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Articles

Volume 04, Number 1 (1979)

Power Impinging: Hearing Atwood's Vision

  • Pat Sillers
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1979-01-01

Abstract

In Margaret Atwood's poetry, the reader is understood to be a transmitter as well as a receiver; the voice of the poem seems to assert that the reader, a nonpoet, is completely capable of "rare vision." With Atwood's verse, the language of poetry, imagistic and associative, has been fashioned to imitate the rhythms of discursive language; however, the content concerns percepts instead of concepts and evokes imagism, not ideas. Atwood's poetry is ideogrammatic and reader-involving.