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A Study Guide for Alan Dugan's "How We Heard the Name"
A Study Guide for Alan Dugan's "How We Heard the Name"
A Study Guide for Alan Dugan's "How We Heard the Name"
Ebook28 pages19 minutes

A Study Guide for Alan Dugan's "How We Heard the Name"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Alan Dugan's "How We Heard the Name," 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
Release dateAug 19, 2016
ISBN9781535825115
A Study Guide for Alan Dugan's "How We Heard the Name"

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    A Study Guide for Alan Dugan's "How We Heard the Name" - Gale

    1

    How We Heard the Name

    Alan Dugan

    1956

    Introduction

    Written in 1956, How We Heard the Name appeared in the multiple award-winning Poems of 1961. While Alan Dugan’s verse had been published in magazines prior to 1961 (he received an award from Poetry magazine in 1946), it would be difficult to exaggerate the impact of his first collection. As Helen Chasin wrote in reviewing a later volume, Poems 4: Never a promising young poet, Dugan showed what he could do, which was considerable, in his first book.

    How We Heard the Name is typical Dugan. The poem concerns a chance encounter between a soldier and a group of shepherds in the aftermath of an ancient battle, but with Dugan the aboutness of a poem can never be reduced to subject matter alone. Its tone ironic, its language colloquial, How We Heard the Name is a mordant rumination on history, ambition, and identity. It is a deeply personal poem yet also a deeply impersonal one. It is, in short, a bundle of artful contradictions held together by an idiosyncratic sensibility. Writing in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomas McClanahan stresses the equivocal stance adopted by Dugan toward his subject matter, his readers, and, most of all, himself: "He is in many respects both observer and participant, withdrawn and involved, writing from a distance about things that matter greatly to

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