Poetry Captures Both the Personal and the Essay

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Poetry captures both the personal and the political, and it allows for collective exploration of an internal psychic world. The poet shares an internal psychic world by clocking emotional forms into language. Poetry appeals to our need to understand ourselves and the universe by using an art form of metaphor and semantics in much the same way that a musician uses notes, chords, and harmonies. It is to this service of poetry that Lucille Clifton writes "The Lost Baby Poem." This poem reveals the confluence of the personal and the political in poetry.

Contemporary poetry is unique in that it does not confine itself to formal structures. While poets are free to draw from the likes of the sonnet or the haiku, free verse has become and remains an equally valid form. "The Lost Baby Poem" is in free verse, and is therefore quintessentially modern. The poet does not consciously impose rhyme or rhythm onto the verses, allowing her own voice to shine through.

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Used as a springboard for a classroom discussion, "The Lost Baby Poem" reveals the ways poets transcend structure in favor of imagery and semantics. At the same time, there are literary devices that stimulate classroom discussion. For example, Lucille Clifton uses repetition throughout "The Lost Baby Poem" for literary effect. It begins when the last word of the first line of the poem meets the first word of the second line: "down." Down also happens to have some assonance with "drown," which is the central motif in the first stanza of the poem. Repetition is also used in the fourth and fifth lines of the first stanza, which both begin, "What did I know about…" The poem then becomes an embodiment of the imagery of drowning, as the poet's words tumble forth without form or structure, allowing the reader to become unsure of which way is down or up. Toward the end of the poem, however, the reader finds air when the poet….....

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