Feeling Poetry Linda McCarriston shapes feelings of anger, rage, contempt and healing in her poetry through narration, metaphors with detailed sensory language as she unfolds the painful story of sexual abuse and family abuse at the hands of her alcoholic father. In an interview with Bill Moyers, Linda McCarriston states that "poetry allows the individual experience to strike like lightning through the collective institutional consciousness and to plumb the depths of actual communal experience so that what people don't want said in fact get said". (Moyers p. 272). Her simplest defini...

• Word Count: 3020
• Approx Pages: 12
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

A proem is a short introduction, in verse, to the matter and meaning of the rest of the poem. Some published editions of the poem do not make a division between The Proem and The Dream. The Proem is lines 1 through 290, and The Dream is lines 291 through 1334, the end of the poem. In  The Book of the Duchess, the poet is introduced in the first person. He has difficulty getting to sleep and has not slept, he says, for eight years. ...

• Word Count: 5753
• Approx Pages: 23
• Grade Level: High School