For this week’s forum, respond to one of the following questions:

1. One of Robinson’s major themes is the failure of the individual.  His characters are sunk in doubt and disbelief.  Their most frequently experienced emotion is despair, and most of them are beyond hope, with little understanding of their own conditions.  Using “Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevey” as your proof texts, discuss what the poet wants the reader to discover about himself or herself.

2. Explore Amy Lowell’s imagery in “September, 1918.” How does the line, “Some day there will be no war” (line 9) reshape our view of the images that come before and after?

3. Explore Pound’s use of metaphor in his three poems to achieve the literary aims of Imagism.

4. Frost believed with Emerson that “natural facts are signs of spiritual facts” or, at least, that the human heart has a deep desire to read nature as the symbol of spirit. How does nature symbolism shape the speaker’s and the reader’s view of the spiritual in Frost’s “Mending Wall” and/or “The Wood-Pile”?

5. Discuss the theme of appearance versus reality as it is evident in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”