The Quiet World Analysis

Every literature already possesses their meaning on their own and for the readers to
precisely interpret that meaning they should know the different ways on how to criticize a
literature correctly. According to ER Services (2019), reading and discussing improve your
ability to read critically and interpret texts while gaining appreciation for different literacy genres
and theories of interpretation. The purpose of this essay is to analyze and criticize the poem “The
Quiet World” by Jeffrey McDaniel in a way of Formalism Approach.

In the poem, “The Quiet World”, the title itself is very ironic, because we all know that
the world has never been quiet and with the lot of people and even animals that surround the
world, we cannot deny that it is impossible for the world to be in a total silence.

In the first stanza, McDaniel used a fictional place or country in which there is a new
implemented law that the government has created for its citizens to follow. It is a law that gives
167 words only for each citizen to be used per day. The purpose of the said law is to pacify or
placate the demands of the mutes that, we, students, think that the author compared to those
people who talk less or nothing at all and are people who have learned to control their tongues
and speak only when needed to. It complements with the statement of Artscolumbia (2018) that
the mutes are perhaps people who do not speak so often, or at all (most likely belonging to the
minority) and the government has understood that these people can teach a lesson or two to the
other tizzies and would like to appease them through this law.

In the second stanza, based on our own understanding, the author used the literary device
“defamiliarization”, because as the persona, that the gender has not been mentioned yet,
described his/her situation in which the persona is outside and he/she picked up his/her phone
because someone called him/her and the persona did not say anything even “Hello”. It is very
ironic and it confused our minds because why did the persona answered the phone if he/she
won’t say any word? The statement of Bartebly (2014) agreed to it that the situation can be
dubbed as absurd, because why would someone pick up their phone if they are not going to talk
with it. The next situation became more confusing to us, because the persona described the
situation wherein the persona moved to a restaurant where he/she picked up a chicken noodle
soup and got his want across to the staff by simply pointing at it. We started to ask ourselves if
why would someone won’t use any word in buying, especially in a restaurant, knowing that they
have given 167 words to be used per day?

The third stanza enlightened our minds when the persona mentioned that he/she has a
lover, a distance lover, that is why it is very important to the persona to save up every single
word for his/her lover, so that the persona only used 59 words for that day and saved the
remaining words for his/her lover. This stanza cleared and answered our question in the first two
stanzas.

As we moved to the last stanza, we have knew that the persona is a man, because he
described his distance lover as a “She”. His distance lover who has used up all her allocated
words on someone else, but, despite of this, the speaker decided to still spend the rest of his
words on his lover and slowly whispered “l love you” thirty-two and a third times, which is the
amount that is left for him to say, that will add up to the allocated one hundred and sixty-seven.

In our overall view of the poem, we noticed that it is a free verse poem, because it has no
rhyme or rhythm, but it is still can be concluded as an artistic expression because it used words
and phrases in an artistic way that made it considered as a literature. Also, the poem has no
pattern, because there are different numbers of lines in each stanza.
In this literary criticism, we can therefore be concluded that the poem “The Quiet World” by
Jeffrey McDaniel is a very beautiful poem. It describes how a man is very devoted to his long
distance lover that he saved up more than half of the allocated words just to spend those for his
lover. It is somehow serves as a realization to us that everyday we use hundreds or even
thousands of words, but how many of those do we actually meant?
References:

Literary Criticism (2019). Er services. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-

britlit1/chapter/literary-criticism/. Retrieved on August 27, 2019.

The Quiet World Analysis (2014). Bartleby research. Retrieved on

https://www.bartleby.com/essay/The-Quiet-World-Poetry-Analysis-FKQJLVSCPRS5.
Retrieved on August 27, 2019.

The Quiet World Poetry Analysis Essay (2018). Arstcolumbia. Retrieved from
https://artscolumbia.org/literary-arts/poetry/the-quiet-world-poetry-analysis-37463/.
Retrieved on August 27, 2019.