Political Poetry by Margaret Atwood Essay - 1035 Words

Backdrop addresses cowboy by Margaret Atwood Creating a masterful poetic movement through the American mythos, Atwood skewers manifest destiny by embodying the voice of the Other, the discarded I am. Writing political poetry that artfully confronts dominant ideology – thus exposing the motivation and effects of misrepresentation – is a difficult challenge. The process can easily be derailed by temptations to write strident, overly didactic verse that elevates sentiment above nuance and craft. While passion is certainly important, it is the poem itself that transforms political intent into a dynamic act of oppositional literature. To be effective as a statement, it must first be effective as a poem. In Backdrop addresses cowboy,†¦show more content†¦Regarded as a heroic figure by the myth of manifest destiny, he is conversely seen as a reckless tyrant by those who suffer the effects of his violence. The first stanza reveals a comic figure - Starspangled cowboy sauntering through his child-like fantasy while pulling a prop from the Hollywood simulacrum that supports his myth. Atwood complicates this image in the second stanza when she introduces violence to h er almost- /silly characterization of the mythical West. Using a line break to accentuate the transition, she plays the impact of a stand-alone line against the expanded meaning of its grammatical context. Isolated, line six (you are innocent as a bathtub) relates directly to the opening stanza’s child-like caricature, forming an aphoristic trope that is both interesting and oddly mundane. Accentuated by the break, the line’s reading adds dramatic nuance when its sentence unfolds into a broader meaning: you are innocent as a bathtub / filled with bullets. Contrasting the ironic character of opposed readings (innocent and not-at-all-innocent) within the space of shared words, Atwood foreshadows an overall conceptual structure in which backdrop refers both to the simulacrum of Hollywood sets and to the genuine environment of a beleaguered world. Despite its obvious quantitative reference, bathtub / filled with bullets also infers a Hollywood clichà © – the bullet -riddledShow MoreRelatedThe Life and Achievements of Margaret Eleanor Atwood Essay1687 Words   |  7 PagesMargaret Eleanor Atwood, one of the most acclaimed and idolized writers’ to date. Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, on November 18th, 1939 in the Ottawa General Hospital. Two and a half months after the beginning of the Second World War (Atwood). She is a renowned novelist and poet; furthermore writer of short stories, critical studies, screenplays, radio scripts and books for children (Gale). Margaret Atwood is a living inspiration to many writers today. 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