1. What kind of poet were Americans looking for after the Civil War? 1.someone who knew more about factories than about farming
2.someone who could unify or at least help heal the country
3.someone who could remind them of their European heritage
4.someone who would help them keep regional conflicts going

The main themes of the play are: fate and free will with the inevitability of oracular predictions is a theme that often occurs in greek tragedies the conflict between the individual and the state similar to that in sophocles’ “antigone” and   people’s willingness to ignore painful truths both oedipus and jocasta clutch at unlikely details in order to avoiding facing up to the inceasingly apparent truth and sight and blindness the irony that the blind seer tiresius can actually “see” more clearly than the supposedly clear-eyed oedipus, who is in reality blind to the truth about his origins and his inadvertent crimes.