Two Poems for T.

What is the author's style in Two Poems for T. by Cesare Pavese?

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This poem incorporates several different styles at once. It calls itself two poems, and as such is a poetic sequence. Poets use sequences to return to a subject time after time, studying it from different angles. Some poetic sequences run the length of entire books, although it is possible for two poems to constitute a sequence.

On the other hand, the very fact that this piece is printed under one title indicates that it is one poem and that the designation "two poems" from the title is just an artistic ruse to urge readers to look at the differences between the two parts, even while they know the parts add up to a whole. Therefore, accepting its wholeness, the two parts are not really separate poems at all, but are instead stanzas of the same poem. A stanza is a break in a poem, usually occurring at regular intervals. For instance, many poems are written in quatrains, or four-line stanzas. However, there is no rule for how long a stanza should be, and no rule that says that the stanzas of a poem should be the same length. The two stanzas in "Two Poems for T." have similar patterns in the length and language of their lines, and they are both about the same person, which is a fact the reader knows only because the title says it is so. The differences between these two stanzas drive readers to think more carefully about the poem, in order to determine why the author thinks these two different works should be considered one.

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