The Essential Poets Series by Joyce Carol Oates - Book Report/Review Example

The Essential Poets Series by Joyce Carol Oates In this eminent accumulation to “The Essential Poets series,” the author, Joyce Carol Oates has presented a “personal but not private” collection of Emily Dickinson favorites, beginning from relatively obscure art works together with well-known poems to reflect Emily’s regularly unacknowledged range. Joyce is very keen to introduce the audience to the poet’s dissident friskiness; to her radical aesthetic and rebellious nature; to her gender bending façades and astonishingly fabulous comicality (Dickinson and Joyce 43). At the core of this collection, definitely remains the artwork that made Dickinson’s own character as one of great visionary poets of America. One of the artists who have done her work with astonishing lucidity and stoic control about the soul’s obscurest, most petrifying moments. An illuminating and concise introduction to the artwork of an important composer, “The Essential Dickinson” is an astonishing tribute as well from one outstanding woman writer to another. It clearly confirms once again that in most occasions, great art withstands, in Auden’s conspicuous idiom, “in the guts of the living.” Writing in an elliptical, dense flair that arrays from surrealistic to naturalistic to realistic, Oates tries to concentrate on sexual, intellectual and spiritual malaise of the modern American culture; this is witnessed in most of her fiction, revealing the darker nature of human condition. Her violent and tragic plots abound with episodes of incest, murder, rape, suicide, child abuse and mutilation, and her protagonists usually agonize as a result of the natures of their social milieu or even their emotional flaws. This is especially depicted in most of her female characters, who are rendered passive, dysfunctional and susceptible to abuse and exploitation in a male dominated society. Due to this fact, feminist critics regard Oates a provocative figure, since she has built few independent, strong female role models in most of her works. Legendary fame is possibly not the aim, but it appears to have been the main subject to which the composer has given some thought. The poet exposes authors who did poetry to gain recognition. The poet’s willed invisibility/anonymity in her work needs an ascetic clipping back of everything that is distracting and superfluous and simply ancient as objected to eternal (Dickinson and Joyce 411). Subsequently, much of the external universe, the “real world” an individual may refer to, has been omitted from the Poet’s work. For instance, clear national slavery disgrace, the main datum of the Civil War is not actually mentioned in her composition though she had reliable sources during those times. The very antithesis of the war-conscious, public-minded, rhapsodically inconsolable Walt Whitman; the poet never tempted to shied away from the inordinate themes of loss, human suffering, madness, even death, but her main perspective was privately intense. Just like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Ranier Maria Rilke, she stands to be a prodigious bard of inwardness, of that indescribable soul region in which we are in a sensible way all one. Measured against canto characteristic of her period, the poet’s work constitute a type of counter-poetry. The poet’s miniaturist artwork is as jarring and radical as landscape of Cezanne would have appeared to 19th century eyes captivated of the colossal. The bard has omitted most things to do with orthodoxy. Most of the poems from a point of view are revolutionary: her ostensibly breathless dashes and pauses, her odd, disjointed expressions and radical rhyme variants, blacken capitalizations, tempo, and cadence all reveal poetry of uniqueness and unnerving gifts. “The critic is supposed and surely must start from a position of utter humility,” wrote the author. “as well as the novelist, antagonizing his or her oceanic material, and the living, stubborn, breathing characters who finally step out of that material and in turn claim their own interpretations of it. Humility and then finally plunge into audacity.” It is emblematic of Oates to compare instead of contrasting the novelist and the critic. Her work has laid more emphasis on communion as compared to conflict in as much both of them are repetitively at work within it in the end. Where there is humility in most of her comments and other poets’ work that plummet into audacity is clearly witnessed in her works as robust as Belle-fleur, Blonde and Zombie (Dickinson and Joyce 301). The author uses styles that seek to impede the mind of any type of a person, be it male or female, white or black, not to mention class: name any type of hat and she has captured it or she intends to. The essays in this special case maybe contain only one mutual thread as seen. Each strives, with critical humility and possibly a hint there or here of audacity, for the purpose of defining or redefining an aspect of the poet’s artistic vision. Since Oates has published all types of writings for several decades, somebody may think that the parameters of that particular vision are very clear in nature, but evidently, they are not. It is doubtful if the mature Oates has great interest in critical acclaim or complaint. Where the younger writer may once have required an applause boost; however teasingly commented on, most of her late work tries to give advice to the young writers to desist from such youthful idiocy. The novelist perceived vision does not matter after all, at least to the reader, who at the end of it all the only victim of consequence. The author’s work also tells the story of change in the consumption, publication and interpretation of lyric poetry. The author’s work does not contain modern peer, amalgamating as it does knowledge of a variety of pertinent philosophy, poetic theory and poetry as an inquiry gives way no one has ever thought to explore. Essential Dickinson stunningly chains scrupulous theoretical and historical explorations of Dickinson’s inexplicable poetic approaches, and in so doing it allows for the most ultimate questions about what readers and critics since Dickinson have termed the lyric. Future poetry writing in the 19th century U.S and on the nature of lyric and lyrical reading will require focusing on Oates’ searching arguments. The author’s rhyme as well serve as prime examples of academic work that is worth revisiting. The reflection paper shall try and accommodate the themes within Oates’ work. This will be successful through implemented stylistic approaches in the reflection paper. Following the advice that young star should have according to the author, the reflective paper shall be in accordance to what is expected of such. The reflection paper shall also establish a productive critical context for thought not only regarding lesser-recognized writers whose artwork rewards closer analysis, but as well as the developments in the field that may have fled the attention of mainstream academics. Work Cited Dickinson, Emily, and Joyce C. Oates. The Essential Dickinson. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003. Print. Read More