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Articles

Volume 03, Number 1 (1978)

Better Quick Than Dead: Anne Wilkinson's Poetry

  • Robert Lecker
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1978-01-01

Abstract

Polar oppositions govern Anne Wilkinson's poetry and poetic. By interpreting the themes, images, and symbols aligned with these extremes, we can understand this: Wilkinson's passion is for the quick, the actual lived moment of sensual, phenomenal experience; but that very passion arises from and is sustained by her anxious recognition of the dead, the forces of time and tradition which limit experience and threaten the ecstasy of life-flux. However, her ultra-conscious attempt to seize the instant forces Wilkinson into an awareness of that same instant's passing, and of her inevitable movement toward death.