Kenneth Fearing’s Dirge Essay -- Kenneth Fearing Dirge Essays

Kenneth Fearings DirgeTraditionally, dirges are smooth in the form of a song or hymn of wail as a memorial to a dead person. The very exposition suggests that the particular qualities of the dead individual deserve recognition. The dirge is not however written for bothone, that for those deserving of glorification, who survive in the memories of the living as testaments to the greater capacities of humankind. It is against this traditional definition that Kenneth Fearings poem, Dirge, is working, not solo as an overt commentary on the social, cultural, and political factors surrounding the destabilisation of 1930s America but also as an abstraction of the normal views of reality the dehumanization of the human. Fearing superimposes these thematic projects onto the context of the Great Depression, a percentage point of Ameri faecal matter history often seen as representing overarching society decline, the dull malaise of futility, and the alienation of the individual. Throug h an exploration of the structural elements of Dirge, one can find just how Fearing constructs a particular vision of modernism.As a prelude to an inquiry into thematic elements of the poem, it is first necessary to draw egress the importance of Fearings use of experimental form. Fearing adheres to the conventional use of strophic poetical construction, making use of epigrammatic style, where the seven stanzas separate the lament into discriminate combinations and experiments on language and the substance suggests to each one might stand simply as organic entities. Putting these highly-varied units into a single poem reflects on the incoherence of broader theme of ending and the response to death, the dirge, as well as the notion that such a broad topic as death contains many sma... ..., the content and form has self-deconstructed, resulting in a meansless reducing/manifestation of repetition. The primary focus of the poem on the death and depot of a man has been sacrifice d, leaving only the skeletal membrane of any sort of focus in the poem. The Dirge which initially was meant to reflect on the life of the individual has been completely abstracted. The Dirge the reader is left with at the end of the poem is one meant for anyone and no one. Just as the informal contradictions in Kenneth Fearings poem have eliminated the substantial significance of each isolated concern, the reader is left without not only a resolution, but any particular tangible meaning at all. The form and content of this poem have quite effectively established a tidy modernist statement, ironically contingent on the absence and not the presence of meaning in life.