A Study Guide for Charles Simic's "Classic Ballroom Dances"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Charles Simic's "Classic Ballroom Dances," 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 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535820868

Book preview

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Classic Ballroom Dances

Charles Simic

1980

Introduction

Charles Simic has come to be regarded as one of America's most important poets—a remarkable achievement given that English is not his native language. Classic Ballroom Dances is the title poem in Simic's 1980 collection of poems, Classic Ballroom Dances. The collection won the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of America's di Castagnola Award in 1980. Like nearly all of Simic's poems, Classic Ballroom Dances is brief, consisting of just sixteen lines, and is written in simple, straightforward language. Its purpose is not to outline a point of view, tell a story, or develop a situation. Rather, its purpose is to evoke an image by drawing a number of implicit comparisons between the people's activities and dancing.

It can be difficult to classify or attach a label to contemporary poets like Simic, including the broader category called Modernism, given that most draw on a wide range of poetic traditions for their inspiration. Nevertheless, many critics see elements of the artistic movement called surrealism in Simic's work. Surrealism was a movement that dominated both literature and the visual arts between World War I and World War II, and that has continued to have an influence on more contemporary poets. The goal of the surrealists was to create startling imagery, often juxtaposing words and phrases in ways that defied reason. The surrealists tried to link conscious and unconscious forms of expression to create a new, fuller reality—what surrealism's spokesman, French writer André Breton, called a surreality in his manifesto of surrealism, published first in 1924, then in a revised version in 1929. (Breton, however, did not coin the word; it was first used by French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917.) Accordingly, the emphasis in surrealist poetry, including that written by Simic, is on the