Charles Bukowksi Analysis

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New Historicism is used to analyze the effects of an author’s culture and political climate, and how society influences the author, and the author’s effect on society. Charles Bukowksi was somewhat of an enigma for the literary world of poetry: a hard-drinking, tough-talking, cynical womanizer, his poems typically revolved around easy women, sex, alcohol, cigarettes, and misfortunes of his fellow man.
Bukowksi spent his teens during the height of the Great Depression, and his experiences in a violent and broken home certainly influenced his worldview, as well as an early introduction to alcohol, which quickly became his way of “coming to more amicable terms with his life.” During the 1940s, he was arrested by the FBI for draft evasion, but subsequently failed a mental health evaluation, rendering him unfit for military service. For most of his life, Bukowksi was content to write about his various experiences involving trysts with women or aspects of his childhood – however, there are a few poems that break this pattern, and one of these poems is titled, ”Dinosauria, We.”
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