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Albert Goldbarth Albert Goldbarth was born on January 31, 1948
in Chicago, Illinois. He... More > Want more poems? Subscribe to
our Poem-A-Day emails. Related Poems Of Many Worlds in This
World by Margaret Cavendish The Daffodils by William Wordsworth
Related Prose Nature Poems  The Earrings: The Poem as Prediction
by Albert Goldbarth  In her bravura dramatic monologue "The
Triumph of Life: Mary Shelley" Lisel Mueller has her eponymous
speaker say to the future—that is, to us—"I was not your
Cassandra."  The claim of course is about the nineteen-year-
old's famously wunderkind novel Frankenstein, and the idea is
that (despite its seeming prescience of our own hot-button
topics: cloning, test-tube babies, the promise and peril of
science) Mary had no intention to prophesy. Instead, "I only
wanted to write / a tale to tremble by," and any predictory
accuracy was "[b]y accident." Mueller se