“Pickled in a Vat of Tears”: Stallings's and Seshadri’s Different Revelations of Emotion Maria Byrne College

In our current age of nuance coupled with increasingly rampant social media use, the scape of poetry is swiftly changing with deviation from traditional forms and the emergence of new mediums. One recent think-piece has addressed the consumption of “Insta-poetry,” or poetry quickly commodified and consumed for the purpose of being re-posted on social media outlets like Instagram, and the resulting complicated relationship between poetry, social media, and capitalism (Roberts). The author comments on how famed modernist T.S. Eliot wrote of poetry: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (Roberts). While the world of instant online poetry is another topic entirely, this idea expressed by Eliot offers support for formalist styles, especially in an age where an entire society seeks to defy them. A. E. Stallings, a modern poet, seems to be in dialogue with Eliot as she meticulously constructs poems and allows them to age like fine wine in her 2012 poetry collection Olives, expressing modern sentiments that surprise...