Affiliation:
1. Humanities Department , University of Trento , Via Tommaso Gar 14 , 38122 Trento , Italy
Abstract
Abstract
This article offers a meditation on the idea of home as expressed by four US poets belonging to different historical periods and socio-cultural backgrounds. At first, the poetic compositions I will discuss may startle readers in ways similar to what happened to Ludwig van Beethoven’s contemporaries as they first listened to his experimental and defamiliarizing late quartets. Emily Dickinson, Jennifer Elise Foerster, Richard Wright, and Agha Shahid Ali populate their homes with volcanoes, lice, faces hidden in gingerbread tins, and half-inch Himalayas. Moving alternately between macroscopic and microscopic dimensions, this article asks provocatively: How is the relation between movement and homemaking staged in these poems? To what extent do these poetic compositions bear the marks of homelessness and of imaginary homes? And finally, what should we make out of this unharmonious wholeness?
Subject
Literature and Literary Theory,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
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