Poetry and poeticity in Joyce's "The Dead," Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris, and Yehuda Amichai

Note, however, that the term "language" in Brooks's discussion does not refer necessarily to explicit paradoxical formulations (e.g. "the last shall be the first, and the first last") but, rather, to a deep semantic layer that underlies, and generates, the text (when a poem "is based on a paradoxical situation," Brooks 4). [...]even when no explicit paradoxical statements are present, the best way to construct the meaning of the text is by seeing it as emerging from a deep, underlying paradox-like in Brooks's analysis of Wordsworth's "It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free" or, as I suggest, in the conclusion of Joyce's "The Dead." [...]more importantly, Amichai exposes the contrast between the tourists' façade and their true, hidden feelings and likings: between the way in which they "put on a serious face" at the Wailing Wall and their "laughing behind heavy curtains in hotel rooms," between weeping "at the beautiful prowess of our boys" and lusting "for our tough girls." According to Amichai, redemption is not an extraordinary, miraculous event that transcends worldly affairs; it is embedded in ordinary, mundane actions-but only when the latter are recognized to be the most significant because "a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family" represents caring for his family and providing it with basic needs of life. Furthermore, the seemingly neutral mention of Sha'ar Ha-Gai, a place on the way from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, reminds readers (at least Israeli readers) of scenes of war and death: a memorial composed of burntout armed vehicles is deployed along Sha'ar Ha-Gai to commemorate the people who were killed in an attempt to reach the blockaded Jerusalem during Israel's War of Independence in 1948. [...]through its very unorthodox mix of "poetic" and "prosaic" typography, and through the introduction of "poetic" and "prosaic" elements into both sections, Amichai invites us to reconsider the fixed boundaries between poetry and prose and the conventional expectations associated with these two forms or modes of expression.