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While “Bildungsroman” is typically used to describe a category of novel focused on the psychological and moral growth of its main character, it can also apply to a series or collection of poems that presents a character’s progression, often from innocence to experience or youth to adulthood.
Bildungsroman poetry might narratively or thematically cover a span of years, reflecting changes, maturation, and learning processes. It delves deep into the character’s emotions, personal growth, and experiences, making it a very personal and profound form of poetry.
‘Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper’ contrasts two forms of labor and encourages the reader to consider the relationship between them.
At sixteen, I worked after high school hours
at a printing plant
that manufactured legal pads:
Heaney’s ‘Personal Helicon’ draws inspiration from his rural carefree childhood and intimate connection with nature.
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
‘Childhood’ explores the transitory moment when a child becomes aware of the passing of time, and the process of growing old.
I used to think that grown-up people chose
To have stiff backs and wrinkles round their nose,
And veins like small fat snakes on either hand,
On purpose to be grand.
‘My Grandmother’s Houses’ by Jackie Kay is a thoughtful recollection of youth and a young speaker’s relationship with her eccentric grandmother, who is forced to move homes.
She is on the second floor of a tenement.
From her front room window you see the cemetery.
‘To My Brother’ by Lorna Dee Cervantes captures the intense bittersweetness of remembering a childhood checkered by both strife and happiness.
and for the lumpen bourgeoisie
We were so poor.
The air was a quiver
of thoughts we drew from
‘The Butterfly’ is a gentle but profound exploration of youth and innocence that shows Glück at her most subtle.
Look, a butterfly. Did you make a wish?
You don't wish on butterflies.
You do so. Did you make one?
Yes.
‘The Snow is Melting’ is a playful and moving haiku that captures the essence of Issa’s poetic beliefs and values.
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
Jackie Kay’s ‘Compound Fracture’ reveals a child’s experience of racism, blending physical pain with a deeper understanding of identity and the need for comfort.
That day
after the bone came through my skin—
my mother's voice split open
‘Dear Dr. Frankenstein’ is a warning against the dangers of scientific and intellectual arrogance told as a letter to the fictional doctor.
I, too, know the science of building men
Out of fragments in little light
Where I'll be damned if lightning don't
‘Belle Isle, 1949’ by Philip Levine is a poem about a series of moments from a speaker’s youth. He swims in the Detroit River and then returns to his life.
We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
‘Divorce’ by Jackie Kay is about parent-child relationships and how children are impacted by adults’ issues. The speaker is a teenager who is struggling to contend with her parent’s relationship with one another.
I did not promise
to stay with you till death do us part, or
anything like that,
‘Identity’ is a figurative examination of selfhood, and a poetic warning against the dangers of conformity.
Let them be as flowers,
always watered, fed, guarded, admired,
but harnessed to a pot of dirt.
‘Is it Still the Same’ is a brilliant, affirming poem that explores memory and its relationship to a particular place and time.
young woman who climbs the stairs,
who closes a child's door,
who goes to her table
in a room at the back of a house?
‘What I Expected’ is a harrowing account of failed hopes and unrealized dreams, which captures the hopelessness of the 1930s.
What I expected, was
Thunder, fighting,
Long struggles with men
And climbing.
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