Katha Pollitt Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Tillinghast

Critical Essay by Richard Tillinghast

Antarctic Traveller by Katha Pollitt possesses a winning quality that Robert Fitzgerald has aptly characterized as "serious charm."… Pollitt's posture [in the first stanza of the opening poem, "Blue Window"] and elsewhere in this fine collection is romantic, full of emotion and delicate sensibility, yet convincing.

By convincing I partially mean that here I am able to accept the presumption behind the poet's use of what Jonathan Holden (in The Rhetoric of the Contemporary Lyric) calls the "blurred you": a use of the second-person pronoun midway in meaning between the ordinary second-person form of address, the French pronoun on, and a suggestion that the speaker is talking about herself or himself. The blurred you is essentially a device of rhetorical persuasion, because the writer is asking the reader to blend his experience with a description of hers…. [In "Blue Window"] I gladly assent to being included in the poem. In...
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