The Four American Poets - Assignment Example

The routine is fine for the husband, but the wife feels there could be more to life. The wife thinks: Although she loves her husband, the wife wishes it could be different. The wife even wishes her husband would leave, become a poet, or even die to make her life different. The hardship of an American farmer’s wife is clear. The hard work, lack of appreciation, and expectation of marital duty are clearly making the wife exhausted. The American farmer’s wife is often isolated on acres and acres of land.

This isolation breeds the ill will that the wife wished upon the husband. The daughter then goes on to compare her father to a Nazi. She can never please him. The daughter even wanted to kill her father. He died before she could, but she thought about it. The lack of communication due to different languages is a distinctly American trait. This is another American trait of describing the hardship of American life on the coast of Nantucket. The necessity of fishing and working on the sea is contrasted by the risk and death caused.

The Quakers believe everything is in God’s will. Thus the deaths caused by the sea were divinely ordained. The religion is also a big part of American life. Billy Collins uses the first person in many of his poems. Although the first person is not used in “Winter Syntax”, a lone man is described on a journey. The journey is described by freezing cold, the desert heat, and finally as “shivering, draped in sparkling frost, a smile will appear in the beard of icicles” (Collins).

The lone man travels the American landscape to complete the journey which is one thought. The whole description of the journey is about having one thought. This poem, unlike the previous three, does not deal with death. All of these poems fall under the term confessionalism. The poems are deep thoughts that take the form of a confession.