Sharon Olds is renowned for keeping her readers on their toes and changing the direction of her poems drastically and without warning (Galens). This remains especially true in her poem “I Go Back to May 1937”. Olds’ brash style ensures that her...

In "Rites of Passage" Sharon Olds honestly portrays her own struggles with understanding manhood and attempting to overcome her contempt for conventional modes of masculinity by alternating between visions of her son as a baby and the children at...

In his preface to Lyrical Ballads,William Wordsworth describes good poetry as being “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (6). The style of confessional poetry seems especially fitting to this description; to think that confessional...

All humans face the struggle of aging. With the passage of time, one must grow old and eventually perish. Aging is something we fear, as it brings on a variety of physical, psychological, and socially constructed ailments. Often there is the idea...

The poems “I Go Back to May 1937” and “Last Look”, both written by Sharon Olds, show how our relationships with loved ones can be complex. In “I Go Back to May 1937”, the speaker looks back at her parents in their college days. She thinks about...

The poem, "On the Subway", by Sharon Olds is an insightful piece of work that beautifully examines the impact of centuries of racism and unfair stereotypes on the African American community. The narrator is a member of the “in” group of today’s...