Choose one of the eight schools of criticism. Choose a poem from part Essay

Choose one of the eight schools of criticism. Choose a poem from part two of your english 1302 textbook. Craft an argument through the lens of your chosen schools criteria or focus on that poem - Essay Example This serves as a challenge for the reader to try and relate the author’s events with that of a historical event. It is here that he reader is curious as to which race in history is known for martyrdoms? If the first of the reader’s guesses is the Jews, then this answer is conveyed in the latter parts of the poem. One cannot help but sympathise with the state of hopelessness of the author in the second stanza. This is evidenced in the lines: ‘nothing serves me to assuage the agony of our age.’ 1The second part of the poem which is at the beginning of the third stanza is also an emphasis on the hopelessness of the author that her life will not become better with time. We get to know of her obsession with redemption from the life she is living at that time. Short terse and compact lines compel he reader to sympathise with the author’s situation. The reader can feel the sorrow and agony of someone in despair from the use of such short and emotional lines. The reader also is constantly in question as to who is the cause of such misery to the author but a good historical background may serve well to inform the reader that he setting of the poem was in Nazi Germany, where the Germans oppressed the people of Jewish origin. From the line, ‘The Jew of ghetto crawls,’ the reader is given a distinct imagination ox the deplorable living condition of the Jews as they were living in the Holocaust. 2The reader sympathises with the author for the horrors that she experiences of her teenage years after reading the following stanza: â€Å"Like every living Jew I have in imagination seen the gas-chamber the mass-grave the unknown body which was mine and found in every German face behind the mask the mark of Cain I will not make their thoughts my own by hating people for their race.†2 Gershon says that ‘Here and there a Jew lifts an individual face, a man for the sake of his gifts