‘A Poison Tree’ is one of the poems from William Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. This poem – one of his most popular and widely studied – is about the ways in which anger eats away at us when it is […]
Tag: Poetry
A Summary and Analysis of Maya Angelou’s ‘Phenomenal Woman’
‘Phenomenal Woman’ is a 1994 poem by the American poet Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Angelou was a singer, dancer, composer, actor, teacher, memoirist, and poet: a woman of many talents. She was also a key voice in the American civil rights movement. Much of her work is about striving to succeed, […]
Key Quotes from Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ Explained
‘The Tyger’ is not only one of the best-known poems of the poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827): it is only of the best-known and best-loved poems in the English language. Part of the power of Blake’s paean to the terrible beauty of the tiger is the insistent trochaic rhythm […]
A Summary and Analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘Speech to the Young’
‘Speech to the Young’, full title ‘Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward’, is a poem by the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, included in her 1970 collection Family Pictures as well as several subsequent collections. The poem is dedicated to Brooks’ two children, Nora Brooks Blakely and Henry Blakely […]
A Summary and Analysis of Langston Hughes’ ‘Harlem’
‘Harlem’ is a short poem by Langston Hughes (1901-67). Hughes was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s. Over the course of a varied career he was a novelist, playwright, social activist, and journalist, but it is for his poetry that Hughes is now […]