Lisel Mueller’s Poem “Things” with New Criticism
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백정국
Literary Criticism
2014. 10. 28
Lisel Mueller’s Poem “Things” with New Criticism New Criticism is a methodology which argues that literature is independent and criticizes only the text itself without any background, such as its relevance to any information about author or the situations of the time period when it was written. In this paper, I try to analyze and find the poetic beauty of Lisel Mueller’s poem “Things” by using the perspective of New Criticism.
First of all, what can be found in this poem is visual imagery. In the first line, “what happened is” makes the reader imagine that something has occurred. The author tries to visualize almost all the imagery by using the material subjects and verbs like “gave”, “fitted”, “hung”, and so on. Also, one of the most significant features in this poem is personification. In reality, material things such as, “the clock”, “the shoes”, “the pitcher”, and “the country” cannot have qualities like, “face”, “tongue”, “lip”, “heart”. They also cannot feel fatigue and have emotional language. The author mainly uses personification so that the reader can understand the subjects of this poem with more familiarity.
In addition, there is focus on how the author chooses words and the meaning of them. In the first stanza, there is a clock, a chair, and a table. The narrator says that because “we grew lonely, we gave them a face, a back, and four legs which will never suffer fatigue”. The clock, the chair, and the table have something in common; they are all unmovable materials which have simple meaning and each one cannot have stability without the support of a face, a back, and legs. From this common characteristic of these subjects, the author wants to show interrelation between things, including human beings. In this regard, the author uses many material subjects represented by “things”, but she tries to tell us about humanity.
These meaning of subjects are expanded from unmovable material things to large subjects
백정국
Literary Criticism
2014. 10. 28
Lisel Mueller’s Poem “Things” with New Criticism New Criticism is a methodology which argues that literature is independent and criticizes only the text itself without any background, such as its relevance to any information about author or the situations of the time period when it was written. In this paper, I try to analyze and find the poetic beauty of Lisel Mueller’s poem “Things” by using the perspective of New Criticism.
First of all, what can be found in this poem is visual imagery. In the first line, “what happened is” makes the reader imagine that something has occurred. The author tries to visualize almost all the imagery by using the material subjects and verbs like “gave”, “fitted”, “hung”, and so on. Also, one of the most significant features in this poem is personification. In reality, material things such as, “the clock”, “the shoes”, “the pitcher”, and “the country” cannot have qualities like, “face”, “tongue”, “lip”, “heart”. They also cannot feel fatigue and have emotional language. The author mainly uses personification so that the reader can understand the subjects of this poem with more familiarity.
In addition, there is focus on how the author chooses words and the meaning of them. In the first stanza, there is a clock, a chair, and a table. The narrator says that because “we grew lonely, we gave them a face, a back, and four legs which will never suffer fatigue”. The clock, the chair, and the table have something in common; they are all unmovable materials which have simple meaning and each one cannot have stability without the support of a face, a back, and legs. From this common characteristic of these subjects, the author wants to show interrelation between things, including human beings. In this regard, the author uses many material subjects represented by “things”, but she tries to tell us about humanity.
These meaning of subjects are expanded from unmovable material things to large subjects