Margaret Atwood

During her undergraduate years there (1957-1961), Margaret Atwood came into contact with teacher and critic Northrop Frye, who introduced her to the work of William Blake, the poet who appears to have influenced Atwood's consistently double vision of mythic contraries which even the titles of some of her books reveal: Double Persephone, Two-Headed Poems. Even more important to Atwood's development, perhaps, was her friendship with teacher and poet Jay Macpherson, whose irony and fine sense of form suggest a literary kinship between the two women. Other female writers too, Atwood claims, have influenced her poetic development over the years: Anne Hebert, P. K. Page, and, of her contemporaries, Phyllis Webb and Gwendolyn MacEwen. Next to Atwood's Canadian nationalism, her feminism has undoubtedly been the most controversial element of her writing. Term paper hint: Of course, the two issues are not wholly distinct, for she herself has frequently compared the status of Canada to that of women.) Atwood also acknowledges kinship with poet Adrienne Rich, and her continued interest in Marie-Claire Blais dates back to her first review, of the English translation of Blais's first novel, Mad Shadows, in 1961. Although her own works include themes that can be labeled as feminist and nationalist and her most recent work shows a general political concern for human rights, Atwood's concerns as an artist are primarily aesthetic ones. As she insisted in a 1977 interview: "What people fail to understand about poetry and novels and criticism is that they are hypothetical, and they are patterns of words and ideas." While literary culture as a whole may well be a mirror to society, poetry in Atwood's view is more a lens - one which condenses as well as reflects.

In a custom essay, we may pay attention to her first book of verse, Double Persephone, which is perhaps her least socially reflective work. Published in 1961 and awarded the E. J. Pratt Medal that year, this small collection is focused on the doubleness inherent in the classical myth of Persephone (Pluto/Hades and Demeter/earth; winter and spring), with obvious reference to Medusa in the "girl with the gorgon touch." Here begins one of the major oppositions which structures all of Atwood's work over the next twenty years: the contrast between the flux of life or nature and the fixity of man's artificial creations. Here the two immortalities offered in "Her Song" are: "One of earth lake trees/Feathers of a nameless bird/The other of a world of glass/Hard marble, carven word." This paradox established by the contrast between dynamic, natural, creative process and static, unnatural, created product is voiced in all Atwood's work, never more powerfully perhaps than in Power Politics (1971): "Please die I said/so I can write about it." Even in the early 1960s, in poems such as those published in the little magazine Alphabet, the artist is seen, for example, as a witch with her "ice of art" in contrast to the nightingale with its natural song. Atwood continued to write and have verse published during 1962, the year she took her A.M. at Radcliffe College of Harvard University. In 1963, when she returned to Toronto, she took a job in a marketing research firm, where she gleaned the background for part of her 1969 novel The Edible Woman. At the time she devoted herself to writing poetry and to working on another novel- still unpublished - entitled "Up in the Air So Blue." In Toronto she began a fruitful collaboration with her friend artist Charles Pachter. In the 1960s a series of limited edition (fifteen to twenty copies) portfolios and broadsides appeared, written by Atwood and designed and illustrated by Pachter: The Circle Game (1964), Kaleidoscopes Baroque: A Poem (1965), Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966), Expeditions (1966), What Was in the Garden (1969). Their more recent and elaborate collaboration resulted in the deluxe illustrated edition of The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970). Branching out into the other arts, she also provided CBC radio with The Trumpets of Summer (1964), a choral composition with music by John Beckwith.