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Tomatoes By Stephen Dobyns Essay

Decent Essays

Out of the three main forms of text, fiction, screen writing and plays, and poetry, poetry might be the most analyzed and critically thought out for of text. Poetry can be both simple or complex, it can be easy to understand or full of metaphors and symbols, on thing all poetry has in common is that it can be looked at using critical theories. A main theory that can be allied to most of poetry is structuralism. Structuralism is understanding concepts through their relation to other concepts (Alton, Structuralism, 1). Poetry is perfect for this because of the many metaphors and similes that poems can have. Stephen Dobyns’ poem Tomatoes. If a reader were to use the structuralism theory while reading this poem they might read it in a different way and not so literally. …show more content…

Literally, tomatoes are red, juicy, and ripe; however, looking at tomatoes in a structuralism way in this poem Tomatoes perhaps tomatoes are something more meaningful. Using the structuralism theory, a reader can come up with their own interpretation as to what the text means, they can look deeper than just reading the words on the page. “Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes”, (Dobyns, line 31) could mean more than the man planting tomatoes, maybe he is planting the memories of his mother, structuralism allows anyone to ask questions and come up with what they believe the text to mean, sometimes there is not a right answer. Many different forms of text can be looked at analytically using different critical theories; however, there are some theories that do not work well when applying them to certain

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