Abstract:
Poet John Haines is best known for his first book of
poetry, Winter News, which was published in 1966. The book
contains poems about the Alaskan landscape that surrounded
Haines during his many years of living in Richardson,
Alaska. The recurring motifs in his poems include hunting,
trapping, the Arctic cold, animals, and death. Haines says
Winter News "was born of the isolation in which I then
lived" (preface OMD) . It is an isolation that Haines
portrays well to his audience and one that has earned him
critical praise.
Many critics have focused on Haines's use of metaphor
and imagery throughout his poetry in Winter News and
subsequent books, yet one area that has not been addressed
in detail is Haines's use of sound devices, a vital poetic
element. Scholar Helen Vendler says that poets are aware of
all the sounds in their poems, as well as the various
rhythms. Vendler notes that "poets 'bind' words together in
a line by having them share sounds, whether consonants or
vowels. This makes the words sound as if they 'belong'
together by natural affinity" (l45).
Haines produces sounds and rhythms using a variety of
devices such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration.
This paper closely examines a variety of his poems in Winter
News and subsequent books, and it illustrates his extensive
sound device usage. Chapter one introduces Haines and
establishes the boundaries of this paper. Chapter two
discusses the importance sound has in poetry; the chapter
details Goold Brown's classification of letters, which is
used as the basis for the sound dissection. Selected poems
from Winter News and later books are discussed in detail.
Chapter three analyzes the death motif, particularly
prevalent in "The Moosehead," "On the Divide," and
"Arlington." Haines's sound device usage, in connection
with these poems, also is examined in chapter three. The
final chapter discusses the conclusions that culminate from
the previous chapters.
