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    A Study Guide for Rosellen Brown's "What Are Friends For"
    A Study Guide for Rosellen Brown's "What Are Friends For"
    A Study Guide for Rosellen Brown's "What Are Friends For"
    Ebook33 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Rosellen Brown's "What Are Friends For"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Rosellen Brown's "What Are Friends For," 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535842570
    A Study Guide for Rosellen Brown's "What Are Friends For"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Rosellen Brown's "What Are Friends For" - Gale

      12

      What Are Friends for

      Rosellen Brown

      1977

      Introduction

      Rosellen Brown's What Are Friends For was published in her 1977 poetry collection, Cora Fry. What Are Friends For is part of a narrative poem, or poem that tells a story, which spans the entire book; it can best be understood when read in the context of the book as a whole, but it can also be appreciated as a stand-alone poem. In Cora Fry, a mother who has recently been snubbed by one of her friends asks her daughter Cora, the speaker of this poem, what the value of friendship is. The bitter mother insinuates that there is no point in having friends if they always let you down. Cora sarcastically and silently rebukes her mother by comparing friendship to music. Written toward the beginning of Brown's career, What Are Friends For did not receive much critical attention upon its publication. Those who have reviewed Cora Fry have regarded it favorably, and Brown herself has said that of all her books, it is her favorite. The entire book, including the poem What Are Friends For, is written in syllabic verse, a highly unusual metrical form in Western poetry. Though the most prominent theme in the work is friendship, What Are Friends For also speaks to themes of mother-child relationships, sarcasm, and music. Published in the late 1970s, the work evokes a sense of the women's movement and rural isolation in America.

      Author Biography

      Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 12, 1939. Her father's work in textiles caused the family to move frequently to various cities in Pennsylvania, New York, and California while Brown was young. Brown has said that this constant moving was one of the reasons she began writing. Because it was hard to constantly make new friends in new cities,

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