Through the use of diction, the poem helps to emphasize how romanticizing death can lead to a life consumed by despair. In Margaret Atwood’s poem, “Backdrop addresses cowboy”, the persona explores the dangerous lifestyle of cowboys that is often portrayed in Westerns, by saying; “and you leave behind you a heroic / trail of desolation: / beer bottles / slaughtered by the side / of the road, birds- / skulls bleaching in the sunset” (Atwood 14-19). The first verse of this stanza opens with a positive outlook upon the cowboy by calling him “heroic”, however the rest of the stanza depicts the…