Of course a big part of poetry is letting out your creative side; taking what you feel and expressing it through different images to help better portray feelings you have and help readers relate more. If we just wrote down in simple words how we felt, it wouldn’t be poetic. Having the creativity to express your feelings this way, and trying to solve the question of how to do this, is what is shown through some poetry

For example, John Ashbery, author of “The Painter”, talks about a creative block almost. The poem goes through the artists constant search for inspiration. For example, he considers his wife. “He chose his wife for a new subject, as if, forgetting itself, the portrait had expressed itself without a brush.”. Sometimes the search for creativity, almost forcing it to come, can lead you nowhere. Sometimes you just have to let creativity come to you. With that said, ideas might come to you easily, but that doesn’t mean you’ll always like them.

“The Author of Her Book” by Anne Bradstreet, discusses the disappointment artists are faced with when they either can’t come up with an idea or they are displeased with the result. Bradstreet shows this by referring to their work as a child. “Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain”, she says. When we’re creating something, people usually have a certain image in mind of how it’ll come out. And when it doesn’t turn out the way you expected, it can bring about feelings of disappointment.

A lot of the the ideas we can come up with also come from our experiences and the feelings they can manufacture inside of us. Think about when you read a poem. Sometimes, it can sound a bit dramatized. Because to the speaker, that’s how their experience felt. “Ode on a Greecian Urn” by John Keats talks about the story being told on this ancient urn, “forever piping songs forever new”. The poem talks about this person trying to decipher the story that is on this urn, but it’s not quite understood. Much like when a lot of people will read poetry. But in most cases, when poetry goes misunderstood, they give up. However the speaker stands in front of this urn and tries to depict what is on it to understand the story being told. Because, especially with creativity, things take patience.

Blog #11- Alice

A common theme in Alice in Wonderland is childhood, and the story is filled with several quotes that can support this theme. For example, the reading starts off with, “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and having nothing to do”. Children look for adventure and fun, and boredom setting in creates a sense of adventure in them. Of course this could also be seen as foreshadowing to the upcoming events of the story and the adventure she is about to embark on.

Another example is, “Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures.”. This alone is a child-like thing to say. To children, a book with no pictures is considered to be “boring”, the colors and the pictures are the fun of it. The entire world of Wonderland is everything and more from a story book, with the bright colors and talking animals.

One more example is Alice talking to the caterpillar and he says,”and then after you turn into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel a little queer, won’t you?”. This can be seen as him explaining the feeling of becoming an adult. The awkward in-between of not quite being a child and learning to become an adult. The loss of childhood.