The Poems of John Updike Literary Elements

A great many of Updike’s poems replicate the perspective of his novels and short stories. They are first-person narratives of middle-class, middle-century American domesticity relating insight into marriage, affairs, divorce, raising kids, and suburbia.

Updike rarely allows himself to be constricted by rigid form and meter. His preference is for unrhyme free verse with a flair of experimentation in structure and composition.

Updike’s propensity for enjoyment of shocking his readers with sexual frankness is robustly expressed in in the long multi-part poem titled “Midpoint” with striking metaphorical images: “MIRRORS ARE VAGINAS” and “PENISES ARE EYES.”

“Player Piano” features one of Updike’s most playful examples of alliteration: “And no man or band has a hand in / The tones I turn on from within.”

“Ex-Basketball Player” is a narrative poem about a guy name Flick Webb who was a record-setting superstar ballplayer in high school who has ironically wound up a sadly underachieving adult who works at a gas station.

Narrative poetry in that the bulk of Updike’s output tells a story.

For the most part—Updike’s verse reflects his prose in that it collectively tells a story about upper-middle-class concerns of the second half the 20th century.

Lightly ironic with an observational critique of the flaws and foibles of those occupying the upper-middle-class in the 20th century.

The protagonist of the typical Updike poem is a thinly veiled representative of the author: erudite, somewhat emotionally disconnected, and most of all distinctively male.

The defining conflict operating in the verse of Updike is the age-old battle of the sexes, usually located within the conventions of marital discord.

That multi-sectioned, atypically long poem “Midpoint” mentioned earlier is about the speaker reaching middle-age. It is reflection upon what has been learned and a contemplation about how to put that experience to use in the second half of life. It is one of the few poems of Updike that actually moves toward a recognizable climax: “I’ve believed in the Absurd / Which brought me this far; henceforth, if I can / I must impersonate a serious man.”

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The profound implications of aging are perfectly understated in the opening lines of “In Extremis.” “I saw my toes the other day. / I hadn’t looked at them in months.”

The poem “Deja, Indeed” alludes in its entirety to the omnipresence of a certain very prolific actor in French films: “I sometimes fear that I shall never view / A French film lacking Gerard Depardieu.” It also slyly alludes to the poem by Joyce Kilmer in which the speaker famous muses that he thinks he will never see a poem that is lovely as a tree.

“My capital, my alabaster Pandemonium” is a specific example within the more expansive example of the poem titled “Washington.”

From the poem “Trees Eat Sunshine” come this example in the opening line: “It’s the fact: / their broad leaves lap it up like milk”

To the title character of “Mosquito” the speaker is seen as “a fragrant lake of blood.”

“The Cars in Caracas” offers an enjoyable example of this particular literary device:” The cars in Caracas / create a ruckukus, / a four-wheeled fracacas”