Bob Kaufman's Who Has Seen The Wind

By the twentieth century, modern poetry was freed of it’s constraints to meter, rhyme and other lingual schemes. Thus began the age of poetry becoming more opaque, complex, and private in nature, leading most readers to give up and claim that it is too personal to the poet for anyone else to understand, and denounce reading it. Free verse does hold a special place in the history of poetry, however, especially in those pieces written after the Victorian era, had to resemble some of the original piece’s meter and rhyme scheme. That is the case with Who Has Seen the Wind by the contemporary American poet Bob Kaufman. Kaufman wrote his piece in response to Christina Rosetti’s poem Who Has Seen the Wind. We will see that even in a modern era, Kaufman hides alliteration, internal rhyme, musical elements and traditional English meter.

The narrator insists that someone- an artist- has actually seen the wind. Within the first two opening lines, “A Spanish sculptor named Cherino/Has seen the wind.” Shows the reader that a sculptor named Cherino has made a sculpture of the wind, and the shock of the initial claim becomes both a clever joke and an interesting perception about the nature of art and its ability to make the abstract and invisible become concrete and physical. The two final lines, “Be careful when you are moving the wind,/It can put you in the hospital!” bring good, common sense advice on moving the wind, and nicely completes the odd/amusing claim of the