Grass, his epochal volume, came out, the Romantic aversion to science still chafed poetic sensibilities. Through its invasive procedures, the standard indictment read, science violated Nature's pristine wholeness, disfiguring the beauty of natural forms. "We murder to dissect," carped

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An Analysis of Whitman as a Poet

Somewhere in the beginning of our histories of Philosophy, a thinker had announced that the World was a 'Becoming'. That intuition was left to the philosophers until Walt Whitman arrived. And with Whitman the 'Becoming' seems not only to be realized, but to be participated in. All is urge in his poetry. His rhythms flow and break like waves. His stanza have not the measure that belongs to the

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"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking": A Critical Appreciation and Analysis

First published as “A Word Out of the Sea” in the 1860 edition of his collection Leaves of Grass and later published in the 1871 version using the final title. This long poem, one of the most powerful in the collection, is written in lyrical free verse. A boy stands by the seashore at night listening to the song of a mockingbird mourning for his mate; at the same time he listens to the death song

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