SOURCE: "Sea Imagery in American Poetry," in The Literary Half-Yearly, edited by Anniah Gowda, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, July, 1982, pp. 115-22.

In the following essay, Ekambaram examines traditional images of the sea in American poetry, viewing it as symbolic of love and death, loss, destruction, or cosmic order/disorder.

One way of responding to the recurrent theme of loss and death in American poetry is to notice the use of "sea as a spatial metaphor for the positive as well as negative principles of life. [W. H. Auden, The Enchanted Flood]. There is, more or less, a continuous tradition of its use in American poetry from the early nineteenth century. To a number of "colonial" writers, the marine frontier was the principal focus of poetic interest, and they were fascinated by the wilderness of the sea as much as the virgin continent. A great deal of sea fiction deals...