Nobody is just one thing. For Audre Lorde – a black, feminist, lesbian – who was writing during a time before intersectional feminism was really a thing, it was sometimes hard to reconcile the different parts of her identity. In her poem Who Said It Was Simple, Lorde discusses both feminism and racism, and the…

In a world where women in the same field are often pitted against each other, it can be especially nice to hear about a (relatively) healthy friendship between two female poets, such as that between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The two women bounced ideas off of each other, possibly inspiring the others poetry at…

When talking about A Streetcar Named Desire, the characters that are most discussed are Blanche and Stanley. And this makes sense, as Tennessee Williams clearly made them the focal point of his play. But this means that Stella, poor Stella, can often be pushed to the wayside.             Stanley and Blanche are on opposite sides;…

It’s fitting that last week I talked about Eliot and Pound, and this week I get to talk about Countee Cullen, because Cullen’s poem Heritage actually reminds me of The Waste Land and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Hear me out here, before you just click away. Like both Eliot and Pound, Cullen was interested in writing…

Okay, so I did talk about The Waste Land in a blog post during my summer semester. I almost decided not to write about it again, feeling almost as if that was cheating. But then I thought well, we didn’t also discuss Ezra Pound last semester, and decided to do it anyway. T.S. Eliot and…