Table of Contents
The City Planners – Poetry Analysis
In the poem, “The City Planners”, Margaret Atwood, expertly highlights how she believes that the planners’ antics are irrational and that the simple imperfections of the city are actually what make it so perfect. Atwood is able to achieve this through her powerful language and expert command over the language, using many stylistic devices and well integrated syntax and diction to push her point across to the reader. Atwood takes a more aggressive approach to what the planners are doing, as compared to other poets who have written about similar complications with planners of their own.
In the first stanza, Margaret Atwood states that the thing that upsets her the most is the fact that everything is dull and sterile, by saying “what offends us is the sanities”, and then goes on to list several things that the planners have straightened up. Atwood is stating that the planners are comparing things that are not in uniform rows to a dent in a car door, and by evening them up they are almost fixing it and making it look better. The planners believe that by doing this, they are making everything sanitized and sterile, but Atwood is trying to tell them that the little imperfections are what make the town unspoiled. Again, Atwood states that the only sound that can be heard is the “rational whine of a power mower”. She describes this sound as ‘rational’ because the mower is being used to cut grass to make it look even.
However, in the next stanza, Margaret Atwood lists some things that are deemed out of place by the planners. For example, “the smell of spilled oil”, “a splash of paint on brick”, “a plastic hose poised in a vicious coil” and the “too-fixed stare of the wide windows”. By listing these, Atwood is trying to reveal what is being hidden behind the non-existent curtain, what exactly is being covered up by the planners’ pedantic planning, as she states that they “give momentary access to the landscape behind or under the future cracks in the plaster”. Margaret Atwood states that the planners are “concealed from each other, each in his own private blizzard”. By this, Atwood is trying to show how the planners are acting entirely for themselves, and not for the common good. If they were to work together, then the town may actually be something better.
127 our experts are availableright now
In “The City Planners”, Atwood is upset about how the planners are trying to control suburbia. She takes a more aggressive stance towards the planners. This differs from the passive-aggressive stance that Boey Kim Cheng takes towards the planners in his poem, “The Planners”, where he is upset about how the planners are treating his city, but takes a more disconnected stance towards them. In this poem, Margaret Atwood is almost making fun of and sarcastically writing the poem about the planners, but in a rather forceful way. She tries to stop what the planners are doing my trying to spread awareness about how the little imperfections make a place great, how imperfection is perfection. Imperfection is perfection is a somewhat underlying theme of the poem that casts itself upon the rest of the poem throughout. Through all this, Atwood is highlighting the insanity of what the planners are doing.
