Overview
This lecture analyzes Margaret Atwood's poem "The City Planners," exploring how it critiques humanity's obsessive desire for order in suburban landscapes and the underlying dangers of stifling control over nature.
Poem Structure and Style
- Composed of seven free verse stanzas with varying line lengths; no set rhyme or rhythm.
- Uses enjambment, alliteration, sibilance, consonance, and assonance for musicality and emphasis.
- Only four sentences in the poem, with the last lacking a full stop, suggesting a cycle without end.
Themes and Meaning
- Contrasts between surface orderliness in suburbs and underlying chaos or menace.
- Humanity's attempt to impose control on both environment and human behavior seen as futile and unnatural.
- Orderliness is depicted as sterile, oppressive, and ultimately self-defeating.
- Mental illness and physical sickness are used metaphorically to describe the suburbs and their planners.
Use of Figurative Language
- Extensive use of metaphor, simile, and personification to portray suburbs as both oppressive and unnatural.
- Suburban features like houses and trees are described as pedantic and sanitary, emphasizing artificial control.
- Negative connotations in descriptions ("offends," "sanities," "discouraged grass," "vicious coil," "two fixed stare") build a sinister tone.
The City Planners as Characters
- Planners are described as "insane faces of political conspirators," ironically consumed by their own need for control.
- Their efforts are portrayed as chaotic, guesswork, and ultimately futile—rigid lines in vanishing air.
- Snowstorm metaphors suggest they are lost in their own confusion, blind to reality.
Imagery and Atmosphere
- The poem's environment lacks people, making the suburb feel dehumanized.
- Imperfections (spilled oil, paint, coiled hose) hint at suppressed nature and inevitable disorder beneath the surface.
- Apocalyptic and graceful imagery suggests the suburbs will eventually be reclaimed by nature.
Key Terms & Definitions
- Free verse — Poetry without a fixed rhyme or rhythm.
- Enjambment — Running lines of poetry without punctuation breaks.
- Personification — Giving human qualities to non-human things.
- Sibilance — Repetition of hissing 's' or 'z' sounds.
- Semantic field — Group of words related in meaning or theme.
Action Items / Next Steps
- Review the poem, noting examples of figurative language and structural features.
- Prepare to discuss how Atwood’s style supports her critique of suburban order and its consequences.