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    A Study Guide for Randall Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo"
    A Study Guide for Randall Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo"
    A Study Guide for Randall Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo"
    Ebook33 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Randall Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Randall Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMar 22, 2018
    ISBN9781535845977
    A Study Guide for Randall Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo"

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      A Study Guide for Randall Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" - Gale

      18

      The Woman at the Washington Zoo

      Randall Jarrell

      1960

      Introduction

      The Woman at the Washington Zoo is an iconic poem written by the American poet, critic, and man of letters Randall Jarrell. It was initially released in his 1960 collection of the same name, containing both original compositions and English translations of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and fellow German-language poets. The Woman at the Washington Zoo became the recipient of the National Book Award the following year. The title poem was conceived on location in the nation's capital, a city with which Jarrell would claim lasting affinity, during his two-year tenure as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, a position now known as poet laureate.

      Written in what is suggested to be the voice of an unnamed female persona, the poem melds the air of boundless potential, variety, and international bustle inherent to the District of Columbia with the stifling confinement of the barred enclosures at the city's National Zoological Park. As the poem unfolds, this physical claustrophobia takes on psychic dimensions as the protagonist muses on the degraded conditions of her animal counterparts. The poem abounds in color and rich sensory detail and contains language at turns elevated and ethereal or crudely grotesque. In conscious imitation of the Rilkean sensibilities to which the collection aspires, The Woman at the Washington Zoo is a desperate, pathos-laden cry for liberation, a poem equally reconciled to the world's beauty and to its darkest, most inescapable realities.

      Author Biography

      Jarrell was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 6, 1914, to a purportedly handsome father of humble, working-class origin and a mother descended from a prominent and prosperous Nashville family. The second child of this unlikely union, Jarrell was preceded by a sister, Anna, who died while still in her infancy. In 1915, the family relocated

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