The Battle of Two Confusing Poems: Stevens vs. Moore

Ok. The two poems i chose to compare and contrast were Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" and Marianne Moore's "To a Snail". These two poems completely baffled my mind. i didn't understand what either poet was trying to say in either of their poems. The only two similarities i can clearly see between the two is that there really isn't any set rhyme scheme and that each poem confuses the hell out of every single person that dares to read the poems. In "The Emperor of Ice Cream" i can honestly say that i have no idea what exactly the message is that Stevens' is trying to get across here. I dont think that he is talking about ice cream because i dont see any references in the poem that resmeble anything about ice cream or making ice cream. in fact, the only lines in the poem that even mention ice cream are the final lines of each stanza that say "the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream". Moore's poem is a little less confusing than the last one by Stevens, but i guess i just dont really understand why she is writing a poem about a snail. in this poem Moore compliments a snail's abilitly to contract and move without feet. So, i have found the difference between the two poems: i can actually understand what Moore is talking about as opposed to Stevens poem. Like in Stevens' poem, Moore's also has a lack of a rhyme scheme and i also dont really understand the overall message of her poem. Overall, these two poems just really confuse me because no matter how hard i think about it, i can not figure out what each poets overall message is in the their poem.

Elliot vs. Modernism

After reading T.S. Elliot's The Waste Land, I can see why people might object to calling him a true Modernist. When i started reading this work i was having trouble trying to grasp his whole concept behind this complicated poem. i think i now know what you meant when you said that this poem is difficult. But, to do this blog assisgnment i realized that we dont have to understand what Elliot is saying; i only have to pull out concepts which i thought would be related to a modernists' writing. The way we described modernism in class, i got the idea that modernism is based around certain ideas or priciples -- these ideas include violence in terms of a form of identity, the rise of technology, and the rise of the social class system. Right away one of those ideas can be thrown away in this poem because i cant recall one time in the text when technology had been mentioned. there is also no real mention of the class system here either. Because those two ideas are missing from this poem i can see why people might not look at Elliot as being a modernist. On the other side, people might classify Elliot as a modernist after reading this poem because this text is all about death and destruction -- it has an all around dark and sinister feel to it. right away, just from raeding the title of the the first chapter "the burial of the dead" we can sense something dark about it. in the last section of this first chapter the speaker walks through London that is populated by ghosts of the dead. again, the title of the fourth chapter is "death by water" and is a brief description of man's death by drowning. the first section of the final chapter is all about destruction. it talks about how famous cities are destroyed then rebuilt then destroyed again. because of this notion of violence in this poem, critics might classify Elliot as a modernist.