Language

The paradox literary device turns apparent contradiction into truth. Explore Hamlet's cruel kindness, literary examples, and ways to analyze it. Read more.

The allusion literary device borrows meaning from other works. Trace Faulkner's Macbeth reference and learn what it adds to a passage. See examples in context.

Add to the list of great American poets that nobody is talking about. He has been writing quietly for over four decades and gained prominence among the Language school poets. is another masterful accomplishment that further explores his unique form. Since the 1980s, he has been composing copious amounts of syntactically-innovative poetry. It might appear, [...]

In the introduction to you refer to your poems as “ghost sonnets.” Why “ghost sonnets?” And what prompted you to (a) select a definitive form, the sonnet, in which to write the poems and (b) to shave a line off the form? I call them “ghost sonnets” because they’re missing the 14th line of a [...]

This anxiety Walt Whitman has about poetry emerges in the poem “Song of Myself,” as Whitman seeks to establish a taxonomy of poetry, a system classifying what is good poetry, what bad, but the structure he establishes keeps collapsing. The poem is one Whitman’s fullest explanation of his theory of language and poetry, perhaps even [...]

There’s been a bit of back and forth about questions of translatability ( and ), and I thought it was worth some observations. I have mentioned this before on the blog, but for those who do not know, I teach upper level ESL to students who plan on entering graduate school in North America. It’s [...]

This entry is part of a series, Joe Weil on Metaphor» In my next several posts, I am going to talk about metaphors and the invisible neutrino of “and” that lies beneath them. I will make the following contentions: 1. Metaphors are as much about disassociation as association 2. Metaphors generate subtexts. 3. Consciousness and [...]