In the following excerpt, Bloom gives an overview of Parker's verse and concludes that Parker's best work remains the short, witty verse for which she is best known.
Parker's poems are highly restricted in scope and in depth. Although they become more technically versatile and controlled, Parker's subjects, personae, points-of-view, and major techniques remain constant throughout her work.
Parker's poetry, like her short stories, treats love, loneliness, and death. Loneliness and death, however, are usually variations on the motif of romantic love—exploited or exploitive, feigned, unreciprocated, betrayed, denied, abandoned. The relations between men and women in both her poetry and fiction are fleeting, false, and inevitably painful: "Scratch a lover and find a foe." In Parker's restricted milieu, women, as epitomized by her narrative personae, are doomed to unhealthy emotional dependence on men whose.....
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