A Study Guide for Ruth Stone's "Another Feeling"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ruth Stone's "Another Feeling," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535818469

Book preview

12

Another Feeling

Ruth Stone

2004

Introduction

After publishing verse collections with such quiet humility over the last forty years of the twentieth century that her admirers rarely failed to mention how underappreciated she was, American poet Ruth Stone finally received honors considered among poetry's highest in the twenty-first century—the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2002 National Book Award, and the 2002 Wallace Stevens Award.

Stone's poetry is unique; she defies classification into any school, movement, or style. In recent collections, she favors free verse but often uses a loose or sporadic rhyme and meter, giving her work a subtle musical vitality. While she is not shy about expressing a woman's perspective on all realms of life, from the sensual to the intellectual, her work is not political and only indirectly feminist. Her wide-ranging interests in the biological and physical sciences are evident in poems such as the sociological From the Arboretum and the mind-bending The Latest Hotel Guest Walks over Particles That Revolve in Seven Other Dimensions Controlling Latticed Space.

Stone's work has been shaped by a tragic event that dramatically altered her life just before her first collection was published: her husband, the father of her three daughters, committed suicide. Many of Stone's poems resound with desolate grief and lonesomeness that not even the passing decades could resolve, and death in general is a common theme in her work. Her poem Another Feeling, from the collection In the Dark (2004), published as she approached ninety years of age, is a poignant lament for a fateful action that proved unfortunate for an innocent animal.

Author Biography

Born Ruth Perkins, Stone was born on June 8, 1915, in Roanoke, Virginia, in the house of her grandparents, where she was raised among relatives with interests such as poetry and painting. While the infant Stone was nursing, her mother read aloud the works of the Victorian-era British poet laureate Alfred Tennyson. Inspired by her grandparents' large library, Stone began reading at age