The parents viewed the baby as "a fiend hid in the cloud" (Line 4), which shows the ingratitude of the parents towards the life of the newborn. ... On the contrary, the illustrations in Blake's original plate for "Infant Sorrow" are contrastingly in a dark room. ... This pessimistic point of view creates a bitter, cynical, scathing tone towards the social and religious structure that allows parents to pray in church while their children are sold into slavery. In this particular set of poems, Blake once again puts on different masks and disguises himself as different ch...

• Word Count: 1939
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

With World War I raging in Europe, he volunteered for the French-based Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service. ... Because of a misunderstanding, Cummings spent four months in an internment camp in Normandy on suspicion of treason, an experience documented in his prose work The Enormous Room (1922). ... From that time, Cummings abandoned his liberal political views and social circle and became an embittered, reactionary conservative on social and political issues. ... Structured in a pattern of darkness moving toward light, 1 x 1 begins with poems that denigrate businessmen and politicians and ends ...

• Word Count: 1201
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate