MARGARET ATWOOD'S "TRICK HIP": TRANSCENDING DUALITY WITH IMAGINATION

The major theme of Margaret Atwood's work is the transcendence of duality. Several critics, led by Cheryl Grace, have emphasized the duality only, yet there are many examples of wholeness in Atwood's early poems and novels as well as in her more recent fiction. The clearest examples of the reconciliation of opposites are in Atwood's late poems. The poetics of the romantics Blake and Coleridge, as discussed by the twentieth-century critics Northrop Frye and I. A. Richards, and underscored by new theories in physics, may be used to clarify how Atwood resolves dualities. The last five poems of "New Poems 1985-1986" from Selected Poems II demonstrate the blending of life/death, God/human, spiritual/material, body/nature, real/imaginary, male/female, subject/object into one through the use of paradox, poetic image, and remaking of myth, techniques of the imagination that Atwood shares with Blake and Coleridge.