Term 1

poetry
Form 2 2023
01
Revision

02
Fying Inside Your Own Body by Margaret Atwood

03
Try to Praise the Mutilated World By Adam Zagajewski

04
The Road Not Taken By Robert Frost

TABLE OF
CONTENTS
01.
REVISION
PROVIDE THE

DEFINITION AND AN

EXAMPLE
Metaphor simile personification

alliteration assonance onomatopoeia

hyperbole juxtaposition oxymoron

imagery tone mood

 2. MARGARET

ATWOOD
Margaret Eleanor Atwood, (born November 18, 1939,

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada), is a Canadian writer best known

for her prose fiction and for her feminist perspective.

As an adolescent, Atwood divided her time between

Toronto, her family’s primary residence, and the sparsely

settled bush country in northern Canada, where her father,

an entomologist, conducted research. She began writing

at age five and resumed her efforts, more seriously, a

decade later.
After completing her university studies at Victoria College

at the University of Toronto, Atwood earned a master’s

degree in English literature from Radcliffe College,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1962.

Her works have been translated into over 30 languages

and she has been a full-time writer since 1972, first

teaching English, then holding a variety of academic posts

Within ‘Flying Inside Your Own

and writer residencies.
Body’ Atwood uses deeply
She is best known for her novels (The Handmaid's Tale

symbolic and metaphorical

etc.), in which she creates strong, often enigmatic, women

language to speak on themes of

characters and excels in telling open-ended stories, while

freedom, the self, escapism, and

dissecting contemporary urban life and sexual politics.
contemporary life. In her early poetry collections, Atwood ponders human

behaviour, celebrates the natural world, and condemns

The poem may have stemmed from

materialism. Role reversal and new beginnings are

a feeling of oppression for Atwood

recurrent themes in her novels, all of them centred on

at a point in her life due to an

women seeking their relationship to the world and the

experience that inspired her to

individuals around them.
write. It may be something as
Margaret Atwood is a Fellow of the Royal Society of

widespread and well-known as the

Canada, has been presented with the Order of Ontario and

oppression of women and the

the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit, and has been

feminist movement, or a situation

awarded 16 honorary degrees. She has lived in many

experienced by Atwood herself that

places including Canada, England, Scotland and France,

she simply did not want to specify.

and currently lives in Toronto.
The poem is general enough that it

can be applied to both, as well as

many other situations. It is not

dependant on the situation, but

rather just the feeling.

 Flying Inside Your Own Body
by Margaret Atwood

Your lungs fill & spread themselves,

wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow.
When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon
and your heart is light too & huge,
beating with pure joy, pure helium.
The sun’s white winds blow through you,
there’s nothing above you,
you see the earth now as an oval jewel,
radiant & seablue with love.
It’s only in dreams you can do this.
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the think pink rind of your skull.
It’s always the moment just before gunshot.
You try & try to rise but you cannot.
 3. ADAM

ZAGAJEWSKI
Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945; as an

infant he was relocated with his family to western Poland.

He lived in Berlin for a couple of years, moved to France in

1982, and taught at universities in the United States,

including the University of Houston and the University of

Chicago. Zagajewski wrote in Polish, but many of his

books of poetry and essays have been translated into

English. His prose collections include Two Cities: On Exile,

History and the Imagination (1995) and the 2000 memoir

Another Beauty. Zagajewski won the Prix de la Liberté as

well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation

and the Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

Zagajewski was considered one of the “Generation of ’68”

or “New Wave” writers in Poland; his early work was

protest poetry, though he moved away from that

emphasis in his later work. The reviewer Joachim T. Baer

noted in World Literature Today that Zagajewski’s themes

“are the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and

eternity, silence and death.” The titles of his poetry

'Try to Praise the Mutilated World

collections suggest some of these concerns: Tremor

was published in The New Yorker

(1985), Mysticism for Beginners (1997), Without End: New

just after the September 11 tragedy

and Selected Poems (2002), and Asymmetry (2018).

that occurred in NYC. The theme of

Zagajewski won many awards, including the 2004

the poem greatly resonated with

Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2010

the reader’s emotions and

European Poetry Prize, and the 2013 Zhongkun

experiences at that point in time. International Poetry Prize.

The poem focuses on the most

Writing of Zagajewski’s 1991 collection, Canvas, poet and

reviewer Robert Pinsky commented that the poems are

important ways that people can

“about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history

find happiness in their everyday

not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be

lives. They can step out into

illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense,

nature or return to memories. sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and

feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.”
Nature and memories can be a

source of happiness during

Zagajewski died on March 21, 2021, in Krakow, Poland. He

troubling times, looking at past

was 75.
events and remembering the joy

associated with them. Although

things can, and will, go wrong, it is

important to always focus on

finding positives
 Try to Praise the Mutilated World
By Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Clare Cavanagh

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
 4. ROBERT

FROST
Born in 1874 in San Francisco, California. His father was a

newspaper editor (a profession Frost later practiced

himself, among others), and his mother was a teacher

and Scottish immigrant. When he was about ten years

old, his family moved to Massachusetts to be near his

grandfather, who owned a sawmill. Frost was named

both the valedictorian and the “class poet” of his high

school graduating class...and two years later published

his first poem, “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” in the New York

Independent magazine.
He attended both Dartmouth and Harvard, but dropped

out of both before graduating. His poetry wasn’t gaining

traction in the United States, either. To complicate

matters further, Frost and his wife, Elinor, suffered

personal tragedy when two of their six children died in

infancy.
In 1900, feeling frustrated by his job prospects and a lack

of traction in his poetry career, Frost moved his family to

a farm left to him by his grandfather in Derry, New

His 1916 poem, "The Road Not

Hampshire. Frost would live there for nine years, and

Taken," is often read at graduation

many of his most famous early poems were written

ceremonies across the United

before his morning chores while tending to the farm. But

States. Frost’s poetry was still largely overlooked by American

publishers. Consequently, Frost decided to sell the farm

The poem describes how the

in 1911 and moved his family to London. It was there he

speaker struggles to choose

published his first anthology of poetry, A Boy’s Will, in 1913.
between two roads diverging in
Frost’s second anthology, North of Boston, was published

the yellowish woods on an autumn

in 1914 and found massive success in England. Finally,

morning. after years of struggle, Frost became a famous poet

essentially overnight. In order to avoid WWI, Frost

Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not

returned to the U.S. in 1915 and began teaching at

Taken” as a joke for a friend, the

Amherst College and the University of Michigan, all the

poet Edward Thomas. When they

while continuing to write poetry. He received numerous

awards and recognitions, including the Pulitzer Prize for

went walking together, Thomas

poetry, and became the public face of 20th century

was chronically indecisive about

American poetry. Late in life, at 86 years old, Robert Frost

which road they ought to take and

also became the first inaugural poet at John F. Kennedy’s

—in retrospect—often lamented

inauguration in 1960.
that they should, in fact, have

Throughout his career, Frost never strayed far from old-

taken the other one. . fashioned, pastoral poetry, despite the fact that newer

American poets moved in a more experimental direction.

Frost’s poetry continued to focus on rural New England

life up until his death in 1963.

 The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
 1
What do you think this

poem is about?
QUESTIONS
Use evidence from the
Apply these questions

poem to support your

to each poem to help

answer. you gain a deeper

understanding

2 3
Identify, describe and
discuss the poetic
explain the key
elements found in the
characteristics of the
poem
poem

Setting, speaker, themes,

Look for things mentioned

tone/mood etc. on your "revision" page.

How do these things

relate to the poem and

add to the

meaning/message?

4
Comment on the form

and structure of the

poem

Stanzas, rhyme scheme,

punctuation, lines, layout

etc.

Remember: always try to

support your ideas and

statements with quotes

from the poem