poem help? please help!?

Question

i am looking on the internet to find a autobiographical poem. i can not find one anywhere on the internet. could u plz give me a website where there is an autobiographical poem? thx!!!

Answer 1

Poetry deals with the emotions, just as music. An autobiographical poem is personal—it reveals something about the person writing the poem. It does not have to rhyme. Below is a simple plan to write your own autobiographical poem. Just follow the steps and—before you know it—it’s done.
See portrait #7 "Just Because..." in the last web-link cited below.
**
Let us look at this poem by Rebecca:
(-you may also look at some Elizabeth Bishop's poems)

Song for a Seeker
by Rebecca Henry Lowndes


This is a memory: how,
when I’d left off seeking,
eschewed involvement,
disparaged adventure,
one
wet
unheralded Friday I
descried intact a trove,
a lode untapped,
of mettlesome rare cut,
who
bestowed on me a random
smile,
a guileless gift of
candy and the
thoughtless stray remark
that set upon my cheek
a veil;
then,
as though a slackened
string somewhere went snap,
pulled taut and singing,
one
hot
and wary look we shared,
for here it was, the fretted Grail
no toll could ransom out of
time:
a tandem soul.



How glad I’d been, that year, to be
alone!
But now his soft indulgent
eyes, his measured words
me everywhere did stalk,
and brought me down:
the proud and seasoned hunter
snared, undone!

(Sweet consternation)
How, pale in my deep
green robe, I flew the stairs
to let him in -- a stranger,
nearly -- one
unnerved, heart-plundered so,
as to declare me fetching!

And how, within my sunny
garret, kindle-snug and
shrine-remote, we talked,
refined this mined, this treasured
pairing
-- carefully,
for he was bound away from me
and, clouded with regret, described
his years bereft, his hewn disguise,
the loveless trap;
the haughty wife who thissed and thatted
coldly and without regard
’til all was ruin: a marriage
cleft --
and in my lap.


How, after days, and days
again, again
we talked (though ever less)
aloud),
and in our stretching
toward a center,
scarcely touching,
tucked and stitched the raveled
edges of our lives
together.

I’d never trusted the idea
of being loved before the chase,
before the searing trek across
self-immolation land;
but in this memory of how
the love I’d sought to raise
found me
ere I had even -- thrilling --
caught
the taste of ore at hand:
herein lies the becoming of
my life, my history.

= source: http://alliteration.net/poetry/seeker.htm
**

One important point to note is the fact that a poem, however autobiographical in its origins, must not be mistaken for autobiography.

'I won't pretend that it isn't often helpful to know the details of a poet's life, since those details may very well show up in his work, and we might better understand the significance the poet ascribes to certain events and images if we know something about his life.
For example, in "One Art," which is about "the art of losing," Elizabeth Bishop writes, "I lost my mother's watch . . ." (10) . Knowing that her father died when she was nine months old, that her mother was committed to a mental institution when Bishop was four, and that she was raised by her grandmother, we can understand that despite the poem's flippant tone and the seeming insignificance of the loss of a watch, what she is describing is deep, genuine grief. The watch itself becomes a symbol of the time she never got to spend with her mother.
But even autobiographical poetry does not merely recount the poet's life. Those details will be redrawn and reshaped wherever necessary to fulfill the aesthetic and thematic demands of the poem.
If the actual details of the life are incompatible with the requirements of the poem, the poem's needs will inevitably take precedence over mere truth, sometimes without the poet's even being aware that he is reshaping truth in the image of art.
Furthermore, "truth" and "memory" are surprisingly flexible for most people. No matter how honest the poet, no matter how determined to present what actually happened, he is bound--as we all are--to offer instead a fictionalized version of events.
Life imitates art at least as much as art imitates life, maybe even more so. The way any person sees himself, his relation to others, and his place in society and in the human drama is significantly influenced by the patterns made available in his culture's mythic and literary tradition. That tradition reaches different people by different routes, and though the nature of the route will determine surface manifestations, the tradition's deep structure will remain recognizable.
For example, the tradition of the outlaw as Romantic hero can be found in westerns, in the Godfather trilogy, and in certain gangsta rap songs and videos. Young people, seeking a mold to pour their sense of alienated self into, might choose to be the "outlaw," but if they do, their choice of image will depend on what their cultural exposure has provided as models. '
.