Americká literatura
Sandburg, Carl. "Elephants Are Different to Different People".
Summary
Three common men stand in a zoo watching an elephant and each has completely different questions running through his head.
The first man is practical: he asks how the animal is called, where it comes...
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Sandburg, Carl. "Fog".
Summary and Analysis
A brief, condensed Imagist poem in a simple, easily accessible language: "The fog comes / on little cat feet. / It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent haunches / and then moves...
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Sandburg, Carl. "Graceland".
Summary
The first stanza states that a multi-millionaire's tomb, his last long home, is decorated each year with flowers worth 25 000 dollars. The dead man commanded this in his last will.
The next stanza is...
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Sandburg, Carl. "Last Answers".
Summary and Analysis
A clever, slightly ironical, yet tender poem. It seems to refer to Sandburg's poem "Fog". The speaker seems very much to be identified with Sandburg. The speaker develops thoughts on the...
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Sandburg, Carl. "Pennsylvania".
Summary
The speaker says that he has been to Pennsylvania, to the Monongahela and Susquehanna, and around the Appalachians. He simply describes that he has seen police, boys playing marbles, tough workers...
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Shepard, Sam. Buried Child.
Summary & Analysis
Characters
Dodge: In his late seventies. Thin and sickly, plagued by fits of cough. Cures himself by whiskey drinking and smoking rather than taking his medicine. Former prosperous...
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Singer, Isaac Bashevis. "The Lecture".
Summary
The first-person narrator is a Yiddish writer, a Polish Jew who fled from the Nazi regime and became a naturalized American citizen. He travels by train from New York to Montreal where he is to deliver...
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Stein, Gertrude. Melanctha.
Note
Melanctha is the middle part of Three Lives, a book consisting of three novella-length stories, the other two being The Good Anna and The Gentle Lena.
Summary
Melanctha & Rose: The story is set in...
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Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men.
Summary
Introducing George & Lennie: The novella is set in California, a few miles south of Soledad. It focuses on an curious pair of men, migrant workers who travel together. George Milton is small and...
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Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.
Background Summary
Depression in the Dust Bowl: The novel opens with a description of the red and grey country of Oklahoma. It is high summer and the crops of corn are ruined by heat, draught, and dust. The...
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Stevens, Wallace. "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman".
Summary and Analysis
The poem seems to be addressed to the didactic poetical tradition which tries to build a church from the moral law and then from the church to build a "haunted heaven". Formally the...
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Stevens, Wallace. "Anecdote of the Jar".
Summary and Analysis
The speaker announces that he placed a jar upon a hill in Tennessee and the very jar made the wilderness surround it. Then the wilderness was no longer wild and the jar was a port in air....
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Taylor, Edward. "Huswifery".
Summary and Analysis
A devotional poem. "Huswifery" is "housekeeping", here specifically weaving.
The speaker addresses Lord and asks him to turn him into his spinning wheel. The speaker matches the parts of...
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Taylor, Edward. "Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold".
Summary and Analysis
A poem of detailed natural observation, at the same time a devotional poem.
The speaker watches a wasp which is warming her stiffened limbs in the breath of Sol (i.e. the personified Sun)....
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Taylor, Edward. "Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children".
Summary and Analysis
A devotional poem, at the same time an intimate confession of a parent on a painful subject.
The speaker admires the knot (i.e. a flower bed) which God made in paradise. He freely proceeds...
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