ON THE BUS WITH ROSA PARKS RESEARCH PAPER Essay

ON THE BUS WITH ROSA PARKS RESEARCH PAPER - Essay Example y cello in her high school band and visit the White House for the first time in her senior year of high school as a Presidential Scholar (â€Å"Rita Dove†, 2005). Her education included graduating summa cum laude from Miami University in Ohio, two years studying in Germany, taking a Master’s from the University of Iowa and then moving on to teach creative writing at Arizona State University. She had already gained some public recognition through magazines and anthologies before she published her first collection of poetry in 1980. Her third collection won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. Her career has also included short stories, plays and text for orchestral music (â€Å"Rita Dove†, 2005). Although prolific in her writing, Dove says she doesn’t derive inspiration from any one thing. â€Å"If you wait for inspiration, inspiration’s going to go away and look for more fertile ground to work with† (â€Å"An Online Interview†, 1994). Asked in the same interview for advice for budding writers, Dove adds, â€Å"they can only write what they feel. That doesn’t mean they have to experience it, but to write something because someone else thinks its right, to write for PC reasons, to write because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else.† To understand Dove’s inspirations for poems such as those found in her collection On the Bus with Rosa Parks, it is thus necessary to examine the poems themselves. On the Bus with Rosa Parks is a collection of free verse poems that are loosely connected by the characters featured and the experiences shared. The book has a logical progression. It starts with the individual Lucille as she struggles to give birth alone in her Depression-era home after having been abandoned (temporarily) by her husband Joe. As it develops, Dove increasingly brings in greater involvement with the external world as the children of Lucille and Joe increase