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The Orange Chair: Poems. (Original writing);
Abstract
The Orange Chair is divided into five sections, in which the main themes of selfhood and identity are explored through phases of development, complication, fragmentation, reorganization, and the achievement of wholeness. These phases correspond with the narrator's struggle with the prospect of death as a result of a life-threatening illness and its demoralizing effects. The narrator uses myth, his identification with elements of nature, and the resources of imagination and language to reconstruct his identification with living things and an empowered place in the world. The poems are written in a variety of contemporary free verse forms. In addition to lyric and narrative poems of conventional length, there is a poem sequence of fifteen short related poems, two suites of poems, and several long poems, including one, "India/St. Louis" of more than three hundred lines. The author often employs image and metaphor as a primary framework for the occasion of the poem. The early poems of the work focus on the construction of identity, the finding of a vocation, the connection to other people, and the acceptance of mortality and death as some of the most difficult passages of life. The main thematic assertion of The Orange Chair is that one must continually struggle with issues of selfhood and identity as he discovers the facts and conditions of existence. Consequently, the narrator must contend with obstacles to self-knowledge, the conditions of human limitation, and his own mortality. The pivotal third and fourth sections present a process in which the narrator's identity and connection to the world is first deconstructed, and then repaired and remade through the more concerted use of the resources of mind and imagination. The use of metaphor is not only technically prominent in the poems, but is implicitly identified as the imaginative power that enables the narrator to deepen the self and identify with the life in the world beyond his own, and thereby achieve philosophical acceptance.
Subject Area
American literature
Recommended Citation
Coleman, Robert, "The Orange Chair: Poems. (Original writing);" (1995). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9614981.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9614981