Is/Not

Margaret Atwood's poem stages an argument against the language of care, cure, and professionalism in intimacy. The voice rejects the idea that love can be treated as a job, a service, or a clinical procedure, and it resists any relationship in which one person claims authority over the other's pain. The repeated negations create a forceful clearing-away of false models: lover as doctor, sex as remedy, anger as illness.

As the poem moves forward, the emotional center shifts from critique to demand. What the poem asks for is not correction or approval, but permission to feel and speak honestly in the present moment. That insistence gives the poem both tension and urgency. It is not simply rejecting tenderness; it is rejecting a kind of tenderness that controls, diagnoses, or tries to make emotion acceptable before it is allowed to exist. The closing desire for the "present tense" suggests a relationship grounded in immediacy, truth, and unresolved feeling rather than in management or explanation.

Tone in Is/Not

Atwood's tone is brisk, unsentimental, and defiantly lucid. She sounds impatient with pretense and wary of any affection that arrives wearing the mask of expertise or concern. For the reader, the mood is tense but invigorating: the poem feels confrontational at first, then increasingly liberating as its refusals open into a demand for honesty, equality, and emotional immediacy.

Themes in Is/Not

• Resistance to emotional control - The poem rejects any relationship in which one person tries to manage, cure, or authorize the other's feelings.
• Love without professional distance - Atwood challenges the idea that intimacy should be tidy, skilled, or service-like, insisting that love is not a job with procedures and expertise.
• Anger as legitimate feeling - Anger is presented as something real and necessary, not a symptom to be fixed or softened for someone else's comfort.
• Mutuality without mastery - The poem insists that neither partner has power over the other's inner life, and that equality depends on surrendering the urge to dominate.
• Language as assertion - Saying and naming become acts of survival and self-definition, especially when the poem refuses silence, apology, or correction.
• Presence over interpretation - The final appeal favors immediacy and ongoing feeling instead of being explained, resolved, or turned into a moral lesson.

Literary Devices in Is/Not

• Repetition - The repeated use of negative statements builds pressure and reinforces the poem's refusal of sentimental or clinical language.
• Metaphor - Medical imagery turns love and sex into a distorted treatment room, exposing the coldness hidden inside supposedly caring behavior.
• Direct address - By speaking to a second person, the poem creates confrontation and intimacy at once, making the argument feel personal and immediate.
• Enjambment - The line breaks carry the reader forward in short bursts, mirroring the poem's urgent, corrective momentum.
• Antithesis - The poem sets care against control, feeling against diagnosis, and honesty against polite management.
• Colloquial plain style - The language is spare and everyday, which makes the emotional claims sharper and less abstract.
• Listing and accumulation - The sequence of refusals and commands gradually intensifies the poem's insistence, giving it the feel of a speech that will not back down.

Symbolism in Is/Not

• Profession - Suggests love reduced to an occupation or performance, where feeling is replaced by role-playing and social polish.
• Doctor - Represents authority, diagnosis, and the false idea that one person can fix another's emotional life.
• Medicine and cure - Symbolize the pressure to treat anger or desire as an illness instead of a truth to be faced.
• Buttoned - Evokes restraint, propriety, and emotional neatness, all of which the poem resists.
• Present tense - Symbolizes immediacy and lived experience, as opposed to distant explanation or retrospective judgment.

Historical Context of Is/Not

Atwood's poem fits a late twentieth-century feminist literary context in which writers often questioned traditional gender roles, emotional dependence, and the power dynamics built into romance. Its resistance to medicalized and institutional language also reflects a broader modern tendency in poetry to challenge public, authoritative ways of speaking about private life.

The poem's plain speech and sharp argumentative shape are characteristic of contemporary lyric writing that values directness, irony, and psychological insight. Rather than presenting love as idealized harmony, it treats intimacy as a place where power must be named and where language itself can become a tool of resistance.

Poems Similar to Is/Not

• The Applicant - Sylvia Plath
• Song - Adrienne Rich
• A Supermarket in California - Allen Ginsberg
• One Art - Elizabeth Bishop
• Mad Girl's Love Song - Sylvia Plath