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    A Study Guide for May Swenson's "The Centaur"
    A Study Guide for May Swenson's "The Centaur"
    A Study Guide for May Swenson's "The Centaur"
    Ebook37 pages26 minutes

    A Study Guide for May Swenson's "The Centaur"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for May Swenson's "The Centaur," 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 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535835701
    A Study Guide for May Swenson's "The Centaur"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for May Swenson's "The Centaur" - Gale

      08

      The Centaur

      May Swenson

      1956

      Introduction

      The Centaur is a widely anthologized poem by May Swenson that draws on her childhood experiences in Utah and explores the power of the imagination. First published in the Western Review in 1956, it was reprinted the following year in the collection New Poems by American Poets 2 and then appeared in Swenson's second book of poetry, A Cage of Spines, in 1958. It subsequently appeared in several other collections of Swenson's poetry, including the posthumously published Nature: Poems Old and New in 1994. In 2007, it was published separately as an illustrated children's book.

      On the surface, the poem is a simple narrative account of how Swenson's speaker (really Swenson herself, according to an interview she once gave) spent the summer when she was ten. It describes a child's fantasy of riding a horse that is really just a willow branch and pretending to be the horse herself. The poem has been widely praised for its depiction of mixed identities (child and horse, boy and girl), its exploration of gender roles, and its evocation of childhood's imaginative play.

      Swenson is generally seen as a poet interested in nature and in the mysteries of the universe. She is also known as the creator of riddle poems illustrative of her interest in looking at things from new perspectives, making the familiar strange, and taking note of the wonder of the world. Though not technically one of her riddle poems, The Centaur raises various questions about identity and creativity in a way characteristic of the poet, and its focus on a horse, albeit an imaginary horse, is consistent with her interest in animals.

      Author Biography

      Anna Thilda May Swenson was the oldest of ten children of Margaret and Dan Swenson, Swedish Lutherans who converted to Mormonism and emigrated from Sweden to Logan, Utah, where May Swenson was born on May 28, 1913. Swenson drifted away from her parents' Mormon beliefs (poetry became her religion, according to Gudrun Grabher, writing in Body My House: May Swenson's Work and Life), but she maintained a strong attachment to Utah, which she visited often even after moving to New York City in 1936. When she died, she was buried in

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