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    A Study Guide for Michael Blumenthal's "Inventors"
    A Study Guide for Michael Blumenthal's "Inventors"
    A Study Guide for Michael Blumenthal's "Inventors"
    Ebook25 pages15 minutes

    A Study Guide for Michael Blumenthal's "Inventors"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Michael Blumenthal's "Inventors," 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 dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535826143
    A Study Guide for Michael Blumenthal's "Inventors"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Michael Blumenthal's "Inventors" - Gale

      6

      Inventors

      Michael Blumenthal

      1980

      Introduction

      Inventors appears in Michael Blumenthal’s first book, Sympathetic Magic (1980), for which he won the Water Mark Award from Poets of North America. Blumenthal was inspired to write the poem after hearing a lecture by poet Howard Nemerov, who talked about poets being the first namers. A contemporary lyric, Inventors embodies the speaker’s mood of expectation and joy. Like much of Blumenthal’s work, Inventors is celebratory, praising the acts of naming and discovery, and implicitly exploring the links between them. In asking readers to imagine being the first to use words to name discoveries of particular things and processes (e.g., peristalsis, penicillin, convolvulus), the speaker is providing an excuse for himself to also participate in that very exercise. In seven stanzas, he imagines (and implores readers to do the same) being present during the discovery of such things as electricity, for example, and vicariously situates himself in the discoverer’s body, awash with the anticipation of putting into speech the thing just discovered. Blumenthal revels in the very sound of words, their material and sensuous qualities. By asking readers to do the same, he is reminding us of poetry’s capacity to please—to satisfy us as much with its music as with its meaning. Inventors is

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