Kenneth Patchen Kenneth Patchen, in his free-verse poem, develops his idea by first alluding from the title the snow’s depth as pure and undamaged; second, by giving imagery to some of the excerpts of the poem such as: “Always the light falls”, meaning how time moves slowly, or “Softly down, on the hair of my beloved”, meaning that even with time moving slow, his wife is there next to him experiencing it right by his side; third, by giving tone in his second stanza as her personifies how “this is a good world- the war has failed”; fourth, by contrasting the image of him along on his journey with all of the different troubles he comes to meet by witnessing the time slowly making things better, but even through the rough times, “God shall not…show more content… Patchen, born in Niles, Ohio, in 1911, the son of a steelworker in nearby Younstown, began writing poetry as a teen (Rivard, 2012). The Patchens were a family that arrived in America as poor immigrants from Scotland, but raised in England where the name began. They were used to starting from the bottom, but got by very well on every occasion (Smith, 2000). Before he began writing, he was closed to a lot of people regarding his early family life. Throughout his college life, he was a self taught writer, but because of his own writings, he was barely recognized for his poems and he started being more and more secluded (Kenneth Patchen, 2015). He had finally opened up to a former schoolmate in college named Isabel (Smith) Stein stating, “All of my life I have been lonely. Because of illness I did not start school until I was eight years old, and it was while I was sick that I had things read to me.” In an emotional state of mind, he proceeded on, “I lived in an imaginative world. Since childhood I rarely been happy and I am beginning to have a feeling of revolt against going on like this (Smith, 2000).” After that conference he had with open feelings and open thoughts, it was the birth of his poems gaining the public’s eyes. He felt that the need…show more content… “While some critics tended to dismiss his work as naïve, romantic, capricious, and concerned often with the social problems of the 1930’s, -- others found him to be a major voice in American poetry. Even the most generous praise was usually grudging, as if Patchen had somehow won his place through sheer, wrongheaded persistence”, quoted from a critic at Poetry Foundation (Kenneth Patchen, 2015). With Patchen, he didn’t only create beautiful masterpieces on paper with words; he also created masterpieces of those words with art. He had put his frustrations out with letters creating words of reminiscing, but with his art he made it an image to the reader’s mind which created such a beautiful outcome with all of his work. A year after his first book of poems appeared, Patchen had suffered a debilitating spinal injury while helping a friend fix his car (Laughlin, 1939). Over the years of his accident, he underwent numerous surgeries in an attempt to alleviate his chronic pain. Inspite of his disabilities, he went right on working with his painting and his poetry and published many beautiful books (Steloff, 1975).
