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  • Chapter 9 - Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and Poetics

  • Edited by Coral Ann Howells, Institute of English Studies, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood
    Published online:
    19 March 2021
    Print publication:
    01 April 2021, pp 141-156

  • Summary

    This chapter presents carefully argued accessible readings of Atwood’s poetry across five decades. It explores her poetics of metamorphosis, moving the argument beyond the “polarities” and “dualities” that preoccupied early Atwood criticism to consider how her poems continually operate in borderline territory, shifting between the world of everyday experience and a mythologized landscape of the imagination. Detailed analyses of poems in The Circle Game, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Power Politics, and Two-Headed Poems, up to Morning in the Burned House and The Door trace Atwood’s thematic and imagistic range, continually opening up possibilities for transformation and renewal. The chapter considers not only Atwood’s historical consciousness and her use of classical and indigenous mythology but also her interest in sexual and national politics, the role of the poet and of poetry in contemporary society, and in her later volumes her personal meditations on aging and mortality.